Notes

Introduction

1 See Correspondence, 2:603, 610, 688.

2 See Correspondence, 2:794, 803, 809, 825, 851, 855.

3 Correspondence, 2:689.

4 Correspondence, 1:300.

5 Ibid., 386.

6 Correspondence, 1:243.

7 David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992), 61–2. On Malraux’s remark, see The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 619.

8 See “Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian,” Canadian Forum, 16 (June 1936): 21–2; rpt. in Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976, ed. Robert D. Denham (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 277–82; “Oswald Spengler,” in Architects of Modern Thought, 1st ser. (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1955), 83–90; rpt. in Reading the World, 315–25; “New Directions from Old,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, i960), 117–18; rpt. in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 53–4; and “The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,” Dædalus, 103 (Winter 1974): 1–13; rpt. as “Spengler Revisited” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 179–98. This last essay NF describes as “an effort to lay a ghost to rest,” but ten years later Spengler was still making occasional appearances in his essays.

9 “Spengler Revisited,” 187.

10 Notebook 93.3.10, par. 26. Unpublished. NNF, 1993, box 3, file 10.

11 “Symbolism of the Unconscious” in Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature, ed. Robert D. Denham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 89; this essay appeared originally as “Sir James Frazer” in Architects of Modern Thought, 3rd and 4th series (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1959), 22–32.

12 Correspondence, 1:84.

13 NF had written a long paper on Blake for Pelham Edgar during his third year at Victoria; unfortunately the paper has not survived. See Ayre, 92–3, and Correspondence, 1:182.

14 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); see chap. 6, “Tradition and Experiment,” esp. pp. 161–86.

15 “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH, 23 (June 1956): 144–52; rpt. in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 130–7; and “Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (Winter 1990–91): 157–72; rpt. in The Eternal Act of Creation, ed. Robert D. Denham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 94–108.

16 Although the prose style here seems to improve, NF’s assertions about music are, as James Carscallen has pointed out to me, often either questionable or mistaken. James Carscallen to Robert D. Denham, 29 August 1996.

17 The Decline of the West, 1:126. The framework of Spengler’s views on the spatial world of nature as over against the temporal world of organic life was derived from Kant, or rather Fichte’s modification of Kant. See Decline, 1: 124–6, 170–5.

18 NF’s transcript lists the following courses in philosophy: ethics (3d), philosophical texts (3e), history of philosophy (3f), types of aesthetic theory (3g), ethics (4e), and modern philosophy (4g). As his first course in honour philosophy is identified on his transcript only as “Phil.” it is difficult to know which of the first- or second-year courses (ethics, logic, and history of philosophy) he took. The University of Toronto Calendar does not give reading lists for all of NF’s courses, but the lists that are provided include texts by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Hume, Mill, and Spencer, T.H. Green, Mary Evelyn Clarke, Ralph Barton Perry, plus a number of other unspecified philosophers read from anthologies. The courses in ethics (3d) and history of philosophy (3O also include readings from eight secondary sources, called “references.”

19 University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (January 1942), 167–79.

20 Correspondence, 1:52–3.

21 Correspondence, 1:397.

22 Ayre, 94.

23 See, e.g., Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper, 1958), 282–3.

24 In a letter to Helen Kemp written on New Year’s Day 1935 NF reported, “I arose in my wrath the last week of the Christmas term and smote theology hip and thigh—I had five essays and three term exams to get done in a week. So I wrote two Church History essays Monday, two New Testament essays Tuesday, exams in Systematic Theology and Church History Wednesday, exam in New Testament and essay in Religious Pedagogy Thursday. Then I slept and slept” (Correspondence, 1:384).

25 Notebook 27, par. 445. Unpublished. NFF, 1991, box 25.

26 Manitoba Arts Review, 3 (Spring 1942): 35–47.

27 Hudson Review, 2 (Winter 1950): 582–95.

28 For the problems in dating “An Enquiry into the Art-Forms of Prose Fiction” see the headnote to the paper.

29 For an account of NF’s relations to Eliot, largely antagonistic ones, see Imre Salusinszky, “Frye and Eliot,” Christianity and Literature, 42 (Spring 1992): 299–311. NF’s view of the central tradition of English poetry as being romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant is found everywhere in his work, and he states the principle explicitly in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 1, 149. His book is T.S. Eliot (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963; rev. ed., 1968).

30 See The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 40. About the insight from Spengler, NF wrote in a later notebook that Spengler’s insight was “a vision of history as interpénétration, every historical phenomenon being a symbol of the totality of historical phenomena contemporary with it” (Notebook 1993.1. Unpublished. NFF, 1993, box 1).

31 Science and the Modern World (New York: New American Library, 1948), 93. NF would have read the 1925 ed. published by Macmillan; he later acquired the 1938 ed. published by Cambridge University Press. For NF’s comment on this passage see The Double Vision, 40–1.

32 The Double Vision, 41. NF reflects on the meaning of interpénétration scores of times in his notebooks. See, for example, Notebook 19, pars. 130, 172, 182, 202 (NFF, 1991, box 24); Notebook 24, pars. 53, 57, 112, 165, 213 (NFF, 1991, box 25); Notebook 27, pars. 42, 164, 168, 230 (NFF, ibid.); and Notebook 1993.1, pars. 9, 31, 41, 172, 353, 359, 395, 415, 428, 501, 706, 709, 721 (NFF, 1993, box 1).

33 Copious notes for this book, to be called The Critical Comedy, among other proposed titles, are in NF’s notebooks. He never completed the project.

1. The Basis of Primitivism

1 NF apparently takes his ideas about Johnson’s antimusical biases from Lives of the Poets. The seen-but-not heard maxim, as it applies to children, perhaps derives from Johnson’s remarks on children in the entry of 10 April 1776 of Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 628–9.

2 “Introduction: Of Taste,” A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; rev. ed., 1759), in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 300.

3 Landscape artist.

4 Blake’s Book ofThel, composed about the same time as his Songs of Innocence (1789), was written in what was to become Blake’s typical seven-stress line, the fourteener; the story of Thel takes place against the backdrop of a dreamy, pastoral cycle of nature.

5 The ideas in this paragraph derive from Oswald Spengler, “The Soul of the City,” DW, 2:87–110.

6 The reference is to Wordsworth’s repeated statement—in his “Observations” prefixed to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads—that his poetry relied on the language “really used by men.”

7 In R.B. Sheridan’s comic drama The School for Scandal (1777) Charles Surface represents good-naturedness and Joseph hypocrisy; similarly, in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1745), the hero is a generous soul, while Blifil is a cunning hypocrite.

8 NF is referring to various principles in Wordsworth’s “Observations” prefixed to Lyrical Ballads (1800), including his pronouncement that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

9 In the early 1760s James Macpherson had published “extremely literal” translations of the legendary Gaelic poet Ossian; Macpherson’s “original” texts were later shown to be forgeries. Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) wrote and published forgeries of poems said to have been written by Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk. Vortigern and Rowena was a pseudo-Shakespearean play forged by W.H. Ireland (1775–1835).

10 Thomas Gray, who all his life had been interested in primitive verse, translated two Old Norse poems in 1761, The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin; Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances, was published in 1765; Sir Walter Scott’s interest in old ballads and tales was spurred by Percy’s Reliques and medieval French romances.

11 Blackwood’s Magazine, a Tory periodical founded by William Blackwood, began publication in 1817. Rather than the Century, NF must have intended to say the Quarterly Review, which, along with Blackwood’s, the Edinburgh Review, and the London Magazine, was an influential periodical of the time.

12 Edgar has changed “no brains or ears” to “no brains but also without ears.”

13 In October 1817, J.G. Lockhart, writing for Blackwood’s, began a series of vicious attacks on Keats, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt, labelling them members of the Cockney school of poetry; this meant simply that they were poets of no social rank.

14 See, for example, Byron’s, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), and Poe’s analysis of his own poem in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1845). Byron’s critical opinions are to be found also in his Letters and Journals, rev. ed. (London: John Murray, 1922).

15 “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 1205. NF has slightly altered the aphorism. What Wilde wrote was, “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”

16 Arturo Giovannitti’s poem was published in Arrows in the Gale (Riverside, Conn.: Hillacre Bookhouse, 1914) and rpt. in An Anthology of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Kreymborg (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1930), 392–7.

17 “Walt Whitman,” The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 10 vols. (New York: Davos Press, 1906), 10:87. Stevenson was introduced to the natives of Malua in 1889 as “Tusitala,” meaning “The Master of Tales,” and it was the name by which he was usually known in Samoa.

18 Omai from Tahiti (formerly known as Otaheite) was brought to England by the British navigator Thomas Furneaux in 1776; the first South Sea Islander to be seen in London, he received a warm welcome from people like Boswell. In 1870 Miller left Oregon for London, where he published Pacific Poems; he was warmly received by the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his Songs of the Sierras, which Rossetti helped him revise, made him famous.

19 A derisive name given by the Bloomsbury modernists to a literary establishment formed by J.C. Squire (1884–1958), editor of the New Statesman and of a number of successful anthologies, and his friends.

2. Romanticism

1 The date that the Paris mob, led by Camille Desmoulins, revolted and stormed the Bastille. NF himself was born on 14 July.

2 “Carthage must be destroyed,” the repeated declaration to the Roman senate by Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.), who was convinced that Rome’s future could be secured only if Carthage was annihilated.

3 Much of what NF says about the culture-town, the soul of the city, and the metropolis derives from Spengler’s DW; see esp. 1:32–5, 2:87–110.

4 The two volumes of Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England were published in 1857 and 1861 (London: J.W. Parker and Son); Theodor Mommsen’s Romische Geschichte (Berlin: Weidmann, 1855) was translated into English in 1862 as The History of Rome, 4 vols. (London: R. Bentley); both books were subsequently issued in numerous editions. NF had read Mommsen during his third year at Victoria College.

5 Brett’s marginal query: “?opera.”

6 Gustav Fechner (1801–87), German physicist and philosopher, best known as the founder of psychophysics; he maintained that the world of plants and other objects lower than the animal world have a soul as well as a body.

7 The ideas in this paragraph parallel those in the opening paragraph of NF’s “The Romantic Myth,” the first chapter of A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), 3–49.

8 The idea I express by the word blood is usually rendered by heart, with an equal disregard of anatomical exactness, which I reject on account of its sentimental connotation. Cerebellum is perhaps less open to pedantic objection, but the essential meaning should be clear enough. [NF]. Compare the argument here with Spengler’s in DW, 2:3–7.

9 Brett underlined “materialism” and wrote “mechanism” in the margin.

10 NF uses skepsis in Spengler’s sense—the positivistic features of the “winter” phase of an epoch; it is an attitude of doubt that helps to extinguish the spiritual creative force of “culture,” appearing at the dawn of megalopolitan “civilization.” See, for example, DW, 1:45.

11 It is by no means fanciful to see how in history the soil clings to a religious growth, the Christian ascetics being an extreme but not surprising instance. The filth of a religious era is repellent and hideous to a late civilization, which always develops an extensive practice of bathing and bodily culture. The tradition of uncleanliness is associated with the artist, and nations which are commercially more advanced than others and consequently more saturated with the metropolitan spirit, such as the English, Dutch, and Americans, are noted for their personal fastidiousness. I mention this here because of the bearing it has on a fairly important question connected with the rise of romanticism—the collapse of literary obscenity. [NF].

12 Elective Affinities was a story Goethe began writing in 1808, expanding it finally into a novel. The title implies an analogy between chemical affinity and sexual passion. Max Weber (1864–1920) used “elective affinity” to describe the relationship between Protestantism and the ethos of capitalism: the former provides the soil in which the latter can flourish.

13 Brett underlined “implicate” and put a question mark in the margin.

14 We notice that the polite sceptics who helped destroy the eighteenth century and make the nineteenth possible were founders of modern history writing—Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire. [NF]

15 The position argued by the medieval “realists” in their debate with the “nominalists.” Scotus Erigena and William of Champeaux, among others, argued that universals, as opposed to particulars, were the essential and original reality.

16 In the case of Shakespeare the turn to musical form starts with Hamlet. Julius Caesar is a drama; Coriolanus a secular oratorio. Plot and underplot are antithetical and contrasting in the histories; in King Lear they are contrapuntal. Romeo and Juliet moves to a dramatic climax; Macbeth sweeps to a point of repose. The supreme example from this point of view is, however, Coriolanus, which is so concentrated in its form that the blocks of dramatic contrast we find earlier have practically disappeared with lyric “purple passages,” the play being almost impossible to quote from. This play is Shakespeare’s last in this style; the remaining three return to purely dramatic technique. This is one reason for agreeing with Frank Harris in postulating a nervous breakdown in the dramatist around 1608. [NF]. For Harris’s speculation see The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (New York: Horizon, 1969), 401.

17 The college freshman belongs here, I suppose, and the college is the epitome of the metropolis. [NF]

18 In a park adjoining the Petit Trianon near Versailles, Marie Antoinette engaged in a back-to-nature fantasy, establishing there eight small farms, complete with peasants, cows, and dung heaps.

19 Brett underlined “duofold” and put a question mark in the margin.

20 One of the many reasons for the tremendous influence of the Bible on English thought is that it insinuates a sense of the organic growth of the Hebrew culture into a book supposedly a transmitter of the most rigid and abstract truth. Similarly the Puritanic Revolt, which really starts romanticism in England, brings in the Old Testament. Law, prophecy, history, and poetry are organic; gospels, letters, and apocalypses belong to criticism. [NF]

21 The Romantic School (1833) in The Portable Romantic Reader, ed. Howard E. Hugo (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 67.

22 Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 1031, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Richter (München: Carl Hanser, 1985-), 17:893; the well-known maxim also appears in a slightly different form in Gespräche mit Eckermann, 2 April 1929, Münchner Ausgabe, 19:300.

23 In other words, romanticism is to the life of a culture exactly what disease is to the individual: a manifestation of the supremacy of the time-force over its spatial cross-section of life. Which is of course why Goethe equated them. (Incidentally, it follows that romanticism could only deal with disease in terms of disease. This is a vindication of the penetrating suggestion, thrown out but not explained by Friedell, that the homeopathic or inoculative principle represents the romantic approach to medicine. The application of a narcotic to artistic production is the same thing.) [NF]. See Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1932), 3:52–3.

24 Schopenhauer wrote his chief work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), when he was thirty; he began teaching in 1820, but after failing at this, he retired to live a bitter, reclusive life for more than forty years.

25 After being imprisoned in 1830 for the revolutionary views expressed in his literary articles, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72) spent the next forty years, which included exile and arrest, in political agitation of one form or another.

26 In Berlin in the 1820s Schopenhauer (1788–1860) combatively staged his lectures at the same time as those of Hegel, who was eighteen years his senior, but he failed to attract many students. Camillo Benso di Cavour was five years younger than Mazzini, but his patient statesmanship made him a more dominating figure than the often exiled Mazzini in the events leading to the unification of Italy.

27 Hence, of course, the impulse to elaborate dress and bodily concealment disappears with the Directoire and again in the romantic rehabilitation of our own day. We have spoken before of the growth of a bodily culture—the distinction between it and the exercise of the fighters of the creative period is simply that the former, being the result of a merging of sexes, is centred on the narcissistic. (There is a weird anticipation of this in the pseudoclassical superstition that dead-white plasticity was the Greek ideal and consequently should be ours—the movement headed by Winckelmann.) [NF]. The Directoire style, which followed the downfall of the monarchy in France, abandoned the sumptuousness of the Louis XVI style in favour of simpler, less adorned designs. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s influential ideas about Greek art were developed in Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; English trans., Reflections on the Paintings and Sculpture of the Greeks, published by Fuseli in 1765) and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764).

28 Schopenhauer’s attitude toward women seems to have grown out of his bitter relations with his mother; he was obsessed with the physical aspects of sex. The notes he left behind on love and marriage were burned by his literary executor, but his misogyny comes through clearly in his essay “On Women” in Parerga (1851).

29 Cf. the elegant little pastorale in “The Mikado”:

Ko-ko:   There is a beauty in extreme old age—

Do you fancy you are elderly enough?

   Information I’m requesting

   On a subject interesting;

Is a maiden all the better when she’s tough? [NF]

The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Modern Library, [1936]), act 2, lines 783–7.

30 Here NF is following Spengler, who sees Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) and August Strindberg’s plays as two of the principal landmarks of nineteenth-century “ethical” positivism. See DW, 1:374.

31 NF’s ellipsis.

32 It was a widespread belief in the positivistic period that the tomato, which was called a “love-apple,” was poisonous. [NF]

33 In Voltaire’s Candide (1759), a satire on Leibnitzian optimism, Pangloss repeatedly affirms that everything is best in the best of all worlds in spite of the countless examples of natural and moral evil he and Candide encounter.

34 In The World as Will and Idea (1819), Schopenhauer argues that just as ideas are a representation of human will, so the world is a representation of the cosmic will; both are “blind” insofar as they are unconscious driving forces.

35 In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant developed a fourfold division of categories, each having three subcategories: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (inherence and subsistence, causation and dependence, reciprocity between agent and patient), and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).

36 Literally, leaning against or propping; in music, an embellishment consisting of an unharmonized note falling or rising to an adjacent note.

37 This argument is developed in pt. 2 of Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800); trans, by Roderick M. Chisholm as The Vocation of Man (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).

38 Fichte’s philosophy of history was developed in Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1804). Fichte actually gives five stages (reason as instinct, reason as ruling authority, liberation from reason, reason as knowledge, and reason as art). What NF calls the “normal nation” of barbarism apparently corresponds to Fichte’s first stage, the state of innocence; the “age of authority,” to Fichte’s second stage, the state of progressive sin; and the “age of reasonable knowledge,” to Fichte’s fourth and/or fifth stages. NF derives his account of Fichte, not from the Grundzüge, but from the three-stage summary in Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 605–6.

39 Again, NF’s account here of Fichte derives from Windelband, 593–5.

40 On NF’s analysis of Schelling here and in the following paragraphs, cf. Windelband, 597–9, 607–10.

41 For Schelling’s “dynamic atomistics,” which he developed in opposition to mechanistic physics, see his Ideen zur einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), trans, by Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath as Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

42 Schelling advanced the idea of the “indifference” of nature and spirit in vol. 2 of Zeitschrift für speculative Physik (Jena and Leipzig: C.E. Gabler, 1800–1). The work had not been translated into English in 1933, and it is highly doubtful that NF consulted the original German. He perhaps encountered the idea in one or both of the histories of philosophy with which he was familiar: Windelband, 608, or Friedrich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, trans. G.S. Morris, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1875), 2:219–20.

43 In the margin at this point Brett wrote “cp Turgot,” a reference to the French statesman and economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–81).

44 Cf. Chesterton: “The Victorians are somewhat excessively derided today, because their notion of a novel was a story that ended well. The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well— because it ended with the Victorians. They turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite sure that they themselves were the third volume.” —Chaucer [London: Faber and Faber, 1932], 38. [NF]

45 Shaftesbury makes the point in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711); see especially pt. 3, sec. 2 of Treatise 5, “The Moralists.”

46 “To shock the narrow-minded.”

47 The point is made, though not so categorically, by W. Wallace in his Life of Arthur Schopenhauer (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 13–14.

48 See “On History,” chap. 38 of The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1883), 3:220–30. “In all history,” says Schopenhauer in the same book, though in another context, “the false outweighs the true” (1:317).

49 The words of Andrew Undershaft to Adolphus Cusins in act 3 of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905).

50 This essay has not survived.

51 On Buckle and Mommsen, see n. 4. Buckle believed that general laws determined the course of human progress and that these laws could be shown, through the application of the scientific method, to operate in the histories of nations.

52 DW, 1:18–29.

53 Nordau, a Hungarian Zionist, was the author of Entartung (1893) (English trans., Degeneration [1895]), in which he argued that much of contemporary culture was pathologically degenerate; Entartung emerged as a racist term in the 1920s and a decade later became the chief slogan in the Nazis’ campaign against the “degeneracy” of modern art.

54 Traité de l’harmonie.

55 In the piano sonata, op. 31, no. 3, the last movement, which an older composer would certainly have made a gigue, is a tarantelle, which appears and disappears with romanticism. The tarantelle is not a dance but the destruction of one, increasing its speed to the limit of endurance. Ravel did the same thing dynamically for the bolero, and finally annihilated the dance. [NF]

56 The famous Dead March of Handel shows how creative music deals with this. It is simply a succession of dominant and tonic chords in C major—a page of dead music. (The Largo is not a dead march, as an ardent church-goer might suspect; it is more like a slow waltz.) [NF]. The Dead March is from Handel’s oratorio Saul (1739); Handel’s Largo, as it is called in many arrangements, is the famous aria “Ombra mai fü” from the opera Xerxes.

57 After “Dickens” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending, apparently, to go back and fill in the page number where he refers to Dickens later in his paper.

58 The romantic undercurrent finds a peculiar expression in the well-known poem called The Lost Chord, which depicts an organist finding supreme solace and bliss in what must have been a highly complicated discord; otherwise the sufferer could have found it again easily enough. (Sullivan’s setting, however, indicates that it was only a diminished seventh. Grieg as a child got a similar effect from a ninth and never got over it.) [NF]. The Lost Chord, a poem by Adelaide A. Procter (1825–64), was set to music by Arthur Sullivan in 1876 and became the most popular ballad of the century. There may have been an actual incident behind the Mendelssohn anecdote, but the story is a generic one, having been told as often about Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn as about Mendelssohn.

59 Traité d’Instrumentation (1844).

60 The final line of “Brander’s Song,” pt. 2, sc. 4.

61 It was not Frederick William IV but Prince Metternich who asked Berlioz whether he “composed music for five hundred players.” The anecdote is recorded in The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans, and ed. David Cairns (London: Gollancz, 1969), 481.

62 The title given to no. 30 of Lieder ohne Worte, one of thirty-six piano pieces that Mendelssohn began publishing in 1832.

63 Op. 45 (1834)—one of Chopin’s many Preludes.

64 This celebrated religious tune was adapted by Gounod to the first prelude of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier; its original version, for violin and piano, was Meditation (1843).

65 In a letter to Abbé Girod. Correspondance Inédite, ed. Daniel Bernard (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1879), 238–9.

66 The opinions of André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1742–1813) on the sonata are to be found chiefly in his Mémoires, ou essai sur la musique (Paris, 1784).

67 Anton Diabelli (1781–1858) composed mainly for the piano, including a waltz on which fifty composers were invited to write a variation; Beethoven, uninvited, wrote thirty-three (op. 120).

68 Liszt’s handling of the combination and interaction of representative themes can be heard in his Dante Symphony (1847–55) and Faust Symphony (1854–57); Wagner used leitmotifs in his operas to identify leading characters and important ideas.

69 The Second Ballade of Chopin, op. 38, is nothing less than a fight between a major and a minor theme in which the former, a gentle fragile weakling, is completely crushed and forced to express itself in a minor form. (Note the preference of the romanticist Burns for minor in the Cotter’s Saturday Night.) [NF]. It is not clear what NF means by the parenthetical remark, except perhaps the contrast in st. 13 of Burns’s poem between the “artless notes,” by which the cotter and his family “tune their hearts,” and the “Italian trills.”

70 Many musicians and music lovers will not agree to any difference in character of the keys; but those who, like myself, have absolute pitch are in general more sympathetic to the idea. Plato, of course, propounds a corresponding theory for Greek music. [NF]. See Plato’s Sophist, 253b.

71 James Carscallen has pointed out to me that many of NF’s claims about music in this section are questionable—e.g., his assertions that the sonata developed from the suite, that the Beethoven scherzo is a parody of the minuet, that syncopation of a mazurka is an attack on rhythm, that the waltz is the most fundamental of dances, and that the march is necessarily a dance of death (James Carscallen to Robert D. Denham, 29 August 1996).

72 And of course the forms of the chief works of Milton and Bunyan reflect the struggle of a critical spirit in a creative age, and are half-way between the purely musical and the lyric-essay presentations on the one hand, and the dramatic and novelistic on the other. The first, which combines a tonal utterance with a personal world-picture, gives us the Paradise Lost type of philosophical epic; the second is evidently the allegory. [NF]

73 The sonnet is so purely pictorial that it has always been a favourite with painters, from Raphael and Michelangelo down to Rossetti. The Petrarchan sonnet is meant in the above; the Shakespearean is more musical, and a romantic does not handle it so well. [NF]

74 This idea appears, among other places in Blake, in his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. See also NF’s later commentary in Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 91–106.

75 Experiments performed in 1732 when Rousseau was in Paris, as he records in bk. 4 of his Confessions (1765–70, pub. 1782).

76 St. 3 of pt. 1 of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). NF’s emphases.

77 After “Browning” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending, apparently, to go back and insert the page numbers where he refers to Browning below.

78 The opening of Shelley’s Lines: “When the Lamp Is Shattered” (1822).

79 In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert remarks to Ernest, “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing prose” (The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968], 202).

80 NF’s ellipsis.

81 After “scientist” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending to go back and insert the page number for his previous reference to the “hope of finding a rock-bottom formula” in pt. 1, sec. IV, above.

82 See Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859, 1869), Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Masefield’s Tristran and Isolt (1927), and Robinson’s Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927).

83 After “period” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending to go back and insert the page number for his treatment of the theme in pt. 1, sec. V.

84 By “part five” NF means his “Conclusion.”

85 After “Stuarts” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending to go back and insert the page number for his statement about the enthusiasm of romanticism for the Middle Ages in pt. 1, sec. IV.

86 Madeleine de Scudéry (1608–1701) was a prolific writer of French heroic romances, the characters of which were notable persons of her own day.

87 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was being serialized when Dickens died in 1870.

88 NF has in mind a phrase from chap. 1 of George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways: “Rose pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away.”

89 The primitivistic element in American literature is sustained a good deal by the Scandinavians, whose country forms the world’s most typical province. The expression of peasant and proletariat alike in America is to a large extent in Scandinavian hands—Hamsun and Sandburg being respective examples. The importance of Ibsen as a dramatist lies in his having dealt with the repercussion of the world-city upon its environs. The present-day American primitivism is reflected in their choice of Scandinavian types to represent a rugged and strong masculinity and femininity in Lindbergh and Greta Garbo. [NF]

90 After “novel” NF wrote “(see p. ),” intending to go back and insert the page number referring to the detective story in pt. 4, sec. II.

91 Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), known for his strong liberal, revolutionary, and republican views, was one of the leading figures in the unification of Italy; in his later years he was attracted to socialist doctrines, but he failed in his efforts to organize the working classes.

92 Marx, who thought Mazzini was long on rhetoric and short on practical aid for the Italians, especially the peasantry, did not expect the unification movement in Italy to advance his own aims; he also worried about Mazzini’s popular support, and he feared that the independence of Italy would be at the expense of Austria, which Marx saw as a buffer against Russian expansion.

93 Mussolini was especially attracted to Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence; he wrote three articles on Nietzsche in 1908, and reviewed Réflexions when it was published in Italy in 1909.

3. Robert Browning: An Abstract Study

1 Edgar’s revision: “reference to it. All the poetry of the last century or so is therefore to” for “reference to it, so that all the poetry of the last century to.”

2 Edgar underlined “service of being.”

3 In the margin beside this sentence Edgar wrote, “loose sentence structure.”

4 Blake does not use the phrase “vegetable kingdom,” though he often uses “vegetable,” especially in Milton and Jerusalem, to refer to material things.

5 Edgar changed “cheap cynicism of Byron” to “cheaper cynicism that is to be found in Byron.”

6 Edgar underlined “ash-,” meaning perhaps that NF should not, as he had done, have hyphenated “ashcan.”

7 Edgar marked through “only.”

8 Edgar changed “stressing the liberal and wide-ranging education” to “stressing the need of liberalism and diversity in education.”

9 Edgar underlined “tried” and “view.”

10 Browning’s line comes from Pippa Passes (1849), pt. 1, lines 227–8; Pope’s from “Epistle 1” of An Essay on Man (1733), line 294.

11 Edgar marked through “petty.”

12 “And yet God has not said a word!” (line 60).

13 Épîtres à l’auteur du livre des trois imposteurs (10 November 1770).

14 Edgar changed “back of” to “behind.”

15 Edgar underlined “in their” and put an “X” in the margin.

16 In NF’s typescript there is no paragraph break between this sentence and the previous one, but a paragraph mark (¶) has been inserted between them. Whether the mark is NF’s or Edgar’s is uncertain.

17 The dramatic monologues referred to in this paragraph are A Grammarian’s Funeral (1855), The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church (1845), Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864), and Johannes Agricola in Meditation (1834).

18 In his Enneads Plotinus (ca. A.D. 205–70) maintains that the soul needs the deifying or enlightening virtues in order for it to have immediate knowledge of God, which is not possible through thought.

19 See Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

20 One of the readers of the manuscript of the Student Essays suggested that this is “perhaps a reference to the ‘one needful thing’ of Luke 10:42, which provides the title for bk. 1, chap. 1 of Hard Times, where Gradgrind makes his pronouncement about ‘facts.’”

21 Above “it” Edgar wrote “itself” and put an “X” in the margin.

22 Compare with Browning’s attitude the mysticism of Bunyan: “Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder Wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto, so shalt thou see the gate.” [NF]. The quotation comes from the opening episode of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84).

23 An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience ofKarshish, the Arab Physician (1855).

24 See Death in the Desert (1864). The quoted phrase comes from line 205.

25 Mrs. [Felicia Dorothea] Hemans, The Poetical Works (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, [1890]). NF is referring to such words as “funerals,” “dirge,” “death,” “grave,” “mourner,” and “departed” that appear in the titles of Mrs. Hemans’s poems.

26 Edgar marked through “supreme.”

27 Carlyle, in fact, drew several sympathetic portraits of his contemporaries; see, for example, his view of Coleridge in Life of John Sterling (1851), of Wordsworth in Reminiscences (1867), and of Tennyson in a letter to Emerson (5 August 1844). On his high regard for Browning, see his letter to Browning, dated 21 June 1841, in New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1904), 1:233–4.

28 Edgar wrote “and whom” above “that.”

29 “Your friendship,” Browning wrote to Carlyle, “will always seem, as it does now, enough to have lived for”—an attitude Browning maintained for forty years. The letter is quoted by Betty Miller in Robert Browning: A Portrait (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), 59.

30 Edgar underlined “time” and “grasp” and put an “X” in the margin.

31 The quotation comes, not from Sartor Resartus, but from “The Hero as Poet,” where Carlyle says, “Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical,—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and hulls!” (On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History [London: Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1935], 109).

32 In the margin beside this sentence Edgar wrote “meaning?”

33 Edgar corrected NF’s spelling of “literate.”

34 See, for example, Lamb’s “A Chapter on Ears,” The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 5 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903), 2:38–41.

35 Twain’s views on music are found in A Tramp Abroad (1880), among other places; see especially chaps. 9, 10, and 16 for his tongue-in-cheek pronouncements; but see also “At the Shrine of St. Wagner” (1891), a more sober account that shows some appreciation of Wagner.

36 Here NF neglected to type “find,” which Edgar inserted.

37 It will be remembered that the career of Schubert abruptly stopped when he came in contact with the work of Handel. [NF]. There seems to be no evidence for such a claim. Two weeks before he died Schubert, who had just been given a copy of Handel’s works, reported to the Frölich family, “Ye gods! now I see what I still lack, what a lot I still have to learn” (Schubert: Memoirs of His Friends, ed. Otto Eric Deutsch [London: A. and C. Black, 1958], 255). Moreover, Schubert composed several of his major works during the final years of his short life.

38 Cf. Frye’s remark in a letter to Helen Kemp during the summer of 1932: “Thank God for Bach and Mozart, anyway. They are a sort of common denominator in music,—the two you can’t argue about. Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner—they give you an interpretation of music which you can accept or not as you like. But Bach and Mozart give you music, not an attitude toward it. If a man tells me that Beethoven or Brahms leaves him cold, I can still talk with him. But if he calls Bach dull and Mozart trivial I can’t, not so much because I think he is a fool as because his idea of music is so remote from mine that we have nothing in common” (Correspondence, 1:43).

39 Hallam Tennyson records this remark by his father in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 2:285.

40 In the margin beside this sentence Edgar put an “X.”

41 For an unpublished essay on Byrd by NF, written in 1942, see Notebook 17. NFF, 1991, box 24.

42 Burns was notorious for flaunting his various sexual affairs.

43 Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha (1855) is a dialogue between a church organist and the dead composer, Master Hugues, about the meaning of the fugues for which Hugues was well known. Browning himself said that Hugues was a dry-as-dust imitator of Bach.

44 See Parleying with Charles Avison (1887); Browning learned a great deal about music from Avison, an eighteenth-century organist and the composer of Grand March.

45 In the margin beside this sentence Edgar has put an “X.”

46 Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable, 1931), 1:28. [I am indebted to Marc Plamondon for this note. Ed.]

47 “The Critic as Artist,” The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 201–2.

48 The rhyme scheme of Love Among the Ruins (1855) is aabbccddeeff.

49 The rhyme schemes of the various poems in Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper: With Other Poems (1876) are quite varied, but the most common patterns are rhymed couplets of varying lengths and quatrains of the form abab, bcbc, etc. Except for a variation in the first stanza of The Glove (1845), the poem is written in rhymed couplets.

50 A poem by Thomas Hood (1843), written in dactyllic dimeter, with nine different rhyming patterns, the most common being abab and aabccb.

51 When Eliot published The Waste Land in book form in 1922, he added an extensive series of notes that identified a large number of his sources and pointed to the relations between some of the poem’s images and allusions.

52 Edgar underlined “would have,” apparently questioning NF’s use of the verb phrase.

53 “Meredith is prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose” (“The Critic as Artist,” 202).

54 Edgar underlined “back of” and wrote “behind” above it. In the next sentence he changed “due to” to “owing to.”

55 Burns’s Jolly Beggars is about a group of vagabonds who meet, drink, and indulge in unbridled revelry; Browning’s The Heretic’s Tragedy (1855) is about the burning at the stake of Jacques du Bourg-Molay by Philip IV of France; Molay (called “John” in the poem) seems to have been innocent of the charges of heresy, simony, and sodomy.

56 Edgar revised “can be traced back here” to “can be traced to this discordancy in his material.”

57 Speakers in the three dramatic monologues whose titles come from their names: Bishop Blougram’s Apology (1855), Mr. Sludge, “The Medium” (1864), and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871).

58 Pauline (1833), Browning’s first published work, was modelled on Shelley’s confessional poems; it is an account of the conflict and ultimate defeat of a young boy who has renounced his mother’s religion. John Stuart Mill annotated a review copy of the poem, and after Browning read Mill’s comments about the morbid self-consciousness of the poem, he wrote no more confessional verse.

59 G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (London: Macmillan, 1926), 45.

60 In this connection it is interesting to examine the poem called Wanting is— What? which forms the prelude to Jocoseria, in which Jochanan Hakkadosh is found. Incidentally, bearing in mind what was said above concerning the pictorial nature of romanticism, it is not difficult to see why Browning was so inspired by Italy. [NF]. See line 6 of Wanting is—What? (1883): “—Framework which waits for a picture to frame.”

61 Edgar enclosed the second syllable of “gotten” in parentheses.

62 Samson Agonistes (1671), lines 1640–5. The fortissimo notation is, of course, NF’s.

63 The speech of Count Guido Franceschini in bk. 11 of The Ring and the Book.

64 The quotation about Schubert’s modesty has not been located, but according to one Schubert scholar, “Schubert was not particularly known for his modesty or lack thereof. One could say that he quickly gained fame as a song composer and developed a natural self-confidence in this area.” Moreover, “as a student of Salieri and others Schubert had fairly good training in composition” (Tilman Seebass to Robert D. Denham, 20 November 1996). What NF means by the opposition between “instrumental rhythm and song” is not clear.

65 Founded by Frederick James Furnivall and M.E. Mickey in 1881, the society tended to see Browning as a poet who, as Furnivall said in the society’s inaugural meeting, “speaks the Spirit of his Time, and he speaks to his Time.”

66 Two of Browning’s most notoriously difficult poems, published, respectively, in 1840 and 1876.

67 G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 53.

68 Edgar cancelled “the” and made a mark in the margin beside the next sentence, where NF notes it is necessary to use the definite article with “novel” and “essay.”

69 As Chesterton points out in his work on Chaucer, that poet has illustrated the plight of the critical subjectivist very wittily and delicately. Chaucer created others, but he has no story of his own, stammering only doggerel and turgid prose. [NF]. G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 178–9; NF would most likely have used the 1932 edition of the book (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar and Rinehart).

70 The opening paragraphs of Browning’s “Essay on Shelley,” written in 1851, draw on the familiar nineteenth-century distinction, which Coleridge and others had taken from the German romantics, between objective and subjective poets. The subjective poet is, among other things, “impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth.” Browning’s “Essay on Shelley” is included as Appendix I of the Penguin edition of The Poems, 1:999–1013.

71 According to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Browning said that he was more indebted to Landor than to any other of his contemporaries. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 2:354

72 The reference is to Tennyson’s Flower in the Crannied Wall (1869).

73 NF is no doubt referring to the interrogative mode of Song of Myself, many sections of which are answers to questions posed by Whitman. Cf. st. 46, lines 1223–4, where Whitman writes, “You are also asking me questions and I hear you, / I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.”

74 The exuberant and loquacious lawyer who serves as the defender of Guido Franceschini in bk. 8 of The Ring and the Book.

4. The Concept of Sacrifice

1 My thanks to Kingsley Joblin for the information about the permission NF had to submit late papers. Kingsley Joblin to Robert D. Denham, 17 November 1995.

2 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 396, 439. NF probably used the 1927 ed., entitled Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan), though he could have read the 1st or the 2nd ed. (1889, 1894).

3 NF is being ironic: Micawber, in Dickens’s David Copperfield, is always given to grandiloquence and would thus never say anything so ordinary as “eat it.”

4 In Leviticus 16:7–10 Aaron casts lots for two goats: one becomes a sacrificial offering to the Lord; the other is driven away into the wilderness as a scapegoat for the evil spirit Azazel.

5 See Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1883), 2:375–6.

6 The Religion of the Semites, 137–9, 289–311.

7 Cup-marked rocks are found at many sites in Palestine, two of the most outstanding examples being at Gezer and Jerusalem. See R. A.S. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, 2nd ed. (London: Religious Tract Society, 1930), 287–9.

8 The “great hypothesis” NF mentions is outlined in Alfred Loisy’s The Religion of Israel, trans. Arthur Galton (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), 44. Loisy, a French Biblical critic and ordained priest, was excommunicated in 1908 because his Biblical studies, based on the theories of higher criticism, were seen as heretical.

9 According to the documentary theory of the Pentateuch advanced by Julius Wellhausen and others in the nineteenth century, J represents the writings of the Jahwist source, the earliest strand of Old Testament narratives.

10 NF is referring to the creation story in Genesis 1, which is a part of the P or Priestly documents in the Pentateuch and was written centuries later than the J source.

11 “Crush the infamy,” the famous challenge Voltaire hurled at the church; the phrase is found throughout his works, especially his letters; “infamy” refers, not so much to the church itself, but to the persecuting and privileged orthodoxy.

12 Which conjectures NF refers to are uncertain. For an account of early hypotheses on the relation between the alphabet and the lunar zodiac, see Hugh A. Moran and David H. Kelley, The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs (Palo Alto, Calif.: Daily Press, 1969).

13 Sir James Frazer, The Scapegoat (vol. 9 of GB), 412–23.

14 The household gods in Roman religion; the lar, a youth in a tunic carrying a cup and a drinking horn, seems originally to have been a god of the fields; the penates, dancing youths with drinking horns, were gods of the storeroom and kitchen. The images were placed in a niche together, the lar between the two penates.

5. The Fertility Cults

1 This is the position taken by Diotima, as reported by Socrates, in the Symposium, 20ie-2i2c.

2 This and the preceding paragraph draw on Sir James Frazer, The Dying God (vol. 4 of GB), 14–46.

3 The source of the material in this paragraph is Sir James Frazer’s Adonis, Attis, Osiris—the two volumes of GB devoted to dying and reviving gods; see especially pp. 1–12, 263–76.

4 John Milton, Lycidas (1637), line 106.

5 According to the documentary theory of the Pentateuch advanced by Julius Wellhausen and others in the nineteenth century, P represents the writings of the Priestly source, which was combined with the other earlier written sources about 400 B.C.

6 In this story the children of Benjamin captured the virgins of Shiloh, who were dancing at an annual festival, and took them as their wives. See Judges 21:16–24.

7 Against the Lord’s injunction not to look back at the destroyed city of Sodom, Lot’s wife did so and was changed into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:12–26). Similarly, when Orpheus descended to Hades to rescue Eurydice, he looked back, against the injunction not to, and Eurydice disappeared.

8 The name Samson, for example, may be derived from the word for “sun.”

9 The five Amorite kings who warred against Gibeon hid in a cave and were brought forth and hanged by Joshua. See Joshua 10:3–26.

10 Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was sacrificed by her father so that he could sail to Troy to help recapture Helen, his brother’s wife, from Paris.

11 That is, any passionate censor. Cato the Elder (234–139 B.C.), the Roman statesman, was strongly opposed to the contemporary fashion for all things Greek; he was made censor in 184 B.C., and because of the vigour with which he executed his office, he became known as “the Censor.”

12 See Edvard Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 5th ed., 3 vols. (New York: Allerton, 1922); and Edward Carpenter’s two books, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919) and Love’s Coming of Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1909).

13 Solomon’s revision of the administrative structure of the united kingdom (1 Kings 4:7–19) led to a weakening of the old tribal ties and greater assimilation of the Canaanite population. The division of the united kingdom into Judah and Israel occurred in 931 B.C.

14 The Book of Esther recounts the saga of the deliverance of the Jewish people from their Persian enemies; the deliverance accounts for the annual Purim feast on the fourteenth day of Adar.

15 Sir James Frazer, The Scapegoat (vol. 9 of GB), 417.

16 G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 178–9; NF would have used the 1925 ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead).

17 In Leviticus 16:7–10 Aaron cast lots for two goats: one became a sacrificial offering to the Lord; the other was driven away into the wilderness as a scapegoat for Azazel, an evil spirit or demon.

18 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 21.

19 NF is paraphrasing I.A. Richards, who said, “Besides the experiences which result from the building up of connected attitudes, there are those produced by the breaking down of some attitude which is a clog and bar to other activities.. .. The great masters of irony—Rabelais and the Flaubert of Bouvard et Péuchet—are the chief exponents of this kind of exorcism” (Principles of Literary Criticism [London: Kegan, Paul, French, 1925], 209–10).

20 No such title by James exists. Of James’s several books on myth and ritual NF probably meant to list either Primitive Ritual and Belief: An Anthropological Essay (London: Methuen, 1917) or Origins of Sacrifice: A Study in Comparative Religion (London: John Murray, 1933).

6. The Jewish Background of the New Testament

1 “Whatever men do.”

2 Auguste Comte believed that each science passed through theological, metaphysical, and positive stages. See his Positive Philosophy, trans. Harriet Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 26–7. Vol. 12 of GB is the bibliography and index. NF is referring, not to this vol., but to vol. 11, the second of two vols, entitled Balder the Beautiful; here Frazer, although not mentioning Comte by name, refers to the three stages of history as magic, religion, and science (305–6). See also the preface to vol. 10 (vol. 1 of Balder the Beautiful), where Frazer says that his own general concern is “the gradual evolution of human thought from savagery to civilization” (vi).

3 The line, slightly misquoted, comes from one of Voltaire’s most successful verse satires, Les Systèmes (1772). Voltaire represents Spinoza as saying to God—the “grand Être”: “Pardonnez-moi, dit-il en lui parlant tout bas, / Mais je pense, entre nous, que vous n’existez pas. / Je crois l’avoir prouvé par mes mathématiques” [“Pardon me, he said to him very softly, / But I think, between us, that you do not exist. / I believe that I have proved that by my mathematics”] (Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. [Paris: Gamier Frères, 1877–85]: 10:170, lines 59–61).

4 G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 38.

5 In this paragraph NF repeats the familiar argument of Spengler’s DW.

6 For a fuller treatment of the argument of this paragraph see NF’s “The Augustinian Interpretation of History” in this volume (no. 10).

7 Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 B.C.-A.D.50) was the most prominent representative of the form of Hellenistic Judaism that flourished in Alexandria for three hundred years, beginning about 200 B.C.; much of his work was devoted to allegorical interpretations of the Pentateuch.

8 Interesting overtone insofar as the word suggests Jacob, or the nation of Israel. The two names are not etymologically related.

9 That is, for almost three hundred years—from Saul’s assuming the throne of Israel’s united kingdom in ca. 1020 to the middle of the eighth century, when Jeroboam ruled in Israel after the kingdom was divided.

10 The inscription on the cliff of the Zagros mountains on the Baghdad-Hanadan road: “Thus saith Darius the King. That what I have done I have done altogether by the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other gods that be, brought aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be bring aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer, neither I nor my family, but according to Rectitude I have ruled.” NF no doubt learned of the inscription from a footnote in Spengler’s DW, 2:207.

11 King of Israel who killed the kings of Israel and Judah, executed Jezebel, and carried out other bloody deeds under a prophetic revolutionary mandate. See 2 Kings 9–10. Hosea 1:4–5 takes a different perspective on the revolt.

12 Malachi, which means “my messenger,” seems to be a title rather than a name.

13 All are stories from the Apocrypha.

14 Both Judith and Jael defeat the enemies of Israel by literally taking matters into their own hands: the former, a devout widow, cuts off the head of Holofernes, one of Nebuchadnezzar’s generals (Judith 13:7–8); the latter, the wife of Heber the Kenite, drives a tent-peg through the skull of Sisera, a Canaanite captain (Judges 4:17–22, 5:24–27).

15 Both Susanna and Tamar narrowly escape: the former, a devout and beautiful woman, is falsely accused of adultery but is saved by the clever cross-examination of Daniel; the latter, Er’s widow, is condemned for playing the prostitute to trick Judah, but she escapes punishment because of her righteousness in upholding the principle of the levirate marriage (Genesis 38).

16 Regarding Joseph’s resisting the temptation to lie with Potiphar’s wife and his dream interpretations, see Genesis 39–41; Daniel resolves not to defile himself in Nebuchadnezzar’s court (1:8); his interpretations of the king’s dreams are recorded in chaps. 2 and 4.

17 Both festivals celebrate deliverance: the Passover commemorates the time when Yahweh, smiting the first-born of the Egyptians, passed over the habitations of the Hebrews (Exodus 12); Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Israelites when Haman’s conspiracy against them is foiled by Esther and Mordecai (Esther 2–9).

18 Samson’s name is similar to several Semitic words for sun.

19 NF means to refer, not to Genesis 4, but to Genesis 6:1–4, which speaks of the “sons of God,” or the divine beings of the heavenly court, who descended into the human sphere to take the “daughters of men” as their wives. The fall of the angels is also recorded in the first of the three books of Enoch (the Ethiopic Book of Enoch).

20 Most conspicuously the flood episode in Genesis 6–8 derives in part from Gilgamesh.

21 “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 4.3.217).

22 The first period of the Cenozoic era, marked by the dominance of mammals on land.

23 The four “servant songs” in Second Isaiah (42:1–4, 49:1–6, 50:4–9, 52:13–53:12).

24 See 1 Enoch 37–71.

25 C.G. Montefiore, The Old Testament and After (London: Macmillan, 1923), 201–91. NF’s characterization is not altogether accurate; although the thrust of Montefiore’s argument is to illustrate the antecedents of the gospel in Judaism, he does say that the doctrine of losing one’s life in order to save it was a new doctrine (256).

26 A Jewish religious group that emerged in Palestine at least as early as the second century B.C., the Essenes were ascetics who engaged in esoteric teachings and various ritual observances; as NF suggests, they resembled medieval monastic orders.

27 St. Dominic (1170–1221), a rigorous ascetic known for his piety and learning, founded the Dominicans, which began as a preaching order; St. Francis (ca. 1181–1226) founded the Franciscans and was primarily interested in ministering to the poor and the needy.

28 A Gnostic sect which originated near the Jordan River in the first or second century B.C.; the sect is perhaps connected with John the Baptist, who in any case is prominent in Mandean writings.

29 See especially Ecclesiastes 1.

30 Jonah 1:17–2:10; Daniel 6; the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being cast into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar is in Daniel 3:8–30; Nebuchadnezzar’s insanity, described in bestial terms, is recorded in Daniel 4:33.

31 Asmodeus, whose name means “destroyer,” is described as an “evil demon” in Tobit 3:8; Abaddon and Apollyon are the Hebrew and Greek names for the “angel of the bottomless pit” in Revelation 9:11.

32 One of the Hellenic “mystery religions” in which personal rebirth was a chief theme. In the central story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the latter had to return to the underworld because the former failed to follow his instructions. See NF’s essay “St. Paul and Orphism” in this volume (no. 9).

33 Mattathias (d. 166 B.C.), a priest of Modlin, who defied the efforts of Antiochus IV to Hellenize the Jews; Judas Maccabaeus, his son, who defeated the Syrian generals and in 165 B.C. recovered the temple for Jewish worship; and Jonathan, his brother, who consolidated the power of the Maccabees and the Jews. See 1 Maccabees 2–12.

34 As indicated in the headnote, this is almost certainly NF’s paper “The Augustinian Interpretation of History,” essay no. 10 in this volume.

35 This point is made by Spengler in DW, 2:222.

36 See n. 20 to essay no. 5, “The Fertility Cults.”

7. The Age and Type of Christianity in the Epistle of James

1 The Ebionites were a Judaeo-Christian sect of the early Christian era that rigorously observed the Jewish law and believed Jesus was the Messiah, though not truly divine.

2 In this verse James alludes to the injunction against swearing in Matthew 5:34.

3 The Wisdom of Solomon was composed in Greek by an unknown Hellenistic Jew, probably in Alexandria during the late first century B.C.; Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, was written by a Jewish scribe, probably in Jerusalem, about 180 B.C. Philo Judaeus was a first-century Jewish Hellenistic philosopher who sought to synthesize Greek philosophy and Jewish scripture and who greatly influenced Clement and Origen. James Moffatt, throughout his commentary, points to James’s familiarity with these sources.

4 Moffatt says that Origen was the first writer actually to quote from James and that it was “more than probable” that Hermas knew the Epistle. The General Epistles: James, Peter, and Judas (New York: Harper, 1928), 1. Origen was a third-century Biblical scholar and the leading theologian of Alexandria, where he became head of the catechetical school. The Shepherd of Hermas was a popular second-century work purportedly written by a freed Roman slave; it is divided into visions, mandates, and parables.

5 Joseph B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes, and Comments, rev. 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1913). NF’s note is confused. The quotations from p. cxxi of Mayor are not from ante-Nicene writers quoting James but simply evidence that James was acquainted with Philo. Mayor does say that Origen “is apparently the first who cites the Epistle as Scripture and as written by St. James” (lxxxi), but he gives an extensive list of references to James by several dozen writers before the time of Origen (lxx-lxxxi).

6 Mayor claims that James was “written probably in the fifth decade of the Christian era by one who had been brought up with Jesus from his childhood and whose teaching is in many points identical with the actual words of our Lord as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels” (The Epistle of St. James, vii).

7 Two epistles were attributed to Clement of Rome (late first century); the first, written ca. A.D. 96, is generally accepted as his.

8 “Didache” is the short title for “The Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles,” a brief manual of Christian moral teaching and church order written in the early second century.

9 For the publication information on Mayor and Moffat, see nn. 5 and 4 above. The other commentaries are: James Hardy Ropes, The Apostolic Age in the Light of Modern Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912); R.J. Knowling, The Epistle of St. James, with an Introduction and Notes (London: Methuen, 1904); and F.J.A. Hort, The Epistle of St. James: The Greek Text (London: Macmillan, 1909).

8. Doctrine of Salvation of John, Paul, and James

1 See Alan Hugh McNeile’s Introduction to the Study of the New Testament, 2nd. ed., rev. by C.S.C. Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). NF was using the first edition of this book, entitled Introduction to the New Testament (1927).

2 vide Kautsky, Beginnings of Christianity. (A well-sustained Marxist attempt to prove that Christianity was basically a labour movement, making much of allegedly “socialistic” utterances in James tending to identify the poor with good and rich with evil.) [NF]. Unless NF is referring to the original German text, Der Ursprung des Christentums (1923), he means to cite the English trans., Foundations of Christianity (New York: International Publishers, 1925). NF does give the correct title in one of the notes to essay no. 13, “Relative Importance of the Causes of the Reformation.”

3 Dow underlined “inherently a ritualist” and put a question mark beside it in the margin.

4 Dow placed parentheses around “the Pharisaic … ritual” and put a question mark beside it in the margin.

5 vide Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions. [NF]. Perhaps NF means “cf.” rather than “vide,” for H.A.A. Kennedy’s St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913) argues exactly the opposite of what NF claims.

6 Dow put parentheses around “Holy Spirit” and wrote “Word” above it.

7 Dow underlined “midway between” and put a question mark beside the phrase in the margin.

8 Dow put square brackets around “and the atonement of Jesus’ death” and placed a question mark beside the phrase in the margin.

9 Dow underlined “John it is … salvation” and put a question mark beside the passage in the margin.

9. St. Paul and Orphism

1 The quotation from Gilbert’s book (New York: Macmillan, 1928) comes from pp. 99–100.

2 See H.A.A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913); Kennedy’s actual position is that the influence of the Greek mystery religions on Paul was insignificant.

3 Alfred F. Loisy (1857–1940) was a French Catholic theologian whose books and articles on Biblical criticism were condemned by the Church and some of them placed on the Index; he was eventually excommunicated; from 1909 to 1932 he was professor of Church history at the Collège de France; among his many books are La naissance du christianisme (1933; Eng. trans., 1948) and Les origines du Nouveau Testament (1936; Eng. trans., 1950). Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) was a French archaeologist whose Orpheus: A History of Religions (rev. ed., 1930) NF was familiar with. Richard Reitzenstein (1861–1931) was a German classical philologist and historian of religion; one of his better-known works, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: nach ihre Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (1910), was available only in the original German when NF was writing; H.A.A. Kennedy, to whom NF refers, is greatly indebted to Reitzenstein, even while disagreeing with many of his conclusions.

4 See especially chaps. 1–4 of The Birth of Tragedy (1870–71; 1st Eng. trans. 1909).

5 That is, designed to avert evil and ward off the anger of the gods.

6 Throughout “On Superstition,” Plutarch’s moralizing comments are set in opposition to the views of atheists and various superstitious people. See his Moralia (London: Dent, 1912), 371–88.

7 Plutarch’s attitude toward war appears at many places in his Lives. See, to take one example, his account of Antony’s foray into Ephesus, where Antony is described as “the Devourer and the Savage.” Plutarch’s Lives, the so-called “Dryden translation,” corrected and rev. by A.H. Clough, 5 vols. (New York: A.L. Burt, n.d.), 5:74.

8 This paragraph derives from Sir James Frazer’s The Dying God (vol. 4 of GB).

9 See Sir James Frazer’s Adonis, Attis, Osiris (vol. 5 of GB), 1–12, 263–76.

10 See, for example, Isaiah 57:3–13.

11 The Hellenizing program of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, following his accession to the Syrian throne in 175 B.C., is recorded in 1 Maccabees 1:11–15 and 2 Maccabees 5:11–26.

12 Sabazius was a Thraco-Phrygian god; the Vincentius frescoes at Rome associate him with certain Jewish eschatological ideas.

13 See par. 2 of Plutarch’s life of Alexander, Plutarch’s Lives, the so-called “Dryden translation,” rev. by A.H. Clough, 5 vols. (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914), 4:179–80.

14 NF’s source here is Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Holt, 1913), chaps. 3 and 4.

15 In the dramatic period the satyric drama was retained as the last play of the tetralogy. [NF]. On the etymology of tragedy and the relation of the Diony-sian rite to satyric drama see NF’s source, Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 420–1.

16 “Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!”—the words of the captain of Louis XIV’s bodyguard, exclaimed from the window of the state apartment after the king’s death.

17 Cyclops, trans. William Arrowsmith, in Euripides, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 3:260, lines 643–8.

18 The vase depicting Orpheus and Apollo is reproduced in Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 467, and in W.K.C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (London: Methuen, 1935), 38. The vase itself does not depict Apollo uttering the oracle: that comes rather from an account by Philostratus in his biography of Apollonius of Tyana (Harrison, ibid.).

19 This punning on and symbolizes, according to Macchioro, op. cit., the doctrine of the unity of opposites, made into a philosophical principle by Heraclitus, whom Macchioro claims as an Orphic. The opposites in this case are death and life. Life is the death of the soul; the death of the body, in the palingenesis or in actual death, the freeing of the soul into life. [NF]. The quotation is from the Cratylus, 400c (trans. H.N. Fowler), which was probably called to NF’s attention by Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 156–7, or perhaps by Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 615. NF’s reference to Macchioro is somewhat misleading. Although Macchioro does examine certain southern Italian timboli (burial mounds), which he sees as containing evidence of the Orphic views about the body as a prison, he says nothing about the punning on soma (“body)” and sema (“tomb” or “sign”) that is implicit in the passage from the Cratylus. See Vittorio D. Macchioro, From Orpheus to Paul: A History ofOrphism (New York: Holt, 1930), 109–21. Despite the “op. cit.” NF has not previously cited Macchioro, whose work he lists in his bibliography at the end of the paper. For Macchioro’s view on Heraclitus and Orphism, see pp. 169–76—a view, according to Guthrie, that is without merit (Orpheus and Greek Religion, 224–31).

20 See “The World of the Unborn,” chap. 19 of Erewhon (1872; rev. by Butler in 1901).

21 Odyssey, bk. 11, line 598. “The cruel boulder bounding again to the level” (trans. Robert Fitzgerald).

22 NF doubtless read about this in vol. 1 of Sir James Frazer’s translation of Pausanias’s Description of Greece, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913), bk. 10, chaps. 28–31. For Frazer’s commentary on the passage, see vol. 5, 372–5. See also Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 601–2.

23 See n. 10 in “The Jewish Background of the New Testament” (no. 6, above).

24 Vide Toynbee, A.J.: A Study of History, vol. 1. [NF]. See A Study of History, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 1:63–7; only three volumes of Toynbee’s eventual twelve-volume work had been published when NF was writing.

25 The point of NF’s rhetorical question is apparently that just as Cyrus the Great was largely responsible for the restoration of Israel after the Babylonian captivity, granting the Jews the return of Palestine and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple, so Alaric II, the Visigoth king of Spain and southern Gaul (A.D. 485–507), was responsible for reversing the policy of his father, Euric, who had persecuted the Christians.

26 The ancient Greek city of southern Italy, which became a byword for the voluptuousness of its people. Kroton, with the aid of the Troezenians, recaptured Sybaris from the Achaeans in 510 B.C. On the Orphic tablets discovered at Sybaris, one of the ancient centres of Orphism, see Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 583–8.

27 Vide Colin Still: Shakespeare’s Mystery Play. [NF]. Still’s book, which NF repeatedly referred to over the years in his discussions of The Tempest, was published in London by C. Palmer in 1921. The danse macabre, or dance of death, did not really develop in painting until after the Middle Ages, the Black Plague and the Hundred Years’ War having helped to condition the response to such a theme.

28 After Socrates decides to admit Strepsiades into his school, there follows a long “initiation” scene that parodies a religious rite (lines 614 ff., B. Bickley Rogers translation). The point about the parody is made by Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 511.

29 Jonson’s play (1614) satirizes among other Puritan attitudes their attacks on the theatre.

30 An Orphic poem often quoted by Neoplatonic writers; its date and authorship are uncertain.

31 “Everything comes out to be of One and is resolved into One.” The translation is by Guthrie, who quotes the Greek passage on pp. 74–5. The epigram is recorded by Diogenes Laertius in the “Prologue” to his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., rev. ed., trans. R.D. Hicks (London: Heinemann, 1950), 1:5. Hicks’s translation: “All things proceed from unity and are resolved again into unity.”

32 Orpheus and Greek Religion, p. 106. [NF]. Guthrie says, “The conception which seems to me to have the best right to be called an Orphic idea is that of a creator.”

33 The vase is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. NF’s source is doubtless Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which reproduces the amphora on p. 612.

34 For Heraclitus see Macchioro, op. cit., pp. 169 ff., and for Empedocles see Guthrie, op. cit., pp. 169 ff. [NF]

35 See H.A.A. Kennedy, “St. Paul’s Relation to the Terminology of the Mystery-Religions,” chap. 4 of St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1913]), and C.A. Anderson Scott, Christianity according to St. Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 122–33.

36 Guthrie notes that Aristophanes is among those who “show by a turn of phrase or by a thought an acquaintance with Orphic literature” (74).

37 See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. Thomas B. Falls, in Saint Justin Martyr, vol. 16 of The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America), 278. For Clement of Alexandria’s views on false religions, see his Exhortation to the Heathen, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2 of Fathers of the Second Century, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1956), 171–206.

10. The Augustinian Interpretation of History

1 See City of God, ed. David Knowles (New York: Penguin, 1972), bk. 18, sec. 2.

2 Although NF is being the devil’s advocate here, Augustine does not actually ignore Greece and Egypt. He considers Rome and Assyria as earthly cities because they “present a kind of pattern of contrast, both historically and geographically.” The other earthly cities are “appendages” of the Roman and Assyrian empires. See City of God, bk. 18, sec. 2.

3 Those who minimize the importance of Augustine’s political and social views include three writers listed in NF’s bibliography: Gierke, Carlyle, and Dunning. All three are cited by John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s “City of God” (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), 2–3, which NF says in his bibliographic note was “the main commentary used.” NF remarks that he consulted the three volumes “for the development of Augustine’s thought during the medieval period.” But NF could have learned very little about this development from any of the three. Gierke says almost nothing about Augustine, Carlyle is interested only in Augustine’s views on law and justice, and Dunning, whom NF cites toward the end of his essay, calling him a superficial anticleric, devotes a mere three pages to pointing out how Augustine’s conceptions of law and politics are formulated in the context of the spiritual life. NF may have consulted these three sources, or he may have simply relied on Figgis’s brief account of them.

4 NF names none of the commentators on either side of the debate about Augustine as a philosophical historian; on this point he is doubtless following Figgis, 33–4.

5 Hegel’s wording, at least in the English translation, is a bit different: “What experience and history teach is this,—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it” (“Introduction,” Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree [London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857], 6). NF, who had read a large portion of Shaw in his teenage years, may have first encountered the Hegelian maxim in the preface to Heartbreak House, where Shaw says, “Alas! Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history” (The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, 30 vols. [New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1930], 15:38). A similar remark appears in Shaw’s The Revolutionist’s Handbook: “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!” (Collected Works, 10:228).

6 In the margin beside this sentence Cousland wrote “obscure.”

7 That is, from 336 B.C., when Alexander became king of Macedonia, until the death of Hadrian in A.D. 138.

8 The Assyrian city of Nineveh fell to the Medes and Persians in 612 B.C.; Sardis, the ancient city of Lydia, was captured in 499 B.C. by the Ionians in the Persian Wars.

9 See Herodotus (484–420 B.C.), History of the Persian Wars, and Thucydides (ca. 455–399 B.C.), History of the Peloponnesian War.

10 The point is made by Spengler in DW, 1:9–10, 18.

11 NF is apparently referring to the position taken by Glaucon in his first argument about justice in bk. 2 of the Republic, where he maintains that the nature of a thing can be determined by its origin (3573–3620.

12 Civic degneration as revealed in the various corruptions of the ideal state: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.

13 Gilbert Murray, The Greek View of Life; C.N. Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History. [NF]. No such title by Gilbert Murray exists. The book NF apparently meant to cite was G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life (London: Methuen, 1896), a book which by 1932 had been issued in six subsequent editions. Dickinson, in any case, says that the Greeks, “supplied with a general explanation of the world,… could put aside the question of its origin and end, and devote themselves freely and fully to the art of living, unhampered by scruples and doubts as to the nature of life” (Collier Books edition, 1961, 51). NF’s second citation is to Charles Norris Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1929); the point about history beginning with the Persian Wars is on p. 24.

14 Cf. Figgis, 42.

15 Cf. Figgis, 34: “No one who takes the Incarnation seriously can avoid some kind of philosophy of history.”

16 That is, on the borderland between primary causes (a universe based on a divine plan or purpose) and secondary causes (material and instrumental forces that can be studied scientifically).

17 Windelband, History of Philosophy. [NF]. Wilhelm Windelband maintains that the world-movement of Christianity was based from the beginning on the “experiences of personalities” or “the development of the relation of person to person, and especially the relation of the finite spirit to the deity” (A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts [New York: Macmillan, 1921], 256).

18 For some nine years before his conversion to Christianity Augustine was a follower of Mani (ca. A.D. 217–76), who believed in the fundamental duality of mind and matter.

19 In the margin beside this paragraph Cousland wrote “a good paragraph.”

20 Cf. Figgis, 36–7.

21 The most important of the voluminous writings of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), Italian patriot, republican, and ardent liberal, are found in the partially autobiographical The Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini (1864–70); the Whig thesis of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) is set down in his expansive History of England (vols. 1–2, 1848; vols. 3–4, 1855); the main principles of the humanistic religion of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) are developed in his System of Positive Polity (1852–54) and Positivist Catechism (1852).

22 “Kingdoms without justice are like criminal gangs.” Figgis also calls the title of IV, iv, a “famous tag” (60).

23 This is the theme of the Communist Manifesto. [NF]. NF is referring to the first sentence of pt. 1 of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848).

24 Cf. Figgis, 51–2.

25 vide Dunning, Political Theories, vol. 1. [NF]. William Archibald Dunning, A History of Political Theories, Ancient and Medieval, vol. 1 of the three-volume A History of Political Theories (London: Macmillan, 1902). On Dunning’s reference to Augustine’s view of slavery, see pp. 157–8.

26 This seems to be Augustine’s general position on the question of political theory. Identifying, as he tacitly does, the (Stoic) Senecan theory of the organization of human society on force as a result of a fall from a Golden Age with the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Adam, he attaches comparatively little importance to justice, in practice, as the factor in holding the state together. At the same time, the only thing good in the civitas terrena is this same justice which, like the Church, is the only safeguard for the inhabitants of the city of God on earth (XIX, xxi, xxiv). [NF]

27 See A.J. Carlyle and R.W. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, vol. 1: The Second Century to the Ninth, 2nd ed. (London: W. Blackwood, 1927), 164–70. Carlyle, who argues that Augustine did not have any great influence on medieval political thought, is concerned mainly to illustrate that Augustine differs from St. Ambrose and other Church Fathers in seeing the essential quality of the state as authority rather than justice.

28 That is, an answer on the side of either the Church or the state. The Guelphs were a propapal, anti-imperial party in Italian cities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the Ghibellines were pro-imperialists, supporting the involvement of the Holy Roman Emperor in Italian politics.

29 Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725; trans, into English as The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 1949). This is the first reference in NF’s writing to Vico, whose New Science was to become an important text for him in later years.

30 The dictum that every Jesuit would obey the pope and the general of the Jesuit order as unquestioningly “as a corpse.”

31 Cousland underlined “Roman” and wrote “North African” in the margin.

32 I understand that the influence of Augustine on Descartes and Leibnitz has been traced by M. Gilson, but I have not been able to find anything containing this in any book bearing his name. [NF]. The book NF was unsuccessful in locating was Étienne Gilson’s Etudes sur la rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930).

33 Joachim of Floris’s doctrine of the three ages—of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is developed in his Expositio in Apocalypsin (1527). See Delno C. West and Sandra Zindars-Swartz, Joachim ofFiore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 10–29. NF was probably introduced to Joachim during his second year at Victoria College, when he read Spengler’s DW.

34 On Machiavelli, More, and Vico, see Figgis, 48–50, 101.

35 This view of Hegel’s philosophy of history was later promoted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945), 2:57–75. While there is support for the view of Hegel as a defender of the reactionary policies of Frederich Wilhelm III, other readers of Hegel, especially the left-wing Hegelians, have appealed to his work for its revolutionary and radical implications.

36 Hegel calls Fries the leader of “a superficial brigade of so-called philosophers” (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 15).

37 Spengler’s Hour of Decision, which NF read in the 1934 English translation, argues for the old German militarist position and attacks all forms of socialism, communism, and fascism.

38 The idea of opposing factors resolving in a synthesis, the great addition of Joachim to Augustine, appears not only in Hegel, but, with different context, in the Kantian and Comtian laws of three stages in thought. [NF]. Auguste Comte had proposed three stages in the development of each of the sciences—the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. For Kant, the three stages were the dogmatic, the sceptical, and the critical. The tripartite scheme appeared also in Kant’s critiques of knowledge, morality, and feeling, which he examined in turn in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790).

39 Spengler conceived the thesis of his book before 1914 and worked it out by 1917; it was published a year later as Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit and appeared in its English translation in 1926. NF read the revised 1928 edition. In this sentence NF’s typescript reads “though written earlier, he culminates.” Cousland noted the error by putting “he” in parentheses.

40 See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1882–85), and Shaw, Man and Superman (1901, 1903; first performed in London in 1905).

41 Spengler outlines his basic thesis about the organic nature of culture in the introduction to vol. 1 of DW; see especially pp. 21–46.

42 That is, the deficiency of Spengler in treating St. Augustine as a Manichean. See DW, 2:227, 234.

43 For Spengler’s outline of these correspondences see DW, 1:27, 112; they are summarized in more detail in the three tables at the end of vol. 1 of DW (following p. 428).

44 For Augustine’s views on Varro and Seneca, see The City of God, bk. 6, chaps. 2–6, 10–11, perhaps the source of NF’s statement here.

45 “Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and only men” (Goethe to Luden, as quoted by Spengler, DW, 1:21).

46 NF seems to have constructed his bibliography at least partially from memory, which in some cases failed him. The books he lists, in addition to those of Hegel, Marx, and Spengler, are these: John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s “City of God” (London: Longmans, Green, 1921); R.W. Carlyle and A.J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (London: R. Blackwood, 1903–36); Otto Friedrich von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900); F.J.C. Hearnshaw, ed., The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers (London: G.G. Harrap, 1923); William Archibald Dunning, A History of Political Theories, Ancient and Medieval, vol. 1 of the three-volume A History of Political Theories (London: Macmillan, 1902).

11. The Life and Thought of Ramon Lull

1 A work completed about 1272, this book was not translated into English when NF was writing (and has not yet been translated). The Art of Contemplation, trans, by E. Allison Peers (London: SPCK, 1925), is a different work altogether, being a section of Lull’s prose romance Blanquerna.

2 This work had not been translated into English at the time NF was writing; it has since become the first volume of the Selected Works of Ramon Lull, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

3 Wallace underlined “to” and wrote “than” in the margin.

4 Acre, the Palestinian seaport, was surrendered to the Saracens in 1291, thus marking the end of the crusades.

5 William Caxton’s translation of a French version of Lull’s Book of the Ordre of Chyualrey (ca. 1504) was reissued in 1926 by the Early English Text Society, and that edition was reprinted in 1991 by Sam Houston State University Press in Huntsville, Tex.; Sir Gilbert Hay’s 1456 translation of the same book —The Buke of the Ordre ofKnychthede—was also from a French text.

6 Long before Lull’s time the Western and Eastern Churches disagreed over the Latin Church’s addition of the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed (“proceedeth from the Father and the Son”).

7 Trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Jarrolds, 1926).

8 The most forceful of all papal claims, issued by Boniface VIII in 1302, that the pope has authority over temporal powers.

9 E. Allison Peers translated a portion of this work, which was published as The Tree of Love (London: SPCK, 1926).

10 In this paragraph NF is following Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tuft, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 323–5. Windelband devotes a brief paragraph to Lull (321–2).

11 BL, 26. In Peers’s 1945 edition, this passage was revised to read, “Propriety and Community met, and joined together, that there might be love and benevolence between Lover and Beloved.”

12 Sebonde was a fifteenth-century Spanish theologian who, it is generally held, owed a great debt to Lull; in the 1570s Montaigne translated and published “La théologie naturelle de Raymond Sebon” and later wrote an “Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde,” which appeared in book 2 of his Essais. In the early 1580s Bruno lectured on Lull at the University of Paris and wrote a treatise on his work.

13 “It is impossible for one metal to be changed into the form of another,” says Lull. And again, “It is demonstrated that alchemy is not a science, but a fabrication.” NF quotes the Latin from Peers, 4o6n. 5.

14 Daniel 6:7–23; in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian, confronted by two lions, is afraid to pass by until the porter of the house assures him that they are chained.

15 Athanasius “the Great,” the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria and vigorous opponent of Arianism, was exiled on five separate occasions by his antagonists, among them Constantine and Julian.

12. Robert Cowton to Thomas Rondel

1 For Cowton, see Little, 222–3; for Rondel, 162. Of the eighteen manuscripts in British collections containing Cowton’s commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences, three are at Merton College. Nine Franciscans, five of whom were laymen, arrived at Dover in 1224 and very soon established themselves in and around Oxford.

2 The recipient of Cowton’s letter was the Franciscan lector Thomas Rondel. The role of a lector, according to Andrew G. Little, was “not unlike that of a college tutor, except that he was always a man of proved ability and long experience. To the friars he was far more than a theological lecturer; he was a trusted friend, on whose advice and sympathy and help they might reckon in all the conduct of life” (The Grey Friars in Oxford, 32). For brief biographical sketches of Cowton and Rondel, see the introduction to the present volume, pp. xxiv-xxv.

3 A port of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber.

4 Perugia is the province in central Italy in which Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis and of the Franciscan order, is located; it is also the name of the capital of that province.

5 The much-visited pilgrimage church in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.

6 The Franciscans were known as the Friars Minor.

7 Edward I (1239–1307), King of England, had assumed the throne in 1272. The French king was Philip IV (“The Fair”), who had succeeded his father in 1285.

8 Edward of Carnarvon, son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile; he was made Prince of Wales in 1301 and became King of England in 1307. Edward II, as Cowton predicts, had an unfortunate reign, characterized by dissension among his barons and the loss of the English hold on Scotland. He was eventually deposed, and he abdicated in 1327. The henchmen of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger de Mortimer, had him put to death shortly thereafter.

9 The feasts of the original four doctors of the Western Church—Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Jerome—had been imposed by Boniface VIII in 1298.

10 This is a variant of Chaucer: “And in a glass he haddé piggés bones.” [NF]. The line comes from the portrait of the Pardoner in the “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales, line 702.

11 Edward I had accomplished the conquest of Wales in 1282 after a five-year campaign; in 1296 he began his long offensive against Scotland; following a number of campaigns against William Wallace, which eventually led to Wallace’s defeat and execution, Edward died in 1307 as he was moving toward the border to engage Robert I (the Bruce), Wallace’s successor as leader of the Scots. Duns Scotus, the celebrated scholastic philosopher, studied and taught at Oxford in the thirteenth century.

12 The Franciscans were known as the Grey Friars in England.

13 As Langland did in Piers the Plowman. [NF]. Langland’s poem (ca. 1362) is in part a cry of social protest on behalf of the common person against abuses by the king and the courts; the poet particularly condemns the pride and the abuses of the clergy.

14 St. Paul’s, which dates from Roman times. Construction on Old St. Paul’s, the building that occupied the site in the thirteenth century, had begun in the late eleventh century; it was severely damaged by fire in 1561.

15 The medieval London Bridge, about sixty yards down the Thames from the present structure, was a stone bridge that had been completed in 1209; a row of houses had sprung up on each side of the bridge, giving it the appearance of a continuous street.

16 Chaucer’s pilgrims were also to set forth on their pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Thomas ä Becket.

17 This is a reference to The Second Shepherd’s Play, one of the mystery plays in the Wakefield cycle that was staged on movable pageant wagons. The manuscript for this play is dated mid-fifteenth century at the earliest; the earliest extant nativity play—from the York cycle—was not performed until 1376. The reference to The Second Shepherd’s Play is, therefore, an anachronism— one of the few in Cowton’s letter. (My thanks to Gail Gibson for the information about dating the nativity plays. Ed.)

18 Guienne was an old province in southwestern France, part of the older Aquitaine; it was disputed by England and France in the Middle Ages; between 1294 and 1296 Philip IV of France successfully overran the province, of which Edward I of England was duke; the territory finally passed to France in 1453. Calais, a fortified port on the Strait of Dover, played a prominent part in the early wars between England and France.

19 Edward I gave impetus to the development of law and built up the central administration of government; in response to the hostility of the merchants and other subjects, he issued in 1297 the confirmation of the charters granted by John and Henry III, including the Magna Carta. In 1302 Philip IV called together the nobility, clergy, and commons in a States General to explain his course of action against the papacy; twice more during his reign he summoned the States General.

20 The Franciscans were very strong in England and especially prominent around Oxford. Although the Dominicans (Black Friars) were widely dispersed across Europe by the late thirteenth century, St. Dominic’s early missions had been in southern France, where he had preached especially against the reputed heresies of the Albigensians.

21 For Duns, see n. 11, above. William of Occam, an English scholastic philosopher and a Franciscan friar, studied at Oxford in the early fourteenth century.

22 Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193–1280) was a scholastic philosopher who joined the Dominicans in 1223. Bacon (ca. 1214–94) was a Franciscan scholar, scientist, and philosopher who studied at Oxford; his works were condemned for some unknown reason, perhaps because of his severe attacks on his contemporaries, and he was imprisoned for fifteen years; his scientific experiments led to his being seen as a magician in the popular imagination.

23 English Franciscan philosopher (d. 1245) and the first scholastic versed in the whole of Aristotle’s work. Bacon had remarked that Alexander of Hales “was ignorant of natural philosophy and metaphysics.”

24 A student of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) became the greatest figure of medieval scholasticism; he joined the Dominican order in 1243 or 1244.

25 Construction of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Beauvais, modelled on the cathedral at Amiens, began in 1227; the choir, begun in 1272, collapsed in 1284 but was rebuilt by doubling the number of pillars.

26 “Head of the world.”

27 The Sentences of Peter Lombard (ca. 1100-ca. 1160) was one of the most important theological works of the Middle Ages; e.g., it enunciated the doctrine adopted by the Church at the Council of Trent that a sacrament was both a symbol and a means of grace; the book is arranged as a collection of opinions of theologians, often presenting unanimity on certain points of doctrine. On Cowton’s later commentaries on the Sentences see the introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv, and n. 1, above.

28 Bonaventura (1221–74) was an Italian scholastic theologian who, as general of the Franciscans, was the principal curb on Roger Bacon’s Aristotelianism, which he always mistrusted.

29 It was stamped out in the approved medieval way, when twenty-five of their numbers were burned as obstinate heretics in 1318. [NF]. The Zealots or Zelanti, also known as Spirituals, were a Franciscan faction that emerged in the 1240s intent on strict adherence to the convictions of St. Francis. Pope John XXII was determined to quash the group, and in 1318 twenty-five Zealots were handed over to the state for torture. Four of these were burned (not twenty-five, as NF says), but hundreds more were burned during the next several years. NF’s source for his information about the Zealots was Vida D. Scudder’s The Franciscan Adventure: A Study of the First Hundred Years of the Order of St. Francis of Assisi (London: J.M. Dent, 1931), chap. 10.

30 Philip IV conquered Flanders after Edward I of England withdrew in 1297; five years later the Flemish rebelled and defeated Philip at the Battle of Courtrai.

31 Philip IV was known as Philip the Fair.

32 The term was used as early as 1134. [NF]

33 Jews remained in France in spite of their being persecuted by Philip IV, who oppressed Templars and Italian bankers, as well as other wealthy groups.

34 It was actually Edward I who had ordered the Jews to leave England, resulting in a widespread exodus in 1290.

35 The historical Thomas Rondel was on the board or commission to investigate the Templars during the Philippian persecution, so I assume an antecedent interest. [NF]. The Knights Templar, members of the military religious order of the Poor Knights of Christ, were officially called the Knights of the Temple of Solomon after their house in Jerusalem. The order began during the period of the crusades and became one of the most powerful organizations in Europe: its goal was to protect Christianity, and the military exploits of the Templars won them uncommon fame. Because of the Templars’ great wealth they also became, in effect, the bankers of Europe, and it was this power that kindled the ire and greed of princes, such as Philip IV. Rondel did take part in the examination of the Templars in London in 1309, when he was a master of theology and perhaps a lector at the London Convent.

36 The Knights Hospitallers were members of the military religious Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem; the goal of the order was to aid pilgrims, but when military protection became necessary to fulfil this goal, the focus of the order changed. Like the Templars, the Hospitallers accumulated great wealth.

37 As indeed it did: Philip IV launched a persecution of the Templars from 1308 to 1314, confiscating their money, and Edward II suppressed the order in England.

38 Jacques De Molay had been elected grand master of the Templars in about 1295. Philip IV’s final act against the Templars, which effectively ended the order, was to have De Molay burned to death in 1314.

39 The theologian Pelagius was believed to have been born in England about the middle of the fourth century. The heresies he was accused of had to do with his denial of original sin and with the questions of God’s grace in justifying humanity and humanity’s free will to choose between good and evil.

40 Bartholomew de Glanvilla (Bartholomaeus Anglicus), a Franciscan and author of the celebrated and popular medieval encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (ca. 1220).

41 When Pelagius went to Rome in about A.D. 400, he wanted to improve the moral climate, and toward that end he claimed greater moral responsibility for individuals through a higher freedom of the will than the Church was willing to grant.

42 Dubois (ca. early i250s-after 1313) was a propagandist for the interests of the French king; he began acting as permanent attorney for the king about 1300. The conflict between Pope Boniface and Philip IV, primarily an economic battle, was long-standing. It had begun with Philip’s efforts to levy a permanent tax on the clergy and it eventuated in the seizure of Boniface in 1303 and, six years later, in the Avignon papacy.

43 Better known as Jean de Meung, father of French poetry, who continued the Romaunt of the Rose for some thirty or forty thousand lines. The derivation hazarded for his surname is pure guesswork. [NF]. Jean de Meung’s dates are ca. 1250 to ca. 1305. NF’s guesswork about the derivation of “de Meung” is correct. De Meung (or de Meun) continued the composition of the Roman de la Rose begun by Guillaume de Lorris, adding some 19, 000 lines.

44 Giovanni Villani (1275–1348), author of a history of Florence (12 books), an early masterpiece of Italian prose.

45 The celebrations connected with the jubilee year 1300 drew thousands of pilgrims to Italian cities; as many as thirty thousand pilgrims crossed the Tiber into Rome daily.

46 Cowton would have seen the most beautiful part of the church, the choir, which was begun in the thirteenth century. St. Peter’s was not completed until four centuries later.

47 Dijon became the capital of the duchy of Burgundy in the eleventh century; it was brought to prominence, however, only after 1363 by Philippe le Hardi and the dukes who succeeded him.

48 St. Bénigne and the other church, Notre Dame, were both thirteenth-century churches. Notre Dame was actually built earlier (1229–40) than St. Bénigne (1271–88).

49 Anselm (ca. 1034–1109), the saintly and much beloved doctor of the church, was renowned for his patience in dealing with others.

50 Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327), the father of German mysticism, was widely known as a preacher; he taught at several places, including Paris, Strasbourg, and Cologne; his explanations of mysticism reveal that he was a better theologian than philosopher.

51 St. Francis was born and died in Assisi, and he founded his order there in 1208.

52 NF has let an anachronism slip in, or else this particular Charles of Savoy is a fictional character. The burghers of Geneva did call on the assistance of the dukes of Savoy in the thirteenth century, and the House of Savoy, in fact, aimed to establish a sovereign presence in Geneva. But Charles I, Charles II, and Charles III were fifteenth- and sixteenth-century dukes; and the various Charles Emmanuels came to power in Savoy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If NF meant to be historically accurate, as he almost everywhere else is, he should have referred to Amadeus V (1285–1323) of Savoy, who fought against the counts of Geneva. Or perhaps NF meant Peter of Savoy, the uncle of Amadeus V, who had entered into relations with the city of Geneva—though this would have been several decades before Cowton made his journey.

53 The Habsburg emperor during the time of Boniface VIII was King Albert I of Germany, who ruled from 1298 to 1308; he was the eldest son of Gertrude von Hohenberg and Rudolf I, founder of the Habsburg dynasty.

54 This is perhaps a little early for Eulenspiegel; there is a tradition that he died in 1350, and men of his type do not as a rule live to sixty-five or so. I use him here to symbolize the growing opposition of burgher and peasant. [NF]. Till Eulenspiegel, the north German peasant clown of the fourteenth century, was made famous by chapbooks describing his various tricks against the upper classes; he was not born until the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century.

55 The Viscontis were a powerful Ghibelline family in medieval Lombardy. Matteo (1255–1322) became imperial vicar of Milan in 1294, and he extended the Visconti domain through diplomacy; he was, however, eventually excommunicated because of his opposition to the Church, whereupon he abdicated. Piacenza held a high rank in the league of Lombard towns at the time and was subject to fierce party struggles among the Scotti, Torriani, and Visconti families. The “Scotto” to whom NF refers was Alberto Scotto, the unscrupulous lord of Piacenza from 1290 until 1313.

56 The Ghibellines had been expelled from Florence before the time of Dante, the Blacks and Whites then forming two factions within the Guelph party.

57 The allusion is to Proverbs 16:18.

58 The Cathari were members of an ascetic medieval religious group in southern Europe; their dualistic beliefs sprang from Gnosticism, Christianity, and Manicheanism.

59 In the debate over concepts and individual things, the medieval realists held that concepts had an existence independent of individuals: they existed ante rem, or before the thing. The nominalists, on the contrary, held that concepts existed only post rem; they were generalizations of individual things, and so had no real existence at all.

60 The Albigensians were a Cathari sect in southern France; like other Cathari in the Mediterranean world, they were ascetics and believed in the duality of good and evil.

61 Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1260-ca. 1319), whose painting represents the culmination of the Byzantine tradition in Italian painting; his most famous work is La Maestà, a double painting which hung over the high altar in the Siena Cathedral until 1505 and is now housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. About three years after NF wrote the present paper he saw La Maestä—on a trip to Siena in March of 1937.

62 Cimabue’s frescos, including Madonna with Angels and a painting of the saints, among them St. Francis, are in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco. Cimabue was born about 1240, a fact that helps to date Cowton’s journey. NF later saw the Cimabue frescos—on a trip to Assisi in March of 1937.

63 Perhaps a reference to a literal rendering of the parts of Cimabue’s name: cima (top) + búe (dunce).

64 i.e., in tempera. [NF]

65 The first recorded works of Giotto (ca. 1266-ca. 1337) are in the Basilica of San Francesco.

66 The kingdom of the legendary Prester John was located variously in Asia and Africa; one tradition placed him as the monarch of the kingdom of Ethiopia.

67 Andrew III, with whom the royal Hungarian line descending from St. Stephen died out (1301).

68 The first friar to reach the Mongol dynasty of central Asia was, so far as records reveal, John of Monte Corvino, a Franciscan. The Eastern monarch would have been Kublai Khan (1216–94), who founded the Mongol dynasty in 1279 and who sought priests from Europe to instruct the Mongols.

69 Gunpowder, which had been used in the ninth century in China for fire-works, began to be used in firearms in Europe in the fourteenth century.

70 Ramon Lull (ca. 1236–1315) was a Mallorcan philosopher and missionary. See NF’s essay on Lull in this volume (no. 11). Lull’s educational treatises were Doctrine for Boys and Book of the Order of Chivalry, both written in 1274–75. His Utopian ideas are set forth in his long romance, Blanquerna (ca. 1283). In 1301 he sailed for Cyprus to preach against the heretics.

71 The reference is to Lull’s Ars Magna (ca. 1275).

72 In its essential or universal nature; literally, “under the aspect of eternity.”

73 This grotesque argument is attributed to William of Occam. [NF]. See Occam’s Reportatio, 3, question 1, in Opera Theologica, vol. 6 (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1982), 9.34.

74 Since leaving St. Peter’s Cowton has walked about one kilometre east along the Tiber to a position directly south of the Castel Sant’Angelo.

75 Dante was not exiled from Florence until 1302.

13. Relative Importance of the Causes of the Reformation

1 For a discussion of causation in history, see Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, pp. 117 ff. [NF]

2 A very bald statement of this is in Chesterton’s Victorian Spirit in English Literature, p. 49. [NF]. The title of Chesterton’s book is The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Holt, 1913). But that book, while it does reveal Chesterton’s Roman Catholic conservatism throughout, says nothing, on p. 49 or elsewhere, about the Reformation. Perhaps NF had in mind Chesterton’s account of the Reformation in “Protestantism: A Problem Novel,” in The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1930), 96–102, or his remarks about the Reformation at other places in this book (e.g., pp. 23–5, 127–32).

3 This is the Marxist dialectic as developed by Kautsky: Foundations of Christianity, 11. [NF]. See especially bk. 2, “Society in the Roman Empire,” of Kautsky’s book (New York: International Publishers, 1925). In the margin beside this and the previous sentence Cousland wrote “not very clearly expressed.”

4 NF apparently meant to say, “by no means less likely.”

5 Froude is the standard exponent of this view: see chap. 6 of his History of England. [NF]. NF’s reference is to chap. 6 of vol. 7 of Froude’s History (New York: Scribner, 1871).

6 Smith, Age of the Reformation, p. 20. [NF]. Preserved Smith makes these points on pp. 20–9 of his book (New York: Holt, 1920).

7 Lindsay, History of the Reformation, p. 113. [NF]. It is not clear what NF means to cite in Thomas M. Lindsay’s A History of the Reformation, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1907). Lindsay devotes chaps. 2 and 4 of vol. 1 to an analysis of the political and social conditions underlying the Reformation (chap. 4 ends on p. 113). But Lindsay says nothing explicitly about “a new religious idea.”

8 Here Cousland has inserted the clause “which usually involves a restatement of theology.”

9 This argument is applied to the Renaissance by Spengler, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 232, but his “Renaissance” is practically equivalent to the general cultural Urgrund spoken of above. [NF]

10 Lindsay, op. cit., p. 45. [NF]. For Lindsay’s account of the relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance, see pp. 42–78 of vol. 1 of A History of the Reformation; for his account of capitalism, see pp. 84–9.

11 The Hanseatic League, a mercantile league of medieval German towns.

12 Here Cousland asked, “in a limited or wider sense?”

13 On the culture-town, see Spengler, DW, 1:32–5.

14 Smith, op. cit., p. 6. [NF]. The page reference here should be 5.

15 Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, pp. 152 and 230. [NF]. NF cites passages from vol. 1 of Egon Friedell’s three-volume work, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1930).

14. Gains and Losses of the Reformation

1 Cousland underlined “versus.”

2 Cousland underlined “overthrow” and wrote “in part” beside it in the margin.

3 Cousland inserted “the” before “Protestant.”

4 In the margin beside this sentence Cousland wrote “awkwardly expressed.”

5 Johann Tetzel (ca. 1465–1519) was the Dominican monk whose ostentatious preaching an indulgence for the building of St. Peter’s in Rome provoked Luther’s Wittenberg theses.

6 The basis of the Roman Catholic practice of granting indulgences, merit having been accumulated by the good works of Christ and the saints.

7 St. Januarius was the Italian Christian martyr whose body is preserved in the cathedral at Naples; two phials supposedly containing his blood were said to liquefy on his feast day and at other times.

8 The efforts to reform the church by Cardinals Campeggio, Cajetan, Jiménez, and Wolsey largely failed, and it was not until Pope Paul III was elected in 1534 that substantial reform was possible; he convened the Council of Trent in 1554, and this council, which also met in 1551–52 and 1562–63, was the primary impetus behind the Counter-Reformation, one of the chief arms of which was the Jesuit order.

9 Cousland underlined the repeated phrase “by no means.”

10 That is, the mixed motives behind Henry VII’s desire for divorce, which led to the end of papal jurisdiction in England.

11 The principle stemming from Thomas Erastus (1524–83), who argued against Calvin’s assertion that the state had the right to intervene in and control Church affairs, and against the Church’s practice of excommunication.

12 The “you too” argument: a retort charging opponents with being or doing what they criticize in others.

13 Hugh O’Neill (ca. 1540–1616) was an Irish rebel who spread insurrection against Elizabeth I.

14 Philip II of Spain (1527–98) devoted much of his energy to the Spanish Inquisition, which he saw as a tool not simply to combat heresy but to extend control over his own dominions. The Valois were the members of the French royal house that ruled from 1328 to 1589.

15 Borgia (1476–1507), illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, was captain-general of the armies of the Church; he sought to seize all of central Italy through terror and treachery; Machiavelli saw him as a model prince. “Nephew” is a euphemism for illegitimate son.

16 See, for example, G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1909); Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912), History of England (1915), and Europe and the Faith (1920); and R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Tawney, a Christian socialist, was not a Roman Catholic.

17 The analogy is to the period preceding the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea in A.D. 325, which was called by Constantine to settle the doctrinal controversy between the Arians and the Orthodox about the person of Christ.

18 After Ferdinand II (king of Bohemia) issued the decree in 1627 that Bohemia should be purged of all non-Roman Catholics, the Jesuits began a systematic destruction of Bohemia’s national literature. One Jesuit, Andrew Konias, boasted of having burned 60, 000 Bohemian books himself.

19 The Index of Forbidden Books: the list of works that Catholics may not read, a list that originated in the Counter-Reformation.

20 In a section of his Institutes entitled “Faith assures us not of earthly prosperity,” Calvin says, “Faith does not certainly promise itself with length of years or honour or riches in this life, since the Lord willed that none of these things be appointed for us. But it is content with this certainty: that, however many things fail us that have to do with the maintenance of this life, God will never fail” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, i960], 3.2.27.574). This can hardly be taken as evidence that for Calvin material prosperity was a sign of grace. In fact, there are numerous passages in the Institutes and elsewhere that negate the idea of a connection between election and material prosperity.

21 Following NF’s final sentence Cousland wrote “Bibliography?”

15. A Study of the Impact of Cultural Movements upon the Church

1 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, n.d.), 29–30.

2 See Oswald Spengler, DW, 1:3–50; 2:87–110.

3 Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G.B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 46–7.

4 Ibid., 54.

5 This paragraph is a summary of the position advanced by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed., 1878).

6 Select Poetry and Prose, London, 1933, 187. [NF]. NF quotes from the Nonesuch Press edition, ed. Stephen Potter.

7 “To shock the narrow-minded.”

8 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1933).

9 The refrain appears at the end of six of the twelve stanzas in pt. 4 of Thomson’s poem.

10 Herbert Spencer, A System of Synthetic Philosophy, vol. 1. First Principles, 3rd ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1870), 43, 44. The parenthetical phrase is NF’s.

11 F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 9th impression, corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 392. NF’s page reference is to the 2nd ed., rev. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897).

12 Ibid., 306. NF’s page reference is to the 2nd ed.

13 Thomas Hardy, The Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2. The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama (London: Macmillan, 1925), 6, 7. “S.D.” (stage direction) is NF’s interpolation.

14 A reference to the final two lines of John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819).

15 John Ruskin, The Crown of the Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic, and War (New York: Merrill and Batzer, n.d.), 64–5.

16 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 174–5.

17 “Ideals and Idealists” in The Quintessence oflbsenism. Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, 30 vols. (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1931), 19:28–35.

18 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas (1891).

19 Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Malory’s Le Morte Darthur appeared in F.J. Simmons’s edition of the poem (London: Dent, 1893–94; 3rd ed., 1927).

20 A Ballad of a Nun, in A Ballad of a Nun, and Other Poems, ed. George Sylvester Viereck (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1925), 12–17.

21 Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, a collection of wax figures in London.

22 Literature and Dogma (1873), chap. 1, sec. 2, par. 3.

23 W.P. Benson, Walter Pater, p. 58. [NF]. The quotation appears on p. 111 of the 1906 edition published in the English Man of Letters Series (London: Macmillan). Subsequent reprintings of the book (1907, 1911, 1926) have the same pagination. The author is Arthur C. Benson.

24 See especially chaps. 4–7 of Pater’s Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance (London: Macmillan, 1910).

25 Walter Pater, “Pico Della Mirandola,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), 30–49. The phrase “Christian sentiment” appears in this essay: see, for example, pp. 30, 47.

26 For Pater’s treatment of da Vinci’s La Gioconda (Mona Lisa) see “Leonardo da Vinci,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 123–5.

27 From the récit of Bunthorne in act 1 of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride in The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Modern Library, [1936]), 199.

28 The Works of Oscar Wilde: De Profundis, rev. ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 62, 72, 73, 78–9. NF’s page references are to the 1905 edition.

29 All Religions Are One (1788), Blake’s first illuminated work.

30 Thomas Carlyle, “The Everlasting Yea,” Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 149 (bk. 2, chap. 2).

31 The catchphrase for the utilitarian ethical theory advanced by Jeremy Bentham in Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).

32 John Stuart Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 95.

33 John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 255, 256.

34 Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 11 (vol. 2 of Balder the Beautiful), 305–6. On Comte’s view of the three stages of history, see “The Jewish Background of the New Testament,” n. 2, above.

35 Rabbi Ben Ezra, lines 145–50.

36 Thomas Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A.C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 324–5.

37 Bernard Shaw, Collected Works of Bernard Shaw: Plays, 30 vols. (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1930), 14:49.

38 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 16 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 230.

39 Ibid., 237.

40 Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 11 (vol. 2 of Balder the Beautiful), 304–5.

41 Mr. Sludge, “The Medium,” lines 1112–22.

42 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Scott Elledge, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1991), 314 (chap. 59).

43 Samuel Butler, The Works of Samuel Butler, 20 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 2:35.

44 Ibid.

45 Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, i6:lxxx.

46 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 121.

47 Ibid., 108.

48 Ibid., 259.

49 Ibid., 259–60.

50 Ibid., 262.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 129 (chap. 11).

54 The secondary sources NF lists are as follows:

Mertz, John Theodore. A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. 4 vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1904–14. This book was issued and reprinted in various two- and four-volume editions.

Wingfield-Stratford, Esme Cecil. Those Earnest Victorians. New York: Morrow, 1930.

- The Victorian Tragedy. London: Routledge, 1930.

- The Victorian Sunset. London: Routledge, 1932.

Chesterton, G.K. The Victorian Age in Literature. New York: Holt, 1913.

Benson, Arthur C. Walter Pater. London: Macmillan, 1906.

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1933.

Ward, Wilfrid Philip. William George Ward and the Oxford Movement. London: Macmillan, 1889.

De la Mare, Walter, ed. The Eighteen-Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930. The essay by Eliot in this collection is “The Place of Pater.”

16. The Relation of Religion to the Arts

1 See, especially, chap. 16 of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1898).

2 On the back of the last page of this essay, which is a double-spaced typescript, NF typed the following single-spaced paragraph:

For the so-called separation of art from morals is as much a fallacy as its contemporary superstition, the conflict of religion and science. Sincerity is an example of a quality as valid as an artistic criterion as it is as a moral criterion. And it would be the most precarious kind of quibble to try to maintain that artistic sincerity is not fundamentally the same thing as moral sincerity. Again, when we say that Racine is economical and that Swinburne is extravagant, we are, although we are using a moral category, implying that Racine is a better artist than Swinburne, and it is difficult to see how art criticism could get along without such concepts. Here again it is impossible to urge that the words are metaphors when applied to art. Granting that it may be only accident that Racine was an exceptionally cool business head and that Swinburne was almost as incapable as an imbecile of looking after his own affairs, though that is a sizable cession, the question itself can have only one solution.

This paragraph is similar to the third paragraph in pt. 2 of “The Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama” (no. 17, below).

17. The Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama

1 The tripartite division of the “good” is found in various configurations throughout Plato, but is explicitly set forth in Cratylus, 439c–440e, Phaedo, 65c-d and 75d; see also the Republic, bk. 5, 476.

2 The argument for the dual aim of poetry is rooted in Horace’s Ars Poetica (ca. 20 B.C.); in the British tradition it appears in such well-known critical texts as Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry (1595) and Dryden’s Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1688).

3 See, e.g., Sidney’s account of the poet as vates (prophet) in An Apology for Poetry (1595).

4 The concept originated with Lessing’s Laokoôn (1766) and continued throughout the nineteenth century; during the last two decades of the century Oscar Wilde became a leading advocate of the idea that art is intrinsically valuable.

5 Diderot, d’Alembert, and other philosophes believed that rational behaviour was the only means for moral improvement.

6 vide Max Eastman: Artists in Uniform. [NF]. Eastman’s book (New York: Knopf, 1934) is about the effects of Soviet bigotry and bureaucracy on arts and letters.

7 Montanism was an ascetic, enthusiastic Christian movement of the second century.

8 That is, the hope that some natural, direct passage into Shakespeare’s mind can be discovered without considering the aesthetic qualities of his plays, which serve only as a barrier to his essence.

9 vide Wyndham Lewis: Men without Art. [NF]. Lewis announces in the introduction to Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934) that “in the serious work of art will be found … all the great intellectual departments of the human consciousness” (9). For his attacks on subjective expression, see especially the chapter on “The Terms ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic,’” 185–211.

10 The philosophy of Parmenides (ca. 515–450 B.C.) has come down to us through the fragments of his On Nature; for the views of Empedocles (ca. 493–433 B.C.) on attraction, see his On Nature.

11 The reference is to Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873).

12 The dichotomy between poetry and science, feeling and reference, and connotation and denotation, which underlies NF’s argument in this section, was a familiar opposition in the work of the New Critics, whose principles were beginning to be influential in the 1930s. NF appears to be drawing chiefly on the oppositions found in the work of I.A. Richards, including The Meaning of Meaning, with C.K. Ogden (1929), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Practical Criticism (1929), and Science and Poetry (1926).

13 All Religions Are One (1788).

14 NF is recalling, if a bit imperfectly, a passage from the introduction to Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 42. NF had read the 1930 British ed. (London: Faber and Faber) or the first American ed. (New York: Knopf, 1931).

15 “Charges Toronto Chockful of Stupid Fundamentalism,” Toronto Daily Star, 11 March 1936, 1, 7 (the quotation is from p. 7). The priest is Father E.J. McCorkell, principal of St. Michael’s College and later director of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. [I am indebted to Jean O’Grady for locating this article. Ed.]

16 John Donne, Goe and Catche a Falling Starre, lines 1–9. NF is probably quoting from the Nonesuch Press edition (1929), edited by John Hayward from the 1633 edition of Donne’s poetry (p. 4).

17 John Donne, Holy Sonnets (no. 4), lines 1–8 (Nonesuch Press ed., p. 282).

18 Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) and his followers believed, as against the Calvinists, that Christ died not simply for the elect but for all people. For Friedrich Schleiermacher’s views on election see The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1928), 536–60.

19 Joseph Haydn inscribed In nomine Domine at the beginning of all his scores and Laus Deo at the end.

20 vide William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity. [NF]. Empson’s first book (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930) is a classic of the New Criticism; Empson deals systematically with the different forms of poetic ambiguity, a trope of compression that causes the reader to hold in suspension several complementary or contradictory meanings.

21 See Sir James Frazer, GB. NF’s knowledge of Wilhelm Mannhardt’s researches into myth and folklore probably derived from his reading of Frazer, who frequently cites Mannhardt (1831–80). None of Mannhardt’s books had been translated into English in 1935.

22 See Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 7 (vol. 1 of Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild), 146, 171–7, and vol. 3, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 77–100.

23 (Letchworth, UK: Garden City Press, 1913).

24 Theotokos = the title of the Virgin Mary as the Mother of the incarnate Son of God.

25 Pisistratus was tyrant in Athens from 561 to 527 B.C.

26 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 8.347e. It is assumed that Athenaeus took the line from a life of Aeschylus.

27 See especially the parados and the third episode of the Bacchae.

28 The source of NF’s paragraphs on Dionysus is primarily Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 363–453.

29 vide E.B. Tylor: Primitive Culture. [NF]. For Tylor’s analysis of the sacrifice as gift, see Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1883), 2:375–410.

30 The words of the captain of Louis XIV’s bodyguard, exclaimed from the window of the state apartment after the king’s death.

31 vide Maud Bodkin: Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. [NF]. See p. 17 of Bodkin’s book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934).

32 vide F.M. Cornford: Origins of Attic Comedy. [NF]. Cornford’s chapter on “Classification of Types” in The Origin of Attic Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) connects the beginnings of comedy with the fertility ritual. What follows in NF’s paragraph derives from vol. 4 (The Dying God) and vol. 9 (The Scapegoat) of Sir James Frazer’s GB.

33 A five-day festival during which the master and servant changed places. See Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 4, The Dying God, 113.

34 Prince Hal, crowned Henry V at the end of Henry IV, Part Two, banishes Falstaff in act 5, sc. 5.

35 See Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 9, The Scapegoat, 364–73, 397–407.

36 See Sir James Frazer, GB, vol. 9, The Scapegoat, 412–23.

37 Comus, Milton’s pastoral drama, first printed anonymously in 1637.

38 vide William Lawrence: Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. [NF]. Lawrence’s interpretation of All’s Well that Ends Well draws on themes that are present in tales from the Italian, Indian, Turkish, Icelandic, and French traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 32–77.

39 vide Colin Still: Shakespeare’s Mystery Play. [NF]. NF seems to have first read Still’s book (London: C. Palmer, 1921) after seeing T.S. Eliot’s reference to it in his preface to Wilson Knight’s Wheel of Fire (1930), and NF often noted the book in his subsequent commentaries on Shakespearean romance. Still points to the parallels he sees between Shakespeare’s plays and the ancient mystery rites.

40 The source of this quotation, with its faulty French, remains unknown. The passage NF may have had in mind is from sec. 39 of Baudelaire’s Mon coeur mis ä nu: “La musique donne l’idée de l’espace. Tous les arts, plus ou moins; puisqu’ils sont nombre et que le nombre est une traduction de l’espace” [“Music conveys the idea of space. All the arts do this, more or less; for they employ number and number is an interpretation of space”] (Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, rev. ed., 2 vols. [Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1961], 1:1296).

41 “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 111. Pater makes a similar point in his essay on “Style” in Appreciations (1899): “If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art.”

42 Iliad, bk. 1, line 473; Robert Fitzgerald translates the word as “the One Who Keeps the Plague Afar.”

43 vide Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy. [NF]

44 vide Ruskin: Crown of Wild Olive. [NF]. NF is referring to John Ruskin’s lecture, “Traffic” in The Crown of Wild Olive (New York: Merrill and Batzer, n.d.), 47–80; NF had read this book in English lb during his first year at Victoria College when he was enrolled in the pass course.

45 See Pierre de Nolhac, Un poète rhépan ami de la Pléiade (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1923), 18. [I am indebted to Jean O’Grady for this note. Ed.]

46 For several years NF had been planning to do a B.D. thesis, either at Emmanuel College or in England, on music. In April 1934, he wrote to Helen Kemp, in connection with his thesis plans, that “there are two things which are absolutely unique about the Christian religion and which guarantee its truth—one is music, the other a philosophy of history, and, though I’ll do them both eventually, I don’t care which I start on. They’re intimately connected, of course, and it may be better to get a solid musical background first. We’ll see how things turn out. The Catholic Church has four great ‘doctors of the Church’—St. Ambrose, St. Gregory, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome. The first two were musicians, the second two philosophers of history” (Correspondence, 1:199). By formal action of the Emmanuel College executive council on 10 October 1934 NF’s thesis proposal on “The Development of the Christian Tradition in Music” was approved (Minutes of the Executive Council, United Church of Canada / Victoria University Archives, 92.041 v, box 1, file 1). Had NF written the thesis he would have been awarded the B.D. degree. But the thesis never materialized, NF having turned to literature instead, and he was awarded a “Diploma of the College” on 30 April 1936.

47 vide H.N. Frye: “Ballet Russe,” Acta Victoriana, 60 (December 1935): 4–6; “Jooss Ballet,” Canadian Forum, 16 (April 1936): 18–19. [NF]. NF cites two of his earliest published pieces. In “Ballet Russe,” a review of two ballets by Tchaikovsky and one by Rimsky-Korsakov, NF analyses the function of rhythm, symbolism, and convention in ballet, concluding that the particular performance of the Ballet Russe under review was too allegorical and did not properly represent the emotional range of the form. “The Jooss Ballet” was ostensibly a review of four performances by the Jooss Ballet, but most of NF’s remarks have to do with the ballet as a musical art. He speculates that in an age when the oratorio is dead and the opera moribund the ballet may emerge as a “genuinely new art-form.”

48 “The Fertility Cults,” paper no. 5 in the present collection.

49 See DW, 1:128–31, 227–32, 282–3, 320–3.

50 Reid McCallum, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.

18. The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis

1 NF was granted permission by formal action of the executive council of Emmanuel College to take graduate courses in Honour English as elective subjects during his second year. See the Minutes of the Executive Council, Emmanuel College, 24 September 1934 and 9 October 1934. United Church of Canada / Victoria University Archives, 92.041V, box 1, file 1.

2 For a later essay by NF on Lewis see “Neo-Classical Agony,” Hudson Review, 10 (Winter 1957–58): 592–8; rpt. in Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature, ed. Robert D. Denham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 178–87.

3 The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 32. These books, published together, are subsequently cited as DPDS.

4 Lewis’s only volume of poetry was One-Way Street (London: Faber, 1933).

5 Portions of Joyce’s Work in Progress, which was to become Finnegans Wake (1939), began appearing in the journal transition in 1927; fourteen instalments had been published at the time NF was writing.

6 The two numbers of Blast were issued in June 1914 and July 1915.

7 “Nietzsche as a Vulgarizer,” The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 120–7. Subsequently cited as ABR within the text.

8 See the chapters on Hemingway and Faulkner in ABR, 17–64.

9 Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting Pot” (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929). On Gauguin, see pp. 211–12; on Lawrence, pp. 169–98. Subsequently cited as PF.

10 In Antic Hay, (1923) Aldous Huxley satirizes the cynicism of postwar Bohemia; for the London scenes of Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) see chaps. 5–7.

11 ‘To shock the narrow-minded,”

12 The title of bk. 1 of Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927); the “revolutionary simpleton” is described in chap. 6 of bk. 1. Subsequent citations, following TWM, are to the Beacon Press edition (Boston, 1957).

13 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). On the so-called discipleship of Praz, see Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), 174–5. Subsequently cited as MWA.

14 The positions of Lewis summarized in this paragraph amount to an abstract of bk. 1 of Time and Western Man.

15 TWM, 136. NF used using the 1927 edition (London: Chatto and Windus).

The page references given in the text and notes are to the Beacon Press edition (Boston, 1957). The practice of not capitalizing some proper nouns and their adjectival forms was a quirk of Lewis.

16 TWM, 121. “(The Art of Being Ruled)” is NF’s interpolation.

17 “Mr. Wyndham Lewis: ‘Personal-Appearance’ Artist,” MWA, 115–28.

18 The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1951), 43, 47. Subsequently cited as LF.

19 The two books are Elliot Smith’s The Evolution of the Dragon (West Orange, N.J.: Albert Saifer, 1918) and Jane Ellen Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913).

20 For the attack on Bergson, see pt. 3, chap. 6 of TWM; for the attack on Spengler, pt. 2 of the same book.

21 Tarr, 2nd ed., rewritten 1928 (London: Methuen, 1951), 1. Subsequently cited as TR.

22 See, for example, MWA, 127, and PF, 202.

23 For the split-man’s litany, see The Apes of God (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956), 170–1; for the costume scene, see pt. 11, “Mr. Zagreus and the Split-Man,” 343–62. NF was using the 1930 edition, published in London by the Arthur Press. Subsequently cited as AG.

24 DPDS, 4. In a letter to Helen Kemp, postmarked 4 December 1934, NF wrote: “I don’t know whether it was you or your astral body that I told about Wyndham Lewis’s “Apes of God,” a book I’m busy with at the moment. It’s a brilliant satire on literary charlatanism in London, imitates Rabelais particularly, with some Joyce—probably the best English novel since Ulysses, if that is in English. Sometimes it doesn’t quite come off, but after reading it for half an hour I have to dash over to the library with a list of words a yard long to look up in the dictionary, where they are not always to be found” (Correspondence, 1:374).

25 Edgell Rickword, “Wyndham Lewis,” Scrutinies, by Various Writers, vol. 2, collected by Edgell Rickword (London: Wishart, 1931), 140–61. On the similarities between the styles of Lewis and Nashe, see p. 154.

26 TWM, 105. Lewis repeats the comparison in ABR, 402.

27 American Puritan writer (ca. 1578–1652); his The Simple Cobler of Aggawam (1647) is a satirical tirade against religious tolerance and other matters he considered irritants.

28 “John Galsworthy,” Scrutinies, by Various Writers, collected by Edgell Rickword (London: Wishart, 1928), 60–2; rpt. in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking, 1968), 540, 543–4.

29 In The Man of Property, the first volume of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Bosinney is an architect with whom Soames Forsyte’s wife, Irene, falls in love.

30 Aesop’s “The Frog and the Ox” is a fable about a frog who bursts after continuing to puff himself up in order to become as large as the ox. The moral: “self-deceit may lead to self-destruction.”

31 See, for example, “Romance and the Moralist Mind,” chap. 3 of TWM, 15–19.

32 The Destructive Element, 3rd impression, reissued (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 216.

33 TWM, 94. The parenthetical phrase is NF’s interpolation.

34 TWM, 6. The comment within parentheses is NF’s interpolation. On Spengler’s account of ahistorical cultures see DW, 1:8–12, 132–6.

35 “Wyndham Lewis,” Gog, Magog and Other Critical Essays (London: J.M. Dent, 1933), 93

36 The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 116–17.

37 See Blake’s A Descriptive Catalogue (1809) and his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798).

38 The phrase Lewis uses to refer to himself in MWA, 115.

39 Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology, ed. Arthur Livingston, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 1:92–9.

40 On Shakespeare as a “feminine genius” see LF, 149–58.

41 Lewis “seems aware that, by leaving out the moral element, he has simply constructed a satirist who is a sort of automaton. A satirist who attacks everyone (except the really significant), but who has no particular reason (except prejudice?) for attacking one set of people rather than another” (The Destructive Element, 208).

42 MWA, 126. The experimental quarterly transition was founded in Paris in 1927 by Eugène and Maria Jolas and edited for ten years by Eugène Jolas and Elliot Paul.

43 See especially chap. 6 of MWA, “The Bad-Lands in the Martyrs of the Marsh,” 172–84. On Lewis’s claim that Praz was influenced by DPDS see p. 175. On Praz, see also MWA, 69, 82, 89.

44 See the “Introduction” to The Romantic Agony.

45 J.S. Bach’s Cantata no. 212, “Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet” (1742).

46 NF has in mind Eliot’s remark in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”: “Mr. Lewis has gone quite wrong if he thinks (I am not sure what he thinks) that Shakespeare, and Elizabethan England in general, was ‘influenced’ by the thought of Machiavelli” (Selected Essays [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950], 109).

47 That is, after Eliot announced his position, quoted in NF’s next sentence, in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), vii.

48 Childermass, pt. 1 (New York: Covici, Friede, 1928), 152–3.

49 The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel de Monfreid, trans. Ruth Pielkovo (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 89. The letter is from October 1897. As NF wrote “Cambodians,” rather than “Cambodgiens,” he may have been quoting from another source.

50 MWA, 128; Lewis’s ellipsis.

51 Berkeley Square, a 1933 film directed by Frank Lloyd and adapted from John L. Balderston’s play of that title; the play, in turn, derives from Henry James’s A Sense of the Past.

19. An Enquiry into the Art Forms of Prose Fiction

1 Correspondence, 2:693.

2 Correspondence, 2:809.

3 In a letter to Helen Kemp, NF said, “I ordered a typewriter, but it didn’t come, so I think I’ll let it go—Blunden never asks to see my papers” (Correspondence, 1:621). The only holograph manuscript that has survived NF’s Oxford years is a paper on Chaucer’s early poetry, which NF incorporated into “A Reconsideration of Chaucer” (no. 22).

4 Frye did, however, use different typewriters for the prose fiction paper and the one on Eliot.

5 It could not have been written before 1935 because NF refers to Briffault’s Europa novels, the first of which was published during that year. Sandra Djwa reports that in his 1935 diary Roy Daniells notes that NF gave a lecture entitled “The English Anatomy” to the Graduate English Club on 16 December 1935. The present essay may have been adapted from that talk (Sandra Djwa to Ron Schoeffel, 23 July 1996).

6 Someone, perhaps NF’s instructor, wrote “too conglomerate” in the margin beside this sentence, and below it, beside the next sentence, is a question mark. For two later paragraphs there is also a question mark in the margin.

7 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1950), 140. [I am grateful to Marc Plamondon for locating this reference. Ed.]

8 Paul Valéry, “The Place of Baudelaire,” Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. James R. Lawler, vol. 8 in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 201.

9 NF is punning on Buffon’s aphorism, Le style est l’homme même.

10 “Whatever people do.”

20. The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy

1 Correspondence, 1:427. In announcing his plans for his final year at Emmanuel College, Frye also wrote to Kemp on 28 June 1935 that he was “going to write a paper on Calvin and do some work on Arminius which should put me in good enough shape for Theology” (Ibid., 458).

2 Kingsley Joblin feels certain that this paper is the talk NF presented to the Emmanuel Theological Society (Kingsley Joblin to Robert D. Denham, 17 November 1995).

3 Thomas Erastus (d. 1583) and his followers advocated the doctrine of state supremacy in ecclesiastical matters.

4 The movement from culture-town to metropolis is an idea that NF took from Oswald Spengler’s DW; see especially, vol. 2, chap. 4.

5 What Occam said was that the person of Christ can no more become or be the divine Word than it can become or be a donkey. In the Incarnation, he argued, one person is not formed by adding two natures—one human and one divine—to a single set of individuating principles. This would be as impossible as adding a donkey nature and a human nature to a single set of individuating principles. See William of Occam, Reportatio III, in Opera Theologica, vol. 6, ed. Francis E. Kelly and Girard I. Erzkorn (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1982), pt. 9, sec. 34.

6 See Article V of Aquinas’s “Concerning Human Knowledge,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Allan Wolter (New York: Nelson, 1962), 122–30.

7 NF apparently has in mind Bacon’s account of the “idols of the theatre” in the Novum Organum (1620); one such idol is the fallacious mode of thinking that introduces theological matters into science.

8 NF is referring to the neo-Thomism of such Catholic philosophers as Étienne Gilson, who founded the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1929, and Jacques Maritain, who later taught at Toronto.

9 NF later referred to this idea as interpénétration, an idea he first encountered in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (New York: New American Library), 93.

21. T.S. Eliot and Other Observations

1 Correspondence, 2:699. Blunden was NF’s tutor at Merton College.

2 Although Eliot’s Collected Poems, 1909–1935 had been issued in 1935 (New York: Harcourt, Brace), NF is referring to Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917) and Poems, 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).

3 See Eliot’s Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), issued in a revised and enlarged edition by Faber and Faber in 1934.

4 The three books were Thomas McGreevy, Thomas Stearns Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), Hugh Ross Williamson, The Poetry of T.S. Eliot (New York: Putnam, 1933), and F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

5 D.S. Mirsky, Échanges, 5 (December 1931).

6 J.R. Daniells, University of Toronto Quarterly, 2 (April 1933): 380–96. NF met J. Roy Daniells during the fall of 1934, when the latter had begun teaching at Victoria College. They became lifelong friends. For NF’s account of his meeting Daniells see Correspondence, 1:353–4.

7 From stanza seven of Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service: “Along the garden-wall the bees / With hairy bellies pass between / The staminate and the pistilate / Blest office of the epicene.” NF means that as a critic he is performing a fertilizing function, but at the same time he is adopting Eliot’s satiric pose and poking fun at his own effort.

8 A toast by John Collins Bossidy at the Midwinter Dinner of the Holy Cross Alumni in 1910: “And this is good old Boston, / The home of the bean and the cod, / Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots / And the Cabots talk only to God.”

9 Slightly misquoted from Eliot’s essay, “Francis Herbert Bradley” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 404.

10 Ibid., 397.

11 As indicated in the headnote, this parenthetical instruction and those that follow are directives NF gives himself to read passages from the poems.

12 Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid, 1920).

13 Spengler defines “Faustian” as the “soul whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose ‘body’ is the Western culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th century” (DW, 1:183).

14 The Rape of the Lock (1714).

15 “Preface,” For Lancelot Andrewes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), vii.

16 This is the position taken by interlocutor “B” in Eliot’s “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” Selected Essays (1950), 38.

17 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 152.

18 “Of all art, the cinema is for us the most important.” From a conversation with Lenin recorded by A.V. Lunacharsky in Samoye Vazhnoye iz Vsekh Iskusstv (Moscow, 1963), qtd. in Not by Politics Alone... —The Other Lenin, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), 205.

19 In “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” one of the many places Eliot addresses the issue of poetry and belief, he proposes that the “thinking” poet is the poet “who can express the emotional equivalent of thought” (Selected Essays, 115).

20 Murder in the Cathedral played at the West End Theatre from November 1935 to March 1937. The visitors of Magdalen and Merton Colleges were, respectively, Cyril Forster Garbett, the Bishop of Winchester, and Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (A visitor was a person to whom an appeal was made to settle a dispute that could not be resolved internally.) NF is perhaps referring to the conflict between Church and state that had been debated in the assembly of the Church of England during the summer of 1936. Archbishop Lang had presided at the assembly and Bishop Garbett had been an active participant; or NF may be referring to the fact that both Lang and Garbett had argued at the Convocation of Canterbury on 21 January 1937 that the Church of England should take a more liberal position on the matter of divorce than had been proposed by the Bishop of Ely, the debate having been occasioned by the proposed marriage of Edward VIII in December 1936 to Wallis Simpson, a divorcee. Although Lang had previously spoken out publicly against the king’s intentions, he announced at the Convocation of Canterbury that he could not accept the Bishop of Ely’s resolution that Edward VIII be barred from Holy Communion.

22. A Reconsideration of Chaucer

1 A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809).

2 Thomas Tyrwhitt, Canterbury Tales, 5 vols. (London: T. Payne, 1775–78).

3 When presenting his paper, NF apparently read the passages from Chaucer in modern English; for the written text, however, he quotes from the Middle English.

4 An ordinance issued by King Edward III and his council in 1349 that required workers to accept jobs offered to them, the rate of payment being what was customary before the time of the Black Plague.

5 The various version of Piers Plowman are known as the A, B, and C texts, written by Langland over the course of about twenty years.

6 Guillaume Deguilleville, The ABC, from Pélérinage de l’Ame, pt. 1 of Le Pèlèrinage de la Vie Humaine, in A One-Text Print of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Oxford University Press, 1880), 83–100; this is a parallel-text edition that prints the Deguilleville and Chaucer texts side by side. Subsequent references to Deguilleville’s ABC are to the line numbers in this edition.

7 F.N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 520.

8 See lines 29–154 of The Complaint of Mars, where the various positions and movements of Mars and Venus in relation to the sun (Phebus) are detailed (Robinson, 530–1).

9 For the description of the House of Rumour, see The House of Fame, 1920–2158: 300–2).

10 Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux, The Art of Poetry (1680–83), lines 373–428.

11 NF had seen Barna di Siena’s fresco scenes from the New Testament in the Collegiata when he travelled to San Gimignano in April of 1937; Barna had worked on the frescos in the early 1380s, and they were completed by Giovanni d’Asciano. NF had also seen Martini’s Christ Blessing in the Vatican picture gallery the previous month.

12 John Livingston Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Development of His Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 93–102; George Lyman Kittredge, “The Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 37–72.

13 In The Study of Poetry (1880), Matthew Arnold claims that Chaucer “lacks the high seriousness of the great classics.”

14 Geoffrey Chaucer and the Development of His Genius, 99–100.

15 NF’s handwritten parentheses enclose the material from the beginning of this sentence through the end of the next paragraph. In the margin NF wrote “omit?”—no doubt a query to himself about the oral presentation.

16 Geoffrey Chaucer and the Development of His Genius, 112.

17 Chaucer actually takes the reader with Aeneas beyond the entrance to hell: “And also sawgh I how Sybile / And Eneas, besyde an yle, / To helle wente, for to see / His fader, Anchyses the free; / How he ther fond Palinurus / And Dido, and eke Deiphebus; / And every turment eke in helle / Saugh he” (439–46: 286). Chaucer goes on to recommend that readers consult Virgil, Claudius Claudianus, and Dante for the complete account.

18 Lines 311 ff. (Dido), 605 ff. (eagle), 766–8 (words are air), 2110–58 (catalogue) (Robinson, 285, 288, 289, 302).

19 In his explanatory notes to The House of Fame, F.N. Robinson says “several scholars have striven to show that [the poem] is a kind of parody of the Divine Comedy” (778).

20 The reference is to the speech of Mosca, which opens act 1, sc. 2 of Jonson’s play, and the dialogue that follows.

21 “Raging indignation,” a phrase from Jonathan Swift’s epitaph.

22 1–112: 310–12. The poet is reading Macrobius’ fourth-century commentary on Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio.

23 The source of NF’s claim is unclear. Two of NF’s own sources, Robinson and Lowes, tend to dismiss the many allegorical interpretations of the birds that have been proposed. See Robinson, 309–10, 791–2, and Lowes, 124–6.

24 Anelida’s complaint (220–350: 307–8), written in nine- and sixteen-line stanzas, as compared with the rhyme-royal pattern of the rest of the poem, is the most complicated stanzaic form in all of Chaucer.

25 The Legend of Good Women (115–16, 125–6: 485). NF quotes from the so-called “F Text” (sometimes referred to as the “B Text”) of the poem.

26 Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1763; English trans., 1788). NF may well have encountered the passage from Swedenborg in Blake’s annotations to the book. In any case, he was later to cite Blake’s annotation to the Swedenborg passage in Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 140. The image of the sun of the spiritual world appears also in many places in Swedenborg’s The True Christian Religion (1771).

27 “The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale,” lines 1973–7, Fragment 7 (Robinson, 189).

28 The conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and the crescent moon. See 3.624–9: 427.

29 Swallow, 2.64: 402; owl, 5.319: 463; lark, 5.1110: 471; Niobe, 1.759: 397; Myrrha, 4.1139: 453; Daphne and Herse, 3.726–29: 429.

30 The Latin author from whom Chaucer says he borrowed his story; the source of Chaucer’s information about Lollius remains a mystery, in spite of numerous theories that have been advanced. Lollius is named twice in the poem: 1.394: 393, and 5–1653: 477

31 This conjunction (see n. 28, above), which had occurred in A.D. 769, recurred in May 1385.

32 The reference, apparently, is to 3.1261 ff.: 434, lines which draw upon St. Bernard’s praise to the Virgin Mary in the Paradiso, 33.

33 Between this sentence and the next NF wrote “Insert,” apparently an instruction to himself to add some material.

34 Robert Henryson (1430–1506), one of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, whose Testament ofCresseid (1593), a continuation of Chaucer’s poem, depicts the notoriously unfaithful Cresseid as receiving her just retribution.

35 Edmund, the ambitious villain in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is cynical about everything except his own advancement.

36 Angel Clare is the romantic idealist in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).

37 3.722–3: 428. Actually, some 2400 lines intervene.

38 John Ayre notes that when Frye read his essay to the Graduate English Club it “impressed Margaret Roseborough as an intensely Freudian reading. She remembered his attention to the fertilizing rains associated with lovemaking and his own line that ‘all night it rained’” (Ayre, 147).

39 John Milton, Lycidas (1638), line 106.

40 When Criseyde asks Pandarus to take Troilus her blue ring, Pandarus replies “A ryng? … ye, haselwodes shaken!” (3.890:430). “Haselwode” also appears in 5.505: 465 and 5.1174: 472. Commentators are uncertain about the meaning; all three instances may be nothing more than commonplace expressions of scepticism.

41 The blundering rake in Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1696).

42 After his death Troilus’s “lighte goost ful blisfully is went / Up to the holughnesse of the eighthe spere” (5.1808–9: 479). For Robinson’s opinion that the eighth sphere was that of the moon, see p. 837.

43 The slanderous “slave” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1601–2), who provides a satirical and cynical commentary on the action.