This is a series of notes on the masque, written in preparation for parts 2 and 3 of Frye’s essay “Romance as Masque,” which were originally presented at the Second Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at the University of Alabama, 16-18 October 1975-Part 1 of that essay, for which no preliminary notes survive, was originally delivered as a lecture in Stratford, England, and published, in revised form, in Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969) as “Old and New Comedy.” The complete essay was first published in Spiritus Mundi, 148-78, and was reprinted in SeSCT, 225-51. The separate portions of the typescript, which is in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 11, are separated by the symbol §. The notes conclude with a chart of the archetypes of Milton’s Comus, appended from a typescript in the NFF, 1991, box 28, file 3.
[1] Shirley: Love’s Cruelty, II, ii:1 “now to see a forest move, and the pride of summer brought into a walking wood; in the instant as if the sea had swallowed up the earth, to see waves capering about tall ships, Arion upon a rock playing to the Dolphins … a tempest so artificial and sudden in the clouds, with a general darkness and thunder … that you would cry out with the Mariners in the work, you cannot scape drowning.” “… these waters vanish into a heaven, glorious and angelical shapes presented, the stars distinctly with their motion and music so enchanting you…” Echoes of Macbeth, The Tempest, and the last act of MV, though the explicit reference is to Jonson.
[2] Masque of Queens:2 curtain an “ugly hell,” drawn (probably), and the House of Fame appeared. Mercury Vindicated changes from an alchemist’s laboratory to a “glorious bower.” Vision of Delight starts with a street. Masque of Augurs moves from the College of Augurs to Jove with the Senate of the Gods. Masques of Blackness and Beauty said to be Platonic or Neoplatonic, but of course that’s easy to incorporate in the axis mundi or chain of being business. Hymenaei is perhaps the most important of the marriage masques: here Juno represents Union, and the masquer’s dance is compared to “the Golden Chain let down from Heaven” by Jupiter. Macrobius said to be the source.3 In The Fortunate Isles the antimasque revolves around a Rosicrucian who hopes to develop a magic that will enable him to see gardens in the depth of winter (remarkable passage);4 the antimasque is led by Skelton and Scogan, who present Eulenspiegel5 & the like instead of the people he wants to see. He’s declared to be a gull by an Ariel figure (Jophiel, messenger of Jupiter, or intelligence of his sphere: note the strong interest of masques in the occult), and of course the masque says the real ver perpetuum and earthly paradise and God knows what is guess what. Macaria, a floating island (this theme is frequent in masques) gets attached to Britain.6
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[3] This is the title of a paper I proposed to give at a conference on Shakespearean romance in Alabama this fall.7 I thought originally of doing Cymbeline, as part of a general renewed survey of the four last plays, plus Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The present approach has taken me rather unexpectedly into the second part of Faust, and that has proved so fascinating I may get off on another tack altogether.
[4] Faust is broadening out: I think it’s a gigantic effort, the biggest apart from Blake in the whole of modern literature, to articulate the new mythological universe on the rising side. It’s so big a job that Goethe often didn’t really know what the hell he was doing, and he complicated it by trying to use Classical mythology as a base instead of the Bible.
[5] The connection here is that the masque put on at the beginning, at the Emperor’s court, is really an antimasque, associated, as in Jonson’s conception of it, with a perverted social order. I think the Classical Walpurgis Night is one too, and that the final scenes correspond to the real masque; but I don’t know yet what the Helena is supposed to be; perhaps a transition from one to the other.8
[6] Masque, as it comes out of the Nortons,9 is a rising metamorphosis form in which the coming out from under the masks corresponds to the movement towards identity. This is pretty clear in Comus, and the antimasque often features Circean or descending metamorphosis by contrast. In later masques the antimasques stretch out to become an interminable series of variety turns like the vaudeville acts that afflicted my youth,10 and in one of them there’s an announcement that there is to be no antimasque; howls from one of the characters, who says the public will never stand for it, and something like thirteen antimasques follow.11 In the Jonsonian conception, the more prominent the antimasque, the more anarchic the social overtones, and these late masques are degenerate, foreshadowing their own extinction.12
[7] The whole Fabergé element in the masque, the Inigo Jones part that Jonson called the outward or physical body, is the expensive toy side of it, and is perhaps partly expendable, or separable from the real idea, as Jonson thought.13 Comus wouldn’t have been expensive to produce.
[8] Going up the scale of metamorphosis takes one into the higher elements of time and space. Higher time leads to dance, to time as an expression of exuberance, as in Orchestra,14 and the magician’s intense concentration on timing in the Tempest, with the overtones of Antiochus’ daughter in Pericles played on before her time15 and Miranda’s virginity not to be touched until the time: in Prospero’s world of alchemy and astrology time is almost morbidly important. Space is home, but home is in the sense of anywhere, the nomadic tent-life regained when Adam no longer has to dig.
[9] The interminable sequence of antimasques (somebody spells it “antemasque,” which emphasizes its place as preliminary)16 connects it with the long cinematic drama of Faust and Peer Gynt and, later, of Brecht’s epic theatre. That in turn connects with the continuum of television, which I haven’t got all figured out, though it’s indicated briefly in the Nortons.17
[10] Jonson thought of the masque as the legitimate form of what he condemned in Shakespeare’s romance, which he thought a kind of bastard drama. In the masque the “concupiscence of jigs” is in place.18 Note too that the creaky allegory is also a form of mask: the real meaning of the allegory is in the people in whose honour it’s given.19
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[11] I think the use of Gower in Pericles is partly a return to oral tradition, suggesting a story-teller as well as such a thing can be suggested on a stage.
[12] Anyway, the use of Chaucer in TNK conveys the sense of illusory unreality that the Knight’s Tale has: note double juxtaposition of wedding and funeral at beginning and end, and Theseus’ anxiety about leaving out nothing in a ritual. This last is magical anxiety, repeated in The Tempest.
[13] Anabasis symbolism, going up the axis mundi,20 suggests entering a higher world of time symbolized by the dance, or by the more leisurely rhythms of the “triumph of time” over the “hastily lead away” transience,21 or by the collage of times and cultures in Cymbeline.
[14] Maybe I could end with the masque scene in The Tempest as polarized against, perhaps, the night wood scenes in MND, or against MM, which it turns inside out (moment of forgiveness discontinuous, but a focus around which real time gathers).
[15] Extensions of the theme would take me into Comus, Faust, especially Part Two, The Magic Flute, and subsidiary references to, e.g., Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy.22
[16] Anabasis in masque is simply the authority-structure going up: romance as harmonization of this: Faust II is the revolutionary reversal.23
[17] The fantasies that people develop in some contemporary psychological sessions produce such bizarre and exotic phenomena that many, especially if they have some familiarity with Eastern religion, would like to explain them by some simplistic theory of reincarnation. I have strong resistances to this on many grounds, but especially, having worked with archetypes all my life, I feel that the world in which Jung’s unconscious forces emerge and threaten sometimes to overthrow the ego-consciousness is really an interpenetrating global village. Archetypes represent a world-wide language independent of time and space. The phrase global village made [Marshall] McLuhan24 famous, and the present eclipse of his reputation is due to the fact that people surmised that he was on to something, but got disillusioned by his apparent inference that the electronic media actually communicate news of this world, which they bloody well don’t.
[18] Anyway, it’s in this direction that the “anachronisms” of Cymbeline and other romances point.
[19] Polarity of the masque:
Antimasque: the socially sub-standard (apes, Negroes, gypsies, etc.); also professional actors.
[20] Masque: allegorical and elite; amateur actors (nobles, listed in the printed version); aristocrats assimilated to Classical deities (which were created on the analogy of aristocracy). Anxieties about mixing classes in popular plays.
[21] Cosmology of authority: Creation as a force of order and harmony descending from above on the turbulence of chaos. This is perpetuated in the structure of social authority, where the aristocracy represents the harmony.
[22] Separation dramatizes the stratification of the society; a cyclical progression too from chaos to cosmos (winter to spring).
[23] Enormous expense of the masque: the Fabergé or toy element; transitory World’s Fair quality; candlelight and sense of illusion and unreality. Bacon speaks of toys. With hindsight we can see the transience as socially prophetic. Tempest speech of Prospero.25
[24] This got Jonson down: his soul-body antithesis, and his belief that he supplied the soul.26 Sense of immortality of print (and footnotes). Hence his brutal flattery of King and Queen (cf. his remark to Drummond about Donne)27 has a real point. The royalty represents the continuity he was anxious about; also the cosmology permits of some assimilation of God and King.28
[25] This is the descending movement: for Jonson, the more antimasques the greater the nihilism implicit in the performance, hence the interminable series of variety turns we get later really do presage the downfall of not just the masque but the society reflected in it.29
[26] Ascending movement: axis mundi symbolism.30 Start with rocks (parody) or mountain slope. Curtain anyway; symbol of matter concealing the soul. Interior world disclosed, turning out to be a flattering mirror of the audience as well as the “soul” of the play. At the “top” is frequently some symbol of union, naturally enough if it’s in honor of a wedding. At the end the actors come out of the mirror.
[27] Principle of the demonic world coming clearer when you get to the top of the opposite one, as in Purgatorio: I don’t know if this fits the masque. Yes, it does.31
[28] Some resemblances in New Comedy to the polarizing principle: Tartuffe & the king.32 The nice young man and woman vs. the humor; Falstaff as whale in MW.33
[29] But the romance is a polarizing development of New Comedy which is basically an adaptation of the masque to a popular theatre and an unmixed audience.
[30] The six in Shakespeare. H8 wheel of fortune: sense of transience;34 also of making greatness too familiar. Jonson’s attack on the concupiscence of jigs in WT; for him the masque was the right place for that (James interested mainly in dancing).
[31] Statue coming to life in WT: the curiously alchemical overtones of masque symbolism repeated in Shakespearean romance. Shakespeare temperamentally concentrated on the vanishing performance—nothing of Jonson’s anxiety about continuing fame through print. Staple of News vs. Autolycus, the personification of rumor.35
[32] Wandering romance theme in P and WT: [“]and then[”] narration which is sequential and processional like the series of antimasques. (Note that that series is the ancestor of such things as the interminable vaudeville acts that afflicted my own youth, and of television programmes today.)36
[33] What I didn’t get clear in my Shakespeare-Sonnets article,37 though I circled around it the whole time, was that the Petrarchan love convention was a deliberate re-activating of the poet’s childhood experiences and feelings, the disdainful mistress being psychologically his nursing mother. I don’t know how relevant that is to this article, but I have a hunch it belongs somewhere.
[34] Jonson’s Staple of News: Jonson had a powerful sense of permanent and transient communication media.38 Autolycus in WT is a news-bringing figure, an epiphany of rumor. He goes with a play that deliberately violates all the highbrow canons and goes straight back to the “and then” wandering romance.
[35] I don’t know whether this article can expand into both Faust II and The Magic Flute, but a performance of the latter in Ottawa illuminated it for me as a drama, apart from Mozart. It’s a very powerful and well integrated dramatic structure of the anabasis type, very close to alchemical and similar patterns of ascent, and recreation. This was the first Queen of Night who brought out the curiously inhuman quality of those insanely complicated arias: the point is that she’s a magic flute too, on the white-goddess side. The setting, half Egyptian temple and half forest, seems to be that archaic world that Gurdjaieff [Gurdjieff] calls “pre-sand Egypt.”39
[36] Sounds as though I needed to reconstruct the whole damn idea.
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[37] Teleological plot of New Comedy, with characters as functions of that plot; also the social standards (pragmatic common sense, etc.) involved in the comic resolution.40
[38] Aristophanic dialectical pattern of Old Comedy; separating of opposed societies. It’s this that comes nearest to the masque, with its predecessor the antimasque.41
[39] What you get in romance is the vision of the dialectic, the sort of thing that provides the Great Whore and Beast visions at the top of the Purgatorio. That’s where romance takes on some of the masque elements. Cf. the third book of FQ [The Faerie Queene].
[40] Masque has allegory; romance has archetypal framework. Allegory means elitism, and Jonson’s footnotes. The antimasque isn’t “realism,” but it is fantasy, and fantasy is something that doesn’t get into New Comedy. Series of antimasques usually danced by professionals, reflecting a further social distinction in the contrast. Nearest thing to this in New Comedy is the contrast of the (“antimasque”) humor vs. the nice and anonymous young people, who are allegorical in the sense that they stand for the audience’s sense of a norm.
[41] Dumb show and its curious relationship to allegory. I don’t [know] why this use of pantomime in romance is so often used to kill the sense of suspense by telling you what’s gonna happen. Musical contrapuntal device, perhaps, linked to the collage of time in Cymbeline, and of space in the Winter’s Tale.[*]
* Emblematic vision link with Spenser.
[42] Axis mundi type of imagery in the masque: often starts with rocks, to a degree even parodied at the time; often the slope of a mountain on the curtain, which opens to show something else within. At the “top” is very frequently some symbol of union, naturally enough if it’s in honour of a wedding. Link with the statue-coming-to-life reversal of metamorphosis in Winter’s Tale. I suspect too some sort of political reversal in Shakespeare vs. Jonson: in Jonson the king represents the whole authoritative charm element that’s clamped down on the antimasque world.
[43] Masque of anarchy in Shelley: Pandora’s box theme there,42 along with the allegory, and the use of antimasque as the symbol of a Saturnalian reversal of genuine authority.
[44] The brutal flattery of the king in Jonson is interesting in light of his comment to Drummond about Donne’s Anniversaries: if what Jonson says about King James had been said of Christ it might have been something.
[45] Nervousness of Elizabethan anxieties about confusing socials ranks, e.g., clown scene immediately after a stuffed-shirt one. Note how the masque keeps things apart: professional actors for the antimasque, amateurs for the real stuff.43
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[46] The most dramatic aspect of the masque is its transitory quality: like a World’s Fair, which erects a whole city and then tears it down, an enormously costly, elaborate, and variegated performance is put on and then disappears. This was the side of it that got Jonson down: he simply had to believe that the masque had a permanent soul as well as a fleeting body, and that he supplied the soul. This connects with his keen sense of the relative immortality of print. And footnotes. He often identifies the soul with the King and Queen—the anxiety of continuity in monarchy is part of it.44
[47] Shakespeare, on the other hand, never looked at a Quarto proof, left his plays to be gathered up after his death, and seems all his life to have concentrated his professional interests on the performance. Appropriately, it’s after the masque in The Tempest that Prospero utters that melancholy elegy over the passing of things in time.
[48] One feature of what I call the Fabergé quality of the masque, its role as an expensive upper-class toy (“these things are but toys,” is Bacon’s opening comment on masques in the Essays),45 is its role as a flattering mirror on the wall. The king or whatever sits at one end of a long hall, and at the opposite end is the stage, covered by a curtain, with (usually) the antimasque design on it. Then the curtain opens and an interior world is disclosed: here again is the body-and-soul antithesis.46
[49] The antimasque is very frequently a professional performance; the masque consists of the upper-class amateurs, whose names are always proudly printed in the printed version, who emerge from the mirror at the close and join the audience.47
[50] Shakespeare seems obsessed, almost, by the discontinuity of time in the romances. Of course the romances are in the world of Davies’ Orchestra, and time there is an expression of exuberance, or a dance. Cymbeline has the collage or superimposition of time; Winter’s Tale has the coming-to-life aspect of metamorphosis; Tempest has Prospero with his magician’s neurosis about time. Miranda’s virginity and the daughter of Antiochus, as elsewhere.
[51] Henry VIII has the turning wheel of fortune, where the important thing again is the transience of everything that happens; the play is conceived as an expensive pageant, to the point of exciting disapproval from anxious snobs, like Wotton, who thought it made greatness too familiar48—it is snobbery, though historically that’s a bit unfair. In The Two Noble Kinsmen note how the action is polarized between two juxtapositions of wedding and funeral; also the ritual anxiety about leaving nothing out of the ceremony. Even the fixation on Trecento culture, Gower in Pericles and Chaucer in TNK isn’t really continuity of tradition; rather the opposite.
[52] The six final romances: two are unmistakably Shakespearean masterpieces. But Pericles and TNK aren’t in the Folio, and both are almost certainly works of collaboration. Henry VIII is in the Folio, but deeply suspected, and Cymbeline is one of the most despised pieces in the canon. At least it’s not very often done, nor of course is H8, nor TNK, nor Pericles. Curious how it’s the two middle ones, and the four on the ends shade away, considering what a contrast, in their attitude to the unities and other things, the two successful plays are.
[53] Tartuffe is a New Comedy that approximates the polarity of the masque: the contrast is between the perverted order represented by Tartuffe himself and the obsessed Orgon, and the young people; the role of the king in the audience is what approximates the masque.49
[54] Role of time: Pericles & the daughter of Antiochus having been born at exactly the right astrological moment, but “being played upon before your time” she becomes demonic, like the fire-spirits in Comus.50 Leontes’ “Hastily lead away”:51 cf. the rush of the antimasque, vs. the sense of emancipated time in the masque (Orchestra complex).
[55] Anxiety of ritual in TNK: Theseus doesn’t want to leave out a jot of the ceremony, and postpones action on the queens. Eventually he allows the world of death to take precedence over the world of marriage. By doing so he set in train the whole course of action that gives the death of Arcite precedence over the marriage of Palamon and Emily.
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[56] Occasionally some features of tragedy, such as the witches in Macbeth, fall into an anti-masque idiom. Cf. Jonson’s preface to the Masque of Queens.52
[57] The masque where somebody says the audience won’t stand for no antimasque, so we get 13, is Shirley’s Triumph of Peace.
[58] Daniel’s Vision of 12 Goddesses53 was for the first Stuart Christmas in England, and was the Queen’s masque. Hence a vision of concord. What corresponds to the antimasque is Night awaking Somnus in a cave: he has a black wand in the left hand and a white in the right. Hopkins’ Sibyl:54 in fact he reveals a temple with a Sibylla performing sacrifices. Then Iris tells the Sibylla the 12 goddesses are coming down, which they do. Daniel makes a good deal of the fact that women are the forms of virtue: “those beautiful characters of sense were easier to be read than their mystical Ideas dispersed in that wide and incomprehensible volume of nature.”55 Iris calls herself the daughter of wonder (Thaumante): cf. Miranda and her clean-washed new world. Then the twelve go back again, as in Comus. After a short “departing dance” they ascend the mountain. I’d better play down this joining of actors and audience business: the real truth in it is simply that the actors are an extension of the audience.
[59] There seems to have been a curtain and then shutters drawn aside to reveal inner scenes. In Jonson’s Oberon there are two scene openings, consequently three scenes.56 This progression within is symbolically up: that’s an essential point to make. First, satyrs, in charge of a “Silene, who is ever the prefect of the Satyrs” [11. 29-30], and is a serious person. The second scene is the “frontispiece of a bright and glorious palace” [11. 978], where we see two “Sylvans” asleep.57 The satyrs wake them up, and there’s a song to the moon (which appeared in the first scene); improper remarks about Endymion. Then (third scene) the palace opened to discover “Fays,” i.e., Knights, as in Spenser. Cf. the end of Through the Looking Glass.58 The rest is flattery of Prince Henry, who’s Oberon. Ended by coming of dawn.
[60] In Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly ignorance is a sphinx who keeps Love a captive and has also kidnapped eleven daughters of the Morn (twelve with a Queen), who have journeyed from the east to the west (the locale of masques in Britain, as in Comus).59 So the symbolism is night under the rule of ignorance; the antimasque is represented by “twelve she-fools,” the Follies. Love answers the riddles wrongly; then twelve Muses’ Priests descend and enable him to give the right answer, which is Britain and King James. The riddles come from Cusanus and the right answer is God, of course.60 Anyway, the recognition of the sun-king brings the cycle around to a new day. If I refer to this I’ll have to say eleven daughters of the Morn although I think there were twelve, unless Queen Anne was in the audience, and she isn’t said to be.
[61] Lovers Made Men: antimasque and masque characters the same: note metamorphosis in reverse.61 (To the witches in Macbeth add the antimasque of madmen in The Duchess of Malfi). Lovers think they’re dead for love; drink of the river Lethe (Narcissus reflecting river) and come to life again: Cupid says this is the way he wants it. Four dances, evidently: antimasque dance, then “entry, or first dance,” and then “main dance,” then “they take forth the ladies, and the Revels follow,” then “They dance their going out.” Five altogether.
[62] Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue:62 scene is Mt. Atlas; at bottom a grove, out of which comes Comus with a bowl, which he presents to Hercules to tempt him to the wrong path. Two antimasques, first of followers of Comus, dressed as tuns or bottles, second of pygmies. Then Mercury descends (he’s also in the previous masque:63 another alchemical echo) and crown [crowns] Hercules for making the right choice. Then the twelve masquers come forth led by Prince Charles; their coryphaeus,64 if that’s the word, is Daedalus, because the dance of Virtue is a maze or labyrinth (Orchestra complex: this is the upper world). Four dances, plus the two antimasque ones. A lot of Virgil: the maze-dance, the cup or bowl (Aeneid 8).65
[63] Comus: one of Milton’s poems that are not explicitly Christian, hence the imagery is contrapuntal. The fact that the Lady’s chastity is identified with virginity is evidence of this: she’s a vestal virgin or a pagan saint like the idealized poet in the Sixth Elegy. So instead of Eden and a guardian angel, we have the Gardens of Adonis and an attendant spirit; instead of Christ, Mary and the Bride who is the Church, we have Venus with Cupid-Adonis and Cupid’s bride Psyche. Spenser, of course, and the Reynolds Eden-Adon link.66
[64] Masque form: Lady and two brothers (kids) the only human beings: the recognition scene is their presentation to their father and mother in the audience. In the masque the actors are disguised amateurs who remove their disguises at the end and join the audience in a dance. Here the Lady and Brothers are set free from a world of illusion symbolized by the fact that all the characters except them are elemental spirits.
[65] Comus and his rout, the antimasque figures, are the presiding spirits of a demonic world, and the images of that world are: the forest, the darkness, the lost way, the isolation (Lady separated from brothers), the metamorphosis into animals, and the parody of the lost world above. This last often symbolized by Narcissus, whose aural counterpart is Echo: hence the echo song. Comus’ band are fallen fire-spirits like Lucifer, Jack o-Lantern will-o’-the-wisp figures who profess to be the real thing but parody the stars who are symbols of direction, Dante’s diritta via,67 their dance similarly a parody of the aural counterpart of the stars, the music of the spheres. Comus’ wand and cup, two of the Tarot suits, are of course sexual: cf. Thel’s motto.68 Dead water of magic potion of forgetfulness, vs. living water of Sabrina. I think Sabrina is in the poem partly as an indication of a larger national allegory: the blessed isle in the west, England’s green & pleasant land, may also descend into the demonic world and return to its original home.
[66] Descent and return of the heroine (Lady) follows the story of Psyche in Apuleius, where Psyche is in part an allegory of Lucius’ own soul, set free after a similar Circean metamorphosis by Isis. Drop of dew archetype. In one of Milton’s sources, Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, Comus is a fat slob: note that the language used by Falstaff and his gang about Diana’s foresters and travelling at night is very similar, however different in reference. Comus suggests a lord of misrule or demonic Saturnalia, of course. Similarly, they make signs of resistance but aren’t fighters. The “glistering apparel” of the s.d. [stage direction] recalls the Tempest,69 where the dogs have initiation affinities.
[67] This is what came out of a lecture on Comus: I have a bad habit of sometimes neglecting to write up and preserve what comes out of good lectures. At the same time I gave a good lecture on the opposed styles of religious literature. On the one side is the intensification of sound, most notable in the Koran, which is part of the charm complex, the magical hypnotic repetitive rhythm aimed at taking over the will. Hopkins, the Pearl, a lot of Eliot, especially Ash Wednesday, which is a liturgical poem, and of course liturgy has this quality. Then there’s the opposite pole, the Sutra in Patanjali, where the detached statement has a quality of authority requiring the focussing and intensifying of the intellectual response. This is the area of the “kernels” of aphorism and such,70 and it’s the prevailing rhythm of the Bible in translation—in Hebrew a lot of the original sound intensification, puns, and the like, are still present. The Arabic language has had to go everywhere the Koran has gone, and I’ve always realized that the Bible’s immense superiority to the Koran depended a lot on its being a translatable book, based on sense rather than sound. But the polarity is there, and it’s immensely important.
[68] It’s connected I think with the whole oracle-wit business I’ve been barking my shins over ever since that summer in Seattle.71 It may have something to do too with the expanding of the mind from the third level of experience, which poets down to 1700 couldn’t handle, into the world above (focussing of mind) and the world below (widening or exposing of the mind to an external influence that could be dangerous as well as helpful). I think some of the final answers to this problem might be useful as far away as R [Rencontre], helping to clear up the reasons why Milton was so deadly an influence on Keats.
[69] Dissociation of sensibility is also involved: Eliot on one side, Pound on the other; Tennyson on Eliot’s side, Browning on Pound’s. They both hate Milton, which suggests that Milton has absolute command over both, though his command over the focussing side is perhaps clearer in the prose. I need words. Brecht speaks of “alienation,” but that word has so damn many wrong overtones.
[70] The oracular side goes down the West,72 with commandment (don’t argue, just do it), the prophetic oracle (it’s no use protesting; this is it), the liturgical ritual. liturgical ritual. The wit side goes up the East, with aphorism, riddle, and pericope. Of course it’s very important that at a certain pitch of intensity the two unite and fuse; but do they unite both South and North in contrasting ways or in the same way? The throw of dice that doesn’t abolish chance is the end of oracle; “igitur” is the beginning of wit73 As always, the East side throws the emphasis on the inner mind of the responder, the West on the outward projection from an externalized God, or whatever. The descending or Genesis-Incarnation movement is objective and authoritative; the ascending or Exodus-Resurrection one revolutionary and subjective. The tertium quid is a subject rebuilt by the objective but still confronting an otherness. That is, there are three movements: authority coming from outside; the restructuring of the inside; the dialectic of the two.
[71] I’ve said that the East is the focus of belief, whether in revolution or resurrection; hence the East-to-North Eros quest is archetypally after this life, as in Dante, and moving from the point of death to the point of rebirth towards youth, as implicitly in Dante and in many occult speculations.
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[72]