Collected Works of Northrop Frye

VOLUME 11

Northrop Frye on Modern Culture

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned
and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of
Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose
of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published
and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all
available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including
annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully
acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from
the Michael G. DeGroote family.
Editorial Committee
General Editor
Alvin A. Lee
Associate Editor
Jean O'Grady
Editors
Joseph Adamson
Robert D. Denham
Michael Dolzani
A.C. Hamilton
David Staines
Advisers
Robert Brandeis
Paul Gooch
Eva Kushner
Jane Millgate
Ron Schoeffel
Clara Thomas
Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye on
Modern Culture
VOLUME 11

Edited by Jan Gorak

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com
Victoria University, University of Toronto and Jan Gorak
(preface, introduction, annotation) 2003
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 08020-3696-1

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991
Northrop Frye on modern culture / edited by Jan Gorak.
(Collected works of Northrop Frye; v. 11)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8020-3696-1
i. Civilization, Modern - 2Oth century. 2. Arts, Modern - 2Oth
century. I. Gorak, Jan, 1952- II. Title. III. Series.
CB428.F79 2002

909.82

02002-903698-4

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from
Victoria University.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface
xi
Credits
xv
Abbreviations
xvii
Introduction
xix
The Modern Century
i The Modern Century

3
I City of the End of Things 5
II Improved Binoculars 27
III Clair de lune intellectuel

48

The Arts
2 Current Opera: A Housecleaning
73

3 Ballet Russe
76

vi

Contents
4 The Jooss Ballet
79

5 Frederick Delius
83

6 Three-Cornered Revival at Headington

87

7 Music and the Savage Breast

88
8 Men as Trees Walking
92
9 K.R. Srinivasa's Lytton Strachey
96
10 The Great Charlie
98

11 Reflections at a Movie
103
12 Music in the Movies
108
13 Max Graf's Modern Music
112
14 Abner Dean's It's a Long Way to Heaven
113
15 Russian Art
114
16 Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye
115
17 The Eternal Tramp
116

Contents

vii
18 On Book Reviewing

123
19 Academy without Walls

126
20 Communications

234
21 The Renaissance of Books

140
22 Violence and Television

156
23 Introduction to Art and Reality

167
Politics, History, and Society
24 Pro Patria Mori

175
25 Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

178
2.6 War on the Cultural Front

184
27 Two Italian Sketches, 1939

188
28 G.M. Young's Basic
194
29 Revenge or Justice?

195
30 F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West

197

viii

Contents
31 Wallace Notestein's The Scot in History
201
32 Toynbee and Spengler
202

33 Gandhi
209

34 Ernst Jiinger's On the Marble Cliffs

211
35 Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor
215

36 Cardinal Mindszenty
220

37 The Two Camps

222

38 Law and Disorder

224

39 Two Books on Christianity and History

226
40 Nothing to Fear but Fear
232

41 The Ideal of Democracy

235

42 The Church and Modern Culture

237

43 And There is No Peace

244

44 Caution or Dither?
246

Contents

ix
45 Trends in Modern Culture
248
46 Regina versus the World
262
47 Oswald Spengler
265
48 Preserving Human Values
274

49 The War in Vietnam

282
50 The Two Contexts
283
51 The Quality of Life in the '705
285
52 Spengler Revisited
297
53 The Bridge of Language
3*5

Notes
331
Emendations
381
Index
383

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Preface

This volume contains almost all of Frye's published articles pertaining

to twentieth-century art, politics, and culture. For many readers the
showcase of the volume will be Frye's Whidden Lectures, delivered
at McMaster University in 1967the centenary year of the Canadian
Confederationand subsequently published as The Modern Century.
Other relevant material will appear in the interviews which make up a
later volume of the Collected Works (currently in preparation by Jean
O'Grady), particularly many references to Marshall McLuhan, clearly
both a stimulus and an irritant for much of Frye's work on electronic
communications media from the 19605 until his death, and to Oswald
Spengler, a formative influence on his early mental development. This
volume traces chronologically Frye's contribution as an arts reviewer
and essayist, before moving to a similar compilation of his work as a
political commentator and analyst. The exception to this rule is the position given to The Modern Century, which opens the collection.
Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text, list all known
reprintings in English of an item, and note the existence of typescripts
and where they can be found in the Northrop Frye Fonds in Victoria
University's E.J. Pratt Library. No prepublication typescript exists in the
case of The Modern Century, although notes provided for his French
translator clear up some problems of usage and meaning. The copy-text
chosen is generally the first edition or the first printing for a journal contribution, which was often the only one carefully revised and proof-read
by Frye himself. In some cases he did reread essays for inclusion in his
own collections, such as The Stubborn Structure, which then becomes the
source of the authoritative text. All substantive changes to the copy-text
have been listed in an emendations list, with the source or explanation

xii

Preface

for the change given where necessary. Variants of particular interest

including some discrepancies between the typescript and the published
version of Frye's broadcastsare given in notes.
The accidentals of the text reflect the general practice of the Collected
Works in handling material from a variety of sources. That is to say,
since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers' house styles rather than
from Frye, they have been regularized silently throughout the volume.
For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted
for American -or ones, hyphens have been deleted from some compounds, commas have been added before the "and" in series of three,
and titles of poems have been italicized. Sometimes, where editors have
added commas around such expressions as "of course," these have been
silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the
typescript.
Notes identify the source of all the quotations I have been able to track
down; in the case of short Classical identifications, the section number,
from the Loeb edition, has been placed in square brackets in the text.
Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the
note. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life
dates and date of first publication are provided in the index.
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me in the preparation of this volume. The
articles were originally expertly typed or scanned at the Northrop Frye
Centre by Naomi Savage and Alex Stephens. Ward McBurney prepared
the index, and let me look at "Rock of Ages," his own very interesting
tribute to Frye. I thank them and Margaret Burgess, who copy-edited the
text with her usual thoroughness and first-hand knowledge of Frye matters and who also cheerfully saved me from a number of errors. Graduate assistant Ian Singer efficiently and rapidly tracked down a number
of quotations and long-buried controversies for the notes. Jean O'Grady
was extremely helpful about the direction of the volume and every
detail in its preparation; nothing was too small or too large for her
to help me with and I am extremely grateful for her kindness. Three
anonymous readers had many expert suggestions and useful corrections
to offer. Like anyone else who works on Frye, I have been fortunate
enough to draw on Robert Denham's unmatched knowledge.

Preface

xiii

The librarians at the Pratt library, University of Toronto, were invariably friendly and helpful to me on my visits to the Frye archive. The
staff of the Penrose Library at the University of Denver offered me valued assistance. To everyone in the circulation and inter library loan
departments I offer my warm thanks. Many of my colleagues have
aided me in ways they may not have realized, but I must mention Jessica Munns, who kindly asked me to speak to our division on Frye and
has always been the best kind of colleague, witty, irreverent, and lively.
Bin Ramke and Robert Urquhart have also willingly exchanged views
with me on these twentieth-century literary and cultural matters for a
long time, often to my great advantage.
George Hunter supplied me with some typically stringent critical
commentary on my introduction. Alvin Lee was confident that I was the
man for this job, and I hope I have fulfilled my considerable obligation
to him; together with Barbara McDonald of McMaster, he supplied me
some important facts about Canadian institutions. I don't think I shall
ever fulfil my obligations to Irene Gorak, who has been an incisive critic
and a benevolent guide to the process of making a critical edition.

This page intentionally left blank

Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint

works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and
welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments.
British Broadcasting Corporation for "Communications," from The
Listener (1970).
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for
"Summation," from Symposium on Television Violence / Colloque sur la
violence a television (1976).
Indiana University Press for "The Renaissance of Books" and "Spengler
Revisited," from Spiritus Mundi (1976).
Oxford University Press Canada for The Modern Century (1967).
Simon and Schuster, Inc. for the reply to a questionnaire, from Authors
Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions on the War in Vietnam Answered by
the Authors of Several Nations, ed. Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley (1967).
Copyright 1967 by Simon and Schuster.
University of Toronto Magazine for "The Quality of Life in the '705," from
the University of Toronto Graduate (1971).

xvi

Credits

With the exception of the items listed above, all works are printed courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/ Victoria University.

Abbreviations

AC
BG
CW
D
DG
DV
DW
El
FS
LN

LS

MC
MD
NF
NFF

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto:
Anansi, 1971.
Collected Works of Northrop Frye
The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham.
CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James
Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.
The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. in i. New York:
Knopf, 1939.
The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963.
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1947.
The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1982-1990: Architecture of the
Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5-6. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1939: Unpublished
Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2002.
The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967.
The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem
Comedies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.
Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library

xviii

Abbreviations

NFCL Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review

Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939.
Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1996.
NFR
Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding "The Great Code" and "Words
with Power." Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady. CW, 4.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
OE
On Education. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988.
RW
Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976. Ed. Robert D.
Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
SR
A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968.
StS
The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.
WE
Northrop Frye's Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O'Grady and
Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000.

Introduction

I The Phases of Northrop Frye's Cultural Criticism

Northrop Frye liked to reflect that he was born in 1912 into a world
where the King of England was also the Emperor of India, and lived
long enough to see a Hollywood actor installed in the White House in
1981. The works collected in this volume have a similarly impressive
temporal span: the earliest appeared in 1933, the year of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's inauguration and the legalization of Joyce's Ulysses by the
U.S. Supreme Court; the latest dates from 1986, as the beginning of the
Iran-Contra scandal surfaced and Wole Soyinka became the first African
Nobel Laureate in Literature. So Frye's commitment to writing about
twentieth-century art, culture, and politics was no transitory one. He
maintained it simultaneously with his emergence as a major Romantic
scholar in Fearful Symmetry (1947) and as a synoptic and "scientific" literary theorist in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Because Frye achieved such
eminence in the latter activities, the former have for many readers vanished from the picture, leaving only "the anaesthetic critic" of Frederick
Crews or the depoliticized neo-Aristotelian of revisionist legend.1 From
the writings on politics and art brought together in these pages we can
assemble a very different Frye, a Frye intensely concerned with the
opportunities for thoughtful critical intervention in the national life
available to a Canadian intellectual in the 19305, a Frye keen to participate in the transformation of Toronto from a colonial outpost to a
sophisticated cosmopolitan centre. They also show us a Frye unfailingly
loyal to the ideal of "cooperation" so significant to twentieth-century
Canadian life.
These essays fall into three main groups. The first group extends from

xx

Introduction

1933 to 1945, marking Frye's emergence as a critic at large in reviews of

Puccini, the Russian and the Jooss ballet companies, Surrealist exhibitions, and movies by Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, usually in the
pages of the Canadian Forum. The second phase begins in 1946, when he
wrote an editorial commentary on the Nuremberg trials. At this time, as
the editors of the Forum recognized, old alliances lost their authority in a
world "cut in two by forces that are not primarily European, but Asiatic
and American."2 As a member of the Forum's editorial committeeand
managing editor from 1948 to 1950Frye reshaped the journal's policy
from the directly political position of his predecessor, George Grube,
preferring instead to function as a commentator on what he called "public affairs."3 By focusing less on the policy implications of postwar political developments, he freed himself for the long investigation of cultural
symbolism and political structures that culminated in the publication of
The Modern Century.
From this date until his death in 1991, Frye's career enters a third
phase. He now pursues the implications for the scholar-humanist of a
society where knowledge and leisure are no longer minority pursuits but
everybody's business. Frye acknowledges the enormous investments in
image and drama made by postindustrial societies that simulate works
of art in their everyday transactions and ostensible commitment to an
ideology of perpetual freedom. Frye is a shrewd critic of such societies,
unwilling to swallow the message that the present is the measure of all
things, but he is not involved in a futile rearguard battle on behalf of
"high" art. Instead he attempts practical cooperation with other groups
concerned with cultivating and educating the human capacity to structure the worldsocial and mental health workers, radio and television
producers, scientistsand compares their constructions of the world
with those of art. In this way, Frye maintains his commitment to the crucial evidence of the arts that he first assimilated through Oswald Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, and Andre Malraux. As the opening paragraphs of
his lecture "The Academy without Walls" make clear, however, he liberalizes the message of these authors. He shares their recognition that the
standard canon has disappeared in the light of the enormous past
opened up for artists by museums, reproductions, academies, and the
entire "culture industry," but Frye pledges his loyalty to "the educational process" as both the source and the public for a self-aware art. For
him, as for Habermas, the educational structure provides a buffer zone of
free discussion and cooperation not only against what Malraux, Lewis,

Introduction

xxi

or Spengler release to the artists's "will to power" but also against the
"countercommunication" structures erected by media entrepreneurs
like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. If these are not Frye's most charismatic contributions to criticism, they are the logical and moral fulfilment
of the ideological commitment Frye made early in his career to Canadian
cooperative socialism and his commitment to the power of the imagination to construct a world not reducible to conventional wisdom.
II Constructive Criticism
In 1963, in the broadcasts subsequently published as The Educated Imagination, with his credentials as a scholar and theorist well established,
Frye told his audience that "Everything man does that's worth doing is
some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive
power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction
for its own sake" (El, 50). Frye's broad emphasis on the world as the
product of human construction positions him in the broad stream of cultural debate as established by Vico in the eighteenth century. In his
rather narrower emphasis on what is "worth doing" and "the mind set
free to work on pure construction for its own sake" Frye participates in
the vision of culture as a specialized and emancipating human construction familiar to readers of Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" Schiller's
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and
Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism. Such a vision sees culture as an
autonomous human production, not as a vehicle for patriot, politician,
or promoter. For Frye, these terms represent the basic unit of critical
analysis. In his essay "Frederick Delius" (no. 5, 1936), Frye emphasizes
that art is its own community, and that to speak of Delius as "essentially
English" or "deeply Northern" is to talk nonsense. He warns his readers
that "a musician should be approached in terms of culture, not of race
or nationality, and in Delius's case the appropriate cultural term is
'Romantic'" (84). Many years later, in A Study of English Romanticism
(1968), Frye reiterates that "The word Romanticism is a cultural term"
that "refers primarily to some kind of change in the structure of literature itself" (SR, 3, 4). For the purposes of critical analysis, "culture" thus
initially demarcates the shared artistic conventions and structures of a
movement or a period. Frye never abandons his view that the main task
of the teacher or commentator must be "to help create the structure of
the subject in the student's mind" (OE, 13; or, WE, 543).

xxii

Introduction

Frye's own rapid ascent up the educational ladder registers how far
this program of educational expansion and spiritual enrichment had
already translated into upward mobility for a talented minority. Yet his
is a restless mind, perpetually suspicious of the monopolist tendencies
the institutionalized imagination possesses. If we compare the views put
forward by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy in 1869 with those
Frye expresses nearly a century later, the grounds of his suspicion will
become clearer. Arnold looks to culture as "a centre of authority" in an
industrial, class-conscious, and faction-ridden Victorian England. He
sees culture as an impersonal "idea of perfection . . . an inward condition
of the mind and spirit." Arnold is careful to temper this Romantic
inwardness with the educational, literary, and administrative activities
of a Victorian state defined in terms of "the nation in its collective and
corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider
than that of individuals."4 If Arnold's program can be understood as
synecdochic for the nineteenth-century effort to expand educational
opportunity and political enlightenment, then it is also representative of
the Victorian fear of inwardness unregulated by institutional restraint.
This is something that it did not take Frye long to recognize. In his
first critical book Fearful Symmetry, he remarks that Blake's
conception of culture as the source of order in society and as more complete
in its appeal than religion, may remind us to some extent of Culture and
Anarchy; enough, at any rate, to make us wonder why so strongly "Hebraic"
a thinker and despiser of the Classics as Blake should hold such views. Blake
believed, like Arnold, that culture preserves society: he did not believe, as
Arnold apparently did, that society preserves culture. Society to Blake is an
eternally unwilling recipient of culture: every genius must fight society no
matter what his age. Arnold's view of both culture and society is conservative, traditional and evolutionary; Blake's is radical, apocalyptic and revolutionary. (FS, 90)

For Frye, Arnold's program remained too mired in the Victorian respectability and common sense it purported to despise. The network of institutions that Arnold took for granted made his dissent from Victorian
values too comfortable and complacent. For Frye, Arnold had elevated
the local manners of his Rugby and Oxford into those of culture as a
whole. At the beginning of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye pounces on

Introduction

xxiii

Arnold's dismissal of Ruskin's allegorical interpretation of Othello in

Munera Pulveris. What Arnold sees as only "a piece of extravagance" is
for Frye a genuine attempt to re-envision the play. Frye comments:
it is Arnold who is the provincial. Ruskin has learned his trade from the
great iconological tradition which comes down through Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser, both of whom he had studied carefully, and which is incorporated in the medieval cathedrals he had pored
over in such detail. Arnold is assuming, as a universal law of nature, certain "plain sense" critical axioms which were hardly heard of before Dryden's time and which can assuredly not survive the age of Freud and Jung
and Frazer and Cassirer. (AC, id)
"Plain sense" cannot survive the exegetical strenuousness of modern
thought; nor can it penetrate the visionary core of canonical achievement. At the University of Toronto, Frye was lucky enough to find
instructors for whom "plain sense" was not the ultimate arbiter of intellectual inquiry, and who could strengthen his own intellectual resolve to
forge his alliances elsewhere. From them, he learned that the ancient
universities did not hold a monopoly of intellectual production and creative achievement.
Ill Canadian Cooperation
When Frye's lifelong association with Toronto began in 1929, it appeared an unlikely site for the formation of an alternative model of cultural criticism. As Frye remembered it, to a newcomer Toronto was a
repressive, orthodox, and homogeneous city where an ostensibly fervent alliance to the British Empire masked the machinations of American technology and capital that already threatened to control the city's
future. Yet at Victoria College and in the larger university community,
Frye found pockets of resistance. His entry as a probationary student
and subsequent outstanding performance in the honour course as a student of English literature and philosophy are charted comprehensively
in Northrop Frye's Writings on Education (2.000), edited by Jean O'Grady
and Goldwin French. In the intense atmosphere of a collegiate university with the palpable but loosely defined religious connection the editors describe, Frye embarked on a course of study largely purged of the
"electives" and devotion to the authority of "the textbook" that so

xxiv

Introduction

bedevilled college education in North America.5 Here he could accordingly equip himself with enough knowledge of his subject to lay the
foundations for the "scientific" study of literature exemplified in Anatomy of Criticism.
The university also gave Frye access to intellectuals unconstrained by
disciplinary boundaries but committed to systematic enquiry. As Frye
recognized, most of his teachers had begun in fields other than English:
John Robins had initially been a student of German, E.J. Pratt of psychol
ogy, and the department head, Pelham Edgar, had taught French. If
English at Toronto was a comprehensive, orderly field that marched
from Beowulf to Hardy unimpeded by student choice or preference, its
march was not an entirely linear one. Frye recalled how Robins would
illuminate ballad tradition by referring to Hemingway, just as Edgar's
Shakespeare lectures would break off to consider Woolf and James. Such
methods licensed Frye's lifelong habit of seeing literature as an imaginary museum where authors were not separated by time, but united by
structure. Moreover, it was a short step from the Robins who saw Hemingway and the poet of Sir Patrick Spens on a common plane to the Frye
who could regard Charlie Chaplin as the logical fulfilment of devices
and predicaments dramatized in Shakespeare's problem comedies.
The University of Toronto that Frye entered just a month before the
Wall Street crash did not subscribe to the more pessimistic tenets of
early twentieth-century thought. Frye's teachers endorsed neither the
ideas of cultural catastrophe bruited at this time by Yeats, Pound, Eliot,
and Huizinga, nor the dogmatic anti-romanticism so pervasive in modernist poetics. Robins's scholarship in the ballad tradition and Edgar's
work as a student of Shelley acknowledged the way the Romantic imagination articulated in symbolic language the hopes of the new communities formed in the light of the late eighteenth-century revolutions.
Through Pratt's poetry, Frye was invited to see Canada in terms of the
same massive expansionary energies. Understanding the national culture demanded an understanding of the dynamism of industrial societies, not a retreat into the mythology of "the organic society" before the
coming of the machine.
Perhaps most important of all for a future culture critic, Toronto
reversed the tendency of modern universities to produce specialist
scholars. Some of the most distinguished academics in the university
were figures who, like Harold Innis or Charles Cochrane, had started
their scholarly careers in one field and redefined that area completely in

Introduction

xxv

subsequent work. As an economic historian Innis had won great acclaim

with the publication of The Fur-Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (1940). These books viewed
the history of Canada in terms of the "staple" products developed by its
various regions. In a final series of monographs, Empire and Communications (1950), The Bias of Communication (1951), and Changing Concepts of
Time (1952)all so important for Frye's own The Modern CenturyInnis
engaged with communication systems and their function as the hidden
engine of Canada and all modern technologically driven societies.
Cochrane's first book, Thucidydes and the Science of History (1929),
exhibited all the virtues of scholarly caution, apparently resisting the
innovations by which P.M. Cornford transformed the canonical ancient
historian into a tragic poet and ritual dramatist. Yet Ernest Sirluck's
memory of a Cochrane who "was eager to talk" and "felt somewhat isolated in his department, which is why he would stand in the cloister outside his office hand rolling cigarettes . . . hoping to find someone
interesting to talk to,"6 is consistent with the professional identity of a
scholar who, over a decade later, would publish the massive multidisciplinary study Christianity and Classical Culture (1940). The most innovative scholars at the University of Toronto cultivated habits of slow
maturation culminating in massive production, production that often
moved far beyond their initial field of inquiry. There was much here for
the embryonic cultural critic to learn from, in a university culture that
was itself neither genteel nor specialist.
Like many members of the university, Frye found a venue for his earliest efforts as a cultural commentator and literary journalist in the Canadian Forum, a monthly journal launched in October 1920 as a successor
to the University of Toronto's The Rebel. The Forum's hostility to "doctrines, whose authority springs mainly from their length of days," aligns
it with iconoclastic twentieth-century journals like The Dial or The Egoist.
Frye would have agreed with the opening editorial announcement that
"Too much of our news is coloured and distorted, before ever it reaches
the Canadian press. Too often our convictions are borrowed from
London, Paris, or New York. Real independence is not the product of
tariffs and treaties. It is a spiritual thing. No country has reached its full
stature, which makes its goods at home, but not its faith and its philosophy." The emphasis on imagination and mind as the origin of any
lasting spiritual emancipation is one that Frye and the founders of the
Forum shared, as well as the commitment to "freer and more informed

xxvi

Introduction

discussion of public questions."7 The same suspicion of the monopolizing habits of official cultural agencies that motivates Frye's criticism of
Arnold drives the Forum's critiques of Canadian politics under Bennett
or King.
For many of the Forum's leading contributors, this "real independence" would arrive only through what C.B. Sissons, a member of
the Classics faculty at Victoria College, called in the journal's first number "The Rise of Cooperation in Canada." Only by sharing national
resources and expanding welfare and educational services to the broadest possible numbers of Canadians could a society independent of Britain or the United States be built. In its early years, regular contributions
by J.S. Woodsworth, Frank Underhill, and F.R. Scott laid a platform for a
socialism rooted in cooperation, clearing the path for the journal's subsequent overt affiliation with the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR)
and the Commonwealth Co-operative Federation (CCF). These were
political solutions for Canadians who wanted to resist encroachments of
American capital and imperial patronage without taking the route pursued by Russia. The preference for public ownership and socialism
achieved by parliamentary representation, as well as a constituency
whose urban base largely consisted of teachers, academics, and preachers, ran parallel to the path chosen by the British Fabians. Just as important for Frye, many of the journal's contributors shared the Fabian
commitment to public education and the extension of cultural suffrage.
Sandra Djwa has marshalled considerable evidence to show how the
Forum served as a significant force in disseminating modernism as
poetic practice and aesthetic program to Canadian readers.8 The cultural
pessimism of modernism, on the other hand, was not easy to reconcile
with the Forum's politics of cooperation. In this respect Frye, always a
sceptic about the modernist cultural platform, probably learned much
from two writers whose roots were not Canadian at all, but who did
much to proselytize for a cooperative and culturally progressive Toronto. The regular contributions of Barker Fairley and Eric Havelock to
the Forum are arguably the basis of the projections about Toronto and
Ontario as laboratories for the enlightened cultural policy Frye will outline over three decades later in "Academy without Walls" (no. 19,1961)
and "The Renaissance of Books" (no. 21,1973).
Frye often spoke warmly of Fairley, professor of German at the University of Toronto and a member of the Forum's editorial board from its
earliest days, who widened his own horizons and those of the entire

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xxvii

country. Fairley had argued vigorously for a journal whose constituency

would be the nation, not the university community. A native of Barnsley, a brilliant graduate of the German department at Leeds University,
and a lifelong student of Goethe, Kleist, and Herder, Fairley shared
none of the anti-Romantic assumptions of Eliot or Pound. The most
significant feature of Fairley's work for Frye lay in his view of Romanticism as the last great popular movement, as one that could still enrich
the spiritual life of the twentieth-century world. Fairley translated the
Romantic belief in the creative potential of the community into an intensely practical program for educating the Canadian public in the
arts.
In the first number of the Forum, Fairley's "A Peep at the Art Galleries" reported on his renewed contact with the London art galleries. On
returning to one of the world's great cultural capitals, he felt excitement
tempered by reservation. If the paintings he viewed at London's avantgarde galleries exhibited remarkable technical proficiency, they were
also "all a little too coldly conceived, too intellectual, too theoretical."
Fairley knew that such heavy emphasis on form and theory ran entirely
opposite to the legacy of Romanticism. He argued that
theory is not enough to produce great art. It is only one side of the story
and the other side is some objective world in which the theory can lose
itself, find itself, dissolve itself. Call it what you will. The place for theory in
the finished work is that of the skylark that loses itself in the blue, heard
but not seen, forgotten yet flooding the air with melody. In many of these
modern paintings the theory sits on the fence and croaks. Or it just stares at
you coldly, which is still worse.9

For well over twenty years, Fairley regularly attempted to convince his
readers of the fusion of imaginative power and passionate social concern he found in Joseph Conrad, O.M. Doughty, and Hugh MacDiarmid, but which he found strangely wanting in much modern art. He
attempted to embody these qualities in his own creative work, which
ranged from a Lawrentian playlet on the fishermen of coastal Yorkshire
to lyrics reminiscent of Blake's sketches in their visionary simplicity.
Frye's debts to Eric Havelock, who joined Victoria College as a
teacher of Classics in 1929 and whose commentaries on everyday events
in Toronto and the larger direction of world politics appeared in the
Forum throughout the 19305, are more difficult to evaluate. At first

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Introduction

glance one of Havelock's earliest contributions to the journal, "As It

Strikes an Englishman," evokes the same intimations of the Oxbridge
mind in exile that Frye found so irksome a feature of his term as senior
academic and administrator at Victoria. Similarly, Havelock's pastoral
advice to Canadians that they come to "learn in time how much of
human progress is symbolized in the majestic initials U.S.S.R." is not
something Frye would at any time have swallowed eagerly.10
Yet Havelock did make several major contributions to Frye's political
education. He recognized that twentieth-century society moved in a
direction antithetical to the drift of Marxist prophecy. In modern conditions of mechanized labour the proletariat is not the revolutionary vanguard; rather, the middle-class citizen is the major actor for the social
thinker to understand. Havelock knew that the conditions of middleclass citizenship had also changed, in ways that made voting anything
but a purely rational action: symbolism relayed through a mass-circulation journalism moulded political attitudes more continuously than reasoned argument in a modern culture. The intellectual's task was not
only to raise the standard of political literacy, but also to explore the
functions and needs public symbols supply in modern societies. Accordingly Havelock's articles used local controversies like the naming of a
ferry boat to underscore the value of the longstanding legacy of cooperation for Toronto's civic identity. Finally, Havelock emphasized that only
the time-honoured liberal education in letters and eloquence enabled
modern citizens to understand the politics of persuasion and symbol
that dominated modern societies. Havelock ridiculed provincial efforts
to make vocational education the dominant paradigm for Ontario's children. He emphasized that education was too necessary for modern citizenship to be left to market forces.
In "The Philosophy of John Dewey" he took issue with the effort to
launch Dewey as the great demystifier of Western philosophy. Rather,
Havelock emphasized that Dewey was the apologist for Americanism
and all its systematic exploitation of masses, markets, and raw materials.
Cultural hegemony was no longer solely a matter of gunboats and missionaries, but was now carried by newspapers, textbooks, and images.
Consequently, Dewey's significance was less as a thinker than as an
entrepreneur in thought, as a North American Cecil Rhodes whose staple commodity was the intellect. Against Dewey's exploitation of mental
capital, Havelock set about his own task of understanding the motives of
political actors and the deep drives that controlled their actions, of relay-

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xxix

ing his discoveries to his readers in a lucid and unpatronizing prose.

Whatever their differences in style and concern, Fairley and Havelock
both assume the existence of a public capable of comprehending, weighing, and acting on its deliberations. Neither endorses the embattled
modernist assumption that cultural questions can only be conveyed by a
solitary outsider to a small group of fervent disciples.
This complex legacy of cooperative socialism, synoptic scholarship,
and visionary thinking shaped Frye's subsequent efforts as a cultural
critic. It enabled him to filter out some of the authoritarian and elitist
assumptions of high modernism, while still acknowledging that form
and convention remain the necessary conditions for artistic utterance
and critical understanding. This committed Frye to a position that
acknowledged the power of art, while recognizing its interplay with the
larger complex of representations available in society as a whole.
Finally, it led him to recognize that the "distinctly Canadian" could
never really dislodge itself from the larger issues that threatened the stability of the world outside Canada. In a way Kant or Schiller might not
have appreciated, the loyalties of a twentieth-century cultural critic
were always to what might be called humanityto a public not so much
educated as capable of educationhowever much he might owe to his
local roots.
IV Frye's Beginnings
The years immediately preceding Frye's earliest essays in this collection
were peculiar "stop-go" ones for cultural criticism. T.S. Eliot's contributions to The Dial between 1920 and 1929, Edmund Wilson's journalism
for The New Republic, and Gilbert Seldes' The Seven Lively Arts (1924), all
signal a collective shift away from a narrowly classical yardstick for
artistic achievement. For Eliot in the 19208 an abrasive, insolent music
hall performance by Little Titch or Marie Lloyd was a more enriching
cultural event than a Gilbert Murray translation of Euripides performed
by Sybil Thorndike at the Old Vic for a self-approving audience. Wilson's quest for an alternative to the genteel tradition led him to Tennessee sharecroppers, New York burlesque shows, and Hopi snake dances.
Seldes paid this alternative culture almost rapturous tribute in The Seven
Lively Arts, where he celebrated the twin commitment to craft and anarchy embodied in a Chaplin movie or a Catskill revue. With its vaudeville acts, burlesque shows, and silent movies, early twentieth-century

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Introduction

culture in the United States was clearly developing along non-Arnoldian

lines.
By 1929, as Frye began his undergraduate education, this emancipating moment was about to end. The Wall Street crash curbed the exuberance of the decade, eroding all hopes of stable prosperity within an
unrestrained capitalism. In 1933, as Frye signalled his own dissent from
the conventional pieties of patriotism, Eliot spelled out the cultural
implications of his new loyalties to Anglo-Catholicism, monarchy, and
classicism. In the lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia that
year on "Tradition and Modern Literature" Eliot celebrated tradition,
not as the innovative, sceptical artist of The Sacred Wood, but as a reactionary Christian, nostalgic for a homogeneous community. When they
appeared a year later as After Strange Gods, Frye could hardly have welcomed the fortress culture severed from the twentieth century that Eliot
erected for his Southern audience. Nor could he have enjoyed reading
Eliot's assessment that "the chances for the reestablishment of a native
culture are perhaps better here than in New England. You are farther
away from New York; you have been less industrialized and less
invaded by foreign races; and you have a more opulent soil."11 This was
not a usable past for a Canadian critic.
Frye's own position is sharply opposed to Eliot's. Where Eliot links
culture to custom, creed, and region, Frye constructs his own tradition
from very different sources. Having already noted the patterns of imagery shared by the anonymous ballad writers and an emerging Romanticism, he now found these images surfacing again in the new works he
reviewed for the Forum. As his inventory of buried cities, enchanted gardens, and demonic machinery expanded, he began to wonder whether
what Eliot called "heresy" in his lectures was the route to a lost truth.
Frye also began to formulate an alternative model for the needs that art
met and the conventions that it forged to meet these needs. In "Poetry
and Drama" (1951) Eliot renewed his claim that "It is a function of all art
to give some perception of an order in life, by imposing an order upon
it."12 In contrast, Frye saw dramatic production in terms of a shared
endeavour that welds artistic skill to community practice, reminding his
readers that "music and drama are the two great group art forms; that is,
they are ensemble performances before audiences" (88). Art's origins, its
specific manifestations in concert hall or gallery, and its continuing
existence among future audiences, all rely on the cooperative labour of
participant and public.

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xxxi

To Frye, Eliot is ultimately an Arnold in Yankee's clothing, always

hankering for a metropolitan sophistication even as he purports to
despise it. When Eliot reviews London opera for The Dial, he regrets its
survival as "one of the last remainders of a former excellence of life, a
sustaining symbol even for those who seldom went."13 Frye knows that
the Versailles most familiar to his audience will be the Versailles of the
divisive peace treaty, not the Versailles of le roi soleil, and he sets about
understanding how opera and ballet can expand the perceptions of citizens who belong to that volatile and divided world. Ultimately, his criticism seeks to estimate the function of ballet for a cooperative modern
culture, not as Eliot's monument to high living. Frye argues that ballet
belongs to a family of "dynamic arts appealing . . . to a group consciousness . . . depending on group production and group response" (79). For
Frye, high art and an expanding audience are not necessarily contradictory, and no unpassable gulf separates Stravinsky from Disney. Frye
never believes the group must necessarily slide into the mob, and this is a
view shared by few early twentieth-century writers on art. Eliot's community is always ready-formed; for Frye, the whole challenge of art
comes from the way its cooperative undertakings perpetually expand
the horizons and the hopes of the communities responsive to it.
Yet just as Barker Fairley recognized the anxiety that was the underside of Canadian sublimity, Frye also acknowledges the "primitive fears
of an uncanny and hostile world" (88) that shadow the Utopian potential
of human communities. This acknowledgment does not lead Frye to
endorse Eliot's neoclassicist "order." Instead, he proposes an imaginative synthesis that fuses Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and
Greek ritual to resurrect "the spirit of life and growth that died when
the year died, and rose again at the year's rebirth." He then moves outward to his own audience, adding that the Greeks "were cursed with
that, and we are born under that curse, but we and our children don't
have to keep on applauding gangsters and allowing them to tear us to
pieces with bombshells to the end of time. If Winter comes, can Spring
be far behind?" (91). The quotation from the dislodged visionary-socialist Shelley indicates the gap between Frye's loyalties and those of many
of his contemporaries. Frye understands culture as plot as well as imagery, and its plot takes on the shape of a collective hope and commitment
to action, a deep identification with the imagery of a reborn world in garden, forest, or city. Such imagery promises the restoration of a beneficent pattern to the world through the construction of images congruent

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Introduction

with our most benignly Utopian desires. In the political world of the
19303, Frye sees only natural depravity actualized on the theatre of
world politics. The cyclic structures of drama and art, on the other hand,
hint at the self-renewing powers of humanity. Unlike Eliot, the Southern
Agrarians, or the contributors to F.R. Lea vis's Scrutiny, Frye does not see
"the organic society" as demarcating the sole horizons for any valid cultural projections. He knows that Canada's existence is inseparable from
the expansive energies that forged Blake and the industrial revolution
alike. Frye's is a world where the imagined cities of Plato, the green
world of Shakespeare, and the cartoon fantasies of Disney can exist on a
common axis, as so many signals of a permanent hope for a renewed
society.
By the late 19305, North American intellectuals estranged by Eliot
were looking for deliverance in quite different directions. To this group,
Edmund Wilson embodied a powerful alternative to Eliot's example.
The publication of After Strange Gods in 1934 crowned Wilson's own disenchantment with Eliot's leadership. Only a year later, Wilson journeyed to Odessa to begin his quest to redefine the relationship between
politics and letters. In a trail-blazing essay on "Marxism and Literature"
(t-937) f Wilson argued that "in practising and prizing literature, we must
not be unaware of the first efforts of the human spirit to transcend literature itself."14 Throughout this period, in such essays as "Flaubert's Politics" and "A.E. Housman" (1937), Wilson showed how nineteenth- and
twentieth-century artists repeatedly arrived at the very brink of imagining the extinction of the existing social and political order but stopped
short of supplying any vision of a new society. After a battery of preliminary sketches published in The New Republic, Wilson's blueprint for
this transformed society, To the Finland Stationarguably the last great
nineteenth-century historical novelappeared in 1940.
Wilson welcomed Russian Communism as the logical terminus of a
rational, scientific, progressive, bourgeois nineteenth-century Europe.
For this ultimate fulfilment of humanity's emancipation, he looked to
Michelet, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the heroes of To the Finland Station,
whom he fused in a kind of Balzacian comedie humaine. With its panoramic sweep and clearly-defined dramatic conflicts, Wilson's version
of "the modern century" wrestled the responsibility for progress from a
bourgeoisie that had lost its way. The torch of the future passed to men
of action, not artist-dreamers.
Frye could hardly have viewed the emancipation Wilson delivered as

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xxxiii

much preferable to imprisonment under Eliot. For one thing, he saw in

Communism the resurgence of unchecked institutional power, not the
first chapters in a saga of social liberation. In "War on the Cultural
Front" (no. 26, 1940), he describes Russian Communism as "a religious
movement complete with bible, church, heretics, apostles, saints, martyrs, and shrines" (185). If he could concedeas he did repeatedly
laterthe accuracy of the Soviet assessment of Western economic and
political institutions, Frye could see nothing to welcome in the political
machinery Communism had constructed. This he consistently characterized as a recrudescence of Papal authoritarianism with its imperialism, hagiography, and orchestrated confessions. His short commentary
on "Gandhi" (no. 33, 1948) regrets the fate of the politician apotheosized, and derives consolation from the fact that a murdered Gandhi at
least "avoided being pushed, along with Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, into the
modern pantheon of legendary heroes, infallible and impotent, who can
be invoked to endorse any kind of action, however at variance with their
teachings" (210). For Frye, Wilson's supremely rational interpretation of
modern history ignored its nightmare atmosphere.
Secondly, Frye could not see the profit in Wilson's implied directive
"to transcend literature itself." For Frye, literature and art were the
foundation stones for any plan to emancipate society. The gap between
Wilson's view of Russian Communism and Frye's is a gap between a
critic who interprets a culture by its doctrinal propositions and one who
interprets it by its images. Because Wilson scarcely registers awareness
of the vast grip that symbols exert over human consciousness, he ends
up blessing Lenin's rapacity for power. Frye's own practice leads him
further and further into the fund of images and myths of human societies. These he comes to see as what Malinowski would call the "charters"
for their aspirations. Their stories about the origins, collapse, and subsequent renewal of human sociability are familiar to readers of Frye's later
The Secular Scripture (1976) and The Myth of Deliverance (1983). But they
are embryonically present in his early essays on Disney and Chaplin. To
say this is to recognize the distinct orientation of Frye's cultural criticism
and begin to make its originality more explicit. It is the concern with
imagery and the attempt to read the modern world's scattered images as
a coherent, dialectical narrative of deliverance that raise Frye's essays in
this volume above the level of a series of well-informed, tightly-written,
and energetically conceived reports on politics and literature.
As he acknowledged on many occasions, it was Oswald Spengler

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Introduction

who inspired Frye to see the world as so many imaginative constructs

and to understand the centrality of artistic evidence for the aspiring cultural critic. Spengler's cultural criticism, with its ambitious aim of plotting the geopolitical unconscious of an epoch, had first captured Frye's
imagination when he read The Decline of the West (1919-22) and "practically slept with Spengler under my pillow for several years" (270). Yet
Frye's is a Spengler with a difference, a virtuoso of visionary narrative,
not a gloomy determinist. Frye reverses Spengler's assumptions about
the long winter about to descend over the modern century. In Frye's
eyes, this nightmare technopolis is one option for modern society, but it
is not the only option. For Frye draws very different conclusions from
the vast gulf that separates culture from nature, arguing that its existence shows that nothing is determined in human affairs, even though
"everything contemporaneous in a given society is related" (181). Although Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (1927) saw this as
Spengler's own bleak capitulation to the spirit of the age, Frye discerns
in his encyclopedia of cultural symbolism an order undetectable to those
caught between the dogmas of Wall Street and Red Square. Ultimately,
The Decline of the West enabled Frye to forge the latent affinities between
twentieth-century technological and artistic styles in The Modern Century. Reading Spengler encouraged Frye to develop the historical parallels that elevated analogies between Classical Rome and modern Europe
from guesswork to creative intuition. This schema for the "seasons" of
cultural development allowed him to see the past at work in the present, to juxtapose Chaplin's problem comedy period with Shakespeare's.
Far from being a capitulation to Zeitgeist, Spengler's book liberalized
Hegel's geist.
If it is Spengler who awakened Frye's power to see the created world
as so many imaginative constructions and established the centrality of
the arts for cultural analysis, then it is Frye himself who makes the connection between Spengler and less drastically pessimistic theorists also
concerned with culture as a system of symbolic thinking. Much of this
thinking occurs beneath the level of the conscious mind. As Emile
Durkheim recognizes in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), tne
exchange of coloured paper for goods and services belongs to the sans
dire, the "taken-for-granted" features of everyday social reality in Paris
or London. But it is no less binding for all that, as bankrupts and forgers
rapidly discover. To see modern culture as a spectacular instance of
symbolic breakdownas Eliot, Benda, Hulme15 and a host of twentieth-

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xxxv

century social thinkers had doneis to overlook how many such symbolic encounters proceed successfully in a single day.
P.M. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy (1912) and The Origin of
Attic Comedy (1914)whose influence Frye's work frequently acknowledgestaught him how culture shapes the way people think, regulating
and ordering the exchange of symbols into a structure that in turn is
actualized in a system of social performances, obligations, celebrations,
and crises. Cornford plotted the categories of Greek thought, penetrating the distinct and specific meanings that "tragedy" or "history" took
on for its citizens. He showed how the Greeks deployed images from the
natural and cultural world in their religious speculation. At the end of
the road that stretches from Plato's cave to the Platonic republic come
the communities the people of antiquity inhabited andmost important
of all for Frye's theory of culturethat they wanted to inhabit. These
were the communities they celebrated in the festivals and rituals Cornford saw as the origins of Greek literary genres.
In effect, Frye puts the contributions of Durkheim and Cornford to
two main purposes. First of all, he shifts the syntax of cultural criticism
from the indicative (these are the symbols and images we circulate in
such-and-such a society, these are the symbols that circulated in one
such canonical culture) and the imperative (these are the symbols we
must use in such-and-such a society) to the optative (this is the kind of
society we hope for and these are the kinds of symbols we use to transmit our hopes). Second, he strings the images of a culture into episodes
within a larger plot: what we hope will happen is not always what happens, and our fears, no less than our hopes, control our stock of images
and our narrative structures.
When Frye inspects how these symbols and structures operate inside
literary genres and institutionsas in the festivals of ancient Greece or
medieval Europehe sees them as charged with the great moments of
hope and fear for a society, as vehicles for entertaining speculation
about polls and cosmos that are tabooed in the larger state. Unlike Eliot or
Leavis, Frye does not think this image-making power can only operate
in certain closed societies. Two of the most compelling essays in this collection, "The Great Charlie" (no. 10,1941) and "The Eternal Tramp" (no.
17, 1947), locate this power as alive and well in a commercial cinema
designed to entertain the industrial masses. Frye's Chaplin functions as
an emissary for a turbulent American comic dissidence. To Chaplin,
"the man who is really part of his social group is only half a man" (101).

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Introduction

Frye interprets Chaplin's comedies as updated reworkings of the religious ordeal enacted in pageant cycles or the visionary images of
religious painting. This time, however, it is the soul of the West, as in
Spengler, not the individual soul, that Frye sees as the disputed entity.
The dark shadow of contemporary Europe descends over The Great Dictator, even down to the ineffectual German opposition to Hitler. In Monsieur Verdoux, Frye must confront one of his own traumas: the meaning
of the great crash, an event he saw as so significant in his own experience. In Verdoux the Bluebeard, a man superfluous for international
capital, Frye sees the victim turned revenger, a man able to turn the economic system against itself with murderously successful results. But
Verdoux's is a Pyrrhic victory that only drags the world further into
bloodshed. It is the outsiderthe Huck Finn or the trampwhose nonconformity offers the germs of a more humane alternative to existing
society; in the tramp's detachment from social expectations, Frye perceives the potential for new deliverance. By 1948, Frye was ready to
present "The Argument of Comedy" as an extension and elaboration of
ideas he had worked out in his reviews of Chaplin. The Forum's continuous faith in what it called "the common man" received perhaps one of
the most powerful and original tributes as Frye recast the argument,
imagery, and protagonists of comedy in terms of his hopes for a new
world purged of tyranny.
V Frye and Modern Culture
By 1946, as ideological divisions between East and West widened, an
independent Canadian response to political events became harder to
maintain. Yet this often precarious, vituperative atmosphere did not stifle sustained debate about cultural policies inside the Forum. Despite
unsettled leadership (between 1946 and 1950 editorial responsibilities
passed from Eleanor Godfrey to George Grube, to Frye himself, and
finally to Alan Creighton) and an understandably uncertain response to
the politics of a nuclear age, the Canadian Forum continued to keep alive
the ideal of cultural cooperation. Even as cold war rhetoric often hardened within its own pages, the journal entertained discussions on the
provision of national and provincial libraries and the role of UNESCO,
and expanded its arts reviewing to include discussion of radio and
music programming.
In the university at large, the new structures of citizenship regnant in

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xxxvii

the postwar world did not go unexamined. Harold Innis's pioneering

studies of global communication pointed to the dangers of American
dominance in this sphere. For Innis, a global communications industry
controlled by American media like Time and Newsweek constituted the
greatest threat to the rational public discussion on which the Forum had
staked its hopes for Canadian democracy throughout the 19305. In The
Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (1951), a new translation of Prometheus
Bound accompanied by a lengthy and speculative commentary, Eric
Havelock, now a member of Harvard's Classics department, used the
evidence of Classical antiquity to ask new questions about the modern
state. From the many permutations of the Prometheus myth, Havelock
detected the fear that humanity might not be at the centre of creation at
all, and the suspicion that "we are a temporary event. .. the territory on
which we have a foothold is like a boulder on a mountain slide."16 What
did the acceptable instruments of measuring social realityindividual,
city, nationmean in a world dominated by two vast ideological systems?
From 1946, Frye's own topical, terse commentaries maintain a close
and lively concern with unfolding events in the postwar world. They
consider the strained border relations between the United States and
Canada, the potential stress points of world politics, the coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II, the metamorphosis of the United States from anarchist comedian to global policeman, and the sexual habits of the North
American male. Frye also periodically reviews the efforts of Karl
Lowith, Reinhold Niebhur, F.S.C. Northrop, and Arnold Toynbee to
synthesize politics, religion, and science into a non-Marxist philosophical history. He is not slow to expose the ideologically driven energies
that fuel so many of these works. Paradoxically, the period that saw "the
end of ideology" was also the period in which Frye's awareness of ideology as a social forceas a set of symbols designed to elicit collective
allegiance and thus to fix the shape of the futurewas at its peak. At
this time, Frye's method of understanding the overall direction of social
reality through interpretation of its images took on an even sharper significance for a Cold War society where local symbols now assumed strategic significance. In a context where large "general histories" all too
often seemed a covert means of making the world safe for the American
way of life, Frye's is a sceptical voice.
Many readers will consider Frye's The Modern Century as the crown of
these labours. In January 1967, Canada's centenary year of federation,
Frye followed Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Ronald Syme, and Anthony

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Introduction

Blunt as Whidden lecturer at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

The series had originated in 1954 as McMaster's tribute to the Reverend
Howard P. Whidden, described by the University's principal in 1967 as
"a man of striking appearance, unusual dignity, deep Christian conviction, and ready tolerance" (3). Whidden shared Frye's Protestant faith,
and his commitment to public service and to Canadian academic excellence. By 1967, the reach of the Whidden Lectures stretched far beyond
Canada. Their subject matter engaged with the twentieth century's panic
and fear as well as its widening educational opportunities and expanding democratic structures: the series included lectures on apartheid,
avant-garde art and the Spanish Civil War, colonial elites, and nuclear
weaponry. So it is perhaps not surprising that this was for Frye not simply a celebratory occasion, but an opportunity to extrude the spiritual
pattern from the mass of wars, technical innovations, and artistic experiments in a Western-dominated world between 1867 and 1967.
Possibly uniquely in his canon, Frye's cultural analysis of the twentieth century frequently moves against the grain of his hopes for the century. In his first lecture Frye identifies "the alienation of progress" (11)
as the latent feature that saps the morale of the modern citizen. His second talk anatomizes the various realisms that have made modern art a
resistance movement dedicated to overcoming this pervasive selfestrangement. In his closing address, Frye offers his hopes for an "open
mythology" (65) able to respond to modernity's collective desires and
fears without transforming them into structures of domination. Through
the free discussion of the stories that matter for societies Frye seeks to
maintain twentieth-century Canada's commitment to cooperative democracy and the visionary imagination. He wants to avoid the opportunistic muddle his Canadian Forum columns repeatedly found so unsatisfactory in the daily operations of democracy. He hopes also to steer clear of
the violent solutions to ideological impasse so characteristic of the twentieth century.
The three chapters of The Modern Century show Frye at his most versatile: as cultural diagnostician, historian of the avant-garde, sceptical analyst of the new communication technologies, and educator-humanist.
He continues his search for the institutions that can licitly command a
Canadian intellectual's loyalty in the twentieth century. These questions
of loyalty bring Frye wheeling back to his earliest essays in cultural criticism, when the brazenly patriotic call of "King and Country" made
pressing and irrational claims on a young intellectual's allegiances.

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There were also more immediate reasons for reconsidering these

questions. Only two years previously, McMaster teacher and Canadian
philosopher George Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian
Nationalism (1965) had announced the demise of Canadian national
sovereignty. Grant's lament was occasioned by the fall in 1963 of John
Diefenbaker, the Canadian prime minister, after a controversy about
national defence policy. Since 1957, Canada's participation in NATO
had committed the country to a nuclear defence. By 1963, however,
Diefenbaker appeared undecided about the purchase of the nuclear
warheads on which his own administration had staked national security. Many political commentators ascribed the ensuing crisis to the
prime minister's Hamlet-like capacity for indecision. Grant, however,
interpreted it in terms of a national trauma, arguing that Canadians
were now indistinguishable from the Americans whose presiding ideology of a mastered nature and a managerial political system they completely shared. With what sometimes appears like a certain grim relish,
Grant described an imminent epoch of global U.S. domination in which
questions of national loyalties would be ultimately irrelevant for Canadians. Grant did not stop at describing Canada's long slide into Americanism since the Second World War. He tracked the origins of American
technocracy to the Lockean "contractualism" that effectively severed
politics from moral categories. By this point, of course, Grant was on his
way to estrangement from any political system at all, with the possible
exception of that which prevailed in Classical antiquity.
Given the popularity of Grant's book in Canada, his was not a testimony that Frye could afford to disregard, even though Grant's analysis
ran counter to Frye's own understanding of what nationalism meant in
the modern age. When Grant invoked the normative properties of the
nation, he ignored how often twentieth-century nationalism had functioned coercively. When Grant spoke of the traditional loyalties that
bind subject to city and nation, he raised not only the shaping values but
also the specific conditions of the Athenian city-state to permanent
authority. Canada could never have been conceived in a world where
the organic society was the ruling model of civil association. Grant was
not among the audience for the Whidden Lectures, but his passionate
pessimism shaped an important strand of Frye's argument.
When Frye described the unease in "the emotional relation to the
future" (18) that unpredictable rapid change brings to the modern citizen, he may also have had another Canadian thinker in his sights. In

xl

Introduction

Explorations in Communication (1960), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of

Typographic Man (1963), and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(1964), Marshall McLuhan, a teacher at the University of Toronto since
1946, argued that electronic communications media transformed our
understanding and experience of social reality completely. Where conventional literacy supplied us with a linear, progressive understanding
of events, requiring us to consider one thing at a time through our own
unique screening patterns, television offered "simultaneous sharing
of experience" and put "a premium on togetherness."17 Everything in
existing educational institutions and teaching practices, however, militated against the togetherness McLuhan discerned in his global village
of the future. Consequently, he called for an end to classrooms and educational institutions as currently constituted, adding that it was "misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and
entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter" (Explorations, 3). By 1967, McLuhan's message had achieved international visibility. How was Frye to respond to a
vision of the educator's role so contrary to his own? What had he to offer
to counter Grant's rousingly patriotic lament?
In the future McLuhan and Grant describe there is little room for
agency. Yet Frye's first lecture reminds his listeners that the civilization of
the modern century "is probably the first civilization in history that has
attempted to study itself objectively" (8), and the Protestant corollary that
man is responsible for his creation. The first lecture establishes, however,
that all the items of humanity's social mythologyfamily, nation, city, religionappear to have slipped away from the grasp of the late twentiethcentury citizen. Even the human constructions Frye favoursimages,
stories and mythologiesfunction only as self-protecting, other-destroying illusions in this lecture, which opens with images of alienation drawn
from Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost and closes with brief, suggestive
comments on the social fears dramatized in Waiting for Godot and Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Torn between Beckett's and Albee's variations
on a shared malaise, the modern person, resident in a city precariously
poised "at the end of things," suffers only a deep paralysis of the will.
The second lecture, "Improved Binoculars," rallies from this bleak
portrait. Frye offers the diverse strands of "the modern" as a cohesive,
international period style rationally designed and executed to salvage
the world as a human construction accessible to human understanding.
Moving across centuries of experimental art from Giotto to Cage, Frye

Introduction

xli

posits a coherent objective among artists: that of delivering back to the

human being "the forms he had created" (31). Frye acknowledges that
human groups fear no one more than the gift-bearer, but emphasizes
that such fear derives from the wholesale dependence on the myths of
"stupid realism" (33) imposed by the communications industry on modern citizens. Against these he pits the dynamic realism, perpetually
adjusting itself to changes in consciousness, space, time, and environment, that propels the work of Turner, Eliot, or Joyce. Each of these artists elicits the audience's participation in the construction of illusion.
Each shares a modern tendency to prefer "the imperfect work engaged
in history to the perfected masterpiece that pulls away from time" (39).
This is not true, Frye thinks, of television or electronic media as currently organized. Unlike McLuhan, from whose The Gutenberg Galaxy
and Understanding Media he borrows much of his imagery at the same
time as he annihilates its historical argument and its technological determinism, Frye sees television as more market than rite. He deplores its
continuous incitements to consumption. He sees its advertisements and
rituals as only "counter-communication," not the expansion and redefinition of our categories of perception he finds in the best modern art.
The closing example he draws from Genet's The Balcony, however, raises
issues to be revisited in his last lecture. Genet's world admits authority
only in parodic form, and it is the crisis of authority that Arnold himself
recognizes as the central problem of modern society in Culture and Anarchy. Frye has thus positioned himself to reopen the questions raised in a
book that appeared just ninety-eight years before his own lectures.
Like Arnold, Frye recognizes the existence of three major social tiers.
In "Clair de lune intellectuel," he identifies these as the political, economic, and leisure spheres. Frye argues that the leisure sphere now
enjoys the same structural importance for modern societies as the political and economic spheres did for previous societies. He returns to the
galleries, museums, and exhibitions that were his beat in the Ontario of
the 19305. These activities are now no longer retreats from a world governed by industry, but are themselves "a rival form of society" (48) and
"a structure of education" (59). Frye emphasizes that his preferred
"structure of education" cannot end when its recipients reach twentyone, and that it cannot reach the status of "a rival form of society" just
by drilling an elite with great thoughts from the past. Instead, Frye sees
the university as the site for learning the "myths of concern" that, in
A Study of English Romanticism, a volume published a year after The

xlii

Introduction

Modern Century, he defined as "society's view of its situation and destiny" (SR, 16). At its initial level, concern equates with conformity, the
local pieties Grant saw as the basis of civil society, but which Frye's first
lecture recognized as superseded by the modern conditions that produced Canada. In his last lecture, Frye defines myth as a "reservoir of
possibilities of belief" (65), and thus as a storehouse for all the conceivable constructions a common concern about the future might take. He
concludes that
The world we see and live in, and most of the world we have made,
belongs to the alienated and absurd world of the tiger. But in all our efforts
to imagine or realize a better society, some shadow falls across it of the
child's innocent vision of the impossible created world that makes human
sense. If we can no longer feel that this world was once created for us by a
divine parent, we still must feel, more intensely than ever, that it is the
world we ought to be creating, and that whatever may be divine in our destiny or nature is connected with its creation. (68-9)

The last paragraphs of Frye's book elevate the Utopian constructions of

culture into the modern century's moral imperative. In this deeply introspective volume, so concerned with the ceaselessly transforming identity available to a Canadian born in the modern century, Frye finds a
lasting authority in the images and narratives of the liberating visionary
culture he first began to detect when he discussed Chaplin, Delius, and
Disney in the Canadian Forum. For as long as these images survive and
fertilize so many consciousnesses in Canada and across the world, it is
always premature to voice a "lament for a nation."
VI Towards a Public Culture: Absorbing Imagination
When Frye's critical career began, one of the principal challenges artists
and intellectuals faced was that of constructing a usable past, of selecting from a now infinitely expandable legacy imagined as a "museum
without walls." This museum housed all the monuments and experiments considered most valuable for a talented minority. By contrast,
Frye's later work, written at a time of mounting tension between the
warring nuclear empires of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., acknowledges the
imperative to argue on behalf of an absorbable future for a whole community. The postwar world is, as Frye submits in the closing pages of

Introduction

xliii

The Modern Century, the world of the tiger, where predatory appetites
and destructive tendencies have free rein. It is also a world where in the
West, at any rate, the tiger has disguised itself as the gift-horse, offering
goods, services, and leisure for all who are able to afford to tune in to its
continuous barrage of electronically produced counter-communication.
A surfeit of aggression and desire faces the contemporary citizen at
every turn. What can the humanities offer as a more tolerable version of
society?
One of Frye's toughest assignments is to maintain the intellectual
momentum for the project of cooperation in a period of affluence, inflation, and limitless but well-concealed potential for destruction. In the
19305, as Mussolini and Hitler rose to power and unemployment figures
and hunger marches lengthened, apologists for the Utopian imperative
had a fairly captive audience for their message. These are not the conditions Frye faced in the last thirty years of his life, however, as a managerial society disguises market conditions as Utopia itself. How can Frye's
continued commitment to the values of Canadian cooperation maintain
its persuasive power even as its institutional presence fades from
national politics? What answers has Frye to the challenge of American
ideology as it saturates Canadian airwaves?
Frye's arguments for cooperation rest on four main pillars. The first
strand of Frye's critique comes with his analysis of society as it is, an
analysis that emphasizes the psychological and social destructiveness of
the order managerial society tries to persuade us at every moment to
take for granted. Second, Frye makes a quiet but unwavering restatement of the value possessed by traditional means of communication
books, images, and works of art. Third, Frye reconceptualizes the social
function of the images and narratives dispersed through such agencies,
stringing them together into a larger narrative of "the world man is trying to build out of nature" and of the identity crises he encounters every
day in the neurotic order he is encouraged to accept as natural. Fourth,
Frye recasts the university not as an elite finishing school or factory for
knowledge production, but as a site for the preservation, construction,
performance, interpretation, and transmission of the alternative social
realities that can rescue human society from alienation.
One of Frye's few ventures into the orthodox history of ideas, "Tenets
of Modern Culture" (no. 42, 1950), recognizes the dominance of the
United States in modern civilization and the consequent dominance of
American social thinking in the world. Too bad, then, that for Frye,

xliv

Introduction

American social thinking is so deeply antisocial, amounting to no more

than the unbridled pursuit of self interest. Frye summarizes its central
axioms as a belief that "the chief end of man is to improve his own lot in
the natural world, and the essential meaning of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by nature, including atavistic impulses in man himself" (238). Such assumptions for Frye have their
logical terminus not in a participatory democracy but in a "managerial
dictatorship" (238) that promises to maximize the satisfaction of everintensifying predatory habits and appetites. Yet even in this essay Frye
is as concerned as ever with the means by which such a self-destructive
machinery manages to appear self-evidently natural for its citizens. Frye
points to the "vast and ruthless irony" (242) that controls its communication systems, the scapegoating rituals of its machinery for justice and
governance, and "the sense of imminent apocalypse" (238) that overtakes so many people in their pursuit of the illusions they call life, liberty, and happiness.
Frye's social analysis rests on understanding society's systems of
meaning. His introduction to Art and Reality: A Casebook of Concern (no.
23, 1986) judges that "nine-tenths of what we call reality is not some
ineluctably existing group of objects or conditions 'out there': it is rather
the rubbish left over from previous human constructs" (167). This
emphasis on social reality as constructed and reinforced by cultural
symbols dates back to his earliest essays when, as we have seen, he was
more likely to discuss the arguments for and against war in terms of a
symbolic event like the Oxford Union debate on "King and Country"
than through a detailed analysis of imperial foreign policy. So in some
senses, Frye was always a semiotician avant le signe, intensely interested
in the social ritualstrials, coronations, book banningsof the modern
world.
Frye's assessment of postindustrial society is a harsh one. He sees the
violence against nature that sustained nineteenth-century society as
moving inward in the late twentieth-century, first of all through the perpetual solicitation of television "markets" and then by means of a perpetual cycle of drama disguised as "news." Like Raymond Williams/8
Frye sees the late twentieth century as a uniquely "dramatized society,"
exposed to more dramatic productions in a year than any previous society in a lifetime. This continuous spectacular performance conceals for
Frye "an undercurrent of hysteria . . . a hysteria I had heard before"
(286). The unbridled forces unleashed on contemporary audiences fan "a

Introduction

xlv

deliberate creation of hysteria, which takes such forms as violent language, a constant suppression of dissent, shouting slogans, breaking up
meetings, invoking emergency measures to get rid of troublemakers"
(291). From this perspective, the Vietnam war merely replays on a massive scale the scapegoating rituals that have erupted in American culture throughout its history, in the "Red Scare" of the early twentieth
century, in the Nuremberg trials, and in the McCarthy hearings. Frye's
inspection of the modern century's cultural symbolism moves from
political critique to psychological diagnosis:
Spokesmen on both American and Russian sides of the armaments race
have said that there is no sense in an atomic war, nothing is to be gained by
it, and that no rational person would start such a thing. Such statements do
not reassure us . . . : a century that has seen Hitler and Stalin, besides many
similar phenomena, knows that too many of the people who seek power
within society are insane, and that such insanity is contagious and not isolating. (171)
The "rubbish left over from previous human constructs" (167) includes,
most dangerously of all, the eagerness to use new technology to recycle
old dramas of prohibition and revenge previously transmitted in "laws
.. . myths and stories about the traditional gods and heroes, magical formulas, proverbs, and the like" (321).
Yet Frye continues to insist on the liberating potential of myth and
narrative. In their recurring images and stories, Frye finds traces of
latent affinities between culture and nature. He notes in them a property
he calls "concern," but emphasizes that concern itself may either lock
groups together in the defence of their identity ("This is a story about
the purity of the Teutonic race and about the threat you Jews present to
it") or may look beyond immediate realities to the "myths of deliverance" Frye finds in Measure for Measure and Monsieur Verdoux. Unlike
Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), Frye does not attach this
alternative layer of meaning to any occult properties in the stories themselves, nor does he entrust it to the custodianship of an interpretative
community. (Frye's mistrust of experts and elites is one of the most constant and most appealing features of his cultural criticism.) The distinctive feature of narrative for Frye rests in its capacity for transformation,
exemplified in the metamorphosis that takes Monsieur Verdoux, against
all odds, from crime story to indictment of the world-as-it-is, and that,

xlvi

Introduction

with similar unexpectedness, propels Measure for Measure from captivity

narrative to myth of deliverance. For Frye, Shakespeare's drama serves
as ordeal and emancipation, not one or the other. In this way it brings
our contemporary canons of behaviour to the clean light of accountability, before reconceptualizing them through an act of imaginative charity.
This crystallizes in Frye's own modification of reception theory. For Frye
any valuable work enjoys a dual identity, the first of which a reader construes "like other plays," the second of which releases "an exploding
force in the mind that keeps destroying all the barriers of cultural prejudice that limit the response to it" (MD, vii). Such a view of narrative sees
it ultimately as a release of benign and transforming energy, a counterforce to the merely repetitive momentum of a contemporary society that
drives its audience only into a cul de sac.
Having defined the cultural function of narrative and its internal
dynamic, Frye next considers the authority enjoyed by the bookthe
principal medium for narrative up to the arrival of television and cinema. Is any book only the monument to dead ideas and slow thinking
proclaimed in Marshall McLuhan's influential The Gutenberg Galaxy? In
"The Renaissance of Books" Frye emphasizes that the authority of books
does not reside completely in their factual content, since an afternoon in
any secondhand bookstore is an object lesson in the obsolescence of factual knowledge. Yet books do educate the reader, in ways no author can
ever have anticipated. Frye reminds his audience that reading has historically fostered much less introverted habits than those encouraged by
the electronic media now said to have superseded it. "When society still
contained a number of illiterates, or habitual nonreaders," he observes,
"a village community, say, would form around a man who could read
aloud to them the news . .. and current literature" (150). As Frye argues,
the authority of even factual or polemical works rests not so much in the
certainties they embody as in the habits of cooperation they foster
among their readers. In Frye's words:
The written expository treatise looks at first sight like a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the hypnotic rhetoric of
speech to a present audience is left in it: the author is forced, by the nature
of his medium, to put all his cards on the table, to take his reader into his
confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself.
And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by
its own physical shape, the expository or thesis-book remains the normal

Introduction

xlvii

unit of impersonal social vision, and the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a community. (154-5)

The intersubjective properties of reading, the habits of verification and

rebuttal any book promotes, the way the book can mean nothing if
unaccompanied by the collaboration of its audience, all bolster Frye's
claims for the educative properties and the outward-looking direction of
reading.
Similarly, when Frye turns to imaginative literature, he tracks its history in terms of collective memory as well as individual skill:
the conception of literature develops as a body of great traditional themes
held in common. Chaucer, Shakespeare, the writers of Greek tragedy, all
draw their materials from well-known sources, and their assumption is:
this story may have often been told, but I'm telling it better, so you won't
need to refer to any other versions except mine. (152)

These assumptions are incentives to increase the artist's talent; but the
conditions of reading, composition, and performance hardly validate
such claims. In fact, late twentieth-century works like Michel Butor's
Passing Time (1961) or Don DeLillo's Mao 2 (1991) jettison altogether
claims to better their predecessors and acknowledge rather that they can
only "mean" anything in relation to a stream of antecedent narratives.
More and more contemporary fiction rests on the cooperation of its
readers to situate it in an ocean of narrative as a precondition for understanding its own distinctive properties.
The potential for chaos in these conditions does not escape Frye. It is
at this point that the central institutional importance of the university
moves to the centre of his cultural analysis. Frye's university is the production centre for new art and the largest and most disinterested preservation archive for the art of the past. Organizationally, it can function as
a theatre for the production of mind at work through its exhibitions and
readings, its interdisciplinary forays, and its commitment to lifelong
learning. The university is where individuals can, in an age of panic,
learn the patience necessary for the steady construction of creative skill
and critical judgment that Frye still sees as the only sure means of
human fulfilment.
Frye's last works seize the idiom of the time at a stage of his life when
he might easily have rejected it. He imagines the late twentieth-century

xlviii

Introduction

university as an institution for learning about the structures of reality in

a postmodern society where the structuring of reality, rather than the
production of commodities or the refining of raw materials, enjoys a
centrality unthinkable when his career began. It is in the university that
we can learn that "gods are really human constructs" (324) and that
"practically all the reality we wake up facing is a human construct left
over from yesterday" (327). Most important of all, it is in the university
that a joint commitment to the enlightened habit of creative scepticism
can be renewed, where we can learn that our myths of order and ultimately our social reality itself are, like art, "hypothesis from beginning
to end, assuming anything and verifying nothing" (320). Frye began his
career attempting to slay the monsters constructed by the sleep of reason: nationalism, Fascism, and Communism. His final efforts in cultural
criticism rejoice in the endlessly transformative property of the grammars that encode social reality. Just as important, however, is Frye's
emphasis on the university as the site where the capacity to read these
codes must be transmitted to a community pledged to continuous education and discussion.
VII Frye and Contemporary Cultural Criticism
Frye's most significant contributions to the study of cultural criticism
are arguably fourfold. First of all, he recognized that, even with the
enormous expansion of cultural media and educational opportunity in
the twentieth century, cultural theory habitually lagged behind the
demographics of modern society. In short, it remained an elite activity.
Second, he transferred the primary site of cultural activity from its official agencies in Oxford or Harvard to the constructive powers of the
mind, realizing that it was not only among "primitive" societies that
myths, narratives, images, and metaphors shape the course of social
action. Third, Frye refused to see these as evidence of humanity's will to
regression, but instead saw in them the store of emancipating narratives
all societies have entrusted with their hopes for a better future. Hence
the role of a cultural critic was not to patronize provincials, mobilize
malcontents, or even to promise to "raise" outsiders to metropolitan
sophistication. Rather, it was to enable as many people as possible to
identify the major constructsthe great families of myths and narratives
that circulate in any human societyand to explore the "reservoir of
possibilities" (65) for emancipation in each. Frye's fourth contribution,

Introduction

xlix

therefore, was to translate the Kantian objective of enlightened autonomy in the human consciousness into the necessary conditions of citizenship in twentieth-century society. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to
say that these essays reveal a Frye who resembles Jiirgen Habermas or
Raymond Williams in the recognition that understanding and rebuilding our means of communication is a necessary prelude to understanding and rebuilding our worlds. This may be an unexpected turn of
events for a critic who has often been seen as disengaged from the burning issues of his time. Yet an editor can hope it is only the first of many
misleading assumptions about Frye that a collection like this can begin
to redress.

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The Modern Century

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The Modern Century

1967

The Modern Century: The Whidden Lectures, 1967 (Toronto: Oxford

University Press, 1967). Originally presented at McMaster University on
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 17-19 January 1967, at 8:00 P.M. in the university's new Athletic Centre. Frye wrote a summary of the lectures for a brochure outlining their content to the university community and attendance was
high (see NFF, 1988, box i,file x). After their delivery, E.T. Salmon, principal
of University College, McMaster, wrote back to Frye thanking him "in the
name of the University for the splendid series of lectures which you gave us,"
adding that "We have had any number of complimentary remarks passed upon
them" (NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). The Oxford University Press edition also
included the following foreword by Dr. Salmon, dated February 1967:
The Whidden Lectures were established in 1954 by E.C. Fox, B.A., LL.D.,
of Toronto, the senior member of the Board of Governors, to honour the
memory of a former Chancellor of McMaster University.
The Reverend Dr. Howard P. Whidden, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S.C.,
was a man of striking appearance, unusual dignity, deep Christian conviction, and ready tolerance. Born in 1871 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where
his family had settled in 1761 after three-quarters of a century's residence
in New England, he attended universities in both Canada (Acadia and
McMaster) and the United States (Chicago), and also served as a minister
of Baptist churches in both countries (in Ontario, Manitoba, and Ohio).
From 1913 to 1923 he was President of Brandon College, Manitoba, then
an affiliate of McMaster University, and for part of that period (1917-21)
he represented Brandon as a member of Parliament in the Canadian House
of Commons at Ottawa. He was appointed administrative head (Chancellor) of McMaster University in 1923 and in 1930 became, in a manner of

The Modern Century

speaking, its second founder when he directed its transfer from Toronto,
where it had been established since 1887, to Hamilton. His broad educational outlook and effective leadership resulted in the University's burgeoning greatly in its new location, and Dr. Whidden was able to retire in
1941 with the comforting conviction that he had built both wisely and
well. He died in Toronto in 1952.
The selection of a Canadian scholar to be the Whidden Lecturer in 1967,
the year of Canada's centennial, was inevitable. And that the choice should
fall on H. Northrop Frye, the first person ever to be named by the University of Toronto as its University Professor, was almost equally inevitable.
His reputation as one of the most significant of contemporary literary critics is worldwide and securely established. It is a cause for pride to academic
circles in his native country that he should be the subject of a special volume, issued by the Columbia University Press just over a year ago. A
graduate of Toronto and Merton College, Oxford, he made his mark some
twenty years ago with a penetrating study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry; and since that time a steady stream of books and articles from his
pen has made his name one of the most familiar and most respected wherever the study of English letters is seriously pursued. He has lectured in
scores of universities throughout the English-speaking world and has
received honorary doctorates from many of them.
For the 1967 Whidden Lectures he chose as his theme The Modern
Century, the century in which, as the saying goes, Canada came of age.
He did not restrict his vision, however, to the literary and creative activities that have occurred in this country over the past one hundred years.
Rather, he attempted to relate Canadian developments to those of the
world as a whole- and it was a stimulating and exciting exercise to
accompany him as his purview ranged over other countries, other continents, and other cultures. That the perspective of the many hundreds who
had the privilege of hearing him was deepened and broadened, there is not
the slightest doubt.
McMaster University is now very pleased to publish the lectures in book
form so that an even wider audience may share in the rewarding experience
of learning the views of a distinguished Canadian on man's spiritual and
intellectual adventures since 1867.
Frye judged these to have been among his best delivered and best received public
lectures. Four pages of typescript notes concerning the French translation clarify some, of Frye's dense allusions and emphases in this work and these have

City of the End of Things

been drawn upon where appropriate for explanatory comment (see NFF, 1988,
box 62, file i).

Author's Note
The operation of giving the Whidden Lectures for 1967 was made pleasant and memorable by the hospitality of McMaster University and my
many friends there. To them, as well as to the extraordinarily attentive
and responsive audience, I feel deeply grateful.
I am indebted to the Canada Council for a grant which enabled me to
work on this and other projects, and to Mrs. Jessie Jackson for her preparation of the manuscript.
The lectures were delivered in the centenary year of Canada's Confederation, and were originally intended to be Canadian in subject matter. I felt, however, that I had really said all I had to say about Canadian
culture for some time, with the help of about forty colleagues, in the
"Conclusion" to the recently published Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1965). Hence the shift of theme to a wider context. I have tried to make my Canadian references as explicit as possible,
for the benefit of non-Canadian readers, but have not invariably succeeded. For example, the titles of the three lectures are titles of poems by
well-known Canadian poets: respectively, Archibald Lampman, Irving
Lay ton, and Emile Nelligan.1

N.F.
Victoria College in the
University of Toronto
January 1967
I City of the End of Things
The Whidden Lectures have been a distinguished series, and anyone
attempting to continue them must feel a sense of responsibility. For me,
the responsibility is specific: I have been asked to keep in mind the fact
that I shall be speaking to a Canadian audience in the Centennial year of
Confederation. I have kept it in mind, and the first thing that it produced there was what I hope is a sense of proportion. The centenary of
Confederation is a private celebration, a family party, in what is still a

The Modern Century

relatively small country in a very big world. One most reassuring quality in Canadians, and the one which, I find, chiefly makes them liked
and respected abroad, when they are, is a certain unpretentiousness, a
cheerful willingness to concede the immense importance of the nonCanadian part of the human race. It is appropriate to a Canadian audience, then, to put our centenary into some kind of perspective. For the
majority of people in North America, the most important thing that happened in 1867 was the purchase of Alaska from Russia by the United
States. For the majority of people in the orbit of British traditions, the
most important thing that happened in 1867 was the passing of the Second Reform Bill, the measure that Disraeli called "a leap in the dark,"2
but which was really the first major effort to make the Mother of Parliaments represent the people instead of an oligarchy. For a great number,
very probably the majority, of people in the world today, the most
important thing that happened in 1867, anywhere, was the publication
of the first volume of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, the only part of the book
actually published by Marx himself. It was this event, of course, that
helped among other things to make the purchase of Alaska so significant: another example of the principle that life imitates literature,3 in the
broad sense, and not the other way round. There is a still bigger majority
to be considered, the majority of the dead. In the year 1867 Thomas
Hardy wrote a poem called 1967* in which he remarks that the best
thing he can say about that year is the fact that he is not going to live to
see it.
My own primary interests are in literary and educational culture.
What I should like to discuss with you here is not Canadian culture in
itself, but the context of that culture in the world of the last century. One
reason for my wanting to talk about the world that Canada is in rather
than about Canada is that I should like to bypass some common
assumptions about Canadian culture which we are bound to hear
repeated a good deal in the course of this year. There is, for instance, the
assumption that Canada has, in its progress from colony to nation,
grown and matured like an individual: that to be colonial means to be
immature,5 and to be national means to be grown up. A colony or a
province, we are told, produced a naive, imitative, and prudish culture;
now we have become a nation, we should start producing sophisticated,
original, and spontaneous culture. (I dislike using "sophisticated" in an
approving sense, but it does seem to be an accepted term for a kind of
knowledgeability that responds to culture with the minimum of anxi-

City of the End of Things

eties.) If we fail to produce a fully mature culture, the argument usually

runs, it must be because we are still colonial or provincial in our attitude, and the best thing our critics and creators can do is to keep
reminding us of this. If a Canadian painter or poet gets some recognition, he is soon giving interviews asserting that Canadian society is hypocritical, culturally constipated, and sexually inhibited. This might be
thought a mere cliche, indicating that originality is a highly specialized
gift, but it seems to have advanced in Canada to the place of an obligatory ritual. Some time ago, when a Canadian play opened in Paris, a
reviewer, himself a Canadian, remarked sardonically, "Comme c'est
canadien! Comme c'est pur!"6 I should add that this comment was
incorporated by the Canadian publisher as a part of his blurb.
Analogies between the actual growth of an individual and the supposed growth of a society may be illuminating, but they must always be,
like all analogies, open to fresh examination. The analogy is a particularly tricky form of rhetoric when it becomes the basis of an argument
rather than merely a figure of speech. Certainly every society produces a
type of culture which is roughly characteristic of itself. A provincial
society has a provincial culture; a metropolitan society has a metropolitan culture. A provincial society will produce a phenomenon like the tea
party described in F.R. Scott's well-known satire, The Canadian Authors
Meet. A metropolitan society would turn the tea party into a cocktail
party,7 and the conversation would be louder, faster, more knowing,
and cleverer at rationalizing its pretentiousness and egotism. But its
poets would not necessarily be of any more lasting value than Mr.
Scott's Miss Crotchet, though they might be less naive. It is true that relatively few if any of the world's greatest geniuses have been born in
Canada, although a remarkable British painter and writer, Wyndham
Lewis,8 went so far as to get himself born on a ship off Canadian shores,
and developed an appropriately sea-sick view of Canada in later life.
But we do not know enough about what social conditions produce great
or even good writers to connect a lack of celebrated birthplaces with the
moral quality of Canadian civilization.
Another aspect of the same assumption is more subtle and pervasive.
It is widely believed, or assumed, that Canada's destiny, culturally and
historically, finds its fulfilment in being a nation, and that nationality is
essential to identity. It seems to me, on the other hand, quite clear that
we are moving towards a postnational world, and that Canada has
moved further in that direction than most of the smaller nations. What is

The Modern Century

important about the last century, in this country, is not that we have
been a nation for a hundred years, but that we have had a hundred years
in which to make the transition from a prenational to a postnational consciousness. The so-called emergent nations, such countries as Nigeria or
Indonesia,9 have not been so fortunate: for them, the tensions of federalism and separatism, of middle-class and working-class interests, of
xenophobia and adjustment to the larger world, have all come in one
great rush. Canada hasso farbeen able to avoid both this kind of
chaos and the violence that goes with the development of a vast imperial
complex like the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. The Canadian sense of proportion that I mentioned is especially valuable now, as helping us to adopt
an attitude consistent with the world it is actually in. My present task, I
think, is neither to eulogize nor to elegize Canadian nationality, neither
to celebrate its survival nor to lament its passage,10 but to consider what
kinds of social context are appropriate for a world in which the nation is
rapidly ceasing to be the real defining unit of society.
We begin, then, with the conception of a "modern" world, which
began to take shape a century ago and now provides the context for
Canadian existence, and consequently for our Centennial. A century ago
Canada was a nation in the world, but not wholly of it: the major cultural and political developments of Western Europe, still the main centre of the historical stage, were little known or understood in Canada,
and the Canadian reaction even to such closer events as the American
Civil War was largely negative. Today, Canada is too much a part of the
world to be thought of as a nation in it. We have our undefended border
with the United States, so celebrated in Canadian oratory, only because
it is not a real boundary line at all: the real boundary line, one of the
most heavily defended in the world, runs through the north of the country, separating a bourgeois sphere of control from a Marxist one.
Culturally, the primary fact about the modern world, or at least about
our "Western" and "democratic" part of it, is that it is probably the first
civilization in history that has attempted to study itself objectively, to
become aware of the presuppositions underlying its behaviour, to
understand its relation to previous history, and to see whether its future
could in some measure be controlled by its own will. This self-consciousness has created a sharp cultural dialectic in society, an intellectual antagonism between two mental attitudes. On one side are those
who struggle for an active and conscious relation to their time, who
study what is happening in the world, survey the conditions of life that

City of the End of Things

seem most likely to occur, and try to acquire some sense of what can be
done to build up from those conditions a way of life that is at least
self-respecting. On the other side are those who adopt a passive and
negative attitude, responding to the daily news and similar stimuli,
aware of what is going on but making no effort to understand either the
underlying causes or the future possibilities. The theatre of this conflict
in attitudes is formed by the creative and the communicating arts. The
creative arts are almost entirely on the active side: they mean nothing, or
infinitely less, to a passive response. The subject matter of contemporary
literature being its own time, the passive and uncritical attitude is seen
as its most dangerous enemy. Many aspects of contemporary literatureits ironic tone, its emphasis on anxiety and absurdity, its queasy
apocalyptic forebodingsderive from this situation.
The communicating arts, including the so-called mass media, are a
mixture of things. Some of them are arts in their own right, like the film.
Some are or include different techniques of presenting the arts we
already have, like television. Some are not arts, but present analogies to
techniques in the arts which the arts may enrich themselves by employing, as the newspaper may influence collage in painting or the field
theory of composition in poetry. Some are applied arts, where the
appeal is no longer disinterested, as it normally is in the creative arts
proper. Thus propaganda is an interested use of the literary techniques
of rhetoric. As usual, there are deficiencies in vocabulary: there are no
words that really convey the intellectual and moral contrast of the active
and passive attitudes to culture. The phrase "mass culture"11 conveys
emotional overtones of passivity: it suggests someone eating peanuts at
a baseball game, and thereby contrasting himself to someone eating
canapes at the opening of a sculpture exhibition. The trouble with this
picture is that the former is probably part of a better educated audience,
in the sense that he is likely to know more about baseball than his counterpart knows about sculpture. Hence his attitude to his chosen area of
culture may well be the more active of the two. And just as there can be
an active response to mass culture, so there can be passive responses to
the highbrow arts. These range from, Why can't the artist make his work
mean something to the ordinary man? to the significant syntax of the
student's question, Why is this considered a good poem? The words
"advertising" and "propaganda" come closest to suggesting a communication deliberately imposed and passively received. They represent
respectively the communicating interests of the two major areas of soci-

io

The Modern Century

ety, the economic and the political. Recently these two conceptions have
begun to merge into the single category of "public relations."12
One very obvious feature of our age is the speeding up of process: it is
an age of revolution and metamorphosis, where one lives through
changes that formerly took centuries in a matter of a few years. In a
world where dynasties rise and fall at much the same rate as women's
hemlines, the dynasty and the hemline look much alike in importance,
and get much the same amount of featuring in the news. Thus the progression of events is two-dimensional, a child's drawing reflecting an
eye that observes without seeing depth, and even the effort to see depth
has still to deal with the whole surface. Some new groupings result: for
example, what used to be called the trivial or ephemeral takes on a function of symbolizing the significant. A new art of divination or augury has
developed, in which the underlying trends of the contemporary world
are interpreted by vogues and fashions in dress, speech, or entertainment. Thus if there appears a vogue for white lipstick among certain
groups of young women, that may represent a new impersonality in sexual relationship, a parody of white supremacy, the dramatization of a
death-wish, or the social projection of the clown archetype. Any number
may play, but the game is a somewhat self-defeating one, without much
power of sustaining its own interest. For even the effort to identify
something in the passing show has the effect of dating it, as whatever is
sufficiently formed to be recognized has already receded into the past.
It is not surprising if some people should be frustrated by the effort to
keep riding up and down the manic-depressive roller-coaster of fashion,
of what's in and what's out, what is u and what non-u, what is hip and
what is square, what is corny and what is camp.13 There are perhaps not
as many of these unhappy people as our newspapers and magazines
suggest there are: in any case, what is important is not this group, if it
exists, but the general sense, in our society, of the panic of change. The
variety of things that occur in the world, combined with the relentless
continuity of their appearance day after day, impress us with the sense
of a process going by a little too fast for our minds to focus on anything
in it.
Some time ago, the department of English in a Canadian university
decided to offer a course in twentieth-century poetry. It was discovered
that there were two attitudes in the department towards that subject:
there were those who felt that twentieth-century poetry had begun with
Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922, and those who felt that most of the best of

City of the End of Things

11

it had already been written by that time. There also appeared to be some
correlation between these two views and the age groups of those who
held them. Finally a compromise was reached: two courses were offered, one called Modern Poetry and the other Contemporary Poetry.
But even the contemporary course would need now to be supplemented
by a third course in the postcontemporary, and perhaps a fourth in current happenings.14 In the pictorial arts the fashion parade of "isms" is
much faster: I hear of painters, even in Canada, who have frantically
changed their styles completely three or four times in a few years, as collectors demanded first abstract expressionism, then pop art, then pornography, then hard-edge, selling off their previous purchases as soon
as the new vogue took hold. There is a medieval legend of the Wild
Hunt, in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all
day and all night at top speed. Anyone who dropped out of line from
exhaustion instantly crumbled to dust. This seems a parable of a type of
consciousness frequent in the modern world, obsessed by a compulsion
to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the
total movement. It is a type of consciousness which I shall call the alienation of progress.
Alienation and progress are two central elements in the mythology of
our day, and both words have been extensively used and misused. The
conception of alienation15 was originally a religious one, and perhaps
that is still the context in which it makes most sense. In religion, the person aware of sin feels alienated, not necessarily from society, but from
the presence of God, and it is in this feeling of alienation that the religious life begins. The conception is clearest in evangelical thinkers in the
Lutheran tradition like Bunyan, who see alienation of this kind as the
beginning of a psychological revolution.16 Once one becomes aware of
being in sin and under the wrath of God, one realizes that one's master
is the devil, the prince of this world, and that treason and rebellion
against this master is the first requirement of the new life.
A secularized use of the idea appears in the early work of Marx,
where alienation describes the feeling of the worker who is cheated out
of most of the fruit of his labour by exploitation. He is unable to participate in society to the extent that, as a worker, he should, because his status in society has been artificially degraded. In this context the alienated
are those who have been dispossessed by their masters, and who therefore recognize their masters as their enemies, as Christian did Apollyon.17 In our day those who are alienated in Marx's sense are, for

12

The Modern Century

example, the Negro, whose status is also arbitrarily degraded, or those

who are in actual want and misery. The Negro, looking at the selfishness
and panic in white eyes, realizes that while what he has to fight is ultimately a state of mind, still his enemies also include people who have
got themselves identified with this state of mind. Thus his enemies,
again, are those who believe themselves his masters or natural superiors. Apart from such special situations, not many in the Western democracies today believe that a specific social act, such as expropriating a
propertied class, would end alienation in the modern world.
The reason is that in a society like ours, a society of the accepted and
adequately fed, the conception of alienation becomes psychological. In
other words it becomes the devil again, for the devil normally comes to
those who have everything and are bored with it, like Faust. The root of
this aspect of alienation is the sense that man has lost control, if he ever
had it, over his own destiny. The master or tyrant is still an enemy, but
not an enemy that anyone can fight. Theoretically, the world is divided
into democracies and peoples' republics: actually, there has never been a
time when man felt less sense of participation in the really fateful decisions that affect his life and his death. The central symbol of this is of
course the overkill bomb, as presented in such works as Dr. Strangelove,18 the fact that the survival of humanity itself may depend on a freak
accident. In a world where the tyrant-enemy can be recognized, even
defined, and yet cannot be projected on anything or anybody, he
remains part of ourselves, or more precisely of our own death wish, a
cancer that gradually disintegrates the sense of community. We may try
to persuade ourselves that the complete destruction of Communism (or,
on their side, of capitalist imperialism) would also destroy alienation.
But an instant of genuine reflection would soon tell us that all such
external enemies could disappear from the earth tomorrow and leave us
exactly where we were before.
In this situation there is a steady pressure in the direction of making
one's habitual responses passive. The first to succumb to this pressure
are those whose attitude to the world is deliberately frivolous, who have
only an instinct for avoiding any kind of stimulus that might provoke a
genuine concern. Such an attitude tries to ignore the issues of the day
and responds mainly to the "human interest" stories in the tabloids19
provided for it, gathering its experience of life much as one might pick
up a number of oddly shaped stones on a beach. But even here the effort
to shut out anxiety is itself an anxiety, and a very intense one, which

City of the End of Things

13

keeps the conscious and critical part of the mind very near to the breaking point of hysteria. The mind on the verge of breakdown is infinitely
suggestible, as Pavlov demonstrated,20 and the forces of advertising and
propaganda move in without any real opposition from the critical intelligence.
These agencies act in much the same way that, in Paradise Lost, Milton
depicts Satan acting on Eve. All that poor Eve was consciously aware of
was the fact that a hitherto silent snake was talking to her. Her consciousness being fascinated by something outrageous, everything that
Satan had to suggest got through its guard and fell into what we should
call her subconscious. Later, when faced with a necessity of making a
free choice, she found nothing inside her to direct the choice except
Satan's arguments, which she perforce had to take as her own, the more
readily in that she did not realize how they had got there. Similarly, the
technique of advertising and propaganda is to stun and demoralize the
critical consciousness with statements too absurd or extreme to be dealt
with seriously by it. In the mind that is too frightened or credulous or
childish to want to deal with the world at all, they move in past the consciousness and set up their structures unopposed.
What they create in such a mind is not necessarily acceptance, but
dependence on their versions of reality. Advertising implies an economy which has some independence from the political structure, and as
long as this independence exists, advertising can be taken as a kind of
ironic game. Like other forms of irony, it says what it does not wholly
mean, but nobody is obliged to believe its statements literally. Hence it
creates an illusion of detachment and mental superiority even when one
is obeying its exhortations. When doing Christmas shopping, there is
hardly one of us who would not, if stopped by an interviewer, say that
of course he didn't hold with all this commercializing of Christmas. The
same is to some extent true of propaganda as long as the issues are not
deeply serious. The curiously divided reaction to the Centenniala
mixture of the sentimental, the apprehensive, and the sardonicis an
example. But in more serious matters, such as the Vietnam war, the
effects of passivity are more subtly demoralizing. The tendency is to
accept the propaganda bromide rather than the human truths involved,
not merely because it is more comfortable, but because it gives the illusion of taking a practical and activist attitude as opposed to mere
hand-wringing. When propaganda cuts off all other sources of information, rejecting it, for a concerned and responsible citizen, would not only

14

The Modern Century

isolate him from his social world, but isolate him so completely as to
destroy his self-respect. Hence even propaganda based on the big lie, as
when an American or Chinese politician tries to get rid of a rival by calling him a Communist or a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, can establish itself and command assent if it makes more noise than the denial of
the charge. The epigram that it is impossible to fool all the people all the
time may be consoling, but is not much more.
What eventually happens I may describe in a figure borrowed from
those interminable railway journeys that are so familiar to Canadians, at
least of my generation. As one's eyes are passively pulled along a rapidly moving landscape, it turns darker and one begins to realize that
many of the objects that appear to be outside are actually reflections of
what is in the carriage. As it becomes entirely dark one enters a narcissistic world, where, except for a few lights here and there, we can see
only the reflection of where we are. A little study of the working of
advertising and propaganda in the modern world, with their magic-lantern techniques of projected images, will show us how successful they
are in creating a world of pure illusion. The illusion of the world itself is
reinforced by the more explicit illusions of movies and television, and
the imitation world of sports. It is significant that a breakdown in illusion, as when a baseball game or a television program is proved to have
been "fixed," is more emotionally disturbing than proof of crime or corruption in the actual world. It is true that not all illusion is a bad thing:
elections, for example, would hardly arouse enough interest to keep a
democracy functioning unless they were assimilated to sporting events,
and unless the pseudo-issues were taken as real issues. Similarly the
advantages of winning the game of space ships and moon landings may
be illusory, but the illusion is better than spending the money involved
on preparations for war. Then again, when illusion has been skilfully
built up, as it is for instance by such agencies as the Reader's Digest, it
includes the illusion of keeping abreast of contemporary thought and
events, and can only be recognized as illusion by its effects, or rather by
the absence of any effects, in social action.
Democracy is a mixture of majority rule and minority right, and the
minority which most clearly has a right is the minority of those who try
to resist a passive response, and thereby risk the resentment of those
who regard them as trying to be undemocratically superior. I am speaking however not so much of two groups of people as of two mental attitudes, both of which may exist in the same mind. The prison of illusion

City of the End of Things

15

holds all of us: the first important step is to be aware of it as illusion, and
as a prison. The right of free criticism is immensely important, and the
habitually worried and anxious attitude of the more responsible citizen
has a significance out of proportion to its frequency. But the alienation
of progress operates on him too, in a different way. He finds, in the first
place, his response of concern becoming a stock response.21 Many of us
have had the experience of beginning to read a journal of critical comment, tuning ourselves in to the appropriate state of anxiety, and then
noticing that we have in error picked up an issue of several months
back. In the split second of adjustment we become aware of a conventionalized or voluntarily assumed response. I am not deprecating the
response: I am trying to describe a cultural condition. But any conventionalized or habitual response is subject in the course of time to the
pressure of becoming automatic. As I write this, an official communique
about education arrives in the mail, and I read: "If we are to keep pace
with the swiftly moving developments of our time, we must strive for
ever higher standards in every field of endeavour.... No informed person is unaware of the tremendous effort that [it] will take to meet the
demands that the years ahead will produce. Yet we are also aware that
the general well-being of our nation is dependent on our ability to meet
the challenge."
One would say that it was impossible to write flatter cliches and platitudes, and the effect of cliche and platitude ought to be soothing. So it is,
and yet every word is soaked in the metaphors of a gasping panic, as
though the author had placed a large bet on a contender in a race who
was, like Hamlet, fat and scant of breath [5.2.287]. The conscious appeal
is to the concerned and intelligent citizen who ought to take an interest
in what his public servants are trying to do. A less conscious motive is to
prepare him for an increase in taxes. But the combination of urgency in
the rhetoric and of dullness in the expression of it is, or would be if we
were not so familiar with it, very strange. Something has happened
to atrophy one's responses when the most soporific words one can use
are such words as "challenge," "crisis," "demand," and "endeavour."22
Even the most genuinely concerned and critical mind finds itself becoming drowsy in its darkening carriage. And not only so, but the very ability to recognize the cliche works against one's sense of full participation.
Self-awareness thus operates like a drug, stimulating one's sense of
responsibility while weakening the will to express it.
The conception of progress grew up in the nineteenth century around

16

The Modern Century

a number of images and ideas.23 The basis of the conception is the fact
that science, in contrast to the arts, develops and advances, with the
work of each generation adding to that of its predecessor. Science bears
the practical fruit of technology, and technology has created, in the modern world, a new consciousness of time. Man has doubtless always experienced time in the same way, dragged backwards from a receding past
into an unknown future. But the quickening of the pace of news, with
telegraph and submarine cable, helped to dramatize a sense of a world
in visible motion, with every day bringing new scenes and episodes of a
passing show. It was as though the ticking of a clock had become not
merely audible but obsessive, like the telltale heart in Poe. The first reactions to the new sensationfor it was more of a sensation than a conceptionwere exhilarating, as all swift movement is for a time. The prestige
of the myth of progress developed a number of value-assumptions: the
dynamic is better than the static, process better than product, the organic
and vital better than the mechanical and fixed, and so on. We still have
these value-assumptions, and no doubt they are useful, though like
other assumptions we should be aware that we have them. And yet
there was an underlying tendency to alienation in the conception of
progress itself. In swift movement we are dependent on a vehicle and
not on ourselves, and the proportion of exhilaration to apprehensiveness
depends on whether we are driving it or merely riding in it. All progressive machines turn out to be things ridden in, with an unknown driver.
Whatever is progressive develops a certain autonomy, and the reactions to it consequently divide: some feel that it will bring about vast
improvements in life by itself, others are more concerned with the loss of
human control over it. An example of such a progressive machine was
the self-regulating market of laissez-faire. The late Karl Polanyi has
described, in The Great Transformation, how this market dominated the
political and economic structure of Western Europe, breaking down the
sense of national identity and replacing it with a uniform contractual
relationship of management and labour. The autonomous market took
out a ninety-nine year lease on the world from 1815 to 1914, and kept
"peace" for the whole of that time. By peace I mean the kind of peace
that we have had ourselves since 1945: practically continuous warfare
somewhere or other, but with no single war becoming large enough to
destroy the overall economic structure, or the major political structures
dependent on it. And yet what the autonomous market created in modern consciousness was, even when optimistic, the feeling that Polanyi

City of the End of Things

17

has finely described as "an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing

virtues of unconscious growth."24 That is, the belief in social progress
was transferred from the human will to the autonomous social force.
Similar conceptions of autonomous mass movement and historical process dominate much of our social thinking today. In Communist theology the historical process occupies much the same position that the
Holy Spirit does in Christianity: an omnipotent power that cooperates
with the human will but is not dependent on it.
Even earlier than the rise of the market, the feeling that man could
achieve a better society than the one he was in by a sufficiently resolute
act had done much to inspire the American and more particularly the
French Revolutions, as well as a number of optimistic progressive
visions of history like that of Condorcet.25 Here the ideal society is associated with a not too remote future. Here too there are underlying paradoxes. If we ask what we are progressing to, the only conceivable goal is
greater stability, something more orderly and predictable than what we
have now. After all, the only thing we can imagine which is better than
what we have now is an ensured and constant supply of the best that we
do have: economic security, peace, equal status in the protection of law,
the appeal of the will to reason, and the like. Progress thus assumes that
the dynamic is better than the stable and unchanging, yet it moves
toward a greater stability. One famous progressive thinker, John Stuart
Mill, had a nervous breakdown when he realized that he did not want to
see his goals achieved, but merely wished to act as though he did.26
What was progress yesterday may seem today like heading straight for
a prison of arrested development, like the societies of insects. In the year
1888 Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, a vision of a collectivized future which profoundly inspired the progressive thinkers of
that day, and had a social effect such as few works of literature have
ever had. Today it impresses us in exactly the opposite way, as a most
sinister blueprint for a totalitarian state.
A more serious consequence is that under a theory of progress
present means have constantly to be sacrificed to future ends, and we do
not know the future well enough to know whether those ends will be
achieved or not. All we actually know is that we are damaging the
present. Thus the assumption that progress is necessarily headed in
a good or benevolent direction becomes more and more clearly an unjustified assumption. As early as Malthus27 the conception of sinister progress had made its appearance, the vision of a world moving

i8

The Modern Century

onward to a goal of too many people without enough to eat. When it is

proposed to deface a city by, say, turning park lots into parking lots, the
rationalization given is usually the cliche "you can't stop progress."
Here it is not even pretended that progress is anything beneficent: it is
simply a Juggernaut, or symbol of alienation. And in history the continued sacrificing of a visible present to an invisible future becomes with
increasing clarity a kind of Moloch-worship [i Kings 11:7; Acts 7:43].
Some of the most horrible notions that have ever entered the human
mind have been "progressive" notions: massacring farmers to get a
more efficient agricultural system, exterminating Jews to achieve a
"solution" of the "Jewish question," letting a calculated number of people starve to regulate food prices. The element of continuity in progress
suggests that the only practicable action is continuous with what we are
already doing: if, for instance, we are engaged in a war, it is practicable
to go on with the war, and only visionary to stop it.
Hence for most thoughtful people progress has lost most of its original sense of a favourable value judgment and has become simply
progression, towards a goal more likely to be a disaster than an
improvement. Taking thought for the morrow, we are told on good
authority, is a dangerous practice [Matthew 6:34]. In proportion as the
confidence in progress has declined, its relation to individual experience has become clearer. That is, progress is a social projection of the
individual's sense of the passing of time. But the individual, as such, is
not progressing to anything except his own death. Hence the collapse of
belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the
consciousness of death. Alienation and anxiety become the same thing,
caused by a new intensity in the awareness of the movement of time, as
it ticks our lives away day after day. This intensifying of the sense of
time also, as we have just seen, dislocates it: the centre of attention
becomes the future, and the emotional relation to the future becomes
one of dread and uncertainty. The future is the point at which "it is later
than you think" becomes "too late." Modern fiction has constantly
dealt, during the last century, with characters struggling toward some
act of consciousness or self-awareness that would be a gateway to real
life. But the great majority of treatments of this theme are ironic: the act
is not made, or is made too late, or is a paralysing awareness with no
result except self-contempt, or is perverted into illusion. We notice that
when the tone is less ironic and more hopeful about the nature and
capacities of man, as it is for instance in Camus's La Peste, it is usually in

City of the End of Things

19

a context of physical emergency where there is a definite enemy to

fight.
Even in theory progress is as likely to lead to the uniform and the
monotonous as to the individual and varied. If we look at the civilization around us, the evidence for uniformity is as obvious and oppressive
as the evidence for the rapid change toward it. The basis of this uniformity is technological, but the rooted social institutions of the past
home, school, churchcan also only be adapted to a nomadic society by
an expanding uniform pattern. Whatever the advantages of this situation, we have also to consider the consequences of the world's becoming
increasingly what in geology is called a peneplain, a monotonous surface worn down to a dead level by continued erosion. We are not far
into the nineteenth century before we become aware of a different element both in consciousness and in the physical appearance of society.
This is a new geometrical perspective, already beginning in the eighteenth century, which is scaled, not to the human body, but increasingly
to the mechanical extensions of the body.28 It is particularly in America,
of course, that this perspective is most noticeable: Washington, laid out
by L'Enfant in 1800, is already in the age of the automobile. This
mechanical perspective is mainly the result of the spreading of the city
and its technology over more and more of its natural environment. The
railway is the earliest and still one of the most dramatic examples of the
creation of a new kind of landscape, one which imposes geometrical
shapes on the countryside. The prophet Isaiah sees the coming of the
Messiah as symbolized by a highway which exalts valleys and depresses mountains, making the crooked straight and the rough places
plain [Isaiah 40:3-5]. But, as so often happens, the prophecy appears to
have been fulfilled in the wrong context.
The traditional city is centripetal, focused on market squares, a pattern still visible in some Ontario towns. Its primary idea is that of community, and it is this idea that has made so many visions of human
fulfilment, from Plato and the Bible onward, take the form of a city. To
the modern imagination the city becomes increasingly something hideous and nightmarish, the fourmillante cite of Baudelaire, the "unreal
city" of Eliot's Waste Land, the ville tentaculaire of Verhaeren.29 No longer
a community, it seems more like a community turned inside out, with
its expressways taking its thousands of self-enclosed nomadic units in a
headlong flight into greater solitude, ants in the body of a dying dragon,
breathing its polluted air and passing its polluted water. The map still

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The Modern Century

shows us self-contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of
concrete. I have had occasion to read Dickens a good deal lately,30 and
Dickens was, I suppose, the first metropolitan novelist in English literature, the first to see the life of his time as essentially a gigantic pulsation
toward and away from the great industrial centres, specifically London.
And one notices in his later novels an increasing sense of the metropolis
as a kind of cancer, as something that not only destroys the countryside,
but the city itself as it had developed up to that time.
The Victorian critics of the new industrialism contemporary with
Dickens, such as Ruskin and Morris, concentrated much of their attack
on its physical ugliness, which they saw as a symbol of the spiritual ugliness of materialism and exploitation. Critics of our time are more
impressed by the physical uniformity which they similarly interpret as a
symbol of spiritual conformity. If certain tendencies within our civilization were to proceed unchecked, they would rapidly take us towards a
society which, like that of a prison, would be both completely introverted and completely without privacy. The last stand of privacy has
always been, traditionally, the inner mind. It is quite possible however
for communications media, especially the newer electronic ones, to
break down the associative structures of the inner mind and replace
them by the prefabricated structures of the media. A society entirely
controlled by their slogans and exhortations would be introverted,
because nobody would be saying anything: there would only be echo,
and Echo was the mistress of Narcissus. It would also be without privacy, because it would frustrate the effort of the healthy mind to
develop a view of the world which is private but not introverted, accommodating itself to opposing views. The triumph of communication is the
death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated.
The role of communications media in the modern world is a subject
that Professor Marshall McLuhan has made so much his own that it
would be almost a discourtesy not to refer to him in a lecture which covers many of his themes. The McLuhan cult, or more accurately the
McLuhan rumour, is the latest of the illusions of progress: it tells us that
a number of new media are about to bring in a new form of civilization
all by themselves, merely by existing. Because of this we should not, in
staring at a television set, wonder if we are wasting our time and

City of the End of Things

21

develop guilt feelings accordingly: we should feel that we are evolving a

new mode of apprehension. What is important about the television set is
not the quality of what it exudes, which is only content, but the fact that
it is there, the end of a tube with a vortical suction which "involves" the
viewer. This is not all of what a serious and most original writer is trying to say, yet Professor McLuhan lends himself partly to this interpretation by throwing so many of his insights into a deterministic form.31
He would connect the alienation of progress with the habit of forcing a
hypnotized eye to travel over thousands of miles of type, in what is so
accurately called the pursuit of knowledge. But apparently he would see
the Gutenberg syndrome as a cause of the alienation of progress, and
not simply as one of its effects. Determinism of this kind, like the determinism which derives Confederation from the railway, is a plausible
but oversimplified form of rhetoric.32
Similarly with the principle of the identity of medium and message,
which means one thing when the response is active, and quite another
when the response is passive. On the active level it is an ideal formulation which strictly applies only to the arts, and to a fully active response
to the arts. It would be true to say that painting, for example, had no
"message" except the medium of painting itself. On the passive level it
is an ironic formulation in which the differences among the media flatten out. The "coolness" of television is much more obvious in the privacy of a middle-class home than it is when turned on full blast in the
next room of a jerry-built hotel. All forms of communication, from transistors to atom bombs, are equally hot when someone else's finger is on
the button. Thus the primary determining quality of the medium comes
from the social motive for using it and not from the medium itself.
Media can only follow the direction of the human will that created
them, and a study of the social direction of that will, or what Innis called
the bias of communication,33 is a major, prior, and separate problem.
Technology cannot of itself bring about an increase in human freedom, for technological developments threaten the structure of society,
and society develops a proportionate number of restrictions to contain
them. The automobile increases the speed and freedom of individual
movement, and thereby brings a proportionate increase in police
authority, with its complication of laws and penalties. In proportion as
the production of retail goods becomes more efficient, the quality of
craftsmanship and design decreases. The aeroplane facilitates travel,
and therefore regiments travel: a modern traveller, processed through

22

The Modern Century

an immigration shed, might think ruefully of the contrast with Sterne,

travelling to France in the eighteenth century, suddenly remembering
that Britain was at war with France, and that consequently he would
need his passport [A Sentimental Journey, vol. 2, "The Passport, Paris"].
The same principle affects science itself. The notion that science, left to
itself, is bound to evolve more and more of the truth about the world is
another illusion, for science can never exist outside a society, and that
society, whether deliberately or unconsciously, directs its course. Still,
the importance of keeping science "free," i.e., unconsciously rather than
deliberately directed, is immense. In the Soviet Union, and increasingly
in America as well, science is allowed to develop "freely" so that the
political power can hijack its technological by-products. But this means a
steady pressure on science to develop in the direction useful to that
power: target-knowledge, as the Nazis called it.34 I am not saying that
there are no answers to these questions: I am saying that no improvement in the human situation can take place independently of the human
will to improve, and that confidence in automatic or impersonal improvement is always misplaced.
In earlier times the sense of alienation and anxiety was normally projected as the fear of hell, the "too late" existence awaiting those who, as
Dante's Virgil says, had never come alive [Inferno, canto 3,1. 64]. In our
day this fear is attached, not to another world following this one, but to
the future of our own world. The first half of the modern century was
still full of progressive optimism: an unparalleled number of Utopias, or
visions of a stabilized future, were written, and universal prosperity was
widely predicted, partly because most of the people being exploited in
the main centres of culture were well out of sight in Asia or Africa. After
the midway point of 1917 there came an abrupt change. Spengler's
Decline of the West appeared in Germany the next year. Here it is said
that history consists of cultural developments which rise, mature, and
decline like organisms. After they have exhausted their creative possibilities, they turn into "civilizations." The arts give place to technology and
engineering; vast cities spread over the landscape, inhabited by uprooted masses of people, and dictatorships and annihilation wars
become the course of history. A Classical "culture" entered this stage
with Alexander, and, later, the rise of Rome. The Western world entered
it with Napoleon, and is now in the stage corresponding to that of the
Punic Wars, with the great world states fighting it out for supremacy.
Spengler is often dismissed as "fatalistic" today, but his paralleling of

City of the End of Things

23

our historical situation with earlier periods, especially that of the Roman
Empire, and his point that our technology could be part of a decline as
easily as it could be part of an advance, are conceptions that we all
accept now, whether we realize it or not, as something which is inseparably part of our perspective.
The progressive belief suffered a rude set-back in America in the
crash of 1929; it was adopted by the Soviet Union as part of its revolutionary world view, but is gradually fading out even there, much as the
expectation of the end of the world faded out of early Christian thought.
In our day the Utopia has been succeeded by what is being called, by
analogy, the "dystopia," the nightmare of the future. H.G. Wells is a
good example of a writer who built all his hopes around the myth of
progress, in which the role of saviour was played by a self-evolving science. His last publication, however, Mind at the End of its Tether (1940),
carried all the furious bitterness of an outraged idealism. Orwell's 1984
is a better-known dystopia, and perhaps comes as close as any book to
being the definitive Inferno of our time. It is a particularly searching
study because of the way in which it illustrates how so many aspects of
culture, including science, technology, history, and language, would
operate in their demonic or perverted forms. The conception of progress
took off originally from eighteenth-century discussions about the natural society, where the progressive view was urged by Bolingbroke and
Rousseau and the opposite one by Swift and Burke. According to Rousseau, the natural and reasonable society of the future was buried underneath the accumulated injustices and absurdities of civilization, and all
man had to do was to release it by revolution. Writers of our day have
mostly reverted to the view of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, that slavery is to
man at least as natural a state as freedom: this is the central insight of
one of the most penetrating stories of our time, William Golding's Lord
of the Flies, and is certainly implied, if not expressed, in Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World and many similar works.
It is natural that many people should turn from the vision of such a
world to some illusion or distracting fiction that seems to afford a more
intelligible environment. Nationalism is or can be a distracting fiction of
this kind. The nation, economically considered, is a form of private
enterprise, a competing business in the world's market; hence, for most
people, nationality comes to their attention chiefly through inconveniencecustoms duties, income taxes, and the like. But it also may provide some sense of a protected place. It can't happen here,35 we may say,

24

The Modern Century

deliberately forgetting that the distinction between here and there has
ceased to exist. It is significant that intense nationalism or regionalism
today is a product either of resistance to or of disillusionment with
progress. Progress, when optimistic, always promises some form of exodus from history as we know it, some emergence onto a new plateau of
life. Thus the Marxist revolution promised deliverance from history as
history had previously been, a series of class struggles. But just as there
are neurotic individuals who cannot get beyond some blocking point in
their emotional past, so there are neurotic social groups who feel a compulsion to return to a previous point in history, as Mississippi keeps
fighting the Civil War over again, and some separatists in Quebec the
British Conquest.
However, one wonders whether, in an emergency, this compulsion to
return to the same point, the compulsion of Quixote to fight over again
the battles he found in his books, is not universal in our world. In ordinary life, the democratic and Communist societies see each other as dystopias, their inhabitants hysterical and brainwashed by propaganda,
identifying their future with what is really their destruction. Perhaps
both sides, as Blake would say, become what they behold [Jerusalem, pi.
44,1. 32]: in any case seeing tendencies to tyranny only on the other side
is mere hypocrisy. The Nuremberg trials laid down the principle that
man remains a free agent even in the worst of tyrannies, and is not only
morally but legally responsible for resisting orders that outrage the conscience of mankind. The Americans took an active part in prosecuting
these trials, but when America itself stumbled into the lemming-march
horror of Vietnam the principle was forgotten and the same excuses and
defiances reappeared.
All the social nightmares of our day seem to focus on some unending
and inescapable form of mob rule. The most permanent kind of mob
rule is not anarchy, nor is it the dictatorship that regularizes anarchy,
nor even the imposed police state depicted by Orwell. It is rather the
self-policing state, the society incapable of formulating an articulate criticism of itself and of developing a will to act in its light. This is a condition that we are closer to, on this continent, than we are to dictatorship.
In such a society the conception of progress would reappear as a donkey's carrot, as the new freedom we shall have as soon as some regrettable temporary necessity is out of the way. No one would notice that the
necessities never come to an end, because the communications media
would have destroyed the memory.

City of the End of Things

25

The idea of progress, we said, is not really that of man progressing,

but of man releasing forces that will progress by themselves. The root of
the idea is the fact that science progressively develops its conception of
the world. Science is a vision of nature which perceives the elements in
nature that correspond to the reason and the sense of structure in the
scientist's mind. If we look at our natural environment with different
eyes, with emotion or desire or trying to see in it things that answer
other needs than those of the reason, nature seems a vast unthinking
indifference, with no evidence of meaning or purpose. In proportion as
we have lost confidence in progress, the scientific vision of nature has
tended to separate from a more imaginative and emotional one which
regards nature or the human environment as absurd or meaningless.
The absurd is now one of the central elements in the contemporary
myth, along with alienation and anxiety, and has extended from man's
feeling about nature to his feeling about his own society. For society,
like nature, has the power of life and death over us, yet has no real claim
on our deeper loyalties. The absurdity of power is clearer in a democratic society, where we are deprived of the comforting illusions that
surround royalty. In a democracy no one pretends to identify the real
form of society either with the machinery of business or with the
machinery of government. But in that case where is the society to be
found to which we do owe loyalty?
There are two contemporary plays which seem to sum up with peculiar vividness and forcefulness the malaise that I have described as the
alienation of progress. One is Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The main
theme of this play is the paralysis of activity that is brought about by
the dislocation of life in time, where there is no present, only a faint
memory of a past, and an expectation of a future with no power to
move towards it. Of the two characters whose dialogue forms most of
the play, one calls himself Adam; at another time they identify themselves with Cain and Abel; at other times, vaguely and helplessly, with
the thieves crucified with Christ. "Have we no rights?" one asks. "We
got rid of them" the other saysdistinctly, according to the stage direction. And even more explicitly: "at this place, at this moment of time, all
mankind is us." They spend the whole action of the play waiting for a
certain Godot to arrive: he never comes; they deny that they are "tied"
to him, but they have no will to break away. All that turns up is a
Satanic figure called Pozzo, with a clown tied to him in a parody of
their own state. On his second appearance Pozzo is blind, a condition

26

The Modern Century

which detaches him even further from time, for, he says, "the blind
have no notion of time."36
The other play is Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woo//? The title of
this play is echoed from the Depression song, "Who's afraid of the big
bad wolf?" where the "wolf" was a specific fear of unemployment. I
began this talk by saying that the modern century was the first to study
itself objectively, and that this has created an opposition between the
active mind that struggles for reality and the passive mind that prefers
to remain in an illusion. Art, culture, the imagination, are on the side of
reality and activity: Virginia Woolf, chosen because of the sound of her
last name, represents this side, and the characters are "afraid" of her
because they cannot live without illusion. The two men in the play are a
historian and a scientist, facing the past and the future, both impotent in
the present. "When people can't abide things as they are," says the historian George, "when they can't abide the present, they do one of two
things .. . either they turn to a contemplation of the past, as I have done,
or they set about to ... alter the future."37 But nobody in the play does
either. George can murder his imaginary child, but the destruction of
illusion does not bring him reality, for the only reality in his life was contained in the illusion which he denied.
I have tried to indicate the outlines of the picture that contemporary
imagination has drawn of its world, a jigsaw-puzzle picture in which the
Canada of 1967 is one of the pieces. It is a picture mainly of disillusionment and fear, and helps to explain why our feelings about our Centennial are more uneasy than they are jubilant. In the twentieth century
most anniversaries, including the annual disseminating neurosis of
Christmas, are touched with foreboding. I noticed this early in life, for
my twenty-first birthday was spent at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933,
entitled "A Century of Progress," where the crowds were much more
preoccupied with worrying about the Depression than with celebrating
what had led to it. And yet this picture, as I have tried also to explain, is
the picture that the contemporary imagination draws of itself in a mirror. Looking into the mirror is the active mind which struggles for consistency and continuity of outlook, which preserves its memory of its
past and clarifies its view of the present. Staring back at it is the frozen
reflection of that mind, which has lost its sense of continuity by projecting it on some mechanical social process, and has found that it has also
lost its dignity, its freedom, its creative power, and its sense of the
present, with nothing left except a fearful apprehension of the future.

Improved Binoculars

27

The mind in the mirror, like the characters in Beckett, cannot move on
its own initiative. But the more repugnant we find this reflection, the
less likely we are to make the error of Narcissus, and identify ourselves
with it. I want now to discuss the active role that the arts, more particularly literature, have taken in forming the contemporary imagination,
which has given us this picture. The picture itself reflects anxiety, and as
long as man is capable of anxiety he is capable of passing through it to a
genuine human destiny.
II Improved Binoculars
Let us begin by looking at some of the characteristics that we generally
associate with the word "modern," especially in the arts. "Modern," in
itself, means simply recent: in Shakespeare's day it meant mediocre, and
it still sometimes carries that meaning as an emotional overtone. In its
ordinary colloquial sense it implies an advanced state of technology and
the social attitudes of a highly urbanized life. In some Western Canadian towns, for example, houses with outdoor privies are advertised
as "unmodern." But "modern" has also become a historical term like
"Romantic," "Baroque," or "Renaissance." It would be convenient if,
like "Romantic," the colloquial uses of the word were spelled in lower
case and the cultural term with a capital, but this is not established. Like
"Romantic" again, "modern" as a cultural term refers partly to a historical period, roughly the last century, but it is also partly a descriptive
term, not a purely historical term like "medieval." Just as we feel that
Keats or Byron are Romantic and that some of their contemporaries,
Jane Austen for example, are either not Romantic at all or are less
Romantic, so we feel that "modern" is in part a style or attitude in recent
culture, and that some of the artists and writers of the last century have
been "more modern" than others.
"Modern," so used, describes certain aspects of an international style
in the arts which began, mainly in Paris, about a hundred years ago. Out
of compliment to our centenary, I shall date it from 1867, the year of the
death of Baudelaire. The larger context of this "modern" is the series of
vast changes that began to take place, not around 1867, but a century
earlier. These earlier changes included the American and French Revolutions, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, new and more analytical schools of thought, such as the French Encyclopedists and the
British Utilitarians, and the cultural development we call Romantic. By

28

The Modern Century

1867 this movement had entered on a second phase, continuous with but
distinguishable from its predecessor, and this begins the modern century properly speaking. The thinkers Darwin and Marx, and later Freud
and Frazer, the writers Rimbaud, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche,
the Impressionist painters and their successors, belong to it.
During the whole of the last century, there has naturally been the
most frantic resistance to "modern" culture, for both the highbrow arts
and the popular ones, though for different reasons, have a powerful
capacity to stir up guilt feelings, personal insecurities, and class resentments. The Nazis called the modern style a Jewish conspiracy, the Jews
being for them the symbols of a racism without a national boundary.
The Communist hierarchy calls it an imperialistic conspiracy, and particularly attacks the "formalism" which it asserts symbolizes the ideology of a decadent class. One may suspect from such things as the
Sinyavsky-Daniel trial38 that the periodic "thaws" in the Soviet Union
are mainly a device to determine where the really dangerous threats to
the bureaucracy are coming from, but even so they show something of
the tremendous pressure building up against the barriers of official stupidity and panic, which may eventually break through them. Chinese
resistance is still militant, though of course the cultural traditions there
are different. Hysterical people in the democracies, in their turn, call the
modern style a Communist conspiracy; in Canada it is often called
Americanization. It is true that many aspects of modern culture, especially popular culture, are of American origin, like jazz, but America is a
province conquered by the international modern much more than it is
a source of it.
In literature, the international character of the modern style has been
partly disguised by difference in language. Just as we seem to be moving
into a world in which we meet the same kind of things everywhere,
from hydro installations to Beatle haircuts, so we seem to be moving into
a world in which English will become either the first or the second language of practically everybody. But of course it does not follow that
English or any other language will become a world literary language.
The last hundred years have also been a period in which many minority
languages have been maintained, revived, or in some cases practically
invented, by an intense regional patriotism. Hebrew, Norwegian, Flemish, Irish, and French in Canada are examples. The prestige of such
movements is one of several elements that have helped to shape a common view which is the opposite of the one I am advancing here. Culture,

Improved Binoculars

29

it is often said, in contrast to economic and political developments, is

local, regional, and decentralized, as dependent on an immediate environment as a fine wine or a delicate and traditional handicraft like peasant costumes. The first step in the creation of an indigenous culture,
therefore, is a firm boundary line, and the next step is the cultural equivalent of high tariffs against foreign influences.
This theory of culture probably originated in Romantic theories about
a creative "folk," and has been confusing the Canadian scene for even
longer than the past hundred years. I held a version of it myself, or
thought I did, when I was beginning to write in Canadian periodicals a
generation ago. According to Shelley in his preface to Prometheus
Unbound, the decentralizing of Great Britain into a dozen or more districts, each with its own cultural centre, would help to awaken the country to the kind of cultural vitality enjoyed earlier by such small towns as
Periclean Athens or Medicean Florence. It sounds unlikely, but it is a
roughly consistent extension of Shelley's association of human freedom
with the self-determining of national cultures, particularly Greece and
Italy. William Morris, again, thought of culture as essentially "manufacture" in the strict sense, as the work of brain and hand which has a
totally different function from that of mechanized industry. Hence his
ideal world is one of small and relatively isolated communities, governing themselves by local councils and keeping themselves busy making
things. In his view the so-called minor or useful arts are the index of a
culture; the major arts are assimilated to them, and both are produced
by a domestic economy.39 In T.S. Eliot, again, we find "culture" associated with an intense decentralization. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition
of Culture and similar essays are much preoccupied with Welsh and
Scottish nationalisms and with the desirability of having most people
not move from the place where they were born.40
The attempts to "purify" a language are also part of the resistance to
the international modern. It is consistent with William Morris's attitude
that he should deplore the mongrel nature of modern English which has
helped to make it a world language, its grafting of so many Latin conceptual and Greek technical terms on a Teutonic stock. Morris was one
of those who wanted English to throw out its load of loan words and
return to more Teutonic methods of making up a vocabulary, such as
calling a market a cheaping place or a baby carriage a pushwainling.41
Such efforts got nowhere in English, but some other languages, such as
Persian, or German in the Nazi period, were more successful in driving

3O

The Modern Century

out foreign influences on vocabulary and syntax, at least for a time. Even
in Australia, I understand, there has been a group of poets devoted to
putting as many native Australian words into their poems as possible.42
A late echo of this tendency is the anti-/ow0/43 campaign in French Canada, the effort to set up European French as a standard of correctness
against the normal linguistic developments which tend to Anglicize and
Americanize French-Canadian speech. Outside literature, resistance to
the modern style has very little if anything to put in its place. Approved
Nazi painting and approved Communist fiction can only fall back on
idioms derived from the art before 1867, on worn-out Romantic and Victorian formulas which can no longer be used with their original energy
and conviction. If we compare T.S. Eliot's theories about decentralized
culture with his own poetry and the quality of his influence, both of
which are completely international, it is clear that the theories are
merely something dreamed up, and have no relation to any cultural
facts.
It is of course true that a coherent environment is a cultural necessity.
And many of the world's great cultural developments do seem to have
been assisted by some kind of local resistance to imperial expansion. The
catalyser of ancient Greek culture was clearly the successful battle for
independence by a province on the fringes of what was essentially, in its
civilization, a Persian world. Hebrew culture drew a similar strength
from its resistance to Egyptian and Mesopotamian imperialism. Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century Holland were provincial rebels
against the centralizing forces of the Papacy and the Hapsburg Empire;
Germany in the Napoleonic period and, on a smaller scale, Ireland at the
turn of this century joined a cultural efflorescence to a political resistance. In our day similar movements are going on, though more confined to the cultural area. The liberalizing of Communist culture is much
more likely to start in Poland44 or Hungary than in the Soviet Union, and
Mexico has maintained a remarkable cultural independence of its northern neighbour. The feeling that Canada in this respect has left undone
what it ought to have done45 amounts to a national neurosis. But what I
have described is not a social law: it is merely something that often happens, and just as often fails to happen. And even if it were a social law,
there are many elements in Canada's situation that would make the
applying of it to Canada a false analogy.
Even apart from this, however, there is still the question, Where does
the seed come from that grows up in these localities of provincial resis-

Improved Binoculars

31

tance? Spontaneous generation is no more credible in culture than it is

in biology. Seeds of culture can only come from the centres of civilization which are already established, often those centres against which the
local culture is revolting. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the forms of
art are autonomous: poems and pictures are born out of earlier poems
and pictures,46 not out of new localities, and novelty of content or experience in such localities cannot produce originality of form. We notice
that the more popular an aspect of culture is, such as jazz music, films,
or the kind of poetry associated with beatnik and similar groups, the
more quickly it becomes international in its idiom. To try to found a
serious culture in Canada on a middle-class intellectual resistance to
popular culture of this kind would be the last word in futility. All this
may seem too obvious now to insist on, but many intellectuals, in both
English and French parts of the country, have in the past been engaged
in an inglorious rearguard action of trying to encourage a regional or
tourist's-souvenir literature, and it is perhaps still worth repeating that
the practice is useless and the theory mistaken. Complete immersion in
the international style is a primary cultural requirement, especially for
countries whose cultural traditions have been formed since 1867, like
ours. Anything distinctive that develops within the Canadian environment can only grow out of participation in this style.
The distinctively "modern" element in the culture of the last century
has played, and continues to play, a revolutionary role in society. It may
be easiest to illustrate this from the pictorial arts. In medieval painting
the prevailing conventions were religious, and for that and many other
reasons the technique of representation was highly stylized. As the centuries went on, we can see a growing realism in the painting which, in
its historical context, was an emancipating force. The Byzantine type of
stylizing comes to be thought stiff and angular; lighter and springier
lines succeed in later Gothic; more human touches appear in the divine
faces; landscapes sprout and blossom in the background; an occasional
nude appears if the iconography makes it possible, as in pictures of St.
Sebastian or Mary Magdalene. The growth of realism, in other words, is
also a growth in the humanizing of the projected myths, man recovering
for himself the forms he had created.
As we pass into the Renaissance, and painting becomes more secularized, it begins to reflect something of the spirit that is also in Renaissance science, the feeling of man as a subject confronting an objective
world. With the development of perspective the pictorial vision settled

32

The Modern Century

on a fixed point in space. As a result there grew up some curiously

pedantic critical theories of painting, which assumed that it was primarily a representational art, and that the function of painting was not to
create a vision but to record one. The Elizabethan critic Puttenham,47
writing in the age of Michelangelo and Titian, even asserted that the
painter had no creative power at all, but merely imitated nature in the
same way that an ape imitates a man. This dreary doctrine found its way
into Shakespeare's Winter's Tale [4.4.89-93] somewhat disguised. I mention it only to emphasize the fact it misunderstands, which is the tremendous projecting force in Renaissance and Baroque painting. In
Rubens, the great spiralling and twisting rhythms, usually starting from
a diagonal, that, so to speak, pick up the eye and hurl it into the furthest
point of the picture, express a kind of will to objectify. The same kind of
will is also in Rembrandt, in a quieter and more contemplative form, as
the eye is led to the points of light that emerge from the graduated shadows. Rembrandt carried this objectified form of painting about as far as
human skill could carry it, and imposed his way of seeing on successors
for generations.
When we look at the later work of Turner, contemporary with the
great English Romantic poets, there is a different feeling which, in the
particular context we are speaking of now, might be called a colossal
emancipation of vision. It is not the titles of such pictures as Rain, Steam
and Speed that make us feel that we are in a new world, but the sense of a
new way of seeing. We are not looking at nature here, but are identified
with the processes and powers of nature, the creative forces symbolized
by the swirling colours, the dissolving shapes, and the expanding perspective where we seem to see everything at once, as though the eye
were surrounding the picture. This is imitating nature as the Romantic
age conceived imitation, where man and nature are thought of as connected, not by the subject-object relation of consciousness, but by an
identity of process, man being a product of the organic power of nature.
As Coleridge says, it is this latter, the natura naturans, that the painter
imitates, not the structure of natura naturata in front of him.48 With
the great Impressionists who followed Turner the realistic tendency
achieves a second culmination. Impressionism portrays, not a separated
objective world that man contemplates, but a world of power and force
and movement which is in man also, and emerges in the consciousness
of the painter. Monet painting Rouen cathedral in every aspect of light
and shade, Renoir making the shapes in nature explode into vibrations

Improved Binoculars

33

of colour, Degas recording the poses of a ballet, are working in a world

where objects have become events, and where time is a dimension of
sense experience. We can, of course, look back on earlier painters and
see the same things in Rubens or Tintoretto, but we see them there with
the hindsight that Impressionism has given us.
In all these centuries the representational aspect of painting is the
organically growing aspect, the liberalizing force, the avant-garde
movement. It is a realism of form, and as it develops it tends to become
something of a conservative social force. Thus Dutch realism often
reflects a quiet satisfaction in middle-class Dutch life, and in some modern paintersI think particularly of Vuillard49the visual aspect of our
social experience is similarly bathed in a benevolent glow of beauty and
charm. There is nothing wrong with this, but it was inevitable that there
should also develop, as part of the expanding horizon of pictorial experience, a revolutionary or prophetic realism, of the sort that runs
through Brueghel, Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier. This kind of realism is
often not realistic in form: it may be presented as fantasy, as in Brueghel's Mad Margaret or Goya's Caprichos. But it tears apart the fagade of
society and shows us the forces working behind that facade, and is realistic in the sense of sharpening our vision of society as a mode of existence rather than simply as an environment.
By 1867 Impressionism was reaching its climax of development, and
the "modern" world was taking shape. But there are very different elements in the modern world which are also making pictorial impressions. In advertising, propaganda, and a great deal of mass culture, of
the type I referred to in my previous lecture, and which is usually
intended to be received passively, the prevailing idiom is one that may
be called stupid realism. By stupid realism I mean what is actually a
kind of sentimental idealism, an attempt to present a conventionally
attractive or impressive appearance as an actual or attainable reality.
Thus it is a kind of parody or direct counter-presentation to prophetic
realism. We see it in the vacuous pretty-girl faces of advertising, in the
clean-limbed athletes of propaganda magazines, in the haughty narcissism of shop-window mannequins, in the heroically transcended woes
of soap-opera heroines, in eulogistic accounts of the lives of celebrities,
usually those in entertainment, in the creation by Madison Avenue of a
wise and kindly father-figure out of some political stooge, and so on.
The "socialist realism" of Communism, though much better in theory
than this, has in practice much in common with it.50 It seems clear that

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an officially approved realism cannot carry on the revolutionary tradition of Goya and Daumier. It is not anti-Communism that makes us feel
that the disapproved writers, Daniel and Babel and Pasternak, have
most to say to us: on the contrary, it is precisely such writers who best
convey the sense of Russians as fellow human beings, caught in the
same dilemmas that we are. Revolutionary realism is a questioning,
exploring, searching, disturbing force: it cannot go over to established
authority and defend the fictions which may be essential to authority,
but are never real. We may compare in American painting the lively
development of the so-called ashcan school51 with the WPA murals52 in
post offices which glumly rehearsed the progress of transportation from
camel to jeep, and which are now mostly covered up.
In this context we can see that realism of form has changed sides: it is
no longer a liberalizing and emancipating force, incorporating the hopes
and fears of humanity into the icons demanded by churches, public
buildings, and well-to-do patrons. The projected image is now the
weapon of the enemy, and consequently it is the power to project the
image that becomes liberalizing. A new kind of energy is released in
the painting that followed the impressionists, an energy which concentrates on the sheer imaginative act of painting in itself, on painting as the
revolt of the brain behind the eye against passive sensation. Cezanne is
the hinge on which this more specifically "modern" movement turns,
but it has of course taken a great variety of forms since. One is the
abstraction, or Abstract Expressionism later, which portrays the combination of form and colour without reference to representation. Another
is the action-painting which tries to communicate the sense of process
and growth in the act of painting. Still another is the "pop art" which
presents the projected images of stupid realism itself, in a context where
the critical consciousness is compelled to make an active response to
them.53
Stupid realism depends for its effect on evoking the ghost of a dead
tradition: it is a parody of the realism which was organic a century or two
ago. The active and revolutionary element in painting today is the element of formalism. (I know that I am using "formalism" in a looser sense
than it is used in Marxist criticism, but I am trying to suggest some of the
wider implications of the contrasting views.) I said that to the painters of
the age of Giotto the old Byzantine conventions were beginning to seem
unnecessarily constricting. But in the stupid realism of commercial late
Roman sculpture, with its stodgy busts and sarcophagi, the sharp angu-

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35

lar patterns of Byzantine leap out with a clean and vital flame. The cycle
of culture has turned once more, and once again it is the stylized that is
the emancipating force. Of course there is always a central place for a
realism which is not stupid, which continues to sharpen our vision of the
world and the society that are actually there. But the exhilarating sense
of energy in great formalism is so strong that modern realism tends to
express itself in formalist conventions. In Brueghel's Slaughter of the Innocents a conventional religious subject is located in a realistic landscape
that recalls the terror and misery of sixteenth-century Flanders; in Picasso's Guernica54 the terror and misery of twentieth-century Spain is
expressed with the stylizing intensity of a religious primitivism.
In literature there is a change from Romantic to modern around 1867
that is in some respects even sharper and more dramatic than the shift
from Impressionism to Cezanne. At the beginning of the Romantic
period around 1800, an increased energy of propulsion had begun to
make itself felt, an energy that often suggests something mechanical.
When the eighteenth-century American composer Billings developed
contrapuntal hymn settings which he called "fuguing-tunes," he remarked that they would be "more than twenty times as powerful as the
old slow tunes."55 The quantitative comparison, the engineering metaphor, the emphasis on speed and power, indicate a new kind of sensibility already present in pre-Revolutionary and pre-industrial America.
Much greater music than his is touched by the same feeling: the finale of
Mozart's Linz Symphony in C is based on the bodily rhythm of the
dance, but the finale of the Beethoven Rasoumovsky Quartet in the
same key foreshadows the world of the express train. Bernard Shaw
compares the finale of Beethoven's Opus 106 to the dance of atoms in
the molecule, whatever that sounds like.56 A similar propulsive movement makes itself felt in those greatly misunderstood poems of Wordsworth, The Idiot Boy, Peter Bell, The Waggoner, where we also have
references to "flying boats" and the like, and in many poems of Shelley,
where again some of the characters seem to be operating private hydroplanes, like the Witch of Atlas. This sense of the exhilaration of mechanical movement continues into the modern period, especially in the
Italian Futurist movement around the time of the First World War. In
fact the modern is often popularly supposed to be primarily a matter of
"streamlining,"57 of suggesting in furniture and building, as well as in
the formal arts themselves, the clean, spare, economical, functional lines
of a swiftly moving vehicle.

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But in modern literature at least, especially poetry, we have to take

account of other tendencies. The decline of admiration for continuity is
one of the most striking differences between the Romantic and the modern feeling. It perhaps corresponds to the decline of confidence in
progress that we discussed earlier. The Swinburne whose linear energy
carries his reader through hundreds of pages of poetic dramas and lyrics
is felt, by Eliot, to be a poet "who does not think,"58 as less modern in
both feeling and technique than the Hopkins who prefers the techniques
of "sprung" to those of "running" rhythm. (Swinburne is more correctly
estimated now, but as part of a critical development which has outgrown the anti-Romantic phase of modernism, and has got its sense of
tradition in better focus.) In France, one modern poet even maintained
that the function of poetry was to wring the neck of rhetoric.59 Such a
poet would be bound to accept the dictum of Poe, a most influential one
in the modern period, that a long poem is really a contradiction in
terms,60 for it is rhetoric, in the sense of a conventional form of expression that supplies a continuous verbal texture, which makes a poem
long. In French literature this rhetorical continuity is associated particularly with Victor Hugo, who is thought of as a premodern Romantic.
Modern poetry tends to be discontinuous, to break the hypnotic continuity of a settled metre, an organizing narrative, or a line of thought, all
of which, it is felt, are apt to move too far in the direction of passive
response. In Eliot's The Waste Land the scenes, episodes, and quoted lines
are stuck into the reader's mind somewhat as the slogans and illustrations of advertising aretachistoscopically, as the educators say.61 But,
once there, the reader is compelled to a creative act of putting the fragments together. The continuity of the poem, in short, has been handed
over to him.
One may see here a tendency parallel to the formalism of modern
painting. What corresponds for the ear to stupid realism in the visual arts
is partly rhetoric, in the sense used above, the surrounding of an advertised object with emotional and imaginative intensity, the earnest, persuasive voice of the radio commercial, the torrent of prefabricated
phrases and cliches in political oratory. Nineteenth-century social critics
who could not always distinguish the paranoid from the prophetic, such
as Carlyle and Ruskin, often work themselves up emotionally by means
of rhetoric into states of mind where they are possessed by the rhetoric
and are no longer controlling it, so that a certain automatism comes into
the writing. We see this also in a debased form in propaganda harangues.

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In general, uncontrolled rhetorical babble is an expression of a sadomasochist cycle, where the thing that is uncontrolled is a desire either to hurt
someone else or to humiliate oneself. The definitive presentation of the
"anti-hero" in modern literature, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground,
emphasizes this feature of uncontrolled mechanical talk, and traces it to
an excess of conscious awareness over the power of action. The narrator
despises himself, and yet admires himself for being honest enough to
despise himself, and hence is continually possessed by rhetorical rages
directed either at himself or at some projection of himself. Similar tendencies exist in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is the chief reason why
Hamlet, with his melancholy and his broken power of decision, his
self-accusations and his uncontrolled brutality to others, becomes so central a Romantic and modern image of consciousness. The antirhetorical
tendency in modern literature is part of a general tendency in modern
culture to plant a series of antitank traps, so to speak, in the way of the
rumbling and creaking invaders of our minds.
In the creation of poetry there seems to be an oddly paradoxical element. Something oracular, something that holds and charms and spellbinds, is involved in it, and the oracular permits no distraction or
criticism: nothing must dispel its mood. Yet what the oracle expresses is
frequently an epigram, a pun, an ambiguous statement, or a conundrum
that sounds like a bad joke, like the witches' elliptical prophecies to
Macbeth [1.3.48-69; 4.1.48-132!. Wit is addressed to the awakened critical intelligence and to a perception of the incongruous. Poetry has often
veered between these two aspects of the poetic process: in the age of
Pope, wit was the preferred element; with the Romantics a more solemnly oracular tone dominated, or alternated with wit, as in Byron. In
the modern period the prevailing tone tended to shift again to wit. The
degree of abstraction in painting that we see in Leger or Modigliani,62 or
perhaps even in Cubism, where a representational picture has been
assimilated to geometrical outlines, is witty, in somewhat the same way
that poetry stepping along in antithetical rhyming couplets is witty. In
both it is the discordia concors of artistic discipline and natural untidiness
that evokes the sense of wit, as when a woman's breast becomes a
sphere or an epigram falls neatly into ten iambic syllables. T.E. Hulme,63
Wyndham Lewis,64 and others, in the early anti-Romantic phase of
modernism, were much struck by this analogy between abstraction and
satirical wit, and set it up as a standard against the continuous rhetoric
and oracular solemnity that they found in the Romantics, from Words-

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worth to Gertrude Stein. Of poets, perhaps Auden in English has given

us most clearly the sense of creation as play, an expression of man as
homo ludens.65 The contrived and artificial patterns of his verse are consistent with this, just as the light verse they resemble is more contrived
than heavy verse, and play-novels like detective stories more contrived
than "serious" fiction. Valery's view of poetry as a game bound by arbitrary rules like chess is similar, and Valery remarks that "inspiration" is
a state of mind in the reader, not in the writer66another example of the
modern tendency to turn as much activity as possible over to the reader.
There are many complaints about the obscurity of the arts in the modern world, and about the indifference that the modern artist seems to
have for his public. But we can see by now that modern art is directly
involved in a militant situation peculiar to our time. It does not simply
come into being as an expression of human creative power: it is born on
a battlefield, where the enemies are the anti-arts of passive impression. In
this context the arts demand an active response with an intensity that
hardly existed before. Hence the modern artist is actually in an immediate personal relation with his reader or viewer: he throws the ball to him,
so to speak, and his art depends on its being caught at the other end. We
have already noticed how in The Waste Land (and much other modern
poetry) the poet hands the continuity of his poem over to the reader, and
one could make out a very good case for saying that the reader of Finnegans Wake is the hero of that book, the person who laboriously spells out
the message of the dream. Finnegans Wake belongs of course to the
stream-of-consciousness technique in modern fiction. This technique,
which is still going strong in the novels of Samuel Beckett, is continuous,
but not rhetorically continuous: that is, the links are associative and not
merely ready-made as they are in a propagandist speech, hence they
require an active reader to see the sequential logic in them.
One would expect to find in the modern, then, some decline in the
prestige of the particular quality in art represented by the term "craftsmanship," or, perhaps more accurately, by the highly significant epithet
"finished." The work of art is traditionally something set up to be
admired: it is placed in a hierarchy where the "classic" or "masterpiece"
of perfect form is at the top. Modern art, especially in such developments as action-painting, is concerned to give the impression of process
rather than product, of something emerging out of the heat of struggle
and still showing the strain of its passing from conception to birth.
Balzac tells a celebrated story about a painter whose masterpiece broke

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39

down into a tangle of meaningless lines. But the modern century has to
take this parable of the chef d'oeuvre inconnu [unknown masterpiece]
seriously, for the lines are not meaningless if they record the painter's
involvement with his subject and also demand ours. Malraux67 has
remarked how much the sketch, the sense of something rapidly blocked
out and left incomplete, seems to us the index of an artist's vitality. The
same principles hold for poetry, even to the extent that a poet today can
get more money out of selling his manuscript excreta to libraries than he
can out of royalties on the published volume. Dramatists try to break up
the hypnotic illusion of the play by various devices that suggest a dramatic process in formation, such as introducing stagehands or prompters, or breaking down the distinction between actor and role. Such
devices are regarded by Brecht as a creative form of alienation, giving
the audience a closer view of imaginative reality by chopping holes in
the rhetorical facade.68 Novelists adopt similar devices to break the
story-teller's spell on the reader: thus Gide's The Counterfeiters is a story
about a novelist writing a novel called The Counterfeiters. Readers of
Canadian literature may see similar tendencies in Reaney's Listen to the
Wind or Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.69
The tendency to prefer the imperfect work engaged in history to the
perfected masterpiece that pulls away from time is closely related to
another tendency which also originates in the opposition to passive
anti-art. Advertising and propaganda are interested arts, arts with ulterior motives. Behind them is a course of action which they end by
exhorting one to follow. A good deal of literature has followed the same
pattern (e.g., The Pilgrim's Progress, Self-Help by Samuel Smiles) and still
does. But as a rule the work of art as such is disinterested: there is nothing beyond itself to which it points as the fulfilment of itself. In modern
painting and poetry, especially in the last two decades, there has been a
good deal of emphasis not only on this disinterested and self-containing
aspect of the arts, but of attack on those tendencies within the arts themselves that seem to lead us passively on from one thing to another. A
detective story is a good example of this donkey's-carrot writing: we
begin it to find out what we are told on the last page. Writing with this
structure is teleological: it contains a hidden purpose, and we read on to
discover what that purpose is.
Many modern poets, with William Carlos Williams70 at their head,
regard such concealing of a hidden design as gimmick-writing: for them,
the image, the scene, the thing presented, the immediate experience, is

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the reality that the arts are concerned with, and to go beyond this is to
risk dishonesty. The theory of the modern style in poetry is set out in the
letters of Rimbaud known as the lettres du voyant, with their insistence
that the genuine poet sees directly, in contrast to the rhetorician who
talks about what he sees. The same kind of emphasis has been common
in painting for a long time: music has been affected by it more recently,
but perhaps more radically than any other art. Classical music, up to
quite recent times, has been intensely teleological: in symphonies from
Haydn to Brahms we feel strongly how the end of a movement is implied
in the beginning, and how we are led towards it step by step. In much
contemporary music, both electronic and conventional, the emphasis is
on the immediate sense impression of sound: the music is not going anywhere; it may even be proceeding by chance, as in some of the experiments of John Cage.71 The ear is not thrown forward into the future, to
hear a theme being worked out or a discord resolved: it is kept sternly in
the present moment. This conception of the unit of experience as a thing
in itself is of course an intensely impersonal attitude to art: the writer
(and similarly with the other arts) is doing all he can to avoid the sense of
impressing himself on his reader by suggesting meaning or form or purpose beyond what is presented. In this conception of chosisme,72 as it is
sometimes called, it is not simply continuity, but significance or meaning
itself, which has been handed over to the reader.
One may see in most of these modern tendencies a good deal of distrust in the rational consciousness as the main area of communication in
the arts. Modern art is irrational in many respects, but it is important to
see why and in what ways it is. We spoke of advertising and propaganda as stunning or demoralizing the critical consciousness in order to
move past it and set up their structures in the rest of the mind. There is
clearly no point in setting the artists to defend a Maginot line73 that has
already been outflanked: the artist has to move directly back into the
attacked area, and set up his own structures there instead. Hence the
various Freud-inspired movements, like surrealism, which communicate on a normally repressed level; hence too the great variety of modern
developments of fantasy and articulated dream, where there is no identity, and where the world is like that of Milton's chaos, with things forming and disappearing by chance and melting into other things. In Kafka,
for example, the event, the ordinary unit of a story, is replaced by the
psychological event, and the social and other significances of what is
happening are allegories of these psychological events. The primary

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emphasis is on the mental attitude that makes the events possible. Thus
The Castle is presented as a kind of anxiety nightmare, yet a theological
allegory of God's dealings with man and a political allegory of the
police state run in counterpoint with it.
I am not trying to suggest that all these modern tendencies form part
of a single consistent pattern: far from it. All that they have in common
is an imaginative opposition to the anti-arts of persuasion and exhortation. The obvious question to ask is, of course: granted that the arts in
the modern world are full of antagonism to the anti-arts, granted that
they parody them in all sorts of clever ways, granted that they encourage an active instead of a passive response, does this really make them
socially effective? In a world resounding every day with the triumphs of
slanted news and brainwashed politics, what can poetry and painting
do, tortoises in a race with hares? This question is one of the most powerful arguments of our enemy the accuser. We are constantly learning
from the alienation of progress that merely trying to clarify one's mind
is useless and selfish, because the individual counts for so little in society. Marxism, with its carefully planned agenda of revolution, provides
the most complete answer to the question, "What then must we do?"74
The democracies provide more limited and piecemeal forms of social
activism, demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins, protest marches, petitions,
and the like, partly (if one may say so with all due sympathy and
respect) as gestures of homage to the superior effectiveness to be found
in the world of public relations and controversies. Similarly, the artist
often feels an impulse to guarantee his vision by his life, and hence we
find the pattern of antagonism of art to anti-art repeated in an antagonism of artist to society.
In political thought there is a useful fiction known as the social contract, the sense that man enters into a certain social context by the act of
getting born. In earlier contract theories, like that of Hobbes, the contract was thought of as universal, binding everyone without exception.
From Rousseau on there is more of a tendency to divide people into
those who accept and defend the existing social contract because they
benefit from it, and the people who are excluded from most of its benefits, and so feel no obligation, or much less, to it. As everyone knows,
Marx defined the excluded body as the proletariat or workers, and saw
it as the means to a reconstituted society. Those who accept and are
loyal to the social contract are known consistently, throughout the
whole period, as the bourgeoisie or middle class, otherwise known, in

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different contexts, as Philistines or squares. Whenever artists think of

themselves as a social group, they seem inclined to define themselves in
terms of their opposition to the bourgeois society of the contract, with its
materialistic and conformist standards.
Some of them have followed the Marxist form of this opposition,
though very few in the English-speaking countries, and very few even of
those, have been of a type that under a proletarian dictatorship would
survive the first purge. Radical sympathies in American fiction have
tended rather to take the form of a sentimental populism, of a thepeople-keep-marching-on type. During the Depression, the contest of
labour and management began to assume something of the dimensions
of a revolution, and the labour movement still had, like the Negroes
today, the dignity of an oppressed group. As a result there was a considerable infiltration of working-class sympathies into the drama, films,
and musical comedies of that period. But today few areas of American
life are less inspiring to the Muse than the trade unions. The collapse of
Communist sympathies in American culture was not the result of
McCarthyism and other witch-hunts, which were not a cause but an
effect of that collapse. The object of the witch-hunt is the witch, that is, a
helpless old woman whose dangerousness is assumed to rationalize
quite different interests and pleasures. Similarly the Communist issue in
McCarthyism was a red herring for a democratic development of the big
lie as a normal political weapon: if internal Communism had been a genuine danger the struggle against it would have taken a genuine form.
Sympathy with Communism collapsed under the feeling that, even at its
best, and ignoring its atrocities, the bureaucracy of Communism was
enforcing much the same kind of social contract as the managerial and
authoritarian elements in the democracies. Hence American liberals,
even radicals, soon lost all faith in the moral superiority of Communism.
Losing the faith75 was undoubtedly right: the immense relief with which
they lost it may have been less so.
But if the Marxist form of radicalism, of the kind that helps to shape
the dramas of Brecht and Gorky, is rare in American literature, there is a
type of anarchism in it which is far more common. The figure of the individual who will not play the silly games of society, who seems utterly
insignificant but represents an unbreakable human force, runs through
its literature from Rip van Winkle and the romances of Cooper to the
present day. The patron saint of this tendency is Thoreau, retreating to
Walden to build his own cabin and assert that the only genuine America

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is the society of those who will not throw all their energies into the endless vacuum suction of imperialist hysteria and of consuming consumer
goods ["Conclusion"]. Huck Finn, drifting down the great river with
Jim and preferring hell with Jim to the white slave-owner's heaven [The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chap. 31], is a similar figure, one of the
bums, hoboes, and social outcasts who reach a deeper level of community than the rest of us. This outcast or hobo figure is the hero of most of
the Chaplin films; he also finds a congenial haven in comic strips. The
juvenile delinquent or emotionally disturbed adolescent may in some
contexts be one of his contemporary equivalents, like the narrator of The
Catcher in the Rye. Sympathy for the youth who sees no moral difference
between delinquency and conformity still inspires such Utopian works
as Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd.76 An earlier and very remarkable Canadian work of this anarchist kind is Frederick Philip Grove's
A Search for America, where the America that the narrator searches for
is again the submerged community that only the outcast experiences.
This form of proletariat has recently combined with another tradition
of very different origin. One distinctively modern element in our culture, introduced in the main by the Romantic movement, is the conception of the serious writer, who is in a prophetic relation to society, and
consequently in opposition to it. It is no longer sufficient to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that they who live to please must please to live:77 the
serious writer is committed to saying what may not and probably will
not please, even if he hopes to please enough, on a different level of
pleasure, to be able to live also. With Baudelaire and his successors this
antagonism to society becomes a way of life, usually called Bohemian,
the antagonism being expressed partly in the oversimplifying phrase,
epater le bourgeois [getting the middle class's back up]. More accurately,
the artist explores forbidden or disapproved modes of life in both imagination and experience. The square, the man who lives by the social contract, takes the public appearance of society to be, for him, its reality.
Hence his obsessive tendency to appear in public clean, clothed, sober,
and accompanied by his wife. The artist may symbolize a more intensely imaginative community through dirt or slovenliness, lousifying
himself as much as possible, as Rimbaud remarked, or through more
openly acknowledged forms of sexual relationship outside marriage.
Drugs and narcotics have been associated with the arts for a long time,
but took on a new intensity and relevance to the creative process with
the Romantic movement. The bourgeois view that the appearance of

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society is its reality is of course based on illusion, and we have seen how
a breakdown in illusion is often more disturbing than genuine dangers.
Similarly, long hair in young men or pictures portraying a consenting
sex act may stir up deeper social anxieties than actual delinquency or
rape.
The combination of Bohemian and hobo traditions in the beat, hip,
and other disaffected movements of our time seems to be part of an
unconscious effort to define a social proletariat in Freudian instead of
Marxist terms. Such groups find, or say they find, that a withdrawal
from the social establishment is a necessary step in freeing them from
repression and in releasing their creative energies. Creation is close to
the sexual instinct, and it is in their attitude to sex that the two groups
collide most violently, as each regards the other's views of sex as
obscene. The Freudian proletarian sees established society as a repressive anxiety structure/8 the basis of which is the effort to control the sexual impulse and restrict it to predictable forms of expression. His
emphasis on the sexual aspect of life, his intense awareness of the role of
the thwarted sexual drive in the cruelties and fears of organized society,
make him quite as much a moralist as his opponent, though his moral
aim is of course to weaken the anxiety structure by the shock tactics of
"bad" words, pornography, or the publicizing of sexual perversions and
deviations. The collision of youth and age is more openly involved in
this kind of movement than elsewhere. In a society dominated by the
alienation of progress, the young, whose lives are thrown forward to the
future, achieve a curious kind of moral advantage, as though the continued survival of anyone whose life is mainly in the past required some
form of justification. Certain other elements in this social movement,
such as the growth of confessional and self-analysing groups, show
some parallels with Marxist techniques.
The picaresque heroes of Kerouac are "Dharma bums," social outcasts
with serious social and even religious ideals.79 Their environment is the
squalid and seedy urban one, the city that is steadily devouring the
countryside, yet in their repudiation of everything structured and organized in it they struggle for an innocence that is almost pastoral. They
seek a kinship with the nature which, like them, has been repressed,
almost obliterated, by organized society. In two writers who have
strongly influenced this Freudian proletariat movement, Henry Miller
and D.H. Lawrence, pastoralism is a central theme. In the nineteenth
century the relation of country to city was often thought of, in writers

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who had begun to hate and fear the rise of a metropolitan civilization, as
a relation of innocence to experience, of the healthy natural virtues of
the country corrupted by the feverish excitements of the town. This
myth produced a good deal of nineteenth-century literature and social
propaganda, ranging in value from Wordsworth's Michael to temperance melodramas. The pronouncements on drinking and sexual mores
made by those in our society who are most spectacularly not with it, like
many members of the lower clergy and the higher judiciary, are still
often inspired by such visions of a virtuous rustic daring to be a Daniel
in a wicked Babylon [Daniel 7-12].
A number of other writers who continued the tradition of eighteenth-century primitivism also nurtured a tangled garden of metaphors
about the need for being "rooted in the soil," as part of a similar opposition to the metropolitan development of society. This form of nostalgic de
la boue80 was a strong influence on nineteenth-century fiction (Jean
Giono, Knut Hamsun),81 though the ponderous prose lyrics it tended to
specialize in are largely forgotten now. It is an attitude with a naturally
strong bias toward racism, and in this form it entered into the volkisch
developments in Germany which lay behind much of Nazism. Nineteenth-century French Canada also had its propagandists for the motto
emparons-nous du sol,82 idealizing the simple peasant bound to his land
and his ancestral faith, a picture with a strong resemblance to Millet's
Angelus, of which the most famous expression is Maria Chapdelaine.83
There were similar movements elsewhere in America, like the Southern
agrarian movement of a generation ago.84 In Miller and Lawrence this
pastoral theme is less sentimentalized and more closely connected with
the more deeply traditional elements of the pastoral: spontaneity in
human relations, especially sexual relations; the stimulus to creative
power that is gained from a simpler society, less obsessed by satisfying
imaginary wants; and, at least in Lawrence, a sense of identity with
nature of great delicacy and precision.
The pastoral withdrawal from bourgeois values merges insensibly
into another, the sense of the artist as belonging to an elite or neo-aristocracy. The origin of this attitude is the feeling that in a world full of the
panic of change, the artist's role is to make himself a symbol of tradition,
a sentinel or witness to the genuine continuity in human life, like the
London churches in The Waste Land. In religion this attitude expresses
itself, as a rule, in adherence or conversion to the Catholic Church. Here
it is often the Church as a symbol of authority or tradition that is the

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attraction: Charles Maurras expressed this most bluntly by saying that he

was interested in Catholicism but not in Christianity.85 Political preferences are right-wing, with emphasis on the traditional functions of aristocracy and royalty, especially among those who actually were of
aristocratic origin, like Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Eliot's characterizing of
himself as "royalist in politics"86 is a late and not very resonant British
echo of what was mainly a French and nineteenth-century tendency.
Economic preferences vary, but are always strongly against the conspiracies of international finance. In the 19205 and '305 many of this group
were attracted to Fascism, which they saw as leading to a new recognition of heroic energy in life, including the creative energy of the arts. Both
this group and the pastoralists are haunted by the sense of an invisible
serenity which has disappeared from contemporary life but can be
re-experienced through tradition. Often this feeling takes the form of a
sense of vanished gods, like the "dignified, invisible"87 presences of
Eliot's rose garden. Yeats tried to identify these presences with his pantheon of Irish gods and heroes; Lawrence with his darker gods and his
historical myths like that of the Etruscans; George and other German
Romantics with the Classical gods; Jung with unconscious archetypes.
Christian writers tend to think more conceptually of the organizing ideas
of religionoriginal sin, Incarnation, a personal power of evil, and the
likeas giving a new richness and depth of significance to life, whether
of joy or terror. "I do wish those people who deny the reality of eternal
punishment," said the Catholic poet Lionel Johnson, "would understand
their own dreadful vulgarity."88
One type who most obviously withdraws from the social contract and
sets up a way of life in opposition to it is the criminal. There are two
kinds of criminals, professional and amateur: those for whom crime is
money and those for whom crime is fun. We are concerned with the latter group. It is obvious that the criminal or conspirator is a ready symbol
for the artist who breaks with the social contract; one thinks of Joyce's
Stephen Dedalus and his conspiratorial motto of silence, exile, and cunning, or Rimbaud's identification of himself as a child of Satan, linked to
criminals, slaves, and outcasts of all kinds. The symbol of the artist as
criminal, however, goes much deeper. I spoke of the way in which optimistic theories of progress and revolution had grown out of Rousseau's
conception of a society of nature and reason buried under the injustices
of civilization and awaiting release. But, around the same time, the Marquis de Sade was expounding a very different view of the natural soci-

Improved Binoculars

47

ety. According to this, nature teaches us that pleasure is the highest

good in life, and the keenest form of pleasure consists in inflicting or
suffering pain. Hence the real natural society would not be the reign of
equality and reason prophesied by Rousseau: it would be a society in
which those who liked tormenting others were set free to do so. So far as
evidence is relevant, there is more evidence for de Sade's theory of natural society than there is for Rousseau's. In any case there is an unpleasantly large degree of truth in the sadist vision, and a good many literary
conceptions have taken off from it, or near it. One is the cult of the holy
sinner,89 the person who achieves an exceptional awareness, whether
religious or aesthetic in character, from acts of cruelty, or, at least, brings
about such an awareness in us. Dostoevsky's Stavrogin, Gide's Lafcadio, with his acte gratuit or unmotivated crime, the hero of Camus's
L'Etranger and of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, are examples.90 A good
deal of contemporary American writing links not merely picaresque
law-breaking, smoking marijuana and the like, but outright violence
and terror, with serious social attitudes. There is something of this in
Mailer, and a good deal more in LeRoi Jones and other "black power"
adherents.91 In D.H. Lawrence, too, a curious hysterical cruelty occasionally gets out of hand, most continuously, perhaps, in The Plumed
Serpent.
Jean Genet is the most remarkable example of the contemporary artist
as criminal: his sentence of life imprisonment was appealed against by
Sartre, Claudel, Cocteau, and Gide, and even before his best-known
works had appeared, Sartre had written a seven-hundred-page biography of him called Saint Genet. Genet's most famous play, in this country,
is Le Balcon. Here the main setting is a brothel in which the patrons dress
up as bishops, generals, or judges and engage in sadistic ritual games
with the whores, who are flogged and abused in the roles of penitents or
thieves. The point is that society as a whole is one vast sadistic ritual of
this sort. As the mock-bishop says, very rudely, he does not care about
the function of bishop: all he wants is the metaphor, the idea or sexual
core of the office. The madam of the brothel remarks, "They all want
everything to be as true as possible . . . minus something indefinable, so
that it won't be true"92a most accurate description of what I have been
calling stupid realism. A revolution is going on outside: it is put down
by the chief of police, and the patrons of the brothel are pulled out of it
to enact the "real" social forms of the games they have been playing.
Nobody notices the difference, because generals and judges and bishops

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are traditional metaphors, and new patrons come to the brothel and continue the games. The chief of police, the only one with any real social
power, is worried because he is not a traditional metaphor, and nobody
comes to the brothel to imitate him. Finally, however, one such patron
does turn up: the leader of the revolution. There is a good deal more in
the play, but this account will perhaps indicate how penetrating it is as a
sadist vision of society.
All these antisocial attitudes in modern culture are, broadly speaking,
reactionary. That is, their sense of antagonism to existing society is what
is primary, and it is much clearer and more definite than any alternative
social ideal. Hugh MacDiarmid, supporting both Communism and Scottish nationalism, and Dos Passes, moving from a simple radicalism to a
simple conservatism, are random examples among writers of what
sometimes seems a dissent for its own sake. Wherever we turn, we are
made aware of the fact that society is a repressive anxiety structure, and
that creative power comes from a part of the mind that resists repression
but is not in itself moral or rational. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pale
Fire, a gentle, wistful, rather touching pastoral poem falls into the hands
of a lunatic who proceeds to "annotate" it with a wild paranoid fantasy
about his own adventures as a prince in some European state during a
revolution. Poem and commentary have nothing to do with each other,
and perhaps that is the only point the book makes. But the title, taken
from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens [4.3.438], suggests a certain allegory
of the relation of art to the wish-fulfilment fantasies that keep bucking
and plunging underneath it. Such forces are in all of us, and are strong
enough to destroy the world if they are not controlled through release
instead of repression. In my last lecture I want to talk about the way in
which the creative arts are absorbed into society through education.
Meanwhile we may notice that the real basis for the opposition of artist
and society is the fact that not merely communications media and public
relations, but the whole structure of society itself, is an anti-art, an old
and worn-out creation that needs to be created anew.
Ill Clair de lune intellectuel
The modern world began with the Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Revolution set up an economic structure beside the political one
which was really a rival form of society. Industry had often enough
taken the form of an organization distinct from the state, but never

Clair de lune intellectuel

49

before in history did man have so strong a feeling of living under two
social orders as he did in the period of laissez-faire. The separation
could not, of course, last indefinitely, because the economic social order
had so revolutionary an effect on the political one. Explicitly in Marxism, and more tentatively in the democracies, all society eventually
comes to be thought of as consisting functionally only of workers or producers. Marxism moves in the direction of a final or once-for-all revolution in which the productive society becomes the only society; in the
democracies the nonproductive groups, or leisure classes, gradually
become socially unfunctional. In both types of society, however, there
are, in addition to the workers and their directors, a large group who
exist to explain, manifest, encourage, rationalize, and promote the various forms of production. In Marxist societies, those in this second group
are known as party workers; in the democracies, especially in North
America, they are thought of as advertisers and educators.
It seems clear that even with the heavy handicap of defence budgets,
even with the assistance given to those parts of the world which are
committed to the West but are otherwise unfortunate, the productive
power of American and other advanced democracies has become so
overefficient that it can continue to function only by various featherbedding93 devices. One device, of the type satirized in Parkinson's Law,94
is the subsidizing of employment; another, of the type lamented in The
Feminine Mystique,95 is the effort to encourage as many as possible of the
female half of the population to devote themselves to becoming
full-time consumers. But these devices do not conceal the fact that leisure is growing so rapidly, both in the amount of time and the number
of people it affects, as to be a social complex equal in importance to
employment itself.
Thus the technological revolution is becoming more and more an
educational rather than an industrial phenomenon. For education is the
positive aspect of leisure. As long as we think of society, in nineteenth-century terms, as essentially productive, leisure is only spare
time, usually filled up with various forms of distraction, and a "leisure
class," which has nothing but spare time, is only a class of parasites. But
as soon as we realize that leisure is as genuine and important an aspect
of everyone's life as remunerative work, leisure becomes something that
also demands discipline and responsibility. Distraction, of the kind one
sees on highways and beaches at holiday weekends, is not leisure but a
running away from leisure, a refusal to face the test of one's inner

5O

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resources that spare time poses. It is to genuine leisure what the

feather-bedding devices I have just referred to are to genuine industry
and business. Our problem today is not that of a leisure class, but of leisure itself, as an increasingly growing factor in the lives of all classes. In
relation to the economy, man is essentially functional, deriving his individuality from his job and his social context. In relation to leisure he is
essentially a performer or actor, judged, not by his specific role, but by
his skill in performance. That is, any leisure activity which is not sheer
idleness or distraction depends on some acquired skill, and the acquiring and practice of that skill is a mode of education.
Education involves, first of all, the network of educational institutions:
schools and universities, which occupy most of the time and attention of
a large part of the population, and many other types of organization
churches, museums, art galleries, theatres, just to start with. To look at
our society realistically today, we have to think of its economic or productive aspect as a part of it: let us say, by a rhetorical statistic, half of it.
The other half consists of the educational activities which are growing
much faster, proportionately, than industry, and which I shall call the leisure structure of society. The industrial and the leisure structures make
up, between them, the program of needs and activities which, in their
degenerate form in the ancient Roman world, were described as bread
and circuses.96
In the democracies, as well as in the Communist states, social development has been mainly a matter of relating the economic structure to the
political one. In Canada, as in Britain and America, the left wing tends to
favour closer relations, usually stopping short of complete socialization,
and the right wing tends to favour economic autonomy, usually stopping considerably short of pure laissez-faire. Views on the relation of the
political to the leisure structure seem to be the reverse of this. Liberal
sympathies are more disposed to keep the leisure structure autonomous,
and to feel that the political influence on the leisure structure is normally
a bad influence. The right wing are more disposed to mutter about the
injustice being done to the anti-intellectual majority of taxpayers, and to
call for tighter cultural budgets.
In any event the question of what the government does in relation to
the leisure structure is taking on an increasingly revolutionary importance. The word "revolution," which originally suggested conspiracy
and barricades in the street, can now, in our society, only be associated
with some kind of centralized action, usually by the government, in

Clair de lune intellectuel

51

whatever areas can develop enough freedom of movement to revolutionize anything. At present the so-called mass media are sponsored
mainly by advertising, which means that they are related primarily to
the economy: these include television, newspapers, and the dwindling
body of fiction and picture magazines which function as retail advertising journals. The turning of sponsorship into direct control, as when an
editor is dismissed or a program cancelled for offending an advertiser, is
felt to be pernicious by those who are not completely cynical in such
matters. Every effort of a government, however timid, to set up national
film and broadcasting companies, and thus to turn over at least some of
the mass media to the leisure structure, is part of a fateful revolutionary
process. So is every effort to subsidize creative talent; so, even more
obviously, is every effort to plan a city more intelligently than leaving it
to speculative blight. We are taking the first cautious steps on this revolutionary road now, and it is highly typical of Canada that it is the
administration of the leisure structure, questions of dividing responsibility and authority, that should be most eagerly discussed. The complete
control of the leisure structure by the political or economic power is a
logical development of Marxism, at least in its twentieth-century form,
but to us the Marxist attitude to the leisure structure seems a purely
reactionary one. If the growth of the leisure structure is as important
and central a development as I think it is, some of the major possibilities
of further social development remain with the more industrially
advanced democracies.
Schools and universities are mainly for young people, and, under the
influence of the view of society as consisting primarily of wage-earners,
they have traditionally been thought of as places in which the young are
prepared for real life. This view is congenial to the normal tendency of
the adult to think of the adolescent as a rudimentary and primitive form
of himself. In my own student days during the Depression, when so
many students came to college because of the difficulty of finding jobs,
it was felt that the four years spent in study required some justification.
What creates a man's self-respect, it was thought, is the holding of a job
as the head of a family, and university appeared merely to postpone this
function. Young people in working-class homes felt this even more
strongly, and, in my experience, did not much care that most of them
were unofficially but effectively excluded from the universities. The
greatly increased number attending today reflects of course an increase
in both population and economic buoyancy; but when it is said that stu-

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dents go to college because industry and business now require more

education, I suspect a hangover of the old self-justifying arguments. I
think students come to college because they realize, more clearly than
many of their elders, that by doing so they are fully participating in their
society, and can no longer be thought of as getting ready for something
else more important.
It inevitably follows from the same principle, however, that the university, or at least the kind of thing the university does, can hardly
remain indefinitely the exclusive preserve of the young. The question of
adult education is still too large and shapeless for us to be able to look
squarely at it along with all our other problems of expansion, but, apart
from the very large amount of education within industry itself, the adult
population will also need institutions of teaching and discussion as the
organized form of their leisure time: I think particularly of married
women with grown-up families. It is difficult for a government not to
think of education in terms of training, and to regard the university as a
public service institution concerned with training. Such a conception
naturally puts a heavy emphasis on youth, who are allegedly being
trained for society, the human resources of the future, as we say. Adult
education will no doubt enter the picture first in the context of retraining, as it does now in industry, but before long we shall have to face a
growing demand for an education which has no immediate reference to
training at all.
We have next to consider the relation of the leisure structure to the
arts. Down to the nineteenth century, painters, poets, composers tended
to follow the traditions set by their predecessors, imitating them and carrying on their conventions in a more elaborate way. Thus there was a
steady increase in self-awareness and complexity, and a process resembling that of aging, with each generation building on what had been
done up to that point. With the nineteenth century there came, along
with the continuing of this process, a prodigious lateral expansion in
influence. It was mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century that
the great museums came into being, at least in their present form, and
the museums brought together an immense assemblage, not merely of
works of art, but of objects that presented analogies to and suggestions
for the arts. The result was to provide the artist with an encyclopedic
range of influences; it made the artist an academician instead of an
apprentice learning from masters. What the museums did for the visual
arts modern recordings have done for music.

Clair de lune intellectuel

53

The increase of historical knowledge, of which archaeology formed a

central part, was so vast as to make it seem as though the cemeteries
were on the march, the entire past awakening to an aesthetic apocalypse.
Painters and sculptors in particular were presented with a worldwide
panorama of creative skills, very largely in the applied or so-called
"minor" arts. This was naturally an important influence on the trend to
formalism that I spoke of in my last lecture, for what this panorama
revealed was primarily a universal language of design. Design in its turn
has provided a basis for the unifying of the "major" and "minor" arts.
Anyone today comparing an exhibition of modern painting or sculpture
with one of textiles or pottery gets the impression that in the modern
period there is really only an art of design, which is applied equally to all
the visual arts, major and minor. I have referred to the view of William
Morris,97 at the threshold of the modern period, that the minor or useful
arts were a key area in social revolution because they represent, more
clearly than the major arts, the imagination as a way of life, as providing
the visible forms of a free society. Although social developments have
not followed Morris's antimechanistic anarchism, it is still no doubt true
that the principles which link such a painter as Mondrian98 to textile or
ceramic design are a part of a considerable democratizing of aesthetic
experience. If so, Morris was right in seeing a significant social, even a
political dimension in modern cultural developments.
Along with archaeology and its "museum without walls,"99 as it has
been called, came anthropology and its study of "primitive" cultures,
which brought primitive art, with its weird stylizing of form, its openly
phallic and sexual themes, its deliberate distortion of perspective,
squarely in front of the artist's eye. Of all elements in the modern tradition, perhaps that of primitive art, of whatever age or continent, has had
the most pervasive influence. The primitive, with its immediate connection with magic, expresses a directness of imaginative impact which is
naive and yet conventionalized, spontaneous and yet precise. It indicates most clearly the way in which a long and tired tradition of Western art, which has been refining and sophisticating itself for centuries,
can be revived, or even reborn. Perhaps the kinship between the primitive and ourselves goes even deeper: it has frequently been remarked
that we may be, if we survive, the primitives of an unknown culture, the
cave men of a new mental era.100
It is not always realized how closely analogous the developments of
modern literature are to those in the visual arts. The worldwide pan-

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The Modern Century

orama of the museums is not attainable in literature with the same

immediacy, because of the barriers of language. Linguistics sometimes
gives an illusion of having surmounted these barriers, but the illusion of
literature in translation is even less convincing. However, the trend to
formalism, stylizing, and abstraction is quite as marked in poetry as in
painting. The elements of verbal design are myth and metaphor, both of
which are modes of identification. That is, they are primitive and naive
associations of things, a sun and a god, a hero and a lion, which turn
their backs on realism or accurate descriptive statement. In literature, as
in painting, realism was an emancipating force down to the nineteenth
century, when it reached its culmination in the great novelists of that
period. The modern period begins with Baudelaire and the symbolisme
that followed him, and literature ever since has been increasingly organized by symbolism, dense and often difficult metaphor, myth, especially in drama, and folk tale. This development was anticipated in the
great mythopoeic poetry of the Romantics, especially Blake, Shelley, and
Keats, who correspond in poetry to the revolution of Turner in painting.
Like the parallel developments in visual art, the increase of consciously
employed myth and metaphor is also an increase in erudition and the
conscious awareness of tradition.
When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected
and classified at that time. The oral ballad makes a functional use of
refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts. The fact
that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were
smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry. The literary ballads which imitate
these characteristicsthe Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
Blake's Mental Traveller, Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Mercicome about as
close as poetry can come to reproducing directly the voice of the creative
powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited
and yet curiously impersonal as well. This was also the "democratic"
voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which
cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture. A different but
related Canadian tradition is that of the chansonniers, as represented
today by Gilles Vigneault.101

Clair de lune intellectuel

55

Fifty years ago it could be said that the university and the creative artist were at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. The university, on its
humanistic side, ran a critical and scholarly establishment concerned
with the past, and related itself to the present by translating the values of
the past into contemporary middle-class values. Anyone interested in
painting or writing was likely to drop out of school as soon as it had
wasted the legal amount of his time and devote himself to living precariously by his wits. I spent a dinner talking to such a (Canadian) writer
recently: he told me of how he had left school at grade ten and eventually
established himself as a writer, of how his life since had been financially
difficult, even despairing at times, but redeemed by the excitement of an
unexpected sale, or, more genuinely, by occasional gleams of satisfaction
over a creative job well done. A century ago this would have been a
familiar type of story, but while I listened with interest and respect,
because I knew his work and admired it, I felt that I was hearing one of
the last legends of a vanishing species, of a way of life that was going and
would not return.
For in the last few decades the leisure structure has become much
more integrated. The university's interest in contemporary culture is
now practically obsessive, nor is its relation to it confined to mere interest. More and more of the established artists are on its teaching staff,
and more and more of the younger rebels are their undergraduate students. While serving on a committee for awarding fellowships to Canadian writers, I noticed that practically all the serious English candidates
were employed by universities and practically all the French ones by the
National Film Board or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. What
cultural differences this implied I do not know, but for both groups
some professional connection with the leisure structure was so regular
as to amount practically to a closed shop. When the beatnik movement
began about ten years ago, it seemed as though an anti-academic, even
anti-intellectual tendency was consolidating around a new kind of cultural experience. It attracted certain types of expression, such as the
improvising swing ensembles and their derivatives, which had traditionally been well outside the orbit of higher education. But the academics got interested in them too, and vice versa.
The nineteenth-century artist was typically a loner: even in the twentieth he was often the last stand of laissez-faire, resisting every kind of
social mediation between himself and his public. It is still often asserted
that he ought to continue to be so, and should avoid the seductions of

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The Modern Century

university posts and foundation grants. The social facts of yesterday are
the cliches of today. But he is now in a world where such agencies as the
Canada Council102 represent a growing concern on the part of society
with the leisure structure. This has affected all aspects of the arts: we
may note particularly the changes in genre. Some arts, like music and
drama, are ensemble performances for audience; others, like the novel
and the easel painting, are individualized. In an intensely individualized era like the Victorian age, the novel goes up and the drama goes
down. Up until quite recently, the creative person, say in literature, was
typically one who "wanted to write," and what he wanted to write was
usually poetry or fiction. He might dream of rivalling Shakespeare, but
he would be unlikely to want Shakespeare's job of a busy actor-manager
in a profit-sharing corporation. It looks as though creative interests were
shifting again to the dramatic: it is Pinter and Albee and Beckett on the
stage, Bergman and Fellini and others in film, who seem to be making
cultural history today, as the novelists were making it a century ago. The
creative undergraduate tends less to bring his sheaf of poems to his
instructor, and tends more to ask his advice about where he can get
financial assistance, private or foundational, as a result of having gone
broke with a film-making or dramatic venture. This may be a temporary
vogue, but I think not, and of course it is obvious how this kind of creative interest immediately involves the artist in the social aspects of the
leisure structure. (Psychotherapy, so profoundly connected with the
contemporary imagination, has recently changed its emphasis from narrative and confessional techniques to dramatic ones,103 which is perhaps
another aspect of the same cultural trend.)
In my earlier talks I spoke of the modern imagination as resisting the
pressure of advertising and propaganda, which assume and try to bring
about a passive response. Advertising and propaganda come respectively from the economic and the political structures, and I touched on
the neurosis in modern life which springs from the feeling that these
structures are not worth loyalty. For all our dislike of the word "totalitarian,"104 we have to recognize that there is a profound and genuine, if
ultimately specious, appeal in any form of social activity which promises to expand into a complete way of life, engaging all aspects of one's
interests and providing fulfilment for one's cultural, spiritual, and intellectual as well as social needs. A generation ago many people plunged
into radical politics in the hope of finding a total program of this kind,
but all forms of politics, including the radical form, seem sooner or later

Clair de lune intellectuel

57

to dwindle into a specialized chess game. Many others at various times

have sought the same total activity in religion, a more promising place,
but often a disappointing one, with rather second-rate cultural rewards.
It would simplify my argument considerably at this point if I could say
that the leisure structure was the missing piece of society, that it is what
we can give an unqualified loyalty to, and that it does fulfil the entire
range of nonmaterial human needs. There is however no reason to suppose that the leisure structure, as it grows in social importance, will produce a social institution any better (if no worse) than business or politics
do: the most we can hope for is a system of checks and balances which
will prevent any one of our new three estates from becoming too powerful. Even Plato hardly went so far as to believe in the perfectibility of
intellectuals, and the history of the Christian Church, which started out
with a much higher ideal of loyalty, does not encourage us to feel that
any social institution can be a genuine embodiment of a social ideal. It is
mainly those in the departments concerned with the arts, humanities,
and general education who show a clear difference of social attitude, not
because their virtue is superior, but because their budgets are low. The
rich grants that scientists and administrators can obtain as employees
of government and industry will always be attractive, whatever their
relation to academic freedom, a relation which in itself will become
much hazier as universities become more dependent financially on
government.
I should describe the ideal or Utopian features of the leisure structure,
along with the political and economic ones, rather differently. The evolution of political democracy, as it fought against entrenched privilege
at first, and then against dictatorial tendencies, has to some extent been
a genuine evolution of an idea of liberty, however often betrayed and
perverted, and however much threatened still. The evolution of industry into a society of producers, as labour continued to fight against a
managerial oligarchy, has been to a correspondingly modified extent an
evolution of an idea of equality. Matthew Arnold warned the dominant
bourgeoisie of Victorian England that a society could pursue liberty to
the point of forgetting about equality.105 Today, with capitalism in a
counter-reformation period and with totalitarianism thought of as
something foreign, we prefer to be reminded that societythat is, other
societiescan pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty.
But neither political democracy nor trade unions have developed much
sense of the third revolutionary ideal of fraternitythe word "com-

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rade" has for most of us a rather sinister and frigid sound. Fraternity is
perhaps the ideal that the leisure structure has to contribute to society. A
society of students, scholars, and artists is a society of neighbours, in the
genuinely religious sense of that word. That is, our neighbour is not, or
not necessarily, the person in the same national or ethnical or class
group with ourselves, but may be a "good Samaritan" or person to
whom we are linked by deeper bonds than nationality or racism or class
solidarity can any longer provide. These are bonds of intellect and imagination as well as of love and good will. The neighbour of a scientist is
another scientist working on similar lines, perhaps in a different continent; the neighbour of a novelist writing about Mississippi is (as
Faulkner indicated in his Nobel Prize speech)106 anybody anywhere
who can respond to his work. The fact that feuds among scholars and
artists are about as bitter as feuds ever get will doubtless make for some
distinction between theory and practice.
It is a peculiarity of North America today that culture is absorbed into
society mainly through the university classroom. Such a dependence of
contemporary culture on the educational system, rather than on a selfacquired social education supplementing the academic one, is much less
true of Europe. This seems to imply, perhaps correctly, a higher degree
of maturity in European society, in this respect at least. When I speak of
the North American university's interest in contemporary culture as
obsessive I am speaking of a degree of interest that I somewhat regret: it
might be better if the university confined itself to supplying the historical dimension of its culture. But the students dictate a great deal of the
teaching program of the university, though they seldom realize it, and
students of the humanities appear to regard the study of the contemporary or near-contemporary as the most liberalizing element of a liberal
education. My notion is that the trend is for the European pattern to fall
in with the North American one rather than the other way round, but
my observations do not depend on such a prediction.
Whatever the eventual relation of teaching and culture, the academic
and the creative aspects of contemporary society have certainly come
together within the last generation or so, and their future destinies, so
far as one can see into the future, appear to be closely linked. This
accounts for a feature of our cultural life which seems more paradoxical
than it is. The university classroom is concerned with "liberal" education, and liberal education is liberal in every sense of the word: it emancipates, it is tolerant, it assimilates the learning process to a social idea.

Clair de lune intellectuel

59

Yet so far as it is concerned with contemporary culture, its material

includes all the reactionary and antisocial attitudes I glanced at earlier,
some of which are, in detail, quite obviously silly, perverse, or
wrong-headed. But when contemporary authors are assigned for compulsory reading, and when they are taught in a way that relates them to
their cultural heritage, a certain detachment comes into the attitude
toward them. Not all the detachment is good, but one thing about it is:
the social attitude of the writer is taken over by the social attitude of
education itself, and loses its crankiness by being placed in a social context. Study, as distinct from direct response, is a cool medium, and even
the most blatant advocacy of violence and terror may be, like Satan in
the Bible, transformed into an angel of light by being regarded as a contribution to modern thought. Where shall wisdom be found? [Job 28:12].
Chiefly, for our age, in the imaginative and technical skills of the more
or less unwise.
The leisure structure, then, is essentially a structure of education,
which means that it is vitally concerned with teaching. One can teach
only what is teachable, and what the university must teach is the only
thing it can teach: the specific disciplines into which genuine knowledge
is divided. What results from this in the mind of the student? Facts, perhaps; ideas; information; the techniques of the present; the traditions of
the past. But all these things are quickly acquired by the good student,
and, unless used for some definite purpose, quickly forgotten. What
emerges from university teaching, as its final result in the student's
mind, is something the university cannot, or should not, explicitly teach.
As most great theorists of education, from Castiglione to Newman, have
recognized, the form of liberal education is social, in the broadest sense,
rather than simply intellectual. I should call the social form of liberal
education, provisionally, a vision of society, or, more technically, a
mythology.
In every age there is a structure of ideas, images, beliefs, assumptions,
anxieties, and hopes which express the view of man's situation and destiny generally held at that time. I call this structure a mythology, and its
units myths. A myth, in this sense, is an expression of man's concern
about himself, about his place in the scheme of things, about his relation
to society and God, about the ultimate origin and ultimate fate, either of
himself or of the human species generally. A mythology is thus a product of human concern, of our involvement with ourselves, and it always
looks at the world from a man-centred point of view. The early and

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primitive myths were stories, mainly stories about gods, and their units
were physical images. In more highly structured societies they develop
in two different but related directions. In the first place, they develop
into literature as we know it, first into folk tales and legends of heroes,
thence into the conventional plots of fiction and metaphors of poetry. In
the second place, they become conceptualized, and become the informing principles of historical and philosophical thought, as the myth of fall
becomes the informing idea of Gibbon's history of Rome, or the myth of
the sleeping beauty Rousseau's buried society of nature and reason. My
first lecture dealt primarily with mythology in this sense, particularly
with the so-called existential myths.
It seems to me that there have been two primary mythological constructions in Western culture. One was the vast synthesis that institutional Christianity made of its Biblical and Aristotelian sources. This
myth is at its clearest in the Middle Ages, but it persisted for centuries
later, and much of its structure, though greatly weakened by the
advance of science, was still standing in the eighteenth century itself.
The other is the modern mythology that began when the modern world
did, in the later eighteenth century, but reached its more specifically
modern shape a century later, and a century before now.
The older mythology was one that stressed two things in particular:
the subject-object relation and the use of reason. Man was a subject confronting a nature set over against him. Both man and nature were creatures of God, and were united by that fact. There were no gods in nature:
if man looked into the powers of nature to find such gods they would
soon turn into devils. What he should look at nature for is the evidence
of purpose and design which it shows as a complementary creation
of God, and the reason can grasp this sense of design. The rational approach to nature was thus superior to the empirical and experimental
approach to it, and the sciences that were most deductive and closest to
mathematics were those that were first developed. Of all sciences,
astronomy is the most dependent on the subject-object relationship, and
in the Middle Ages particularly, astronomy was the science par excellence, the one science that a learned medieval poet, such as Dante or
Chaucer, would be assumed to know.
In the premodern myth man's ultimate origin was of God, and his
chief end was to draw closer to God. Even more important, the social
discipline which raised him above the rest of creation was a divine ordinance. Law was of God; the forms of human civilization, the city and the

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61

garden, were imitations of divine models, for God planted the garden of
Eden and had established his city before man was created; the ultimate
human community was not in this world, but in a heaven closer to the
divine presence. Philosophers recognized that the ordinary categories of
the mind, such as our perception of time and space, might not be adequate at a purely spiritual level. It was possible, for example, that a spiritual body, such as an angel, did not occupy space or travel in space at
all. The unfortunate wretch who attempted to put this question into a
lively and memorable form by asking how many angels could stand on
the point of a pin has become a byword for pedantic stupidity, a terrible
warning to all instructors who try to make a technical subject interesting. But as far as popular belief and poetic imagery were concerned, the
spiritual world was thought of as essentially another objective environment, to be described in symbolscity, temple, garden, streets
derived from human life, though the myth taught that human life had
been derived from them. This mythology, relating as it did both man
and nature to God, was a total one, so complete and far-reaching that an
alternative world picture was practically unthinkable. This is the real
significance of Voltaire's familiar epigram, that if God did not exist it
would be necessary to invent him, which was, in his day, a much more
serious remark than it sounds.107 One could, theoretically, be an atheist;
but even an atheist would find God blocking his way on all sides: he
would meet the hypothesis of God in history, in philosophy, in psychology, in astronomy. As for morality, its standards were so completely
assimilated to religious sanctions that even a century ago it was impossible for many people to believe that nonreligious man could have any
moral integrity at all.
In the eighteenth century there began to grow, slowly but irresistibly,
the conviction that man had created his own civilization. This meant not
merely that he was responsible for ithe had always been thatbut
that its forms of city and garden and design, of law and social discipline
and education, even, ultimately, of morals and religion, were of human
origin and human creation. This new feeling crystallized around Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and the assumptions underlying the
American and French Revolutions were relatively new assumptions.
Liberty was no longer, as it had been for Milton, something that God
gives and that man resists: it was something that most men want and
that those who have a stake in slavery invoke their gods to prevent them
from getting. Law was no longer, as it had been for Hooker, the reflec-

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tion of divine order in human life, but in large part the reflection of class
privilege in property rights. Art and culture were no longer, as they had
been for the age of Shakespeare, the ornaments of social discipline: they
took on a prophetic importance as portraying the forms of civilization
that man had created. The Romantic movement brought in the conception of the "serious" artist, setting his face against society to follow his
art, from which the modern antagonism of the artist to society that I discussed earlier has descended.
A major principle of the older mythology was the correspondence of
human reason with the design and purpose in nature which it perceives.
This correspondence was still accepted even after God had dwindled
into a deistic first cause, a necessary hypothesis and nothing more. The
modern movement, properly speaking, began when Darwin finally
shattered the old teleological conception of nature as reflecting an intelligent purpose. From then on design in nature has been increasingly
interpreted by science as a product of a self-developing nature. The
older view of design survives vestigially, as when religion tells us that
some acts are "contrary to nature." But contemporary science, which
is professionally concerned with nature, does not see in the ancient
mother-goddess the Wisdom which was the bride of a superhuman creator. What it sees rather is a confused old beldame who has got where
she has through a remarkable obstinacy in adhering to trial and error
mostly errorprocedures. The rational design that nature reflects is in
the human mind only. An example of the kind of thinking that Darwin
has made impossible for the modern mind is, "If the Lord had intended
us to fly, he'd have given us wings." The conception of natural functions
as related to a personal and creative intention is no longer in our purview.
Modern mythology, at least with us, is naturally not as well unified as
the earlier one, but it does possess some unity nonetheless. It reaches us
on two main levels. There is a social mythology, which we learn through
conversation and the contacts of family, teachers, and neighbours,
which is reinforced by the mass media, newspapers, television, and
movies, and which is based fundamentally on cliche and stock response.
In the United States, elementary education, at least before the Sputnik
revolution of 1957,108 consisted very largely of acquiring a stockresponse mythology known as the American way of life. Canadian
elementary teaching has been less obsessed by social mythology, as its
children do not require the indoctrination that citizens of a great world

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63

power do, but it has its own kind, as in fact do all societies in all ages.
Social mythology in our day is a faint parody of the Christian mythology which preceded it. "Things were simpler in the old days; the world
has unaccountably lost its innocence since we were children. I just live
to get out of this rat race for a bit and go somewhere where I can get
away from it all. Yet there is a bracing atmosphere in competition and
we may hope to see consumer goods enjoyed by all members of our
society after we abolish poverty. The world is threatened with grave
dangers from foreigners, perhaps with total destruction; yet if we dedicate ourselves anew to the tasks which lie before us we may preserve
our way of life for generations yet unborn." One recognizes the familiar
outlines of paradise myths, fall myths, exodus-from-Egypt myths, pastoral myths, apocalypse myths.
The first great modern novelist is usually taken to be Flaubert, whose
last and unfinished work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, included, as part of its
scheme, a "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." In recent years there has been
a phenomenal growth of books which are written from within one of the
social sciences, but are actually read as social satires. Anyone can think
of a dozen titles: The Lonely Crowd, The Affluent Society, The Organization
Man, The Academic Market-Place, The Status Seekers, The Insolent Chariots,
The Hidden Persuaders, Games People Play. This last one breaks the rhythm
of the conventional titles: a stock phrase preceded by the inside-knowledge suggestion of the definite article. Not all of these are good books,
but they all deal with subjects about which good books ought to be written. The importance of this form of literary fiction, for that is what it is,
is that it studies society from the point of view of its popular or cliche
mythology, its accepted ideas. It is bound to have a revolutionary
impact on other fiction by making novelists and dramatists more aware
of the symbolic and ritual basis of social behaviour.
A more complicated mythology emerges in general education and liberal arts courses, where we become aware of the immense importance of
the thinkers who have helped to shape our mythology: Rousseau, Marx,
Freud, the existentialists, and others whose importance depends on
what versions of it we take most seriously. In addition to the art and
scholarship which is specialized and works with limited objectives,
there is a wide variety of "idea books," books that survey the intellectual
world, or a large section of it, from a certain comprehensive point of
view. On the bookshelves of my study in front of me as I write I see
works of history: Spengler's Decline of the West, Toynbee's A Study of His-

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tory, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Works of philosophy:

Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
Works of science: Eddington's Nature of the Physical World, Sherrington's
Man on his Nature. Works of criticism: McLuhan's Understanding Media,
Fiedler's An End to Innocence, Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the
New, Irving Howe's Steady Work. Works of psychology: Norman
Brown's Life against Death, Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Works of religion: Buber's / and Thou, Tillich's The Courage to Be, Cox's The Secular City. This is a purely random list, but it should give an idea of the
kind of book that helps to shape our contemporary mythology, and to
give coherence and coordination to our views of the human situation.
All these books deal with ideas, but occasional words in the titles,
"Decline," "City," "Eros," "Innocence," indicate their origin in myth. In
a sense they are all philosophical, even though most of them are clearly
something other than actual philosophy. What I am here calling mythology has in fact often been regarded as the rightful function of philosophy, and we note that philosophers, especially of the existentialist
school, have been particularly fertile in naming our central myths, such
as the alienation, absurdity, anxiety, and nausea dealt with in my first
lecture.
Our mythology, I said, is a structure built by human concern: it is existential in the broad sense, and deals with the human situation in terms
of human hopes and fears. Thus, though some of the books I have listed
are written from the point of view of a scientific discipline, it does not
really include the physical sciences. In our day, ever since Darwin, there
have been two world pictures: the picture of the world we see, which is
simply there, and is not man-centred, and the picture of the world we
make, which is necessarily man-centred. The arts, the humanities, and in
part the social sciences, all contribute to the contemporary myth of concern, but the physical sciences have their own structure, perhaps their
own mythology. The earlier mythology was developed out of the idea of
God; God has today no status, even as a hypothesis, in physical science,109 but the myth of concern neither excludes nor necessitates God,
who comes into some versions of it and not into others. Of course scientific conceptions are continually being annexed by mythographers: the
conception of evolution, for instance, has been applied in dozens of
ways. But when the term evolution is used in Bernard Shaw's theory of a
divine creative will, in Herbert Spencer's philosophy of ethics, in a Biblical scholar's account of the growth of the idea of God, or in a history of

Clair de lune intellectuel

65

painting, the conception used is not identical with the biological theory:
it is only a mythological analogy of that theory. How significant the
analogy is has still to be determined, as a separate problem. Naturally
science has immense relevance to the myth of concern, especially when
it manifests an ability to destroy or to improve human existencein
some areas, such as genetics, it is not always easy to distinguish the two
things. But it is a primary function of the myth of concern to judge the
effects of science on human life in its own terms. This is what good
mythological works written by scientists, such as the books of Eddington and Jeans110 and Sherrington, help us to do. When a mythologist
attempts to show that the conceptions of science support or prove his
vision, he weakens his power of resistance to science.
What I am describing is a liberal or "open" mythology, of the sort
appropriate to a democracy. I call it a structure, but it is often so fluid
that the solid metaphor of structure hardly applies to it at all. Each man
has his own version of it, conditioned by what he knows best, and in fact
he will probably adopt several differing versions in the course of his life.
Myths are seldom if ever actual hypotheses that can be verified or
refuted;111 that is not their function: they are coordinating or integrating
ideas. Hence, though good mythological books are usually written by
competent scholars, the mythology of concern is something different
from actual scholarship, and is subordinate to it. Any verified fact or
definitely refuted theory may alter the whole mythological structure at
any time, and must be allowed to do so. Yet there are certain assumptions which give mythology some social unity and make discussion,
argument, and communication possible. It is not addressed directly to
belief: it is rather a reservoir of possibilities of belief. It is the area of free
discussion which Mill, in his essay On Liberty, felt to be the genuine parliament of man and the safeguard of social freedom as a whole. It is the
"culture" that Matthew Arnold opposed to the anarchy of doing as one
likes,112 the check on social and political activism. For activism, however
well motivated, is always based on rationalized stock response. Beliefs
and convictions and courses of action come out of an open mythology,
but when such courses are decided on, the area of discussion is not
closed off. No idea is anything more than a half-truth unless it contains
its own opposite, and is expanded by its own denial or qualification.
An open mythology of this kind is very different from a closed one,
which is a structure of belief. There are two aspects of belief, theoretical
and practical. Theoretical belief is a creed, a statement of what a man

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says he believes, thinks he believes, believes he believes. A creed is

essentially an assertion that one belongs to a certain social body: even if
one is trying to define an individual belief not exactly like anyone else's,
one is still defining one's social and intellectual context. One's profession of faith is a part of one's social contract. Practical belief is what a
man's actions and attitudes show that he believes. Pascal's conception of
the "wager,"113 the assumptions underlying one's conduct, is a conception of practical belief. Similar conceptions are in Newman's Grammar of
Assent, and, more generally, in Vaihinger's theory of assumed fictions."4
A closed mythology, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, requires the
statement of theoretical belief from everyone, and imposes a discipline
that will make practice consistent with it. Thus the closed mythology is a
statement both of what is believed to be true and of what is going to be
made true by a certain course of action. This latter more particularly is
the sense in which Marxism is a closed mythology, and the sense in
which another revolutionary thinker, Sorel, generally conceives of
myth.115
A closed mythology forms a body of major premises which is superior
in authority to scholarship and art. A closed myth already contains all
the answers, at least potentially: whatever scholarship or art produce
has to be treated deductively, as reconcilable with the mythology, or, if
irreconcilable, suppressed. In Marxist countries the physical sciences are
allowed to function more or less independently of the myth, because, as
remarked earlier, society picks up too many of its golden eggs to want to
kill the goose, but as the physical sciences do not form an integral part of
the myth of concern, their autonomy, up to a point, would not be fatal to
it. A closed myth creates a general elite. In the Middle Ages this elite
consisted of clerics; in Marxist countries it consists of those who understand both the principles of Marxism and the way that the existing
power structure wants Marxism rationalized.
In the democracies there are many who would like to see a closed
myth take over. Some are hysterical, like the John Birch Society,116 who
want a myth of the American way of life, as they understand it, imposed
on everything, or like the maudlin Teutonism which a generation ago
welcomed the formulating of the Nazi closed myth in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century. It may be significant that the book
which actually bears that title should be one of the most foolish and mischievous books of our time. Some are nostalgic intellectuals, usually
with a strong religious bias, who are bemused by the "unity" of medi-

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67

eval culture and would like to see some kind of "return" to it. Some are
people who can readily imagine themselves as belonging to the kind of
elite that a closed myth would produce. Some are sincere believers in
democracy who feel that democracy is at a disadvantage in not having a
clear and unquestioned program of its beliefs. But democracy can
hardly function with a closed myth, and books of the type I have mentioned as contributions to our mythology, however illuminating and
helpful, cannot, in a free society, be given any authority beyond what
they earn by their own merits. That is, an open mythology has no canon.
Similarly, there can be no general elite in a democratic society: in a
democracy everybody belongs to some kind of elite, which derives from
its social function a particular knowledge or skill that no other group
has.
The earlier closed mythology of the Western world was a religion,
and the emergence of an open mythology has brought about a cultural
crisis which is at bottom a religious crisis. Traditionally, there are two
elements in religion, considered as such apart from a definite faith. One
is the primitive element of religio, the collection of duties, rituals, and
observances which are binding on all members of a community. In this
sense Marxism and the American way of life are religions. The other is
the sense of a transcendence of the ordinary categories of human experience, a transcendence normally expressed by the words "infinite" and
"eternal." As a structure of belief, religion is greatly weakened; it has no
secular power to back it up, and its mandates affect far fewer people,
and those far less completely, than a century ago. What is significant is
not so much the losing of faith as the losing of guilt feelings about losing
it. Religion tends increasingly to make its primary impact, not as a system of taught and learned belief, but as an imaginative structure which,
whether "true" or not, has imaginative consistency and imaginative
informing power. In other words, it makes its essential appeal as myth
or possible truth, and whatever belief it attracts follows from that.
This means that the arts, which address the imagination, have, ever
since the Romantic movement, acquired increasingly the role of the
agents through which religion is understood and appreciated. The arts
have taken on a prophetic function in society, never more of one than
when the artist pretends to deprecate such a role, as, for instance, T.S.
Eliot did. It is sometimes said that the arts, especially poetry, have
become a "substitute" for religion,"7 but this makes no sense. The arts
contain no objects of worship or belief, nor do they constitute (except

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professionally for a few people) a way of life. If a man is brought up to

believe, say, in the immortality of the soul, loses that belief, and then reconciles himself to death by saying that he will continue to live in the
memories of his friends, he really does have a substitute for religion
that is, an accommodation of a transcendent religious conception to the
categories of ordinary experience. Many "philosophies of life," like that
of Sartre in our day, are substitutes for religion in this sense, but the arts
are not and never can be. The alliance of religion and art is based on the
fact that religion deals with transcendent conceptions and that the arts,
being imaginative, are confined, not by the limits of the possible, but by
the limits of the conceivable. Thus poetry speaks the mythical language
of religion. And perhaps, if we think of the reality of religion as mythical
rather than doctrinal, religion would turn out to be what is really open
about an open mythology: the sense that there are no limits to what the
human imagination may conceive or be concerned with.
I developed my own view of such questions by studying the poetry of
William Blake. Most of Blake's lyrical poems are either songs of innocence or songs of experience. One of the songs of innocence is a poem
called The Lamb, where a child asks a lamb the first question of the catechism, "Who made you?" The child has a confident answer: Christ made
the lamb because he is both a lamb and child himself, and unites the
human and subhuman worlds in a divine personality. The contrasting
poem is the song of experience called The Tyger, where the poet asks,
"Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Some students of Blake, I
regret to say, have tried to answer the question. The vision of the world
as created by a benevolent and intelligent power is the innocent vision,
the vision of the child who assumes that the world around him must
have parents too. Further, it is a world in which only lambs can live:
lions and tigers can enter it only on condition that they lie down with the
lamb, and thereby cease to be lions and tigers. But the child's vision is
far behind us. The world we are in is the world of the tiger, and that
world was never created or seen to be good. It is the subhuman world of
nature, a world of law and of power but not of intelligence or design.
Things "evolve" in it, whatever that means, but there is no creative
power in it that we can see except that of man himself. And man is not
very good at the creating business: he is much better at destroying, for
most of him, like an iceberg, is submerged in a destructive element.118
Hence the fragility of all human creations and ideals, including the
ideal that we are paying tribute to this year. The world we see and live

Clair de lune intellectuel

69

in, and most of the world we have made, belongs to the alienated and
absurd world of the tiger. But in all our efforts to imagine or realize a
better society, some shadow falls across it of the child's innocent vision
of the impossible created world that makes human sense. If we can no
longer feel that this world was once created for us by a divine parent,
we still must feel, more intensely than ever, that it is the world we ought
to be creating, and that whatever may be divine in our destiny or nature
is connected with its creation. The loss of faith in such a world is centrally a religious problem, but it has a political dimension as well, and
one which includes the question we have been revolving around all
through: What is it, in society, to which we really owe loyalty? The question is not easy to answer in Canada. We are alienated from our economy in Marx's sense, as we own relatively little of it ourselves; our
governments are democratic: that is, they are what Nietzsche calls "all
too human." We have few ready-made symbols of loyalty: a flag perfunctorily designed by a committee, a national anthem with its patent
pending, an imported Queen.119 But we may be looking in the wrong
direction.
I referred earlier to Grove's A Search for America, where the narrator
keeps looking for the genuine America buried underneath the America
of hustling capitalism which occupies the same place. This buried
America is an ideal that emerges in Thoreau, Whitman, and the personality of Lincoln. All nations have such a buried or uncreated ideal, the
lost world of the lamb and the child, and no nation has been more preoccupied with it than Canada. The painting of Tom Thomson and Emily
Carr, and later of Riopelle and Borduas,120 is an exploring, probing
painting, tearing apart the physical world to see what lies beyond or
through it. Canadian literature even at its most articulate, in the poetry
of Pratt, with its sense of the corruption at the heart of achievement, or
of Nelligan with its sense of unfulfilled clarity, a reach exceeding the
grasp,121 or in the puzzled and indignant novels of Grove,122 seems constantly to be trying to understand something that eludes it, frustrated by
a sense that there is something to be found that has not been found,
something to be heard that the world is too noisy to let us hear. One of
the derivations proposed for the word "Canada" is a Portuguese phrase
meaning "nobody here." The etymology of the word "Utopia" is very
similar, and perhaps the real Canada is an ideal with nobody in it. The
Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have
failed to create. In a year bound to be full of discussions of our identity, I

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should like to suggest that our identity, like the real identity of all
nations, is the one that we have failed to achieve. It is expressed in our
culture, but not attained in our life, just as Blake's new Jerusalem to be
built in England's green and pleasant land [Milton, Preface, 1. 16] is no
less a genuine ideal for not having been built there. What there is left of
the Canadian nation may well be destroyed by the kind of sectarian
bickering which is so much more interesting to many people than genuine human life. But, as we enter a second century contemplating a world
where power and success express themselves so much in stentorian
lying, hypnotized leadership, and panic-stricken suppression of freedom and criticism, the uncreated identity of Canada may be after all not
so bad a heritage to take with us.

The Arts

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Current Opera:
A Housecleaning
October 1935

From Acta Victoriana, 60 (October 1935): 12-14. Reprinted in RW, 1-4.

Noteworthy here is Frye's interest in the comic potential of opera.

This is not a criticism of the performances of the opera company that

visited Toronto recently, as the present critic succeeded in seeing only
Madame Butterfly. If this was typical, they were adequate enough, if
somewhat perfunctory. Of course Madame Butterfly is unfortunate in
having a modern and quasi-realistic setting, which throws an onus of
stage "business" on the singers. The result in this case was a good deal
of spasmodic cigarette-lighting and nose-blowing and uneasy and rather aimless puttering about the stage in an effort to make some gesture in
the direction of drama. But the response to a melodrama of stock pathos
is one thing, and the response to Puccini's extraordinarily competent
and fluent journalistic style of composition is quite another, and a general impression remained of an hermaphroditic and ill-conceived mingling of outlines.
This suggests the obvious reflection that the opera would be all the
better for being completely conventionalized; surely a drama that
depended on automatic movements making no pretence of holding a
mirror to any kind of nature1 would be better suited to the declamation
and rhetoric which singing involves. If Madame Butterfly depended at all
on chorus work the demands of the drama would of course be less
obtrusive, but when it proceeds almost entirely by aria and recitative the
stage effect is bound to be stiff and awkward. The opera began as a
method of incorporating Greek drama in Western art forms: two or
three leading characters, a chorus, a mythological setting; all this was de

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rigeur throughout the seventeenth century, and in fact provides the basic
form for Handel and Gliick. If Handel was dissatisfied with the opera, it
was not because he rebelled against the operatic convention, but simply
because it was not concentrated enough for him to impose his massive designs on it. His genius expanded into the oratorio, which is not
less conventionalized than the opera but far more so. After his time a
century-long duel was fought between the traditions of German counterpoint and of Italian melody, a conflict resolved only by Mozart, which
had for its chief incidents the row between Handel and Bononcini, the
Gliick-Piccini opera fight in Paris, the triumph of Rossini in Vienna, the
establishment of the Italian comedie larmoyante in the nineteenth century,
its destruction by Wagner, and the belated attempts of Puccini and his
colleagues to cling to Wagner's coat-tails.2 All the energy which the
great Germans expended on incorporating the opera into the tradition of
systematic music did not, however, succeed in affecting the Italian
model to any extent, and attempts to revitalize it now can have only an
eccentric interest. The Italian operatic tradition has lived long, but it is
not the less dead for having died hard. The impact of the Russian ballet
annihilated what was left of it at once; a single touch of the immense
strength and discipline of conventionalized art was enough to sweep the
facile virtuosity of the Pattis and Carusos into limbo.3
We have said that it is necessary to conventionalize the opera to avoid
the absurdity and incongruity which the sensitive listener is bound to
feel: every work of art asks a suspension of judgment from us, but the
serious opera asks too much. But of course where the appeal is comic,
where the incongruous becomes artistically valuable, this objection disappears. For if we conventionalize the opera in any direction, we immediately get something that is not an opera, however excellent an oratorio
or ballet it may be. Therefore when Mozart's unerring instinct brought
the opera to its highest pitch of perfection and established it as an art
form in its own right, it appeared as comedy. For high tragedy in musical drama seems difficult to reconcile with the loose and florid construction of opera: it needs massed choruses undisturbed by the broken lights
of the stage. Tragedy, in short, belongs to the oratorio; the opera is
comic, seldom succeeding with anything more serious than pathos.
Madame Butterfly is typical of a large number of entirely unconvincing
melodramas. Owing to the difficulty of getting a genuinely sympathetic
audience, there is no form more easily parodied than the opera: the
whole English tradition, from Gay to Dame Ethyl Smyth, has run not

Current Opera: A Housecleaning

75

only to light opera but to mock opera.4 It will probably be impossible to

convince the antiquarians of future centuries that Gounod's Faust5 is not
a parody of Goethe: they would simply point to Ave Maria as an instance
of Gounod's skill in parody. The association of the opera with high society and its support by wealthy women pretending to culture has also
helped to make it entertainment closer in spirit to the circus than to creative art.
Whether Wagner ever succeeded in nullifying these objections is a
question at present beyond our scope. His framework is mythological,
of course, but not conventionalized; his gods are Dionysiac rather than
Olympian,6 and the general effect is one of assertive antinomianism and
self-apotheosis carried to its fullest extent. As a master of display Wagner probably has no rival in history, but that very fact makes him anarchic and disruptive as an artist; even if he did succeed, no one else can
follow him in his field. Wagner stands with Nietzsche as the joint godfather of Nazism, and until we have found out whether the swaggering
and posturing of pompous heroes who do not have to pay their own
way is more lasting and worthwhile, in art or in life, than a unity
founded on rationality and humour, we shall be unable to put Wagner
in his proper perspective. But we can hardly deny that he did his work
with sufficient thoroughness; so completely did he shatter the opera that
it is now in a state of decadence from which it can never be rescued. It is
possible, in fact it is highly probable, that the opera, in a changing social
order, is undergoing a catacomb period of which Wozzeck7 may furnish
an example. But "grand opera" is no longer synonymous with culture,
even with ermine and diamond pseudo-culture; the contemporary turn
to symphonies and chamber music is a healthy and hopeful sign.

Ballet Russe
December 1935

From Acta Victoriana, 60 (December 1935): 4-6. Reprinted in RW, 4-7. Sergei Diaghilev launched the emigre Ballet Russe in Paris in 1909. In its earliest
phase the company owed much of its reputation for innovation to the close connection to Russian composer Igor Stravinsky that Frye describes here, and to an
outstanding company whose members included Vladimir Nijinsky and Leonide
Massine. Diaghilev's sudden death in 1929 led to the creation of a variety of
Ballets Russes companies, who often, as in the performance Frye witnessed in
Toronto, performed the work of more traditional national composers alongside
their more innovative successors.
The ballet, like all forms of drama, demands the divided attention of
sight and hearing, which sometimes makes for mixed feelings on the part
of its audience. In my own case there was a marked contrast between the
effect of the stage performance on the one hand, and the succession of
unpleasant noises made by a rather scarecrow orchestra on the other,
which seemed to have tuned its kettledrum to the music of another
sphere altogether. The night I wentThursdaytwo of the ballets were
Tschaikowsky and one Rimsky-Korsakov, which provided another contrast between the suave, jog-trot waltz rhythms of nineteenth-century
dance music and the whirling spirals, piercing lines, and sharp colours of
the stage settings, a contrast which the intermediate dancing did not fully
resolve. My obstinate refusal to see in Tschaikowsky's Fifth Symphony a
musical representation of the conflict of man and Destiny is perhaps an
irrelevant point. And perhaps not. Tschaikowsky provided worse programs than that for other works, in order to cover up his deficiencies in
command of musical form: one can always see the easy-going slapdash

Ballet Russe

77

amateur under the most solemn passages in his music, just as one can
always see the incredibly skilful technician under the most delicate and
spontaneous passages of Mozart. Music such as Tschaikowsky's, however pleasant it may be in itself, does not meet the demands of the art
form of the ballet.
Let me explain. If a tired businessman is dragged, first to an opera,
then to a ballet, his reaction will probably be in favour of the latter. If he
tried to rationalize his preference, he would no doubt say that, in the
first place, it was more pleasant to look at human bodies, specifically
female bodies, that were organisms of grace and suppleness and rhythm
than to contemplate the masses of soggy porridge the average prima
donna packs around her vocal chords; that, in the second place, there
was something moving and happening all the time, instead of having a
lot of people standing around with their mouths open; that, in the third
place, while in both art forms people perform a number of complicated
actions for largely unintelligible reasons, in the ballet they are more
obviously following the music, so that the tired businessman, without a
foreign language, does not feel so much that he is being cheated out of
half the show.
What these impressions boil down to is this. In a ballet it is the rhythm
of the music that is projected across the footlights; in an opera it is the
melody. Now rhythm is the fundamental organizing force of music;
music is an art that moves in time, and while it is possible to examine it
in terms of pattern, such an examination entails abstraction from performance. Melody in music exists solely in a contrapuntal and rhythmic
context, and has a completely relative function. All music has melody,
doubtless, but to think of music in terms of it is to reduce music to pattern. Consequently it is no mean technical feat to organize an opera
rhythmically and prevent it from breaking up into a disjointed series of
elaborate harmonized tunes. Wagner's development of recitative and
his theory of "endless melody"1 result from his recognition of this difficulty, but his approach is rather a negative one, owing largely to the fact
that when the Romantics destroyed the strict forms of the great contrapuntal traditions the inner rhythmic vitality that held the operas of
Gliick and Mozart together was greatly weakened. But the ballet, being
a projection of the rhythm in music, while it demands a higher standard
from the composer, will respond far more readily to one who can meet
that standard. Because of its immense energy and its concentration and
economy of form, it meets, as no other art form in drama has yet done,

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the aesthetic demands of a mechanical civilization which seeks the

greatest power and strength in the most clean-cut outlines; and because
of its shorthand way of communicating ideas it can appeal to an intellectual and sophisticated audience which can respond to symbolism and
convention, but becomes impatient of explanation.
The performance I attended of the Ballet Russe, while it supplied all
the fun and excitement one could reasonably ask, also showed how
young the ballet is, how little composers have kept pace with its technique, and how quickly any one aspect of it becomes outmoded. The
music had an unusual lightness and virilityunusual at any rate for
Tschaikowskybut it was still a rather thin support for the amazing
dexterity and energy of the dancing. Not only was the music old-fashioned, however, but the intellectual conceptions portrayed seemed at
times somewhat incongruous as wellI am thinking, of course, of the
Fifth Symphony. The interpretation, which was all about Temptation
and Passion and Fate and Frivolity, was as frankly allegorical as a miracle play, and allegory is not symbol.2 In an allegory two related outlines
are kept separate and parallel; the result, in this case, was to let the dancing represent the program of the music, in other words, to keep translating the music into a synthesis of intellectual concepts belonging to
philosophy or religion. This is pernicious: music is music, not a warbling
system of ethics. On the other hand, music is a part of life, and if the choreographer can give us human actions, or actions connected with
humanity, which take on meaning through a musical rhythm and which
in turn bring that rhythm more closely into experience, so much the better. This can be done by the symbolism of such a ballet as Petroushka,
where drama and music become rhythmically one thing instead of two;
and this work in particular owes much of its power to the concreteness
and clarity of its view of life. The ballet cannot remain permanently in
fairylandthe satiric attitude is too important and essential to contemporary art for that. And, despite a regrettable tendency to flood the stage
with a sulphurous glow of blue or yellow light, the Ballet Russe gave us
little idea of the emotional range or intensity of its chosen form, or of the
maturity it has already assumed. The ballet is in the hands of the twentieth century, which starts, as far as it is concerned, with Stravinsky. It
also seems to be in the hands of Russia, and it is difficult to judge the art
form by the particular aspects of it treated by emigres. What those last
two sentences imply about the connection of Russia with the twentieth
century is a question I postpone.

The Jooss Ballet

April 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (April 1936): 18-19. Reprinted in RW, 7-10.

Kurt Jooss was a German choreographer, teacher, and director. In 1933, after
the rise of the Nazis forced Jooss and his company out of Germany, the group
moved to Darlington, England. From this base, the Jooss Ballet toured the
world. Frye's critical estimation of Romanticism as "subjective art" in these
early pieces may perhaps prove an unexpected feature for many readers.

It is a stock commonplace to say that a healthy society produces a

healthy art, and sick society decadent art. Art flourishes when the artist
is regarded, not as a long-haired wild-eyed shaman, but as a skilled
labourer who gets properly paid for his workwhether he is famous or
anonymous does not matter. It flourishes when it can depend on a set of
symbols or conventions the public recognizes and is ready to accept; for
that means, on the one hand, that the artist can take something at least
for granted, without having to surround his works with a palisade of
apologetic, and on the other that the public is settled enough to prefer
the original to the novel. It flourishes when it appeals to a large and vulgar audience as well as to a discriminating coterie, when it makes room
for bright colours and a loud noise. It flourishes when it can be pressed
into the service of religion, for a religion provides both the large audience and the required body of understood conventions and symbols.
Setting the plastic and graphic arts aside, we should infer from the
above that it is a healthy sign when a society is able to produce dynamic
arts appealing definitely to a group consciousness. That is, arts depending on group production and group response, an ensemble performance
and an audience, such as music and drama. Music and drama have

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The Arts

always been associated; they both developed out of the dance, both were
originally ritual arts and have frequently been allied with religion.1 They
go up when society feels itself secure and cooperative; they go down
in an era of individualism. Sixteenth-century England, for instance, produced an amazing development in music and drama: in nineteenthcentury England both arts practically disappeared. To pass to the more
specific form of musical drama, we find that the pre-industrial eighteenth
century gave us the oratorios of Bach and Handel and the operas of Gliick
and Mozart; but in the long century and a half of subjective art which followed the one important contribution, that of Wagner, was the most
highly individualized achievement, and therefore more a destruction
than a development of musical drama.
Consequently if we are passing from anarchic individualism to a more
strongly unified society, we shall assuredly get more music, more
drama, and consequently more musical drama. Today the oratorio is
dead and the opera apparently moribund, but we seem to be getting an
extremely lively and genuinely new art form in the ballet. And the ballet
possesses all the symptoms of healthy art postulated above. For its production it demands, not a charlatan chewing his nails in a garret, but a
group of workmen in music, drama, and choreography who have graduated from apprenticeship, a school of dancers, and an integrated tradition of performance. It is definitely a conventionalized and symbolic art
form, depending on a stylizing of gesture and pantomime, and aided
rather than rendered meaningless by the use of masks and traditional
costume. By its use of gesticulation it leaves room for farce, satire, melodrama, propagandaeverything that goes home to a large unselected
audience. It unites music and drama on the common basis out of which,
we have said, they both developedthe dance. Its rise, therefore, adumbrates future social developments in a way that no political prophecy
could do. Its ramifications, connecting up, via Russia, with Oriental
drama, indicate that the Eurasian tendencies which have become so
prominent in painting and music will find a focus in the ballet as well.
So far the ballet has gone through a period of transition. It has used
incidental music not originally intended for it, and the greatest of the
composers treating it seriously as an art formStravinskyhas been
temperamentally unsuited to it, for though he clearly recognizes, and
has explicitly stated, the necessity of impersonality and convention, his
own style tends toward the vehement spluttering of Wagner or
Tschaikowsky rather than the more objective balance required. Behind

The Jooss Ballet

81

Stravinsky there is the "emigre" Russian ballet, associated with the

names of Diaghilev, Massine, and Nijinsky. A typical product of this
school visited Toronto last fall, and the laboured virtuosity of its dancing, the eternal jiggling monotony of its nineteenth-century music, its set
poses, rococo pictorial backgrounds, and vaguely allegorical programs
amply showed how far the ballet had yet to go.
On the other hand, the Jooss Ballet, which came more recently, definitely showed where the ballet is going. One almost dares to hope that
neither Wagner nor his godson Hitler have yet bludgeoned all the music
out of the German soul. Out of the four ballets they performed, two
were developments of the rather anaemic delicacy of the older ballet,
which specialized in fairyland and period pieces. But all four had an
artistic integrity and unity about them, a genuinely dramatic outline
and development, a thoroughgoing rhythmical organization. Each was
built around a central conception into which every feature of the music,
drama, and dancing was closely welded. Their last and biggest ballet,
called The Green Table, opened with a scene of gesticulating politicians
getting ready for war, which admirably showed how powerful a vehicle
for satire the ballet really is.2 For caricature, the most direct form of satire, gets its effect by suggesting past movements, and in the pantomime
of the ballet the movements are worked out. The following scenes, presenting the war itself in its various aspects of battles, starvations of refugees, rapes in brothels, and so on, were presented with an amazing
concentration and power. There was no "incidental" music; the music
organized every motion of the dancing; there was no "story" tacked on
as a program for the music; the lines of the drama blended at every
point with the other elements. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that
this type of ballet is musical drama, and has nothing whatever to do
with program music.3
One of the most extraordinary touches of the performance was the
instrumental accompaniment, which dispensed with the orchestra and
was played on two pianos. It can easily be seen how immensely the conventionalizing of the dramatic action was reinforced by this conventionalizing of the music; the clipped, incisive, penetrating rhythm of the
piano, never changing in timbre, knit together the whole performance in
a way no other instrumental arrangement could have done. The Jooss
Ballet gave us a completely new idea, not only of what the ballet is capable of doing, but of what the piano is capable of doing. Since Stravinsky,
there has been an increasing tendency to regard the piano, not as an ille-

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gitimate descendant of the clavichord, not as an epitomized orchestra,

not as a mechanized harp, but as an instrument of percussion, having a
uniquely rhythmic power, as the violin has a uniquely melodic expressiveness.
If we seem to have been talking all around the Jooss Ballet, rather than
definitely about the performance, that is partly because the writer's critical faculties were to some extent paralysed by its novelty, and partly
because he believes it to possess an unparalleled historical importance
for our time. After all, if one sees growing up under one's nose a new art
form showing every sign of becoming as expressive for the twentieth
century as Elizabethan drama and Mozartian opera were for their
respective times, it is something to get very much excited about, is it
not?

Frederick Delius
August 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (August 1936): 19-20. Reprinted in RW, 10-14.

Frye had anticipated writing this review for some time: in remarks on the state
of music in Toronto made in a letter postmarked 25 January 1935, he told Helen
Kemp that "Toronto is going into a spasm of mourning for dead British musicians, which means that I shall have to listen to a lot of Elgar and this blasted
Pre-Raphaelite Delius" (NFHK, 1:401).

Frederick Delius was born in England of naturalized Dutch parents,

spent his early days in America, studied in Germany, and lived nearly
all the rest of his life in France. Yet no one, we are told, has more successfully expressed the very spirit of England and the English than
Delius has done in Brigg Fair and the Cuckoo in Spring. By virtue of this,
it is claimed, Delius is essentially an English composer, although he has
written with equal success in American, Celtic, French, and Norwegian
idioms, and was acclaimed by Germany long before he was known in
England. The moral of which is, that the language of music is so concrete and exacting that it must necessarily, like that of science, be universal, nationalism being on the other hand only an arid abstraction. Thus
national music is probably written best by those who, being divorced
from national ties, can look at a nation objectively. So if Delius has done
what a more explicit patriot like Elgar could not do, it may be partly
because he has that advantage, just as Bach would have the advantage
of a peasant when it came to writing a peasant's cantata. Nationalism in
so academic an art as music can never get very far away from a sentimental primitivism consisting largely of fine writing around a folk tune,
which is by now a thoroughly sterile and irritating formula.

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I should myself be inclined to trace Delius's musical ancestry, by virtue of his Leipzig training, through Grieg to Mendelssohn. Further back
it is hardly necessary to go. It has been said that his treatment of the variation form1 recalls the great Elizabethans, but this is an unconscious and
by no means isolated influence. Certainly he is one of the small group of
composers who, being accepted as English, have helped to deliver
English music from an obsession with a tom-tom marching rhythm
which has disfigured it from Handel's imitators to Elgar. But this is
rather a negative achievement. A musician should be approached in
terms of culture, not of race or nationality, and in Delius's case the
appropriate cultural term is "Romantic."
The essential fact about Romanticism in music is that it overthrew the
classical conception of music as rhythmically organized counterpoint
that is, as a time art working out a rhythmic impulse in a traditional
formand replaced it with a conception that looked at music vertically,
as a succession of harmonies supporting a leading melody. This made
room for the increase of subjectivity which the Romantics brought to
music by destroying objective forms like the Bach fugue and the Mozart
sonata. But this static approach to music resulted in new forms which
were necessarily plastic and pictorial rather than strictly musical. Delius
is almost a complete Romantic in this sense. All through his work runs a
chordal rather than a contrapuntal conception of music. He is far more
interested in tone "colour" (a pictorial metaphor) and timbre than in the
long buoyant outlines of polyphonic construction, and his music seems
never very far removed from some pictorial program. The best instrument for bringing out leading melodies is, of course, the violin, and the
violin is obviously Delius's favourite instrument, the more so as he himself was trained as a violinist.
In the violin sonatas the Romantic conception of melody against a harmonic background is carried to almost excessive lengths; the piano parts
consist of page after page of subordinate chords and echoes of the violin
melodies. It is true that Delius is an expert harmonist, and that he has all
the faculty of a Franck or a Debussy2 in getting the right chord for any
context. But a chord so placed is an epigram, and hundreds of epigrams
in succession become wearisome. He is usually, as we should expect, at
his best in slow movements, to which the aria form is well adapted. It is
this static, pictorial approach to music, this lack of pervading rhythmic
vitality and horizontal development, that accounts for the languor, the
sensuousness, the cloying sweetness, so frequently complained of in his
work. The string quartet, which demands a continuous contrapuntal tex-

Frederick Delius

85

ture, is a poor medium for him, and his one essay in the form disintegrates in performance, while his writing for the piano, an unmistakably
rhythmical instrument, is sonorously arid.
The same Romantic qualities are evident in his treatment of the sonata
form. The classical sonata is inherently dramatic, dependent on strong
contrast in movements and themes. Delius's more lyrical approach usually gets rid of the movement contrast by welding the sonata into one
movement, while his thematic development presents a uniformly flowing movement of successive ideas which are neither new themes nor
variations of old ones. When this pattern is combined with the repetition and restatement of themes which the sonata form itself demands,
the resultespecially evident in the violincello sonata and the string
quartetis apt to be monotonous, reminding one of a late Beethoven
quartet without the struggling propulsion, or, more frequently, of a sort
of jellied Schubert.
With Delius this harmonic approach is merely a convention justified
by the music: he does not vociferate it as a dogma, like Schonberg or
Scriabin.3 His deficiencies in chamber music result from the choice of an
unfavourable medium, not from incompetence. The chorus and the
orchestra give him an additional variety of ''colour" in timbre, and a
fuller emancipation from a hampering classical tradition. The massive
serenity and balance of his best choral and orchestral work is a striking
contrast with the restless moodiness of his chamber music. The expansion of the medium allows his creative will freer play. For Delius is a true
Romantic in his subjectivity. Debussy has a pictorial interest in music as
well, but he does not lack rhythmic vitality; in consequence, his pictorial
tone poems are far more objective. His clouds, gardens, raindrops, and
so on are, like Blake's, "men seen afar";4 they seem to express their own
natures in sound. Delius takes the point of view rather of the contemplating spectator, and so powerful is the domination of a single mood that an
impression of unity is retained in spite of all the vagaries of unrepeated
themes. This is why his music is so frequently described as rhapsodic.
All of which is thoroughly consistent with Delius's own character: he
has always been known as an individualist, taking no part in the
rough-and-tumble world of professional music, owing allegiance to no
school. But even here he is profoundly typical of culture. For the Romantic assertion of will that followed the Industrial Revolution developed a spiritual loneliness in the artists of the nineteenth century which
drove many to eccentricity and a few to insanity. A pervading attitude
of isolation in a hostile universe brought about a kind of revised pagan

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religion, which shows itself in three easily recognized aspects. The arrogant will-to-power doctrine of Nietzsche caricatured in Fascism today is
an example of one aspect; Whitman's ecstatic absorption in nature illustrates another; and the languor and sensuousness of the Swinburnian
school of English poetry is a good instance of the third. Delius, as thoroughgoing a pagan as one could wish to find, has touched all three
points. In his great Mass of Life he sets Nietzsche to music; in his Sea Drift
he sets Whitman; in his Songs of Sunset he even condescends to Dowson's revoltingly sticky Cynara.5 One hardly needs a not too successful
Pagan Requiem to summarize the evidence. Delius's paganism is honest
enough, with none of the hankering for a cloudily catholic religion
which inspires the theosophies of Hoist and Cyril Scott,6 and, like most
paganism, it is centred on an ideal of physical dignity. In the stately
chord progressions of the choral and orchestral works which culminate
in such tremendous climaxes, we get the will-to-power side of this; in
the dreamy relaxation of the symphonic poems, we get the more purely
sensuous side; in his consistently pictorial approach, we get the "nature
mysticism" of it. He cannot be said to be free from the spiritual elephantiasis which is also in Elgar, Hoist, and Vaughan Williams, but his
expression of it is less portentous. One has to set him beside someone
like Cesar Franck to understand the limitations of his attitude. In Delius,
whether he repeats his themes or not, the ultimate unity is one of mood;
the organizing force of his music is the expression of an emotional
impulse. In Franck, as we are carried along the constant evolution and
transformation of ideas, we are conscious of entering into an objective
structural unity. If one likes antithetical jingles, one might say that
Delius's music is the mental expression of physical energy, and Franck's
the physical expression of mental energy.
Most of those who have written on Delius have known him personally,
and Delius seems to have been well worth knowing. In consequence, his
undoubted sincerity and nobility of character have tended to make criticism of his music rather partial. When this passes, his importance will, I
am forced to think, become increasingly historical. Composers are now
impatient with the long harmonic lethargy of Romantic music, and the
twinges of contrapuntal conscience which have so sorely afflicted
Stravinsky, Schonberg, and even Antheil7 in recent years may indicate
that contemporary music is doing a certain amount of noisy yawning and
stretching preparatory to getting up and going somewhere.

Three-Cornered Revival
at Headington
28 October 1936

From Isis, 28 October 1936,14. Signed JR (by Canadian Rhodes Scholar Joseph
Reid), but written by Frye (see NFHK, 2:614). Based on a story by Faith Baldwin, Wife vs. Secretary was a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer production directed by
Clarence Brown.

Wife versus Secretary is constructed on the well-worn pattern of the isosceles triangle whose three high-spots are Clark Gable, magnificent business man and suspected husband; Myrna Loy, sweet andt?]1 suspicious
wife; and Jean Harlow, super efficient, suspected, but innocent secretary. Apart from the fact that one feels all along that a little honest
heart-to-heart talk would put everything straightin fact that the
whole substance of the story is based on a rather stupid and far-fetched
misunderstanding, which simply doesn't tally with the sophistication
of Gable and Loythis is first-rate cinema. The producer has exercised
admirable restraint in appealing hardly at all to wild passions, and at
the same time has delighted his public with a display of manly affection
rarely seen on the screen, and never seen off it. The dialogue is fast and
clever, without any of the distressing sort of thing we remember having
heard in Blond Bombshell.2

Music and the Savage Breast

April 1938

From Canadian Forum, 18 (April 1938): 451-3. Reprinted in RW, 14-18.

The occasion for this review, as Frye belatedly reveals in his last paragraph, is
the Canadian release of Walt Disney's first animated feature Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs, in December 1937.

Music and drama are the two great group art forms; that is, they are
ensemble performances before audiences. They have a common origin
in religious ritual.1 All primitive tribes, emerging from a stage of human
sacrifice and cannibal communion, develop a number of dances and
songs which to them are the expression of worship. The two principles
on which these dances and songs are based are rhythm and mimicry,
the sources of music and drama respectively. As music and drama
evolve into art forms, they retain for a long time something of their sacerdotal, other-world associations. Greek music and Greek drama were
both closely connected with Greek religion. In the Middle Ages music
was composed by monks and regulated by theologians; and from the
special choir music at Christmas and Easter services comes the whole
medieval drama, which was essentially an acting out of Christian
mythology.
Music and drama, then, come down to us haunted by primitive fears
of an uncanny and hostile world, by a primitive shuddering delight in
seeing murder and torture, by primitive lusts and emotional hysteria. In
proportion as they develop into art forms, music and drama work this
off and turn it into more civilized sublimations. Drama did this in nearly
all the great civilizations, ancient and modern: Aristotle called the sublimating effects of tragic drama pity and terror [Poetics, i449b]. But music

Music and the Savage Breast

89

remained rudimentary and abortive in every civilization except our

own, and consequently it bears a far heavier weight of hocus-pocus. For
centuries people thought of it as a kind of hypnotic magic, good for
charming men as well as snakes, possessed of a mysteriously compelling power of attraction. The Bible tells us of David's use of it to cure the
manic-depressive attacks of King Saul [i Samuel 16:14-23]. Greek legends speak of an Orpheus who drew trees and stones after him [Ovid,
Metamorphoses, 10.1-105, 11.1-84], and of Sirens whose singing pulled
sailors to their rocks [Homer, Odyssey, 12.39-54, 158-200]. Then the
myth becomes rationalized. Greek religious philosophy had to account
for music in some way, and was full of the most abysmal puns on the
word "harmony": the principle of order which held the universe together was a "harmony" and therefore it was musical, although this cosmological music could not be heard. In spite of which, the idea lasted for
two thousand years. Shakespeare proved by means of it that a man who
was tone-deaf would be out of tune with universal harmony and would
therefore be the very lowest kind of criminal.2 He was checkmated by
Milton, however, who realized that as the music we know is not harmony, but a series of discords ending in a harmony, earthly music ought
not to exist at all.3 Angels and regenerate men, on this theory, spend
eternity yelling one note.
When men ceased to believe that the sun went around the earth, they
gave up the music of the spheres. By that time music was a flourishing
art form, and its development did a great deal to clear up the superstitions connected with it, which were based on ignorance like all superstitions. But while the superstitions have gone, the terrific emotional
impact of music has not. Cultivated music refines and canalizes this
impact; popular music gives it to us straight in the midriff. And popular
music, it should be noticed, is musical drama; that is, it is associated
with dancing and marching, which are forms of dramatic action. It is
directly descended from the war dance and the fertility rite. Every highschool girl knows what a powerful erotic stimulant music is, and everyone interested in promoting wars knows that music can turn a decent
man or woman into a murderous maniac.
It is nothing against popular music to say that it has a savage ancestry; so has everything else. But the second example I have given shows
that an emotional orgy, if carefully exploited by unscrupulous people,
can be a very powerful social evil. Bread and circuses4 were what the
Roman tyrants kept their people in order with, and of the two circuses

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are by far the more important. For the circus, the big show of flags and
salutes and marching men with a thumping, sandbagging musical
rhythm organizing it, is absolutely essential to tyranny and social reaction today. As long as one exists the other will. As long as people can get
lumps in their throats and go shivery all over when they see uniforms
and hear a brass band, so long will mass wars and totalitarian states last,
whatever they call the causes they appeal to.
And yet musical drama has had a glorious record in the arts. All great
ages of drama have been aided by music: Greek drama had its chorus,
Elizabethan drama its songs, the Chinese drama of the Sung dynasty,5
which is still acted in Toronto, has its orchestra. Similarly, the great age
of music has been aided by drama. When the art of music reaches its culmination in the eighteenth century with Bach and Mozart, Bach brings
the tragic form of the oratorio to its highest development in the St. Matthew Passion (a form strikingly similar to Greek tragedy), and Mozart
does the same for the comic form of the opera.
The only other musician equal in genius to these two, setting Beethoven aside as an instrumental composer, is Wagner. For Wagner's bitterest enemies, among whom I include myself, cannot deny that in sheer
ability to write music he gets top ranking. But in Wagner's musical dramas we begin to see where the reactionary circus of today comes from.
Wagner's art form represents a tremendous individual conquest over
both music and drama, and in consequence (it is a consequence) he
makes a religion of megalomania. It is a point of honour with that
religion, not only to be anti-Christian, but to go straight back to the
primeval elements of the German soul, or, in less technical language, to
re-establish in modern Germany the war dance and fertility rites the
Germans indulged in before they became civilized. Hitler is an avowed
disciple of Wagner, and that fact is not accidental. He could find nothing
to his taste in a Christian such as Bach, or a peaceful Austrian sceptic
such as Mozart.
In proportion as society becomes more cooperative, musical drama,
the central group art form, will become more popular. We have seen that
if the growth of social cooperation leads only to the brutal and degrading tyranny of the totaltarian state, popular musical drama will lead
only to the incessant flogging of the higher feelings by the lower,
induced by military bands and erotic jazz orchestras. But there are other
forces at work, trying to make this growth of cooperation lead to a more
efficient, sane, and peaceful civilization. Can they make any use of musi-

Music and the Savage Breast

91

cal drama? Can the art form of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bach, and
Mozart be made popular, and help them to fight their battle for sanity?
I think so. There are two media through which it could be done. One
is the ballet. I have expressed my ideas about the ballet before in this
magazine [nos. 3-4], and need not repeat them, other than to say that, as
the ballet unites music and drama on the basis of the dance out of which
they both evolved, as it demands an immense cooperative organization
and the long apprenticeship so essential to sane and normal art, as it
integrates gesture with the drama and needs a background of vivid and
pungent painting, it could easily be the most highly developed and
intellectually concentrated art form of the twentieth century. This would
not make it immediately popular, in spite of its power to convey farce
and caricature, but would make it politically very significant. The other
is, of course, the cinema. There is no better index to the general level of
civilization in a country today than the quality of its cinemas. Hollywood has given a free hand to two authentic geniuses, Charlie Chaplin
and Walt Disney, and it is obvious in their pictures how close we are to
ballet and pantomime techniques, and how nearly the music comes to
organizing every movement of the dramatic action.
Yes, I've seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Yes, I told you all that
stuff about Wagner and Greek philosophy just to lead up to it. I'm sorry,
butyou remember that it started to rain when Snow White dropped
dead, and that she remained in her glass coffin through autumn and
winter, and came back to life in the spring when her lover kissed her?
Well, that's what most of those primitive rituals were aboutthe spirit
of life and growth that died when the year died, and rose again at the
year's rebirth. They meant more than just rape and murder. They were
cursed with that, and we are born under that curse, but we and our children don't have to keep on applauding gangsters and allowing them to
tear us to pieces with bombshells to the end of time. If Winter comes,
can Spring be far behind?6

Men As Trees Walking1

October 1938

From Canadian Forum, 18 (October 1938): 208-10. Reprinted in RW, 35-9.

The original was accompanied by four reproductionsof Dawson's Blue
Mouth of Paradise, Picasso's Woman Weeping, Penrose's The Human
Frame, and Doll's Autumnal Cannibalism.
The art exhibition at the CNE, an unusually good one all round, included the first Canadian showing of representative surrealist pictures.2
Apparently the idea was that the show would be a refresher for the
jaded throats of our fashionable artistic nonentities and professional
screamers, hoarse with the lunacy of the Group of Seven3 and the hideous obscenity of a picture of a naked wench. But, as that kind of stunt,
the show was a pleasant failure. People came in crowds: some, it is true,
to make the automatic comments and objections which perhaps even a
surrealist painter could have anticipated, but most because they were
genuinely curious and amused. Those who knew something about pictures saw in front of them, in painting after painting, a technical precision which leaves many very clever Canadians, untrained in the
millennium-old European tradition of accurate drawing and colouring,
miles down the road. The surrealists can hardly be charlatans if they can
paint like that, they felt. Those who knew nothing about pictures and
cared less spluttered or giggled hysterically, but practically every picture held them with its glittering eye and had its will.4 Something was
happening to them inside which made them giggle and splutter. Most
of the rest simply asked, quite intelligently and honestly, What's it all
about?
This article is less an answer to the question than an attempt to restate

Men As Trees Walking

93

it. After the Great War the disintegration of European culture impressed
artists so much that a number of them made an artistic creed of chaos.
Art is form and synthesis, but art in so incoherent a world as ours can
only be an art stuck together out of odds and ends. So arose the movement called Dadaism, an art of putting things together at random to
"evoke oracular responses,"5 as one devotee put it, from the unusual
patterns afforded by their combination. An artist would go for a walk
and come back littered with rubbish which he would patiently glue
togetherthis kind of assembling is called montage or collage. Very
soon the Dadaist movement was hit by Freud's earlier and cruder theory of the soul as a libido struggling for self-expression but censored
and distorted by the respectable ego or conscious mind. The libido creates dreams, and the Dadaists turned to it as the sole source of creative
energy remaining to man in the modern world. They laboured to summon the authentic dream image from their midriffs and smite it straight
into the midriffs of their public, if they had a public in mind at all.
Dreams, they felt, had an immediate, vivid communication denied to
the censored consciousness. And as dreams are the unrepressed fears,
lusts, and hates of the essential man, the Dadaists, who of course inherited the whole tradition of sadism and the "romantic agony"6 of the
nineteenth century, set forth in their pictures an All Hallows Eve of
demoniac horror and obscenity. Not that it was all deadly seriousthe
odd or unexpected is always funny, and the public is quite justified in
laughing at it. Max Ernst's Burning Woman7 is not far from the comicstrip Olive Oyl.
All of which was very healthy for both art and culture. But psychology passed from the demons to the gods. Freud shared the limelight
with both Jung and the new researches into the primitive mind carried
on by anthropology. Painters began to realize that the subconscious
speaks a universal and intelligible language, a language of symbols no
doubt, but a language from which all existing languages, all myths of all
religions, and all the effective imagery of art, are derived. So the
destructive anarchism of the Dadaists passes into the synthetic movement of surrealism. Its central idea remains in Tanguy's The Questioning,8 in which a litter of half-formed objects is set against a blank
background.
At first, then, surrealism reflected the Freudian theory of the split in
human consciousness, the antagonism of libido and ego. One can see a
rather feeble example of this in Dawson's Blue Mouth of Paradise,9 in

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which the heads representing the routine slickness of conscious activity

have been pasted on, while the painted ones have the haunting quality
of the subconscious. In the earlier Dali10 (the Dali of the famous limp
watches and the half-open drawers), objects are painted with meticulous
care, and it is in the paradoxical combining of these objects that we recognize the bizarre emotional intensity of the dream image. This, in Dali
and in his imitators, is generally considered surrealism proper, distinguished sharply from two other art movements: cubism, the geometrical
analysis of the space world, and abstract painting, the purely lyrical
arrangement of pattern which attempts to bring painting to the imaginative concentration of music. Of late, however, abstract and surrealist
painting have begun to merge, as in this show we could see most clearly
in the pictures of Chirico, Miro, Klee, and Paul Nash,11 and even so cubist a picture as Picasso's Weeping Woman was included as surrealist. This
is partly owing, no doubt, to the fact that cubism, abstraction, and now
surrealism (to which he seems finally committed) have all been experimental stages in the development of Picasso, one of the greatest revolutionary geniuses in Western culture. But even more important, the
dropping of "isms" in modern art is one sign that serious artists have
begun to realize that if they want to maintain their ideals they must get a
clearer idea of what they are. Cafe intellectualism, pseudocultured giggles at bourgeois stupidity, arty remoteness from life, the painting of
critical cliches rather than picturesall these defects of modern art must
join the dodo before the ferocious brutality now given carte blanche over
most of the world. In the coming fight between creators and destroyers,
the artists must present a united front on the creative side.
A few surrealists, such as the young English poet David Gascoyne,12
find the universal symbolic language spoken by surrealism in the proletarian mind, the analytic, differentiating side of the soul having gained
the upper hand among the bourgeoisie. But the high command of the
left wing has decided that "socialist realism" is the orthodox offering to
the working class, and as a matter of fact surrealism has developed from
the "mental revolution," apparently a sort of extreme unction to prepare
the bourgeois mind for dissolution, proposed by the Dadaists. Idealism
obstinately clings to these pictures, the belief that the world exists as it is
perceived, and that a renewed imagination would create a better world.
Tyranny may be explained as the result of economic conditions, but fundamentally it is a condition of the human mind; clear up the mind and
the tyrants can be hooted off the stage. Some of these pictures are like lit-

Men As Trees Walking

95

tie lectures in the idealist dogma that the mind creates the world, like
Penrose's Human Frame,13 in which the figure holds a bit of blue sky in
her hand (this is of course impossible to see in our illustration), or Dali's
Great Dreamer, in which a human face is superimposed on a procession
that looks like an allegory of history. Surrealism is perhaps more congenial to Spaniards and Germans, whose traditions are more favourable to
synthetic and symbolic thinking, than to Frenchmen or Americans. The
Germans, who have given us Klee and Kandinsky/4 will probably make
the most important contributions to its future development as soon as
they lynch their gangster parasites.
Yet surely, in a balanced mind, the critical consciousness is the
interpreter of the symbols produced by the creative imagination, and
symbolic art in consequence has to strike a medium between the unintelligible chaos of private associative patterns and the dead conventions
imposed by a Philistine religion. For this reason, surrealist art is certain
to develop in the direction of more explicit and fundamental symbolism, from which consistent commentaries can be more easily inferred;
one thinks of the development of the highbrow classical allegories of the
Renaissance, now forgotten, into the art of Botticelli and Mantegna.15
Revolutionary painting today, at any rate in the hands of such a master
as Orozco/6 depends upon this communal symbolism, and in such a
picture as Dali's Autumnal Cannibalism, deeply felt and universally
shared feelings about the autumn as a time both of the maturity and of
the dying of the world and its connection with the approaching butchery of the human race, perhaps as a necessary prelude to its rebirth, are
what appear on canvas. How far the surrealists can go in their apocalyptic attempt to make the human mind create a new heaven and a new
earth [Revelation 21:1], no one can say. But it's worth trying.

K.R. Srinavasa lyengar's

Lytton Strachey
December 1940

Review of Lytton Strachey, by K.R. Srinivasa lyengar (London: Chatto and

Windus, 1939). From Canadian Forum, 20 (December 1940): 292-3. Lytton
Strachey, biographer, satirist, pacifist, man of letters, and debunker, is most
famous as the author of the iconoclastic Eminent Victorians (1918). Other
works include Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Queen Victoria
(1921), Elizabeth and Essex (1928), and Portraits in Miniature (1931).
This book has obvious defects: its ideas are commonplace, its style indifferent (though it improves greatly after its rather Babu opening),1 and it
hardly supersedes Boas.2 But it does bring back the memory of that
"peculiar age," the first decade of the twenty-year truce. In 1919 E.T.
Raymond said that, the old men having bungled the young into a war,
the young would run things for the future.3 But the young men were
dead, and the foolish old men doddered on, and culture was taken over
by a group of highly talented dons. What they produced, naturally, was
brilliant, ephemeral and parasitic, orchidaceous and fungoid; fine poets
wrote in allusion and epigraph, good novelists dealt in allegory or with
a cadaverous and crepuscular "higlif." They loved the eighteenth century and they cursed their ghostly father, Matthew Arnold, but towards
their own time they were quizzical, pragmatic, and very annoyed with
the obscenity laws. Such a soil could, like the mud of the Nile, only produce something equivocal, something not-quite.
Strachey is one of the best of these dons. His "Portraits in Miniature"
display the irony of a Chekhov, who, through some defect in creative
power, has turned to memory instead of imagination, to history instead
of drama. The studies of Victoria and Elizabeth have a documentary

K.R. Srinivasa's Lytton Strachey

97

gestation and stylistic parturition as laborious as that of a Flaubert

novel, but their navel-strings are not cut: they never become independent works of art. Oh, well. Strachey is dead, and eke his patience, and
both at once are buried under a hail of Nazi bombs.4

10

The Great Charlie

August 1941

From Canadian Forum, 21 (August 194.1): 14.8-50. Reprinted in RW, 18-24.

London-born Charles Spencer Chaplin joined Mack Sennett's Hollywood Keystone film company in 1913. The films Frye describes here are of a later period,
when Chaplin's fame, opportunities, ambitions, and talents had all expanded:
they include The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times
(1936), and The Great Dictator (194.0), In this review essay, Frye speaks of the
"impartial destructiveness" of Chaplin's humour and notes the recurrent religious imagery that underprops his political critique. It is also one of the first
occasions in this collection when he recognizes and speculates about the enormous imaginative power an artist can mobilize through the fusion of comedy
and allegory. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3.
Serious discussion of the importance of movies in modern art has long
ago passed the condescending phase. When the culture of the industrial
age really hits its stride, the mainsprings of its creative power will be in
its one cultural industry. What the church was to the Middle Ages and
the prince to the Renaissance, the movie is to modern artists, and it will
continue to be their chief patron however many other outlets are provided in PWA1 work, social planning and housing, the radio, or industrial design. And just as the drama is appropriate for an organic society
and the novel for a laissez-faire one, so the movie, where the audience is
docilely regimented by ushering officialdom and yet sits in dark spiritual isolation from one another, is appropriate for us.
Of course, the central and dominating influence of the movie is not
yet fully obvious in America, perhaps not in any country except Russia,
where Lenin emphasized it.2 This is due largely to the paralysis of finan-

The Great Charlie

99

cial monopoly in Hollywood, which has hurt both the movie and the
arts outside it. At present writers are brought up and forgotten about
just as inventions are, and for the same reasons; the supercolossal complex inherited from the 19205 has pandered to a waning hope that the
Age of Tinsel will sometime return. The audience often lags behind the
movie: it never occurs to anybody, for instance, to listen to the incidental
music, and it is cheaper to use chunks of the Unfinished Symphony than
to pay a good musician to write an intelligent sound track, as the French
and sometimes the Russians do.
Outside the movies, the analysis of emotion in poetry, of society in the
novel, of the subconscious in surrealism, becomes increasingly clinical
and antiseptic as more popular forms of nostalgia and grousing and
morbidity are reeled off in the theatres. The preoccupation with the
means rather than the ends of expression, with words, cadences, geometrical patterns, and mental processes rather than with ideas and subject
matter, is an infallible sign of decadence, and points to a lack of integration between modern art and modern life. The cinema should take the
lead in any such integration. The thought of the salary paid to Madeleine
Carroll3 has encouraged many a pretty girl to look prettier; and a poet
might find his Muse a much less pimpled and constipated lady if he
thought the movies could make an intelligent use of a good poet.
The movies suffer, of course, from a corresponding decadence: they,
too, put the emphasis on the means, on beautiful actors and showy sets.
But the director is growing in box-office prestige and a surprisingly
large number of films do attain to a considerable unity and relevance of
detail. This is partly because the movie is capable of the greatest concentration of any art form in human history. The possibilities of combining
photographic, musical, and dramatic rhythms leave all preceding arts
behind in their infinity. Music accompanying silent business can turn it
into a scene de ballet: a camera travelling around a dialogue can give it a
weird fourth-dimensional symbolism: the crudest slapstick can use a
repeating pattern of scene or gesture as essential to it as blood and sleeplessness to Macbeth or the Siegfried motif to The Ring. When a real
genius controls the production of a movie, things should happen.
Back in the old silent days, when the average commercial film had the
artistic appeal of a streetcar ad, Charlie Chaplin was turning out a series
of grotesque little ballets, with every movement and gesture as eloquent
as the lines of a sculptor's drawing. The public did not laugh because it
was amused: it thought it was being amused because it laughed, with the

ioo

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panicky suffocation of hysteria. True, there were scenes of unbearable

pathos, like the unattended banquet in The Gold Rush, but that was all
right: Charlie made them laugh, so he must be a funny man. Like Mark
Twain. Mark Twain had written The Prince and the Pauper and The Connecticut Yankee, two of the loudest screams of fury against society ever
uttered in America: he had lanced the putrescence of Hadleyburg; he had
shown us Huckleberry Finn deliberately choosing to go to hell with outcasts rather than to heaven with decent people (chap. 31); he had left
notebooks full of epigrams burning through social hypocrisies like nitric
acid. But everybody knew Mark Twain was funny, because they laughed
at him. Dryden says that audiences in his time always laughed at lunatics, which would include Ophelia and Lear.4
Just before the Age of Tinsel dropped dead, Chaplin planted a terrific
kick in its posterior with City Lights, in which the rags-to-riches philosophy of that period, its fawning on athletes and tycoons and its callous
disregard of subtler heroes, got its definitive take-off. But that was a jeu
d'esprit: not until Modern Times did the importance of Chaplin in American culture (I know he was born in England) become fully obvious.
Major American art seems always to have been the product of an individualism which has no constructive theory of society and regards it as
essentially a product of hypocrisy, tyranny, and cowardice. Its motto is
Whitman's, "Resist much; obey little."5 Never mind why: just buck. This
idea of the original sin of the state, this reckless and instinctive anarchism, is in Jefferson's theory of decentralized democracy, in Thoreau's
program of civil disobedience, in Emerson's idea of self-reliance as trust
in God, in Whitman's myselfishness, in Hawthorne's and Melville's
pagan and diabolic allegories, in Mark Twain's intellectual nihilism. We
are now told that this attitude is extinct beyond the coasts of Maine, but
it has only shifted its perspective. In exhorting America to buck Hitler
off their necks because he has ideas about organizing society, Dorothy
Thompson and MacLeish6 are appealing to the same instincts Franklin
and Paine appealed to to buck England off.
Since Mark Twain, no anarchist of the full nineteenth-century size has
emerged except Charlie Chaplin. But the hero of the Chaplin films, with
his quixotic gallantry and courtesy, his pity for the weak, his apologetic
and ridiculous isolation from society, and the amount of damage he
does against his own very good will to that society, makes this Yankee
cussedness an ideal worthy of respect. For all its plethora of revolutionary symbols, Modern Times is not a socialist picture but an anarchist one:

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101

an allegory of the impartial destructiveness of humour. Put into the perfectly synchronizing machinery of a factory, a jail, a restaurant, this forlorn and willing Charlie wrecks all three, not by trying to but by trying
not to. He very nearly accepts the highbrow's compromise with society
by singing a song no one understands and dares not admit ignorance of,
but even this does not work. He gets, however, an insight into love,
courage, and sacrifice which the foremen who bully him and the cops
who beat him up no more understand the nature of than a bedbug
understands the nature of a bed. We are left with a feeling that the man
who is really part of his social group is only half a man, and we are
taken back to the primitive belief, far older than Isaiah or Plato but
accepted by both, that the lunatic is especially favoured by God.7
This, of course, is not fully intelligible without some reference to religion, and it is in this that The Great Dictator shows its chief advance on
Modern Times. To the Nazi the Jew sums up everything he hates: he is of
a different race, he is urban, he is intellectual, he is often undersized, he
has a sense of humour and tolerance. For these reasons he is also the perfect Chaplin hero: besides, a contempt for this big-happy-family racialism is the first principle of American anarchism. Imagine Huckleberry
Finn without Jim or Moby-Dick without Queequeg, and you can soon see
why Chaplin had to be a Jew. But the picture itself is not Jewish, but
Christian to a startling degree. The parallel between the dictator who
gains the world but loses his soul and the Jewish barber on the one hand,
and Caesar and a Jewish carpenter on the other, is very unobtrusive but
it is there. Chaplin knows well enough what the Jew Freud and the
Christian Pope Pius agree on, that anti-Semitism is a preparation for, and
a disguised form of, anti-Christianity. But his conception of Christianity
is one conditioned by his American anarchism. What attracts him about
Christianity is that something in it that seems eternally unable to get
along with the world, the uneasy recurrence, through centuries of compromise and corruption, of the feeling that the world and the devil are
the same thing. Hence the complement to his Jewish barber is a dictator
who is also an antichrist. The picture opens with a huge cannon pointing
at Notre Dame. "Oh Schultz, why have you forsaken me?" [cf. Mark
15:34] Hinkel blubbers at one point, and when his counsellor whispers
the word "god" to him he screams and climbs a curtain. At probably the
same moment Hannah says that if there were no God her life would be
no different, which recalls Thoreau's remark that atheism is probably the
form of religion least boring to God.8 The horrible isolation of the will to

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The Arts

power makes its victim not superhuman but subhuman: "a brunet ruling
a blond world." When Hinkel explains that he is shaved in a room under
the ballroom with a glass ceiling, it sounds like a very corny gag, but it is
quite consistent with his scurrying up curtains, mangling nuts and
bananas, and dashing about in the futile restlessness of a monkey. Hinkel
may not be the historical Hitler, but he is, perhaps, the great modern
Satan Hugo and Gide and Baudelaire longed to see, though he would
have disappointed them, as Satan always does. Opposite Hinkel is the
inarticulate, anonymous, spluttering Jewish barber, who hardly speaks
until a voice speaks through him, and with that voice the picture ends.
How anyone can imagine that it could have any other end is beyond me.
One of the minor triumphs of the picture is Commander Schultz, the
perfect Quixote type of our age, the man who tries to fight Hitler with a
complete set of Hitler's ideas in his head. With his schoolboyish attempt
to pit melodrama and adventure and secret societies and "Lombard sacrifices" against the Hinkel machine, with his maudlin Teutonic reveries
about apple blossoms and bright-eyed maidens in a garden when he is
flying upside-down in his plane (one of the most brilliant touches in the
picture) Chaplin shows, without wasting a syllable, both why Nazism
began with Germans and why mere patriotism, in Germany or outside
it, will never ruffle a hair of Hitler's forelock.
Apart from the expression on the great white tank that follows Charlie
into Austria and the superb shaving ballet to Brahms's dance, there is little made of the mechanical mass hypnotism of the Nazi state. This is
rather a pity, considering what the cinema can do along this line, but
Chaplin's choice was deliberate: in the "review" of armed forces before
Hinkel and Napaloni we never see a machine, but only the grimacing
figures in the box. He lets the singsong howls of Hinkel's wonderful
speeches do the rest, along with that curious rhythmic beat that holds
every Chaplin film together but is difficult to define, except for obvious
repetitions like the circulating of dishes in the ordeal scene and of chairs
just before the final speech.
How long does celluloid last? Other pictures go: Reynolds's are fading, Apelles' destroyed.9 Giotto's, it is true, look as though they had
been painted yesterday, but then they probably have been. If films can
survive indefinitely our grandchildren will probably ask some very
awkward questions if we didn't see the great Chaplin masterpieces
when they were new, or did see them and missed the point. They won't
care about the Russian campaign.

11
Reflections at a Movie
October 1942

From Canadian Forum, 22 (October 1942): 212-13. Reprinted in RW, 28791. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

Was it not that quaint old forgotten author, Karl Marx, who said that
new instruments of production are the causes of cultural changes? At
any rate the movie and its ally, the radio, have made a very considerable
one. Fifteen years ago, when movies were silent and the radio a squalling infant, Calvin Coolidge was in the White House.1 This gentleman,
never having anything to say, seldom opened his mouth, and when he
did open it a noise like the cry of the great bronzed grackle in the mating
season emerged. This inability to talk was one of his chief political
assets, for he lived at a time when a president was merely an idol carried
in the processions of big business. In those days fluent and ready speech
was associated with high-pressure salesmen, and rhetoric in consequence distrusted: even patriots did not take the Fourth of July orator
very seriously. Today the uvula is mightier than the tank: Churchill's
and Roosevelt's speeches have been major military operations, and in
former years an alleged cancer on Hitler's throat gleamed like the Star of
Bethlehem to exasperated democrats. Rhetoric and oratory are back
again to stay, and the radio and the movie have brought them back.
All over Canada, and America, of course, the old regime still lingers.
Children are taught to read and write, but the manner of speech is left to
original sin. To the average Canadian or American, cultivating an accent
means cultivating an English accent, and anyone who does that is a
sissy, a snob, and a hypocrite. The fact that it is far better to cultivate an
English accent than not to cultivate an accent at all is quite lost on him.

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The result is painful but ubiquitous. Untold millions of Americans tawk

through their nowses and hawnk like fahghorrns; some whine like flying shells; some splutter and gargle like cement mixers. The average
American pronunciation of "yes" or "now" is hardly a human sound at
all. Bad speakers, however, are not yet outcasts; they are not yet in the
position of the stinking innocents of the soap ads, whose friends can
smell them but can't tell them. We are all in the same boat. I have a grating and monotonous voice myself, and am unusual only in being aware
of it. Education simply leaves the voice alone: there are "rhetoric"
courses in American universities, but the university is both too late and
too exclusive. But the day of judgment on the corncrake and the hyena is
at hand. It is no longer true that every American boy has a chance to
become president: he has a chance only if he can attain mastery of the
air, and he can do that only by learning to talk. If he is to persuade the
voters that he is a reincarnation of Lincoln, he must forget about jokes
and split rails and log cabins2 and concentrate on Lincoln's magnificent
oratorical style.
Much of the now obsolete distrust of oratory was well founded, and it
is only now emerging from its Neanderthal stage of Fascist rabble-rousing. Even Hitler is far less of a screaming ham than he used to be, however, and we are now able to see more clearly what the radio and movie
are doing for literature. A respect for rhetoric implies a close affinity
between the spoken and the written language, and through the two chief
mediums of it we are gradually becoming more aware of the sounds and
rhythms of our own speech. One of the main reasons for the immense
ascendancy of Huckleberry Finn in American literature is that it is the
only book of its time written throughout in authentically American language. Not until Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and their better contemporaries
is there a systematic attempt to get away from a conventional literary
English for narration and descriptionand these writers reached maturity with the talking picture and the radio. It is the same in poetry.
Poetry has for a long time been afraid of rhetoric, and in consequence
has got badly bogged down in the book. Minor poets have largely lost
even the ambition, let alone the ability, to imitate the roll and sweep of
major poetry.3 For the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and Co. is not a lot
of lines on the page: it is something to walk down street keeping time to,
something to bellow when you're drunk. If you try to walk down the
street marching to Amy Lowell or get drunk and try to bellow the Spoon
River Anthology, you will see what I mean by the decline of rhetoric.4 Yet

Reflections at a Movie

105

this state of things cannot survive the era of the sound track and the
radio play, and our more interesting poets are slowly abandoning the
subtle shuffle of Rozinante for the bucking of Bucephalus.5
The moral for Canadians is quite simple. Fifteen years is not a long
time, geologically speaking, and with increased practice in listening to
the sounds and rhythms of speech, we may in another fifteen years
begin to find out what our language is. Canadians speak American.
There is no Canadian accent or idiom, at least none common to all nine
provinces, and British English, apart from a few cloistral schools, is as
foreign to Canadians as Erse.6 Official documents still require "our"
spellings and schoolteachers still insist that whenever there is a difference of usage the English form is the right one, if we can only remember
which it is. (Check your guess on "schedule" with the dictionary.) But
none of this has the slightest effect on the spoken language. A schoolteacher is often not aware that she makes no attempt to speak the language she teaches, and would be quite capable of saying, "Now
tomorrow we will go on to the lesson on shall and will, as I would like
to finish it by Friday." The various people who sound off about the danger of Americanizing our speech always make their protests in the purest American, and a Daughter of the Empire7 would have arrived at a
fantastic pitch of imperialism before she would say petrol for gas or
wireless for radio. Now this simple fact, instantly obvious to any Canadian, has not yet, with a few honourable exceptions, been digested by
Canadian writers. Most of our poets give up the problem of language
entirely and retreat into the lyric, where they can write in poetic diction
to their heart's content. I open Marjorie Pickthall at random and my eye
falls on the word "byre."8 No Canadian farmer calls his cowshed a byre;
why should a Canadian poet avoid the usage of her own country? And
if a Canadian novel or short story happens to be dull or commonplace, it
is often so not from a lack of imagination, but from a lack of courage and
confidence in taking hold of the language.
The radio and the movie are dramatic forms, and the drama is simply
integrated rhetoric: one of its chief functions is to bring together the spoken and written language in some sort of unity. There will always be a
certain looseness in speech and a certain convention in writing, but the
wide gap between standard American and what Mencken calls the "vulgate"9 is decadent, and partly the result of a dead theatre. Movie actors
and radio speakers from Roosevelt down will have to take the lead in
establishing a normal speech which is free and colloquial and at the

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same time good enough to be a basis for writing. This involves the larger
problem, one of the most important of our postwar reconstruction jobs,
of establishing cultural standards which are not based either on class
distinctions, as in Britain, or on an intellectual minority, which is our
problem. This latter is the cause of the unnatural union of slovenly
speech and free education. The American vulgate speaker does not say
"throwed" because no one has told him that "threw" is the accepted
form. He says "throwed" because he knows damn well that "threw" is
the accepted form. Nine-tenths of "bad" grammar is a deliberate and
conscious (or half-conscious or subconscious or unconscious, whatever
your private psychological myth may be) variation of a known standard.
The variation does not always originate directly, of course, with the user
of it, but it is in his background. He feels that a consistent use of standard speech, while it would certainly be "talking good grammar,"
would also be stilted and formal; it would sound stuck-up and make his
friends nervous.
The standard of correctness, then, is established by a small group,
written down in grammars, taught at school and university, and evaded
by a working majority of speakers. This is an impossible situation: rights
and wrongs in speech should be established by general usage. But general usage at present seems to have little ambition beyond altering a tacitly accepted standard. The use of "throwed" for "threw" does not mean
that ordinary speech tends to change strong verbs into weak ones: if
standard speech requires "dived" the vulgate will have "dove." Toronto
streetcar conductors almost always announce Elm Street as "ellum," but
I heard one, directly after doing so, pronounce "borrowed" as "bor'd,"
showing phonetically the reverse tendency. If standard speech calls for
"I began" and "I've begun," the vulgate will have "I begun" and "I've
began." Wherever there is a feeling of cultural inferiority there will be
this parody of accepted forms: Huckleberry Finn says "skiff" and "raft";
Jim says "skift" and "raff." A grocery clerk once said to me, "it doesn't
make any difference," and then at once corrected himself to, "it don't
make no difference." He felt that the latter form was more pungent and
direct, and he may well have been right. But this antithesis of "correct"
speech and effective speech evidently should be overcome as far as possible. The movies, and even to some extent the radio, are doing this in
their own way. The boys and girls who want to model their lives on
their movie heroes will at any rate have to listen to them talk. Their
voices, if not actually pleasant, are at least intelligible, which is a good

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107

deal; and movie dialogue, while seldom interesting in itself, is at least

recognizable as the spoken language. The more dignified movie characters, of course, speak infinitely better than the average American, and
the speech of the latter is generally represented by the comic characters.
There is, therefore, a slight but significant pressure of ridicule on the
gum-choked whinnies of the American adolescent. And on such bases a
new sense of the importance of the sound of the voice, the choice of the
words, and the rhythm of the speech, is bound to grow, and bound to
wake up literature. Where should we be today if we had been offered
blood, toil, tears, and perspiration?10

12

Music in the Movies

December 1942

From Canadian Forum, 22 (December 1942): 275-6. Reprinted in RW, 24-8.

Now that I have got it down there, that title seems a rather derisive challenge, like an ostrich egg in a henhouse. In the first place, there is a discouraging text for all music critics from the Book of Ecclesiasticus [32:4]:
"Pour not out talk where there is a performance of music, and display
not thy wisdom out of season." In the second place, a casual layman,
who cannot even follow movie reviews which talk about pan shots and
fade-ins, and who never worked up the courage to see Gone with the
Wind or Fantasia or Mrs. Miniver, is hardly the person to spot Significant
Trends. But the subject of music in the movies has been so little treated
(the only good book on the subject I have seen is Oscar Levant's A Smattering of Ignorance) that perhaps even vague and ill-documented remarks
about it may have some point.
Music has been used as a background for movies ever since the latter
were first made; since then, the movie proper has developed amazingly,
but the incidental music has kept pace with it only just enough not to be
completely incongruous. In early days a scarecrow orchestra sat in the
pit and sawed off popular songs, keeping a wary eye on the screen so
that the traps man could tonk something when the clown hit his head,
or the bass fiddler slither the strings when a woman tore her dress or got
kissed. Gradually attempts were made at more appropriate commentaries. I can remember when I was about fourteen seeing a book called
Motion Picture Moods, assembled by one Rapee,1 in which the various
emotions and scenes depicted in movies were listed alphabetically and
given appropriate music from some standard composer. There were

Music in the Movies

109

Chopin Nocturnes and Grieg Idylls for Love and Romance, and various
allegro agitatos for Excitement and Fire. The first entry, Aeroplane, had
a slice of Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso, then my stock piece. I
could never understand why, possibly because as I played it it sounded
more like a tank charge. With talking pictures, of course, Hollywood
took over the performance of the music itself, which, pace the Musicians'
Union, was a good thing. But Hollywood still thinks of music as "sound
effects," and music is about the only Hollywood Cinderella still without
a success story. There is a considerable gap in intelligence and interest
between, say, Frankenstein and Citizen Kane, and the music in the latter
case ought to show a corresponding superiority in the shivering of timbres. But the music for both sounds much alikethe same endless drum
rolls, the same tired trombones sliding from solemn burp to gloomy
blop. That curious feeling of reincarnation, of Having Been Through All
This Before, that assails one so frequently at movies, owes a great deal to
the stereotyped music.
Two reasons have been assigned for the neglect of music: one, that
nobody, from producer to ultimate consumer, ever by any chance listens
to it; and the other, that the movie is a realistic art which the use of
music disorganizes. The first point, though true, is an effect rather than
a cause; the second, though obsolescent, deserves a brief comment.
Still photography, apart from portraiture, is a more epigrammatic art
than painting, and is more dependent than painting on the picturesque.
No matter how carefully composed, it usually retains some suggestion
of a found subject, a random impression which happens to be typical of
a large number of others. This is doubtless the reason why photographers display so marked a tendency to corny allegory, of the kind that
labels a picture of a little girl "Springtime" or "Age of Innocence." And
what is true of still photography is even more true of the movie. The
camera's business is not to trace the action indiscriminately, but to pick
out the salient and representative details. Thus, to illustrate the fact that
a man has just died, you may show a telephone ringing without being
answered, or a hand relaxing, or a dog barking, without showing the
man at all. This is not realism; it is symbolism. A stage play may be, up
to a point, realistic: but once you photograph it you have conventionalized it as much as if you had put the dialogue into blank verse. In the
opening scene of Romeo and Juliet there is a continuously ascending
series of Montagues and Capulets: first the servants, then Tybalt and
Benvolio, then the heads of the houses, and finally the Prince. In the

no

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movie version2 the camera darts all over the market place, giving one
quick shot after another, in an associative but not a logical order. The
play presents the brawl as a single visual pattern: the movie gives a
series of symbols of it. Years ago, in a very indifferent Harold Lloyd3 picture, the hero undertook to bounce a spoon into a glass with another
spoon. As long as he was unsuccessful in the story he failed to do this
trick: when his enterprises worked out to a happy ending he did it with
a flourish. That was, of course, a pure if somewhat crude piece of symbolism, and it would have been impossible without a camera. The more
intelligent the moviegoer, the more he appreciates this kind of thing,
and the more he will be attracted, not by the name of the star, but by that
of a witty and resourceful director.
Therefore, a continuous use of musical symbolism is in complete
accord with the whole structure of the movie. The movie demands a
running musical commentary, like the Chinese drama: it is not so well
adapted, like the Elizabethan, for the incidental dance or song. The camera gets restless during a song and acquires a nervous habit of peering
into the singer's molar cavities which is painful and embarrassing to
watch. The talents of Romberg, Gershwin, Kern, and Berlin4 are very
considerable ones, but they are stage and not screen talents. In fact, the
whole of dance-based contemporary music, whether jazz, swing, or
popular song, is ill-suited to the movie and has had little influence on it.
Practically all of it is bound to a remorseless slogging treadmill rhythm,
from the wittiest Duke Ellington or the subtlest blues down to the silliest
stop-the-wop war song. Syncopation, incidentally, does not vary this
beat; it accentuates it.
This is not saying that the popular song or dance has no place in a
movie, but that it should have a subordinate place in a unified musical
pattern. This pattern should be symbolically related to the movie without being program music. That is, it should be based on certain recurring themes which, like the leitmotifs of a Wagner opera, are associated
with certain characters or symbols in the picture. That is what Chaplin
does, or at any rate did in Modern Times, and what Chaplin is doing
today other directors will be overdoing tomorrow. Quotations from
standard music would be a minor feature of this. I did not, as I have
indicated, see Fantasia, but I gather that the treatment of the Pastoral
Symphony was a bit heavy-handed compared to the delicate reference
to it at the opening of the superb Farmyard Symphony, just before all the
animals got to work on the Verdi Miserere. Often a director will develop

Music in the Movies

111

a plot through a long sequence of symbolic shots known as "montage/'

which nearly always has a musical accompaniment. This technique is
capable of almost indefinite expansion: one thinks of documentaries,
like O'Flaherty's Man ofAran, in which there are long descriptive scenes
without a word of dialogue. These point the way to a mixed musical and
pictorial art of a kind heretofore impossible. When human beings are
used in such scenes, the emphasis thrown on pantomime is so strong
that the picture becomes a kind of ballet: a beautiful example is a Rene
Clair called Sous les Toils de Paris.5
Hollywood directors still have a horror of all music that calls attention
to itself: their insistence on its subordination is too marked to be anything less than a dogma. That is why it is so noisy: if it were quieter it
would be more impressive and noticeable. Levant says that the average
producer, like the parvenu who refused to have any second violins in
his orchestra, feels gypped if he gets anything less than tuttis. And that
is why it is written in an invariable idiom made up from the mannerisms of well-known composers. And that is why it is so pompous and
rhetorical: an audience will nearly always get the point of the smallest
touch of musical humour, a cavorting bassoon or cuckoo noises from the
piccolo. And that is why it still sticks to a conventional orchestral background, the train and boat sequence in The Reluctant Dragon6 being the
sort of exception that proves the rule. However, all these lags will get
adjusted in time. Unfavourable critics of movies usually blame their
deficiencies either on the Tycoon at one end or the Goon at the other,
depending on whether they are left or right critics. But there is a kind of
inner evolution in art which neither cigar-chewer nor gum-chewer can
obstruct forever, and what is now a sprawling and amorphous "show"
may in a surprisingly short time become a clean-cut musical drama.

13

Max Grafs Modern Music

November 1946

Review of Modern Music: The Story of Music in Our Time, by Max Graf
(New York: Philosophical Library, ca. 1946). From the "Briefly Noted" section
of Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 190.
Not much use to anyone with a serious interest in the subject, as the
author seems almost incapable of referring to music except in terms of
metaphors and similes from other arts; but it mentions a good many
names and contains a number of cultural pep-talks which might provide
some frame of reference to a beginner in music "appreciation," whatever that is. The general line of approach is Bruckner-Mahler Viennese.1

14

Abner Dean's It's a Long

Way to Heaven
November 1946

Review of It's a Long Way to Heaven, by Abner Dean (New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945). From the "Briefly Noted" section of Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 190. This brief review maintains Frye's
momentum in the investigation of popular, antirealist art forms.

About sixty eerie drawings, with mysterious titles, of naked, gnome-like

figures, ranging in treatment from allegory to surrealism. The best have
a disturbingly haunting quality that one rarely finds in the more realistic
captioned cartoons of the New Yorker school, and in fact are "funny"
only to the extent of making one giggle hysterically. Most are psychoanalytic in reference, but a few can be called social comment and a few are
theological. One of the latter shows a figure squatting on top of a pillar
in a desert, completely swathed in a ball of yarn. Title: "Accumulated
Virtue."

15

Russian Art
December 1946

Review of The Art of Russia, edited with a preface by Helen Rubissow (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 26 (December
1946): 213.

A very useful collection of black and white reproductions illustrating

Russian painting from medieval icons on. It appears from it that after
the seventeenth century, Russia became the Eastern colony of European
art as America became the Western one, and Russia like America lost
the ability to resist cultural invasions at the same time that she gained
the ability to resist military ones. All the European fashions in painting
seem to have rolled over Russia in waves, most of them dyed with a
strong Germanic tinge by the time they arrived. The Revolution helped
release a tremendous burst of creative energy, and the art of Lissitsky,
Malevich, Chagall, and Kandinsky1 was the result; but, following a
directive from Lenin, this energy was soon gleichgestaltet [forced into
conformity] and a rather corny "socialist realism," supposed to be
directed more directly to the masses, took its place.2 The same development occurred in America under the WPA,3 where however, a more
relaxed policy permitted the growth of more variety.

16

Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye

August 1947

Review of The Innocent Eye, by Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber,
1946). From Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 119. Sir Herbert Read,
born in Yorkshire to a dairy-farming family, was an infantry officer in World
War I, and subsequently one of the most indefatigable promoters of avant-garde
art in the English-speaking world. His many works include Naked Warriors
(1919), The Green Child (1945), and Contemporary British Art (1951).
Autobiography is, like blank verse, very easy to write and very hard to
write well. Mr. Read writes well, especially in the early part of his reminiscence, which reads at times like a prose version of Wordsworth's Prelude. This is natural for a critic who strives to be, in contrast to T.S. Eliot,
anarchist in politics, Romantic in literature, and agnostic in religion.1 He
is perhaps an anarchist only in the sense in which we are all anarchists,
wanting the society that interferes least with individual freedom.
Romanticism he defines as belief "in the immediacy of expression, in the
automatism of inspiration, in the creative nature of even poetic evolution" [78-9], which has made him among other things a spokesman of
surrealism.2 His religious position is cloudier, and I think confused by
Kierkegaard's statement of the religious and aesthetic positions as an
"either/or" dilemma. I should say at a venture that further examination
of the Taoism he refers to would reveal something more interesting than
agnosticism. But any autobiography is apt to sound pretty tentative
unless its author is much nearer to being dead than Mr. Read is.

17

The Eternal Tramp

December 1947

From Here and Now, i, no. 2 (December 1947): 8-11. Reprinted in RW, 2834. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3.

With Monsieur Verdoux Chaplin enters a "problem comedy" phase of his

development which has lost him a good deal of his popular following.
Shakespeare must have suffered a similar loss when he abandoned Falstaff and Pistol for Angelo and Parolles, and orthodox comedy constructed "as you like it" for dubious dramatic hermaphrodites too bitter
to be amusing and too sardonic to be tragic. At the same time those who
consider Chaplin to be one of the world's greatest dramatists are reassured by the explicitly didactic quality of Monsieur Verdoux, for it indicates that Chaplin is fully aware of his genius and has accepted the
authority that genius confers. So those who have recognized this authority for some time need no longer feel condescendingly highbrow, as
people so often are when they find real humour in a comic strip or real
merit in a bestseller. In any case Monsieur Verdoux seems, like Measure
for Measure before it, to be talking insistently about religion, so we must
examine it as religious drama, whatever our previous impressions of
Chaplin may be.
Comedy is intensely conservative in its formulae: The Great Dictator
could have been entered with Aristophanes in an Athenian festival with
very little essential change. And the character of the tramp, the pathetic
clown whom Chaplin has spent his life creating, has affinities not only
with the great comic types, the pantaloon, the vice, the harlequin, the
fool, and so on, but with the great characters who evolve out of the
types, with Quixote and Falstaff, Micawber and Huck Finn. Laughter,

The Eternal Tramp

117

the criticism of comedy, expresses a sudden release from something

frustrating, and hence may be the laugh of society delivered from a
menacing or eccentric individual, or the laugh of an individual delivered from some entangling social machinery. Hence the clown who
draws both the laugh of sympathy and the laugh of ridicule becomes a
focus of comic genius. Here pathos enters, for the root idea of pathos is
the failure of an individual, through weakness or ignorance or disastrous luck, to enter his natural community. This attacks a fear in us so
deep that real pathos (false pathos appeals to self-pity) is a kind of artistic rape, a physical assault of unbearable intensity. The death of Quixote,
the rejection of Falstaff, the unattended banquet in The Gold Rush, the
laughter of the blind girl in City Lights when she first opens her eyes on
the forlorn jailbird who has made such efforts to get the money for her
operationthese things make us wince and look away and feel that our
entertainer has betrayed our confidence. But such an incident is a sign
that comedy is developing into something that is not comedy, and yet
not tragedy either, for it includes comedy.
Chaplin's tramp is an American dramatic type, and Rip Van Winkle
and Huck Finn are among his ancestors. The tramp is a social misfit, not
only because he is too small and awkward to engage in a muscular
extroverted scramble, but because he does not see the point of what
society is doing or to what purpose it is expending all that energy. He is
not a parasite, for he possesses some occult secret of inner freedom, and
he is not a bum, for he will work hard enough, and still harder if a suitable motive turns up. Such a motive occurs when he discovers someone
still weaker than himself, an abandoned baby or a blind girl (students of
Jung will recognize the "anima" in Chaplin), and then his tenderness
drives him to extraordinary spasms of breadwinning. But even his normal operations are grotesque enough, for in the very earnestness with
which he tries so hard to play society's game it is clear that he has got it
all wrong, and when he is spurred to further efforts the grotesqueness
reaches a kind of perverse inspiration. The political overtones of this are
purely anarchistI have never understood the connecting of Communism with Chaplin1the anarchism of Jefferson and Thoreau which
sees society as a community of personal relationships and not as a
mechanical abstraction called a "state." But even so the tramp is isolated
by his own capacity for freedom, and he has nothing to do with the typical "little guy" that every fool in the country has been slobbering over
since Pearl Harbor.2

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City Lights marks the end of a phase in the tramp's development. Up

to this time he has been very much like Huck Finn: Huck Finn with his
ingenious dodges to protect his hunted friend, his gentle but fierce loyalty which makes him choose hell with Jim rather than the slave-owner's
heaven [chap. 31], and his open-mouthed admiration for the bustling
know-it-all Tom Sawyer, who, realizing that Jim is free anyway and that
he can't lose, muscles in at the end and takes all the credit for setting him
free while making the silliest possible shambles of Huck's simple plan
[chaps. 32-42]. In Modern Times a new theme appears: the relation of the
tramp to society is no longer personal, for society has become mechanized, and the central symbol of the film is that of the man caught in the
machine, the machine itself representing not other human beings but an
anonymous impersonal fate. Here the latent anarchism of the tramp
becomes an unconscious direct-action sabotage, wrecking the apparatus
he is trying so hard to control. Here too, however, the machine provides
an insistent rhythmical beat driving the story along and keeping the
characters in step with a glazed hypnotic stare. In the great nut-twisting
scene this reaches the concentration of a ballet, and there is one breathless moment when even the tramp himself is caught by the rhythm, and
rushes out into the street twisting nuts on everything he sees. This
moment, expanded, is the theme of The Great Dictator.
When the tramp turned his attention to Hitler he attacked, like Napoleon, at the strongest point. The only mark of real greatness in Hitler was
the seriousness with which he accepted his Antichrist role, his pedantic
insistence that even a child saying grace at meals should thank his
Fiihrer for his bread.3 The Antichrist symbolism in The Great Dictator, in
which a dictator who is blacked out by a Jewish barber recalls the Caesar
who was annihilated by a Jewish carpenter, is too complicated to work
out here, but is connected with a personal relation between Hitler and
Chaplin's tramp. Every normal person thinks of Hitler as a ham, and a
great clown would therefore see in him only a pretty poor imitation of
himself. The Great Dictator is built on the resemblance of Hitler to the
tramp, Mussolini representing the bully of the earlier films. And because
this resemblance is merely a special application of every normal person's reaction, the real tramp, throughout the picture, is also the normal
human being, who speaks in the name of all decent people at the end.
This means that Hitler is not only the counterfeit tramp, but that Chaplin
has found the Antichrist where in a sense Nietzsche found it, in something subhuman that imitates the normally human, something to be

The Eternal Tramp

119

symbolized by an ape or monkey. That is why Chaplin's Antichrist Hitler is also a repulsive anthropoid who climbs curtains, gobbles bananas,
and peers up women's skirts. But at the same time he is quite clearly the
tramp himself gone mad, possessed by the pounding beat of a machine
age. We understand now why the real tramp's efforts to act "normally"
are so absurd: he is normal, and he can only behave like others by
becoming obsessed as they are.
In Monsieur Verdoux the tramp appears again, with the same jaunty
air, the same extravagant clothes, the same exuberant courtesy. As in
City Lights, he is poor and has a helpless girl to look after, and as in Modern Times, he is thrown out of work by a "Depression," a mysterious
twist of a social machine. And so, the tramp decides, he will learn to
operate that machine, and do things the way society does. Society is evidently playing a ruthless law-of-the-jungle sort of game, the strong
trampling on the weak, the cunning making fortunes out of the helpless,
and a few at the top building up vast social engines for the sole purpose
of destroying life. So, with the same reasonable and conscientious earnestness with which the tramp in City Lights entered a boxing ring to
earn money for his blind girl, Verdoux sets about murdering and robbing rich widows in order to protect his crippled wife and child. Not
moral, perhaps; but morality doesn't seem to be the point of society's
game. And about his fourteen murders there is (one thinks of Arsenic
and Old Lace)4 a kind of crazy innocence. He does not rationalize, or pose
as an artist in crime; he merely accepts an "existential situation" absurd
enough for Camus (whose L'Etranger remotely resembles Verdoux). The
touch of the sentimental about him (he can incinerate women but not
step on a caterpillar) suggests the Nazi's maudlin brutality, and he
makes the quick financial decisions of a capitalist tycoon. But unlike
them, he shows no defensive self-righteousness, either of the romantic
or the realistic kind. And so while his behaviour is a shrewd and logical
parody of the tycoon and the Nazi, still his lack of self-righteousness
makes it naive and what we already see with intolerable clarity slowly
begins to dawn on him: that somehow or other he has got it all wrong
again.
His success however is remarkably well sustained, and it is clear that
he could only have played society's game by catching, as Hitler does,
the maddening beat of the social machine. His actions are a beautiful
and intricate juggle of timing and two-timing, punctuated by a rhythmical sequence of phone calls, train schedules, and riffled bills. He

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goes through his routine with Hitler's glazed eyes, glancing at his
watch as Hitler would consult an astrologer, rising to a crisis of action
as Hitler would seize the historic hour. And his downfall is not due to
the cleverness of society so much as to the fact that he wakes out of his
hypnotic trance, reverts to normal, and becomes again the real tramp,
the sane social misfit, unable to act because deprived of motives for
doing so.
Nobody really catches him. From society's point of view the story of
Verdoux is a detective thriller, and the detective does get on his trail. But
the whole smug banal convention of the detective story, with its criminal murder at one end balanced by a judicial murder at the other, its glorification of the man-hunter, and its elaborate pretence that the social
order develops logical machinery to catch every rebel against it,
explodes at the moment that the detective accepts Verdoux's poisoned
drink. Again, the film opens on a hideous squabbling family that supplies Verdoux with one of his victims, and this family, a symbol of social
claustrophobia, does close in at the end. Nevertheless the social vengeance that traps Verdoux comes from Verdoux himself. He deliberately
walks into the prison because he has finally realized that he has never
escaped from what it represents.
We are told that another turn of the social machine, a financial crash
that wiped him out, was what brought him to his senses. But the real
awakener is his realization that the machine does not operate as a
machine, much less as a social order, because it is out of control, and
therefore it operates as blind chance. Luck is no respecter of persons,
and even a vulgar and selfish fool like the Martha Raye5 character (her
name of course is Bonheur, but a pun on bonne heure, underlining the
subtle timing element, occurs in the dialogue), simply because she is
born lucky, has more of the predestined accuracy of the sleepwalker
than he, with all his agility. Her shattering mindless laugh, which regularly recurs through a wedding party, is certainly a voice of doom, yet it
is a laugh with no pleasure (which is, like Blake's tear, an intellectual
thing) [Jerusalem, pi. 52,1. 25], no triumph and no cry for vengeance, but
is more like the noise the iceberg made when the Titanic hit it. Again, the
girl-tramp whom Verdoux was going to poison as an experiment is dismissed with a theatrical remark about her corrupting him into goodness,
transforming Satan into an angel of light. He turns the girl's luck; he
waves his hand and makes her richfor she goes to the arms of a munitions manufacturer.

The Eternal Tramp

121

In the dock something of the dazed bewilderment of the trance still

hangs about Verdoux, because he is not cynical enough to understand
why the pretence of moral virtue is so important to society. Of course
his life is immoral, but why is society talking about morality? He does
not argue that he should be released because his judges are no better. He
merely refuses to accept what is in front of him as an adequate symbol
of his condemnation. He feels, in other words, not only that he does not
understand what society is driving at with its mass murders, but that
there can be no sense in anything at all, including his trial, unless everyone present is in the dock of a bigger court under the eye of a wiser
judge.
"I shall see you all very soonvery soon," he says. In The Great Dictator Hitler was portrayed both as Antichrist and as a counterfeit tramp,
which implies an association between the sane tramp and Christ. That is,
the tramp, the mouthpiece of all decent people in the final scene, represents whatever it is in man that is redeemable. Verdoux is both the mad
and the sane tramp, and hence Antichrist, the monkey that looks like a
man, is the mad tramp acting as society does: in short, Antichrist is
human nature, which mocks the image of God in man. At that moment
Verdoux becomes Everyman, possessed by a new security inspired by
his great discovery. All men are condemned to death because all men are
involved in crime. From one point of view at least, and the one that now
he must hold to, there can be no difference between moral good and
moral evil, the two aspects of degraded knowledge, between the criminal who kills and the society that wages war, between the criminal who
robs and the society that exploits labour. The futility of all human efforts
to judge other humans is what marks all victims of human justice, however much they "deserve" their punishment, with a more than human
dignity.
Verdoux sustains that dignity to the end. He resists the very subtle
temptation of the reporter to give his side of the story, to presume to be
a prophet on the strength of his experience of evil. Then a priest comes
in. "What would you do if there were no sin?" asks Verdoux. "What I
am doing now," says the priest: "trying to save a lost soul." There can be
lost souls without sin apparently: the priest cannot conceive a paradise
without a church militant: he is, therefore, like the reporter, merely a
projecting claw of the social machine. Then the police offer Verdoux a
drink of rum, and for the third time in the picture a drink is refused and
then accepted. Perhaps Verdoux accepts because refusal is the gesture of

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the really innocent victim, like Christ refusing the vinegar sponge [Mark
15:36!. "I've never tasted rum," he says, and Everyman, with his foul life
and his immortal soul, drains the communion cup with its new drink,
and goes out to be caught in a machine once more, full of hope because
this time the machine will overreach itself and set him free.

18

On Book Reviewing
June 1949

From Here and Now, 2 (June 1949): 19-20. Frye's remarks, along with those
of Malcolm Ross and F.R. Scott, were introduced by a note from the editor
explaining that "the following three articles constitute the result of a questionnaire which we sent to Mr. Frye, Mr. Ross, and Mr. Scott. We do not doubt
that all our readers' questions will not be answered here and for this we are
solely to blame. However, insofar as the subject is inexhaustible, we hope that
our authors have provided sufficient impetus for further discussion." Readers of
this volume will note Frye's reference to criticism as "the science of literature"
and his controversial views on the precritical nature of the value judgment.
QUESTION: Is there, in your opinion, a real difference between reviewing as
such and literary criticism?
ANSWER: Oh, yes. Criticism is the science of literature: a systematic and
progressive comprehension of it. Being a science, it begins in induction
and the collecting of instances. Book reviewing thus belongs to the preparatory empirical stage of criticism; but there are many aspects of criticism itself that deal with general laws, principles, and axioms, and have
nothing directly to do with the preliminary survey of available data
which the reviewer helps to make. Aristotle was a great critic, but I
should guess that he would have been a rather poor book reviewer.
QUESTION: If so, what is a) the function of the book reviewer?
ANSWER: Book reviewers are among the shock troops of culture. They
are the first victims of the fact that far too many people can read and
write. Countless swarms of books pour off the presses and make their
noisy and jostling way to the citadel of criticism and scholarship. Each

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has to be stopped and challenged by a group of critical sentries, asked

for his papers, and, if they are found to be in good order, passed on, otherwise turned back to be ground up into pulp again and put to more
useful purpose. Abandoning metaphors, the reviewer has to determine,
first, what category the book belongs to, second, how good it is of its
kind. The value judgment is based on two things. A good book must
delight and it must instruct.1 Anyone who desires to quarrel with or
qualify that statement should take up some other occupation.
QUESTION: b) the audience he addresses?
That depends first on the category of the book. Books on fishing should
delight and instruct fishermen, whether or not the reviewer can tell a
salmon from a trout. It depends secondly on the audience of the magazine he writes for. It is his editor's business to limit the objectives of his
circulation. If the reviewer writes for the popular press, he should adopt
standards of delight and instruction as unselected as possible; if he
writes for a learned journal, he is already directly concerned with critical
problems.
QUESTION: c) the end he wishes to achieve?
The end of the book review is to determine other readers dialectically
either to accept the book (which means buying or at least reading it), or
to let it go. If the reviewer moves for the book's rejection, that is still a
dialectic choice. If he recommends it, the end of book reviewing is the
beginning of criticism proper. The first reviews of a successful book are
followed by the slower rhythms of secondary criticism, where the
author as a whole is considered, and eventually becomes a classic, or at
least part of the permanent data of literature on which criticism is based.
QUESTION: d) the means by which he attains his end?
I don't understand this altogether: surely the means is the review itself.
The value of the review depends on the reviewer's intelligence and
responsibility. The reviewer has no business to be a satirist of new literature: he has no right even to exult in his power of making bad books
look as bad as possible. It is too easy to be what Jacob prophesied of the
tribe of Dan: a serpent in the way that biteth the horse's heels so that his
rider falleth backward [Genesis 49:16-20]. Still, book reviewers are perhaps too much maligned. Kierkegaard, I seem to remember, speaks of
them as a scrofulous eruptionor was it a green slime?on the surface

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125

of literature.2 Even bad reviewers, however, have their uses for the
author, if none for the reader: they correct his perspective. The author
knows not only what he means, but what he intended to mean, what he
thought of on the way toward saying it, and what overtones of meaning
he wants to be picked up. Thus he unconsciously creates in his mind an
ideal reader who is really a double of himself. The reviewer always
turns out to be someone else, and so his perceptions will seem unexpectedly gross and dull. But even if he is stupid or malicious, the author
must learn that a regrettably large proportion of his public is also stupid
and malicious. Yet I think it possible to be too quick in assuming that the
reviewer has sold his soul to Satan the accuser. So vain an animal is
man,3 that if he writes a book he regards anything said in his favour as
the least the fool could have said, whereas any animadversion is apt to
make him feel like a Hamlet watching the dumb show of a damned
smiling villain dropping poison into a sleeping public's ear [3.2.260,
stage direction]. If I may speak both as a reviewer and as one who has
been reviewed, I think that usually a reviewer's failures are only occasional breakdowns in the exacting discipline of his craft.

19

Academy without Walls1

May 1961

Address delivered to the Canadian Conference of the Arts, O'Keefe Centre,

Toronto, 4 May 1961. From Canadian Art, 18 (September-October 1961):
296-8. Reprinted in Varsity Weekend Review, i December 1961, i, 4; OE,
38-45; and RW, 45-54. Frye's speech was one of "Two Canadian Points of
View." A variety of typescripts, prepared before and subsequent to the delivery
of the address, and for republication in RW can be found in NFF, 1988, box i,
files n and o, NFF, 1988, box 47, file i, and NFF, 1991, box 38, file 2. These
largely record Frye's obvious corrections of typographical and spelling errors,
e.g., "neoclassical" for "new-classical," "manifestos" for "manifestoes." In an
article adjacent to Frye's in Canadian Art, "That Museum without Walls,"
Frank Underhill disputed whether the absorption of the arts into the educational system was as benign a process as Frye had argued, and wondered
whether the university was a sufficient shield for the unprotected, misunderstood condition of the arts in Canada. Contributors to the symposium varied
widely in style and subject matter, although the tight connections many of
themparticularly Jean-Charles Falardeau and Jane Drewforged between
the arts and the life of the city would have resonated with Frye's own concerns,
and he may well have recalled them when he began writing MC.

I suppose everyone here has been asked by someone, at some time or

other, to explain contemporary art to him. I cannot explain contemporary art, but I can point out two of its characteristics without moving
very far away. In the first place, this is a conference of contemporary arts.
Artists have always formed cliques, schools, groups, and "isms"; they
have formed societies and guilds; they have organized manifestos, little
magazines, cooperative housing, and insurance schemes. But the confer-

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127

ring artist, the artist who goes to a conference of artists, is a product of

this age alone. In the second place, I am the third university man in a
row to address you this afternoon, which means, whatever else it may
mean, that we are well into the twentieth century. At no other period of
history would academics be so willing to talk to artists or artists be so
willing to listen to academics. At no other period of history has the university's devotion to the liberal arts been so closely associated with the
actual arts.
One obvious fact about the culture of our time is the enormously
increased awareness of its past, and the variety and range of tolerance in
its sense of tradition. The greenest student in a conservatory may learn
more about pre-Mozartian music than Mozart himself ever knew; and
even if, say, Watteau or Goya had known anything about Bushman
painting or Haida masks,2 they could hardly have seen much connection between them and the traditions of art that they accepted. But the
artist of today cannot think of himself as being pushed along at the end
of a thin line of historical development through Greece, Rome, and
Western Europe. He is now a citizen of all time and space: Javanese
puppet plays, Chinese calligraphy, Benin bronzes, Peruvian textiles
anything that has ever been produced as art or is now realized to be art
may take its place in his tradition. Immense erudition is needed to
understand the variety of influences on contemporary artists, and the
work of Picasso, of Stravinsky, of T.S. Eliot, might from one point of
view be studied as a mass of quotations and allusions.
An artist may serve his apprenticeship in many ways: he may start at
the age of eleven in a master's studio grinding colours and laying in
backgrounds; or he may attend slide lectures in a university scribbling
indecipherable notes in the dark about Carolingian manuscripts in the
Ottoman Renaissance. What he is doing in either case is learning about
the conventions of his art. For no artist ever faces his world directly: he
enters into the conventions provided by the art of his time. One does not
learn to paint landscapes by studying landscapes, any more than one
learns to compose fugues by listening to street noises. After a little study
of Italian painting, one may learn to distinguish at a glance across a
room what century a particular picture was painted in. This would be
impossible if any artist really had the power to face nature directly, outside the prism of convention. The novelist may gather his material from
the life around him, but his ability to make anything of it will depend on
his knowledge of novel-writing, which begins in his knowledge of how

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other people have written novels. An artist's technical ability, in short,

comes out of his craftsmanship, and his craftsmanship comes out of his
scholarship.
Consequently, an increase in the sense of the variety of tradition, of
the number of legitimate influences it is possible to have, becomes part
of an increase in the technical resources of the arts. Art is, Aristotle tells
us [Poetics, 14473], an imitative activity, and what it imitates, according
to the critics, is nature. Other authorities have assured us that art is also
a creative activity, and that what it creates is an aspect of human society.
But in the twentieth century "nature" is no longer so firmly rooted a
world of familiar physical objects, nor is "society" a group of familiar
personalities growing out of it. You heard that a conference was being
held in Toronto and came here by plane or train or car: in other words
your "society" or environment is a coordinated series of points in space.
Twentieth-century life does not radiate from a centre but rotates in an
orbit, moving from point to point at will. Nature has become similarly
abstract and conceptualized. The ease of moving around has become
central in our imaginations, and our sense of objectivity is no longer
identified with fixed objects. The objective world appears as a swirling
mass of electrons even to those who do not know what an electron is; the
view of the world from an airplane window, as an abstract pattern of
crop and fallow fields or a geometrical network of city lights, is the
world view even of those who have never been in a plane. Vision is relative to the choice of a point of view: this has always been true, of course,
but never before so obviously true. Consciousness itself is a chosen point
of view; there is no reason why the world of dream and fantasy should
not be an equally valid choice.
This vast expansion in the possibilities of form has given the artist
unprecedented resources in technique. Representationalism in painting,
diatonic harmony in music, strict metre and rhyme in poetry, are as
legitimate techniques as they ever were, but each is now regarded as one
among a great many possibilities. Like man in existentialist philosophy,
art is in a state of unqualified freedom. To begin with, anything goes:
difficulties may come later, but they come as consequences of a free
choice. At times one feels that the artist is rather in the position of Adam
in paradise, who had so much freedom that all he could do was sin. And
yet much of this sense of unlimited freedom is an illusion, or rather, it
exists for the art as a whole, but not for the individual artist. The artist is
in theory free to commit himself to any one of a dozen conventions, but

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129

all that he can choose is a convention. Tachism,3 abstraction, twelve-tone

harmony, free verse: these are loose terms for groups of conventions
each of which is as rigid as the conventions of plain chant,4 Russian
icons, or a beatnik's vocabulary.
Contemporary art is neither popular nor esoteric. It is academic and
scholarly, newly possessed of tremendous technical resources and still
experimenting with their use. It is therefore an integral part of the educational system of our time, which is why the artist and the scholar can
be so naturally associated as they are in this conference. It has always
been said that the artist's function was to delight and instruct,5 and in an
age like ours his importance as an instructor cannot be ignored. There
will always be artists for every variety of creative expression, but a large
part of the creative energy of our time is bound to be directed toward
the exploring of technique. It is natural that poetry should turn to myth
and metaphor, painting to the abstract relations of pattern and colour,
music to a neoclassical absorption in form. How long this academic
phase of art will last I do not know, not having a clouded crystal ball
handy, but other things being equal it should outlast the century. There
will be reactions against it every year or so, eddies churning in the
stream, and each will be hailed in turn as the beginning of something
totally new. But, as Samuel Butler remarked in Erewhon a century ago,
"There is no way of making an aged art young again; it must work out
its salvation anew, and in all fear and trembling."6 I am not making a
value judgment on contemporary art: I am merely trying to characterize
it. Being an academic myself, I feel that if art is academic there is nothing
better for it to be, and that there is no reason why our age should be culturally inferior to any other.
When the ideals of modern democracy were formed, there was some
hope that patronage in the arts would be replaced by popularity; that art
would cease to be a status symbol for connoisseurs and would take a
central functional place in society. It has done this to some extent, but in
a way that has disappointed many. Some of you may recall a tedious
and foolish harangue that covered an inordinate amount of a Toronto
newspaper a few weeks ago under the title of "Cult or Culture."7 There
is, of course, no "or" about it: culture has always been a cult, in the sense
of being a group of specialized and exacting disciplines. It is natural that
some people should resent this, just as it is natural that some people
should resent the fact that years of hard work in education are necessary
for the best life. It is natural that some people should feel a strong urge

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The Arts

to tell the artist that whatever he is doing he is doing it all wrong, and
ought to "return" to something they regard as more satisfactory. The
trouble is that the artist does not have all that freedom of choice, once his
initial choice (and even that may not be a choice)8 has been made. He
can paint or write or compose only what takes shape in his mind: he cannot will to become a different kind of artist. It is possible in a totalitarian
society, and it might be possible in this one, to lay down certain
approved norms that all artists must conform to, and to ensure that no
one who does not have the specific talents required will ever get to be an
artist. But that would not make realists out of artists; it would merely
mean that a very different and much less genuinely creative group of
people were taking over the arts.
The contemporary artist is dependent neither on patronage nor on
popularity, but on something in between. Because his work is increasingly regarded as an academic and scholarly activity, he depends on recognition by critics, reviewers, directors of museums and art galleries,
members of the advisory boards of councils and wealthy foundations,
university administrators who employ him as a summer teacher or resident artistalmost entirely a community of scholars. The artist may dislike this situation, or pretend to do so. He may dream of appealing to the
general public over the heads of such scholars: he may attack them as
unimaginative, culturally sterile, parasitic, prissy, and hidebound: he
may fall into cliches of nineteenth-century Romanticism about the creator's virility and the critic's lack of it. We find this in the work of the
writer who produces, for middlebrow magazines, the kind of highly
conventionalized essay about his view of the modern world that is
designed to give the impression of a writer writing like a writer. Or the
artist may have been brought up to think of the academic as the opposite
of the creative, and be genuinely bewildered by a world in which they
have become the same thing. Nevertheless, scholars are the public on
whom the artist must make his first impression, and from his point of
view he could hardly do better. Advisory committees and the like are as
a rule liberal to a fault: they know how many mistakes have been made
in the past, and are not anxious to repeat them; they do not require conventional morality or subservient behaviour; they expect the artist to
take the odd nervous bite out of the hand that feeds him. There are
exceptions, but they are far fewer than when Samuel Johnson could list
the hazards of the mental life as: "Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron, and the
Jail" [The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1.160]. For many a modern artist, sup-

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131

ported by benevolent foundations until he can be handed over to the

women's committees of symphonies and art galleries, the course would
be better described as: "Prize, study, grant, the matron, and the kale."
The patronage of the arts by various semi-official bodies, and the
employment of artists by universities, do not mean that the country is
trying to buy itself a culture, or that foundations are seeking for more
virtuous and better publicized ways of paying income tax. Such things
mean that in the twentieth century the creative arts have become
absorbed into the educational process. The artist is recognized as a
teacher and educator, and society is exposed, however reluctantly, to
the contemporary arts because they are a necessary part of education.
The "difficulty" of contemporary art is precisely the same as that of any
other subject of education, which means that most of the difficulty, like
beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Algebra is neither difficult nor easy
to the keen student, but to, say, the girl who has already decided on a
life of bridge and Saturday shopping it is impenetrably obscure. She
"can't do" algebra because it has no place in her vision of life. Nevertheless the educational system mildly compels her at least to try a little
algebra, because this is a democracy, and it is her right to be exposed to
quadratic equations however little she wants them. The arts are much
less like algebra than, for example, a well-planned football game, but
still they do demand some concentrating of attention. It is the right of
people to be kept in contact with the contemporary arts because the
public is partly paying for them, and the public ought to get what it
ought to get. It is entirely impossible to know nothing of art and yet to
know what one likes: what one likes is always a measure of what one
knows. Those who deny that society is responsible for guiding and
developing its own taste are people who cannot distinguish a democratic society from a mob.
The result is that there is now an unprecedented tolerance for experiment and originality of all kinds in the arts. It is difficult even to imagine
what sort of pictures would go today into a Salon des Refuses.9 Gone are
the days when radicalism in the arts could be regarded as a sign of atheism, Communism, and moral turpitude. I remember passing behind two
gentle old ladies in the Art Gallery of Toronto as they were contemplating some rather strident pictures by a young painter, and hearing one of
them say, "And when I knew him he was a nice clean boy." But such
comments are now rare. T.S. Eliot, with his Order of Merit and his odour
of sanctity, must look back with some nostalgia to the days when The

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The Arts

Waste Land was a new poem and he could be described as a "drunken

helot" and a "cultural Bolshevist."10 On the contrary, even the Museum
of Modern Art in New York is old hat now, and crowds line up before
the elevators in the Guggenheim Museum waiting to be sucked down
into the vortex of that preposterous building. As art becomes increasingly fashionable, anything new in art becomes a new fashion. To encourage it is ever so revolutionary, and yet completely safe. The Canada
Council has no qualms about supporting the magazine Canadian Art,
however radical the art may be that it illustrates.11 The Canadian Forum is
a magazine that the Canada Council, according to its own statement,
will not support, on the ground that it expresses opinions. Some things,
apparently, can still be disturbing; but the arts, like the religions, seem to
have become immunized.
Pseudo-tolerance has an insecure basis, and carries its own disadvantages. Hazlitt, a tough Romantic radical who was both painter and critic,
once spoke of music as a thing without an opinion,12 and though I do not
share the view of music implied, I can understand his attitude. In their
younger days artists may form in groups issuing manifestos and endeavouring to impress the public with the importance of their work by making defiant gestures at it. But as the artist grows more successful he
becomes less fond of other artists and more fond of the people who buy
his work and advance his reputation, and so tends to fall into the social
attitudes prescribed for him by them. And academic art, like any other
kind, has the defects of its virtues. For the arts reflect the world that produces them, and everything the detractors of modern art say about it is
true, except that what they are objecting to is not so much something in
our art as something in our lives. Painting, music, and architecture, no
less than literature, reflect an anonymous and cold-blooded society, a
society without much respect for personality and without much tolerance for difference in opinion, a society full of slickness, smugness, and
spiritual inanity. But as long as the arts are thought of as educational they
can teach as well as reflect. It would be an appalling disaster if the arts
became merely decorative, identified with the qualities they do, to some
extent, illustrate.
It is a great mistake to imagine that the end of education in the arts is
simply to admire the works of art themselves. Education in the arts
makes one more critical and detached, not more impressionable. Of
course one does appreciate what one has learned to understand; but the
arts have something to teach beyond themselves, a way of seeing and

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133

hearing that nothing else can give, a way of living in society in which
the imagination takes its proper central place. Just as the sciences show
us the physical world of nature, so the arts show us the human world
that man is trying to build out of nature. And, without moralizing, the
arts gradually lead us to separate the vision of the world we want to live
in from the world that we hate and reject, the ideals of beauty from the
horrors portrayed by art when it is in the mood that we call ironic. All
genuine art leads up to this separation, and that is why it is an educating
force.
Our present society is not predestined to go onward and upward,
whether with the arts or without them. We are trying to marshal all the
resources of culture and intellect we have in order to struggle with the
problems that our civilization has created. We have outside us nations
with different political philosophies, and we think of them as dangers,
or even as enemies. But our more dangerous enemies, so far, are within.
I spoke a moment ago of the difference between a mob and a democratic
society. Our effective enemies are not foreign propagandists, but the
hucksters and hidden persuaders and segregators and censors and hysterical witch-hunters and all the rest of the black guard who can only
live as parasites on a gullible and misinformed mob. Yet the only really
permanent way to turn society into a mob is to debase the arts: to turn
literature into slanted news, painting into billboard advertising, music
into caterwauling transistor sets, architecture into mean streets. As an
educator, the artist today has a revolutionary role to play of an importance of which no nineteenth-century Bohemian in a Paris garret ever
dreamed. He has powerful friends as well as enemies, for in his commitment to his art he has the fundamental good will of society on his side.

20

Communications
9 July 1970

From the Listener, #4 (9 July 1970): 33-5. Reprinted in Mass Communications: Selected Readings for Librarians, ed. KJ. McGarry (Hamden, Conn.:
Linnet Books, 1972; n.p.: Clive Bingley, 1972), 119-24; Mass Media: Forces
in Our Society, 2nd ed., ed. Francis H. Voelker and Ludmila A. Voelker (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 402-6; and The Little, Brown
Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet (Boston: Little, Brown,
1980), 420-5. On Saturday, 20 June 1970, Frye recorded his talk for transmission on BBC Radio Three. Two typed transcripts exist in NFF, 1991, box 38,
file 2, and NFF, 1999, box 38, file 4. Where they seem significant, the changes
Frye made from the broadcast to the published essay have been recorded.
I am on an advisory committee concerned with Canadian radio and television, and so I have been trying to do some reading in communication
theory. I find it an exciting subject to read about, because so much of the
writing is in the future tense, with so many sentences beginning, "We
shall soon be able to ..." But I have also become aware of a more negative side to it, as to most technology. The future that is technically feasible may not be the future that society can absorb. There is a great gap
now between what we are doing and what we have the means to do,
and many writers regard this as a disease peculiar to our time that we
shall get over when we feel less threatened by novelty. But I doubt that
the gap can be so soon or so easily closed. When I read symposia by
technical experts telling me what the world could be like one hundred
years from now, I feel a dissolving of identity, with all the familiar social
landmarks disappearing, as though I were in Noah's flood climbing a
tree [Genesis 7:11-24]. As I imagine that this is what most people feel, I

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135

suspect that the world one hundred years from now will be much more
like the world today than the experts suggest.
Plato was much concerned with the revolution brought about by writing in his day. He felt that the oral tradition was done for, and that the
poets, the great rememberers, were on their way out as teachers, and
would have to give place to the writing philosophers. But Plato's
Socrates, of all people, was unlikely to overlook the ironic side of this. In
the Phaedrus we are told that the Egyptian god Thoth invented writing,
and explained to all the other gods how greatly his invention would
transform the memory [2740-2753]. The other gods looked down their
noses and said that on the contrary it would only destroy the memory.
Thoth and his critics were talking about different kinds of memory, so
they couldn't get any further. The deadlock between the enthusiasm of a
technological expert and a public digging in its heels to resist him has
never been more clearly stated.
All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social
authority, and reflect their anxieties. In socialist countries they reflect
the anxiety of the political Establishment to retain power; in the United
States they reflect the anxiety of the economic Establishment to keep
production running. In either case communication is a one-way street.
Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous,
caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders,
culture, contemporary issues, and remedies against the migraine we get
from listening to it. It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the
voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming our habits of speech,
our processes of thought.
If people did not resent this they would not be human, and all the
nightmares about society turning into an insect state would come true.
My hair prickles when I hear advertisers talk of a television set simply
as a means of reaching their market. It so seldom occurs to them that a
television set might be their market's way of looking at them, and that
the market might conceivably not like what it sees. If the viewer is black
and sees a white society gorging itself on luxuries and privileges, the
results can be explosive. But this is only a special case of a general social
resentment against being always treated as an object to be stimulated.
As with erotic stimulation, or should I say as with other forms of erotic
stimulation, there is a large element of mechanical and involuntary
response, for all the resentment. The harder it is to escape, the more
quickly the resentment turns to panic, and it seems clear that a great

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deal of the shouting and smashing and looting and burning of our time
comes from this panic. Many other things are best understood as forms
of resentment, or at least resistance, to mass communication, such as the
rock music which wraps up its listeners in an impermeable cloak of
noise. I often wonder, too, how far the users of drugs have been affected
by a feeling that they have been cheated out of genuinely new sensory
impressions by the mass media.
More important is the political resistance. When I read articles on satellite broadcasting and the like I am often told, with a teacher's glassy
smile, that the increase in the range of broadcasting will lead to far
greater international understanding, because very soon now we can
have all the problems of Tanzania or Paraguay brought to us by touching a button, and won't that be nice? One answer from the public which
is remarkably loud and clear is that they don't want all those people in
their living room. If the world is becoming a global village, it will also
take on the features of real village life, including cliques, lifelong feuds,
and impassable social barriers. In spirit I agree with the optimists: it is
the destiny of man to unite rather than divide, and as a Canadian I have
little sympathy with separatism,1 which seems to me a mean and
squalid philosophy. But I can hardly ignore the fact that separatism is
the strongest political force yet thrown up by the age of television.
The direction of most of the technological developments of our time
has been towards greater introversion. The automobile, the passenger
aeroplane, the movie, the television set, the multistorey block, are all
much more introverted than their predecessors. The result is increased
alienation and a decline in the sense of festivity, the sense of pleasure in
belonging to a community. Even our one technically festive season,
Christmas, is an introverted German Romantic affair, based on a myth of
retreat into the cave of a big Dickensian cuddly family of a type that
hardly exists. The one advantage of an introverted situation is privacy;
but for us the growing introversion goes along with a steady decrease in
privacy. This means that the psychological conditions of life, whatever
the physical conditions, become increasingly like those of life in a
prison, where there is no privacy and yet no real community. In this situation the easy defences of introversion, such as apathy or cynicism, are
no defences at all.
We hear of meetings broken up and speakers howled down by organized gangs; we try to phone from a tube station and find the telephone
torn out; we read of hijacked planes and of bombs in letter boxes; hood-

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lums go berserk in summer resorts and adolescents scream all the words
they know that used to be called obscene. We realize that these acts are
in too consistent a pattern to be mere destructiveness, and yet they are
too irresponsible to be serious revolutionary tactics, though they may be
rationalized as such. However silly or vicious they may be, they are acts
of counter-communication, acts noisy enough or outrageous enough to
shout down that voice and spit at that image, if only for a few moments.
But hysterical violence is self-defeating, not merely because it is violence
but because, as counter-communication, it can only provoke more
of what it attacks. Every outbreak of violence releases more floods
of alarm, understanding, deep reservations, comment in perspective,
denunciation, concern, sympathy, analysis, and reasoned argument.
Violence, however long it lasts, can only go around in the circles of lost
direction. There is a vaguely Freudian notion that there is something
therapeutic in releasing inhibitions; but it is clear that releasing inhibitions is just as compulsive, repetitive, and hysterical an operation as the
repressing of them.2
To go back to Plato and the god Thoth's invention: an oral culture,
before writing develops, is heavily dependent on individual memory.
This means that the teachers are often poets, because verse is the easiest
verbal pattern to remember. With writing, and eventually printing, continuous prose develops. With prose, philosophy changes from aphorism
and proverb to a continuous argument organized by logic and dialectic,
and history to a continuous narrative. Such metaphors as "the pursuit of
knowledge" are based on the sense of the planned and systematic conquest of reality which writing makes possible. In our day the electronic
media of film, radio, and television have brought about a revival of the
oral culture that we had before writing, and many of the social characteristics of a preliterate society are reappearing in ours. The poet, for
example, finds himself again before a listening audience, when he can
use topical or even ephemeral themes: he does not have to retreat from
society and write for posterity.
One common interpretation of this fact, strongly influenced by Marshall McLuhan, is that print represents a "linear"3 and timebound
approach to reality, and that the electronic media, by reviving the oral
tradition, have brought in a new "simultaneous" or mosaic form of understanding. Contemporary unrest, in this view, is part of an attempt to
adjust to a new situation and break away from the domination of print.
This view is popular among American educators, because it makes for

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anti-intellectualism and the proliferating of gadgets, and I understand

that for some of them the phrase "p.o.b," meaning print-oriented bastard, has replaced s.o.b. as a term of abuse. It seems to me that this view
is not so much wrong as perverted, the exact opposite of what is true.
The difference between the linear and the simultaneous is not a difference between two kinds of media, but a difference between two mental
operations within all media. There is always a linear response followed
by a simultaneous one, whatever the medium. For words there is the
participating response of turning the pages of a book, following the trail
of words from top left to bottom right, or listening in a theatre or before
a radio. This response is precritical, and is followed by the real critical
response. This latter is the "simultaneous" response which reacts to the
whole of what has been presented. In looking at a picture there is a preliminary dance of the eye before we take in the whole picture; in reading
a newspaper there are two preliminary operations: the glance over the
headlines and the consecutive reading of a story. Pictures and written
literature give us a spatial focus, a kind of projected total recall, to contain the experience. When the communication simply takes place in time
and disappears, there has been a purely linear experience which can
only be repeated or forgotten.
In verbal communication the document, the written or printed record,
is the technical device that makes the critical or simultaneous response
possible. The document is the model of all real teaching, because it is
infinitely patient: it repeats the same words however often one consults
it. The spatial focus it provides makes it possible to return to the experience, a repetition of the kind that underlies all genuine education. The
document is also the focus of a community, the community of readers,
and while this community may be restricted to one group for centuries,
its natural tendency is to expand over the community as a whole. Thus it
is only writing that makes democracy technically possible. It is significant that our symbolic term for a tyrant is "dictator": that is, an uninterrupted speaker.
The most vivid portrayal of an oral society I know is in the opening of
Paradise Lost. Satan is a rhetorician, an orator, a dictator; for his use of
words, everything depends on the immediate mood, where one can
express agreement or disagreement only by shouting. The devils are
being trained to become oracles, whispering or commanding voices telling man how to act and think. They are also being trained to forget, to
cut their links with their past and face the present moment. Eventually

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they adjourn for a cabinet meeting, for a preliterate society cannot get
politically past the stage of a closed council with its oral deliberations. It
is true that when we come to heaven there is another harangue and
another listening audience. But there is one important difference: God is
thinking of writing a book, and is outlining the plot to the angels.
The domination of print in Western society, then, has not simply
made possible the technical and engineering efficiency of that society, as
McLuhan emphasizes. It has also created all the conditions of freedom
within that society: democratic government, universal education, tolerance of dissent, and (because the book individualizes its audience) the
sense of the importance of privacy, leisure, and freedom of movement.
What the oral media have brought in is, by itself, anarchist in its social
affinities.
It has often been pointed out that the electronic media revive many of
the primitive and tribal conditions of a preliterate culture, but there is
no fate in such matters, no necessity to go around the circle of history
again. Democracy and book culture are interdependent, and the rise of
oral and visual media represents, not a new order to adjust to, but a subordinate order to be contained.4

21

The Renaissance of Books

15 November 1973

From Visible Language, 8, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 225-40. Reprinted with

two small omissions in SM, 49-65. A note in Visible Language explained that
"This essay was originally prepared as an address to the Ferguson Seminar on
Publishing, held on the campus of the College of William and Mary [in Williamsburg, Virginia], November 15 and 16,1973." It is in some respects a reply
to George Steiner's article "After the Book?" in Visible Language (Summer
1972), which was also originally delivered as a Ferguson Seminar lecture. The
Ferguson Seminars were conceived by William Cross Ferguson, former president of the World Book Company and director and treasurer of the American
Textbook Publishers Institute, who before his death in 1967 set in motion the
establishment of an endowment for "a seminar in publishing ... devoted to the
writing, editing, designing, printing, and marketing of books." At this date, it
is clear that Frye's article is at once a uniquely personal effort in "the history of
the book" an important analysis of the cultural authority enjoyed by the print
medium, and a retrospective episode in his own intellectual autobiography. A
carbon copy of the article in NFF, 1988, box 4, file hh lists some pencilled corrections, and strikes out "or even Iris Murdoch" from the list of contemporary
novelists who, like Vonnegut and Pynchon, have moved to antirealist modes.
NFF, 1988, box 60, file 6 contains the abstract Frye composed for the article, a
document that further clarifies his disagreement with McLuhan. In it, Frye
emphasizes that his concern is with the unique position of the book "among the
instruments of communication in modern society," a uniqueness he credits to
its existence as "a stationary focus for the community." This file also contains
Frye's response to Norman Fiering about suggested revisions to the article.

I suppose one may spend one's whole life with books, without thinking
particularly about the different kinds of emotional impact that books

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may have, not only because of what they are, but because of what they
symbolize or dramatize in society. I can trace in my own earlier life several kinds of such symbolic influence. There had been a clergyman in
our family, and the bookcases in our house included several shelves of
portly theological tomes in black bindings. These were professional
books, of course, and their equivalents would have been, and still would
be, found in other such homes. But on a child they gave an effect of
immense and definitive authority, of summing up the learning and wisdom of the ages. They appealed to that primitive area of response before
reading was a general skill in society, when "gramarye" meant magic,
when there were few Prosperos and many Calibans to say of them:
Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am; nor hath not
One spirit to command.... Burn but his books. [The Tempest, 3.2.91-5]

And yet when I was old enough to begin to try to use these books
myself, I became aware of another important principle connected with
books: the principle of the mortality of knowledge. Apart from two
which I am still using, a Cruden's Concordance to the Bible and a Josephus, there was hardly a statement in any of these volumes which had
not become demonstrably false, meaningless, or obsolete. I remember
opening a huge commentary on the first page, the introduction to Genesis, and reading there: "Nothing is more certain than that this book was
written by Moses." Alas, I already knew that if there was one thing
more uncertain than the authorship of Genesis, it was the existence of
Moses. The black bindings were appropriate: the books were coffins of
dead knowledge. Their impressiveness as physical objects was grotesquely inconsistent with the speed at which scholarship moves, and it
was clear that books ought to have a very different sort of appearance if
they are to symbolize the fact that genuine knowledge is always in a
state of flux.
In the same house there were sets of Scott and Dickens, and sets of
lesser writers as well, for in those days even a bestselling novelist with a
temporary vogue might achieve a collected edition in twenty volumes.
There were also poetsElizabeth Browning, Longfellow, Whittier
bound up in some repulsive substance that at the least hint of sustained
use began to split, crack, and come off on the fingers. Sinclair Lewis in
Main Street refers to the "unread-looking sets" of authors in the homes

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of Gopher Prairie,1 and doubtless many such sets were unread. But
being read may not have been their only, perhaps not even their primary, social function. I still possess a set of The World's Best Essays,
bound in red leather and illustrated by steel engraving portraits of the
authors. I hesitate to give it away, because it really is an extraordinary
collection: I could hardly have believed that so much of Baudelaire,2 for
example, was so available to North American homes around 1910. But
the physical conditions of the set make it difficult to read, and almost
impossible to use.
I am not trying to characterize the reading habits, or nonreading habits, of an earlier generation: I am trying to illustrate the symbolic impact
of certain types of books in middle-class households up to about 1920.
As physical objects, such books assumed the role of a cultural monument, representatives of the authority of tradition. They are well evoked
in an early poem of T.S. Eliot:
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law. [Cousin Nancy, 11.11-13]

However, this poem is also about a girl who smoked and danced the
modern dances, implying that even Matthew and Waldo may not have
been altogether with it, at least not in that physical form. The word "glazen," meaning, of course, that they were in formally designed bookcases
with glass covers, indicates that, whether they were read or not, being
looked at when they were not being read was an integral part of their
function and value.
I went to Toronto for my university training, and Toronto, in the 19305,
still had a good deal of the British midland town about it, including a
number of second-hand bookshops. Here was a quite different kind of
emotional appeal connected with books. I should put this statement in
the plural, for many emotions clustered around the second-hand bookshop. One was the emotion of nostalgia, on finding the favourite books of
one's earlier life. Alexander Woollcott has an essay about a woman who
discovered on a Paris bookstall the identical copy of a book she had possessed as a child: he speaks of this experience as "catching nature in the
act of rhyming."3 Then there was the reflection on the vanity of human
wishes, in coming, say, upon a book by an unknown author with a sad
little inscription on the flyleaf presenting it to a friend. More central, of

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course, was the excitement of the treasure hunt. This could be literal and
commercial, the rare exhilaration of carrying out from under the bookseller's nose something that was more valuable than he realized. But that
was for experts: as a rule, one was content with the feeling that the book
itself might be a hidden treasure, an unlocked word-hoard. This feeling,
however often disappointed, is quite as primitive and essential as the
impression of magical authority, already mentioned. Such shops have
now largely disappeared from Toronto, as from other cities: even the forlorn books that used to go the rounds of church rummage sales have
been bought up by librarians of new universities, at least in enough
quantity to remove them from the orbit of the book-searcher's interest.
The second-hand bookshop however represents something irreplaceable
in one's literary experience, and it is bound to revive sooner or later, if
only as an aspect of the junk-antique business.
I was in London, on my way to Oxford as a student, when Penguins
began to appear. At that time they were sixpence apiece, and could be
got out of slot machines. They were aggressively advertised, at least for
British mores at that time: I remember an advertisement contrasting a
new Penguin with a battered and dog-eared copy of a book from a public library, with the caption: "You don't know who had it last."4 I did
realize that this reflection on public libraries had some social significance, the public libraries being so major an influence on the book market throughout the nineteenth century, able to exert collateral forms of
pressure like censorship. But I did not realize that I was seeing the birth
of something like a revolution. After all, why should it have been one?
Why should putting out books in brightly coloured soft covers, with the
pages glued instead of sewn, be an important cultural change? It is
surely not comparable with other physical changes in the history of the
verbal arts, such as the change from scroll to codex around the beginning of the Christian era, to say nothing of the invention of the printing
press itself.
The reason, I think, is once again the fact that books are significant not
only for what they are but for what they dramatize or symbolize in society by their appearance. The paperback was partly a reaction to the
book as cultural monument, and by being that it helped to dramatize the
importance of the book as an intellectual tool. It suggested a higher
degree of expendability, and so acknowledged the mutability of scholarship and literary taste. The psychological effect of studying such a work
as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind in paperback seems to me to be quite

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different from studying the same book in a hard cover. And by dramatizing the book as intellectual tool, the paperback also dramatized the
extraordinary effectiveness of the book, the fact that, familiar and unobtrusive as it is, the book is one of the most efficient technological instruments ever developed in human history.
There are signs, naturally enough, that the paperback vogue is waning
and that it will come to dominate the book world less exclusively in the
future. One has to see it in its proper context, as one of several revolutions in verbal media. Others are the development of photocopying and
the immense growth of facsimile reprints: I should add to this also what
seems to me to be an unprecedented increase in the volume and range of
translation. All these are part of the same cultural expansion that has
produced reproductions in paintings and recordings of music, and like
them they have greatly expanded the range of possible influence on contemporary culture. Just as any freshman in a conservatory may learn
from records more about pre-Mozartian music than Mozart himself ever
knew, so any student in a small college may have access, potentially, to a
range of materials formerly available only in the biggest libraries. Even
when books are produced in the scale and size of the cultural monument, they show the effects of these revolutions. An example is the type
of book usually called, rather deprecatingly, the coffee-table book. This
is normally a collection of photographs of pictures or buildings, and is
designed, not to stand on shelves with an army of unalterable law, but to
lie down enticingly and alone, like a mistress.
Paperbacks and photocopied materials reflect also a major change in
the academic perspective. As an undergraduate I was taught philosophy by G.S. Brett, a scholar greatly admired by his students, and most
deservedly so, for his vast learning. He was the author of a History of
Psychology, still a standard work on the subject; he had no degree except
an Oxford M.A., and was Dean of the Graduate School, a task he took
with little seriousness because he thought graduate research was mostly
a lot of nonsense. He represented a generation of scholars whose life
work was expressed by a single major book, or a very restricted canon
of such books.5 But even in his last teaching years, the cataract of
papers, offprints, and other manifestations of the publish-or-perish
fetish in academic life had begun, as a part of the cultural change of
which the paperback and the reprint are other symbols. Philosophers
like AJ. Ayer began mounting attacks on metaphysics,6 partly, I think,
because metaphysics represented the structural aspect of philosophy,

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the aspect which made large books possible. In their wake came the
"productive scholars" of a new school, who tended to be suspicious of
all books that were not collections of brief papers. Robert Musil, in The
Man without Qualities, surveys the situation with his usual doubleedged irony:
Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at
their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of
locking it up in a system. Probably that is also the reason why there have
been great philosophic minds in times of tyranny, whereas times of
advanced civilization and democracy do not succeed in producing a convincing philosophy, at least so far as one can judge from the lamentations
one commonly hears on the subject. That is why nowadays there is a terrifying amount of philosophizing done in small slices. . . . There is, on the
other hand, a definite mistrust of philosophy in large chunks, which is simply considered impossible.7

I have always been very touched by the preface to the third and last
volume of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology. This was a work on which
Tillich had spent many years, because, he says, he had always wanted to
write a systematic theology. I can think of no better reason for writing
anything, but the ambition itself was typical of a certain period of culture. By the time he reached his last volume the fashion in theology had
changed, the younger intellectuals had turned to much more simplistic
versions of existentialism than the one that he held, and he was being
told on all sides that the phrase "systematic theology" no longer made
any sense, in fact was a contradiction in terms.
Similar changes naturally affected literature itself, especially poetry,
which up to about 1950 symbolized a good deal of cultural authority
whether it was read or not. When we speak of such nineteenth-century
poets as Longfellow as "popular," we are using the term in a somewhat
retrospective sense: Longfellow was widely read, but he was also a
scholarly poet, and most of those who read him felt that they were
engaging in a fairly highbrow enterprise. Even writers of inspirational
doggerel might be regarded, on a popular level, with the kind of awe
implied in another phrase from Lewis's Main Street: "they say he writes
real poetry."8 The great poets of the first half of this centuryEliot,
Yeats, Poundhad the somewhat aloof authority conferred by their
erudition, even though they often felt the pull of the desire to be genu-

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inely popular. We have the Eliot of Sanskrit quotations and the Eliot of
practical cats; we have the Yeats of Rosicrucian symbolism and the Yeats
of the luminously simple ballads in the Last Poems. Allen Ginsberg's
Howl is usually taken as the turning point towards a neo-Romantic
poetry which has been popular in a way hardly known to previous generations. Much of this poetry has turned back to the primitive oral tradition of folk song, with the formulaic units, topical allusions, musical
accompaniment, and public presentation that go with that tradition.
The changes in prose fiction are even more significant from our
present point of view. In Canada, as in many other communities, there
lingered for a long time the myth of "the great Canadian novel," the
hope that somebody some day would produce a novel in Canada as
monumental as War and Peace. The word "the" implies that whoever did
it would do it only once, but, even so, the achievement would have a
redemptive force for the whole Canadian community: the authority of
such a work would confer authority on the society that produced it. This
means, among other things, that a monumental novel reflects a relatively coherent social order, as the Victorian three-decker, the book one
could live inside of, manifested the prestige of Victorian society. Even
Tolstoy's Russia, despite our hindsight, afforded a good deal of stability
to the novelist of this kind. Hence the most highly regarded novels, in
the period up to say 1940, were predominantly realistic, for realism had
the dignity and the moral force that goes with the ability to study and
interpret a civilization. Such realism was central to what F.R. Lea vis calls
"the great tradition," which he studies, in a book with that title, in
George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.
However, when empires start building walls around themselves it is a
sign that their power is declining, and "the great tradition" is now not
much more than a tradition. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings came out in the
mid-1950s, to the accompaniment of a chorus of readers saying "of
course I can't read fantasy," usually with an air of conscious virtue. The
success of Tolkien's book, however, indicated a change of taste parallel
to the post-Ginsberg change in poetry, towards the romantic, the fantastic, and the mythopoeic. Science fiction, which is really a form of philosophical romance, has taken on a new importance, and the mythical
elements in Pynchon or Vonnegut do not revolve around a realistic centre, as they do in Ulysses. Romance, fantasy, and mythopoeia are the
inescapable forms for a society which no longer believes in its own permanence or continuity. I know several writers who acquired early in life

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an intense desire to be novelists of the "great tradition" type: they are

dedicated and highly intelligent people, but they find heart-breaking
difficulties in getting published, and when they are published suffer
from a feeling that the parade is now going down some other street.
One curious feature of the realistic development of prose fiction, from
Don Quixote down to the last generation, is that it so frequently took the
form of a parody of romance formulas. This is explicit in Don Quixote
itself, but many other novels, Joseph Andrews, Northanger Abbey, The Eustace Diamonds, even Waverley, began as parodies of well-known types of
romance. In Jane Austen's other novels the realistic study of character
and setting is related, somewhat quizzically, to a romantic story with a
conventional happy ending, and in the later novels of Dickens a great
pageant of vividly "lifelike" characters move within a melodramatic plot
so incongruous with them as to be almost an anti-narrative. We notice
that characters confused by romantic valuesEmma Bovary, Lord Jim,
Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archeroften occupy the central place in a realistic narrative. There seems something inherently paradoxical about the structure of a genre of literature that avowedly
imitates life. The reason is not really so hard to grasp. Life has no shape;
literature has. A realistic story must get its shape from somewhere, and
ultimately the only place it can get it from is romance, a form of fiction in
which the story is told for its own sake.
The change of taste in favour of the romantic and mythopoeic in fiction, therefore, is parallel to the movement away from representation
in painting. Fantasy presents the reader with the kind of situations
that occur only in stories: it belongs to a conception of literature as a selfcontained and autonomous art. But literature, as long as it uses words,
can never be as purely abstract as painting or music, and a more farreaching principle still is involved. Modern criticism, as such, begins
with Oscar Wilde's dialogue, The Decay of Lying, the main object of which
is to point out the shortcomings of any kind of literature that accepts the
obligation to imitate "nature," or "real life." The speakers in Wilde refer
to Charles Reade, who wrote one outstanding romance, The Cloister and
the Hearth, followed by a number of inferior realistic stories, as an example of the fact that the popular notion of the greater weight and dignity
of realism can often mislead a writer. They also say that Romola is a better
novel than Daniel Deronda, not a statement that many admirers of George
Eliot would accept, but again expressing a preference for romance over
realism. Again:

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M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for
the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but
Romanticism is always in front of Life.9

Literature, we are told, does not necessarily gain in seriousness or value

when it imitates nature or real life, but nature and real life do gain in
seriousness or value when they imitate literature, that is, when something like a literary shape can be discerned in their chaotic phenomena.
Wilde's argument is presented as a good-humoured paradox, but for us
to go on thinking of it as one is living in the past: it expresses a simple
truth reflected in many aspects of our cultural situation, especially from
the mid-1950s to our own day.
The principle of life imitating literature explains why the growth of
fantasy and mythopoeia in fiction is accompanied by such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night,10
which are not realistic fiction but are documentary reports on events
that seem to have in themselves a narrative shape. In some films the
boundary line between imaginative artefact and documentary is even
more difficult to find, the former often being disguised as the latter. This
development is important in the growth of the communication media
that have the social function of stabilizing the nonreading public. The
nonreading public includes, of course, the reading public whenever it is
not reading. But it also includes the very large group of people who cannot get a sufficiently vivid stimulus from the printed word to rely much
on it for their imaginative participation in society. This group has finally
settled mainly on television, to which films, radio, and picture magazines have all become subordinated. All these media are concerned with
news and commentary as well as entertainment, and the principle of life
imitating literature is present in both aspects.
Our waking existence is a continuum: sleep and dreams have beginnings and ends, but when we wake up again we rejoin the continuum.
Our lives also begin and end with birth and death, but birth and death,
both of which are often described in terms of sleep or dream, respectively
attach us to and drop us off the unending continuum of the living, the
dead, and the unborn, in Edmund Burke's phrase.11 The function of the
news media is to present a verbal imitation of this continuum, and television is the most efficient of all the media at doing so. Ritual is one means
of keeping the continuum punctuated: we dramatize the stages when we
join it or leave it or make a major change in our relation to it. News, in the

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stricter sense, is whatever breaks into the continuum, which is why so

much news consists of disaster, and why all disaster is news. But besides
the images of breaking, air crashes and the like, there are images of confrontation. Intellectual news, or the discussion of "issues," consists very
largely of a polarizing of attitudes, for and against, which is why news
media are so fascinated by the conception of the "controversial." In the
"issue" the continuum appears to stop for an instant and focus on a
simultaneous vertical contrasting of opposed attitudes.
Television is consequently most effective when it presents such rituals
as public weddings and funerals, or the ritualized confrontations of
football and hockey games, and it presents "issues" in the same polarized way. Such direct pro-and-con opposition, with all neutral or middle ground eliminated, is also what the revolutionary aims at: the
revolutionary strives for situations in which everyone opposed to his
group can be equally characterized as "counter-revolutionary." Hence
the treatment of issues in democratic mass media consists very largely
of a kind of unconscious and undirected revolutionary strategy. The
time when the impact of television really hit American society, in the
later 19605, produced exactly this kind of undirected revolutionary confrontation, in student demonstrations and the like, which achieved practically nothing of any real social importance and stopped as suddenly as
it began.
This combination of ritual, game, and polarized issue brings into television a quality of literary imitation, a "story line" with a beginning, a
prescribed direction, and a conclusion. The three elements are most
completely merged in the great public trial or investigation scenes,
where ritual, game, and the polarizing dialectic of legal prosecution and
defence are all most fully employed. The Watergate sequence belongs to
the same quasi-literary genre as the Joseph McCarthy hearings of the
19508: evidently a modern society needs a continuous supply of such
dramas if the imitation of literature by life is to be kept at its most effective pitch. And unless life takes on something of the shaped quality of a
literary structure it will not be deeply interesting to watch. For, as indicated above, it is by our imaginations, the mental response we make to
literature, that we primarily participate in society.
By itself, of course, this imitation of literature by the news media
could become a very sinister tendency. There is no difference between
Watergate and the Stalin purge trials of the 19305 so far as the genre
being employed is concerned.12 Besides, moral issues are not related to

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literature in the same way that they are related to actual life. We ask an
actor to put on a good show, not to tell the truth, and when, say, a senator remarks approvingly that the president was very "believable" in his
last interview, he reflects the confusion of standards. Such a confusion
returns us to the Machiavellian principle of pure appearance, the basis
of what we now call propaganda. It is not important that the prince
should be virtuous; it is important only that he should seem so. Such an
attitude is imaginative in a perverted sense. Literature is phenomenal: it
presents reality entirely through appearance, but in "real life" what is
"real" is normally hidden or disguised by the appearance. In trying to
get out of the bind that this imitation of literature by life gets us into, we
have to return to the book, or at least to the verbal documents of which
books form a major part.
Newspapers and the electronic media have carried much further a
tendency which was begun by the book: the tendency to break down the
distinction between private and social experience. It always was true
that poetry, for example, could never become the exclusive possession of
one person in the way that an easel painting could be. Wherever there is
a literature, there is a community of shared imaginative experience; and
yet, wherever there are books, there is the opposite tendency of individualizing the audience. When society still contained a number of illiterates, or habitual nonreaders, a village community, say, would form
around a man who could read aloud to them the news, or what passed
for news, and current literature. A certain amount of Richardson in the
eighteenth century, even of Dickens in the nineteenth, was transmitted
in this way. But of course in proportion as the ability to read increased,
the audience of hearers decreased. In Elizabethan times there were several popular theatres, but the fateful action taken by Ben Jonson in 1616,
of publishing his plays in a book, and so suggesting that one could stay
home to read the play instead of risking catching the plague in an audience, began an erosion of the public theatre that by Victorian times had
threatened to remove drama from serious literature altogether. Similarly
with religion: although Protestants insisted on public attendance at
church as strongly as Catholics, their simultaneous insistence on the
supreme authority of a sacred book did much to advance the decay of
church attendance which is still with us. The concert hall has met similar
difficulties with the recording of music. In the age of television it is a
common experience to attend a public function and then go home to get
on television a more comprehensive and comprehensible view of what

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one has just been engaged in. So what is the comparative value of the
two experiences?
Traditionally, the individual is thought of as having a primary duty to
support the institutions of society. The permanence and continuity
of church, court, lawcourt, political party, classroom, even, in lesser
degree, of theatre and concert hall and museum, give dignity and
importance to the individual's life by representing something older and
longer lasting than he is. Hence the feeling of obligation about many
forms of public attendance. The kind of development we have been tracing, from the earliest books to television, reverses this tendency by
increasing the range of private life. It is significant again that the impact
of television in the late 19605 carried with it a cult of nearly anarchic
individualism. Yet the individual, qua individual, can hardly get much
beyond the spectacular perspective on public life which makes it potentially a series of theatrical events. There must be some other form of
activity that enables us to get closer to what underlies these spectacular
representations.
The permanence of social institutions is often symbolized by public
monuments, buildings, statues, and the like, built for the astonishment
of posterity out of stone or metal. There is of course a lurking irony in
such productions of the kind crystallized in Shelley's Ozymandias sonnet: anything that can be set up can be knocked down, and doubtless
will be sooner or later. The history of verbal documents is rather different, even though they too can become monumental, as we saw. There is
a dramatic episode in the Book of Jeremiah, in the Old Testament, where
Jeremiah's secretary Jehudi is reading from the prophet's scroll, to the
king, a prophecy consisting largely of denunciations of the royal policy.
At the end of every paragraph or so the exasperated king cuts off the
read portion of the scroll with a knife and throws it into the fire [Jeremiah 36:20-32]. This must have been a papyrus scroll: parchment or vellum, besides being probably beyond the prophet's financial means,
would have been tough enough to spoil the king's gesture. The king's
palace disappeared totally in a few years, but the Book of Jeremiah,
entrusted to the most fragile and combustible substance produced in the
ancient world, remains in reasonably good shape. The vitality of words
written on papyrus, as compared with the hugest monuments of perennial brass, has perhaps some analogy to the fact that life, precarious and
easily snuffed out as it is, is still at least as strong a force as death.
In our own civilization, as explained earlier, information changes

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quickly and needs more fluid media, and paperbacks, talked and taped
books, interview books, printouts, microfiche, and documents coded for
feeding into computers are all parts of the result. So are the great mountains of photocopied papers, which among other things have thrown the
copyright law into a complete chaos. But by doing so, photocopied
materials have illustrated the importance of a moral issue connected
with the verbal arts which is even more important than copyright.
In a primitive society, where there is no general dissemination of the
ability to read or write, the poet becomes the teacher of the community.
The reason is that a society without writing depends a great deal on
memory, and the poet is better able to remember than other men
because he can hitch things into verse, and verse is easier to remember
than any prose arrangement of words. In such a society there is of course
no sense of the poet's having exclusive possession of his material, any
more than any other teacher would have. Later, the conception of literature develops as a body of great traditional themes held in common.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, the writers of Greek tragedy, all draw their materials from well-known sources, and their assumption is: this story may
have often been told, but I'm telling it better, so you won't need to refer
to any other versions except mine. Gradually literature became assimilated to the conditions of the capitalistic market: the individual author's
work had to be sufficiently distinct for him to patent it and prevent others from appropriating it. The right of an individual author to benefit
from the marketing of his work is of course an unquestioned moral principle, and is likely to remain one. Still, copyright, or the private possession of literary work for the purposes of making a living from it, is not
the primary moral principle connected with literature, or the verbal arts
generally. That primary principle is rather the principle of public access
to the work.
I think once more of the Old Testament. We are told that during the
repairing of the Temple in Jerusalem, a "book of the law" was discovered and brought to King Josiah:
And . .. when the king had heard the words of the book of the law,... he
rent his clothes. And the king commanded . . . saying, Go ye, enquire of the
Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of
this book that is found; for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled
against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this
book. [2 Kings 22:11-13]

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What is significant here is the king's conviction that it was a matter of

the utmost importance for the community as a whole to know what was
in a written document. Naturally the first categories of verbal documents that need to be publicly known are the laws, so it is not surprising
that a book of the law should first be open to public inspection. Most
scholars think that the book thus discovered was, or was closely connected with, the existing book of Deuteronomy, which in the present
arrangement of books looks like a supplement to or repetition of the
law, as its name indicates. But it seems more likely that Deuteronomy
was the kernel of the conception of a sacred book, out of which the
whole Bible eventually grew. What was new was the feeling that this
sacred book should be known by the whole community instead of being
locked away among temple records. We see history in the process of
turning a corner here, making a decisive and permanent change in
human conditions. In such an event as the Protestant Reformation, two
thousand years later, we can see how important still for the future was
the insistence on the general accessibility of the acknowledged sacred
book.
This leads to a much more far-ranging general principle, one that has
been expounded by the Canadian scholar Harold A. Innis in such works
as The Bias of Communication. Control of communications is one of the
primary aims of an ascendant class: whatever tends toward democracy
must have, as one of its primary aims, the openness and sharing of communications.
This principle goes along with another one, that the more fully a communications medium is concentrated on the passing show, on recording
events as they occur, the more it tends to become a one-way street of
messages in which the ordinary consumer has a passive role. In our day
radio and television tend naturally to become monologues of this kind,
despite the efforts made through cable and open-line programs to give
the consumer a chance to talk back to his set. The electronic media are in
any case so set up that, given a revolutionary situation, it is relatively
easy for the group in power to seize control of them. Wherever there
are dictatorships, the radio is the main instrument of expression: it is,
in fact, highly significant that everything we regard as antidemocratic
should be summed up by the word "dictator," that is, an uninterrupted
speaker, who can expatiate for five hours on the glories of his regime
and have the same speech bellowing from every street corner. Television is sometimes thought to be a "cooler" medium, but it isn't: we may

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compare the role of the "telescreen" in Orwell's 1984. In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the
political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural
consequences have many parallels. Newspapers also become one-way
streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to
become something more like journals of opinion. Even Time, the most
dictatorial of all journals, was recently startled by Watergate into producing an editorial.
In this situation it seems clear that, however important it may be to
have a "free press" and extend the principle of that freedom to radio and
television as well, the main battles of freedom are not fought on the
news front. They are fought further back, in an area where issues have
acquired some temporal dimension and some historical context. If it
were really true, as McLuhan and others have urged, that print is a "linear" medium, carrying the eye forward and hypnotizing all responses
except the purely visual one of reading, there would be no difference
between print and any other medium. But this thesis confuses the reading process with the consulting process, and overlooks the fact that print
has a unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with
unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted. It is therefore public access to printed and written documents
that is the primary safeguard of an open society. We notice how drastic
the alteration of the degree of freedom in society is when we are at war
and a large group of documents have to be treated as "top secret,"
thereby inculcating a facile habit of secrecy which carries on into peacetime. We said earlier that there is no difference between Watergate and
the Stalin purge trials of the 19305 so far as the genre is concerned: open
inspection of the relevant documents is one of the major moral distinctions between them, one quite as important as the physical treatment of
the witnesses.
The relevant documents are, of course, difficult to interpret, and in
raw form are as esoteric to most people as though they were locked up.
We are brought back to the book, more particularly the book which is an
expository treatise, as the ordinary means of expressing and understanding the general conflict of opinion in society, so far as that opinion
is not simply a snap response to current events but a sustained and supported argument. The written expository treatise looks at first sight like

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a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the

hypnotic rhetoric of speech to a present audience is left in it: the author
is forced, by the nature of his medium, to put all his cards on the table,
to take his reader into his confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself. And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by its own physical shape, the expository
or thesis-book remains the normal unit of impersonal social vision, and
the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a
community. Now that society, after some years of reeling from the
impact of television, is beginning to bring it under control, we can see
more clearly that the book is the chief technological device that makes
democracy and the open society continuously possible.

22

Violence and Television

26 August 1975

The"Summation" from the book Symposium on Television Violence/Colloque sur la violence a la television (Ottawa: Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission, 1976), 206-15; French translation, 215-26.
Reprinted as "Violence and Television" in RW, 3*53-73. Partially reprinted in
French as "La violence a la television est un phenomene actuel que nous ne pouvons eviter" in Le Devoir, 11 October 1975, 13. Frye's remarks were originally presented at the Symposium on Television Violence at Queen's
University, Kingston, Ontario, 24-26 August 1975. Frye was the president of
this symposium, convened by the research department of the CRTC and
attended by experts from all over North America. Its aim was to understand
"the technical, economic, and creative logic of cultural production and diffusion
in broadcasting," according to a document of conference objectives prepared by
the CRTC and available in NFF, 1988, box 76, file 5. This file also contains a
transcript of the summary of the presentation Frye made at the symposium and
there are variations, of varying significance, between the text here and "the
memorable talk" he delivered on the occasion. Memorable or not, Frye called for
the organizers to send him all the materials relating to the symposium, and
appears to have revised very carefully: the most interesting variations between
the talk and the printed essay have been included in the endnotes. One of the
chief differences is that, over and over, the typescript seems to hammer home the
educational duties of the broadcaster, where the published summary works
more indirectly to the same end. Citations in the notes to other papers delivered
at the symposium will be in the form Symposium, followed by page numbers.

The problem of violence is a problem without boundaries, and it expands indefinitely into the human situation. Of other major problems

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confronting us, those of ecology, the energy crisis, the curtailing of natural resources, the exterminating of animal and plant species, are the
result of inheriting several centuries of systematic violence against
nature. As for human society, violence is built into that on various levels. Wherever there are great inequalities of wealth and privilege, there
is at least indirect violence, and the tremendous productivity of the
United States, the major part of the North American civilization to
which we belong, has been built up by a social activity that has included
slavery, lynchings, the bad men of the Wild West, free fights with eyes
gouged out, beatings of union organizers, and the more carefully legalized violence of the "robber barons" who built up such immense fortunes, some of which have become charitable foundations subsidizing
studies in violence. In an expanding society like nineteenth-century
America, violence flourished on the social or economic frontier; as the
continent became socially consolidated, much of this violence was
forced underground and became increasingly antisocial. Apart from
outright crime, which is now a business like any other, there are many
activities which are still legal but are morally wrong. When a broadcaster and a sponsor conspire to produce a socially irresponsible program, that is in itself a violent situation, and has to be recognized as
such. In Canada, where we began with a military conquest and held
down the northwest by a police force, most of the violence has been
repressive, or law-and-order, violence. That is one reason why Canadian-produced television is quieter than American television, and why
we take regulatory bodies like the CRTC so much for granted.
I am somewhat disturbed by the fact that the opposite of "violent"
seems always to be "nonviolent," as though violence were a positive
thing and we had nothing to put against it except a negation. Wherever
there is one human being there is a very considerable output of mental
and physical energy, and wherever there is more than one human being
those energies are going to conflict. It seems to me that violence, as we
have been using the word here, is misapplied energy:1 it is to energy
what prostitution is to sexual love. As such, it really is a negative force,
and controlling violence would be the way to set human energy free for
its proper tasks.
Controlling violence means, first of all, raising the level of society. The
people who produce and sell socially irresponsible programs are thinking of their viewers as a mob rather than a community. The mob is the
lowest form of community: it is a completely homogeneous society

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organized for hatred, and will not remain a mob long unless it can find
someone to beat up, or, failing that, something to smash. When a television program depicts someone being slowly beaten to death, the primary appeal is, "Look at this: isn't it fun?" As soon as anyone begins to
object that this may be a wrong kind of fun, the violence is immediately
rationalized, and turns self-righteous. All rationalized violence has
much the same argument, the argument behind all fights on school playgrounds: he started it. That is, whenever violence is rationalized it is
asserted to be counter-violence. Somebody else did something first, and
we have to resist it. That is true of the violence of capital punishment; it
is true of the violence of Palestinian terrorists.2 Fictional violence, however, may be rationalized more simply as a refusal to take a positive attitude in a violent world, that is, this is what we're all involved in,
whether we like it or notand so on. But the real reason, as Mr. Kotcheff
remarked, is simply lack of imagination:3 depicting violence is easy,
quick, and profitable. It is easy partly because violence is a mechanical
form of human energy: so mechanical that it can even be quantified or
classified as "heavy" or "light." As a mechanical cause producing a
mechanical response, violence never accomplishes anything: the pendulum of aggression and counter-aggression simply goes on swinging all
through history.
To discuss such a question seriously we have to get away from what I
think of as the whodunit fallacy. Many people think they are being practical about social problems when they think they have located a cause.
We wouldn't have inflation if it weren't for the profit motive in making
munitions; and so on. But every such located cause turns out eventually
to be one more symptom of the problem, and not a cause at all. Mr.
Garth Jowett's paper outlined a history of disapproval of popular arts as
causes of a great number of social evils.4 First there were dime novels
and penny dreadfuls; then there were movies, then comic books, and
now television. One can always find some evidence for such arguments,
but the evidence is seldom conclusive because of the "predisposed" element so often mentioned at this conference. Some people are always
looking for something to trigger them to violence, and such stimuli are
not hard to come by in any society. This is not an argument for dismissing the seriousness of the social effects of violent television programs, as
so many of their producers say; it is merely an argument against regarding television violence as the cause of social violence. For as soon as a
cause is thought to be located, the next step is "take it away; censor it;

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ban it." This would be a logical inference if the cause diagnosis were
sound, but it isn't; there are too many causes. Censorship is itself a violent, or counterviolent, solution: it assumes that you've caught the real
villain and are justified in doing what you like to him, which is precisely
the fallacy of violence itself.
We should be careful, therefore, not to go the way of the past, when
our forebears tried to cure alcoholism by the law of Prohibition, or sexual excesses by censoring books.5 One can see in such measures vestiges
of middle-class prejudice, and nervousness about what people might do
without supervision. Prohibition was partly an attempt to impose a
middle-class work ethic on the whole of society; prudery was partly a
middle-class reaction to the fact that sex was something available to
ordinary people, who really shouldn't be allowed to have it. Such measures turn what could otherwise be quite genuine problems into empty
anxiety or pseudo-problems; they always focus on token anxiety symbols, like four-letter words, and they generally end in overcompensation. That is, after a generation of Prohibition North American society
has become as boozy a society as the world has ever seen, and after a
century or so of the most frantic prudery about sex, it has becomewell,
you can finish that sentence for yourselves.
When newspapermen say that a democracy must have a free press,
what they mean is "we want to run this paper ourselves." But behind
that there may be a quite genuine belief that running the paper themselves would make for a freer society than external control would do,
and the belief may well be right. In any case I sympathize with the low
threshold against censorship demonstrated here: some of the liveliest
moments of discussion came when someone on a panel would say, "I
am entirely opposed to censorship and repressive legislation," and three
people would jump up and say, "what do you mean by talking about
censorship and repressive legislation?" But not many people are really
defending censorship here: Mr. Lawrence says that the CRTC has no
power to censor programs, and I for one would not stay on the Commission for ten minutes if I thought it was seeking such powers. Regulations are easy to pass, but equally easy to evade; Mr. Les Brown6 has
reminded us of the vast industrial inertia bound up with the status quo,
which can make any amount of regulation impotent. The only real justification for violence is self-defence, and of course society has a right to
self-defence as well as the individual. But censorship and attempt at regulation are circular, following the dreary round of "how do we prevent

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the growing disrespect for law? Well, pass a law against it." One difficulty here is that the law ultimately can never catch the right people.
Even a professional hired killer is less dangerous to society than the man
who hires him, and the drug addict who murders in quest of a fix is still
less dangerous than the man who controls the heroin supply.
There is really no way to circumvent the laborious, frustrating, illogical procedures of democracy. Producers of irresponsible programs, like
producers of motor cars which are death traps, will not improve what
they are doing, so long as it is profitable, until they are forced to do so by
the general pressure of society. Society as a whole includes all the regulatory agencies in government, religious groups, minority groups,
groups of concerned citizens, and the people of integrity in the business
itself. Any one of these may represent a very partial interest, but out of
the whole conflict we get some sense of society as a structure, a society
as far as it can get from the homogeneous mob. Something of that was
beginning to emerge from the Pastore hearings,7 and I am seeing it
emerging from this symposium as well.
At the same time, I think nearly everyone here feels that violence
on television constitutes a genuine problem, and is not an anxiety or
pseudo-problem. It may have some of the characteristics of anxiety
problems: there is the same desire to protect the weakest members of the
community, which means the childrenfifty years ago it would have
been women and childrenand there is nervousness over the fact that
we can't control access to a television set as we can to a public theatre.
The authority of parents is all we have to depend on, and in manyperhaps mostNorth American households that is not good enough. But
Mr. Liebert8 and others have, I think, convinced us that something much
more tangible than anxiety is involved. It is always possible to say to a
social scientist that there may be methodological errors in his research
and that he should go back and do some more research, but that's only
stalling: the problem exists and it's here. As such, it is primarily an educational problem. By education I mean the structuring of experience that
goes on every moment of our waking lives, not merely schooling, which
is a very small, though certainly very central, part of education.9 Much
of it, further, falls into my own area of literary education. No medium of
communication can convey anything directly except sounds, verbal or
musical, and images, and the communication of words is as important
here as it is anywhere.
We have to start with the peculiar characteristics of television as a

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medium, and more particularly as a medium of education. In teaching

children one element to be educated is the imagination, the creative and
structuring part of the mind. In literature, the imagination is best taught
and trained through oral instruction, that is, telling stories, through
learning to read and through encouraging children to write and tell
their own stories. The stories children themselves tell are often quite
ferocious: the fairy tale that ends dispensing poetic justice on all sides is
likely to be an adult concoction. But the ferocity doesn't matter so much
when it's a part of imaginative development: it's something to watch,
but not something to be unduly concerned about. Television, because it
presents the visual image directly, is not the best medium for training
the imagination: what it is best at is training sensory alertness. That is
why it is so influential a medium, and why it so strongly suggests imitation, at least by children and sick or immature adults. Its power to
inspire imitation is, of course, the main reason why we're all here.
Again, partly because of the way it can enter our lives from within our
own homes, the television image has an energy of impact beyond that of
any other medium. One could say, and I think M. Basile10 did say, that
television is inherently a violent medium, violent by the nature of its
own form, apart altogether from its content.
The experience of life is a continuity, and news is essentially what
breaks into that continuity. That is why so much news consists of disaster, and why all disaster is news. When news breaks into the continuity
of life, it sets up a polarity, of safety against danger, security against
threat. When the issues of the day become news, the simplest way to
deal with them is to polarize them, break them into a for-and-against
opposition, create adversary situations of the "hot seat" type, or assimilate controversy to the pattern of an election issue, where the conclusion
is to vote for A or for B. Television, at least in communities where there
is a round-the-clock supply of programs, is the most continuous medium in history, and forms a counter-world to experience, a world continuously polarized between good and bad, safety and disaster, peace
and violence. Hence it is almost irresistibly easy for television to create
melodramatic situations, with the good guys arrayed against the bad
guys, and so presenting the illusion of a world in a state of constant violence, even though actual life, as Mr. Mohr11 reminds us, sees violence
only rarely. Such melodramas even enter the presentation of sports,
whether the sporting event is phoney, like the wrestling matches
described by Mr. Kotcheff, or genuine, like hockey games.12

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Television emphasizes particularly the "human interest" or dramatic

side of events and issuesthat is, it puts actual events into dramatic
forms. Somebody remarked in the discussion that we depend on the
news media to structure the news, and that word "structure" is
immensely important in this context. Once we get past the talking head
in television, we are instantly in a world of drama, whether we are
watching a hockey game or a race riot. I am not competent to enter the
controversy over whether there is or is not such a thing as staged film,
nor whether Daniel Boorstin is right in speaking of "pseudo-events," or
events deliberately created by the news media themselves.131 do not see
in any case why such pseudo-events are not also real ones. What I do
know is, first, that television illustrates, more vividly than any other
medium, the fact that we participate in society dramatically more than
we do conceptually; and, second, that on television the structuring of
fact is very similar to the structuring of fiction, both falling into much
the same dramatic conventions.
The educational problem I mentioned earlier resolves itself into one of
turning the passive viewer into an active one, and this process should
begin as early as possible in childhood. It was Gandhi who discovered
that the most effective form of political violence was nonviolence,
because nonviolent resistance forces the other side to exhibit violence.
But the principle that passivity engenders violence can be applied in
ways that would have horrified Gandhi. The passive viewer has to be
increasingly stimulated: he gets bored or desensitized quickly, and so
there must be a continual escalation of ferocity. Yet even so nothing is
really going on, for him: nobody dies, nobody comes alive.14 The television set is a curiously ghostly medium: in our day, if we see ghosts or
hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. But the passive viewer's whole world is equally spectral: he cannot distinguish fact from fiction either on the screen or off it. He may see
the most terrible event take place on the street before his eyes, but he
will not lift a finger even to call the police. Nothing is really happening.
This represents a central and frightening problem of violence in itself: a
zombie existence in which violence emerges as a desperate effort at
identity. Marshall McLuhan's phrase "the medium is the message" has
been quoted so often, even at this conference, that it has lost all its meaning, if it ever had any. But another phrase of McLuhan's is much more
concrete: he speaks of the need for civil defence against media fallout,
which exactly describes what I mean here.15

Violence and Television

163

In attempting to train children to become active viewers, of television

as of the rest of life, our assumption has to be that there is no audience in
modern society: we can't afford to have audiences any more. We're all
on the stage: each of us has a role to learn and a part to play. One of the
roots of this problem is the old gap between the highbrow and the lowbrow, the academic and the popular, the overdetached and the overinvolved, the hypercritical and the uncritical.16 This gap is a socially
morbid condition, and everything positive we are trying to do, about
violence or any other problem, depends on outgrowing it. The electronic
media can help us to outgrow it, I think, but we need other changes. I
wish teachers of literature, starting with kindergarten, would understand that what confronts them is the student's whole verbal experience,
and that everything we think of as literature is, in that experience, only
the visible tip of an iceberg.
I was once talking to a grade eight teacher who had given his students
the problem of studying the rhetorical devices in television advertising,
examining the status symbols offered, distinguishing the flattery from
the threats, and seeing what was being referred to in both. The effect on
them was so shattering that he thought at first he was working with too
young an age-group, but he soon realized that he had struck the level on
which their verbal experience was really being affected. They were not
too young: on the contrary, any child old enough to be affected by television advertising is also old enough to study its effect on himself. The
next step is the study of convention. Literature is made up entirely of
conventions. There are no unconventional writers; convention is something that we can never break with: we can only build on it. Mr. Kotcheff's description of the assembling of a "Mannix"17 show is an example
of convention on the lowest level: the difference between that and King
Lear is a vast difference in degree of subtlety and complexity, but it is
not really a difference in kind. But, because fact and fiction are presented in much the same frameworks in television, we have also to
study the conventions of news reporting and of the discussing of contemporary issues, along with advertising and the entertainment programs. I am not thinking of this as a debunking operation, designed to
make the student feel hostile or superior to television: I simply want
him to understand what is going on, as early in life as possible. But, of
course, understanding what is going on would also liberate him from
the sense of what one of the background papers issued by the Research
Branch of the CRTC calls the "intrinsic authenticity" of the medium.18

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A small child knows that he can be hurt, mentally and physically; but
it takes him much longer19 to understand that others can be hurt too,
and that it matters whether they are or not. In all scenes of violence there
is the choice of identifying either with the agent or with the victim of
violence.20 The "natural" or easiest tendency is to identify with the
agent: this is primarily what is wrong with the wrong kind of television
program. The path of genuine education has to go through identification
with the victim. In Christianity, as M. Cote remarked,21 the centre of violence is the Crucifixion, and Christians are directed to focus their attention on a victim of mob violence. This would be equally true of Judaism, with its long and terrible history of anti-Semitism; it is also true of
Classical culture. Plato's Republic is written around the question of why
it is better to suffer than to inflict injustice.22 The focusing of interest on
the victim is a common civilizing element in all our major cultural
traditions.
In literature, the difference between identifying with the agent and
with the victim provides a basis for distinguishing what are called melodrama and tragedy. In melodrama we are expected to take the "right"
side, to applaud the hero and hiss the villain, it being much more clearly
established in melodrama than it ever is in actual life which is which.
Melodrama appeals to the element of mob violence in us, the selfrighteous sense that we know the good guys from the bad guys, the "law
and order" rationalizations that are growing so rapidly in society today,
as the panic engendered by so much crime develops a vigilante complex
among us. But it is significant that melodrama is something we don't
take very seriously. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a melodrama, and
a very instructive one. In this play the villain kidnaps the hero's two
sons, and says he will kill them unless the hero chops off his hand and
sends it to him. The hero does soon the stage, of coursebut the villain
doublecrosses him and kills the sons anyway. However, the hero gets his
deposit back: the villain sends him his hand, along with his sons' two
heads. Then there is the question of getting all this meat off the stage: the
hero takes both heads in one hand by their hair, but finds he hasn't any
other hand with which to carry his other hand, if you follow me, and so
turns to the heroine, who carries it off in her mouth, because she has had
both hands cut off and her tongue cut out in a previous caper. Finally the
villain, who is black, is caught and sentenced to be buried alive up to his
neck. His response is melodramatically most satisfactory: he wishes only
that he had been able to do ten thousand more evil deeds.23

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165

If a member of Shakespeare's audience were to feel that all this was

only a lot of masturbation, and wanted to see something that was for
real, he could go over to Tyburn to watch the execution of the latest traitor. The traitor would be hanged, cut down while still conscious, disembowelled, castrated, and finally torn to pieces by horses. The audience
would think: what a very bad man to have done such a thing, and how
protected and secure we should feel that all this is being done to him.
When I speak of concern for the victim of violence I do not mean sentimentality; the punishment of criminals is doubtless an inescapable element of social life. What is wrong is the pleasure in the punishment, or
in any act of violence whatever.
What we call tragedy in literature is usually an action in which an
agent of violence becomes a victim of it. As a victim, we look at his fate
with concern, though not always necessarily with sympathy: we may
feel sorry for Romeo and Juliet, but our feelings about Macbeth are different. The audience of a tragedy accepts violence as a fact of life: we are
not living in the garden of Eden, and violence is one of the things that
are always happening. When we see it happen, our view of it is
detached, but not indifferent; concerned, but not weakly sentimental.
This attitude of detached concern is what is meant in literature by
catharsis.24 Catharsis does not mean working off aggressive feelings by
watching violent television programs: it means that when we see violence, violent emotions are aroused in us, and that a fully mature
response passes through and beyond these violent emotions, reaching a
point at which we accept the reality of what is presented to us, but
accept it with neither approval nor panic. This is the attitude, surely,
that the active viewer should take to all the violence reflected on his television set.
At this point, perhaps, we may see what a profoundly civilizing force
television could be, and potentially is. All new inventions are apt to
come first as social headaches, and it takes a while before their real usefulness is understood. In my younger days, in the '305 of this century, I
was often shocked and disgusted at the callousness with which intellectuals could rationalize or dismiss so many of the most horrifying events
of our times, such as the great Stalin massacres and deportations, whenever such events did not happen to fit their political categories. Their
infantilism was connected with their being entirely men of print: they
never saw anything except lines of type on a page. But something of
the real horror and evil of the Vietnam war did get on television, and

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The Arts

the effect on public opinion was, on the whole, good in the sense that the
American public came to hate the war, instead of becoming complacent
about or inured to it. In a world like ours, horrifying things will happen
practically every day from now into the foreseeable future. Newsmen in
all media have a duty to report violence when it occurs; novelists and
dramatists have a duty to present imaginative forms of it. For an audience of concerned, serious, active viewers, this is a part of reality, and
we can fight violence in the street with better courage and hope if the
violence on the screen is on our side.

23

Introduction to Art and Reality

1986

From Art and Reality: A Casebook of Concern, ed. Robin Blaser and Robert
Dunham (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986), 1-5. Frye's words introduce a collection of papers given at the Art and Reality Conference at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, 28 April 1983.

The following collection of essays is not so much about art and reality as
about art and society. It deals with the perennial question of how the
arts, which are seldom if ever popular in their higher manifestations,
may be incorporated into society and on what terms. Mr. Irwin, who
leads off, says that discussions of reality always turn immediately into
discussions of meaning.1 He is on solid philosophical ground here:
"reality" is a question-begging word, perhaps not a legitimate philosophical term at all, and we have to find a context for it. Meaning is
established by context, and for the arts that means primarily a social
context. Nine-tenths of what we call reality is not some ineluctably existing group of objects or conditions "out there": it is rather the rubbish left
over from previous human constructs. The modern artist's struggles
with the elements of his own art are his private business and in some
aspects the business of criticism, but his obvious and public struggles
are with a civic environment laid out by developers and the motor car,
with bureaucracies staffed by people with a strong tendency to give top
priority to holding their own jobs, with a public indoctrinated by mass
media gossip. It is not surprising that among the most "realistic" of the
contributors to this volume (Fortier, Luft, Hull, Straight) are administrators who have had experience in probing our human environment
for relatively soft spots. The main theme discussed, then, is the relation

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The Arts

of the arts to what M. Germain's lively and witty paper calls "cultural
charity."2
Every human society sets up a distinctive form of culture with distinctive assumptions about itself and its relation to the world. In early or
primitive societies there is a strong sense of concern, of the importance
that everyone should believe or act alike, and either accept the common
assumptions of the society or say they do. This kind of concern dominated our own culture during the Middle Ages, and it has revived today
in totalitarian states, where the arts are required to be an answering chorus to the political assumptions of those in power. The situation in the
Soviet Union and China differs from that in Europe and North America
in that the latter societies have a political ideal called "democracy,"
which is of infinitely greater importance than the economic system as far
as cultural life is concerned. Artists in our own society think very little
about living under capitalism, and seldom feel any loyalty to capitalism
as such: the democratic ideal is what matters.
Democracy in the Western world comes at the end of a long process of
social maturing, complicating, and pluralizing. After a time a general
undifferentiated social concern becomes aware of special bodies of
thought and skill forming within it that set up different standards of truth
and authority. In the seventeenth century, astronomy began to advance a
heliocentric view of the solar system when society as a whole was still
concerned to cling to a geocentric one. Such heliocentric supporters as
Galileo and Bruno3 became aware of a conflict between two kinds of
authority, the authority of society as a whole and the authority of their science, and consequently they also became aware of a conflict of loyalties.
It is not so difficult to see this conflict in the sciences, because of the
kind of verification that science appeals to. It is more difficult to realize
that serious artists and writers also belong to bodies of culture with a
distinctive discipline, a distinctive authority, and a distinctive claim on
the loyalty of their members (see particularly Irwin and Mays).4 In our
day, totalitarian societies simply deny, as a matter of dogma, that literature and the arts have any authority beyond what the concerns of those
in power want. In Marxism (I am not speaking of what Marxist intellectuals working in democratic countries may say, but of what Marxism
itself does when it comes to power), artists and writers have the social
function of promoting socialist ideology; otherwise they become the
kind of neurotic, self-indulgent, romantic, etc. artists and writers that
infest bourgeois countries.

Introduction to Art and Reality

169

Unfortunately we have no theory of the authority of literature and the

arts in society either, although artists and writers in democracies clearly
accept some assumption of such an authority instinctively, and obviously not purely from self-interest. I should imagine that the basis of
any such theory would assume two levels of concern in society. One is a
primary level where coherence and agreement is everything: this type of
concern, left to itself, would produce a kind of lynching-mob mentality, where any fully-rounded individual, simply by being that, would
immediately become a marked-out victim. The other is a secondary
level where the society can be studied with some detachment, a detachment which does not mean withdrawal but the capacity to look at one's
environment objectively. Social concern does have its own case: environmental pollution, the energy crisis, the atom bomb, all show that a
purely laissez-faire attitude to the development of science is pernicious.
And there must be some limits for artists and writers as well, though in
the absence of a general theory it is hard to say what or where they are.
Practically all movements of censorship are simply expressions of mob
hysteria, and almost invariably focus on the very people whom genuine
social concern should be regarding as allies instead of enemies. In any
case the tension between a society and its culture can never be decisive,
because the arts and literature have authority but no power, and their
authority is clearly not infallible either. But any genuine political guidance in a democratic country has to remain aware of the two levels of
social concern. Intellectuals often do not make good politicians, because
they form their social visions themselves without waiting for the input
of the people they represent. They are aware, in short, only of the upper
level of concern, just as the demagogue is aware only of the lower one.
It is futile to argue about the importance of the arts in society on
grounds that accept the usual popular assumptions about that importance. The basis of all such assumptions is an unshakeable conviction
that the arts are something we could do without: we may associate them
with something pleasantbeauty, special insight, world peace, or whateverbut as soon as the social mood changes such pleas are gone with
the wind.5 We need the solidity of what is here and already established.
I regret particularly the small attention given in this book to the role of
the university in providing a focus for the counter-environment of culture in a society. The university is specifically dedicated, especially in its
liberal arts areas, to fostering the critical sense, the detachment without
withdrawal from social concerns, that keeps a democracy functioning.

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The Arts

Society will enforce compulsory education up to a point, because it

needs a sufficiently large number of docile and obedient citizens. We
must learn to read in order to read traffic signs, and to count to make out
our income tax. But literacy on this level is a passive response and reflex,
and all genuine education begins in trying to transform this passivity
into an activity. When society demands a "back to basics"6 movement in
education, it usually forgets that the "basics" are not bodies of knowledge but skills, and that skills require an immense amount of practice
and repetition. Such practice has to come increasingly from the student's
own initiative, if teachers can no longer find the time or energy for
supervising the amount of practice that every student must produce if
he is to learn to read and write actively, reading with comprehension
and writing with articulateness.
The very interesting papers on technology indicate, I think, that technology can help this situation only in very specialized ways. In music,
the old system of composing a piece of music, then scoring it, then trying to get someone to publish it and some musical group to perform it, is
intolerably cumbersome and discouraging under present conditions.
Technology can do a great deal to simplify and shorten this process, but
there is one feature in the development of technology that aggravates
educational problems rather than lessening them. Technological development tends to make for increasing introversion in society: the plane is
more introverted than the train, the television set more introverted than
the theatre. The young people one sees on the streets with headsets
clamped over their ears are acting out what was a science fiction nightmare a few years ago. And introversion, of course, increases the gap
between social consciousness and the arts which is the real theme of this
conference.
It is pointed out by several contributors (Lozoya, Watmough, Gagne,
and, taking a different approach, Hirsch)7 that while the natural tendency of political and economic developments is to centralize and build
up increasingly larger units, the natural tendency of culture is rather to
decentralize, as smaller and smaller units of society become more culturally articulate. It is easy to oversimplify this contrast, because the marketing of the arts is an economic activity, and "cultural charity" may
assimilate them to a political perspective even if it tries not to do so. But
the contrast is there: economic developments tend to turn smaller centres into distributing centres only, and produce among other things the
uniform hideousness of ribbon development and the kind of thing we

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171

drive through on the outskirts of every town. Its cultural developments,

especially in architecture, are in themselves apt to develop only a dead
and pompous uniformity. Here again the role of the university, as a continuous community specifically set up to dramatize the kind of social
life in which the intellect and imagination have a functional place, is
hard to overestimate. Without the university and the counter-environment it fosters, art galleries and museums become mainly tourist attractions, with, in Mr. van der Marck's8 tart phrase, Sisyphus9 for their
patron saint. Perhaps Third World countries, or some of them, may be
more responsive to cultural developments than countries devoted so
intensively to the demands of the ugly consumer. Dr. Kirpal's10 paper is
one of several that are suggestive on this point, though even UNESCO
sometimes gives ominous signs of becoming one more goodwill institution bypassed by history, like the League of Nations.11
In earlier centuries the authority of social concern could be centred in
a set of assumptions acceptable to almost everyone in the upper middle
classes, to every person of "quality" whose opinion counted. Whatever
its failings, and they were obvious enough, such a social structure did to
a considerable extent balance the two levels of culture, preventing the
primary one from degenerating into a mob and the secondary one from
splitting off into an esoteric cult. In the twentieth century hardly anything of this sense of a social norm as a reliable criterion of judgment is
left. In the eighteenth century a serious writer could assume a consistently rational reader: both writer and reader could accept certain postulates, and an individual outside that contractBlake, for example
could be dismissed as an eccentric. Now we feel that if sanity is a social
judgment, society has no ability to make such judgments beyond a very
limited point. Spokesmen on both American and Russian sides of the
armaments race have said that there is no sense in an atomic war, nothing is to be gained by it, and that no rational person would start such a
thing. Such statements do not reassure us (see Oglesby, Schafer and others):12 a century that has seen Hitler and Stalin, besides many similar
phenomena, knows that too many of the people who seek power within
society are insane, and that such insanity is contagious and not isolating.
I have referred very briefly and more or less at random to some of the
papers that follow, because the reader will soon be reading them for
himself. They have much to say about the profound social unease of our
time, its confused priorities and its muddled standards, the general
incomprehension of the arts, the sense of claustrophobia resulting from

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The Arts

the absence of any genuine authority. They do not, I think, get to the
point of establishing a case for the arts in the contemporary world to
present to someone not already alerted to their importance, but they do
suggest that the anxiety bred by the lack of such a case may drive us
harder in pursuit of one.

Politics, History, and Society

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24

Pro Patria Mori

April 1933

From Acta Victoriana, 57 (April 1933): 31-2. When Frye wrote this article, he
was the editor of Acta.

The number of letters received by the editor, including a few contributions, congratulatory and condemnatory, on the result of Victoria's discussion of the Oxford Debate on their relation to King and Country,
have made it obvious that the university and its alumni look to Acta for
a formulation of the undergraduate attitude.1 At the request of the associate editor, in whose hands this issue is, I shall as a contributor endeavour to bring out the leading indications of the resolution: "That this
House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country." My
own reaction to the attitude of our elders and alleged betters, as exemplified by the editorials of our downtown newspapers, one excepted,
and the letters of those, including many Vic graduates, who have made
such exhibitions of themselves in their columns, will find clearer and
more fluent expression through that of a colleague of mine in the following issue. "Abeunt studia in morones," says Mr. Rowland, and I need not
gloss the epigram.2
What the motion signified, as I conceive it, was that there is a substantial group at Victoria who are ready to push a desire for peace to its logical and inevitable conclusion of refusing to break peace, and who
believe that anything short of direct action in this regard is hypocrisy or
moral cowardice. That a concrete statement should meet with such a
roar of outraged protest, both here and in England, when the mouthing
of pious abstractions in generalized terms meaning, in so far as they
meant anything, the same thing, would have been greeted by unctuous

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Politics, History, and Society

approval, strikes this group as absurd and vicious. But it should be

noted that this group is not setting itself against another which acclaims
war as a means for killing off surplus population, a healthy outlet for
energy, a developer of the qualities of stern and heroic manhood, and so
on. These pretensions it dismisses, and gets down to brass tacks with its
real opponents, who admit that war is an unmitigated and purposeless
horror, but that as long as the status quo in economics, which implies a
periodicity in annihilation wars, is kept alive by Fascist or other forms of
dictatorship, there is always danger, and a war of defence probable, for
more peaceably-minded nations.
Now on strictly defensive grounds the pacifist argument begins to
lack conviction. Lytton Strachey may have been inspired, but in sober
fact he really dodged the issue.3 There is, of course, no such thing as an
enemy. Even in the frenzy of 1914 people were only able to persuade
themselves that they really ought to be fighting Germans by inventing
an imaginary abstraction of savagery called a "Hun" and saying that
this was a typical German.4 But while there are no enemies, any man or
group of men who is in our country with hostile intent is a criminal, and
has to be treated as such. That is, he must be shot down in cold blood.
That this shooting down of a human life is a hideous insensate butchery
is quite true, and that fact must be faced with set teeth, both in wartime
and in peace. The soldier of another country in our own domain must be
as calmly and cynically killed as a noxious insect. That attitude of
detached calmness and total lack either of sadism or of patriotic zeal
which has been retained by all the invincible military conquerors
Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington, Napoleonif adopted by a general populace, would be similarly invincible. As no man of really high
intelligence ever goes in for a military career, and as every army is wellknown to be a masterpiece of inefficiency, a military attack, whether Japanese, French, German, or Russian, could not stand up two weeks
against a handful of people who were unhurried and unafraid and
could keep their heads. The fact that England has always taken her wars
so much more casually than France or Germany, due to her insular position, has been the reason for her easy supremacy.
But what has the phrase "For King and Country" got to do with such
an attitude? A defensive war is fought for the safety of society, and follows the maxim "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay
down his life for his friends" [John 15:13]. King and Country, however,
represents a propagandic and deliberately induced hysteria which leads

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177

people, mad with the last desperation of fear, to calm themselves suddenly and then hurl themselves in front of a Juggernaut with exactly
the same fanaticism, in obedience to the high priests of the army and
the state. Bright uniforms, a thumping rhythmic music, impassioned
speeches from hundreds of recruiting sergeants, including the heads of
educational and governmental institutions, blazing posters, a frothing
press, all scream the ideal of "King and Country." To say that this is not
an appeal to intelligence would be putting it mildly. No state would
dare to attempt conscription on the perfectly reasonable excuse that the
interests of the nation demanded a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf
or some trade concessions in the West Indies. Still less would it appeal
to the decency and humanity of individuals, as the maxim quoted above
does. This frenzy of what used to be called religious enthusiasm, this
courage of the berserk or the priests of Baal [i Kings 18:28-9], is all that
King and Country stand for. Even this began to falter under the grim
hideousness of the late war, and the expedient was taken of adopting
the slogan of a "war to end war."5 Just how much this phrase meant
President Wilson6 soon found. War appeals to young men, because it is
fundamentally auto-eroticism. That is why the reaction of the press to
the attitude of students has been concentrated on emphasizing their
youth and immaturity. We will leave psychologists to examine just how
much hatred and envy of youth is concentrated in that reaction. We
merely point to the fact that the confidence they express in our responding to another war springs, not from an attitude of despairing horror, as
it ought, but from one signified by a wide and toothsome grin. Our task
just now is to show that "King and Country" represents the screaming
of the professional patriot who is a criminal in peace time, and more of a
nuisance than a Hindenburg Line7 in war, as any Englishman who had
anything to do with the late war can tell you. No Christian objects to
dying for his friends, or even for a great cause, as a martyr or witness.
But to assume that the call to arms of "Your King and Country need
you" is imperative upon the highest ideals of humanity is an insult to
the King and a sneer at the Country.
Duke et decorum est pro patria mori.8 The propaganda of the war was
ample evidence that if the Horatian line as it stands is true, it would
be equally true without the pro patria. The abridged form, perhaps, contains all the wisdom of the ages. But no Christian can believe that, and
very few non-Christians are ready in cold blood to act upon its logical
inference.

25

Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

June 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (June 1936): 21-2. Reprinted in RW, 277-82.

Robert Denham suggests that this essay may have originated in Frye's work for
the graduate English course he took during his second year at Emmanuel College. Certainly, editors inflicted major cuts on the essay as it moved from Frye's
writing desk to the printed pages of the Forum. Frye's own offprint carries a
terse note in his own hand that the article was "badly cut and printed, and
pretty unintelligible" in the form supplied below. For the original and uncut
version of the essay see "The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis: A Study in Prose
Satire," in SE, 346-80. Page references to Time and Western Man have been
keyed to the edition published in Boston in 1957 by Beacon Press. Lewis's other
works as mentioned here include: Tarr (Egoist Press, 1914; rev. ed., Chatto and
Windus, 1928), The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Lion and the Fox: The
Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (Grant Richards, 1927), Time
and Western Man (1927), Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot
(1929), The Apes of God (Arthur Press, 1930), The Diabolical Principle
and The Dithyrambic Spectator (1931), Hitler (1931), Men Without Art
(Cassell, 1934). The place of publication is always London and where no publisher is noted, the publisher is Chatto and Windus.

The recent death of Oswald Spengler [8 May 1936] raises the issue of
how far the influence of that thinker has penetrated into the Englishspeaking world. The Decline of the West is a book often used and seldom
referred to, frequently quoted and rarely acknowledged. Its theses have
become inseparable from our present modes of thinking: the theory of
the organic growth of cultures, the maturation of our own and its historical parallelism with the Roman Empire, the distinction between culture

Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

179

and civilization; all this is as much taken for granted today as the libido
or the dinosaur. But few people who parrot these ideas have any notion
of their source, and as of course no "pessimist" can possibly be left
unanswered, many of those who have read Spengler have attacked him.
Of these attacks, probably the most important in English is that in
Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, and an analysis of Wyndham
Lewis's thought will provide an excellent opportunity for seeing how
unwelcome and yet how irresistible the arguments of an original thinker
can be.
Wyndham Lewis was one of the group of experimental writers who
appeared just before the war, his most notable ally being Ezra Pound.1
The war, in which he served, interrupted his career at the beginning, but
by 1919 he had established himself as novelist, painter, and polemical
writer. After several years of silence, he produced a treatise on political
theory, The Art of Being Ruled, following it by its literary and philosophical complement, Time and Western Man. From these two books his other
long treatises radiate as more specialized applications of his attitude.
The Industrial Revolution, says Lewis, ushered in a new form of society. Industrial technique entails incredibly rapid movement and development, which produces a society accustomed to regard incessant
metamorphosis as normal. This stereotype of thought Lewis calls "revolutionary," and its most direct symbol is the advertisement. The Art of
Being Ruled is devoted to showing that the imminent collapse of this
form of society will result in something more stable and permanent,
probably an economic world order governed by dictatorships, as ruling
is the work of a professional ruler, not of a population in general. In
1931 Lewis singled out Hitler as a symptom of this Caesarean birth.
The democratic form of society depends for its stability on the creation of stereotypes of mass thinking, mass entertainment, mass action.
It depends, in other words, on a wholesale vulgarizing of the creative
activity of art, the speculative activity of philosophy, the exploring
activity of science. Industry vulgarizes science: man believes himself to
be living in a scientific age because he can play with toys like radios and
automobiles, which he could not have acquired without science; and it
is only in this "popular mechanics" form that science really reaches him.
Politics vulgarizes philosophy: Darwin's thesis of the survival of the
fit becomes the excuse for mass murder; Spengler presses philosophical concepts into a counsel of a reactionary fatalism. So the ordinary
man gets hold of philosophy only in the forms of social stereotypes.

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Politics, History, and Society

Nietzsche, Sorel, Spengler, and Freud, Lewis regards as vulgarizers of

philosophical and scientific ideas. A precisely similar process goes on in
art. Instead of the genuinely creative work of the rare and isolated
genius, we find his techniques imitated by shrewd and clever craftsmen
who swarm together in schools, movements, tendencies, groups, and
generally in what Lewis calls phalansteries. These cliques, who are naturally on their guard to see that no real genius is given a hearing, vulgarize art into movements which become, like vulgarized science and
philosophy, essentially political phenomena. Lewis's two novels are satires on these herd artists. Tarr, its scene laid in the cultural underworld
of Paris, is built around the antithetical figures of Tarr, the genuine artist, and Kreisler, the typical parasite and charlatan. The Apes of God shifts
the scene to London. A Greek called Zagreus (the god of the Orphic initiation) leads a vacuous moron, Daniel Boylen, through a kind of katabasis in which he is exposed to all sides of this vast interlocking arty
"public," of the "Bohemian" variety, of people with private incomes
who make hobbies of art, music, literature, and revolutionary politics.
Lewis's world is essentially that of Antic Hay and the biting London
scenes of Women in Love.
The larger pattern behind this many-sided attack emerges in Paleface.
Lewis regards the cult of sensibility preceding the French Revolution,
and a similar cult preceding the Russian Revolution, as respectively the
beginning and end of a fairly homogeneous cultural development, usually called Romanticism in its earlier stages and Impressionism in its
later, which was throughout the product of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Perhaps its most persistent characteristic is Primitivism,
the sentimental admiration, by a sterile and senile society, of the
untamed, the unexplored, the uncultivated, the amorphous. All this is
breaking down, the Great War having hastened its collapse and provoked a reaction which in the plastic arts is generally called "Expressionism." In his latest book, Men without Art, Lewis outlines the essential
theories of Expressionism in regard to literature. Music, the great time
art, is breaking down with the time philosophy, and literature will be
forced more and more toward a plastic ideal. It will approach its subjects
from the outside; it will tend to abandon poetry, which depends on
rhythm and movement, for prose, and will be satiric rather than lyrical.
Painting under Impressionism has dissolved in a mist of "atmosphere,"
and rigorous formal outline, more like that of the Egyptian or the Chinese, will replace the naturalistic humanism characteristic of the Hellenic tradition, which we have inherited.

Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

181

When Lewis comes to deal with Spengler in Time and Western Man, it
is noteworthy that, in spite of his abusive tirade, he is not primarily concerned with the objective truth or falsehood of Spengler's theory of the
organic growth of cultures. He says:
To say that I disagree with Spengler would be absurd. You cannot agree or
disagree with such people as that: you can merely point out a few of the
probable reasons for the most eccentric of their spasms, and if you have
patienceas I haveclassify them. That, I think, I have done enough. [297
(pt. 2, chap. 2)]

This is of considerable significance. How does one find out the reasons
for other people's spasms, and on what principles does one classify
them?
Lewis attacks Spengler, not as an individual, but as a symptom of a
cultural consciousness. The whole importance of Lewis as a thinker lies
precisely in his perception of the unity of that cultural consciousness
(or, as Pareto calls it, a "psychic state")-2 The underlying postulate of
Lewis's argument, which he takes so completely for granted that he
does not bother to formulate it, is that a given society produces the philosophy, art, literature, politics, and religion appropriate to it. Lewis
apparently denies this as a general principle. But the whole first part of
Time and Western Man assumes the interconnection of the time philosophies of Bergson and Spengler, the will-to-power attitudes of Sorel,
Marinetti, and Nietzsche, the stream of consciousness technique of
Proust, Joyce, and Stein, the political development of imperialism and
nationalism leading to Fascism, and more superficial phenomena like
Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos. He says, of course: "This essay is
among other things the assertion of a belief in the finest type of mind,
which lifts the creative impulse into an absolute region free of Spenglerian 'history' or politics" [148 (Preface to bk. 2)].
But Lewis has never treated a single great literary figure in this absolute way; everyone he has ever dealt with has been examined from the
cultural-consciousness point of view. And of course it is precisely the
thesis of a cultural consciousness, to which everything contemporaneous in a given society is related, that forms the basic doctrine of Spengler. One might suppose Shakespeare to represent "the finest type of
mind," but I have never seen a book on Shakespeare more concerned to
represent him as a historical and political phenomenon than Lewis's
study of him in The Lion and the Fox. Lewis might, of course, protest that

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Politics, History, and Society

his whole point is that the nineteenth century never produced any really
great or "absolute" art; that it was because of the "vulgarization" engendered by democracy that art got mixed up with politics and so became a
historical phenomenon. Tackled on the score of The Lion and the Fox, he
might extend this principle to our "semi-barbaric" Western culture (he
assumes, of course, the existence of a Western culture), which he regards
as far less civilized than the Chinese. But as every one of Lewis's diatribes is in some way concerned with that very culture, what price the
following syllogism: all Lewis's critical books are concerned with the
analysis of the cultural consciousness of the Western world, mainly during its last hundred years or so, which is treated both as a unity and as
an organic growth; Spengler's work is a general view of history based on
the same postulates; therefore all of Lewis's critical work is a special
application of the Spenglerian dialectic. What Epicurus was to Lucretius,
what Aquinas was to Dante, what, perhaps, Montaigne was to Shakespeare, that Spengler is to Wyndham Lewis. Lewis's whole thinking is
dominated by Spenglerian concepts. The introduction to his preposterous book, The Dithyrambic Spectator, is based on Spengler's theory of
craft-art in late civilization. His references to the "adolescence" of the
Elizabethans as compared with our senile child-cult and to the "Roman
brutality" of contemporary sport echo Spengler. His denunciations of
Bohemia are pure Spengler: that both novels are Spenglerian satires is
immediately obvious to anyone who has read both authors. His theory
of the emergence of the philosopher-ruler, worked out in The Art of Being
Ruled, is Spengler's theory of the rise of Caesarism. His book on Hitler is
in octave counterpoint to The Hour of Decision. His attack on Impressionistic painting as having deserted a plastic for a musical ideal is unintelligible without its context in Spengler. And so on. In The Lion and the Fox,
Lewis speaks of Frederick the Great, who, himself the most perfect disciple of Machiavelli in history, composed a bitter philippic against him,
which was exactly what Machiavelli would have advised him to do.
Similarly, Lewis examines Spengler, in Time and Western Man, as a historical and political phenomenon evolved by the cultural consciousness
that also produced Bergson in philosophy, Proust in literature, Einstein
in science, Picasso in painting, which is precisely according to Spengler's
own instructions.
Thus, Lewis's foreshortened perspective and his parenthetic repudiations of the very thesis he is advancing give him an air of being more
commonsense and practical than Spengler, and of course he makes easy

Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

183

game of Spengler's bombastic and truculent jingoism, his turgid apocalyptic writing, his irascible retired-colonel philistinism. But the fact
remains, that the more completely Lewis is the Spenglerian satirist, in
the same way that Shaw is a Fabian satirist and Auden a Marxist satirist,
the better off he is as a writer.
Lewis has achieved a considerable reputation as the man who
"debunked" Spengler, his biographer Gawsworth3 claiming that he has
utterly destroyed Spengler's pretensions to being a thinker of importance in the contemporary world. For those genuinely interested in distinguishing the first-rate from the second-rate thinker, the producer of
ideas from the exploiter of them, it may be as well to expose such a
claim whenever possible.

26

War on the Cultural Front

August 1940

From Canadian Forum, 20 (August 1940): 144, 146. Reprinted in RW,

282-6.
Three economic systems, Nazism, Communism, and capitalism, are
engaged in destroying (a) each other and (b) what they originally stood
for. Nazism, in origin a frantic nationalism, is now an international
armed force attempting world conquest, its vanguard a rabble of reactionary big shots in each country ready to act as traitors to the latter. Communism, at one time completely international in outlook, has
become a patriotic national movement wherever it has had any real
power or influence: in Spain, in Czechoslovakia, in China, in India, and
of course in Russia. The capitalist imperialisms of Britain and America
are committed to the defence of small independent nations. In the meantime, the word "democracy" wanders through books, magazines, newspapers, and speeches undefined and untranslated.
We think of democracy in various ways: as the safeguarding of civil
liberties, tolerance of labour unions, permission to curse the government, a bulwark of eccentricity and relaxation from the herd, retention
of nineteenth-century parliamentary machinery, sabotage of would-be
dictators, supremacy of civil over military power, or as a loose aggregate of all these things. In gloomier moments we suspect that it is only a
sentimental ersatz religion, or an excuse for yammering in enlightened
magazines, or, worst of all, only a word, used as pretext by the traitorous rabble mentioned above to destroy everything we have just listed.
The source of this confusion seems to be that we think of democracy
as a political theory. But a political theory without an economic context

War on the Cultural Front

185

is only newspaper blah, and if democracy implies the economic context

of capitalism, the socialists engaged in its defence are rather muddled. It
is easy to say that they are, but too simple. A better explanation is that
democracy is not primarily a political theory at all, but something
rooted in the broader and deeper concepts of culture and civilization.
This something broader and deeper neither Nazism nor Communism
possesses. Both of these systems are at once political and economic
structures, each is based on a social dialectic, and each Weltanschauung
(that word has to come in somewhere) is a series of inferences from certain basic premises. Both are essentially synthetic or religious modes of
thought; both, that is, are efforts of an organized social will to compel
human life and science to fit a certain pattern of ideas. That is not what I
mean by a religion, but it is what I mean by a religious mode of thought.
Both being state religions without gods, neither can accommodate ideas
in philosophy, discoveries in science, or works of art inconsistent with
their immediate political ambitions, whether they are, in the language of
the Defence of Canada Regulations (based on identical postulates) "false
or otherwise." All such work must meet the very narrow pragmatic test
of its usefulness to the state at that moment: otherwise the social organisms of Germany and Russia can no more absorb it than a baby can
absorb coal oil.
Marxism, for instance, has made little if any attempt to incorporate
Spengler's irrefutable proof of the existence of organic culture growths,
or the researches of Freud and Jung into the subconscious, or the great
strides made by anthropology and related studies since 1900. Its most
striking failure, however, is its childish attitude to religion: it has not
recognized itself as a religious movement complete with bible, church,
heretics, apostles, saints, martyrs, and shrines; it failed to see that the
bourgeois reaction to it would form the rival religion of Nazism, and it
considers any religious phenomenon essentially explained when glibly
transposed into economic terms. As for Nazism, the delirious absurdity
of its race theory needs no italics. Of course, the Nazis know that Jewand Red-baiting arouse far more sneaking sympathy than contempt in a
country like Canada, but their "Nordic" fantasies have no such propagandic value.
Democracy is in essence a cultural laissez-faire, an encouragement of
private enterprise in art, scholarship, and science. The list of people tortured or banished by Hitler includes Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons, homosexuals, and sponsors of rival brands of Nazism like

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Politics, History, and Society

Strasser.1 No one can be equally sympathetic with all these groups, but
in the last century English culture has received contributions from Jews
(Disraeli), Catholics (Newman), Protestants (Browning), Freemasons
(Burns), homosexuals (Wilde), and spokesmen of potential English
Nazism (Carlyle). Obviously there has been considerable anarchy in
English culture, a hopelessly inconsistent inclusiveness about it, and
that large inconsistency is the basis of democracy. For it implies the
acceptance and practice of the scientific attitude on the part of the people
as a whole: the inductive suspending of judgment until enough, not only
of facts and discoveries and techniques, but of viewpoints and theories
and gospels and quack panaceas, are in, before changing the direction of
social development. Opposed to this is the crusading religious temperament of the dictatorships working with a partial and premature cultural
synthesis. Out of this inclusiveness of outlook springs everything else
we associate with democracy, and it is on that basis that democratic
countries rest their claim to be more highly civilized.
What is true of science and scholarship is of course true of the arts.
The dictator is less dependent on popular opinion than the democratic
leader and is therefore far more dependent on popular prejudice: it is
not Churchill or Roosevelt but Mussolini who must pose for cameras
and kiss the shuddering babies and generally advertise himself like a
toothpaste to retain public favour. Similarly the art that emerges under
the cultural anarchy of democracy may be subtle, obscure, highbrow,
and experimental, and if a good deal of art at any time is not so, the cultural achievement of the country is on a Woolworth level. But art under
dictatorship seldom dares to be anything but mediocre and obvious.
This is least true of music, for music is difficult to censor, and may well
be the entering wedge of civilization in the two leading dictatorships.
But crude, gaudy realism of painting and pompous broken-down classicism of architecture in both countries has been foreshadowing the
Soviet-Nazi pact for years.
The notion that democracy depends on economic rather than cultural
laissez-faire has made a good many people rather confused about it and
inclined to believe that it is nothing but a rationalizing of oligarchy. This
idea is sedulously fostered by Nazi propagandists. Another source of
confusion lies in the division between national and international loyalties, which, as we said at the beginning, is the underlying paradox of this
whole conflict. Common to all three systems is the tendency to worldwide expansion we generally call imperialism: common to all three also

War on the Cultural Front

187

is an intense, if sometimes vicarious, patriotism. Whichever way we

look, that conflict of sympathies confronts us. Everyone wants a worldwide Zollverein2even a community of old ladies drinking tea needs a
merchant navy to bring the teaand everyone wants to see the farce of
anarchic national sovereignty and desperate national self-sufficiency
brought to an end. How can we do that by propping up Poland again?
And yet the highest culture seems to require some kind of decentralizing. Music and science are international, but literature depends on language and painting on locality: we shall always want the flavour of the
region in these arts, just as we shall always want it in wine or in cheese,
in glass or in linen. But is this worth so much blood and misery?
A worldwide economy will emerge, whoever wins or loses the war
the human race is trying to evolve a digestive system, and will doubtless
succeed. But it should be an unobtrusive and automatic digestive system, like the individual's. Being developed by states, however, it is necessarily accompanied by the phenomenon of expanding world states.
Now the state has been well named Leviathan, for it is a primitive and
barbarous form of the community just as the dinosaur is a primitive and
barbarous form of life. It cannot survive without a small group of
exploiters and a mass of victims. The bigger it gets, the greater the mass
of victims and the more force necessary to hold them down. A world
state would be, therefore, a handful of dictators, backed up by huge
armies of praetorian guards ready to supply more when they die, ruling
over vast slave populations. After criticism has been clubbed, reform
machine-gunned, art degraded to the poster and the circus, religion to
Caesar-worship, science to engineering, the surviving slaves would be
well fed and clothed, and nothing could overthrow such a state but an
invasion from Mars. The analogy between insect states and those of
slightly dazed human beings has often been noted. In the present war
it is our business to disintegrate and disorganize this world state whatever else happens. Our most powerful allies are not America and Turkey,
but the war itself and the famine, starvation, plague, and anarchy
that accompany it. We should not look for a dynamic ethic to fight the
dictators with: confronted with their entomological logic we stand for
nothing but absolute nihilism, absolute denial. We dream of no reestablished status quo: we look for nothing further than destruction.

27

Two Italian Sketches, 1939

October 1942

From Ada Victoriana, 67 (October 1942): 12-14, 23. NFF, 1991, box 24,
notebook 17 contains Frye's handwritten draft for this article. There are very
few changes from handwritten draft to published article. The most significant of
these have been indicated in the endnotes.
San Gemignano
We are on our way from Siena to Florence, and decide to stop at San
Gemignano. That's a little town on top of a hill full of enormous skyscraping towers the nobles used to build and shoot at each other from.
We say good-bye to a cheerful little clerk we've been talking to on the
train: he took English as his second language at school, and fed us
remarks like "I am happy to go without Italy," meaning he would like to
get out of the country, while we exchanged Italian almost as bad. The
place is called Poggibonsi, which we know only from a couplet I found
once in Browning:
You may at Pekin, or at Poggibonsi,
Either a shifty priest, or a dodgy bonze see.1

We look around for a shifty priest, and find nothing less than a bishop,
which we take as a good omen. Then we get the bus, crowded with chattering Italians, and wind slowly up and up an enormously long hill. We
glance at the people around us, reflecting that the Italians are a very
convenient people for the Nazis to deal with: as long as they are friendly
they can remember about the Nordic Lombards, and if that friendship

Two Italian Sketches

189

cools they can bring up the subject of Etruscans. Up and up we go, passing women washing clothes in a brook and drying them on hedges,
passing vineyards and olive trees, passing dusty donkeys and the
downhill bus.
Some of our friends have objected to our taking a holiday in a Fascist
country, feeling that we ought to spend our handful of vacation money
in those noble, generous, brave-spirited, free republics, Great Britain
and France. Well, perhaps. Certainly at Siena, where we had an air-raid
practice and a blackout, we began to get restive at being in an officially
hostile country with the papers all hermetically sealed against news. "La
politica non e serena," as our landlady said. But surely away up on this
mountain, breathing this free mountain air (one of the voices of liberty,
according to Wordsworth, who ought to have known),2 we can forget
about Mussolini for a few hours.
When we get there we find, however, that the town has been made
into a "national monument" and Mussolini's plug-ugly sourpuss is
plastered all over it. His epigrams, too. For every conspicuous piece of
white wall in Italy is covered with mottoes in black letters from his
speeches and obiter dictathe successor to the obsolete art of frescopainting. One of them says, with disarming simplicity, "Mussolini is
always right." "The olive tree has gentle and soft leaves, but its wood is
harsh and rough," says another more cryptically. "War is to man what
maternity is to woman," says a third. "The best way to preserve peace is
to prepare for war," says a fourth, and it looks just as silly in Italian as it
does in English. Another one of the few not of Mussolini's authorship
reads: "Duce! We await your orders." Up here they present us with "We
shoot straight."
One of these, "The nation should be as strong as the army and the
army as strong as the nation," reminds us how Italy is taxed to the back
teeth for her army and how oddly all this gathering of pearls from swine
contrasts with the miserable poverty of the town, a poverty as patient
and humble as that poor old donkey. But is it so odd? Peasant feeds soldier and soldier kicks peasantthat was the Roman arrangement, so
why not now, when the grandeur of Rome is revived and the national
emblem once more is a whip?
Well, where shall we start? The cathedral, I suppose. The big attraction
there is a chapel full of Ghirlandaio,3 one of the stuffier of the Florentine
stuffed shirts. That can wait: the nave is full of Sienese frescoes, and as
there's very little fresco at Siena itself, we'd better start with these.

190

Politics, History, and Society

On the west wall is a Last Judgment by Taddeo di Bartolo,4 a grim,

saturnine peasant of a man who goes through hell with relish, adding a
few touches of his own. We see fiends holding back a fat friar from a luscious banquet, a fiend riding on a woman and cutting off her breasts, a
fiend excreting into his victim's open mouth with a wide grin on his
ugly face, fiends winding somebody's bowels out of his stomach over a
windlass. One can see in every line of its precise and balanced painting,
Chesterton says, that medieval culture was always seeking equilibrium.5
Yeah . . . Here's the north wall, scenes from the Old Testament by Bartolo di Fredi,6 a good-natured soul with a weakness for animals. He
really goes to town on the ark, and Pharoah's army drowning in the Red
Sea, though his camels and giraffes certainly look a lot like horses. On
the south wall are scenes from the life of Christ by someone called
Barna7never heard of him.
They couldn't read or write in the Middle Ages, you see, and these pictures were the Bible of the poorall the poor that could get field glasses
or stepladders to see them and then somebody to figure them out, that is.
It's not easy to make much out of the upper ones except that this Barna
obviously has something to say and isn't just filling space. So the lower
row on the Passion, which we can see, has all the more terrific a punch
when we get to it. There's nothing like it in ItalyThe Triumph of Death at
Pisa, perhaps, but certainly nothing else, not even the Sistine, has that
feeling of effortless strength. The first hint of it is the picture of Judas taking money from the priests. The priests are in a solid mass, scowling
heavily at Judas, who is uneasy and acts as though the money were burning his hand. Not a slimy Judas, like Giotto's, but an intelligent and sensitive Judas. Then the taking of Jesus in the garden. Here you see the
soldiers firstwell, not the soldiers so much as an enormous thick mass
of iron: helmets, armour, spears, pikes, all in perfect order. Christ is
motionless and alone, and crowded out of the picture are the disorganized and beaten disciples. Peter hits out, a desperate and hopeless blow
at Malchus's ear. Then Christ before Pilate: Christ with a prophetic Sienese face, gentle and human, yet almost unconscious of the surrounding
ring of disciplined steel. Then the Crucifixion. Everything is there, of
course: the three crosses, the fainting Virgin, the casual soldiers, the
watchful angels; but they're not what you see first. What you see first is
a Roman officer on horseback with his arm bent back to strike a terrific
blow with a thick club at the legs of one of the thieves, and it's the stupid
brutal power of that arm that keeps pulling your eyes back however long

Two Italian Sketches

191

you look at the picture. And that's all. The Crucifixion is the end: there's
no hint of anything beyond the fainting virgin, the absent disciples, the
tortured God, and that symmetrical design of animated iron.
Ghirlandaio can go to hell: we've got to get that bus. "We shoot
straight," bellows Mussolini after us. Nowait a minutemy Italian is
pretty shakyit's future: "We shall shoot straight."
Venice
Venice does exist, gondolas and palaces and canals and everything, and
as we settle into the steamboat and hear an American crack the deathless joke about every house sitting on its piles, we like it. It's a brilliant
day, though, and the sun is unkind to Venice: the palaces badly need
repair, and the canals reek with a subtle but very unpleasant smell. A
sinister mass of green slime clings to every building, and as the wash of
the steamboat reaches it, lifts and waves gently. How long can these
buildings stand that wash, asks the same tourist. No one knows.
No, the best part of Venice is at night, floating through the little
canals in a gondola, with the queer lighting and the bridges and the
waterstairs. Venice in the days of its glorywhere the devil is the man
going? Oh, yes, somebody caterwauling in another gondola over there.
"E molto interessante, la serenata," says the gondolier. One of their rackets. We don't want it, thanks, but it takes a lot of splutter to get him
detoured.
We spend money at Venice: everything is very much higher here. All
buildings charge admission three to seven times what other towns
charge. The food is bad, for the first time in Italy; later we find in Verona
that Venetian food is a standing joke. I got royally gyppednot just
shortchanged, but gyppedtoday, also for the first time in Italy. They
charge admission to churches; they charge extra to show you anything
starred in Baedeker, who unfortunately loves the town; and there's a
Veronese show here carefully spread over five buildings with enormous
(for Italy) admission prices for each. These are microscopic things, but
you're sensitive to money when you're travelling, and after a few days
they begin to generate movement, like steam molecules.
What does it live on, this quiet World's Fair of a town? There are no
industries here. "What does this town live on?" I ask Mike. "Suckers,"
answers Mike, drowning his cigarette. That's certainly the atmosphere:
everybody pounces on you to sell you something, and a blond like me

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Politics, History, and Society

feels as self-conscious as Lady Godiva on St. Mark's Piazza. Now that its
paint has worn off, old Venice sits and dreams and reaches out for
money, like a hermit.
But was it really different in the days of its glory? I read something
about this town once that explained what I'm feeling about it, but I can't
just place it. Wasn't it a sort of clearing house for the Orient, a banking
centre? Did it ever produce anything? Wasn't it always built on pure
money, without any commodity basis for the money? Something like
that, I think, though my economics are not very expert.
That would explain a lot of Venetian art. These fantastic buildings like
the Doge's Palace with their unreal and abstract decoration: they have
nothing functional about them, like cathedrals or grain elevators, nothing that takes root in a soilthere isn't any soilor has any relation to
living, somehow. The painting's the same. Veronese shows Venice as a
huge blonde bawd getting rained on by a torrent of gold, and that would
be all right to the Venetians. They knew that money creates and sustains
and moves all things: money would therefore be worthy of perfectly sincere worship. It doesn't matter whether their painters are stupid louts
like Veronese or not. Tintoretto with a ponderous St. Mark flying
through the air like Superman, Carpaccio with his ten thousand virgins
being martyredthey were real painters even if they were paid by the
square yard, but there's something vulgar about them you can't get
around.8 And as there was never anything but money in the town, there
could be nobody but bourgeois in it: no sort of class opposition and no
real aristocracy. If only these people had been Jews. What a source of
comfort and consolation they'd be to anti-Semites! That reminds me, I
read a poem of T.S. Eliot on Venice which tried feebly to blame it all on
the Jews anyhow.9
Jews . . . Oh, The Merchant of Venice, of course. That's what I've read.
Have you ever noticed how much money there is in that play? It's all
about Antonio's merchandise and his bargain with Shylock and Shylock's bond and equitable judgment and the relative value of gold and
silver and lead caskets and the worth of promises and rings and wives
and revenges. Even the stars are beautiful because they look like guineas. That would explain Shylock, who is neither a villain Jew nor a persecuted hero, but a money-maker making money faster than Christians,
who decide to gang up on him.10 . . . Hey, you, you can't go home yet.
We're paying for an hour, and it's only forty-five minutes. We compared
watches when we started, remember?

Two Italian Sketches

193

No, I'm not giving you all that fifty-lire note and it's no good touching
your cap. You owe us five lire change. Well, if you haven't any change
you can bloody well get some.
When we go to the railway station the next morning it's draped in
swastikas, because Dr. Goebbels, who has an axis to grind, is arriving to
open a movie theatre. In Padua we read that he was greeted by gondoliers on his arrival. "You wan' guide? You wan' pos' card? You wan'
feelthy peecture?" Sure he wants them. He wants everything he can
get.11 He may even want a book we saw on the station bookstall, L'Arte
di Conquistar gli Amid, by Dale Carnegie.12

28

G.M. Young's Basic

May 1944

Review of Basic, by G.M. Young (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943). This was
Tract 62 of the Society for Pure English. This society, founded in 1919 by Robert Bridges, recognized the expansion of English into a world language, but
feared that this expansion would dissolve the links that tied contemporary
usage to what Bridges called "the finest literary language in the world." As a
solution to the responsibilities and perils presented by this expansion, Bridges
urged the Society's members to lobby for scientific reform, to monitor journalistic usage closely, and to maintain close supervision of worldwide variations in
the use of the English language. The Society's membership included art historian Kenneth Clark, medievalist Kenneth Sisam, and philologist Logan Pearsall
Smith. From Canadian Forum, 24 (May 1944): 47.
This sounds like an erudite and competent commentary on Basic
English by a writer for the Society for Pure English who is opposed to
it.1 His point is that Basic English is not real English, and that the only
people who can make it sound like real English are the people who
already know real English, whereas others will simply fall back on the
idiom of their native tongue and thereby make Basic unintelligible even
as a code. He attacks, too, the elimination of the verb and the emphasis
on nouns as a devitalizing of speech. The present reviewer, though his
prejudices are with Mr. Young and though he has read very little Basic
English that did not sound like unimaginative pidgin, is incompetent to
discuss the merits of the case beyond suggesting that the use of Basic
has progressed so far that it has got rather beyond the hypothetical
arguments of what it would or would not do and should now be examined on its actual record of accomplishment.

29

Revenge or Justice?1
November 1946

From Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 171. Reprinted in RW, 377-8.

The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, established by Great Britain, France, the
U.S.S.R. and the United States, took place between November 1945 and October 1946 and tried twenty-two high-ranking Nazi defendants. The transcripts
of the trial were published in forty-two volumes in Nuremberg in 1947-

Morally, the defendants at Nuremberg represented perhaps the largest

mass of guilt that the human race has ever seen at one place and time.
But in the present state of international anarchy, in which the executives
of a sovereign state are not answerable to a higher court for their
actions, they were legally as innocent as lambs. The object of the trials
was, we were told, to remedy this monstrous situation, so that the execution of a convicted Nazi would not be the revenge of victor on vanquished, but the result of embodying a moral code which all decent men
accept in some legal form. That, so we understood, was why the judges
were willing to sit for months listening to evidence in which murder,
torture, conspiracy, and treason kept turning up like the figures in an
interminably recurring decimal, and why they leaned so far backward
(too far, the Russians said)2 to declare that three of the most sinister
heels in Europe were, as far as they were concerned, "innocent."
But the newspapers and movies have long ago decided that anything
to do with the war is no longer news, and the best they could do was to
play up the trials as a pallid and rather unsuccessful version of a torso
murder case. The British press complains that the executions were
arranged solely for the convenience of American correspondents who
wanted to make the early morning editions. Nothing in the news

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Politics, History, and Society

expresses or appeals to any feeling but the satisfaction of revenge on

enemies who deserved at least all they got. Well, of course they did: but
did all that work prove nothing except that Julius Streicher deserved
hanging?3 An example of the real meaning of the trials is: if it is now a
crime to try to start a war, what is now the legal status of the people who
are advocating a "preventive" war on Russia? Or: if the theory of the
amoral sovereign state can no longer be used as an excuse for aggressive
actions, what is now the legal status of the more blatant forms of American imperialism? Has the smallest inkling of this real meaning yet penetrated to the minds, if any, of the hog-callers who proclaim that the
American navy will go where it damn pleases? It is certainly not the
newspapers' fault if it has.

30

F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of

East and West
March 1947

Review of The Meeting of East and West, by F.S.C. Northrop (New York:
Macmillan, 1947). From the "Turning New Leaves" section in Canadian
Forum, 26 (March 194.7): 281-2. Reprinted as "Total Identification" in
NFCL, 107-10. F.S.C. Northrop was Master of Silliman College and Sterling
Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale University.

Professor Northrop's ambitious attempt to provide a philosophical basis

for the union of Eastern and Western thought has attracted a good deal
of attention. It is the work of an average but active intelligence, well
informed on its own subject, which is philosophy; and though his grasp
of history and art is less sure, it would be a very unusual erudition
indeed which could derive no profit from all the information he provides about causation in Aristotle, the person in St. Thomas, the metaphysical assumptions underlying Renaissance science and the way that
nuclear physics has affected them, the relation between Oriental philosophy and art, and the place of Mexico in the contemporary scene. The
real value of the book is, I think, as a quarry of such information, and the
fact that I find its thesis inconclusive does not, for me, affect that value.
The style is a lecturer's style, ranging from lucid exposition to a habit of
wordy repetitiveness doubtless acquired from watching difficult ideas
bounce off the faces of sleepy undergraduates.
The author quotes a Mexican writer as saying that American civilization is Utopian in shape.1 The postulates of American democracy are, on
a social and moral plane, both admirable in their idealism and practicable in their application; but above that plane certain limitations begin to
appear. The principles of the American constitution do not provide a

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Politics, History, and Society

cultural synthesis comprehensive enough to make an integral place for,

in particular, the arts, philosophy, and religion. There is unity in American civilization; there is not enough in its culture.2 In American education the various subjects of study are autonomous and separate, the
central principles common to them being lost; American taste in the arts
inclines either to the highbrow and insulated, or the lowbrow and barbarous; and the God in whom American coins trust is a vague haze of
benignant morality.
Hence, for many American thinkers today the gigantic synthesis of
religion, philosophy, science, and politics achieved in the Middle Ages
looms up in front of them like an intellectual Utopia which complements
that of their own moral idealism. American magazines and books are
thickly strewn with admiring references to Aristotle, St. Thomas, the
seven liberal arts, and the medieval preservation of personal values; and
of deprecatory ones to the cult of self-analysis, the dehumanizing of the
individual, and the centrifugal movements in politics and science which
came with the Renaissance and sent us all skittering down the butterslide of introversion into our present Iron Age. It is an idea which
should be left to Catholics, who know what they want to do with it;
writers who have got a phallic father or something identified with what
they call the "Puritan tradition" are apt to develop a sloppy habit of
comparing the theory of Catholicism with the practice of Protestantism.
Professor Northrop takes over from there. He feels that the Thomist
synthesis is too full of fictions to serve for what he feels is required
today, in a world which contains Russian Communism and the cultural
traditions of China and India in addition to the great variety nearer
home. To provide a basis for global understanding, we need a supersynthesis in which the two major elements will be a Western-democratic-scientific complex on the one hand, and an Eastern-contemplative-aesthetic complex on the other. (Russia will not be meat in this
sandwich: the author has written an article called "The Impossibility of a
Theoretical Science of Economic Dynamics," and has the usual academic-liberal view of Marxism.)3 He says that there is a unity in Eastern
thought, and in Western thought; that these differ from one another, but
are reconcilable. The fundamental datum of Eastern thought is an immediate apprehension of experience as a totality; that of the West, a theoretical construction made from experience which represents and makes
intelligible its reality. The author calls the former (I think inadvisedly)
an "aesthetic" and the latter a "theoretic" approach [461-5]. He feels that

F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West

199

we can reconcile them by realizing that both actually exist simultaneously in all experience, whether Western or Eastern, as a direct
two-term relationship, as, for instance, "blue" exists both as a pretty
colour and as a light wave with a certain rate of vibration. This gets rid
of the common Western fallacy of regarding the pretty colour as a subjective illusion thrown up by the theoretic word, a "secondary quality"
at one remove from reality.
Philosophers will have to decide on the value of this suggestion; its
social and political importance, which the author is very keen on, seems
to me rather doubtful. I am not sure that mutual understanding makes
for better relations. Ten years ago, the people who best understood
Nazism were those who most wanted to fight it. Today, Russians can
see the drift of American imperialism far more clearly than Americans
themselves, and vice versa. Tomorrow, it may well be better for Christians to believe that Mohammedans worship an idol called Mahound
than to send them educated missionaries to explain that their theism
should be "softened down" and "take on more of the open-mindedness
of Hinduism" [456], as our author urges. Besides, achieving "one
world" involves first economic unity, secondly the pooling of scientific
techniques, and thirdly political unity. When this is done it will be
found that wars are no more caused by conflicts in cultural traditions
than thunderstorms are caused by clouds bumping together. It is a false
analogy to say that because we should surrender national sovereignty
we should also give up our language and all its literary possibilities for
some dismal, idiomless Esperanto; and I think that religion, philosophy,
and the arts, which latter are as dependent on locale as a fine wine, are
involved in that false analogy. There is no earthly reason why the world
should be culturally federalized; in the U.S.S.R. economic and political
federation is counterbalanced by regional developments of culture,
which seems to me to make sense. Chinese painting, for example, will
influence Western painting purely through its merits as painting, not
through any Western attempt to understand Chinese cultural traditions
for political reasons.
An Easterner might say that reconciling an aesthetic with a theoretic
component of thought is itself a theoretic project, so that to reconcile
them on these terms is really to annihilate the Eastern direct apprehension by absorbing it into a Western theory about its "place" in a still
larger apprehension. The author says: "the specific relation between the
aesthetic and theoretic components must be determined, thereby per-

2OO

Politics, History, and Society

mitting the newly formulated world philosophy to specify the theoretical criterion by means of which the two differing cultures . . . can be
combined" [376]. The word "theoretical" in this sentence suggests Western. The author quotes Lao-tzu as saying "the sage embraces oneness"
[336!, but surely Lao-tzu does not mean by "oneness" something to be
"reconciled" to what by hypothesis is something else. He is not talking
about a mode of apprehension but about total identification; he is not
simply throwing an epigram on a philosophical ammunition dump, but
hinting at a vision as far beyond the merely aesthetic or emotional (the
author rather recklessly associates these words) as it is beyond the
merely intellectual. I imagine that whenever an Oriental philosopher
tries to tell us about his Tao, his Citta, his Nirvana, or his Brahman, he is
also telling us, in Eastern language, that an intellectual and cultural synthesis which gets everything in and reconciles everyone with everyone
else is an attempt to build the Tower of Babel, and will lead to confusion
of utterance. He may be wrong, but Professor Northrop will never catch
him in his made-in-U.S.A. net, however skilfully he throws it.

31

Wallace Notestein's
The Scot in History
July 1947

Review of The Scot in History, by Wallace Notestein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 194.6). From Canadian Forum, 27 (July 1947): 96.

An attempt to convey, by means of an easy-going historical jog-trot, the

distinctive characteristics of Scottish culture, and to discover what sort
of reality underlies the ready-made stereotypes of thrift, dourness,
humourlessness, ambition, respect for education, and nonconforming
aggressiveness which are usually associated with the Scotch. Doubtless
there are such things as national characteristics, but so many accidents
and exceptions are involved in them that such generalizations as "the
Scots are better at taking a joke against themselves than the English"
[333! seem to me of very doubtful value. The purpose of this book
would probably have been better served by a straightforward cultural
history. For an uninstructed non-Scottish reviewer two things seem
understressed: the distinctive features of Highland culture and the variety and richness of the civilization of medieval Scotland, culminating in
something of a golden age in the fifteenth century. Duns Scotus, for
instance, is not mentioned.1 The best parts of the book deal with the Reformation and the eighteenth century.

32

Toynbee and Spengler

August 194.7

Review of the abridgement of the first six volumes of Toynbee's A Study of

History, by D.C. Somervell (London and New York: Oxford, 1946). From
Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 111-13. Reprinted as "The Shapes of
History" in NFCL, 76-83. All references to Spengler's The Decline of the
West (cited as DW) are keyed to the two-volumes-in-one edition published by
Knopf in 1939.

The synthesis of modern thought is the philosopher's stone of our age,

and any such synthesis would have to contain, if it did not actually consist of, a philosophy of history.1 The two greatest modern achievements
in this field are represented by Marx and Spengler, one a Communist
and the other more or less a Nazi. What we want, clearly, is an equally
impressive structure which will make room for humane values and
established religion and not scare the pants off the middle-class reader.
So when the first six volumes of Toynbee's A Study of History came out
in a one-volume abridgement, it scored a smashing popular success.
This success was due mainly to Time, which has a deep interest in all
books that promise to draw a cultural cordon sanitaire around Marxism.2
A Study of History presents an enormous mass of historical material
strung along a thin line of argument often represented only by a single
word, generally Greek. In the original, one can snuggle down to read
endlessly about hundreds of fascinating subjects, with a comfortable
feeling that all the time all this is proving something, though we may
have to look back at the table of contents to see just what it is. The
abridgement, by exposing the lines of communication more clearly,
indicates that Toynbee is not writing a philosophy of history so much as

Toynbee and Spengler

203

unrolling a vast historical panorama. His material does not really

"prove" anything: it provides the detail of his vision, and he leads us
toward an imaginative total apprehension which can skip over the logical, and sometimes even the factual, stage. I have read many critiques of
Toynbee, ranging from eulogy to invective, and have been struck with
the fact that if one is in broad sympathy with what he is trying to do, his
errors, however numerous, appear as blemishes in a picture rather than
as wrong turns in a chain of reasoning. But if one is not in sympathy
with him, everything seems equally pointless, and the whole pattern
dissolves in chaos.
Toynbee worked out his plan independently of Spengler, and when
Spengler's Decline of the West appeared after the last war he thought at
first that his work had been done for him. Spengler says that the essential shape of history is neither a chaos of accidents nor a steady linear
advance, but a series of social developments which he calls "cultures."
These cultures behave exactly like organisms: they grow, mature,
decline, and die; and they all last about the same length of time. Each
begins in a "spring" of an agrarian economy, a feudal and aristocratic
society, and a mystical iconic religion, and matures into a "summer" of
city-states and individualized art, thence into an "autumn" of urbane
sophistication in art and economic expansion. At that point the "culture" changes to a "civilization" and plunges into a "winter" of huge cities, impoverished agriculture, dictatorships, and annihilation wars. The
possibilities of its arts are exhausted, and its great achievements are
technical feats of engineering and civil and military administration. The
culture to which we belong is a "Western" one, which had its spring in
the Middle Ages, its summer in the Renaissance, its autumn in the eighteenth century, and began its winter with the French Revolution. Previously there had been a Classical culture which went through the same
stages. The heroes of Homer correspond to those of our own age of chivalry, the era of Greek city-states to our Renaissance, and the last glories
of Athens to our age of Bach and Mozart. With Alexander the "civilization" phase of world empires begins, for Alexander corresponds to our
Napoleon. The "decline of the West" has thus reached about the stage of
the Punic Wars in Classical times, and the Roman Empire and the reign
of the Caesars indicate what is ahead of us. In addition to these two
great cultures, Spengler deals with an Egyptian, a Chinese, and an
Indian one, an Arabian or Syrian one (he calls it "Magian," [1:183-216])
which began around the time of Jesus and aged into Mohammedanism,

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Politics, History, and Society

and a new Russian one which is just beginning. Apart from these culture
growths, human life presents a mere continuity of existence without
shape or significance. Primitive societies and exhausted ones alike "have
no history."
When one culture follows another in time, Spengler says, it does not
really learn from its predecessor, and thus there is no general progress in
history. When two cultures conflict, the more aggressive one may stunt
and dwarf the other, producing what Spengler calls a "pseudomorphosis" [DW, 2:243]. Classical civilization did this to Magian culture, and
Western civilization is doing it now to Russia. But no Westerner can ever
understand what goes on in a Classical or Indian mind: he can only
guess at it by seeing how all the products of the other culture fit into a
consistent mental pattern which is not his. This overall pattern can be
grasped, not, of course, through abstract propositions, but through symbols. Classical culture lives in a "pure present": it has nothing of our
sense of time and history: it thinks of architecture as a columnar mass, of
tragedy as stylized attitude, of sculpture as bodily form, of mathematics
as integral numbers and enclosed spaces, of music as a relation of single
notes, of diplomacy as personal contact. Western culture is characterized
by a feeling for the infinite: it thinks of architecture as a soaring structural energy, of tragedy as an analysis of character, of sculpture as a
struggle with material, of mathematics as variable function, of music as
counterpoint, of diplomacy as cabinet decisions used as long-range
weapons. Magian culture is full of domes, caverns, sacred books, and
esoteric traditions; Russian culture expresses a "denial of height" both in
its squat architecture and in its social communism, and so on.
A good deal even of this is German Romanticism at its corniest, and
some more sinister features are involved. We should, Spengler thinks,
accept the character of our age and not sigh for a vanished past or a Utopian future which (Toynbee agrees) is the shadow of a tired mind. We
can think up new variations of the arts, but new organic developments
are no longer possible, and we should leave them to misfits and get on
with our big wars and dictatorships . . . . Was the Rome of the Caesars,
the Rome of Virgil and Horace and Ovid and Catullus, really interested
solely in aqueducts and brass hats? Don't interrupt the professor. The
author of Spengler's next book, The Hour of Decision, is just another Nazi
stumblebum. But his thesis has bitten deeply into us: we are all Spenglerians to some extent, and if the enemy has any ammunition that we can
capture, we should fire it back at the enemy.

Toynbee and Spengler

205

Much of Toynbee's book, especially the first three volumes, reads like
an improved version of Spengler backed up by a far greater knowledge
of history. He also isolates the "civilization" or "society" as the unit
of historical study. The first three volumes trace the "genesis" and
"growth" of these societies, and the next three "decline" and "disintegration," though in volume 4 he avoids the "decline" (Untergang) of
Spengler's title and adopts "breakdown" instead. Spengler's six or eight
civilizations are all included in a much fuller survey of twenty-one. The
main improvement on Spengler comes in the role assigned the proletariat in the last stage. To Spengler the proletariat is nothing but a rabble:
Toynbee sees that an internal proletariat (the exploited members of the
society) and an external one (the barbarian nomads outside) combine to
form a "universal Church" which becomes at once the coffin of the old
society and the womb of a new one, so that a real spiritual progress from
one society to another can occur. For reasons too complicated to examine here, this gives Christianity a far more satisfactory historical explanation than Spengler gives it.
At the beginning of volume 4 there comes a crisis in Toynbee's argument, the question of the cause of decline, which involves a direct examination of Spengler. But he fails to pass this crisis, and all the rest of his
book has the air of a dodged issue. He fires off two very damp squibs at
Spengler. First he calls him a "fatalist," which is irrelevant: to predict the
death of every living organism may be tactlessness, but it is not fatalism.
Then he complains that Spengler uses a metaphor as though it were a
fact. But A Study of History, organized throughout on such figures as
"nemesis of creativity," "withdrawal and return," "schism and palingenesia," is a rather glassy house from which to throw this stone. As we
have seen, an intuitive response based on an imaginative grasp of the
symbolic significance of certain data is demanded by Toynbee as well as
Spengler. Toynbee's real answer is that civilization is not an organism.
An organism has a lifespan predetermined from the start; a civilization
is a way of social life initiated by an environmental challenge and dependent for its continuity on maintaining a social will and judgment
sufficient to meet further challenges. If it collapses, there is always a
definable and at one time avoidable cause.
Spengler's evidence for the organic nature of culture is of a kind
which Toynbee shows himself much less skilful in handling. If, says
Spengler, we study the growth of painting from Giotto to Rembrandt,
we can see, in its development of interest in landscape, realistic portrai-

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Politics, History, and Society

ture, and the handling of light, a steady advance in self-consciousness

and in the exploring of a certain range of possibilities [DW, 1:257-95]. It
is not getting better or worse: it is simply growing older. If we compare
modern America with Classical Rome, we shall see parallels of a kind
that do not appear when we compare it with the age of Charlemagne,
and these parallels can be accounted for only by a conception of cultural
age. Spengler does not say, any more than Toynbee does, that "breakdown" is inevitable: he says growing older is inevitable, and he is quite
as insistent as Toynbee on the importance of "self-determination" to prevent breakdown at a late stage. And his powerful argument proving that
Western culture is a relatively old one still stands completely unrefuted.
It will not do to suggest, like a lazy book reviewer, that it may after all
rest on nothing but a false analogy. It doesn't.
Toynbee's conception of history is so closely related to Spengler's that
when he throws out Spengler's thesis, most of his own would go with it
if he did not continually accept in practice what he denies in theory. He
is stuck with many organic metaphors which he does not know how to
avoid using. The death-and-rebirth rhythm of The Golden Bough3 is an
essential part of his structure: he is quite right, and Spengler quite
wrong in ignoring it; but it happens to be an organic rhythm. Civilizations still "grow," even if they suddenly turn into machines and "break
down," and then into inorganic substances and "disintegrate." He quarrels with Gibbon's ghost for regarding the Antonine age as a real summer instead of an Indian one. He has no class of things with which to
associate his conception of civilization and has to define it in circular
terms like "entity." Of his twenty-one civilizations, every one except
ours has gone through what look suspiciously like organic stages of a
"time of troubles," a universal state, and a universal church; and the
constant assertions that ours is an exception are not very convincing
even to Toynbee himself, as the troubled cadences of his sixth volume,
with its many uneasy glances at the parallels to "disintegration" in our
own time, abundantly show. One has the feeling that he is afraid that the
logical consequence of his own argument will land him in Spengler's
"pessimism." But whatever one thinks of Spengler's pessimism, the
optimism of a man who can write in 1939 that it is too early yet to say
whether we have come to our time of troubles seems rather woebegone.4
Unlike Spengler, primarily a philosopher who picked up his history as
he went along, Toynbee is primarily a historian, and his philosophical
basis consists largely of his own hunches, some of Bergsonian origin.

Toynbee and Spengler

207

There are many places where he does not even see that a prior philosophical problem is involved. Thus, his survey of the causes of breakdown itself breaks down through ignoring the question of what
constitutes a historical cause. Pascal says that if Cleopatra's nose had
been an inch longer it would have changed the world's history.5 Spengler says that different characters might have replaced Antony and
Cleopatra, different battles might have been fought, and the course of
historical events superficially quite different, but the fundamental relationship of a moribund Egyptian culture, an aging Classical one, and a
nascent Syrian one would still have been there. This distinction between
history and chronicle is one of the profoundest of Spengler's insights.
The distinction disappears in Toynbee, and in consequence he takes us
back to the old "practical" view of history as a chaotic sequence of lucky
and unlucky accidents, a roulette game in which a gambler's luck may
hold if he figures out a system to beat the laws of chance.
Both Spengler and Toynbee talk about Marx as though he were a
second-rate thinker: the Nazi calls him a Jew and the English liberal a
German Jew. But I suspect that Marx is holding the nutcracker that the
reader of both Toynbee and Spengler wants. New instruments of production change the whole character of a society; and the technique for
producing new instruments of production at will brought in by the
Industrial Revolution has changed the whole character of history. There
is now a completely new factor in the situation which cannot be wholly
absorbed into a dialectic of separate "civilizations," important as that is.
The question whether Western civilization will survive or collapse is out
of date, like the same question about the British Empire, for the world is
trying to outgrow the whole conception of "a" civilization and has
reached a different kind of problem altogether. Because the Industrial
Revolution started in the West, its transformation of the world has
looked like the expansion of Western society, and in fact has partly been
that, but something else is also happening. The factors which are the
same all over the world, such as the exploitation of labour, have always
been, if not less important, at any rate less powerful in history than conflicts of civilizations. Now they are more important, and growing in
power. Toynbee feels that world peace now is essentially a question of
getting the five surviving civilizations to live together in spite of their
traditional differences in outlook. But this is the old league of sovereign
nations again, the balance-of-power fallacies revised to rationalize the
new set-up of national "blocs." The conception of United Civilizations,

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Politics, History, and Society

like the conception of United Nations, is pretty, but it isn't the real
thing.6
A Study of History is already something of a museum piece. Volumes 4
to 6 were the product of the 19305, that horrible period of impotent
democracy and rampant Fascism, and their general tone of hoping
against hope that as much as possible of the status quo will "survive"
reflects what we all felt then. Now we have the atom bomb and
Russo-American imperialism before us, but some years have elapsed in
war work since the completion of volume 6, and perhaps a fresh start
will bring a fresh energy. The great synthesis of Marx and Spengler has
yet to be written, but so has half of Toynbee's book.

33

Gandhi
March 1948

From Canadian Forum, 27 (March 1948): 267. Reprinted in RW, 382-3.

Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalist, pioneer of "passive resistance" to British
imperial power, and spiritual leader, was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by
Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic, shortly after participating in the negotiations for an autonomous Indian state.

It is difficult to fathom the mind of the man who murdered Gandhi.

What, from his point of view, could have made Gandhi so detestable a
figure that he was capable of entering his presence, asking for his blessing, and then shooting him down in cold blood? It seems almost as
though the Hitlers and Stalins of the world do not get shot because the
people who hate them are the kind of people to whom murder, for however good a cause, is repugnant. But the Lincolns and Gandhis of the
world are hated by the kind of people to whom murder comes naturally
and agreeably. The assassin of Gandhi was an Eastern apostle of the cult
of violence and of the easy and sensual pleasures of looting, massacre,
and terror; and Gandhi had to die because he threatened to spoil the
fun.
Yet in the recent utterances of Gandhi there was a kind of foreboding
melancholy, as though Gandhi himself felt that he had outlived his time.
He never wanted to be a white dictator, and he was far too intelligent
not to realize that much of the popular emotion on which his personal
ascendancy was founded indicated a kind of spiritual poverty in his followers, as though he stood for a vicarious sanctity. His personal prestige
was never higher than when his teachings were most disregarded, and
he felt very keenly the irony of his situation. How, he asked plaintively,

2io

Politics, History, and Society

could he be so reverenced in an India that was working out all its problems with no reference whatever to the power of nonviolence? Some of
his followers tried to make him into a god, and though he would have
preferred assassination to that, it is hard to see how he could have
avoided being pushed, along with Lenin and Sun Yat-sen,1 into the
modern pantheon of legendary heroes, infallible and impotent, who can
be invoked to endorse any kind of action, however at variance with their
teachings. The combination of saintliness and political shrewdness is by
no means rare in history, but as the former quality is childlike (in the
best sense) and the latter adult, the political saint as a rule seems to create the sort of situation in which he himself becomes an anachronism.
Smaller and tougher people succeed him, who persuade themselves that
they are more mature because they have lost their innocence.

34

Ernst Junger's On the Marble Cliffs

March 1948

Review of On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Junger, trans. Stuart Hood (Guildford: John Lehmann, 1947). From the "Turning New Leaves" section in Canadian Forum, 27 (March 1948): 283. Reprinted in RW, 291-4.

Ernst Junger was one of the German intellectuals who shouted for years
about the affirming power of blood and race as opposed to the critical
negations of reason, about the sensuous ecstasy of war and the way that
life is fulfilled by heroic death, and about the sacred duty of transforming nationalism into a religion and of having no gods but the state.
However, after the Nazis had finally got the crusade started, even
Junger decided he had had enough, and in 1939 published a dreamy
and fantastic allegory which is at the same time a bitterly disillusioned
anti-Nazi satire. That such a book could have appeared at all in Nazi
Germany gives it, of course, a good deal of curiosity value, though I do
not feel that it is a really significant example of what a totalitarian state
does to literature.
The allegory is intentionally vague and ambiguous, and many
details of it are not clear to me yet, but I cannot think that the allegorical form was adopted merely to obscure the anti-Nazi aspect of the
meaning, which in any case it hardly does. It is hopeless for a writer
under a tyranny to try to devise a way of getting past a stupid censor
to an intelligent public. Either his book is suppressed or its meaning
fails to get across: the censor is never stupid enough and the public
never intelligent enough to provide any escape from that dilemma.
Jiinger's book appeared because from the Nazi point of view his record
was good, and because the general context of its anti-Nazi sentiments

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Politics, History, and Society

was an attitude thoroughly acceptable to many powerful Germans,

militarists, Junkers, old-school Prussian officers, and right-wing religious groups.
The general thesis of the allegory appears to be that Hitler is the serpent in the paradise of German Romanticism. The paradise is the ideal
life on top of the marble cliffs, a life at once monastic and military, in a
fairyland outside time and space, where the women are beautiful and
compliant, the animals (including a remarkable set of vipers) beautiful
and tame, and the gardens and vineyards perennially fruitful. Religion
is a genial paganism based on fertility rites in the spring and vintage festivals in the autumn; philosophy is a series of cozy and witty symposiums; science (largely botany) is an untroubled contemplation of the
beauty of nature. This lush daydream is roughly intruded upon by
the tyrant of the wooded plains beneath, a "Chief Ranger" who gathers
around him a base-born rabble and proceeds to turn it into a hideous
nightmare of brutality and terror. The cliff-dwellers ignore him as long
as possible and go on with their botany: "While evil flourished like
mushroom spawn in rotten wood, we plunged deeper into the mystery
of flowers" [60]. But gradually and very reluctantly they realize they
have to fight him: "Mingled with this there was something else that
might be described as a sense of shamethat we did not regard the
woodland breed as enemies" [66]. It might at that. The conflict that the
cliff-dwellers win with the help of their tame vipers (I am not clear what
they are, except that they are not Allied soldiers), forms the crisis of the
narrative.
At no time is this conflict clearly presented as a conflict of freedom
against tyranny. It is presented rather as a conflict of true and perverted
heroic virtue, of those who understand Nietzsche and Wagner as
opposed to those who merely exploit them. It is because the Chief
Ranger has the same assumptions and values as the cliff-dwellers that
the latter are so slow in understanding he is evil. Some of their leaders, it
is explicitly said, hardly differ at all in temperament and morality from
their enemies. The cliff-dwellers and the woodsmen possess the same
conceptions of discipline and authority, of the profound significance
that a heroic death gives to life, of the value of the utter abandonment of
the will to the demands of the blood. But somehow or other the cliffdwellers hold these ideas in a noble sense, and the woodsmen in a vulgar sense. "Between full-blown nihilism and unbridled anarchy there is

Ernst Jiinger's On the Marble Cliffs

213

a profound difference" [82] says our author plaintively; a difference

which the present reader has failed to grasp.
It may be instructive to compare this story with another allegory that
resembles it in some respects: Rex Warner's The Aerodrome. There the
conflict really is one of freedom and tyranny, represented by an English
village and an air force commanded by a maniacal dictator. The villagers are disorganized, ignorant, sensual, and helpless, the air force ruthless, efficient, and fanatical; yet in the very disorganization of the village
there is a free spirit that liberates and triumphs, and in the very efficiency of the air force there is a central vacuum of despair into which the
whole structure collapses. The same pattern is to be found, I think, in
Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky. But these are conceptions out of the
reach of Jiinger, who, like the sorcerer's apprentice, stands bewildered
and blinking before the apparition he deliberately tried to raise, hating it
and yet fascinated by it, rejecting it and yet unable to escape from it. For
if Nazism is not an alien thing but the reflection in reverse of one's own
attitude, one can hardly help finding a curious reassurance in it. "Even
the warrior caste begins to lose heart when they see the masklike faces
rising up to the battlements from the depths. So it comes about that in
this world soldier's courage takes second place, and only the noblest
spirits in our midst penetrate into the dwelling-place of terror. They
know that all these images in reality live only in our hearts, and pass
through them into the portals of victory as if they were mere mirrored
shadows. Thus the masked terrors confirm them in their own reality"
[75]. That last sentence is worth pondering.
Jiinger has been prevented from writing by the occupation authorities, which seems a pity, as he is now evidently prepared to explain that
the values of the liberal, Christian, and humanist traditions were right
all the time. But a prophet has had it if he says, "Follow me, and I will
take you down to the still depths of the human soul, where you will be
free from all the compulsions of waking life, free from God, from morals, from conscience, and from your duties to others; where you will
have the heat of the blood instead of the dazzle of light, and where you
will dwell in the nothingness at the heart of both nature and yourself
instead of barking your shins over the outworks of reality." And one's
sympathy for him is a bit limited if, when he gets to this dark and godless world of blood, he turns around and says, "Oops, sorry; we seem to
be in hell: excuse it please." However, the book is very rewarding for

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those who are interested in the doublings and windings of the post-Nazi
German conscience; unless, to be sure, you can get to a revival of Chaplin's The Great Dictator. If that is possible, go and study the role of Commander Schultz in that picture, and you will learn from it all you ever
need to know about the psychology of anti-Nazi Nazis.

35

Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor

July 1948

From Canadian Forum, 28 (July 1948): 85-6. Reprinted in RW, 295-300.

Alfred Kinsey was an American biologist, founder, and director of the University of Indiana's Institute for Sexual Research. Kinsey led the team whose
report on male sexuality, based on more than 5,000 interviews, appeared in
1948 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders,
1948). Since the publication of this review, Kinsey's report has been subject to
severe methodological critiques. On 27 January 1975, as Frye put together a
"memorandum for a possible third collection of essays," he noted how
"addresses and commentaries . . . date very quickly," adding that the Kinsey
review is "now so out of date that it has gone through the full cycle and has
acquired a sort of historical interest." See NFF, 1991, box 36, file 12.

The first volume of the Kinsey report is now in the hands of the American and Canadian public, and has been very well received: readers of
this magazine will remember Professor Ketchum's brilliant review of it
in a recent issue.1 Following close on this comes a caterwaul to have it
banned in Canada, which, in view of our various hole-and-corner systems of censorship, could succeed. In any case, it reopens the whole
question of censorship.2 The anvil chorus this time is said by the press to
be supported by a doctor who is president of the National Health
League of Canada, which must be an error, as anyone in such a position
would appreciate the value of the book. To urge that the sale and distribution of the book be restricted is defensible, though in my opinion mistaken; but to call the book itself immoral, as is very freely done, is to
show unconsciously how badly such a study is needed.
Censorship and democracy don't mix, and there is no argument in

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Politics, History, and Society

favour of censorship that does not assume an antidemocratic social tendency. Being an adult citizen of a modern democracy implies certain
responsibilities and certain privileges. A pretty fair proportion of adult
citizens will surely try, as far as they can, to dodge their responsibilities
and abuse their privileges. That doesn't matter. The principle of a
democracy is the principle of a jury trial: the control of the expert by
common sense. It is unlikely that a man would get to be a judge without
knowing some law and having some claims to personal integrity; and it
is very possible that a juror may possess no law and no integrity. That
doesn't matter. When it comes to bringing in a verdict, the judge must
defer to the jurors. Similarly in every election many people either don't
vote at all or vote on prejudice and a profound ignorance of the real
issues involved. That doesn't matter: a democracy must extend the franchise to as many people as possible. In the Kinsey report there is a mass
of evidence about sexual behaviour suggesting that much of our legislation is out of date and that major changes in it may be called for. In a
democracy the only people sufficiently responsible to be entrusted with
major legislative changes are the general public, fools, morons, and perverts included. It is certainly possible that many people will read the
Kinsey report, or try to read it, for more or less unworthy reasons. That
doesn't matter.
Two questions are involved in all censorship: from whom is the book
to be kept, and to whom is it to be restricted? Most arguments for it say
that books dealing with adult problems should be kept at least from
adolescents. There may be something to be said for this: the ten-year
interval, pointed out in the report, between the awakening of sexual
desire and the possibility of a stable satisfaction of it constitutes a hard
problem for the adolescent: he needs guidance, and censorship may conceivably be a legitimate form of guidance. But all effective guidance of
the adolescent begins and ends in the individual home: it is difficult if
not impossible to devise machinery outside the home that will be of any
use to him. And, of course, it is even more difficult to protect from himself the adult who never outgrows his adolescence. A certain amount of
censorship, however, which operates entirely in this field is unavoidable. There is such a thing as real pornography, addressed chiefly to perverts: its nature and methods of distribution are well known to the
police, and the police are competent to handle it. There is also borderline
pornography addressed to the infantile intelligence, some of which, in a
necessarily haphazard way, does get banned. Canada bans a good deal

Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor

217

of material such as comic books which no one would want to go to bat

for, even if one had some doubts about the principle involved.3 I am
speaking only of unmistakably adult books, of which the Kinsey report
is one.
With regard to the second question, there is a lurking fallacy in the
notion that certain books should be restricted to professional people. In
a democracy there is no body of knowledge which "should" be
restricted to anybody. All professional people are in possession of technical knowledge which other people have not taken the time to learn,
and which the more childish and simple-minded people never could
learn. Such technical knowledge is restricted by its very nature, but
whenever a profession claims the right to an exclusive knowledge of
anything, as distinct from a license to apply it, it is conspiring against
the public interest. In this it is abetted by the childish part of the public,
who like to feel that they are being safely taken care of by someone who
has grasped all the high mysteries of law, medicine, or religion, who
knows all about their complaints and how to treat them. Soap operas
and cheap movies are loaded to the gunwales with wise and indulgent
doctors, clergymen, and judges who are what the psychologists call
"father figures." Doctors especially are singled out for sages of exemplary devotion to the line of duty. The medical profession as a whole is
considerably embarrassed by this fawning servility and wants no part of
it, though of course a few will always be corrupted by it, and spread a
"doctor knows best" attitude through society as far as they can. Here
again, the argument that an outsider may make a wrong use of his
knowledge is logically quite sound, but in a democracy, the most illogical of all forms of government, it is merely irrelevant. Democracy simply
says that it is harder to make a right use of ignorance.
Literary people, alas, have no professional organization, and are continually being deprived of such books as Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of
Hecate County and James Farrell's Bernard Clare (the case of both books
has been taken up in this magazine)4 through a censorship that is started
up at random, like a roulette wheel. Some amateur censor complains
about a book, and the professional censor, an official whose main job is
not censoring at all, has to try to make sense of a boozy and maundering
law about "prejudicial to public morals," or some such phrase. In practice this means that if a book contains one or more of the half-dozen
words generally considered unprintable, or an unusually detailed
account of the sex act, it can be banned. If allowed to circulate, there

2i8

Politics, History, and Society

might be a remote chance that someone of limited culture would find

the word or the passage and chortle, "Cheese, right out in print!" I don't
see what harm would befall the social order if he did, but the law says
that this possibility is frightful enough to deprive you and me of the
book. James Joyce's Ulysses got into the States through a judicial ruling
that it was not obscene because its attitude to sex was more discouraging
than appreciative. I daresay this is good law, but it is not good literary
criticism. I doubt if Rabelais would have been admitted under this decision, yet Rabelais was an even greater writer than Joyce.
There is, however, no point in trying to argue reasonably with anything so stupid and irrational as this: we have simply to recognize that
we have touched on a kind of social neurosis which we should try to
diagnose and understand, and as far as possible cure. Panic about sexual
frankness seems to be endemic in our society. It is not like panic about
Communism, which has a perfectly definite cause. As for the amateur or
self-appointed censor, the fact that he probably needs psychiatric attention himself is gradually dawning on the public, and he is no longer
taken very seriously as a spokesman of religion and morality. He now
has to work mainly by stealth: Dr. Kinsey and his associates received
many threatening letters in the course of their research. It is the social
response to him that is the real problem, and perhaps a future volume of
the report will deal with it. I can only offer a tentative suggestion.
As soon as an American child stops playing with his toys and looks
around for other forms of entertainment, a vast interlocking world of
commercial amusement is opened to him, nearly all of it focused directly
on his emerging sexual consciousness. He (or she: the girl really gets the
brunt of it) is smothered in erotic novels and magazines, erotic popular
music, erotic movies and radio programs. By erotic I mean having the
relation of the sexes presented as the most important and desirable feature of life. This erotic material is beyond the reach of the censor,
because most of it has already been censored in accordance with an
almost frantic prudery. The general principle of such censorship is to
leave in everything that is adolescent and titillating, and cut out everything that implies maturity and responsibility. The habitual moviegoer
will see plenty of bare thighs, but never a pregnant woman. This combination of the erotic and the prudish can only be understood if we realize
that the function of prudery is not to suppress the libidinous feeling, but
to enable it to achieve a socially acceptable expression. The result is that
"innocent" relationships in popular fiction often require a sultry and

Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor

219

morbid passion that in my opinion really is "prejudicial to public morals." I remember a prattling gooey movie with a fifteen-year-old girl as
heroine, and the way the film presented the relation of that girl to her
father made my back hair prickle. But then the producer had aimed it at
children who had not yet learned to disentangle their filial and sexual
feelings, and at childish parents who had continued to slobber over their
children and give them fixations of a type that is now being called
"momism."
The evil that such entertainment does is in throwing a sexual spell on
the adolescent before he can defend himself against it, so that it takes a
good deal of character and will power for him to fight his way out of it.
It would do so even if he did not have, in addition, the subtle but pervasive resistance of all the entertainment media, who want to keep on selling him the same bill of goods. Considering the statistics of movie
attendance, soap opera listening, and pulp and slick magazine reading,
it is clear that many if not most people fail to outgrow this stage. America almost seems to present at times the appearance of being continually
sunk in a maudlin erotic stupor. I say America, not because American
sexual habits differ from those of any other country, but because the
commercial exploitation of them is so highly organized.
Anyone sunk in such a stupor is naturally irritated by the more dry
and matter-of-fact tones in which adults discuss the workings of the sexual instinct. The listeners to soap operas acquire not only prudery, but
vague smoldering resentment against the people who walk at large in
the world they are trying to escape from. And while I have no idea what
censors think they are doing, what they really are doing is defending the
tinsel world of the soap opera and the low-grade movie against the
adult competition that continually threatens to shatter it. Nearly all
really erotic literature is untouchable by any censor. Even Forever Amber
could not be banned, and Forever Amber, though lively and amusing
enough, was certainly designed for the relief of concupiscence, as the
parsons say of marriage.5 Too many people want erotic literature. It is
the adult book that is vulnerable to censorship, the serious author with
something true and therefore unwelcome to say, who has to fight to be
read. But the advantage of a democracy is that the minority who lead
and the majority who get led have a good deal of respect for one
another, and I should like to feel that the popular reception of the Kinsey report was in part an example of that.

36

Cardinal Mindszenty
March 1949

From Canadian Forum, 28 (March 1949): 267. Reprinted in RW, 387-8. The
case of Hungarian prelate Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty received international
attention following his arrest by the Communist government on a charge of
treason in 1948 and his conviction the following year.

It is quite possible that Cardinal Mindszenty was, as he admitted, at

least technically guilty of most of the charges against him. One of them,
treason, is the same as our charge against Communists here: "conspiring
to overthrow the government by force." Western reaction and comment
to the trial is an inconsistent mixture of several things. We are given to
understand that he should not have been tried because he was an eminent clergyman, that he was innocent of all charges, and that if he was
conspiring to overthrow the government, good for him. Our newspapers, without intending it, are thus raising the same sort of dust storm
propaganda and confusion of moral issues as the Hungarian government.
The reasons for condemning the Mindszenty trial are quite simple,
and have nothing to do with his rank or even his guilt. First, there is the
whole illegal procedure in which the accused is kidnapped by the police
and held incommunicado. The same thing happened in our spy trials,
but here all thoughtful citizens, of whatever political creed, saw the
insult to democracy in it.1 Protests were made, questions asked in Parliament, and those responsible for the bungle considerably embarrassed.
More important, when the accused were brought to court they got a fair
trial and were acquitted if there was no evidence against them. Second,
there is the dreadful possibility, and even probability, of torture. The

Cardinal Mindszenty

221

Communists appear to know much more about torture than the Nazis
ever did, and to understand how to handle a man so that no external
signs of torture can be discovered, while the whole soul and body
within have been so destroyed that there is no will power left to resist
any suggestion. It is unnecessary to labour the point that torture and justice cannot exist side by side. Third, there is the whole conception of a
trial as a publicity stunt, as propaganda for the government, which
turns the procedure into a ritual of human sacrifice, based on the principle that, as Caiaphas said at the trial of Christ, "it is expedient. . . that
one man should die for the people" [John 11:50]. This evil thing is coming over here, and while it has of course not touched the courts yet, it is
present in the Thomas committee hearings and other forms of extralegal
action.2

37

The Two Camps

April 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (April 1949): 3. Reprinted in RW, 391-2. From

12 March 1947, when U.S. President Harry S. Truman, pressed by a militantly anti-Communist Republican "class of '46" that included Senator Joseph
McCarthy, had declared his "Truman Doctrine" of global commitment to the
fight against Communism and urged the world to "choose between alternative
ways of life," the controlling factor of postwar U.S. foreign policy became its
crusade against Communism. As Frye's subsequent articles acknowledge, the
effects of this policy spilled over into the domestic political arena and had
unpleasant implications for America's neighbours. In an unusually heated
atmosphere, Frye repeatedly attempted to put forward the position of principled
detachment he thought most appropriate to a Canadian democracy.

The world situation from the Russian point of view is something like
this. Wars are caused ultimately by economic rivalries among nations.
All nations except Communist ones are class societies, which must
either preserve their class system through exploitation, search for colonial markets, and eventually armed conflicts, or have their class system
destroyed by a revolution leading to a classless society. Thus the only
possible way to achieve world peace is first to achieve a worldwide revolution. There can be no hope for peace as long as a major capitalist
power remains in the world. Fortunately the situation is developing
beautifully along Marxist lines. The U.S.S.R. holds the centre of the largest land mass in the world; it holds all Eastern Europe, and can put
Western Europe in its pocket whenever it likes. The most important
political event just now is the revolt of Asia,1 and Communism is able to
exploit that, whereas America is forced to try to prop up reactionary and

The Two Camps

223

corrupt governments that are done for anyway. China is already in the
Communist camp. The revolt of Africa has not yet come, but it is certainly coming, and the Communists will similarly be in a position to
exploit that. There is no use tackling America directly: she is far too
strong, she has the atomic bomb, and a more effective way to wage war
with her is to curtail her export markets until, faced with the impossible
contradiction between a shrinking market and an expanding economy,
she blows up.
The American point of view, if the Americans can be said to have a
consistent point of view, is that the world is now in the same position as
America herself was in in 1861. We are faced with the idea of the Union,
a Union which has in practice hardly any existence at all. Yet the idea is
there, and must be preserved. The Union must essentially be a union of
free peoples, and it cannot exist half slave and half free. It is thus primarily a union of good will, and may contain many economic systems.
The one thing it cannot tolerate is the right of secession on the part of a
group of confederate states pledged to maintain a slave economy such
as Americans believe the Russian economy to be. And America will, if
absolutely necessary, fight to preserve the idea of Union against the
right of secession.
Anyone who keeps on hoping that Russia can be brought to see the
democratic point of view, or is maintaining a theoretical Marxism
against her own essential convictions, or will somehow manage to do
something else than try to achieve a worldwide Marxist revolution, is in
precisely the same position as those who fifteen years ago refused to
read Mein Kampf and insisted that sooner or later Hitler could be
brought to see reason. And if the issue is now between democracy and
Communism, it follows that every blow against democracy aids Communism, including those struck by Americans themselves in an effort to
preserve democracy. Marxist dialectic says that everyone must ultimately be a Communist or an anti-Communist, and Marxists not only
expect but want those who are not Communists to be anti-Communists.
Every offence to civil liberties in America and Canada today which is
carried out in the name of democracy is following in the wake of the two
men who have done most to aid Communism since LeninHitler and
Chiang Kai-shek.2

38

Law and Disorder

July 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (July 1949): 75. Reprinted in RW, 392-3.

The present Communist witch-hunt in the United States has rather
paralysed liberal criticism, because of the complexity of factors and
uneven distribution of sympathies involved. On the one hand, the democratic tradition gives the widest possible freedom of action in politics;
on the other hand, the American people feel that in the present state of
affairs Communists are for all practical purposes agents of Russia and
active enemy aliens. Thus Communism is legal, but discouraged by
intimidation; it cannot be prosecuted, so it has to be persecuted. Unlike
the witch-hunt of 19191 the present moves against Communism have a
good deal of popular support, as Russia has thrown away all the vast
good will which, a few years ago, she could have had for the asking
from the American public. Liberals and intellectuals who find in Communism the enemy of everything they stand for hardly know what to
say, as they disapprove of the means employed while recognizing a certain amount of sense in the anti-Communist drive.
The trouble is that there is no substitute for a reign of law except a
reign of terror. If steps are taken against Communism outside the regular legal channels, they cannot help being violent and arbitrary. Without
a legal definition of Communism, which would protect the Communist
as well as the non-Communist, there is nothing to stop some people
from calling anyone a Communist whom they regard as sufficiently
dangerous. Without definite legal procedures, there is nothing to stop
the anti-Communist drive from being led by people with lynching mentalities, who regard the processes of law as too cumbersome and slip-

Law and Disorder

225

pery to work properly in an emergency situation. Whatever good the

Dies and Thomas committee hearings2 may have done, the evil of intimidation, character assassination, forcible suppression of evidence, and
the spreading of terrorized insecurity among government employees far
outweighs it. To try to outlaw something by outlawed means in the
name of the law is a hopeless paradox, and every step in contempt of
law taken by a democracy brings it so much nearer to the processes
of police espionage, torture, and secret arrest which democrats hate so
much in the totalitarian countries.
There are great and perilous difficulties involved in declaring the
Communist party illegal, but at least such a procedure would put all
suspected people to some extent under the democratic guarantees of
personal security and presumption of innocence prior to legally proved
guilt.3 The law may be imperfect, and even more imperfectly administered, but still it does possess our inherited liberties. As it is, the real
Communists are far less vulnerable than their innocent bystanders to
the reckless mud-slinging, private feuds, and official spreading of slander which have resulted from the Thomas hearings.

39

Two Books on Christianity

and History
September 1949

Review of Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern

Views of History, by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner's, 1949) and
Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of
History, by Karl Ldwith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). From
Canadian Forum, 29 (September 1949): 138-9. Reprinted as "The Rhythm of
Growth and Decay" in NFCL, 141-6.
It is curious, and probably significant, that two books by well-known
Protestant theologians,1 on practically the same subject, should appear
at practically the same time. They are based on the same essential facts,
take quite similar attitudes toward them, and quote much the same
authorities, an interpretation of the Bible being of course fundamental to
each. But in spite of this parallelism, which extends to an identical number of pages, they complement rather than overlap each other. Dr. Niebuhr presents an argued thesis of his own; Dr. Lowith offers a series of
studies of philosophical historians, beginning with Spengler and Toynbee and going backward through Marx and Hegel, through Vico and
Voltaire in the eighteenth century, to the great medieval prophet of historical progress, Joachim of Floris,2 thence to St. Augustine, and finally
to the Bible. This crab-like movement is a little confusing to the reader
until he gets used to it, in spite of the fascinating information to be
picked up on the way. Dr. Lowith's book documents and supplies evidence for Dr. Niebuhr's thesis, and Dr. Niebuhr's thesis synthesizes and
illuminates Dr. Lowith's erudition. Even their faults are complementary: Dr. Niebuhr's book has too many misprints, and Dr. Lowith's a
bad index.

Two Books on Christianity and History

227

Both writers agree that there are three major views of history, the
Classical, the Christian, and the modern. The Classical view was that
history is a series of cycles: the same things happen over and over (or at
any rate the same kind of thing does), empires rise and decline and give
place to other empires, and no one can look for anything in history but
change and decay. The wise man, from the Classical point of view,
would do well to cut loose from history altogether, and cultivate the life
of reason, which is timeless and not subject to change.
This pessimistic view of history is, Dr. Niebuhr argues, an oversimplified identification of history with nature, and tends increasingly to identify the salvation of the soul with a withdrawal from contemporary
reality. It was overthrown by Christianity, because Christianity's central
doctrine is the coming of God to the world at a certain time in history. It
was partly because Christianity could give a religious meaning to history, while pagan philosophy could not, that Christianity conquered the
intellectual world during the fall of the Roman Empire. (The evidence
for this is set out in the late Charles Cochrane's book, Christianity and
Classical Culture, one of the finest scholarly studies ever written by a
Canadian.)3
The Christian sense that there is meaning in history beyond just an
endless series of cycles gave birth to the modern theory of progress.4
This theory is at the opposite pole from the Classical one: it finds a
redeeming force within history itself, and thinks that man should
become wholly absorbed in it. Both writers agree that the doctrine of
progress, like the cyclic view, is inconsistent with Christianity, but Dr.
Niebuhr devotes more attention to it. He gives some very melancholy
quotations from apologists of progress which indicate that nearly all
nonreligious modern views of history, whether bourgeois or Communist, liberal or reactionary, are attempts to cheer ourselves up by saying
that while most human problems are still unsolved, nevertheless man is
going on and on and up and up to greater and better things. Just what
these things are depends on the taste of the theorizer. Some people say
that we're improving generally because we're getting more individual
freedom; others say it's because we're getting more social order. Some
say that the advance of science will fix everything, others that a change
in our economy will do it. The discovery of evolution in biology gave a
lot of people a vague idea that science had now proved that there is
progress in historya notion that Dr. Niebuhr correctly identifies as
"social Darwinism."

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Politics, History, and Society

The views of the progressivists referred to by Dr. Niebuhr are a curious melange of half-baked liberal and half-baked revolutionary ideas, in
which freedom and dictatorship are often treated as though they were
interchangeable. Thus, says one writer, the management of human
affairs requires a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physics, physiology and metaphysics, pathology, chemistry, psychology, medicine,
genetics, nutrition, pedagogy, aesthetics, ethics, religion, sociology, and
economics: that it would take about twenty-five years to learn all that,
and that those who did learn it could start directing the "reconstruction
of human beings" from the age of fifty on. This precious pearl of wisdom happens to come from Dr. Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown, but
Dr. Niebuhr quotes others equally depressing. His conclusion, which he
feels is the only one possible to Christianity, is that man alone cannot
arrive at a final judgment of value on human life, for all human judgments reflect some kind of class prejudice or special interest.
That is, you can't assume that whatever you happen to be most interested in is the key to everything. If you're interested in science, it doesn't
follow that the advance of science will bring man freedom. Even if it
does, it doesn't follow that freedom is the best thing for man to have,
particularly if you don't know what you mean by freedom anyway.
Even if it is the best thing for man, it doesn't follow that all history is a
movement toward getting it. If you assume that it is, your "progress" is
the automatic plodding of a donkey with a carrot in front of his nose.
The donkey would do much better to stop and turn around and see who
is driving him on, and why that particular carrot is dangling there. All
the evidence goes to show that the real driver of the progressive human
donkey is the selfish, greedy, and tyrannical part of man himself. Once
we realize that, we may get somewhere with a theory of progress.
It seems rather ironic, if not silly, to be talking in terms of progress
when the world we actually live in is a world of dictatorships, global
wars, and political persecutions of unprecedented fury. When an American intellectual looks out on such a world and sees that it is fundamentally very good, he really means that the enormous wealth and power of
the American middle-class culture he belongs to makes him feel, for the
moment, very comfortable. When a Russian Communist talks the same
way, he means really that production of steel in the Soviet Union is up
and things look good for the advance of Communism. After the last war
and the atomic bomb, a lot of people began to realize that the express
train to Utopia might be derailed, but were unable to turn from a frivo-

Two Books on Christianity and History

229

lous optimism to anything but an equally frivolous despair. Dr. Niebuhr

refers to H.G. Wells, who began by writing books with such titles as
A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods, who then began to talk in terms of
scientific dictatorships, and whose last book was called Mind at the End
of Its Tether.
Neither writer, however, really brings out the moral horror of a progressive view of history, or points to the consequences of the reckless
sacrificing of means to ends which it entails. It is progressive to say, If we
murder a hundred thousand farmers now we may get a more efficient
system of collectivized agriculture in a hundred years. The arguments of
the inquisitors in Koestler's Darkness at Noon are progressive arguments.
The point is important, because our use of words is easy-going, and all
the well-meaning people in the country describe themselves as progressive, including the writer of this article and most of his readers. It should
be clearly recognized that the real dynamic of democracy is empiric and
experimental rather than progressive in any metaphysical sense. Democratic action involves foresight and long-term planning rather than
merely muddling through, but that is something very different from a
belief that the real end of what we are trying to do now lies in the future.
Such an attitude leads to despising the present generation for not being a
hypothetically ideal posterity, which is a completely vicious state of
mind.
Both writers are far better on negative than on positive criticism. Dr.
Lowith is deliberately negative: he comes much closer than Dr. Niebuhr
to Luther's complete separation of church and world, and the main thesis of Meaning in History is that there isn't much meaning in history. He
agrees that the Classical view of history was cyclic and the modern one
progressive, and that both are inconsistent with Christianity. But he also
feels that every philosophy of history must be either cyclic or progressive and that, therefore, no Christian philosophy of history will work
out. He feels that the Incarnation is something that cuts vertically across
history, not a new historical principle. So for him a religious philosophy
of history is possible only in Judaism, where the Messiah is believed to
be still to come. A progressive view of history therefore strikes him as a
kind of parody of Judaism. Of all the people he discusses, he is most
interested in St. Augustine, precisely because St. Augustine was the
least interested in secular history as such.
Dr. Niebuhr attempts a more positive view in the second half of his
book but his argument is still heavily overlaid by negative statements.

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Politics, History, and Society

The people he disagrees with make up quite a large company, and after
reading that the Catholics are wrong because they absolutize the church,
the Lutherans wrong because they believe in a rule of saints, the modern
liberals wrong because they are infected with progressivism, one begins
to reflect rather irritatedly that everybody seems to be out of step but
our Reinhold. It is possible to attack human complacency to the verge of
being complacent oneself in refuting it, and Dr. Niebuhr often does not
do full justice to the intensity and power of some of the modern thinkers
he refers to: Marx, for instance, or Nietzsche.
It seems to me possible to say much more about a Christian philosophy of history than either writer does say. The modern cyclic theories of
Vico and Spengler, and to a lesser extent Toynbee, are very different
from the old Classical view of the cycle. And it is too simple to say that
St. Augustine refuted all cyclic views of history merely because he ridiculed the Classical one. It is possible to look at St. Augustine in another
way, and find in his City of God a conception of the recurrent rise and
decline of civilizations as central to his whole idea of the thing which
stands over against the City of God, the civitas terrena or earthly city. The
fall of the Roman Empire was the immediate occasion for, and the most
impressive proof of, St. Augustine's thesis that anything man can erect
will fall down sooner or later. In all human institutions, then, there is a
rotary movement of rise and fall which goes back to the original fall of
man. The affinity of this rhythm of growth and decay to that of the natural world, with its yearly vegetable cycle of death and revival, is the
basis for the Vico-Spengler conception of history as showing a series of
"civilizations" or "cultures" which behave more or less like natural
organisms and go through much the same phases of growth, maturation, and decline. It is also possible that behind this organic rhythm,
which it seems to me certainly does exist in history, there may be an evolutionary one, and, without vulgarizing this into a theory of progress,
we may perhaps see in the Industrial Revolution the beginning of something that makes us, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, the cavemen of a
new mental era.5
However, as far as they go Drs. Niebuhr and Lowith are sound
enough. The serpent in Eden told Adam that if he would take a few bites
out of the apple of the tree of knowledge, he would become like the
gods, and know clearly what good and evil were. When Adam listened
to this, he got into trouble. Adam's descendants, we are told, once
decided to get together and build a big tower that would reach heaven,

Two Books on Christianity and History

231

but before they finished it they found that they were no longer speaking
the same language [Genesis 11:9]. The preachers of progress have been
handing out similar advice, and planning similar projects, for well over
a century, and with much the same result. There are many today who,
looking at the world before them, feel vaguely that this was where they
came in, but don't know how to get out of the dark theatre and back to
the sidewalks of a real city. All Drs. Niebuhr and Lowith have tried to
do is to indicate a possible exit.

40

Nothing to Fear but Fear

November 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (November 1949): 169-70. Reprinted in RW,

395-8. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

For some months now the American immigration authorities have been
busily defending our otherwise undefended border. A number of labour
leaders, students, and unfrocked Communists have been held up,
turned back, or refused visas, and on a principle of chance well known
to duck-hunters, they have even managed to bag a few authentic members of the Labour-Progressive Party. The recent refusal of visas to Professor Shortliffe of Queen's and Professor Barker Fairley of Toronto,1
amounting in at least the latter case to permanent exclusion, has brought
the matter more into the open. As practically every Canadian has
friends or relatives in the States, Canadian protest has been somewhat
muffled. When made, it has usually been carefully qualified by two
points: first, that it is intelligible that the U.S.A. should want to exclude
people with a vocation for overthrowing its government by force; and
second, that as a sovereign nation it has a perfect right to exclude whom
it likes.
Well, so it has, but its officials need not be so contemptuous of the
national sovereignty of Canada, which, even if smaller, is quite as highly
civilized, and quite as interested in democracy. It is an insult to Canada
to have American authorities in charge of Canadian immigration who
do not know the elementary facts of Canadian political life, and who
cannot distinguish a Communist from a social-democrat. Earlier in the
summer a prominent CCF leader had some difficulty in getting a visa
because he had been called a Communist in a Trestrail pamphlet.2 But

Nothing to Fear but Fear

233

no American official should be handling Canadian immigration at all

unless he knows all about the trustworthiness of Trestrail pamphlets. A
similar political astigmatism must have blurred the official view of Professor Shortliffe, who, though he has associated himself with the CCF,
was otherwise merely a professor of French trying to proceed to an
appointment in French at Washington University.
Professor Fairley wanted a visa to fulfil an invitation to lecture on
Goethe at Bryn Mawr. For any normally competent official, the only
question of importance would be: is there anything in this man's record
to indicate that he is going to do anything more subversive than lecture
on Goethe? And the answer to that question was obviously no. Professor Fairley is a world-famous Goethe scholar, and has never made a
political speech in his life. But the officials, in a frenzy of misapplied
subtlety, looked up all the occasions on which he had lent his name to
the support of a Soviet friendship organization, and gravely decided
that he was not sufficiently at war with Russia to be admitted even for a
month. After all, had not Mrs. Fairley been sent home from the Peace
Conference some months before? True, that action was as high-handed
and foolish as the exclusion of her husband. But perhaps the authorities
reasoned that if they made two foolish decisions over the same family,
they would save their faces by their consistency.
It is the element of panic in these decisions that is disconcerting. The
immigration service is really a part of the police force, and there is no
surer index of the official attitude to democracy than the behaviour of
the police. In a totalitarian state it is obviously necessary to keep the
police as stupid and brutal as possible. In democracies a reactionary
government, if secure and at peace, generally prefers to have its police
slightly confused. It likes to feel that if it says to a policeman, "Go out
and get some Reds," he will soon return dragging after him an assortment of labour leaders, clergymen, social workers, liberal intellectuals,
the executive of the Housewives Protective Association, and a Jewish
tailor named Marks. This level of police activity is well represented in
the recent case of a Toronto student arriving from Europe, who, though
only passing through to Canada, was detained at Ellis Island for questioning about an alleged "inflammatory speech" made on shipboard.
She had made no such speech, and was eventually released with apologies. The news report added that there were seven secret agents on
board her ship, and this idiotic bungle was apparently the only result of
their combined efforts.

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Politics, History, and Society

But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must
become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any
use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to
individuals, but dangerous to their own community. The caprice of
immigration officials is only a small part of the widespread dither
engendered by the loyalty purges and all the other processes of trial by
slander and prosecution by hearsay. Insecurity, distrust, and a feeling
that an emergency situation demands arbitrary measures are, as everyone must know who has not completely lost his head, the elements that
make a dictatorship strong and a democracy weak. The worst enemy of
the American people could wish for nothing better than this kind of
hysteria.
In so energetic a country as America a lot of steam bubbles off the surface, and those who do not look below the surface get some very curious
notions about the American character. Those who know Americans
welland Canadians do know them wellknow them to be a people of
great courage and high morale, with a deep love of freedom, a solid
sense of humour, and inexhaustible reserves of generosity and hospitality. These qualities are, at the moment, not being adequately represented
by the quaking sentries on the world's least dangerous frontier.

41

The Ideal of Democracy

7 February 1950

Published in the Varsity, 7 (7 February 1950): 3. The subheadings that appeared in the original have been omitted here.

All governments whatever must be either the expression of the will of a

minority holding autonomous power, which is able to impose that will
on society as a whole, or the expression of the will of the people as a
whole to govern themselves. In the former case there is an antithesis
between a ruling class and the ruled classes; in the latter case there is no
governing class, but only a group of executives and public servants
responsible to society as a whole for what they do. The latter conception
of government is the democratic one.
Democracy is thus essentially the attempt to preserve law and order
in society which has superseded the primitive and outmoded idea of
"rule." A monarchy may be democratic, as in Great Britain, but only if
the king is conceived as reigning rather than ruling. But the cardinal
democratic principle of limiting autonomous power applies to the
majority as well. Unanimity being unobtainable in human society, the
deciding force of democratic political action is normally the will of the
majority; but democracy is very far from being merely the expression of
the will of the people. The unconditioned will even of a majority could
bring about as great a tyranny as the unconditioned will of a single
ruler. The energy and dynamic of a democracy derive from majority
rule; its balancing and preserving principle is minority right.
In other words, the expression of the popular will will bring freedom
only insofar as it is an informed will directed toward a desirable end.
The conception of what the desirable end is must be built up from a con-

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Politics, History, and Society

flicting body of minority opinions. A democracy must, therefore, adopt

the principle of toleration of variety in opinion and an inductive and
empiric attitude to opinion in general. All kinds of religious views, of
political programs, of scientific and philosophical conceptions, must be
given free play. The limiting principle of such toleration is that all opinions should as far as possible be publicized, that is, submitted to the people as a whole. The publicizing of various opinions is democratic
education in the broadest sense, the informing of the popular will by the
individuals or minorities who have something to contribute to it. To use
Toynbee's language for a different purpose, in a democracy all minorities must be creative minorities, never dominant ones.1
Antidemocratic social action, of the kind intolerable to a democracy,
must necessarily be in the direction of withdrawing information and
action from the community as a whole. It is a contradiction in terms for a
democracy to tolerate a conspiratorial coup d'etat aimed at the restoration of the old idea of a professional ruling class.
Democracy being a political theory only, it needs an economic structure to complete itself. Originally, this economic structure was laissezfaire capitalism, which aided the growth of democracy by playing a
revolutionary role against the old hereditary concretions of power and
privilege which had come down from feudal times. By now laissez-faire
is in considerable danger of developing into an oligarchic dictatorship or
managerial system, and revolutionary democratic action now takes the
form of using the democratic machinery of government, the Parliament,
the civil service, and the cabinet, to control the productive industrial
economy to the point of making its actions known to the people as a
whole and responsible to them. Along with this has grown what is coming to be known as the "welfare state,"2 the attempt to integrate the
economy of society more closely with its government.
Democracy is thus compelled at present to wage war on two fronts,
against the dangers of a revolutionary coup d'etat coming from either end
of the economic structure. These two threats are generally known as Fascism and Communism respectively, and both have as their aim the total
control of government by a small ruling class within the economic structure. Both, therefore, aim at managerial dictatorships, and both claim to
be fighting, not democracy, but one another. Both claim that democracy
is merely the propaganda facade of its real enemy. The problem of
democracy at present is to oppose both threats to its existence without
being frightened by either into becoming the cat's paw of the other.

42

The Church and Modern Culture

1950

In 1947, Frye was a member of a commission appointed by the United Church

to study modern culture and its points of tension with Christian faith, and to
assess "the role of the church in the redemption of culture." Although the published version of the commission's report, The Church and the Secular
World (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1950), was a
collective project, Frye told Robert D. Denham that he had written the extract
on pp. 13-14 of the booklet, Tenets of Modern Culture, reprinted here. In a
diary entry written on 4 May 1950, Frye says that he also wrote the section
"Literature" for part 2 of the report (D, 339). In this contribution, written at
the very peak of the "end of ideology" period (see Introduction, xxxvii), Frye
devotes considerable pains to an analysis of the American ideology.
Tenets of Modern Culture
1. The oldest civilization in the modern world is the American one,
which was established in its present form in 1776. Modern France dates
from the French Revolution; Great Britain began to assume its modern
form with the Reform Bill of 1832; Germany and Italy entered the modern world in 1870; China in 1912; Russia in 1917, and so on. The party
now in power in America is the oldest political party in the world, and
the Stars and Stripes is one of the world's oldest flags.
2. The axioms of this culture are essentially those of eighteenthcentury Deism. There is no real world except the physical world and the
order of nature, and our senses alone afford direct contact with it. Religion can provide no revelation of another; nature is red in tooth and
claw;1 we must look for God only in man, and in nature to the extent

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Politics, History, and Society

that it is subdued by man. The essence of religion is morality, dogma

and ritual being parasites that settle on it in decay. The chief end of man
is to improve his own lot in the natural world, and the essential meaning
of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by
nature, including atavistic impulses in man himself. This is done chiefly
through the advance of science, by which is meant the increase in the
comfort of the body, of which the mind is a function.
3. The problems of American civilization are connected with the facts:
(a) that these absurd notions, however inadequate to the modern world,
form part of an unofficial established church in American society, are
taught in schools, and are impressed on American children at their most
impressionable age; (b) that the real churches have been too deeply contaminated with such ideas themselves to make much effective resistance
against them; (c) that they form part of the ideology, not of democracy,
but of laissez-faire, and yet have kidnapped and secularized the democratic spirit in American life, so that many Americans regard democracy
as inseparable from laissez-faire.
4. The axioms and postulates of laissez-faire, as the above indicates,
are anti-Christian, and lead in the direction, not of democracy, but of
managerial dictatorship. Such a dictatorship may be established in
either of two ways: (a) through the consolidation of the power of the oligarchy (Fascism); (b) through the seizure of power by a revolutionary
leadership established within the trade unions (Communism). The preservation of democracy thus depends on a balance of power held by the
state and its popularly elected representatives against the threat of a
coup d'etat coming from either end of the economic machine. Both Fascism and Communism claim to be the logical forms of true democracy,
and both claim to be fighting, not democracy, but one another, for each
maintains that democracy is merely the propaganda facade of its rival.
5. The sense of imminent apocalypse in history is not new, but the
present one has five main causes:
(a) The Fascist cause. This rests on the belief, worked out most coherently by Spengler, that Western culture has reached, like the Roman
Empire before it, a late era of imperialism, technical and engineering
feats, annihilation wars, and dictatorships, and that now is the time for
the advent of new Caesars whose will will release a divinely heroic
power in their followers.
(b) The Communist cause. This rests on the belief, worked out most

The Church and Modern Culture

239

coherently by Marx, that the Industrial Revolution, with its attendant

power of introducing new instruments of production at will, has brought
a dialectic struggle into history that will eventually end history as we
know it (i.e., as a pattern of class exploitation). It may be noted that both
Fascism and Communism are cul ts of a divinely inspired leader, but that
the Fascist hero is a man of will who seizes "the hour of decision"2 and the
Communist hero is the incarnation of a revolutionary dialectic. Fascism
subordinates the natural reason to the natural will, and Communism
reverses the process. The practical results do not greatly differ.
(c) The laissez-faire cause. This rests on the belief that man is rapidly
progressing towards a temporal Utopia, and is part of the heritage of
American Deism. It has run a manic-depressive cycle from a manic
point in 1928-29 to a depressive point now with the threat of the A- and
H-bombs.
(d) The technological cause. This is the simple fact that man has
finally succeeded in learning how to do himself some irreparable damage, and the natural man's hatred of life is now checked in mid-course
by his fear of death.
(e) The religious cause. From the religious point of view, Fascism
in its pure form of German Nazism looks very like an atheistic parody
of Judaism, preserving its sense of ethnic purity and its expectancy
of a temporal Messiah but throwing away its God. From the religious
point of view, Communism looks very like an atheistic parody of
Roman Catholicism, preserving its sense of an irrefutable and worldconquering dialectic and setting up at Moscow an imitation of its central infallible church, but, again, throwing away its God. It is possible
that laissez-faire, the doctrine of the individual liberty of the natural
man, is similarly a godless parody of Protestantism. If so, democracy
and Protestantism are natural allies, for democracy has consistently
played a revolutionary role against laissez-faire. Thus from the point of
view of any one of the three great Biblical religions, our age seems to
be an age of a consolidating anti-Christ.
6. Communism, the most immediate of the three enemies, is antireligious because it regards religion as the shadow thrown into another
world by the class exploitation of this one, and believes that if men are
deprived of the hope of immortality they will turn with renewed energy
to transforming their own society. Christians know that when the eternal perspective is taken away from man, the resulting claustrophobia

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Politics, History, and Society

(angst) drives men mad. But unless Christians devote their energies to
transforming society as though the Communists were otherwise right,
the Source of Christian charity will remain unsatisfied.
[Modern] Literature
From the invention of the alphabet to our own day, the only major technological advance directly affecting literature has been the printing
press. Now, however, the changes brought about by movies, radio, and
television, to name only the more conspicuous agents, have made our
own age one of unparalleled transmutation of cultural values. Even the
conceptions of "book" and "author" are undergoing change. A modern
bestseller has only a temporary incarnation as a book between its initial
appearance as a magazine serial and its ultimate appearance as a movie.
In the making of a movie the role of the author, or "word man," is a
minor and often a negligible one. Many of the conventional categories of
literaturenovel, essay, poem, and the likeare becoming inorganic
extensions of tradition. In studying, say, drama in Canada, we must take
account of radio drama (which ranges from Lister Sinclair's "Socrates"3
to soap opera), revues (e.g., "Spring Thaw"),4 pantomime and monologue (Fridolin),5 and the influence of films and television, as well as the
more conventional stage plays.
Among the good effects of these technological changes we may
reckon the new prestige which radio and movie alike have given to the
spoken word. The revival of oratory, the change from the era of the
silent Coolidge to the era of the eloquent Roosevelt, is the most striking
example of this; but the beneficial effects of the new media on drama
and even on poetry (which by 1900 had got so badly bogged down in the
printed page that it had nearly lost its connection with vigorous rhythmical speech) cannot be questioned. The results, which range from the
sporadic efforts to revive poetic drama down to the use of choral reading in primary education, are still tentative, but healthily experimental.
The bad effects are more obvious, and one hopes that they are more
temporary. The commercial sponsorship of radio programs (partly
counteracted in Canada by a publicly owned broadcasting commission)
and the complete commercialization of the Hollywood film industry are
alike fatal to independent and original creative effort. The successful
magazines, the so-called "slicks," which print popular fiction and sometimes a very little poetry, are, for all practical purposes, retail advertis-

The Church and Modern Culture

241

ing journals. The greater part of American book business is now in the
hands of three or four vast publishing combines, each with its own
reprint trade, its own book-of-the-month scheme for dumping ephemeral rubbish on a bewildered public, and its own advertising machinery
for ballyhooing the latest purveyor of erotica into a rival of Balzac and
Tolstoy.
The Grip of Commerce

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that nearly all genuine culture of our

day should be characterized by a revolutionary revolt, on principles of
economy and simplicity, against the interlocking and strangling grip of
commerce. The original novelist must find an independent publisher,
content to make at most a small profit on the book, who will not refuse it
if it does not seem likely to make a successful movie. The poet must seek
fame (he need waste no time looking for financial support) in the "little
magazine," run on a shoestring by a few enthusiasts until its mounting
deficit finally kills it. The little magazine has for nearly a century been
one of the main arteries of culture, especially in France. Trade unions
are on the side of exploitation as far as culture is concerned, but the linotype may soon have its monopoly threatened by cheaper machines. The
discriminating book-buyer must avoid the glossy bestseller counter and
do his buying among second-hand books and paper-backed reprints.
(There are signs that in America and Britain, as in France, the paperbound book will become the salvation of the impoverished intellectual.)
Drama must confine itself to the energy and devotion of small groups
with little money for elaborate staging, sometimes (one thinks for the
third time of France) restricted to a front parlour. Among films it is
almost a rule that the less money a film has cost, the better it is likely to
be, the Italian films Shoe Shine and Open City being done under conditions which approach those of the commedia dell'arte.6 In the long run, of
course, products of culture which depend on the human brain and hand
will flourish long after commercial pseudo-culture has, like Frankenstein, been killed by the mechanism it has created. Even now it
seems probable that the situation will be greatly clarified by the development of photographic magazines, comic books, and the like, to cater
to the needs of those who find reading too great a mental strain, and
whose demands for entertainment have long confused the literary
scene.
We have spoken only of the democracies: in totalitarian states, where

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Politics, History, and Society

advertising has become propaganda, and vested interests complete

monopoly, all loopholes for the independent author are closed up. But
even in the democracies the tendency of the author to regard himself as
the prophet, priest, and king of a new era, which was so common in the
previous century, has largely disappeared. Advertising and propaganda
are ironic arts, in the sense that they say what they do not wholly mean,
and in the face of this vast and ruthless irony the sincere author is only
too glad to turn to anything that seems to guarantee the validity of his
sincerity.
The Importance of Religion
In this situation religion seems to offer a new hope to the author, and an
increase in the importance of religion is a very real fact in contemporary
culture. In poetry, for instance, there has been nothing like the outburst
of technical experiment that followed the previous war: it seems as
though our poets were more interested in finding something to say than
in finding new ways to say it. The stock secular themes of poetrythe
beauty of nature, the power of sexual passion, even the cruelty and
injustice of societyseem to be handled with an increasing detachment,
as though the themes themselves were felt to be spiritually exhausted.
On the other hand, we have the great popularity of religious themes,
besides the Anglo-Catholic influence emanating from Eliot, the Barthian
influence emanating from Auden, and the Roman Catholic influence
emanating from Claudel and Peguy. All this seems to be due, not to accident or fashion, much less to any desire to escape to a better world, but
to a growing sense that the whole point of poetry is that God and man
meet in a Logos.
In fiction the abrupt decline of the classical novel, the pure study of
character, is hardly realized even yet, but the form that rose with the
middle class in the eighteenth century is rapidly disappearing with that
class. The author who writes a novel primarily because he has a story to
tell is now a rare bird; our best "novelists," if the word is still applicable,
have themes rather than stories, and their approach is allegorical rather
than realistic. We have the explicitly religious allegory of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis,7 the socially significant allegory, including the
melodramas which deal with the labour unrest and race prejudice, and
the historical allegory, where the characters illustrate the author's philosophy of history. The great rise to popularity of the thriller (the French

The Church and Modern Culture

243

"existentialist" movement has largely founded its prose fiction on the

thriller form) makes it look as though a stereotyped conflict of heroes
and villains will provide the basic formula of fiction in the next age.
Here again the role of religion in clarifying the nature of heroism and
villainy (one thinks of the use of Catholicism in Graham Greene), is of
increasing importance. The hero of a thriller is regularly an agent of
freedom, as the villain is of tyranny, and the existentialists are much
preoccupied with freedom as an end in itselfbut what a man is to be
free for they do not say. Perhaps religion can help them.
The churches should make sure that they are always on the side of
genuine and sincere creative effort, however new, different, or "shocking." Commercial art is not only monotonous but also prudish, ready to
give way to any kind of pressure in order to please every kind of superstition and immaturity. The churches have acquired a bad but deserved
reputation for supporting prudery, for continually demanding the
enforcement of the most trumpery social and moral taboos, and for
showing no other interest in culture: for being, in short, a mouthpiece
for middle-class vulgarity and for the commercial interests that pander
to it. The church should be a mouthpiece only for the truth that makes
free [cf. John 8:32] and for the Word that has overcome the world, and if
it is so, all the genuine culture in the world will bear witness to its
power.

43

And There Is No Peace

June 1950

An unsigned editorial from Canadian Forum, 30 (June 1950): 52. This and
the next piece were identified as Frye's by Robert D. Denham in the course of
his work on Frye's 1950 Diary (see D, 353).

The Canadian delegation to the Moscow Peace Congress1 has been

active in various cities of Canada since its return. A "Ban the Bomb"
petition and interviews with Messrs. Pearson and Coldwell2 in Ottawa
backfired somewhat, but large public meetings in Toronto and Hamilton were more successful, and the movement is currently enjoying a
good deal of publicity.
The stock reactionary answer is that the movement led by Dr. Endicott and Hewlett Johnson3 is a one hundred per cent Communist front,
and that anyone who imagines it to be anything else is a sucker. Because
it is the stock reactionary answer, many people of tolerance and good
will feel that it is too facile to be the right one. Actually, it is the right
one. But if Communists talked complete nonsense they would not be
dangerous. We cannot say that it's all Communist propaganda and
therefore a pack of lies; if it's all Communist propaganda, it's about
forty per cent true. It is true that the world is heading straight for a war
of unimaginable destruction. It is true that no organized group of people in Canada are preaching peace with the same earnestness as the
Communists. It is true that Soviet Russia does not want a shooting war.
And it is very probably true that the inherent contradictions in the
present structure of American capitalism make, if not a war, at any rate
some kind of war economy, necessary to its functioning at the present

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245

time. A lot of other things are true too; but that does not prevent these
things from being equally true.
Hence the enormous propaganda value that Dr. Endicott, Dean
Johnson, and Father Duffy4 have for the Communists. They suggest that
their adherence to the party line is the result of a Christian longing for
peace; they rouse nostalgic memories of the 19305 and the mirage of a
"Popular Front"5 of all lovers of freedom against brutal tyrants; and
they exploit the very natural distrust that many people have for antiCommunist smear campaigns. They can create a mass rally in a big
auditorium where the Communists in their own name could not raise a
dozen people beyond their own members. Hoodlums who break up
their meetings add immeasurably to their prestige. And their influence
can do nothing but expand and increase in the power vacuum created
by the democratic apathy and sense of frustration about an approaching
atom-bomb war. We shall have to find better arguments for peace than
the facile demonstration that those who advocate the peace of a worldwide Communist dictatorship are Communists.

44

Caution or Dither?
July 1950

An unsigned editorial from Canadian Forum, 30 (July 1950): 75, identified as

Frye's in D, 384. The postwar Canadian Forum took a keen interest in the
British experiment in Parliamentary socialism under Clement Attlee and this is
Frye's own contribution to this ongoing concern.

The confusion resulting from the Labour Government's refusal, or nearrefusal, to enter into the Schuman Plan is due to the fact that it is impossible not to sympathize, to some extent, with all the points of view. The
Schuman Plan is primarily an attempt to end the political schism in
Western Europe between France and Germany by making the economic
interests of both countries too closely akin for a major conflict between
them ever again to occur.1 Nobody can oppose the possibility of ending
all future Franco-German wars. Nobody can fail to agree that economic
union, starting with coal and steel, is the only effective way to bring this
about. It is, of course, a snap decision, brought about through fear of
Russian aggression and infiltration, and through the encouragement of
the Marshall Plan, of which the Schuman Plan is really a subsidiary
part.2 But that could actually be a point in its favour: it certainly could
be argued that the correct procedure is to express a will to agree first,
and work out the details afterward. The trend toward unity and away
from jealousy is good in itself, whatever its motivation; and surely the
strength and importance of the labour unions in the negotiations will
prevent the Schuman Plan from becoming just one more cartel.
Against this, British public opinion is divided between what is often
called "doctrinaire socialism" and what might well be called doctrinaire
expediency. Mr. Attlee3 and the executive group hesitate to commit

Caution or Dither?

247

themselves to the unqualified principle of setting up a coal and steel

Authority that will limit national sovereignty, not because they disapprove of limiting national sovereignty, but because so sudden a change
in Britain's relations with the Continent would involve a complete
reconsideration and realignment of Britain's present economic structure, as well as her political relations with other Commonwealth nations. The Conservative view is probably very similar, though they are
not missing the opportunity to get an Opposition's free credit out of the
situation. On the other hand, the Bevan-Dalton group,4 which appears
to have issued the latest Labour Party statement more or less on its own,
is raising all the old uncomfortable socialist questions. Isn't the Schuman Plan merely one more effort to "make capitalism work," and, by
absorbing the present British Government within its structure, throw
Socialism out of work?
The least satisfactory aspect of the situation is the fact that the Labour
Party seems to have a genius for bad public relations. It has given the
public, with the help of a right-wing press, the impression of fumbling a
fine opportunity for statesmanship and dithering away a chance to turn
the whole course of history toward peace and unity. This impression is
quite false, but it will not do to leave it at that.

45

Trends in Modern Culture

1952

From the original publication as chapter 7 of The Heritage of Modern Culture: Essays on the Origin and Development of Modern Culture, ed. Randolph C. Chalmers (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952), 102-17. This was the book
that grew out of the work of the Culture Commission of the United Church (see
headnote to no. 42). Reprinted in RW, 300-15.
The Modern Social Scene
The modern world derives its form primarily from the vast social
change which began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and
which we may call the Industrial Revolution, from its most conspicuous
feature. This change, like every other, was at once old and new: unique
and yet in some degree a repetition of the pattern of previous events.
The repetitive aspect of it is worked out most fully in Spengler's Decline
of the West. Spengler sees history as a series of quasi-organic developments or "cultures," which are at first agricultural and feudal, then
urban and oligarchic, and finally become industrial and totalitarian. The
last stage is one of huge cities, nomadic population, profiteering and
dictatorships, mass wars, the impoverishing of agriculture and the
exhaustion of the arts, and the growth of technology. The only hope for
such an epoch is in a nation strong enough to place it under martial law.
Classical culture, according to Spengler, went into this phase in its
Roman period, and Western culture reached the same stage at the time
of Napoleon. We are now at the stage corresponding to the Classical
Punic Wars, with the centres of growing world empires struggling for
mastery, and the Rome of the future will be whatever nation has enough

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249

organization, discipline, leadership, ethnic integrity, and historical

sense to impose its will on the rest of the world. Being a very right-wing
German, Spengler had no doubt about which nation that would be, or
how it would proceed to go about imposing its will.
The uniqueness of the same event finds its most articulate exponent in
Marx. According to Marx, the structure of society is dependent on the
range of productive power represented by its "instruments of production," or technological potency. This productive power is used to maintain the class structure of society, in which the producing classes are the
servants of a leisure class. The Industrial Revolution brought in, not
simply new inventions, but a technique for producing new inventions at
will. Hence its immediate effect is to accelerate exploitation at a terrific
speed, making the group of dispossessed producers so large that it
becomes practically the equivalent of society itself. Such a dispossessed
society could, by seizing its own producing power, recover its balance
in a revolutionary act that would not only destroy its class structure but
put an end to history as we know it, history as we know it being essentially the mutation of class struggles.
Here, then, are two logical and coherent interpretations of the Industrial Revolution which help to explain the two great totalitarian movements of our time. Both movements are revolutionary, leading up to an
act of will in a crisis. In all critical acts, whether social or individual,
there can be no division of attitude: the act implies that argument, objection, and doubt of the issue have ceased. Hence a revolutionary movement demands a heroic leadership that must be accepted by all its
followers as inspired and infallible. The nature of the leadership differs
slightly: both Nazism and Communism determine the future on the
analogy of the past, but for Nazism analogy means likeness and for
Communism it means inner structure (as in Paul's phrase "analogy of
faith").1 Thus the Nazi hero catches the historical moment or "hour of
decision" (the title of Spengler's second book)2 as it recurs in time, and
the Communist hero incarnates the dialectic of history: he is the word of
Marx made flesh, for all Communist leaders, whether Trotsky, Stalin, or
Tito, must claim to be the true heirs of Marx and Lenin. However, for
most of those living in the democracies, the essential identity of Fascism
and Communism as cults of the divine leader or conquering Messiah is
far more significant than these differences.3 The Industrial Revolution
came to a world in which the most highly organized groups were relatively small nations, most of them in Western Europe. It increased pro-

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Politics, History, and Society

duction at such a rate, and engendered so competitive a scramble, that

nations had to become either large enough to endure the contest, or
small enough to drop out of it. The colonial expansion which resulted
appears to have been a transitional phase. What is now taking shape is a
new "geopolitical" configuration, in which the effective nations are huge
land masses extending over most of a continent. The development of
long-range destructive weapons such as the atomic bomb is designed to
make warfare on a full continental scale a military possibility. The continental character of the modern political world is so new that it is difficult for many to stop thinking in the old terms. This is particularly true
of Europe, where the nations obviously have no political future except in
a continental federation. Again, at least one of the new continent-powersa vast Negro republic in Africahas not yet been born, but it assuredly will be born sooner or later, and if South Africa insists on sowing
the wind of apartheid it may have to reap the whirlwind of a Communist Africa.
We do not normally think of the United States of America as the
world's oldest country. But, as the firstborn political child of the new
age, there is a sense in which it is. The party now in power at Washington is the oldest political party in the world, and the Stars and Stripes is
one of the world's oldest flags. No other major power goes back as far as
1776 in its modern form, in which the leadership generated by the new
social changes has attained political control. The American Revolution
itself was mainly pre-industrial, but was able to pass into the industrial
phase without a second major shift of class power. France's modern reformation was later, and that of Great Britain was not really achieved
until the Reform Bill of 1832. Germany, Italy, and Japan entered the
modern world around 1870, when the first two became national entities;
Russia, China, and India were born in our own generation. The nations
that went Fascist, we notice, were those which were too late to compete
in the struggle for colonies, and too early to succeed in transforming
themselves into continental powers, as Germany and Japan tried so hard
to do. The nations that went Communist were those which had inherited
vast geopolitical resources and territories exploited by a corrupt and
demoralized administration. Thus Fascism is evidently an aberrant
phase of the transition from colonial to geopolitical power, and Communism similarly appears to be an aberrant phase of the transition from
geopolitical conflict to a world federation. It is in America, in any case,
that we should look for the original form of modern culture. This origi-

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251

nal form, which we are struggling to attach to the word "democracy," is

a much less obviously logical response to the Industrial Revolution than
its more recent rivals; but it appears to be outliving one of them already,
and it may have outlived the other by the end of the century. In spite of
its age, America is not necessarily the best or most mature of contemporary democracies, but it is the only geopolitical champion of democracy,
and our own country revolves in its orbit, so we shall confine and attach
ourselves at the moment to the American scene.
The geopolitical America, unlike the European countries, was able to
add its colonies to its own body, and hence it was a kind of proving
ground for all the expansionist energies of its age, economic laissezfaire, political liberalism, and religious individualism included. The
belief that men can be and have a right to be equal and independent is
the growing point of this expansionism and the source of everything
vital in it, and that belief, rather than any political modus operandi, is
what is usually implied first of all by the word "democracy." As the conception of democracy has matured, it has separated itself from its vague
background of Utopian optimism. Many Americans still believe that
laissez-faire is the economic aspect of democracy, but there is a growing
realization that laissez-faire by itself does not lead to democracy, but to
oligarchy, and thence to managerial dictatorship.4 Laissez-faire by itself
is antidemocratic: all progress in the conditions of the working classes
has been wrung from it in a kind of cold civil warnot always so cold,
as it has included lynchings, sadistic beatings, systematic starvation,
and an occasional massacre.
Again, the Rousseauist doctrine that man is by nature good, and has
been corrupted by institutions, sank deeply into American life from the
beginning: it is still quite generally believed that democracy implies an
optimistic view of human nature. The second part of the Rousseauist
doctrine contains a powerful social dynamic: it means that whatever
man is, his institutions do not, in more than one sense, do him justice,
and so leads to a relative view of human society which permits continuous experiment, opposition, and reformation. As for the statement
about human nature, it certainly cannot in itself be accepted by any
Christian, at least not without attaching a very different meaning to the
word "nature." But, historically, this doctrine conflicted, not directly
with original sin, but with the authoritarian political views which had
been, quite illegitimately, deduced from it. It is clearly absurd to say that
if man is born in sin, the majority of men ought to be bridled and bitted

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Politics, History, and Society

by a minority who cannot be any better than they are. Yet that is the traditional inference, and democratic sentiment was quite right to reject it.
However, it is gradually becoming clearer that the real principle of
democracy is not "faith in human nature," but the limitation of human
power. The nauseous adulation of dictators is the feature of totalitarian
life most shocking to a democrat, and this kind of adulation is the narcissism of the mob. The position of general leadership, in contrast to the
position of specific responsibility, is always a projection of a mob's
unconditioned will, and means that man has begun to worship himself.
The view that man is by nature good does not lead to a very goodnatured view of man, and a satiric humour, based on a cheerful acceptance of human depravity as a fundamental social postulate, is one of
the most reassuring features of American life.
Democracy is normally thought of as progressive, and its goals are
evidently very similar in some respects to the goals of Marxism: a classless society consisting entirely of workers, and a self-controlling administrative structure replacing the old "state," or government by rulers.
Democracy is, however, trying to replace the Marxist proletarian dictatorship with a transitional phase of its own which we may call the open
class society, in which class distinctions exist, but are founded on equality of opportunity rather than on hereditary or caste privilege. All
thoughtful democrats agree that the main threat to democracy from
within arises, not from disparities of wealth, but from disparities of
opportunity. Antidemocratic activity consists in trying to put class distinctions on some permanent basis. We find this in, for instance, discrimination against Negroes and other minority groups, and in the kind of
paternalism that industrialists with the worst labour records so often
favour. Thus democracy attempts to contain its class conflict, and prevent the separating tendenciesoligarchy and pressure-group organizationfrom making a breach of the social contract. From the democratic point of view, Fascism is an oligarchic conspiracy against the
open-class system, deriving its real power from the big oligarchs and its
mass support from would-be oligarchs, the "independent" (i.e., unsuccessful) entrepreneurs. Communism is the corresponding conspiracy at
the other end, addressing itself to those most likely to feel that society in
its present form will permanently exclude them from its benefits. In
many places (southern Italy, for example) Communist propaganda is so
solidly based on facts that only reforms of equal radicalism are likely to
make much headway against it. In the more prosperous America it may

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253

rely on some caricature and oversimplification, but even there it is never

too far from the facts to be refuted by argument alone.
It is far enough, however, to make Fascism a more imminent domestic
threat. The unquestioned supremacy of civil over military power, and of
public law over sealed orders, is of course a vital organ of democracy,
and its functioning is greatly hampered by the essential nuisances of
war. Unfortunately the Marxist claim that capitalism can in the long run
only function under wartime conditions has not yet been disproved. The
rise, both in power and in popularity, of a military autocracy and a
secret police, and the standard features of wartime hysteria: purges, trials that are publicity stunts, and the use of frivolous political jockeying
to protect the sin of bearing false witnessall these are signs of the possibility, however remote, of America's becoming what the Soviet press
asserts her to be now. It would not be realistic, of course, to overlook the
American ability to keep degenerate tendencies boiling away in open
kettles, so to speak. A military leader may be hailed with all the maudlin
devotion inspired by dictators elsewhere, but in a few weeks it is evident that he is not the object of the feeling, but merely the occasion for
releasing it. The real danger is perhaps not so much one of giving up
democracy, as one of failing to develop the energy, intelligence, and
goodwill to evolve it out of its open-class stage.
Up to 1929, American democracy to a great extent depended passively on the automatic stimulus of prosperity. The crash of that year
brought to an end the Utopian illusion in American life, the hope of raising the standard of living to a classless level in America alone. The
scrambling treasure hunt of laissez-faire is still a conspicuous feature of
American economy; but in the last two decades the rise of social services, social sciences (which have not only developed in themselves but
have acquired a quite new political importance), a civil service nurtured
by long periods of unchanged government in the United States and
Canada, and the first major efforts at integrating the political and economic structures have brought about a silent and gigantic revolution.
Pure laissez-faire has gone the way of the dinosaursno political party
in Canada now supports it, to judge from their published manifestos.
The old "left" and "right" metaphors in politics, according to which all
conservatives were hesitant Fascists and all social democrats hesitant
Communists, are dead too, and it is slanderous nonsense to continue to
talk in such terms. The major agreement that we must empirically work
out the economic and social conditions, whatever they may be, under

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Politics, History, and Society

which democracy can develop towards its next stage is far more important than any differences about the means adopted.
At present, both Communism and democracy promise eventually to
eradicate the major sources of human tyranny and of needless human
misery, Communism through proletarian dictatorship and revolution,
democracy through equality of opportunity and reform. Each claims
that the other is powerless to evolve from its present phase. Obvious as
it sounds, there is yet some point in saying that we have nothing to gain
from losing to Communism. It could be argued that Communism is an
international revolution, and that its reckless cruelty, its venomous
hatred, and the unceasing cannonade of its lies will automatically stop
when the whole world becomes Communist. A little study of the relations of Russia with other Communist countries makes it clear, however,
that in a completely Communist world there would be as much war, as
sharp boundaries, and as constant suspicion and intrigue as ever. The
terrible clarity of this fact has wiped out nearly all the intellectual sympathy with Communism in the democracies. If the struggle with Communism reaches the stage of a third world war, that war, like its
predecessor, will have, to begin with, a right and a wrong side. The right
sideourswill derive its Tightness, not from the value of what it fights
for, but from the evil of what it fights against. War only destroys, and
there is no good in war except in the destruction of evil. At the end of a
war there is no good ready to replace the evil, but only a disorganized
situation that a surviving power may be able to take some advantage of,
if it is not too exhausted and has any idea what to do. Whether there is
major war or not, therefore, there is no hope for us either in defeat or in
victory, but only in a constructive act of social evolution, which, if made
in time, may avoid war, and, if not made in time, will in any case be the
only means of ending war with a peace instead of a mere truce. If
democracy attains the next stage of its evolution, it may soon gain control of the world without a major war. All other roads lead to totalitarianism, which is the art of prolonging a wartime situation.
Contemporary Deism
The cultural pattern behind the American war of independence was of a
very curious weave, with Deism, Freemasonry, and a liberalized Protestantism among its most conspicuous strands. Culturally, the "American
way of life" revolves around an unofficial established church which con-

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255

trols the allegedly nondoctrinal educational system from kindergarten

to teachers' college. This catholic if not apostolic church has very few
real dogmas, but it has many assumptions, a few of which may be
roughly summarized as follows:
Reality consists of a moral and a natural world. There is no effective
spiritual reality, but the concept "God" is defensible as a hypothesis unifying the other two worlds. Such a "God" could be conceived as the evidence of intelligence and purpose indicated by the order of nature, and
therefore as a mysterious sanction for morality. However, the best way
to deal with this God is to place him in the background of the struggle of
man and nature, holding both coats, so to speak. That leaves morality as
the essence of religion, ritual and dogma being symptoms of intellectual
decay. It also leaves the human mind as a function of the body, for man
has received his body from nature, and his mind is his unique instrument for achieving a harmonious and comfortable adjustment to nature.
The meaning of life is in, first of all, the removal of the obstacles presented by nature to human comfort, and, secondly, the removal of the
corresponding moral obstacles, hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, presented by human life itself. Wisdom is the human capacity to apply
knowledge, and hence if knowledge is progressive wisdom must be
progressive too, so that the wisdom of the past derives its validity from
its relevance to the present. It is characteristic of this creed of implicit
assumptions that there is no name for it: let us call it Deism, which is
inaccurate but indicates the general area.
The cultural consequence of Deism is to throw the primary emphasis
in education on the natural and social sciences, and subordinate to them
the more elusive modes of apprehension represented by the humanities.
The social sciences are so new, and so anxious to be sciences, that they
are largely unaware of how naive their assumptions are, and of the
extent to which they are forming a patristic commentary on the above
oracles. The religious consequence of it is pure secularism. The Catholic
church is better equipped to deal with Deism, because, in its doctrines of
substance and of the real presence, its Thomist interpretation of reality,
and its stress on the visibility of the Church, it holds all the high cards in
this very suit. But Protestants affected by it tend to slip into a Pharisaic
legality which tries to distinguish itself from the world by a shoddy
fetishism. At least, that seems the best way to describe the notion that a
drink of liquor is a more fateful event in the history of the soul than loss
of faith in the Trinity. Millions of Protestant Americans have drifted,

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Politics, History, and Society

and are continuing to drift, away from their earlier religious moorings,
not always through indifference, but very often because they feel that a
secular life is the most mature, civilized, and serious form of the kind of
Christian liberty offered them by Protestantism. Between the secularists
and the churches are those who regard religion as a kind of palladium
that it might be unlucky to throw away, or feel that religion has a place
as a loyal conservative opposition, checking the overconfidence of
human progress with reminders that all is not yet well.
It is obvious that American Deism is an easy-going and tolerant version of dialectic materialism. The Leninist form of the latter creed asserts
that a superhuman hypothesis can never be anything but a symbol of a
permanent governing or ruling-class principle, and hence as long as the
idea "God" exists, it will be the rallying point of all those who shrink
from a classless society. In itself, this doctrine is merely clarified humanism, and helps to explain why Marxism during the 19305 had an influence in the democracies so vastly greater than its popularity. Even many
clergymen at that time maintained that the Russians were Gentiles
doing by nature the things contained in the law. The Communist influence has vanished because of political rivalry and because Communism
failed to be as tolerant as Deism, not because the established church of
America has modified its views.
Protestantism has been so profoundly influenced by Deism that it is
now in many quarters almost the exact opposite of a church based on the
doctrine of justification by faith. There have been several attempts to
combine the two traditions, of which the Unitarian movement of the
nineteenth century was perhaps the most ambitious. Within recent
years, however, a small minority of Protestants have, largely under
European influence, begun to make more articulate objections to it, and
to point out that Deism really amounts to saying: a few more bites out of
the fruits of the tree of knowledge and morality, and we shall be as gods.
Hence we are now hearing a great deal about the dilemma of modern
man, and of how the events of the last two decades have proved that
optimistic humanism is a house built on sands [Matthew 7:26]. But
Deism is a resilient belief, and a few panicky desertions will not weaken
it. It is also a hopeful, liberal, and active belief, and the truth of the religious case against it is less in the propositions religion makes than in the
extent to which religion can comprehend Deism, and so expand and
emancipate it.
We have not yet brought into focus the strongest point in Deism, the

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257

one that commands all its real loyalty, and inspires the belief that it is
the true faith of democracy. This is liberalism, the doctrine that society
cannot attain freedom except by individualizing its culture. It is only
when the individual is enabled to form an individual synthesis of ideas,
beliefs, and tastes that a principle of freedom is established in society,
and this alone distinguishes a people from a mob. A mob always has a
leader, but a people is a larger human body in which there are no leaders or followers, but only individuals acting as functions of the group.
Tolerance of disagreement and criticism among such individuals is necessary, not because uniform truth is nonexistent or unattainable, but
because the mind is finite and passionate. We have tried to suggest
above that Communism isolates the secular element in Deism, and that
when it does so, liberalism instantly disappears. It seems to follow that
the existence of liberalism in any society has a lot to do with the tolerated presence of the religious perspective.
Protestantism was an important influence on liberal theory, and the
role it ascribes to the individual is in many respects analogous. In Protestantism the individual does not work out his own theology, but tries
to listen to the Word with his own ears. The attempt to listen signifies,
on his part, a desire to become permanently attached to another community. This community is the City of God, the vision of which the
churches struggle to represent. Belonging to it does not detach one from
one's social function, nor does it project itself as a social class: the "rule
of the elect" is an illusion. In liberal theory we have a similar process on
the cultural level. The individual does not really "form his own opinions," as the saying is, but tries to understand the disciplines of truth
with his own intelligence, and so to join another community. This community of searchers for truth is what the universities struggle to represent. Such a community again has no class affinities: the "rule of the
elite" is another illusion. Outside these realms is the double community
of actual society, the community of production and the community of
distraction, the world of work and the world of amusements and hobbies, of gossip and complaint. This latter world is important, but it is not
a free world: the most cynical tyrannies assume that man shall not live
by bread alone [Luke 4:4], but by circuses.5 Conscience, principle, criticism, experiment, and all other elements of liberalism can only exist
within the spiritual or the intellectual communities.
The word "liberal" implies a disinterested pursuit of truth as its own
end, in contrast to the attempt to manipulate it or press it into the ser-

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Politics, History, and Society

vice of an immediate social aim. It is the disinterested handling of the

medium, whether facts, truths, words, or life itself, that distinguishes
science from technology, philosophy from propaganda, literature from
verbal communication, and freedom from anarchy. And just as there is a
church wherever there are two or three believers, so there is a university
wherever there is free discussion of liberal arts and sciences. It has been
proved over and over again that it is only from such free discussion that
real social benefits come. This is true even of dubious benefits: the Nazi
conception of "target knowledge,"6 reducing science to military strategy, not only ruined German science but helped materially in losing the
war. The Marxist conception of the social reference of all knowledge was
a far better theory to begin with, but its application has been very similar. And in American Deism too, one wonders if the connection of reality
is subtle enough to include the university and the church as above
defined.
For after all, the criterion of reality, in Deist theory, is what present
man, say a normal American middle-class adult, thinks to be real. Hence
education is largely a matter of getting the individual to meet the social
norm. From this point of view religious and intellectual independence
are essentially forms of play, ways of cultivating interests or hobbies,
and so relaxing the pressure of the working world. But it is still actual
society that pronounces on their value. This recurrence of a social norm
is marked in Deist educational theories, which usually begin with the
individual and his interests, then go on to "education for today"or
tomorrow, depending on tasteand finally become absorbed in participation, adjustment, integration, orientation, and other benevolent
euphemisms for mass movement. Here, as above, the totalitarian theories of Marxism seem to be the logical and coherent form of the tendencies of Deism. The increase in the prestige of the sciences also tends to
weaken the sense of the crucial importance of intellectual and spiritual
independence, as it is so much easier in the sciences to absorb oneself in
a methodology. Liberalism itself, if founded merely on the conception of
relaxing the social order, finds it difficult to find reasons for surviving
whenever society, through fear or anger or impatience or the prompting
of unscrupulous leaders, begins to close together. In any case liberty in
America, after two centuries of democratic experience, seems to be as
seriously menaced as ever. The utilitarian and materialistic attitudes of
Deism are no longer merely vulgar, now that "useful" is beginning to
manifest its true meaning of "essential to waging war."

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259

It is only in a condition of freedom that democracy can make the evolution that will save it, and freedom is exclusively a matter of setting up
the university and the church in the centre of society. The draft that
draws the fire of freedom is liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its
own sake by free men. This pursuit of truth is an act of faith, a kind of
potential or tentative vision of an end in human life. Without this tentative vision, all activity can only be the implementing of the greedy passions produced by a will that can only see what it thinks it can reach.
But the draft, to complete its work, needs a chimney reaching into the
sky. Liberal education by itself cannot envisage the end of human life
except as a vague future: the revolutionary's claim that liberalism is
only a lazy way of postponing social action is so far true. With all his
good will, the liberal is still involved in the moral horrors of a theory of
progress. And all worship of the future is Moloch-worship [i Kings
11:17; Acts 7:43] whether it consists in murdering a hundred thousand
farmers to get a more efficient collectivization of agriculture, or in sacrificing one's life for the perfunctory and generalized gratitude of posterity, or in trying to persuade the underprivileged not to make any
disturbance until their betters think how to improve things.
Man does not lose his claustrophobia and panic, and the process of
liberty does not function, until the ideal of partial improvement expands
to the ideal of infinite regeneration. This does not sacrifice a specific
improvement to a muzzy benevolence: it merely replaces the tantalizing
future goal with a real presence which extends over all life and death,
and so guarantees the present value of every act of charity. When we act
in this light, we find that we are not members of a social group, but of
one body. Without this infinite expansion of the liberal ideal, liberalism
cannot avoid the dilemma of either returning to a criterion of immediate
usefulness or getting lost in an impossible objectivity. Such an infinite
expansion includes, of course, God as well as man, and must be based
on a definitive revelation of the way in which God and man are united.
The Decisive Struggle
However objective the knowledge we have may be in itself, the form in
which we put it together shows clearly enough how impossible it is for
any individual to get away from his own society. All the great philosophies of the past have shown striking analogies to the communities in
which they were conceived. Plato's "ideas" belong to an impregnably

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fortified citadel, in the world but not of it, which only rigorously scrutinized souls are allowed to enter. Locke's "ideas" are a trading stock
accumulated and exchanged by individuals: nobody has any to begin
with, but one may collect and save them, put them out at interest, and
insist on their being "clear and distinct," of full weight and sound value.
One can see the same principle at work in all the major world outlooks
traced in this book. The chain of being in medieval thought is clearly
the intellectual form of a culture organized on a feudal economy and a
hierarchic church. The political structure changes to the Renaissance
absolute prince, the enlightened despot or Roi Soleil, and philosophy
changes, with Descartes, to a dualism in which the enlightened conscious mind is exalted to a superior world, and the rest of nature follows
it in a state of mechanized hypnotism. Our period begins when revolutions are shaking the world, and the conscious mind is deciding in consequence that perhaps it is not so much like the sun in the sky as like a
boat on a perilous sea.7
This change began as soon as Kant distinguished the world as an
object of conscious knowledge from the world in itself, and led on into
the Romantic movement, in which, in nearly all branches of culture, the
conscious mind is seen as deriving its strength from a subconscious reality greater than itself. Hence the importance of suggestion and evocation
in Romantic art, of the surrender of conscious intelligence to spontaneous mythopoeia. After Schopenhauer, this subconscious world becomes
evil, sinister, and yet immensely powerful, and visions of nightmarish
terror begin increasingly to creep into the arts. No matter where we turn
in the culture of the immediate past, the same picture meets us, a picture
reminding us less of the harassed boat than of the young lady of the limerick who smiled as she rode on a tiger.8 In Schopenhauer the world of
conscious idea thus rides on a cruel (except that it is unconscious) and
inexorable world of will with the whole power of nature behind it. In
Freud, the conscious mind attempts, with very partial success, to hold in
check a mighty libidinous desire. In Darwin, the conscious mind is the
sport of an unconscious evolutionary force. In Marx, civilization is the
attempt of a dwindling minority to keep a vastly stronger majority away
from its privileges. In liberal thought, freedom is the possession of integrity by a small group constantly threatened by a mob. In Kierkegaard,
the consciousness of existence rests on a vast shapeless "dread" as big
and real as life and death together. There is hardly a corner of modern
thought where we do not find some image of a beleaguered custodian of

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261

conscious values trying to fend off something unconscious which is too

strong to be defeated. It seems the appropriate cultural pattern for a
period in which the tiny peninsula of Western Europe was encircling the
world.
If this age really does see the decisive struggle of liberty and terrorism
for the fate of the world, the pattern of thought will make the necessary
changeunless terrorism wins, in which case there will be no pattern at
all. If liberty wins, we shall have, instead of the complacent and doomed
young lady on the tiger, the image of a conquering hero with a dead
dragon at his feet. As we continue to look at the hero, we shall see in
him the image of a consciousness that has absorbed the unconscious and
defeated all the dark powers of our present thought: a man armed with
the power of God extending through all the eons and light years of
nature, the conquered territory of death annexed to his life, fulfilling the
desire and liberating the oppression of all men. As we continue to look
at the dragon, we shall see in him the rotting body of what is now laying
waste the world: the body of eternal bondage, the endlessly postponed
vision of peace and leisure, the endless intrusion of temporary necessity
to thrust us away from real life, the endless massing of lynching mobs to
transfer our self-contempt to another scapegoat, the reduction of individual life to a hopeless isolation surrounded by threats of torture.
In the present struggle we have been given great physical powers, but
we have been given them only for the baffling of evil and tyranny. All
construction has to come from the spiritual power great enough to bring
peace on earth to men of good will. And it is impossible to exaggerate
the physical weakness of that power: a new-born baby in a deserted stable in a forlorn village of a miserable province of an enslaved empire is
not more weak. The important thing is that it should be a real presence,
and when it is, all the wise and simple begin to meet one another around
its cradle.

46

Regina versus the World

June 1953

From Canadian Forum, 33 (June 1953): 49-50. Reprinted in RW, 403-6.

Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

Among the mass of historical curiosa recently dredged up by the press

is the fact that the coronation of Queen Victoria was, ritually speaking,
quite a mess. The ring was put on her wrong finger; peers of the realm
fell over their own feet; bishops fluffed their lines, and one dignitary, as
the Queen herself acidly recorded, was heard saying to another,
"M'Lord, we should have had a rehearsal." But it didn't matter. No
omens could alter the fact that the British Empire was on the up and up.
By the time Queen Victoria was dead she was Empress of India1 and
had seen the occupation of the Suez, the conquest of the Boers, and a
series of decisive checks to the power of Russia administered all the way
from the Crimea to Afghanistan.
There will be no mistakes in this coronation. The present queen is as
irreproachable, as handsome, and at least as intelligent as her predecessor. But she is not the Empress of India, and her title is reduced to a
euphemism which actually means "Queen of whatever countries still
want to admit that she is their queen." The British won the Boer War but
evidently forgot to win the peace; British soldiers are being apoplectically ordered out of the Suez by a native; and the strongholds of Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, and the rest are now, like the Chinese wall, the ruins of
an obsolete strategy.2 The punctiliousness surrounding the present coronation has all the anxiety of primitive magic in it: there is hope that a
woman, especially a woman named Elizabeth, will bring luck, and that

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263

the spell-binding formula "Elizabeth by the grace of God Queen" will, if

uttered with enough conviction, somehow work its old power again.
Gibbon's great narrative of the decline of Rome reaches its first full
close at the time of the secular games of the Emperor Philip, instituted to
mark the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the city. "Every circumstance of the secular games," says Gibbon,
was skillfully adapted to inspire . . . solemn reverence. . . . The Campus
Martius resounded with music and dances, and was illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches. Slaves and strangers were excluded from any
participation in these national ceremonies. . . . The devout were employed
in the rites of superstition, whilst the reflecting few revolved in their anxious minds the past history and the future fate of the empire. . . . The form
was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled. . . . The
strength of the frontiers, which had always consisted in arms rather than in
fortifications, was insensibly undermined; and the fairest provinces were
left exposed to the rapaciousness or ambition of the barbarians.3

The irony of the coronation, especially in the fair province of Canada

which lies between America and Russia, is in fact so obvious that anybody who can read a newspaper may regard himself this time as one of
the "reflecting few." Yet there is a curious process in history that seems
to make institutions grow as ideas when they decline in physical
strength. This has happened to the monarchy itself, which has gained
popularity in proportion as it has lost effective power. It happened even
to the Roman Empire, which became the great organizing idea of medieval Christendom after it had fallen. And it may yet happen to the tiny
royal figure at the centre of the retreating and beleaguered Commonwealth.
Royalty has always had a unique power to fascinate, but it is only
with the last two British monarchs that pathos has become an essential
part of that fascination. Very few people envy the Queen for being a
queen: nearly everyone pities her for being also a human being. This
discrepancy between the office and the person hardly existed for, say,
Elizabeth I. With her, royalty was a function of character: she was a ruler
with the power to rule. The character of Elizabeth II is a function of her
royalty: she dramatizes the idea of royalty, and belongs in the class of
things represented by the Unknown Soldier, not in the class of things

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Politics, History, and Society

represented by presidents or premiers.4 The monarch today has become

the exact opposite of the dictator, who stands for personality alone.
Respect paid to a monarch is paid to a symbol of society; respect paid to
a dictator is the narcissism of the mob.
In the Commonwealth, at any rate, we have certainly got over the
notion that royalty is undemocratic. Nobody associates royalty any
more with aristocracy, or even with a privileged class. If it were nothing
more, the Crown would still be a pretty solid obstacle to any British
McCarthy or Malenkov5 trying to weasel his way into dictatorship. But
the Crown is more than that. In an age of neurotic egotism, the Queen is
a centripetal social focus who can still remind us that in some dim and
mysterious way we are all members of one body. In an age of barbaric
rapaciousness and ambition, the Queen stands above all attainable
power, as the honour of wearing the crown is too great to be deserved or
won; it can only be gained by accident. And in an age of social pressure
where everyone feels compelled to assert his loyalty or justify the value
of his services to society, the Queen, being a perfectly ordinary person except for her situation, stands for the simple birthright of human
existence.
When royalty is separated from the class structure of society, it
becomes perhaps the most genuinely popular of all social symbols. The
feelings it represents are part of the deepest faith of our age, a faith in
human brotherhood that would still be treason in Russia and disloyal in
many parts of America. It is unlikely that the present Queen will ever
see India, South Africa, or Egypt more closely united to the British
Crown than they are now. But she may, by simply remaining gentle and
patient under the extravagant attention paid to her, find herself slowly
becoming, in a more catholic sense than has yet been seen, the defender
of the faith.6

47

Oswald Spengler
23 November 1955

Originally broadcast on 23 November 1955 on CBC Radio. The text is from

Architects of Modern Thought, ist ser. (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, 1955), 83-90. Reprinted in RW, 315-25.

In the summer of 1918, when Germany and Austria were just on the
point of collapse, a book appeared called The Decline of the West, by
Oswald Spengler. Oswald Spengler was nobody in particular, which
was a serious handicap in Germany, where scholars are as carefully
ranked as army officers. More accurately, he was a high school teacher
who had thrown up his job in 1910 in order to write, whose health was
so bad he was never called up for war service, and who was so poor he
could hardly buy food and clothes, much less books. So his book had
been refused by all the best publishers, and was brought out in a small
edition. Within a year it was one of the most widely read and discussed
books in Europe, and Spengler began to revise and expand it. In 1923
the final two-volume edition was complete. Three years later it had sold
100,000 copies in German, and an English translation was begun by C.F.
Atkinson and published by Alfred Knopf. It's a big book. One of the
notices of this broadcast said that I was going to "weigh" Oswald
Spengler. Complete, The Decline of the West weighs four and a half
pounds on my bathroom scales.
The Decline of the West is an essay on human history that tries to take a
broader view than the usual one. The usual one is that the Hebrews,
Greeks, and Romans gave us our religion, culture, and law; that the
ancient world became the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages produced the
modern world, and the modern world produced us. Anything outside

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Politics, History, and Society

this isn't really history. China and India had very little to do with producing us: they just produced more Chinese and Indians, so they're not
progressive. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay," as
Tennyson says.1 Spengler thinks it's possible to make the same kind of
distinction in a less provincial way. If we read the history of a great civilization, Spengler says, we read a story that seems to make sense: there
seems to be a shape and meaning in what happens. There are laws of
cause and effect; institutions evolve, classes rise, and conquests expand
in a logical direction. But if we try to write a history of Patagonians or
Zulus or Mongols, all we can produce is just a series of events or incidents. These peoples live and die and reproduce; they trade and think
and fight just as we do; they make poems and pots and buildings. But
somehow we feel that their stories are chronicles or annals, not coherent
histories. If we compare Lapland in the eighteenth century with Lapland
in the thirteenth, there's not much difference, at least in Laplanders. But
if we compare England in the eighteenth century with England in the
thirteenth, we feel that it's five centuries older. The whole nation seems
to be moving with the same kind of inner purpose that an individual
does, through definite stages of what historians themselves call rise,
growth, decline, and fall. We get this sense of directed history in human
life, according to Spengler, when certain developments like those of a
living, maturing, and aging organism take place in it. These developments Spengler calls "cultures," and cultures are much bigger than
nations or empires. England has a history because it belongs to one of
these cultures, the "Western" culture of Europe, which has now expanded over the world.
This Western culture began to grow up a thousand years ago, and
what we call the Middle Ages was its youth or springtime. Society was
then run by nobles and priests; its literature was largely about heroes
and knights errant; its economy was agricultural and feudal; its art,
especially its architecture, largely anonymous. The Renaissance was its
summer; nobles and priests gave way to princes and courtiers, the feudal system to the city-state, anonymous architects to Shakespeare and
Michelangelo. By the end of the eighteenth century, in the poetry of
Goethe, the music of Mozart, the philosophy of Kant, Western culture
reached its autumn and exhausted its creative possibilities. Whatever
comes later in our arts, Spengler says, will be just repeating or living off
what has already been done. With Napoleon and his bid for world
empire Western "culture" becomes Western "civilization," and enters its

Oswald Spengler

267

final winter period. The main interest changes from art to technology,
and we enter a phase of empire-building, huge engineering feats, enormous cities, and finally mass annihilation wars and dictatorships.
We can figure out our cultural age by comparing ourselves with an
earlier culture, as all cultures have roughly the same lifespan. The one
we know best is the Classical culture, which was in its spring at the time
of Homer. Here again we have a society run by nobles and priests,
where literature was heroic and economics feudal and agricultural. The
next stage came with the early philosophers like Heraclitus, on whom
Spengler wrote his doctoral thesis, and with the rise of city-states like
Athens and Sparta. With the great Greek dramas, the philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle and the last glories of Athens, Classical culture gathered in its harvest. Then came Alexander the Great, who corresponds to
Napoleon in our culture. We're about a century later than Napoleon, so
we're about where Classical civilization was around two hundred years
before Christ, when the great empires, Macedonia, Rome, and Carthage,
were fighting for supremacy. What's ahead of us is something like the
Roman Empire. One of our great nations will grow to a world empire
Spengler hopes it will be Germany. Cecil Rhodes the empire builder is
typical, Spengler says, of the kind of Caesars we'll be getting in the next
few centuries. By "the decline of the West," then, Spengler means that
our culture is getting on in years, about where a man is in his late sixties,
still vigorous, but with no more youth ahead of him.
In between the Classical culture and our own was an Arabian or Near
Eastern one. That had its spring in the time of Christ, its summer in the
Byzantine period, and its imperial world-conquering phase began with
Mohammed. This Near Eastern culture is a hard one to identify. Spengler says that's because it grew up under the weight and prestige of the
older Classical culture. It got twisted out of shape and had to express
itself in Classical forms that weren't appropriate to it. Spengler calls this
deforming of a young culture by an old one a pseudomorphosis, or false
formation, and he says another one is going on now. The only young
culture in the world today is the Russian one, which is in its late spring,
or would be if it weren't getting deformed by Western influences. The
first edition of Spengler explains that the West was declining and that
Russia had more of a creative future; the second volume explains that
the Western philosophy of Communism was choking the life out of Russia's natural development. The first edition sold widely in the Soviet
Union; the second volume was banned. Besides these four cultures,

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Spengler names four others, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Central

Americancertainly not an exhaustive list.
The moral of Spengler's book is that most of the great intellects of our
time will be devoting themselves to technology, war, and force-politics.
They'll be Julius Caesars, not Shakespeares. Spengler would like to see
Germany seize its chance for leadership in such a world, the chance that
its superior discipline and organization gives it. Liberalism, parliamentary democracy, pacifism, progress, are all either illusions or ghosts of
the past. Socialism is more in keeping with our time, but whatever
socialism Germany has should be national or Prussian socialism. We can
see that Spengler, as a political thinker, was one of the group of sentimental conservatives among the German intellectuals of the 19205, who
played with such words as nobility, blood, soil, heroism, national destiny, and so on, and who talked so much about being hard and realistic
that they didn't notice they were dreaming. When the Nazis turned up
and announced that they were these dreams come truewhich of
course they werethe intellectuals backed away shuddering. Spengler
greeted the Nazis with a book called The Hour of Decision, in which he
said, naturally in a rather roundabout way, that they were not quite
what he had in mind. He had previously remarked that what Germany
needed was a hero, not a heroic tenorwhich seems mild enough for
Hitler's falsetto screech. The Nazis stopped the sale of his book, and
although he wasn't personally molested, he lived under a cloud until he
died in 1936.
Ever since it appeared, The Decline of the West has been under nearly
continuous attack, and many of the attacks are violent and contemptuous. There has hardly been a time when we haven't been assured, on the
best authority, that Spengler is old hat. The Decline of the West is one of
those books that have always been utterly refuted last Tuesday, but
somehow won't go away. Spengler's book is a vision rather than a
theory or a philosophy, and a vision of haunting imaginative power. Its
truth is the truth of poetry or prophecy, not of science. But it's possible
to get a first-rate vision from a second-rate mind. A good deal of Spengler's mind was second-rate, and he continually misunderstood and misapplied his own thesis. So there are many attacks on him that miss the
real point of his book, but still they're attacks that Spengler really asked
for.
Spengler is often called a fatalisthe is for instance by Toynbee.
Spengler certainly believes that his cultures behave like organisms: they

Oswald Spengler

269

are things that get born, like babies and puppies. Consequently they will
die: that is, they will return sooner or later to the primitive life of mere
events out of which they grew. But that doesn't make Spengler a fatalist,
unless it's fatalism to say that anything that's alive gets older every year.
If a man wants to box or play the violin, how well he will do these things
will depend largely on how old he is when he starts, and the same,
according to Spengler, is true of a culture. On the other hand, most people realize that there's a good deal of sheer chance in history: as Pascal
said, the history of Rome would have been quite different if Cleopatra's
nose had been an inch longer.2 Spengler would say that it would have
been different in its incidents, but not in its underlying form, or what he
calls its destiny. The incidents of a man's life will depend on what job he
takes, what girl he marries, what town he settles in, and much of that
will turn on chance. But nothing will alter the fact that it will be his life.
Then again, some people have believed that history moves in cycles,
and that whatever we do has been done before and will be done again.
This is both an ancient and a modern superstition, and Spengler has
often been scolded for believing in inevitable recurrence of this kind.
But Spengler has no theory of cycles at all: his cultures grow up irregularly, like dandelions.
Most of the objections to Spengler are not to his real arguments, but to
his sound effects. And his sound effects are sometimes pretty hard to
take. He has all the faults of a prophetic style: harsh, dogmatic, prejudiced, certain that history will do exactly what he says, determined to
rub his reader's nose into all the toughness and grimness of his outlook.
He has little humour, but plenty of savage and sardonic wit. And he has
a fine gift for gloomy eloquence. If it were nothing else, The Decline of the
West would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems. He's fond
of murky biological language, like calling man a "splendid beast of
prey,"3 and the imagery is of the Halloween type that we so often find in
German poets and philosophers. That is, it's full of woo-woo noises and
shivery Wagnerian whinnies about the dark goings-on of nature and
destiny.
Then again, he sees everything a culture produces as characteristic of
that culture: in other words as a symbol of it. History consequently
becomes a collection of symbols representing something that can hardly
be expressed in words at all, because the existence of a culture can't
really be proved; it can only be pointed out, and felt or intuited by the
reader, through the arrangement of the symbols. All his cultures are

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presented in terms of some key symbol: his Arabian culture is a cavern

culture, the Russian one a flat-plane culture, and so on. A Canadian
reader, brought up in a more concrete world, is apt to get a bit stuck
when he runs into chapter headings like "Soul-image and Life-feeling"
[DW, vol. i, chap. 9]. Nowadays a good many people will tell you that
there is no meaning whatever in ideas of this kind, and that all you'll get
out of studying them is mildew on the brain. But I myself think that trying to understand Spengler is a fine exercise in intellectual tolerance.
Besides, many of Spengler's virtues spring from these same characteristics. It has been said that he became popular only because Germans
were looking for a philosophy of pessimism to rationalize their defeat. I
don't believe it. When I first read Spengler I was neither a German nor a
pessimist: I was a Canadian undergraduate of a rather hopeful disposition, and I could see then as clearly as I can now what nonsense he could
sometimes talk. Yet I practically slept with Spengler under my pillow for
several years. The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic
patterns that facts made when he threw them together, the sense of the
whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of meall
these made an experience I never expect to duplicate. There is probably
not a statement in Spengler that has not been regarded as scientific
absurdity or mystical balderdash by some critic or other. But Spengler
has the power to expand and exhilarate the mind, as critics of that type
usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of
them are right.
Another misunderstanding of Spengler that Spengler himself fell into
concerns his view of the arts in the modern world. Spengler's whole case
really rests on the evidence of the arts: they're as decisive for his view of
history as the rocks are for geology. For him there is, on the whole, no
difference in value between the arts of a culture's spring, summer, or
autumn. Western poetry from Dante to Goethe, Western painting from
Giotto to Goya, Western music from plain chant to Beethoven, doesn't
get any better or worse: it just gets older. But suddenly he starts to insist
on the inferiority of all art produced in the winter or civilization stage.
The reason for this is that he has his own political axe to grind: he wants
Germany to go in for Prussianism and world conquest, not for music or
philosophy. The age of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the kind of age he
says is ahead of us, was also the age of Virgil and Horace and Ovid.
Spengler doesn't talk about these poets, because they prove that cultures
can produce great poetry much later than they ought to be doing accord-

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271

ing to his charts. Here again Spengler has been his own worst enemy:
the jingoist has corrupted the prophet.
If we're going to attack Spengler's real argument we have to attack his
central assumption, or metaphor, whichever it is. The assumption is that
there are cultures, or huge social developments in history, that behave
like organisms and follow the same rhythm of birth, growth, maturity,
decline, and death that an individual goes through. We don't have to
assume that cultures are organisms, as Spengler himself does, but only
that they behave like organisms. I don't want to argue directly either for
or against Spengler on this point, only to bring up two other considerations that I find very impressiveimpressive enough to make me feel
that Spengler really belongs in a series on makers of modern thought.
In the first place, several other scholars in our time who have tried to
take a universal view of history have finally come up with something
very like Spengler's organic culture. The best known of these scholars is
Toynbee. Toynbee says he was fascinated by Spengler, but thought he'd
do better with a less dogmatic method. Toynbee has twenty-one civilizations against Spengler's eight, and for twenty of them he's quite happy
with Spengler's organic metaphors. They grow to maturity, they decline
into what he calls a "time of troubles," then they form empires and
eventually die out. In his analysis of these late stages I think he has some
improvements on Spengler. But the twenty-first civilization is his own,
and there he balks. Western civilization has just got to be different; he
won't be a fatalist and say that it's going to behave the way the other
twenty have done. In 1939 Toynbee said that it was too early to say
whether we've come to our time of troubles yet or not. Personally, I find
Toynbee's hopes for a last chance more woebegone than Spengler's outright pessimism. We may prefer Toynbee to Spengler, just as we may
prefer a more up-to-date authority to Freud or Marx. But in both its
strength and its weakness, Toynbee's work is a significant tribute to the
originality and power of Spengler, all the more significant for being a
somewhat unwilling tribute.
My second consideration is this: if we look at the thinkers who have
permanently changed the shape of human thought, such as Darwin,
Marx, Freud, or Einstein, we find, naturally, that their books are complex and difficult and require years of study. Yet the central themes of
their work are of massive simplicity. Evolution, class struggle, the subconscious mind, are all things that have been staring mankind in the
face for centuries. It's the ability to see what's straight in front of his

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nose that marks the thinker of first-rate importance. Now what I find
most deeply convincing in Spengler is the fact that everybody really
takes his thesis for granted, even if they've never heard of Spengler,
even if they've read him and hate his guts. Everybody who thinks about
the matter at all thinks in terms of a "Western" culture; everybody
thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody is struck by the difference between us and the Middle Ages and by the similarity between
us and the Roman Empire; everybody assumes that some crucial change
in our fortunes took place around Napoleon's time.
And at that I'm not counting the people who have a sentimental admiration for medieval culture because it represents our own lost youth,
and try to imitate or revive it in our times. Nor do I count the people
who can't listen with pleasure to any music later than Mozart, or whatever terminal they choose. Nor the people who think that everything
produced in the nineteenth century was too awful for words. Nor the
Marxists who talk about the "decadence" of bourgeois culture, nor the
alarmists who talk about a return to a new Dark Ages. Every one of
these has a more or less muddled version of Spengler's argument as his
basis. Whether we are trying to think for ourselves, or whether we are
just repeating whatever catchwords are going around, the decline of the
West is as much a part of our mental outlook as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians today.
Still, we can't help but sympathize with the feeling that Spengler predicts too much.4 Unless a prophet has unusual sources of information,
he's well advised to stick to analysing the present instead of foretelling
the future. And Spengler wraps up too big a parcel when he tries to suggest that his is the last major book that needs to be written. We can perhaps claim for him that he's isolated a most important group of facts in
our time, facts that can only be explained by his book, or some book like
his. If so, he's an essential contributor to modern thought, and it would
be silly to ignore him. It's another thing to claim, as he does, that reading
his book will let us in on what will happen during the next few centuries. Spengler says that Western man is characterized by infinite expansion, which is why Western culture has spread all over the world. But
perhaps something else is happening. Perhaps our science and technology will bring in a new phase of human life, which will supersede the
history of cultures just as the history of cultures superseded the Stone
Age. Perhaps that's the whole point about science: that it's a universal
structure of knowledge that will help mankind to break out of cul-

Oswald Spengler

273

hire-group barriers, and get rid of war by moving into a higher area of
conflict.
Spengler, naturally, thinks this is a pipe dream. He insists that one
culture can't learn from another, and that the people of Asia and Africa
have no interest in our technology except as a means of destroying us.
But Marx is a more effective prophet today in a large part of the world
than Spengler, and I suspect that one reason for this is that Marx emphasizes the uniformity of human nature and conditions all over the world.
Marx has his limitations too, of course, and is just as dangerous to use
for crystal-gazing. In fact many if not most of our greatest thinkers have
become great partly through exaggeration and over-emphasis. They
have thrown their whole weight behind one solid and genuine idea, and
because they are great they are limited, and have to be fitted into a
larger structure than they ever recognized. Spengler is no exception, and
it's nothing against him to say that there are more things still on earth, to
say nothing of heaven, than are dreamt of in Spengler's philosophy.5

48

Preserving Human Values

27 April 1961

Address to the annual meeting of the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan

Toronto, delivered at Eaton Auditorium during Frye's term of office as principal of Victoria College. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file i. Published in RW, 325-33.
I have been wondering what common ground for communication I
could establish with the Social Planning Council and the part of the university with which I am concerned. It is obvious that I should not
attempt to talk as though I knew anything about social work, as you
would see through me in about thirty seconds. I think my best role is
perhaps that of an appreciative audience, sitting back where I can see in
perspective, or think I can see, the importance of what you are doing.
We are often told that we need some sort of statement of what we, in
the democracies, actually believe in; that we need a clearer view of the
axioms and assumptions about the nature of society and about the
nature of man on which we are proceeding. Public figures like the prime
minister say this publicly, but in a general sense we should do better to
clarify our own dogmas, if we have any.
Now it seems to me that there are two ways of approaching the problem of defining one's belief. I might call them the Sunday method and
the Monday method. One way is to draw up a list of impressive and
sonorous statements about human dignity and freedom. These should
be carefully cadenced; they should sound provocative and yet actually
be reassuring, and they should increase our own self-esteem. That is one
way of approaching the problem of beliefto draw up a statement of
what we say we believe in. The other way is to see what our actions

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275

reveal about what we believe. Our actions do show what our actual
beliefs are, sometimes against our will. A man may go to church on Sunday morning and find himself repeating an extremely impressive statement of what he believes in, but by Monday evening he may have
demonstrated that his real conception of human society is a very different one. I wonder, therefore, what the axioms and assumptions are,
which are evident by what we are doing, and in particular by what a
group of people devoted to social welfare is doing.
We find ourselves of course in a context of a world pressed between
two major philosophies in politics, and the propaganda statement of
each side leads to a complete deadlock. One side says the world is
divided between the democratic and the totalitarian state, and the other
side says it is divided between the socialist state and the tools of capitalist imperialism. We can get no further on that basis. We do not feel particularly as though we belong to a capitalist economyat least it is not
something that presses in on our conscience. And similarly, Russia and
China have no conception in their own mind corresponding to the word
"totalitarian." I think if the Russians, let us say, were not issuing propaganda statements, they would say that they were not living in a socialist state; that they were living through a proletarian revolution which
is trying to become a socialist state. And we, I think, might very well
say, not that we are living in a democracy, but that we are living in
something much more like a bourgeois oligarchy trying to become a
democracy.
In other words, our society, like theirs, is a society in a state of process, and it is a revolutionary state proceeding towards a goal which is
in part an idealthat is, we shall not realize all of it. As such, therefore,
democracy is not to be judged by what it does but by what it aims at in
spite of what it does. Certain principles such as the supremacy of civil
over military power, the publication of all acts of government, and the
toleration of unpopular opinion, are still principles of democracy no
matter how often they may be flouted.
I am sorry to see this sense of revolution declining in North American
society, as I think to some extent it is. It seems to me that the United
States has much less of a sense of an open class society than it had a century ago. As we can see from the career of President Kennedy,1 American presidents no longer have to take the precaution to get themselves
born in log cabins.
I was a little shocked a day or so ago to find that some of my stu-

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Politics, History, and Society

dents, after they had finished their exams, were slipping down to the
Royal York and taking strike-breaking jobs down there. For a person
who lived through the Depression, as I did, that seemed a very strange
procedure on the part of students. And yet I have to remember that their
generation has been brought up to think of labour unions as really just
one more racket, and as something to be associated with someone like
Hoffa2 rather than with any kind of social cause. And I feel for example
that if such an organization as the American Senate Committee on
Un-American Activities were called, for example, a committee on
"Counter-Revolutionary Activities," what it did would perhaps be no
less of an affront to human decency, but at least it would make more
sense from its own point of view, and perhaps it would be less inspired
to do infallibly everything that the enemies of America would want to
see it do.
I imagine that our ultimate goals are not very different from those of
our Communist rivals. I imagine that a classless society, a withering
away of the state, are our own ideals as well. For democracy, if it is a
goal and in part an ideal, is not a system of government like a republic or
a monarchy. If the United States were to adopt a Soviet system, or if it
were to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth as its Queen (as the Americans do in Bernard Shaw's play The Apple Cart), that might be an undesirable move, but it would not be in itself a threat to democracy. It will
be too bad, I think, if democracy suffers from a sense of fixation about its
own political machinery. It is possible that voting on grossly oversimplified issues for candidates who are controlled by political machines
rather than by their electors may be something that in time to come we
shall decide is a bit expendable. The rise of social sciences and the proliferation of the civil service may mean that much in our political system
might prove an anachronism in time to come.
We should do better, I think, to think of ourselves as moving in a certain direction, a direction that I should characterize as a gradual dissolving of classes, a moving toward a society in which class barriers or class
distinctions have, as far as is humanly possible, disappeared. In doing
that, we shall discover many new important and exciting social facts.
When we discover that we do not need an aristocracy we shall discover
who our real aristocracy are. Our real aristocracy, of course, are the children. They are the ones who are entitled to leisure, to privilege, to
expensive playgrounds, and to be supported by the rest of society. Any
of you who have handed a tip to a taxi driver have probably felt that you

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277

are engaged in a social ritual which is both embarrassing to you and

humiliating to the taxi driver. The reason is that what you do when you
hand the tip over is to dramatize a social situation, the relationship of a
gentleman to a flunky which society is trying to outgrow.
One of the great difficulties in trying to express the ideals and axioms
of our society is that many of our ideas are of religious origin. They
come from the Judaeo-Christian tradition with which most of us have
some connection. Perhaps they are not fully intelligible outside their
religious context, though many of them have become secularized. In
Christianity at any rate, there has always been a curious yeasty and fermenting radicalism which has survived centuries of feudalism and
enlightened despots, and perhaps is really beginning to work itself out
in our own day. In this religious origin of many of our important ideas,
one of the most significant is the word "charity." Charity in its original
context in Christianity means primarily God's love for man. And it
includes many other conceptions, one of them being the conception that
no human being is inherently better than any other human being. It may
seem self-evident to say that a saint is a better man than a sinner, otherwise the word "better" would have no meaning, but the saint himself is
very unlikely to hold such a view.
And this view of charity, that no human being is inherently better
than another human being, is the basis, I think, of the conception of
equality in which our society has invested many of its ideals. Whenever
this conception of equality is denied, as it was denied in Nazi Germany
with the Jews and in South Africa today, we know that something has
settled into society which corresponds to cancer in the individual.3 And
it is a very curious fact for anyone interested in the history of words to
see how the word "charity" finally degenerated to the point at which it
became a class word. It meant giving handouts to the less privileged, to
keep them from feeling too restless, and perhaps to coax out of them a
certain amount of gratitude. Charity in this sense is of course not an
activity that any grown man or woman today would care to indulge in,
but it does indicate how much of our own society is permeated with the
vestiges of class notions. I remember speaking with a primary teacher a
while ago who taught children from three areasone normal middle-class, one lower middle-class, and one underprivileged. She was
applying some intelligence and vocabulary recognition tests to her children, and one of the words they were expected to recognize was the
word "gown." The middle-class group said that a gown was what

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Politics, History, and Society

mummy wore when she went to a party; the lower middle-class group
said it was what mummy wore when she went to bed; and the underprivileged group had never heard of the word at all. In other words,
what purported to be a test of intelligence was actually a test of the
father's social status. This kind of relentless self-examination to see
when we are actually falling back on class ideas instead of on democratic ones is a part of the difficulty of our lives.
I should define the conception of equality, I think, rather differently,
as the conviction that a social function is essential to every human
being's life, and that to deprive any individual of a social function is a
kind of murder. The white segregationist who spits on a Negro carrying
an antisegregation placard is of course being as silly and perverse as he
can be, as he very well knows. But I think that that is a less deadly insult
to human dignity than unemployment, that faceless, anonymous,
refusal to find any social function for an individual. It is a less deadly
insult than the black night that settles down on the elderly and the
retired when they are face to face with the fact that there is no longer
anything in society for which their contribution is of any importance. An
individual deprived of his social function is like an animal so mutilated
that he can only crawl away to die, and the assumption behind all efforts
at relief is the assumption that society has failed in its primary duty and
must fall back on some kind of secondary first aid.
If a social system such as Communism can achieve success in giving a
social function to large groups of people who did not have it, what more
is needed? We say perhaps that the system would lack liberty. A totalitarian society may perhaps be reminded that it can pursue equality to
the point of forgetting about liberty. A society like ours can be reminded
that we can pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality. But
the conception of liberty is by no means a simple one. If we think of
some of the things that we are proudest of in our society over the last
century we notice that they are things which seem to curtail individual
freedom. The advance of science, for example, has brought about measures in public health of which we thoroughly approve but which certainly do curtail, in many respects, the range and variety of human
freedom. It has brought people into a closer organization and has made
them more readily marked and identifiable. Compulsory education
again, the assumption that everybody under sixteen who is not in school
on Monday morning is a truant, is a very considerable infringement on
what we ordinarily think of as human freedom, though we have other

Preserving Human Values

279

reasons for approving of it. And social welfare itself may place many
restrictions on personal freedom on the part of many people, as some of
you may have noticed while making out your income tax recently.
Now here again there seems to be a notion, of religious origin, of
some kind of paradox in the view of the human self. We seem to be
caught in a contradictory statement. In religion the human soul is of infinite worth and it is immortal; and yet the same religion seems to take
a very dim view of human nature. It talks about original sin and says
that man's efforts are worth very little. Similarly, democracy was
not founded on any maudlin enthusiasm for the common man. It was
founded on the belief in something very like the depravity of man; that
is, it was founded on the belief that serious matters like the kingdom,
the power, and the glory, are something that men are not fit to be
trusted with. The doctrine that man is by nature good is a doctrine that
does not lead to a very good-natured view of man. A rather sardonic
humour, a conviction that many of the people who serve it are probably
scoundrels, is one of the more reassuring features of North American
life, and it seems to be a view of human nature essential to a society that
gives a primary place to criticism and reform.
Religion has always taught that man has two selves. There is the selfish self which is worth very little and which we try to get rid of, and
then there is the genuine self, the soul that we are trying to save in religion. We feel a similar division, I think, in the secular world. If you do
casework you are aware that every human being is a "case," that his
dilemmas and problems are of a type that you have met beforepeople
even fall mentally ill in highly conventional ways. Yet at the same time
you are equally well aware that no human being is really a "case" and
that every human problem is unique. Similarly in society we have a conception of an ordinary self, the economic man, the man whose behaviour is statistically predictable, the Status Seeker, the inevitable target of
the Wastemakers and Hidden Persuaders,4 a man who is gregarious but
not friendly, who lives apart from his neighbour in a state of spiritual
isolation. This aggressive or acquisitive man is a man who seems to
have very little dignity, and whose freedom hardly seems to be worth
preserving. He is the cornerstone of laissez-faire; he has nothing to do
with liberalism, for all our political parties are now running away from
laissez-faire and they differ among themselves only in their estimate of
how fast and how far they can run.
The conception of freedom, therefore, must apply to a very different

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Politics, History, and Society

conception of the self. I should define freedom as the power to do what

one has learned to do. I do not see that the conception of freedom makes
any sense at all without the learning of a discipline. Until one has
learned music, one is not free to express oneself musically. Until one has
learned to walk, one is not free to move.
I have spoken of liberty and equality. The French revolution had a
third idealthe ideal of fraternity, and fraternity has to do, I suppose,
with the sense of identity which is really a part of the sense of a social
functionthe sense of identity which gives you a nationality, a religion,
a political affiliation, and which may take perverted forms like the delinquent gang.
It seems to me that the genuine fraternity, the genuine social group, is
a group united by some kind of common knowledge or skill. There has
been a good deal of talk about the possibility of replacing a class by an
elite, but I cannot imagine the society of the future producing just one
elite. Anybody who has any social function at all will think of his particular job as central to society, as something on which society as a whole
turns, and in that sense every group of people with a social function
belongs to an elite. This sense of a central focus of knowledge or skill as
something which creates a community can be observed from the very
earliest time. A while ago, I saw a comic strip that I thought had made
an extremely shrewd point. It depicted two children in kindergarten out
for recess. A plane passes overhead. One of them says it is a jet, the other
says it isn't, and there follows a long and quite technical discussion of
the difference between jets and piston engines. Then the bell rings and
one of them says to the other, "Come on, Mike, we got to go back and
string them beads."
Now, that to my mind dramatizes a very important and central fact
about the learning process. I have often thought that the really scholarly
instincts we try to develop in our Ph.D. students are much more clearly
realized in, for example, teenage girls discussing movie stars. They use
documents, they compare authorities, they trace sources and influences,
and their knowledge is in every sense of the term scholarly. Some time
ago when I was visiting an American university I was walking along the
street with my hostess who was complaining about the way in which
one's intellectual life seemed to be lost after one had graduated from
university. She then met another lady and said, "Good morning, Mrs.
Smith," and Mrs. Smith said, "You know how I think I could have made
that no-trump bid last night?" Now there is the continuance of a certain

Preserving Human Values

281

intensity of mental processes, not perhaps in a very socially productive

form; but that is one example of a community being created around an
impersonal knowledge and skill. And I remember also talking to a thirteen-year-old boy about baseball and trying to amuse him by telling him
James Thurber's wonderful story of the losing team that put in a midget
at bat because of the unusual difficulties that the pitcher would have in
getting a strike on him.5 He listened for a few seconds and then said,
"Yeah, that happened in a game between Oklahoma and Arkansas on
June 13,1906." I don't guarantee that those dates are accurate but I guarantee that his were. And this is the kind of intellectual keenness which
we struggle for in more productive ways in the university, and that is
the form in which these true communities begin to take shape. A community of interest like this is one which demands a certain playing
down of the acquisitive or aggressive self. A man cannot join a profession without making some gesture such as the Hippocratic oath in medicine, putting the interest of his profession above his own interests.
Pursued far enough, these things that are focuses of a community are,
in their genuine form, the sciences and the arts. That is, the visions of
reality and of imagination; for science is the vision of the world as it is,
and art is the vision of the world that man wants to build. Religion tells
us that there are two worldsone visible and one invisibleand that
the invisible one is the one that makes sense. And similarly you must
have felt in your own work that there were two Torontos in your
mindthe one in front of you, and the invisible one, the clean, free, and
happy city which you were struggling to realize in all that you did. That
was the Toronto that made sense, and that was the one that you were
determined was going to come into being.
We feel sometimes discouraged when we find ourselves up against a
human nature which apparently can never be improved. But there is no
such thing as human nature in the abstract. Human nature is always to
be found in social contacts, and those social contacts can be improved.
Man's nature is expressed in man's institutions, and it is not his nature
but his destiny that may be good.

49

The War in Vietnam

1967

Reply to a questionnaire, Authors Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions

on the War in Vietnam Answered by the Authors of Several Nations, ed.
Cecil Woolfand John Bagguley (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 35.

I am strongly against the war in Vietnam, which is being waged with a

brutality justified only by a "they do it too" type of argument, and
which makes America's role in the Nuremberg trials twenty years ago
the most miserable hypocrisy.1 It is a genocidal war, one which the
Americans cannot win, and which they keep on fighting only because of
some obsession about face-saving. Its public support is simply the result
of the bloodshed itself, i.e., it is very difficult to accept the fact that one's
fellow countrymen are dying for nothing.
I think the conflict should be resolved by a planned series of strategic
withdrawals with the final objective of getting out of Southeast Asia and
reverting to the Monroe Doctrine.2 The reason for gradual withdrawal
would be to try to build up some of the social infrastructures that would
enable Vietnam to survive as a democracy. The notion that Vietnam
would inevitably go Communist if there were any withdrawal at all is
not necessarily true: the examples of Malaysia and Indonesia indicate
that social movements are more complicated in that part of the world
than public opinion thinks. In any case, the continued presence of an
American army in South Vietnam is a continuous source of demoralization, and the propping up of a corrupt and unpopular regime, as the
example of Chiang Kai-shek ought to have shown long ago, will only
make a Communist takeover eventually inevitable, far more bloody
when it occurs, and much more aggressive and imperialistic in its mood
when it does come.

50

The Two Contexts

1968

From Probings: A Collection of Essays Contributed to the Canadian

Mental Health Association for Its Golden Jubilee, 1918-68 (Toronto:
Canadian Mental Health Association, 1968), 38. On 16 May 1968, Frye was
invited by Leonard Crainford, publisher to the association, to participate in a
"fiftieth anniversary party . . . held in print rather than in person." Frye's
deadline was 29 June and his word limit three hundred words; no payment
would be made. Faced with such an unrefusable offer, he replied with this 359word essay on 20 June.
There are two contexts in which the question of mental health exists,
and they are directly opposite to one another. The first is the therapeutic
context. Here society is the norm, and the individual suffers from some
psychic disability that prevents his full social functioning. All forms of
mental illness, including the schizophrenic and the manic-depressive,
come under this category, and their antisocial actions range from committing suicide to murdering public figures.
In the other context, society as a whole is sick and paranoid, and mental health can be attained only by the individual as a result of some
detachment from the hysteria around him.1 Some societies, like Nazi
Germany, are more obviously insane than others, and some are more
obviously controlled and manipulated than others. But the same principle, that the mob is always insane and that only the individual can be
sane, is always present.
Society itself, of course, cannot distinguish the mentally sick person
from the healthy person who repudiates its own sickness. The psychiatrist, the clergyman, and all those concerned with education, have to
keep in mind the double focus. Frequently individual detachment and

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Politics, History, and Society

neurosis are found in the same person, and many forms of rejection of
social values have themselves their neurotic aspects. Those concerned
with mental health have to be both healers and social critics, just as
architects have to be concerned both with individual buildings and with
much larger issues of technological planning.

51

The Quality of Life in the '705

14 February 1971

From University of Toronto Graduate, 3, no. 5 (June 1971): 38-48.

Reprinted in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times, ed. Hugh A. Stevenson et al. (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 33-41. Also reprinted
in RW, 349-62. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 4, files e,f, and g. Frye gave
his talk at Seminar '71, an event sponsored by the University of Toronto
Alumni Association.
As the 19705 have only started, I suppose this is an exercise in prophecy.
A good deal has been written about the future in recent years, and a
most unpleasant word to describe such writing, futurology, has been
invented. A book of essays on this subject was sent me a while ago. The
first thing I noticed about it was that it was dated 1971, although it was
published in November 1970. The next thing I noticed was that the editor was born in 1940. On the first page the book said, "The world of, say,
1950, if we came upon it today, would seem a quaint exhibition in a
museum or perhaps even a flea market." That remark put in their place
all readers of my age, for whom the world of 1950 is practically last
Tuesday. The next sentence said that a book the editor had published
back in 1968 "already feels a long, long time ago." I turned over the first
page of this patriarchal youth's prose, and he was saying that the old left
and right wing categories for classifying people's political attitudes
were out of date. "If we are to use dichotomies," he said, "it now seems
more valid to divide thinkers into backward-lookers and forward-lookersrespectively, those who regard present life as similar to the past...
and those who see today as radically different."
Well, to begin with, there is no such thing as a forward-looking per-

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Politics, History, and Society

son.1 That is a metaphor from car-driving, and it applies to space but not
to time. In time we all face the past, and are dragged backwards into the
future. Nobody knows the future: it isn't there to be known. The past is
what we know, and it is all that we know. Those concerned with prediction and forecasting, like statisticians, can deal with the future only as
the analogy of the past. Some people, of course, are more receptive to
social change than others, but when it comes to "regarding present life
as similar to the past," we are all in precisely the same boat. Further, all
of us, to some extent, fear and hate change, at least the changes that are
going to affect us. The most ferocious of radicals can only keep going as
long as he can live in the relatively stable society created by his radicalism: the society of those who agree with him and support his views.
Whatever else he wants to change, he never wants to change that.
The prophet, therefore, is not a person who foretells the future, but the
person who tries to get some insight into the present through his knowledge of the past. As such, he has two main functions. One is to warn of
approaching disaster if certain lines of conduct are persisted in. This is
not my main concern now, because warning is already one of the verbal
heavy industries of our time. Everybody likes to warn, from terrorists to
the people who put up signs on highways reading "Prepare to meet thy
God" or "Watch for falling rock." The other function of prophecy is to
point out the opportunities available for a better life, to say, not what is
likely to happen, but what could happen. It is this aspect of the future
that I want to stress, but, of course, I have to start with the immediate
past, the world of the late 19605.
It struck me that the confident, get-with-it tone of the book I have
quoted contained an undercurrent of hysteria, and that it was a hysteria
I had heard before. I am old enough to remember the newspapers of the
spring and summer months of 1929, and how they said that very soon
the world, or the United States leading the world, would have abolished
poverty, distributed income and purchasing power, provided a final
answer to socialism, turned every citizen into a profit-making investor,
and got to Utopia by express. There has been quite a market recently for
books about the technological advances we may expect between now
and the year 2000: the ones I have seen have mostly taken a fullspeed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes line. But few if any of them
seemed to realize that this attitude was a by-product of a boom period in
the economy. Society tends to move from one plateau to another, periods of rapid change being followed by periods of consolidation. My

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287

guess is that the 19603 were a period of advance, notably in the technique of communication, and that the 19705, which begin with inflation,
unemployment, and depression, will be a period of some retrenchment.
Whether this is so or not, I can at any rate state my first principle,
which is that the future which may be technically possible is not the
future that society can absorb. In science and technology there is a good
deal of automatic advance: one discovery leads to another, and when
any given form of technology has a clear field to develop, it can do so
with extraordinary speed. Technology can improve the efficiency of
aeroplanes to a degree that outstrips the wildest dreams with which it
began. But no sooner has it done so than airline companies go broke, airports get clogged up, citizens complain about sonic-boom noise, and
terrorists develop a taste for free rides to Cuba.
Over a century ago, Karl Marx said that history, up to his time, had
shown a consistent pattern of one class exploiting another, but that industrial production had introduced a revolutionary process into history, and
that this was creating contradictions within the class structure of capitalism. We could not both have industrial production and go on playing the
same old exploiting game. So there was really a double revolutionary
process, one the development of production on an industrial basis, the
other the gaining of power over this production by society as a whole. A
generation ago, we were still arguing this point on the same assumptions.
Everybody agreed that industrial production was a revolutionary force;
everybody assumed that this force could only function by being united to
a certain kind of social system. The left wing argued that socialism was
the only possible form of this system; the right wing argued the opposite,
that leaving a good many things to private enterprise was the best way of
keeping society flexible. Neither side questioned the work ethic of production itself; both assumed that the increasing of its efficiency was the
essential function of any social system.
After 1917, the Marxist side of this argument turned increasingly to
rationalizing everything that was happening in the Soviet Union. For
the past twenty years or so it has been fairly obvious that Soviet society
is a more conservative one than ours, and so most Marxist rhetoric has
shifted its ground to China, where the present is less known and the
future less predictable. It has become clearer, nevertheless, that the
advance of knowledge, along with the technological breakthroughs
which accompany it, is the only revolutionary force of our time, and that
changing the economic system, whatever arguments there may other-

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Politics, History, and Society

wise be for it, is not an inseparable part of this revolution. The main
function of all economic systems whatever is to put brakes on social
change, to cushion society against too much of what is now being called
future shock.2 Capitalist and Communist societies have their rigidities
and inflexibilities in different places, but they both have them, and have
them for the same purpose. That is why all governments have such a
curious sense of priorities: why atom bombs and moon landings play so
large a role in the budgets of major powers. Such things are part of the
Great International Handicap: the tacit agreement not to rush too far or
too fast into the future.
The people who find the revolutionary mood of the late 19605 hardest
to understand, I should think, are the old-line Marxists. Old-line Marxism was directed toward an end: it saw everything that happened as
part of a step by step advance toward a revolution that would put an
end to history as we have known it. Those who accepted the Marxist
analysis felt that it gave them a tremendous insight into the reality of
what was happening. All events were, in their deeper meaning, symbols
of the progress towards the final takeover. And, as Marxism regarded
theory and practice as inseparable, this analysis also gave a new meaning to the lives of those who adopted it: it gave historical significance to
every strike, every demonstration, even every committee meeting they
attended.
Contemporary radicalism may use, as it often does, the same arguments, the same Marxist jargon, the same tactics, the same violent
denunciations of the evils of capitalism. But, even when it calls itself
Maoist or Trotskyist, it is really an anarchism that no longer identifies
revolution with seizing control of production. There have always been
two kinds of anarchists, the peaceful kind and the violent kind. Violent
anarchism does not want to take over production so much as to smash
and sabotage it. Its tactics have the plausibility of the argument that the
one really effective way to stop a car is to aim it at a tree. The more
thoughtful anarchists differ in tactics, but not in ultimate aims. The tendency of technical change is towards greater centralization, and anarchism is a decentralizing mode of thought. It is in the long run a doctrine
of organizing society so as to provide for the greatest possible amount of
stability and the slowest possible rate of change.
To understand this mood, we have to remember that it is really, from
its own point of view, counteranarchist. The really anarchic force, it
feels, is the productive machinery itself, which has got out of control of

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society and has become autonomous, or is acting as though it were.

Government, it feels, is a sorcerer's apprentice compelled to stand helplessly by while all the technology of war rolls into Vietnam, because it
has to go somewhere. The United States, it feels, is the worst country in
the world, precisely because it is the most efficient and productive country in the world.
We should not condemn this view without realizing how much of it
the most conservative among us share. For instance: capitalism produces automobiles; then it mass-produces automobiles; then it saturates
the country with automobiles; then it chokes the landscape with tenlane highways, clover-leaf intersections, parking lots, used-car lots; it
develops enormous police forces to cope with the resulting chaos; it kills
hundreds of people every holiday weekend; all over the land the
incense of tons of carbon monoxide rolls upward to the nostrils of its
stinking and murderous god. Perhaps we should control the production
a little, but that would wreck the economy: what's good for General
Motors is good for the country,3 and the production must go on and on
and on. The Spadina Expressway must be built in Toronto.4 All reason
and evidence seem unanimous that this expressway was a bad thing to
have started and a worse thing to try to finish. But what are reason and
evidence against a compulsion neurosis? All such projects cut down the
amount of taxable land: this means a harder squeeze on universities,
schools, churches, libraries, and everything else at all likely to improve
the quality of life in the 19705. It doesn't matter: you can't stop progress.
If I wanted a single phrase to characterize the late 19605,1 should call
it the age of undirected revolution. There have been all kinds of revolutionary movements, of blacks, of women, of students, of unions, of any
group whatever that can work out an argument to distinguish itself
from the "establishment." Many of these movements have been split by
internal dissensions before they could get off the ground. But many of
them did not really care about getting off the ground: their motives cannot be interpreted by the old revolutionary standard of seizing power.
These outbreaks now seem to be giving place to a more serious commitment to such things as pollution and population control, but the principle remains the same. We can no longer assume that the automatic
production of anything, even human beings, is necessarily a good thing.
Production has to meet certain moral criteria first, to answer questions
about its relation to animals and plants, to pure air and water, to housing and town planning, to the landscape and historical landmarks, to

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the balance of human society itself. I imagine that the 19705 will be
deeply concerned with these moral criteria of production.
The 19605 were also a period of becoming adjusted to new techniques
of communication, more particularly the electronic ones. It was the
McLuhan age, the age of intense preoccupation with the effect of communications on society, and with the aspect of life that we call news.
Many of the worst features of the late '6os, its extravagant silliness, its
orgies of lying, its pointless terrorism and repression, revolved around
the television set and the cult of the "image." So the nature of news is the
next thing we ought to look at. I was recently reading the report of the
Senate's committee on the mass media, and came across, in the third volume, the stock question: why do the papers, and news media generally,
seem to report only bad news?5 This is, as I say, a familiar, even a
tedious question, but it raises more interesting ones, two in particular.
First, what is it that is really happening? Second, what is it that the news
media are really set up to record? I shall try to deal with the second
question first.
The greater part of our lives consists of continuity and routine. As
long as the continuity and routine are functioning, we are living in a
world of non-news. As the Senate report remarked, it is not news if the
Air Canada flight from Vancouver arrives on time with everyone safe.
News is whatever breaks into routine, and such news is of two main
kinds: events and issues. Events, things that cut across routine, are very
often the result of a breakdown in routine. That is why so large a proportion of news events are disasters, and why all disaster is news. The issue
operates in the same way. Intellectually, we go on with our mental routines, repeating our ideas and prejudices as long as we meet with no
opposition. The issue breaks into this by dramatizing opposition: everybody has to line up on one side or other of an issue. The fact that in the
mental life only the confronting issue is news is the reason for the pious
devotion of newspapers and other media to anything called "controversial." Now this polarizing of attitude, lining everybody up on one side
or the other, is also what revolutionary strategy aims at doing. Thus the
news media also have, already built into them, as a necessity of their
existence, the quality of undirected revolution. The emphasis on "confrontation" and similar words, the obsession with the discontinuous and
unstructured, the tendency to argue automatically that whatever one
disagreed with was "out of date," show how the anarchism and the preoccupation with media in the late 19605 were aspects of the same thing.

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Revolution without direction bears a close resemblance to war. Two

wars in succeeding generations devastated the twentieth century, and
we appear to be getting the violence of the generation following as a
kind of substitute for a third one. If so, then however bad it may be we
are lucky to be getting it instead of starting where Hiroshima left off.
William James said that we needed a moral equivalent of war,6 and we
may actually have begun to find such an equivalent, if hardly of the type
he had in mind. The atmosphere of the later 19605 resembled a wartime
period in many ways. There was the same projection of an "enemy." In
wartime we know very well that the "enemy" consists of people like
ourselves, but we suppress this awareness: to fight a war we must
assume that our "enemy" is antihuman. In our day the attitude toward
the "establishment" on the one side, and to the "long hairs" or what not
on the other, have the same paranoid quality: both sides wish to forget
that these "enemies" are part of their own community, and that they
cannot eliminate them without eliminating themselves as well. Then
again, in wartime there is an irritable postponing of all serious or complex issues until after the war has been "won." In war we are not concerned with thinking of what we are doing: what we have to do is
generate enough emotional heat to keep on fighting.
Heat is generated by a deliberate creation of hysteria, which takes
such forms as violent language, a constant suppression of dissent,
shouting slogans, breaking up meetings, invoking emergency measures
to get rid of troublemakers, and so on. Again, the psychosis of war takes
a manic-depressive shape: the horror of the war itself is compensated
for by fantasies about all the wonderful things we can do after we win it.
In our day the manic phase is represented by, let us say, the "revolution
is fun" thesis of the Yippies and by President Nixon's remark that the
moon landing of 1969 was the greatest event since the creation.7 Well, of
course, revolution, like wife-beating, may be fun for some people, and
perhaps the moon landing was the greatest event since the creation if
you forget a good deal of what happened in between, such as the fall of
man. But such moods are quickly succeeded by depressive ones, an
administration grousing glumly about permissiveness, radicals retreating into phases of "re-examination" and wondering whether their hopes
and ideals have any substance at all. The large scale of self-destructive
activities in the younger generation also has an analogy to the casualty
lists of wartime.
It is seldom that I risk a prediction about the future, but I did say, in a

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paper given in the fall of 1968, that while nothing seemed less likely then
than a return to the introspection of the Eisenhower period, I was convinced that such a return was just around the corner. At the moment we
appear to have turned such a corner: of course the mood may change
again overnight, but it may be worth mentioning my reasons for making
the statement. In the first place, technological developments during the
last two decades have tended towards greater introversion. The passenger aeroplane is more introverted than the train, the high-rise apartment
more introverted than the bungalow suburb, the television set more
introverted than the neighbourhood movie, and so on. Similarly, much
radical opposition to the social ethos has taken intensely introverted
forms. The drug cults are an obvious example: rock music, which wraps
up its listeners in a completely insulating cloak of noise, is another. But
such things differ very little from the mood of society as a whole. A few
years ago the magic word which explained everything that was going on
was the word "subculture," but I doubt if there really is such a thing as a
subculture: everything the word describes has its equivalent in, or is
taken up by, the rest of society. Recently, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, with which I have a connection,8 has been trying to
impose standards of Canadian content on broadcasters. I expected many
broadcasters to be opposed to these regulations: what surprised me much
more was the howl of protest from so many viewers, many of whom said,
very explicitly, that it was part of the inalienable and God-given birthright of every free-born Canadian to listen to all the American programs
he could get his hands on. A broadcaster made a remark at a recent hearing which seemed to me to throw some light on this. The viewer, he said,
is an addict. He keeps twisting the dial until he gets his fix: then he's
happy. There is much more to be said about viewers than this, but it is
true that for many people television constitutes a socially acceptable form
of drug culture. Similarly in other areas. The newspapers express a good
deal of indignation about Rochdale,9 but I should imagine that most of the
conditions complained of therethe litter, the drugs, the sexual promiscuity, the petty delinquenciescould be duplicated in a good many university residences, male or female. What has happened, I think, is a
considerable decline in the capacity for community living. Perhaps the
hippies will be bellwethers here, as they have been before. A few years
ago it was they who led the cult of doing one's own thing, but now they
are turning increasingly to communes and social settlements, rather like
the Utopian projects of the nineteenth century.

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This introversion is connected with one of the central problems of our

time, the fragmenting of the social vision. The reason for the fragmenting is a perverted notion of freedom. Introversion always thinks of freedom as what the individual wants to do. What he does, in this view, is
what he wants to do minus what society will stop him doing, and the
freer the society, the fewer restraints it imposes. Society is thus considered to be the antithesis of the individual, an external authority, an
"establishment," a father-figure to be destroyed. Such a view of freedom
is, of course, wrong side out. The individual as such is entirely incapable
of freedom: he wants to do what he likes, which means that he wants to
obey a series of internal compulsions. Man is primarily and essentially
social: he belongs to something before he is anything, before he is even
born. Whatever individuality he may have strikes its roots into his social
context and flowers out of it. His freedom is his own adaptation of his
society's freedom, and if one society is freer than another, it is so mainly
because of the amount of criticism it permits. But if such criticism is genuinely free, loyalty to the society, to the community as a whole, is its
premise. If things are wrong in society, it does not follow that society as
a whole is corrupt: what follows is that if criticism can be expressed,
society has, to that extent, some strength and flexibility, and consequently is worth loyalty.
It may be difficult for many to feel loyalty to the community as a
whole, even among those who can distinguish the real community from
its "establishment," because the tendency of a mechanically overproductive society is to alienate more and more groups of people from it.
To function at top capacity, it needs to turn as many people as possible
into full-time consumers. Hence it alienates women by trying to turn
them all into consumers whose lives are a continuous round of shopping and buying. It needs to keep large groups of people off the labour
market: hence it alienates young people, whom it keeps in a limbo of
adolescence, forcing them to walk a treadmill of "education" that deprives them of all real social function. Again, it needs to have large
pockets of cheaper labour, and so alienates black and other "third
world" elements, whom it wishes to retain in a subordinate social role.
For the 19705, it may be too much to hope for concern without panic,
but we may reasonably hope for less panic and more genuine concern. I
imagine that we shall have contained television by then, and become
less obsessed with the impact of instant news. If so, we may be released,
to some degree, from the tyranny of the issue, the constant polarizing of

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opinion, the constant vociferating of pro and con views. Nothing deteriorates the character more quickly than the deliberate telling of
half-truths, where each side tries to expose the lies on the other side and
suppress the lies on its own, to denounce evils in some parts of the
world and overlook the same evils elsewhere, to put its case by shouting
down the opponent or calling the police to jail him. This is merely
another kind of drug culture: it may be exhilarating at the time, but its
only permanent result is hangover. The hangover in this case consists of
a facile and self-pitying sense of alienation.
Through all the confusion and violence of the late 19605, the thing that
anarchism most wants, the decentralizing of power and influence, has
been steadily growing. It will continue to grow through the 19705, I
think, in many areas. For example, the possibilities of cable for breaking
into the monologue of communication and giving the local community
some articulateness and sense of coherence are enormous. And as real
decentralizing grows and we get nearer to what is called participatory
democracy, the false forms of it, separatism, neo-fascism, the jockeying
of pressure groups, and all the other things that fragment the social
vision instead of diversifying it, will, I hope, begin to break off from it.
I said before that the question of what is news raises another question:
what is it that really happens? I said too that most of our lives is spent in
repetition and routine, the world of non-news. But there are two kinds
of repetition. There is the repetition of ordinary habit, three meals a day,
going to the job, driving the car, and all the continuous activities that
preserve our sense of identity. There is also the repetition of practice, as
when we learn to play the piano or memorize the alphabet or the multiplication table. This is directed and progressive repetition, and it is the
basis of all education. The ability to think is just as much a matter of
habit and practice as the ability to play the piano. Whenever anything
that we see, or pick up in conversation, or get as an idea, is added to and
becomes a part of an expanding body of experience, we are continuing
our education. In that sense we may say that nothing is really happening
in the world except the education of the people in it. The news gives us
another aspect of what is happening, what I called a vertical cross-section of it. But the world the news gives us changes with bewildering
rapidity, and we can never understand why it is changing from the
news alone. We can only understand that through the continuous and
structured forms of apprehension, the forms of the arts and sciences.
Education, then, is not a preparation for real life: it is the encounter with

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real life, and the only way in which reality can be grasped at all. Production in society is the result of technological developments; technological
developments are the result of the advance of knowledge. The advance
of knowledge is what is really happening in the world, and the more we
direct our attention to it the more real our lives become.
I speak of the advance of knowledge, which relates mostly to science,
but of course I have a special interest in literature and the arts, whose
function is to intensify experience rather than advance it. The dominance of communication media in the 19605 tended to assimilate painting, music, and literature, especially drama, to the news. They all took
the form of a sequence of movements or vogues appearing and disappearing with great speed. Like other things, the arts were overproduced
and had to adopt a technique of planned obsolescence. They resembled
in this the demands for "relevance" in education, which brought a similar built-in obsolescence into university teaching. A time of "confrontation" and the like is very hard on the arts for many reasons. I think of
Ralph Ellison, a highly intelligent and sensitive black writer, who published his novel Invisible Man some time ago and worked for years on
his next one. It sounds like a most honourable career, but a friend tells
me of a student he has, a girl very involved in black power movements,
who furiously denounced Ellison's devotion to his art as "a personality
cult like Stalin's." Her view was that a black novelist should not be just
writing but writing up: he should be making novels out of news, immediate issues, and crises, and helping to support the black power movement by doing so. This is, of course, a variant of Stalin's own view of
"socialist realism," which in practice meant that Russian writers had to
support his regime or else. It is a view that many of the best Russian
writers today are going to jail rather than submit to.
I would hope for the 19703 a development of the arts in which they
would have recovered something of their real function of binding
together the community in time as well as space, reshaping the past and
addressing the unborn as well as the present. The arts are always a
product of leisure, leisure not in the sense of privilege but in the sense of
relaxation of panic. The free imagination cannot be hurried; it cannot be
partisan; it cannot live on simplistic half-truths; it cannot yield to the
fear of not being up-to-date. It must look at the whole of what is in front
of it, and communicate that sense of wholeness to society.
And perhaps, if the arts could recover their proper social function,
they could lead us on to the highest effort, perhaps, that the 19705 could

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make. I said that I thought the 'yos were likely to be much preoccupied
with the question of the moral criteria of production. But moral criteria
cannot be separated from aesthetic ones. At a certain point the pollution
of Lake Erie or Jasper Park10 is bound to expand into a much bigger
problem, the problem of noise pollution and shape pollution, the hideousness of so much of the sight and sound of contemporary civilization. We unconsciously keep giving ourselves sedatives so that we will
not notice this hideousness, but it constantly affects and influences our
lives in all sorts of subtle ways, and the higher our sense of reality, the
more obvious its effects will be.
One of the more genuinely attractive aspects of the protest movements of the late 19605 has been the insistence with which they have
raised the question "Why not?" Some time ago one of the Beatles put up
advertisements over Toronto saying "War is overif you want it."11 It
was not perhaps a very successful enterprise, but what it said was true
enough. War is over if we want it, and so is the whole nightmare of
human folly and tyranny. It will probably not be over in the 19705, but
there is nothing in the will of God, the malice of the devil, or the unconsciousness of nature to prevent it from going. What prevents it are the
bogies and demons inside us. We have been calling these demons up
pretty frequently during the past few years of confused and infantile
illusions, and they have never failed to respond to our call.12 But they
have no power except what they get from us, and certainly no power to
stop us, if we want it, from making the 19705 an era of grace, dignity,
and peace.

52

Spengler Revisited
Winter 1974

From SM, 179-98. Originally published in Daedalus, 103, no. i (Winter

1974): 1-13. The issue of Daedalus for which Frye wrote had as its general
theme "Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited." References to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West are to the two-volumes-in-one edition published
in 1939 (New York: Knopf), and to Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western
Man to the edition published in 1957 (Boston: Beacon Press). NFF, 1988, box
4, files ee, ff, and gg contain typescripts and printed proofs prepared for this
article entitled "Life after Death: Spengler's Vision of Decline," "Life after
Death ...," and "The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler." The first is
dated 1973, and Frye has added to it pencilled corrections and revisions subsequently incorporated into the manuscript. Where the changes are interesting or
significant, the original is given in an endnote. The logic of Frye's revisions
is driven by his apparent decision to immerse his readers as far as possible in
Spengler's controlling ideas and language. Only in this way, Frye seems to
assume, will they understand his work as an imaginative vision rather than a
network of propositions or a body of dogma.

In July 1918, when the German armies were on the point of collapse, a
book appeared called Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by someone called
Oswald Spengler. I use that phrase because Spengler then was nobody
in particular, an Oberlehrer or Gymnasium teacher who had thrown up
his job in 1910 in order to write, whose health was so bad he was never
called up for military service even in the warm-body months of 1918,
and who was so poor he could hardly buy enough food or clothing,
much less books. Anonymity was a serious handicap in a country where
scholars were ranked in a quasi-military hierarchy, and Spengler's book

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was refused by many publishers before being brought out in a small edition. Within a year it was one of the most widely read and discussed
books in Europe, and Spengler began to revise and expand it. He was
decoyed into other projects before he completed his masterwork, but
finally did complete it with a second volume, as long and detailed as the
first. The second volume, however, adds relatively little to the essential
argument, though it provides more documentation. In 1926 an English
translation of the first volume by C.F. Atkinson, called The Decline of the
West, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, the second volume appearing
in 1928. It is an admirable translation, with many helpful footnotes
added by the translator. In English there is an excellent study of Spengler by H. Stuart Hughes (1952). It is a short book, but even so it takes in a
much wider sweep of argument than I can take here: I am concerned
only with The Decline of the West as a "revisited classic."
The philosophical framework of Spengler's argument is a Romantic
one, derived ultimately from Fichte's adaptation of Kant. The objective
world, the world that we know and perceive, the phenomenal world, is
essentially a spatial world: it is the domain of Nature explored by science and mathematics, and so far as it is so explored, it is a mechanical
world, for when living things are seen objectively they are seen as mechanisms. Over against this is the world of time, organism, life, and
history. The essential reality of this world eludes the reasoner and experimenter: it is to be attained rather by feeling, intuition, imaginative
insight, and, above all, by symbolism. The time in which this reality
exists is a quite different time from the mechanical or clock time of science, which is really a dimension of space. It follows that methods adequate for the study of nature are not adequate for the study of history.
The true method of studying living forms, Spengler says, is by analogy,
and his whole procedure is explicitly and avowedly analogical. The
problem is to determine what analogies in history are purely accidental,
and which ones point to the real shape of history itself. Thanks to such
works as Bernard Lonergan's Insight (i957)/ we know rather more
about the positive role of analogy in constructive thought than was generally known in 1918, and it is no longer possible to dismiss Spengler
contemptuously as "mystical" or "irrational" merely because his method is analogical. He may be, but for other reasons.
Everything that is alive shows an organic rhythm, moving through
stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and eventual death. If this happens to all individual men without exception, there is surely no inherent

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improbability in supposing that the same organic rhythm extends to

larger human units of life. In Spengler's day, philosophy was still largely
dominated by the Cartesian model of the individual perceiver completely detached from his social context. But this is an unreal abstraction,
however useful as a heuristic principle; man also perceives as a representative of a larger social unit. The next step is to identify that unit. Spengler finds that it is not the nation, which is too shifting and fluctuating to
be a unit, not the race (though he wobbles on this point, for reasons to be
examined presently), not the class, which is a source mainly of limitation
and prejudice, not the continent, but the culture. The culture to which we
belong is the "Western" culture, with its roots in Western Europe,
though now extended to the Americas and Australia.
This culture has gone through four main stages, which Spengler symbolizes by the seasons of the year. It had its "spring" in medieval times,
and the features of such a cultural spring are a warrior aristocracy, a
priesthood, a peasantry bound to the soil, a limited urban development,
anonymous and impersonal art, mainly in the service of the priests and
the fighters (churches and castles), and intense spiritual aspiration. It
reached its "summer" with the Renaissance, consolidating in city-states,
princes surrounded by courtiers, a growing merchant class, and a high
development of the arts in which names and personalities become
important. Its "autumn" took place in the eighteenth century, when it
began to exhaust its inner possibilities, of music in Mozart and
Beethoven, of literature in Goethe, of philosophy in Kant. Then it moved
into its "winter" phase, which Spengler calls a "civilization" as distinct
from a culture. Here its accomplishments in the arts and philosophy are
either a further exhaustion of possibilities or an inorganic repetition of
what has been done. Its distinctive energies are now technological. It
goes in for great engineering feats, for annihilation wars and dictatorships; its population shifts from the countryside into huge amorphous
cities which produce a new kind of mass man. The first significant representative of this winter civilization was Napoleon the world-conqueror; Bismarck and Cecil Rhodes the empire-builder are examples of a
type of force-man who will increase through the next centuries.
Before this culture we had the Classical culture, which exemplifies the
pattern for us, as it completed its winter phase. Classical culture had its
"spring" with the Homeric aristocracy, its "summer" with the Greek
city-states, and its "autumn" with Periclean Athens and the Peloponnesian War. Plato and Aristotle, corresponding to Goethe and Kant,

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Politics, History, and Society

exhausted the inner organic possibilities of Classical philosophy, and

Alexander the world-conqueror corresponds to Napoleon. The break we
express by the phrase "Greek and Roman" is now occurring for us; we
are now about where Classical culture was at the time of the Punic Wars,
with the world-states of the future fighting it out for supremacy. Of
these world-states, only the Prussian tradition that runs through Bismarck seems really to have grasped the facts of the contemporary world,
and to have embarked on the "self-determination" which Spengler sees
as essential to a state in the winter phase of its culture. Although the
theme is very muted in The Decline of the West, Spengler seems to have a
hopehe regards it as a hopethat Germany may yet become the Rome
of the future.
In addition to these two cultures, there is a "Magian" one, which
comes in between the Classical and the Western. This culture is Arabian,
Syrian, Jewish, Byzantine, and eastern Levantine generally: it had its
"spring" in the time of Jesus, its Baroque expansion in the age of
Mohammed, and it began to exhaust its possibilities in what we should
call the later Middle Ages. Spengler also identifies an Egyptian, a Chinese, and an Indian culture, all of which have lasted the same length of
time and gone through the same phases. A new culture, Spengler says, is
growing up in Russia now, and is still (1918) in its springtime phase.
When a new culture, however, grows up within the confines or influence of an older one, it is subject to what Spengler calls a "pseudomorphosis," having its genuine shape twisted and deformed by the prestige
of its senior. Thus although the "Magian" culture practically took over
the Roman Empire, even eventually shifting its centre to Byzantium, still
the domination of the Classical culture forced it to express itself in many
ways that were alien to it. The same thing is happening in Russia now,
where the prestige of an aging culture, as Russia's adoption of Marxism
shows, is squeezing the indigenous life out of the younger development.
Such cultures differ profoundly from one another, so profoundly that
no mind in a Western culture can really understand what is going on in
a Classical or Egyptian or Chinese mind. The differences can only be
expressed by some kind of central symbol. The Greek is a purely natural
man, in Spengler's sense of the word "nature": he cared nothing for past
or future, had no history although he invented it for certain occasions,
produced his arts without taking thought for the morrow, and lived in
the pure present, the symbol of which for Spengler is the Doric column.
Spengler suggests primary symbols for most of the other cultures: the

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garden for the Chinese, who "wanders" in his world; the straight way
for the Egyptian, who was as obsessed by past and future life as the
Greek was careless of them; the cavern for Magian culture, expressed
architecturally as the mosquethe Pantheon in Rome being, Spengler
says, the first mosque. As Yeats remarks in his Vision, taking his cue
from Ezra Pound, Spengler probably got his cavern symbol from Frobenius.2 The new Russian culture is best symbolized as a flat plane: it
expresses a "denial of height" [D W, 1:201] in both its architecture and its
Communism.3 The central symbol for the Western, or, as Spengler usually calls it, the "Faustian" culture seems to be that of a centre with radiating points. Faustian culture is strongly historical in sense, with a drive
into infinite distance that makes it unique among other cultures. The
central art of Faustian man is contrapuntal music; Classical culture
expressed its sense of the pure present in its sculpture. The approaches
of the two cultures even to mathematics are quite different. Classical
man thinks of a number as a thing, a magnitude; Western man thinks of
it as a relation to other numbers.
This morphological view of history, which sees history as a plurality
of cultural developments, is, Spengler claims, an immense improvement
on the ordinary "linear" one which divides history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Here Spengler seems to me to be on very
solid ground, at least to the extent that linear history is really, at bottom,
a vulgar and complacent assumption that we represent the inner purpose of all human history. The Hebrews gave us our religion, the Greeks
our philosophy, the Romans our law, and these contributions to our
welfare descended from the Middle Ages to us. The Chinese and Indians had little to do with producing us; they only produced more Chinese and Indians, so they don't really belong to history. "Better fifty
years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay," as the man says in Tennyson.4
Hegel has been often and most unfairly ridiculed for advocating a view
of history which made the Prussian state of his day its supreme achievement.5 But whenever we adopt this linear view, especially in its progressive form, which asserts that the later we come in time the better we are,
we do far worse than Hegel. The linear view of history is intellectually
dead, and Spengler has had a by no means ignoble role in assisting at its
demise.
Spengler's view of history includes, however, a rather similar distinction between human life with history and human life without it. If we
study the history of one of the great cultures, we find that institutions

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Politics, History, and Society

evolve, classes rise, and conquests expand in what seems a logical, but is
really an organic, way. But if we try to write a history of Patagonians or
Zulus or Mongols, we can produce only a series of events or incidents.
These people live and die and reproduce; they trade and think and fight
as we do; they make poems and pots and buildings. But their stories are
chronicles or annals, not coherent histories. Lapland in the eighteenth
century is much like Lapland in the thirteenth: we do not feel, as we feel
when we compare eighteenth-century with thirteenth-century England,
that it is five centuries older. Similarly, after a culture has completely
exhausted itself, it passes out of "history." There are, therefore, two
forms of human life: a primitive existence with the maximum of continuity and the minimum of change, and life within a growing or declining culture, which is history properly speaking.
A parallel distinction reappears within the cultural developments
themselves. People have constantly been fascinated by the degree of
accident in history, by the fact that, as Pascal says, history would have
been quite different if Cleopatra's nose had been longer.6 Spengler distinguishes what he calls destiny from incident. The incidents of a man's
life will depend on the job he takes, the woman he marries, the town he
decides to live in, and these are often determined by sheer accident. But
nothing will alter the fact that it will be his life. Cultures, too, have their
real lives as well as the incidents those lives bring to the surface. Spengler does not mention Cleopatra's nose, but he does say that if Mark Antony had won the battle of Actium the shape of Magian culture would
have been much easier to recognize [DW, 2:191-2]. The incidents of
Western history would have been quite different if Harold had won at
Hastings or Napoleon at the Nile, but the same kind of history would
have appeared in other forms. A modern reader would doubtless prefer
some other word to "destiny," but the distinction itself is valid, granted
Spengler's premises. In what a culture produces, whether it is art, philosophy, military strategy, or political and economic developments,
there are no accidents: everything a culture produces is equally a symbol
of that culture.
Certain stock responses to Spengler may be set aside at once. In the
first place, his view of history is not a cyclical view, even if he does use
the names of the four seasons to describe its main phases. A cyclical
theory would see a mechanical principle, like the one symbolized by
Yeats's double gyre, as controlling the life of organisms, and for Spengler
the organism is supreme: there is no superorganic mechanism. Brooks

Spengler Revisited

303

Adams's The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), which appears to have
wrought such disaster in the impressionable mind of Ezra Pound/ does
give us a rather crude cyclical theory of history as an alternating series of
movements of aggressiveness and usury, with apparently some preference for the former. Yeats's Vision, as just implied, is also cyclical,
because it is astrological, and therefore sees history as following the
mechanical rhythms of nature rather than the organic ones. It seems to
me that Spengler's distinction between primitive and historical existence
is the real basis of Yeats's distinction between "primary" cultures8 and
the "antithetical" ones that rise out of them, but the spirits who supplied
Yeats with his vision did not know much history.
In a way Spengler does give an illusion of a cyclical view: he knows
very little about Chinese and Indian civilizations, and relegates the possibility of other such developments in Babylonia or pre-Columbian
America to bare mentions. Fair enough: nobody expects omniscience.
But this leaves us with a series of five that do run in sequence: the Egyptian, the Classical, the Magian, the Western, and the Russian. This
sequence may have its importance, as I shall suggest later, but for Spengler himself cultures grow up irregularly, like dandelions. There was
no inevitability that a new Russian culture would appear in the decline
of a Western one, nor is there any carryover of contrasting characteristics from one to the other (except in the negative and distorting
form of "pseudomorphosis"), such as a genuinely cyclical theory would
postulate.
Spengler's analogical method of course rests, not only on the analogies among the cultures themselves, but on a further analogy between a
culture and an organism. It is no good saying that a culture is not an
organism, and that therefore we can throw out his whole argument. The
question whether a culture "is" an organism or not belongs to what I
call the fallacy of the unnecessary essence. It is an insoluble problem,
and insoluble problems are insoluble because they have been wrongly
formulated. The question is not whether a culture is an organism, but
whether it behaves enough like one to be studied on an organic model.
"Let the words youth, growth, maturity, decay . . . be taken at last as
objective descriptions of organic states," Spengler says. Spengler's
massed evidence for these characteristics in a variety of cultures seems
to me impressive enough to take seriously. It is no good either denouncing him on the ground that his attitude is "fatalistic" or "pessimistic,"
and that one ought not to be those things. It is not fatalism to say that

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one grows older every year; it is not pessimism to say that whatever is
alive will eventually die. Or if it is, it doesn't matter.
Again, I am not much worried about the "contradictions" or "ambiguities," which can probably be found by job-lots in Spengler's work.
Anybody can find contradictions in any long and complex argument.
Most of them are verbal only, and disappear with a little application to
the real structure of the argument itself. Most of the rest arise from the
fact that the reader's point of view differs from that of the writer, and he
is apt to project these differences into the book as inconsistencies within
it. There may remain a number of genuine contradictions which really
do erode the author's own case, and I think there are some in Spengler.
But for a book of the kind he wrote the general principle holds that if one
is in broad sympathy with what he is trying to do, no errors or contradictions or exaggerations seem fatal to the general aim; if one is not in
sympathy with it, everything, however correct in itself, dissolves into
chaos.
Spengler's book is not a work of history; it is a work of historical popularization. It outlines one of the mythical shapes in which history
reaches everybody except professional historians. Spengler would not
care for the term popularization: he is proud of the length and difficulty
of his work, speaks with contempt of the popular; and of his efforts to
popularize his own thesis, such as Prussianism and Socialism (1919) or
Man and Technics (1931), the less said the better. Nevertheless, his book is
addressed to the world at large, and historians are the last people who
should be influenced by it. What Spengler has produced is a vision of
history which is very close to being a work of literatureclose enough,
at least, for me to feel some appropriateness in examining it as a literary
critic. If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of
the world's great Romantic poems. There are limits to this, of course:
Spengler had no intention of producing a work of pure imagination, nor
did he do so. A work of literature, as such, cannot be argued about or
refuted, and Spengler's book has been constantly and utterly refuted
ever since it appeared. But it won't go away, because in sixty years there
has been no alternative vision of the data it contemplates.
What seems to me most impressive about Spengler is the fact that
everybody does accept his main thesis in practice, whatever they think
or say they accept. Everybody thinks in terms of a "Western" culture to
which Europeans and Americans belong; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody realizes that its most striking parallels

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305

are with the Roman period of Classical culture; everybody realizes that
some crucial change in our way of life took place around Napoleon's
time. At that I am not counting the people who have a sentimental
admiration for medieval culture because it represents our own lost
youth, or the people who cannot listen with pleasure to any music later
than Mozart or Beethoven, or the people who regard the nineteenth century as a degenerate horror, or the Marxists who talk about the decadence of bourgeois culture, or the alarmists who talk about a return to a
new Dark Ages, or the Hellenists who regard Latin literature as a second-hand imitation of Greek literature. All these have a more or less
muddled version of Spengler's vision as their basis. The decline, or
aging, of the West is as much a part of our mental outlook today as the
electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians.
Thus T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922, was written without reference to Spengler, an author of whom Eliot would not be likely
to take an exalted view. But look at the imagery of the poem:
spring
morning
youth
spring rain
Middle Ages

summer
noon
maturity
river Thames
Elizabethans

autumn
evening
age
estuary
i8th century

winter
night
death
sea
2Oth century

The medieval references, it is true, come mainly through Wagner, and

the eighteenth-century section was cut out on the advice of Pound, but
the Spenglerian analogy is there in full force. The parallels with Classical culture are also there, even to the explicit allusion to the Punic Wars
in the reference to the "ships at Mylae."9 W.H. Auden's The Fall of Rome
[1947], and much of the imagery of For the Time Being [1944] are unintelligible without some comprehension, however slight, of Spengler's thesis. Similarly with many poems of Yeats and Pound, where the influence
of Spengler is more conscious, especially in Yeats. James Thurber tells us
of a man who read somewhere that if one did not acquire sexual knowledge from one's parents one got it out of the gutter, so, having learned
nothing from his parents, he undertook an exhaustive analysis of the
gutters of several American cities.10 In other areas we can be more fortunate. If we do not acquire our knowledge of Spengler's vision from
Spengler we have to get it out of the air, but get it we will; we have no
choice in the matter.

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For students of English literature, at least, the most famous attack on

Spengler occurs in Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, as part of
his general onslaught on the "time philosophy." And a most instructive
attack it is. In the first place, we notice that Lewis has no alternative philosophy. He makes vague remarks about attaching more importance to
space and painting and less to time and music, and says such things as
"I am for the physical world" (113). But his book is actually a quite lucid,
often brilliant, example of the very procedure he proposes to attack. He
shows how twentieth-century philosophy, literature, politics, popular
entertainment, music and ballet, and half a dozen other social phenomena all form a single interwoven texture of "time philosophy," and are
all interchangeable symbols of it. We are thus not surprised to find that
Lewis's targets of attack are formative influences on his other work, as
Joyce influenced his fiction and Bergson his theory of satire. And as Time
and Western Man is really a Spenglerian book, doing essentially the kind
of thing Spengler would do, including taking a hostile and polemical
tone toward most contemporary culture, we are not surprised either to
find that Lewis seldom comes to grips with Spengler's actual arguments.
He does make some effective points, such as showing how a Zeitgeist
patter can rationalize irresponsible political leadership by explaining
that history says it's "time" for another war. But this would apply to a
lot of people besides Spengler. What Lewis mainly attacks and ridicules
are Spengler's sound effects.
It is true that Spengler's sound effects are sometimes hard to take, and
the reason for their existence brings us to a problem that the literary
critic is constantly having to face. I have elsewhere tried to show that it
is intellectually dishonest to call a man's work reactionary, whatever his
personal attitudes may have been, because it is the use made of it by others that will determine whether it will be reactionary or not.11 The
pseudocritic is constantly looking for some feature of a writer's attitude,
inside or outside his books, that will enable him to plaster some
ready-made label on his author. Genuine criticism is a much more difficult and delicate operation, especially in literature, where a man may be
a great poet and still be little better than an idiot in many of his personal
attitudes.
In a large number, at least, of important writers we find an imagination which makes them important, and something else, call it an ego,
which represents the personality trying to say something, to assert and
argue and impress. A great deal of criticism revolves around the prob-

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307

lem of trying to separate these two elements. We have Eliot the poet and
Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and
Yeats the poseur; Lawrence the poet and Lawrence the hysteric. Further
back, Milton, Pope, Blake, Shelley, Whitman, all present aspects of
personality so distasteful to some critics that they cannot really deal
critically with their poetry at all. For somebody on the periphery of literature, like Spengler, the task of separation is still more difficult, and
requires even more patience. It does a writer no service to pretend that
the things which obstruct his imagination are not there, or, if there, can
be rationalized or explained away. In my opinion Spengler has a permanent place in twentieth-century thought, but so far as his reputation is
concerned, he was often his own worst enemy, and a stupid and confused Spengler is continually getting in the way of the genuine prophet
and visionary.
We may suspect, perhaps, some illegitimate motivation in Spengler's
writing, some desire to win the war on the intellectual front after being
left out of the army. It would be easy to make too much of this, but he
does say in the preface to the revised edition that he has produced what
he is "proud to call a German philosophy" ([DW, i:xiv] italics original),
although the real thesis of his book is that there are no German philosophies, only Western ones. In any case, he belonged all his life to the far
right of the German political spectrum, and carried a load of the dismal
Volkisch imbecilities that played so important a part in bringing Hitler to
power. Hitler in fact represents something of a nemesis for Spengler the
prophet, even though Spengler died in 1936, before Hitler had got really
started on his lemming march. Unless he has unusual sources of information, a prophet is well advised to stick to analysing the present
instead of foretelling the future. Spengler wanted and expected a German leader in the Bismarckian and Prussian military tradition, and he
doubted whether this screaming lumpen-Kunstler was it. He greeted the
Nazis in a book called in English The Hour of Decision (1933), which the
Nazis, when they got around to reading it, banned from circulation. But
his general political attitude was sufficiently close to Nazism to enable
him to die in his bed.
These personal attitudes account for many of the more unattractive
elements in his rhetoric, which has all the faults of a prophetic style:
harsh, dogmatic, prejudiced, certain that history will do exactly what he
says, determined to rub his reader's nose into all the toughness and
grimness of his outlook. He has little humour, though plenty of savage

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and sardonic wit, and a fine gift for gloomy eloquence. He is fond of
murky biological language, like calling man a "splendid beast of
prey,"12 and much of his imagery is Halloween imagery, full of woowoo noises and shivery Wagnerian whinnies about the "dark"
goings-on of nature and destiny. Thus:
With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep.
Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The
timeless village and the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and
burying seed in Mother Earth. . . . There, in the souls, world-peace, the
peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become
actualand there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of
suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still
Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as
the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and
sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may
lament itbut it is there. [DW, 2:435]
It may not be everybody's poetry, but it is genuine enough of its kind.
But occasionally we come across elements connected with this kind of
rhetoric that are more objectionable. For example, Spengler knows that
his argument really has nothing to do with the conception of "race," and
in The Hour of Decision he makes it clearwell, fairly clearthat he
regards the Nazi attitude to race as suicidal frenzy. But he cannot give up
the notion that Jews are a separate entity: if he did, one of the most
dearly cherished Volkisch prejudices would go down the drain:
Spinoza, a Jew and therefore, spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture,
could not absorb the Faustian force-concept at all, and it has no place in his
system. And it is an astounding proof of the secret power of root-ideas that
Heinrich Hertz, the only Jew amongst the great physicists of the recent
past, was also the only one of them who tried to resolve the dilemma of
mechanics by eliminating the idea of force. [DW, 1:413-14]
According to Spengler's own thesis, a man who spends his life in seventeenth-century Holland belongs to the Western Baroque, whatever his
religious or racial affinities. Most of Spinoza's contemporaries called
themselves Christians, which is equally a "Magian" religion according

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to Spengler. But of course one never knows when such a prejudice will
come in handy. "It is something fundamental in the essence of the
Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand
aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the
business side of their production" [DW, 2:504]. This remark follows
closely on a critique of Marx. As the Nazis said, capitalism and Communism are both Jewish inventions. The biological function of women is
also a fruitful topic for dark symbolization:
Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood. Woman as
Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which
thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly.
[DW, 2:267]

It is little surprise to learn that Ibsen's Nora "is the very type of the provincial derailed by reading" [DW, 1:33]. That is, if Nora had really
responded to the Zeitgeist, and understood that she was Time and Destiny, she would have done nothing so unfeminine as read books, but
would have remained illiterate, pregnant, and absorbed in her
doll-house.13
There is also the unnecessary value judgment implied in the word
"decline" itself. Strictly speaking, according to Spengler Western art is
not getting any better or worse as it changes from medieval to Renaissance to Baroque conventions; it is simply growing older. But Spengler
wants it to decline and exhaust its possibilities, because he wants his
contemporaries, at least the German ones, to devote themselves to the
things required by their cultural age, which for him are technological,
national socialist, and military:
I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel
structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical
and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day
"arts and crafts," architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman
aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues . . . [DW, 1:43-4]

The Romans who built aqueducts and carried out huge massacres and

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Politics, History, and Society

purges also produced Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Catullus. Not
one of these names appears in Spengler's indexes (except Horace by
courtesy of the translator). He would say, with the Hellenists mentioned
above, that Latin poetry was an inorganic repetition of Greek poetry, but
it wasn't. But, of course, for him as for others the word "decline" is an
easy way of dismissing anything in the contemporary arts that one finds
puzzling or disturbing. When Spengler's book was published, the fashionable myth was the myth of progress,14 and Spengler's evidence that
technological advance could just as easily be seen as a hardening of the
cultural arteries was useful as a counterweight. But its usefulness, like so
many other things in history, has exhausted its possibilities now that
this aspect of technology is obvious to everybody.
After all this has been said, and a great deal more that could be said
taken for granted, it is still true that very few books, in my experience,
have anything like Spengler's power to expand and exhilarate the mind.
The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that
facts make when he throws them together, the sense of the whole of
human thought and culture spread out in front of one, the feeling that
the blinkers of time and space have been removed from one's inward
eyes when Greek sculptors are treated as the "contemporaries" of Western composers, all make up an experience not easily duplicated. I first
encountered him as an undergraduate, and I think this is the best time to
read him, because his perspective is long-range and presbyopic, and his
specific judgments all too often wrong-headed. Some of his comparative
passages, such as his juxtaposing of colours in Western painting with
tonal effects in Western music, read almost like free association. Any
number of critics could call these comparisons absurd or mystical balderdash. But Spengler has the power to challenge the reader's imagination, as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive
them all even if all of them are right.
The best-known philosophy of history after Spengler, at least in
English, is that of Arnold Toynbee, whose Study of History began appearing while Spengler was still alive. Toynbee has twenty-one cultures to
Spengler's seven or eight, and twenty of them follow, more or less,
Spengler's organic scheme of youth, maturity, decline (accompanied by
a "time of troubles"), and dissolution. But the twenty-first is Toynbee's
own Western culture, and that one has just got to be different: to assume
that it will go the way of the others would be "fatalism," which is what
he professes to object to in Spengler. So he develops a "challenge and

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311

response" theory which enables him to use a mechanical metaphor

instead of an organic one at the stage corresponding to "decline," and
talk of "breakdown" instead. But the sequence of genesis, growth,
breakdown, and disintegration in Toynbee seems more jumbled than
Spengler's consistently organic model. He begins his discussion of the
causes of "breakdown," at the beginning of volume 4, with a critique of
Spengler which has all the air of a dodged issue. He says that it is too
early to say whether Western culture has come to its "time of troubles"
yet, which is quite a statement to make in 1939; he says Spengler is a
"fatalist," which as we have seen is irrelevant, and he says that Spengler
treats a metaphor as though it were a fact. But every historical overview
of this kind, including Toynbee's, is and has to be metaphorical. When
we look at Toynbee's own table of contents we find "nemesis of creativity," "schism and palingenesis," "withdrawal and return," and if those
are not metaphors I don't know the meaning of the word. He also seems
to feel that ignoring Spengler's distinction between destiny and incident
will give more sense of freedom to man by putting more emphasis on
the accidental factors of history. There is of course a great deal that is of
value and interest in Toynbee's books, but as a Spenglerian revisionist
he seems to me to be something of a bust. Except for one thing.
That one thing is his account of the passing of Classical into Western
culture. He says that when a culture dies it forms an internal and an
external proletariat. The late Roman Empire had its internal proletariat
in the bread-and-circus mobs of Rome and the other big cities, and its
external proletariat in the Goths and Vandals breaking through the
periphery of the empire. Out of these two forms of proletariat there
emerged a "Universal Church," which acted as the tomb of the old culture and the womb of the new one. Spengler also speaks of a "second
religiousness" which enters a culture in its final stages: it seems to be
one of his most useful and suggestive ideas. But he thinks of Toynbee's
internal proletariat simply as a rabble: "The mass is the end, the radical
nullity," he says [DW, 2:358]. He overlooks both the connection of primitive Christianity with the proletariat and its extraordinary power of
organization. It seems to me that Toynbee gives a more rational explanation of the historical role of Christianity in this period than Spengler
gives. He ignores Spengler's "Magian" intermediate culture, but his
own view does not necessarily do away with it: it merely points to
something else that was also happening, to different aspects of what
was happening, and to a process which would also account for the "cav-

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ern" imagery that Spengler associates with Byzantine culture. It also

provides a means of explaining something very important that Spengler
leaves out.
This is the curious fascination15 of Western culture with the idea of
making itself into a reborn Classical culture. In its "spring" period its
poets devoted great energies to recreating the visions of Virgil and Ovid;
in its political life, it revolved around the conception of a reborn Augustus, a Christianized Roman emperor. Why is the central mythical figure
of English literature King Arthur, who has so vague and hazy a historical existence? At best he was merely a local British leader making a temporary rally against the Saxons, who of course won in the end. Why not
make more of, say, Alfred, who really was a great man, and whose historical existence is not open to doubt? When we read in Geoffrey of
Monmouth that Arthur conquered the armies of Rome, and remember
that his colleague in romance was Charlemagne, we get a clue: he is a
prototype of the reborn Christian Caesar, the Holy Roman Emperor.
This symbolism of recreating Classical culture reaches its climax with
the Renaissance, a word which means the "rebirth" of Classicism. It is
highly significant that Spengler is rather silly about the Renaissance,
which he treats as an un-German interruption of the development of
German Gothic into German Baroque. He also seems unaware of the
extent to which the same idea dominated, to or past the verge of obsession, a long series of German writers, from Winckelmann through Holderlin to Nietzsche and George, the last two of whom Spengler certainly
knew well. Of course Toynbee's death and rebirth pattern does introduce a more cyclical element into history than Spengler admits. Vico is
often regarded as a precursor of Spengler, though I see no evidence that
Spengler had read him, but Toynbee brings us much closer to what Vico
means by the ricorso than anything in Spengler.
If one culture can recreate another one in this way, we have to abandon what seems to me in any case a profoundly unacceptable element in
Spengler's argument: his insistence that every culture is a windowless
monad, and cannot be genuinely influenced by another culture. "To the
true Russian the basic proposition of Darwinism is as devoid of meaning
as that of Copernicus is to a true Arab" [DW, i: 23]. This remark may be
a curious anticipation of the Lysenko business in Stalinist Russia,16 but
on the whole such observations are clearly nonsense: there are a lot of
Arabs who know that the earth goes round the sun, and they are not
bogus ones. In fact science, in general, is the great obstacle to Spengler's

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cultural solipsism. Granted that different cultures will construct different scientific world-pictures, there is an obviously translatable quality in
science, which makes its principles quite as comprehensible to Chinese
or Indians as to Germans or Americans. Such science might even
develop a world view on a supercultural scale. We notice that Spengler
casts some uneasy glances at what he calls "the ruthlessly cynical
hypothesis of the Relativity theory" [DW, 1:419]. He tries to see it, of
course, as "exhausting the possibilities" of Western science, but he
seems to be not quite sure17 that its view of time will be content to confine itself to the world of measurement and stay out of his dark existential territory.
Apart from this, however, perhaps the fact that Western culture has
spread over the world means something more than simply the capacity
for expansion which Spengler assigns to the Faustian spirit. If science is
a universal structure of knowledge, it can18 help mankind to break out
of culture-group barriers. Spengler of course thinks this is a pipe dream,
and insists that the people of Asia and Africa have no interest in Western science or technology except as a means of destroying the West. But
Marx is a far more effective prophet in the world today than Spengler,
and the reason is that he emphasizes something uniform and global in
the human situation. The factors which are the same throughout the
world, such as the exploitation of labour, have always been, if not less
important, at any rate less powerful in history than conflicts of civilizations. Now they are more important, and growing in power. The industrial revolution brings a new factor into the situation which cannot be
wholly absorbed into a dialectic of separate "cultures," important as
those have been. The question whether Western civilization will survive, decline, or break down is out of date, for the world is trying to outgrow the conception of "a" civilization and reach a different kind of
perspective.19
If the death-to-rebirth transition from Classical to Western culture
happened once, something similar could happen again in our day,
though the transition would be to something bigger than another culture. This would imply three major periods of human existence: the
period of primitive societies, the period of the organic cultures, and a
third period now beginning. Spengler, we saw, attacks and ridicules the
three-period view of ancient, medieval, and modern ages with, we said,
a good deal of justification. But he also remarks that the notion of three
ages has had a profound appeal to the Faustian consciousness, from

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Joachim of Fiore in the thirteenth century onward. It is possible that

what is now beginning to take shape is the real "Third Reich," of which
the Nazis produced so hideous a parody.
The detail of Spengler's vision is all around us, in the restless wandering of great masses of people, in the violence and overcrowding of our
almost unmanageable cities, in the strong ethical sense in some social
areas, which Spengler compares with Buddhism in India and Stoicism in
Rome, neutralized by dictatorships and police states in others, in the
"second religiousness" of Oriental cults and the like, in the brutality and
vacuousness of our standard forms of entertainment, in the physical
self-indulgence paralleling the Roman cult of the bath, in the rapid series
of vogues and fashions in the arts which distract us from their inner
emptiness. It would be disastrous to pretend that these are not features
of cultural aging. It would be still more disastrous to underestimate the
powerful inertia in society that wants to "decline" still further, give up
the freedom that demands responsibility, and drop out of history. What
Spengler said would happen is happening, to a very considerable
degree. But while Spengler is one of our genuine prophets, he is not our
definitive prophet: other things are also happening, in areas that still
invite our energies and loyalties and are not marked off with the words
"too late."

53

The Bridge of Language

3 January

Originally the keynote address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, 3 January 1981. From Science, 212, no. 4491
(10 April 1981): 127-32. Partial reprints appear as "Detachment Not Possible/' Globe and Mail, 5 January 1981, 8; "Another Look at the 'Two Cultures/" Chemical and Engineering News, 59 (19 January 1981): 9;
"Scientists: Professional Detachment vs. Social Concern/' Perception, 4
(March-April 1981): 18-19. Reprinted in its entirety in OE, 153-67. The editor of Science introduced a number of subheadings, here omitted.
As I understand it, my chief qualification for addressing you here is my
total ignorance of everything you know. That gives a certain detachment to one's perspective, but it does not provide many other clues. I
think that, broadly speaking, the "two cultures" situation described by
C.P. Snow some twenty years ago still holds in most respects.1 Lord
Snow, you will remember, suggested that humanists and scientists did
not see much of one another's point of view, and that humanists in particular tended to be intellectual Luddites or machine-breakers, probably
members of a secret right-wing organization devoted to carbon power
and the destruction of silicon chips. The literary critic F.R. Leavis, you
will also remember, undertook to refute this case by asserting that in his
opinion Lord Snow was a bad novelist.2 It seemed to me that what I
hope might be a more civilized and pertinent statement of the humanist
attitude, Ludditism and all, might be of interest to you. Although this
article is called "The Bridge of Language," I am not a linguist but a literary critic, and that has led me into a different area of study concerned
with the social use of words.

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Lord Snow remarked that scientists "had the future in their bones" [The
Two Cultures, 11]. I take it that this is a reference to the fact that a progressive element is built into scientific method, so that any freshman today
may know facts in physics or chemistry unknown to Newton or
Lavoisier. As far as knowledge is concerned, this is equally true of the
humanities: any freshman can also learn more about drama before
Shakespeare or music before Mozart than Shakespeare or Mozart ever
knew. But the arts themselves (to quote the title of a famous essay on the
subject) are not progressive.3 They have been assumed to be the ornaments of a highly developed civilization, and of course they are that; but
they seem to have a curious affinity too with everything that is most primitive and archaic in human society. Poetry thrives on superstition and fantasy; the formulas of popular fiction are the formulas of the folk tales of
preliterary cultures; the structures and stock characters of romance or
comedy have persisted with astonishingly little change in two thousand
years. Science is generally assumed to have something to do with the pursuit of truth, but the poet, as Aristotle pointed out [Poetics, i45ib], is not
directly concerned with truth because he says nothing in particular, and
only particular statements can be true. So while the mad scientist may be
a stock figure of popular fiction, it is perhaps significant that one of the
great characters of literature should be Don Quixote, a mad humanist trying to make the world over in the pattern of his books.
This primitive quality of literature means, among other things, that
the humanist has the past in his bones: his focus of study is the classic,
the definitive masterpiece which may be many centuries old. Research
in the humanities, however new in itself, always has an aspect in which
it is more light on square one. In caricature, and to some extent occupationally as well, the humanist seems to resemble that heroic if somewhat
confused bird mentioned by Borges, who always flies backward because
he doesn't care about where he's going, only about where he's been.4
Because of the progressive element in science, questions of science
and technology are closely bound up with questions of the future of
society, and of how society is going to adjust to the discoveries and techniques that have developed within it. We soon realize, however, that not
everything that is technically feasible is going to happen; what will happen is only what society is capable of absorbing. That in turn depends on
society's present situation, more particularly that of its power structures,
and its inherited habits. Any such subject as "futurology," in short, is
based on the fact that we know nothing of the future except by analogy

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with the past; hence the perspectives on the past, including the perspectives of the historian and the humanist, are inseparable from the
future-directed concerns of science. Further, we notice that we hear
much less about future shock and the like than we did a few years ago.
One reason is that a widened horizon capable of taking in some speculation about the future is a by-product of economic expansion and political detente. Such conditions of clearing weather are not habitual to
human life, however, and before long we are back in the recessions and
political storm warnings that seem to be the normal lot of mankind.
A future-directed perspective is, in itself, very natural to the young,
but it also is dependent on what for them is a well-functioning economy.
Anyone who has taught students during the 19505 and is still teaching is
aware how their time perspective lifts during expansive periods and
how it shrinks again in times like ours. During the 19605 the "activists"
looking for revolutionary social change were mainly students of middle-class background, who seldom realized how much they had been
conditioned by the assumptions of that background. These were largely
the assumptions of American progressivism, the feeling that as their
society had been moving ahead like an express train for two centuries, it
was in the nature of the historical process for it to continue to do so,
except that it ought to speed up. The students of the 19705, and probably
of most of the 19805 as well, have been forced into an involuntary caution like that of Cardinal Newman's hymn:
. . . I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.5

In my own student days much the same thing happened: a native

bourgeois progressivism was checked by the Depression, and collided
with Marxist views about how a socialist economy would avoid such
setbacks. We were assured, in a great deal of Marxist propaganda, that
once man stopped wasting his energies in exploiting his fellow men the
way would be open for the release of those energies in transforming
nature. The assumption was that nature was still an unlimited field of
exploitation, and the Marxist literature of fifty years ago resounded with
hymns of praise to the tractors and hydro plants of the Soviet Union. But
it is now painfully obvious that nature, at any rate as far as this planet
extends, is finite too, and that the industrializing of human life is not an
endless vista either.

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Politics, History, and Society

It seems strange that the human race took so long to make a serious
effort to develop its science and technology. The technology of the most
advanced parts of the world in the early eighteenth century was closer to
the Neolithic age than it is to us. Even in the nineteenth century, with the
Industrial Revolution fairly started, the speed and extent of the transformation of the world that a concentrated effort at technology would make
was still beyond the most far-out imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had
about as far-out an imagination as the century produced, and used it
partly to invent the modern forms of detective and science fiction. Yet in
his story laid in the future, Mellonta tauta (the things about to be), people
are crossing the Atlantic in balloons at a hundred miles an hour a thousand years after his own time, and even the balloon in which the story is
supposed to be written falls into the Atlantic instead of landing.
The obvious answer is that for most of his history man has been preoccupied with small-scale social coherence. Once the essential needs of
life and survival are met for a sufficient number of people, the rest of
human energy has to be reserved for intensifying the strength of a particular social unit. We can understand the past on this point well enough
from the present, even though the social units are much bigger. Our
governments feel that if they spent as much on science and technology
as they do on armaments, they would create a political vacuum that
other powers would be prompt to fill. At present there are certain kinds
of scientific projects that only the United States or the Soviet Union can
attempt, and it is obvious that some kind of global unity and cooperation is a necessary condition for the unfettered growth of science in the
future. Science and technology thus follow the great centralizing movements of economics, which will eventually, we may hope, transform the
world into a global unity. The contrast with cultural developments, in
literature and the arts, is curious and striking.
The more a country's arts develop, the more they tend to decentralize,
to break down into smaller units, or, more positively, to bring increasingly smaller areas into articulateness. We speak of American literature,
but a great deal of what we learn about America through its literature
we learn by adding up what Faulkner tells us about Mississippi, Robert
Frost about New Hampshire, Hemingway about expatriates in Paris or
Spain, John Steinbeck about northern California, Peter De Vries about
New York. A similar decentralizing movement has been very marked in
Canada in the last twenty years, and whatever "Canada" may mean

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politically, "Canadian literature" means very largely a group of regional

developments. It is a mysterious law of literature that a very specific
and local setting often goes along with universality of appeal: Faulkner
confines himself to an unpronounceable county in Mississippi and gets
the Nobel Prize for literature in Sweden. One hopes that this decentralizing movement will gradually loosen its grip on political activities,
where it is mostly a nuisance, and confine itself to cultural ones, where it
belongs. In some respects, clearly, the world should be a single unit; in
other respects it should be a mass of small communities, where people
can be aware of others as people.
One reason for the difference in social context is the kind of language
literature uses, in contrast to the language of science or philosophy. In
science or philosophy there is an underlying international language of
subject matter, so that abstracts of articles in foreign journals can be read
even with a limited command of their languages. But literature enters
into all the accidents and nuances of language, similarities in sound that
make certain rhymes possible, associations in the meanings of words
that one language may have and another may not, colloquial idioms
that can be rendered into another tongue only by the most complete
rephrasing of them. Science and philosophy remind us that language is
a total human effort at communication; literature reminds us that language is also one of the most fragmented of human activities, so that it is
a life's work to master completely more than one or two.
The word "science," I assume, describes primarily a method, used
wherever such a method is appropriate. A method involves the use of
language, and so far as science uses the language of words in addition to
the language of mathematics, it is committed to a certain kind of verbal
style. Its language is descriptive, and, of necessity, highly technical, and
except in popularized science, it avoids metaphors and similar figures of
speech. It also avoids ambiguity, or using the same word in different
senses. The language of poetry is a complete contrast: it is largely based
on figurative and metaphorical language, and it thrives on manifold
meanings and puns of all kinds. Poetry has a very limited tolerance for
the abstract language of philosophy or the technical language of science,
not because poets dislike these subjectsmany poets are deeply interested in thembut because the language poetry uses has a limited
power of assimilating their modes of language. The normal language of
poetry is a language of colour and sound and movement, of immediate

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sense perception and concrete experience, of the existential rather than

the contemplative or practical sides of human life, of the appearances of
things rather than their underlying form.
In the eighteenth century, the work of Isaac Newton had a powerful
impact on poets and humanists of all kinds. The sense of a regular and
uniform natural law was like a new world to those tired of the anomalies and injustices of civil law, and his obviously sincere religious attitude was deeply reassuring too. So a great deal of poetry was written on
the assumption that this new science could inspire a new kind of poetry,
and we get such expressions of enthusiasm as this:
Let curious minds, who would the air inspect,
On its elastic energy reflect.6

The eighteenth century was also the age of Jenner's discovery of vaccine,
and another poem of the period begins, "Inoculation, Heavenly Maid,
descend!" But this does not seem to be the kind of thing poetry can do.
Obviously a more tactful and skilful poet would do a more convincing
job, but it is the failures that point up the real problem.
What is involved is not a matter of vocabulary or subject matter but of
the inner structure of the discipline used. If we set a poem to music, we
are putting two arts together, but each art communicates within its own
conventions: we are not merging the structures of poetry and music.
Similarly, poet and scientist may use, up to a point, the same language,
or even treat the same themes, but the structure of poetry and the structure of science remain two things. The scientist quantifies his data; the
poet, so to speak, qualifies his: he expresses its whatness, its impact on
concrete experience, and at a certain point they start going in opposite
directions. "I do not frame hypotheses," said Newton,7 meaning, I suppose, that he did not take anything seriously until he had verified it. But
literature is a hypothesis from beginning to end, assuming anything and
verifying nothing.
The same principle applies to science fiction, which is a form of
romance, continuing the formulas of fantasy, Utopian vision, Utopian
satire, philosophical fiction, adventure story, and myth that have been
part of the structure of literature from the beginning. What the hero of a
science fiction story finds on a planet of Arcturus, however elaborate
and plausible the hardware that got him there, is still essentially what
heroes of earlier romances found in lost civilizations buried in Africa or

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Asia. The conventions of literature have to take over at some point, and
what we see, in science fiction no less than in Homer or in Dante, is, in
the title of a seventeenth-century satire set on the moon, mundus alter et
idem,8 another world, but the same world.
There are different ways in which language can be used, three of
them of particular importance. One is the descriptive way that we find
in science and everywhere else where the aim is to convey information
about an objective world. Then there is the language of transcendence
that we find in large areas of philosophy and religion, an abstract,
analogical language that expresses what by definition is really beyond
verbal expression. And there is the language of immanence, the metaphorical language that poetry speaks, where anything can be identified
with anything else, where natural objects can become images of human
emotions. These are different languages, which accounts for the differences in structure I speak of; but they are mutually intelligible languages, so I should like to look at their relation again from a different
point of view.
Even in the smallest social units, man does not live directly and
nakedly in nature like the animals. Human societies live within a semitransparent envelope that we call culture or civilization, and they see
nature only through it. Societies vary a good deal in the extent to which
their cultural assumptions distort their view of nature, but all views of
nature are conditioned by them. There are no noble savages, in the sense
of purely natural men for whom this cultural envelope has disappeared,
nor any form of human life that does not restructure the world in front
of it into some kind of human vision.
I am concerned here with the role of words in this situation. In most
societies, at least, there seem to be traditional verbal structures that are
particularly important for the members of that society, or some of its
members, to become acquainted with. Laws, including rituals and customs, are at the centre of this material; myths and stories about the traditional gods and heroes, magical formulas, proverbs, and the like also
enter into it. In some communities much of it is a secret knowledge,
sometimes imparted to boys in initiation ceremonies. In its higher developments it comes closer to what in Judaism is meant by "Torah," the
instruction of primary importance for the social identity of the student,
which includes the law, but a good many other things as well. We may
call this a structure of concern or social coherence, and it is usually a
mixture of the religious and the political. Religious concerns, Christian,

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Moslem, Jewish, or Hindu, invariably operate in some political context;

political concerns, democratic, Marxist, or Fascist, always have a religious dimension to them as well.
This structure of concern is often called an ideology, but I think that
that is a rather limited and inflexible term, one that does not allow for all
its variety and its capacity for growth. I prefer to call it a mythology, in
spite of all the misleading emotional reactions to that word. We tend to
think of such words as "myth," "fable," or "fiction" as meaning something not really true. This is partly because they are literary words, and
literature is often thought of as a form of socially acceptable lying. Even
more important, they are words for verbal structures, and there is a
long-standing habit of mind that associates truth with a content that can
be separated from structure. Thus we often say of a doubtful proposition
that there may be some truth in it. We mean that if it were restated in a
different structure it might become true, but we speak as though the
truth could be extracted from the structure, like grains of gold from river
mud. Both of these attitudes, in my view, are products of prejudice and
sloppy thinking, so I shall keep the word "mythology."
I speak of a religious or political concern rather than belief, because
the conviction of its truth is less important than the sense of the social
necessity of accepting it. In practice, this means that everybody should
say that they accept it, or at least refrain from saying that they do not.
For some societies, perhaps, the only really essential doctrine that holds
them together is the conviction of their superiority to all other societies.
For others, heresy, revisionism, or scepticism may become criminal or
subversive attitudes.
The social crisis of a battle is a good example of the way in which
questions of truth or falsehood are ignored in order to meet the crisis. In
the battle of Agincourt there was an English army with a war cry
addressed to St. George and a French army with a war cry addressed to
St. Denis. Neither saint had a very solid existence: one developed out of
a folk tale and the other mostly out of a pious fraud. Even if they had
existed, the question of whether they were still available for invocation,
or would automatically respond if they were, might still remain open.
But if one were present at the battle, one would be well advised to
ignore all such doubts and shout with the rest.
The creative arts grow up in most societies mainly as vehicles for carrying the central messages that society regards as primarily important.
Hymns of praise to the recognized gods or epics and tragedies about tra-

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ditional heroes appear early in literature; sculpture developed in Greece

because a polytheistic religion needs statues to distinguish one god from
another; in the Middle Ages painting and sculpture and stained glass
were largely absorbed in producing icons for Christianity. But this introduces a complication into culture: the arts turn out to have structural
principles of their own, so a tension arises between what the artist wants
to say as an artist and what he is obliged to say as an artist commissioned by a church or government or other agent of social concern.
No art ever gets completely away from its social and historical conditioning; nevertheless it has two poles, the pole of concern, or what society wants from its arts, and the pole of style, or what the poet or painter
or composer is discovering within his art. Concern is what makes the
artist socially responsible and gives him a social function; style is what
demonstrates the coherence, power, and influence of the art itself, style
being, as Wallace Stevens says in a remarkable poem on the subject
(Description without Place), the quality that makes everything in Spain
look Spanish.
The arts are older than the sciences, but the development of science
follows the same pattern. A mythology is not, except incidentally, a protoscientific structure: it is meant to draw a circumference around a society and face inward to its hopes and fears and imaginative needs and
desires, not to face outward toward nature. But of course it is bound to
make or assume statements about the natural order: these often conflict
with what further observation of that order suggests, and so, because of
their sacrosanct quality, they become obstacles to science when science
develops. An obvious example is the doctrine of a divine creation in
4000 B.C. When such conflict occurs, a mythological view of some aspect
of nature has to be replaced by a scientific one. But a conflict of science
and mythology means only that the sciences, like the arts, have inner
structures of their own, and are trying to follow the trends of those inner structures instead of conforming to the prevailing mythological
formulations.
There is always tension between the inner growth of the arts and sciences and the anxieties of a controlling mythology. The philosopher Berdyaev complains that nobody wants a disinterested philosopher: it is
felt that if he is going to philosophize he should earn his keep, that is,
justify or rationalize what people want to see generally believed.9 In the
arts, everywhere we look we see the struggle of imagination against the
restrictions of mythology. Islamic countries condemn representational

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art; the Soviet Union condemns nonrepresentational art; some Marxist

regimes, notably the so-called cultural revolution in China, maintain
that no art is socially conscious unless it devotes itself entirely to proclaiming the dominant social faith; in our own countries censors to the
right of us and censors to the left of us volley and thunder.10 As for science, there can hardly be a member of this audience who has not had to
answer, perhaps many times, the question, Why should we spend
money on that 1 from someone in control of funds. Such a question, when
genuine, always indicates a clash between the inner development of science itself and the social concerns connected with what I have called
mythology.
The Greek satirist Lucian, writing in the second century A.D., who was
apprenticed to a sculptor before becoming a writer, has a dialogue in
which Zeus calls a conference of gods, who come represented by their
statues.11 Zeus tells Hermes, who is marshalling the procession, to
arrange them in order of costliness of material, gold statues in the front
row, silver ones behind, bronze and marble in the back benches. Hermes
protests that some consideration should be given to quality of workmanship: on Zeus's arrangement all the Greek gods would have to go to
the bleachers, because only barbarians can afford gold statues. Zeus says
that quality of workmanship certainly ought to come first, but preference has to be given to gold. It is not hard to see why. Giving praise and
prestige to expense fosters the industry of the care and feeding of gods;
and if workmanship became too important, the question would arise of
the extent to which gods are really human constructs. Workmanship
represents the language of culture and civilization; expense represents
the language of concern, which may lag behind imagination and intelligence, but usually controls the power.
The arts and sciences, then, for all their obvious differences, have a
common origin in social concern. In proportion as they follow their own
inner structures, they become specialized and pluralistic. This is simply
a condition of civilized life: they have to do this, and the degree to which
an art is allowed to follow its own line of development is of immense
importance in determining the level of a society's culture and, ultimately, the level of the life of its citizens. The same applies to science,
and resistance to political or religious interference with the arts and sciences is the sign of a mature society. Such resistance organized on an
international scale could become an essential instrument of human
progress. As Thomas Pynchon points out in his brilliant novel Gravity's

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Rainbow, an exclusive devotion to a mythology shuttles between a belief

that everything has been made for man's sake and a belief that man is a
uniquely cursed and doomed species, both views being paranoid.12 At
the same time it is only their common social concern, their interests as
citizens of the human community of which they are equally members,
that can bring artists and scientists together. They cannot be brought
together by trying to learn more about one another's totally different
disciplines, any more than we can bring about world peace by trying to
learn all the world's languages. The reason is much the same: there are
more like two hundred cultures than two. But the notion that we can do
without a common sense of concern, that religion can be absorbed by literature or all mythology replaced by science, seems to me a very muddled one. Such a civilization would be at best only another Tower of
Babel, an unfinishable structure worked on by people who no longer
understand each other.
What does happen, in the course of time, is that as the arts and sciences develop, religio-political units become larger and fewer, the unity
of the world becomes a visible possibility, and so the different mythologies of concern become broader and simpler in scope. This becomes
very clear when a nonhuman danger or catastrophe unites them in the
sense of a common need for coexistence. Camus's novel The Plague (La
Peste) is a brilliantly concentrated study of the way in which, in the face
of a raging epidemic, all human concerns vanish into the two basic ones:
survival and deliverance. Deliverance or emancipation includes all the
forms of the expansion of consciousness and energy that are at the heart
of the major mythologies: salvation in Christianity, enlightenment in
Buddhism, equality in Marxism, liberty in democracy. If the question of
survival is less urgent, these decline into various donkey's carrots of
reward and punishment, either coming immediately from social authority or associated with a future life of some kind, either for ourselves in
another world or our posterity in this one. But in the limit situation of
crisis, all human mythologies reduce to a very elementary basis: that life
is better than death, freedom better than bondage, health better than disease, happiness better than misery.
The twentieth century has seen a growth of a sense of common crisis
in which the essential concerns of survival and emancipation have
slowly moved into the foreground. It is unnecessary to rehearse the
major elements in this sense of crisisthe atom bomb, the shrinking of
natural resources, the feeling that central economic forces, such as the

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value of money, have gone out of control, the overcrowding of the earth
by the one organism too irresponsible to play the game of natural selection fairly. Long before in literature, in Blake, Ruskin, and Morris in the
nineteenth century and Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and others in
the early twentieth, there had been a strong attack on the ugliness that
modern civilization was creating out of its surroundings. Writers looked
at the blasted and blighted outskirts of cities, at once beautiful landscapes buried in tombs of concrete, and felt that even if nature were the
whore that she is said to be in some of our earlier mythologies, there was
no excuse for treating her like that. This was what produced the "two
cultures" situation that Lord Snow misrepresented so grossly. For even
at its most wrongheaded this protest was not a merely aesthetic one, and
it was not a Luddite attack on science or technology as such. It was a
protest in the name of human concern for survival and freedom against
what these writers felt to be a death impulse in the human mind, an
impulse that they saw as trying to get control of science and technology.
More important, they saw the exploitation of nature to be essentially the
same evil thing as the exploitation of other men that has produced all
the slavery and tyranny of history.
Snow [The Two Cultures, chap, i] speaks of Orwell's 1984 as typical of
the humanist's wish that the future did not exist. But it is reasonable
enough to wish that that future would not exist. Man is quite capable of
producing the hell on earth that that book records: to deny or refuse to
face this is to be a far more reckless Luddite than the most reactionary of
poets. We are very near to the chronological 1984 now, and if the particular fear that Orwell's book expresses is no longer our primary one, at
least for ourselves, it is mainly because a new element has entered the
picture: the sense that human survival depends on the well-being of the
nature from which humanity has sprung. The days when a scientist
could use his scientific detachment and the artist his freedom of expression as excuses for withdrawing from this concern are long past.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a strong sense
that reality was divided into the subjective and the objective, and that
science was concerned only with the latter. But even in the physical sciences it soon became clear that the observer himself was a part of the
scene to be observed, and of course the social sciences are entirely based
on this principle. The corresponding development has taken place in the
arts: such a movement as Abstract Expressionism in painting, for example, does not mean that the painter has gone on an ego trip of "self

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expression": it means that he is studying the expressing process in himself as a part of his pictorial vision of the world.
In the twentieth century Einstein has had an impact on the popular
consciousness rather similar to that of Newton in the eighteenth century. Like Newton's, this impact was based on his obvious concern with
the implications of his work in physics for human survival and emancipation. He made several cryptic, even mystical, utterances in this area,13
and Niels Bohr is said to have urged him, rather impatiently, to stop telling God what to do.14 On closer inspection, however, he seems to have
been talking less about God than about the way in which nature, though
with no language of its own, nonetheless makes humanly intelligible
responses to the mind. The inference is that the structures of physical
nature and the human mind are linked in a common destiny, discoveries in nature being also discoveries in human nature. I suspect that this
is as central an intuition for us as the sense of the regularity of natural
law was for the contemporaries of Newton. Further, it is an intuition
that the metaphorical language of poetry, where natural objects and
human emotions are so often identified with each other, can help to
express.
If we split the world into subject and object, we tend to assume that
the objective is real, the world of waking consciousness that we can
agree we are seeing, and that the subjective world is one of dreams and
resentments and wishes and desires and similar products of illusion.
This was the view, fifty years ago, of Freudian psychology with all its
hydraulic metaphors of blocks and drives and channels and cathects,
and with its assumption that we retreat every night into a world of
dream and futile wish-fulfilment, waking up again to face the real
world. But this distinction between reality and illusion arises only when
we stare at the world passively. For the 19805,1 think, we need different
assumptions. First, practically all the reality we wake up facing is a
human construct left over from yesterday. Second, some of that construct is rubbish, and needs to be cleared away. The important difference is not between reality and illusion, but between what we can make
real and what it is time to get rid of.
When we think of things this way, we can see that the arts and sciences, though they have different functions, have essentially the same
kind of place in the human scene. If we think in terms of reality and illusion, we may concede that science deals with reality, but we don't know
what kind of status to give the arts, because they are so concerned with

328

Politics, History, and Society

subjective elements of desire and other products of the dream world.

But when we think of reality in terms of a world to be remade, we find
that we need a model or imaginative vision of what we are trying to
achieve. The world of dream and fantasy can be a source of models as
well as illusions, and models are the first product of the chaos of hunch
and intuition and guesswork and free association out of which the realities of art and science are made. This is the starting point of all creative
work in any area, however different the products may be.
If we go to the theatre, the show we see on the stage is, we may say, an
illusion. But we could search the wings and dressing rooms forever
without finding any reality behind it. The reality-illusion distinction
clearly does not work for plays: the illusion is the reality. If the play is,
let us say, a comedy of Shakespeare, there are things inside it that look
like real things, such as law courts, and other things, like fairies and love
potions and magic rings, that look impossible. What is important is
where all this is going. At the end of the play a new society is created:
four or five couples get married, and things which looked strong and
threatening at first, like Shylock, get left behind. We look back over the
play, and see that what we thought was just fantasy and wish-thinking
was actually a force strong enough to impose itself on things that looked
so well established at first, and transform them into a quite different
shape and direction. The comedy is a miniature example of that drive
toward deliverance that has fostered all the great myths of emancipation
in the world, and is still capable of fostering the great emancipation
myths of the future.
It is not for nothing that dramas are called plays: in fact Shakespeare's
contemporary Ben Jonson came in for some ridicule when he published
his dramas in 1616 under the title of The Works of Ben Jonson. In his endlessly suggestive book Homo Ludens, the Dutch scholar Huizinga distinguishes play and work on the basis, more or less, that work is energy
expended for a further end in view, and that play is energy expended for
its own sake, or as a manifestation of what the end in view is. A chess or
tennis player may work hard to win a game or improve his skill, but
chess and tennis are forms of play. An artist may work hard to perfect a
work of art, but the work perfected is an expression of play, an energy
complete in itself that shows what the work has been done for. Science
and technology work hard to help achieve what would be, once
achieved, a life of play, where nature is no longer conquered territory
held down by man but lived in as his home, and where the mental work

The Bridge of Language

329

of solving problems has become scientia or philosophia, the love of knowing, the play at the heart of all genuine work.
The Book of Proverbs in the Bible describes wisdom as a female principle who was a part of God's mind at the creation. The King James
translation speaks of her as "rejoicing" [Proverbs 31:25-6], but this is a
very weak form of the tremendous Vulgate phrase ludens in orbe terrarum, playing throughout the earth. This world of play or spontaneous
energy is the deliverance to which all religious and political ideals point,
and some glimpse of it is accessible to any artist or scientist at any
moment. The ordinary division of our lives into work and play makes
work the endless pursuit of a donkey's carrot into the future, and play a
relaxation from this that reminds us of the carefree days of our childhood. But the genuine human energy of the arts and sciences converges
on a world where work and play have become the same thing. A gathering together of such people with such interests, including this one,
would be in the deepest and most serious sense a play ground, a common meeting point where all forms of language are interchangeable, all
statements of identity, whether metaphors or equations, balance out,
and scientists and humanists shake the past and the future out of their
bones and join together in a present life.

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Notes

Introduction
1 See Frederick Crews, "Anaesthetic Criticism," in Out of My System (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially 64-71,73-4. Terry Eagleton's
Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) classifies NF as a would-be
emancipator in fact bound by "his own middle-class liberal values" (94).
2 "The Two Europes," Canadian Forum, 27 (February 1948): 243.
3 See Hilda Kirkwood's extremely valuable interview "Frye at the Forum,"
Canadian Forum, 69 (March 1991): 15-17.
4 See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), 49, 75.
5 See A Group of Classical Graduates: Honour Classics in the University of Toronto
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1929) for more on the objectives and
atmosphere of the Honour courses at this time and their independence of
textbooks.
6 Ernest Sirluck, First Generation: An Autobiography (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), 88. See also H.A. Innis, "Charles Norris Cochrane, 18891945," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 12, no. i (1946): 95-7.
7 See the editorial to the Canadian Forum, i (October 1920): 3.
8 Sandra Djwa, "The Canadian Forum: Literary Catalyst," Studies in Canadian
Literature, i (Winter, 1976): 7-25.
9 Barker Fairley, "A Peep at the Galleries," Canadian Forum, i (October 1920):
19-21. See also Fairley's Forum articles: "Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924," 5 (October 1924): 19-20; "Two of Our Conquerors," 9 (January 1929): 130-1; "Hugh
MacDiarmid," 15 (February 1936): 24-5. See also Fairley's play The Runaway,
5 (March 1925): 175-8 and his poems Wild Geese, 4 (February 1924): 143; The
Rock, Winter, Day Dream, Hunger, all published 4 (April 1924): 209; and
Hurdy-Gurdy, 5 (December, 1924): 85.
10 Eric Havelock, "RussiaRecantation," Canadian Forum, 16 (October 1936): 29.

332

Notes to pages xxx-6

Subsequent paragraphs refer to the following Forum articles by Havelock:

"Apology for Toronto," 15 (August 1935): 322; "Teaching the Young to Drive,"
16 (June 1936): 8 "The Philosophy of John Dewey," 19 (July 1939): 121-3.
11 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 16,19-20.
12 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 86.
13 T.S. Eliot, "London Letter," The Dial, 71 (August 1921): 213-17.
14 Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1962), 239.
15 The militant campaign of T.E. Hulmepoet, philosopher, aesthetician, and
polemicistfor a hard, dry classicism in verse composition had a major
influence on modern poetry and poetics. Arguably his fascination with
authoritarian violence had just as much impact on the cultural assumptions
of modern artists. See his posthumously published Speculations (1925).
French social thinker and novelist Julien Benda's works include Belphegor
(1919) and The Yoke of Pity (1913). His influential analysis of the political
infractions of modern intellectuals, La Trahison des Clercs (1927) (translated by
Richard Aldington as The Great Betrayal in 1934), was the subject of a lengthy
review by Eliot in The New Republic.
16 Eric Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston: Beacon Press,
1950), 6.
17 See McLuhan's introduction to Explorations in Communication: An Anthology,
ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960),
xi. Henceforth quotations will be cited within the text as Explorations followed by a page number.
18 See Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatized Society," in Writing in
Society (London: Verso, 1983), 11-21.
i. The Modern Century
1 Archibald Lampman (1861-99) was educated at Trinity College, Toronto.
A longtime clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, his The City of
the End of Things was published in 1894. Irving Layton (b. 1912) was born in
Romania, but grew up in Montreal. His The Improved Binoculars appeared in
1955. Clair de lune intellectuel, by the Montreal poete maudit Emile Nelligan
(1879-1941), appeared in Louis Dantin's volume Emile Nelligan et son oeuvre
in 1903.
2 In the modern biography Disraeli (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966),
Robert Blake credits Lord Derby with the invention of this phrase, used as he
recalled the events leading to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1867 during
his third minority administration (474).
3 For the parent of NF's aphorism, see "The Decay of Lying," in Oscar Wilde's
Intentions (New York and London: Putnam, 1920), 1-54. When Cyril asks

Notes to pages 6-10

333

Vivian incredulously, "You don't mean to say that you seriously believe
that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?"
Vivian replies, "Certainly I do" (30).
4 Thomas Hardy's 1967 was published in Time's Laughing-Stocks (London:
Macmillan, 1909), 53. One of a group classified as "More Love Lyrics," the
poem may arguably be judged a less pessimistic vehicle than NF remembers.
The speaker in the poem speculates that the coming century may "at its
prime" surpass "this blinkered time."
5 The Oxford (Canadian branch) edition of 1967 misleadingly printed
"mature." Reprinted editions (1969) read "immature."
6 Unfortunately, the play and its reviewer have so far not been identified.
7 A witticism at the expense of T.S. Eliot's sophisticated metropolitan comedy
The Cocktail Party (1950).
8 Percy Wyndham Lewis was born 18 November 1882 on his father's yacht,
then moored near Amherst, Nova Scotia. Lewis's Self Condemned (1954) is an
angry and despairing novel shaped by the author's wartime experience in
Toronto where, not for the first time, he swiftly alienated most of the people
he met and plunged into severe financial hardship.
9 Nigeria gained full independence from Great Britain in 1960, but was rocked
by a long fierce civil war when the Ibos of the Eastern region declared a
breakaway republic of Biafra in 1967. Indonesia gained independence from
the Netherlands in 1949, only to enjoy a chequered history that erupted in
massacres two years before NF's lectures.
10 NF's notes to the French translation indicate that this is an allusion to George
Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1965), although he adds, "I don't know if it's worth
picking up in French" (NFF, 1988, box 62, file i). Grant (1918-88) was a Canadian philosopher and member of the Department of Religious Studies at
McMaster from 1961 until 1980, and chair of the department at the time NF's
lectures were delivered. See the introduction to the present volume (xxxixxl, xlii) for further discussion of the relationship between Grant's short, bleak
work, and MC.
11 This phrase introduces an intriguing feature of MC, namely NF's apparent
intention to represent the century in its own idiom. To achieve this end, he
packed his lectures with many words of twentieth-century origin or that
passed into common usage only in "the modern century." The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), cited henceforth as OED, records
1939 as the earliest date for the use of the phrase "mass culture" and cites Life
magazine as its source: "The state of Texas has never been properly recognized for its contributions to U.S. mass culture."
12 OED records only one instance of "public relations"with a different
meaningbefore the twentieth century.

334

Notes to pages 10-15

13 Most of these phrases are offspring of the artistic subculture of "the modern century." "Hip" and "square" are both linked to jazz subculture: the
former, first recorded in 1904, refers to someone "in the know." OED dates
"square" from 1944, offering as a definition "anyone who is not cognizant
of the beauties of true jazz." Musical culture also accounts for "corny,"
tracked by OED to Melody Maker in 1932: "The 'bounce' of the brass section
has degenerated into a definitely 'corny' and staccato style of playing."
Nancy Mitford formulated and Jessica Mitford popularized the distinction
between "U" and "non-U" for the readers of Encounter in the 19505, while
Susan Sontag enlightened readers of Partisan Review on the status of "camp"
in 1964. All these examples substantiate NF's point about the rift between
artistic subculture and the larger middle-class culture.
14 "Happenings": OED defines a happening as "a spontaneous theatrical or
pseudotheatrical entertainment," and cites Nation, 24 October 1959, as its earliest usage: "The first exhibition is not of painting but is an 'event' consisting
of eighteen 'happenings' by Allan Kaprow." In 1989 Stanley Fish and Fredric
Jameson launched a series published by Duke University Press titled "Postcontemporary Interventions." The word "postcontemporary" is not recorded
in OED.
15 See Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983), 33-7, for a lexical
history of alienation that traces many of the semantic shifts NF describes here.
16 Bunyan read Luther's Commentary on Galatians as an exact diagnosis of his
own spiritual condition.
17 When Apollyon first meets Christian in the Valley of Humiliation, he claims
him as one of his subjects. Christian replies, "I was born indeed in your
Dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could
not live on, for the Wages of Sin is death." See The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. J.B.
Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 57.
18 Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb (1964), a famous black comedy about nuclear war, starred Peter
Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden. The screenplay, co-authored
by Kubrick and Terry Southern, was based on a novel by Peter George published in the U.S. as Red Alert (first published in England under the pseudonym Peter Bryant with the title Two Hours to Doom) as a response to the
apocalyptic fears of the 19505.
19 The "tabloid" newspaper, compact in size and frequently demagogic in content, is regarded as the brainchild of Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. OED gives the date of entry of the word into popular usage as 1902.
20 Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov discussed the extreme vulnerability to suggestions
displayed by the neurotic personality in Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (London: Wishart and Dickson, 1928-47), 1:378,2:108-10.
21 For "stock response," see LA. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (Lon-

Notes to pages 15-21

335

don: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), 202-3. See also Practical Criticism:
A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964),
chap. 5, "Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses," 235-54. Richards
contrasts audience responses to poetry governed by "social suggestion" with
those produced by "genuine experience" and finds that the former are more
likely to impair understanding of poetry.
22 Cf. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford, 1967), 93-4:
"When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the
great age of crisistechnological, military, culturalyou may well simply
nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a
multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising
than the opinion that the earth is round."
23 See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: Macmillan, 1932).
24 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 3325 The Marquis de Condorcet's work was first published in 1794. June Barraclough's English translation was published as Sketch for a Historical Picture of
the Progress of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955).
26 See John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, chap. 5, "A Crisis in My Mental History:
One Stage Onward."
27 T.R. Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798,1803) that
poverty could not be relieved because the means of subsistence rises in
inverse proportion to the rise of population.
28 Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1964) concerns itself with these extensions of the body, seeing in them
the key to the distinctive qualities of modern culture and the inspiration for
its leading social images. A year after NF published MC, in War and Peace in
the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), co-authored with Quentin
Fiore, McLuhan wrote, "Man is not only a robot in his private reflexes but
in his civilized behavior and in all his responses to the extensions of his
body, which we call technology. The extensions of man with their ensuing
environments, it's now fairly clear, are the principal area of manifestation of
the evolutionary process" (19). The contrast with NF's position could hardly
be more explicit.
29 NF refers to, respectively, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai (1857),
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and Emile Verhaeren's Les Villes Tentaculaires (1895).
30 NF's immersion in Dickens was possibly a preparation for his English
Institute lecture later in 1967, subsequently published as "Dickens and
the Comedy of Humours" and collected in StS, 218-40.
31 See particularly McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media. "Medium and message" are
discussed in the first chapter of Understanding Media.

336

Notes to pages 21-9

32 This dogma took a modified form in "The Roots of Canada's Geography," by

Andrew Hill Clark and Donald Q. Innis. In this essay, the authors state that
"The Grand Trunk Railway and the Welland and St. Lawrence canals made
Confederation possible." See the essay as published by John Warkentin a
year after NF's lectures in the collection Canada: A Geographical Interpretation
(Toronto: Methuen, 1968), 13-53; the passage cited is on p. 15.
33 Harold C. Innis's The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1951) had a major impact on the study of the relationship between
communications systems and national identity in Canada, as well as in the
modern world as a whole.
34 In the notes he wrote in response to the French translation of MC, NF makes
it clear that "target knowledge" is his own translation of the German Zwechwissenschaft: knowledge with a purpose, directed learning (NFF, 1988, box 62,
file 6).
35 The title of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) has passed into
common usage as an expression of bewildered complacency in the light of
drastic social or political change elsewhere. The novel is sharply critical of
the fascist tendencies Lewis sees as growing from U.S. nationalism, so NF
may well have been making an implied criticism of Canadian variants of
nationalism.
36 "We've lost our rights?" is the exact quotation, cited from Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 19. NF also quotes from
pp. 79,19-20,86. Waiting for Godot received its first French performance (as
En Attendant Godot) on 5 January 1953. The first British performance took
place on 3 August 1955.
37 Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Signet, 1983), act 2,
"Walpurgisnacht," 178. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first performed on 13 October 1962.
38 In September 1965 Andre Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were arrested on
charges of writing and circulating stories that slandered the Soviet Union.
News of their plight soon reached the international media, especially since
this marked the first time since Stalin's era that literary works had formed the
basis for prosecution in the Soviet Union. The two authors were convicted
and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in a labour camp in February
1966, but were released in 1971. As NF surmised, their arrest triggered a
larger crackdown on freedom of artistic expression by the Soviet government.
39 See, for example, Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), chap. 12, "Concerning
the Arrangement of Life."
40 See Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber,
1948), particularly chap. 3, "Unity and Diversity: The Region." NF is referring to the poet's controversial views about limiting the mobility of specific

Notes to pages 29-33

337

modern citizens and ethnic groups, which appear in After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 19-21.
41 See, for example, William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains (1890), where
Morris refers to "manslayings," "sheer-rocks" and "foot-mounds" in his first
chapter.
42 NF's reference is to the Jindyworobak club, founded in 1938 by poet Rex
Ingamells, whose manifesto "Conditional Culture" spelled out the objectives
of the movement. The group, dedicated to the idea of "Australian only"
materials and content and eager to forge alliances with aboriginal culture,
issued anthologies until 1953.
43 See Jean Paul Desbiens, The Impertinences of Brother Anonymous, the English
translation of Les Insolences de Frere Untel (Canada: Les Editions de 1'homme,
1960). Joual is a popular idiom in Canadian French, used widely in rural
Quebec.
44 This comment proved to be prophetic. In September 1980, a Gdansk (Danzig)
shipyard worker called Lech Walesa formed an independent Trade Union
movement he named Solidarity. This rapidly grew to international prominence and is widely regarded as one of the first major cracks in Soviet bloc
unity.
45 The words "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there
is no health in us" come from "A General Confession" in The Book of Common
Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 50.
46 For an early, firm statement of this viewpoint see NF's essay on "Canada and
Its Poetry" (1943). Here he attacks "the Ferdinand the Bull theory of poetry"
that "talks about a first-hand contact with life as opposed to a second-hand
contact with it through books." NF counters this theory by saying that "Practically all important poetry has been the fruit of endless study and reading"
(BG, 135-6; rpt. in the Collected Works in Northrop Frye on Canada, CW, 12
[Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003]).
47 These sentiments are to be found in George Puttenham, The Arte of English
Poesie (1589). In bk. 3, chap. 25, Puttenham contrasts the "reminiscens naturall" of logic and rhetoric with the "bare imitations and worke in a forraine
subject" on show in "the painter or kervers craft." See the edition by Baxter
Hathaway (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 311-12.
48 In "On Poesy or Art," Coleridge observes: "If the artist copies the mere
nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry!... Believe me, you must master
the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature
in the higher sense and the soul of man." See Biographia Literaria, ed. John H.
Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 2:257.
49 Edouard Vuillard, French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, was espe-

338

Notes to pages 33-5

daily known for his power to infuse mystery and suggestiveness into mundane interiors. He was admired by French poet Stephane Mallarme.
50 The theory of "socialist realism," which NF grapples with so often in this collection, was presented initially by Lenin and promoted even more fervently
by Stalin. The aim, to harness art to the task of social reconstruction, in practice left little room for the kind of art NF sees as most worthwhile.
51 Sam Hunter, Modern American Painting and Sculpture (New York: Dell, 1959),
126-7, derives the term "ashcan school" from an American version of the
battle of realisms as outlined by NF in this chapter. The protagonists were
"the eight," a group that included Arthur Davies, William Glackens, Robert
Henri, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, George B. Luks, Maurice Prendergast,
and John Sloan. Their foes were the Leftist critics of Masses. Hunter quotes
the criticism of Art Young, then Masses' art director, who protested that "The
five dissenting artists want to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up
their skirts in Horatio Streetregardless of ideasand without title."
52 The artistic wing of the U.S. Works Progress [later Work Projects] Administration (1935-43) was actually administered by various branches of the
Federal Arts Project, the Federal Writers' Project, etc.
53 These and other artistic movements subsequently mentioned by NF in this
chapter are outlined economically in Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos,
Concepts of Modern Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
54 NF's immediate predecessor as Whidden Lecturer, Anthony Blunt, devoted
his lectures to the genesis of Picasso's painting in 1966. His efforts were subsequently published as Picasso's "Guernica" (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969). This painting had great personal significance for NF.
In November 1938 he reported to Helen Frye that he had seen it in London
along with "studies of bulls, murdered horses, and weeping men and
women" Picasso made as preparatory sketches and studies for the work. At
this point NF admitted, "I couldn't have got much out of the picture itself
without them," although he recognized that "It's the best contemporary
work I've ever seen, I'm quite sure of that" (NFHK, 2:811). A month later NF
sent Helen a postcard of the painting.
55 See William Billings: Three Fuguing Tunes for Four Part Mixed Chorus, ed.
Clarence Dickinson (New York: Mercury Music, 1940), 2.
56 George Bernard Shaw's preface to Back to Methuselah notes: "Beethoven never
heard of radio-activity nor of electrons dancing in dances of inconceivable
energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture of these whirling
electrons?" See Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (New York:
Dodd Mead, 1975), 6:334.
57 OED defines streamlining as "to remodel on smooth, uncluttered lines" and
dates this usage from 1935.

Notes to pages 36-8

339

58 See "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," in Selected Essays (London:

Faber and Faber, 1932), 126-40, where Eliot comments, "We say, in a vague
way, that Shakespeare, or Dante, or Lucretius, is a poet who thinks, and that
Swinburne is a poet who does not think, even that Tennyson is a poet who
does not think" (134-5).
59 Paul Verlaine in Art Poetique urges would-be authors to 'Trends 1'eloquence
et tords-lui son cou""Seize eloquence and wring its neck!" See Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. C.F. Maclntyre (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1948), 180-3.
60 "I maintain that the phrase, a long poem, is simply a flat contradiction in
terms." See Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle" (1850), in Essays and
Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 71-2. Also in "The Poetic
Principle," Poe states that "a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it
excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this
elevating excitement" (71). This definition leads Poe to see a long poem like
Paradise Lost as a practical impossibility and to conclude that "even the
best epic under the sun is a nullity" (72). For Poe even the Iliad accordingly
metamorphoses into a cycle of short lyrics.
61 A tachistoscope is an apparatus used to expose words, images, etc., for a
fraction of a second. Educators use it to increase reading scope or to test
memory and perception. OED cites C.S. Myers's Textbook of Experimental Psychology (1909) as the source for its first usage.
62 Fernand Leger was a twentieth-century French painter and designer who
played a leading role in the Cubist movement. Arnaldo Modigliani, an Italian painter and sculptor who operated in France, is best known for his stylized and elongated sculptures of the human body.
63 See T.E. Hulme's "Romanticism and Classicism" in Speculations (1924; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 111-40, and "Notes on Language and
Style," in Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1955), 77-100.
64 Wyndham Lewis rarely passed up an opportunity to attack Gertrude Stein,
but see particularly his running diatribe against the verbal pattern he termed
"Steining" in The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1931).
65 The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play
Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), a work that
emphasized play and game as constitutive of human identity, was clearly
important for NF. For Auden's sense of play in relation to poetry see, for
example, his poem The Truest Poetry is the most Feigning and its description of
"the luck of verbal playing" as a distinctive property of "the only creature
ever made who fakes."
66 Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 17, 60.

34

Notes to pages 39-42

67 See Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1953), where
Malraux distinguishes between the sketch as "working study" and the sketch
that "records the artist's direct, 'raw' expression." The latter Malraux controversially considers "an end in itself" (109-10).
68 See particularly Brecht's essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in
Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91-9.
69 At the time NF spoke, James Reaney's Listen to the Wind had been performed
in London and Hamilton, but not in Toronto. In 1972 Talonbooks of Vancouver published the play. Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers was published in
1966 by McClelland and Stewart.
70 The preface to bk. i of William Carlos Williams's Paterson (New York: New
Directions, 1946) begins:
To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means
In "The Delineaments of the Giants," also from Paterson, Williams utters his
famous maxim, "No ideas but in things."
71 John Cage's experiments with dice, the Chinese / Ching manual, his random
noise experiments, and the pure silence of 4' 33" (1952), all made his aleatory
music a talking-point for lecturers on artistic experiment and the fate of the
avant-garde in this period.
72 Chosisme is a narrative technique that rejects as outmoded humanism the
notion of any necessary linksympathetic, cognitive, or otherbetween
human beings and the environments, social or natural, in which they find
themselves. See Alain Robbe-Grillet, Towards a New Novel (1963,1965), which
sees the downfall of bourgeois society imminent in the resistance mounted
by practitioners of the nouveau roman to this kind of order. The same author's
The Erasers (1953,1964) parodies and ultimately destroys the conventions of
detective fiction.
73 The Maginot Line, named in honour of its sponsor, French Minister of War
Andre Maginot, extended from the Swiss to the Belgian borders in an effort
to protect the territories of Alsace-Lorraine returned to France after the First
World War. However, the Germans entered France through Belgium in
1940.
74 Lenin asked this question most trenchantly in his pamphlet What is to be
Done? (1902), the title of which was taken from a novel published in 1864 by
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky.
75 See The God that Failed, ed. Richard Grossman (New York: Harper and Row,
1950), for several "confessional" accounts by Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler,
Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and others of the growing disillusionment

Notes to pages 43-6

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

341

among intellectuals sympathetic to socialism with the practical consequences

involved in translating the socialist agenda into practice.
Anarchist, Utopian, and countercultural sage, Paul Goodman (1911-72) was
highly prolific. Growing Up Absurd is a sympathetic inside story of juvenile
delinquency in the U.S.
From Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the theatre in Drury Lane,
1747, in Samuel Johnson, Collected Poems, ed. J.D. Fleeman (Harmondsworth,
Eng.: Penguin Books, 1971), 82. Johnson's words are actually humbler than
NF remembers, since he acknowledges, "We that live to please, etc."
NF may have been thinking of works such as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and
Civilization (1955) and Norman O. Brown's Life against Death (1959) and Love's
Body (1966). In all these works, the specifically sexually repressive features
of bourgeois capitalist society, rather than its economically exploitative
nature, come into the foreground.
Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac, published Dharma Bums in 1958.
Kerouac's rebellious, rootless pose, exemplified in On the Road (1957), made
him a leading figure with the Beat Generation in postwar letters.
Nostalgie de la boue can be roughly translated as "hankering after the dirt":
usually used of a willed primitivism or excrementalism on the part of intellectuals, e.g., Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
Jean Giono, French novelist, and Knut Hamsun, Norwegian novelist, playwright, and poet, share humble backgrounds, wartime notoriety, and peasant or rural subject matter. Hamsun's Hunger (1890; translated 1899) and
Giono's Que Ma Joie Demeure (1935; translated as Joy of Man's Desiring in
1949) are deeply individualistic works.
A rough translation of this phrase would be "cling to the earth." In his introduction to The Prospect of Change: Proposals for Canada's Future, ed. Abraham
Rotstein (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1965), NF made it clear that he associated
the phrase with a self-defeating retreat from modernity. I am grateful to Jean
O'Grady for supplying this reference.
Jean-Franqois Millet's Angelus (1859) depicts peasant labour, and has been
widely reproduced; however, its alleged sentimentality has found many
detractors. Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine (1916,1921), a particular irritant
for NF on these very grounds, is a tale of fidelity and virtue set in an icy rural
Quebec.
See Twelve Southerners, /'// Take My Stand (1930), a far more indirect and
intellectual myth of agrarian society than many of the literary works NF
describes in these paragraphs.
Charles Maurras was very worried about the subversive implications of
monotheism and Christianity. In Trois Idees Politiques, he remarks that "Le
merite et 1'honneur du catholicisme furent d'organiser 1'idee de Dieu et de lui
oter ce venin" ("The merit and the honour of Catholicism was to organize the

342

Notes to pages 46-53

idea of God and to remove its poison"). See Maurras, Romantisme et Revolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922), 274. My thanks to Ian Singer
for this reference.
86 See T.S. Eliot, preface to For Launcelot Andreives: Essays on Style and Order
(London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), vii. NF overlooks Eliot's efforts to align
himself also with American efforts at neo-orthodoxy, like those made by Paul
Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, to rejuvenate a conservative or "neohumanist" revival in North America.
87 Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1. 23.
88 This quotation is not quite accurate: Yeats reports Johnson as saying, "I wish
those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realize their
unspeakable vulgarity" (W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies [London: Macmillan,
1955], 223).
89 An allusion, as NF's notes to the French translation of MC make clear, to
Thomas Mann's novel The Holy Sinner, published in German in 1951
(English translation, 1952).
90 Stavrogin appears in Dostoevsky's The Possessed; Lafcadio in Gide's Les Caves
du Vatican, sometimes translated as Lafcadio's Adventures; Camus's protagonist in L'Etranger is named Merseault.
91 Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself (London: Panther Books, 1968)
devotes pt. 4 to "Hipsters" and contains Mailer's infamous apologia for violence as existential self-definition in "The White Negro." Leroi Jones's Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave (1964) all dramatize the issues NF describes in
this passage (Jones subsequently took the name Imamu Imiri Baraka). They
also mark a significant episode in the representation of black Americans in
American culture as agents of violent retribution rather than as dignified
victims. See also Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968).
92 Jean Genet, The Balcony (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 33.
93 OED records the Bulletin Bureau of Business Research's definition of
"feather-bedding" as "getting pay for work not done" in 1921 as its earliest
usage.
94 See C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration (1957).
95 See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963).
96 See Juvenal, Satires, 10.81, for the reference to "bread and circuses."
97 In his lecture "The Lesser Arts," first given as "The Decorative Arts," 12 April
1877, and published as a pamphlet a year later, Morris refers to the huge
industry "comprising the crafts of house-building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths' work, pottery and glass-making, weaving, and many others."
Ideally, such activities would be designed to foster ties between human
beings and their material environment; but in nineteenth-century society,
Morris argues, they are too often left to exploitative industrialists and care-

Notes to pages 53-7

343

less workmen. See Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. Morton (New
York: International Publishers, 1973), 31-56, especially p. 32.
98 Dutch painter and theosophist Piet Mondrian exerted great influence over
industrial and decorative artists from the 19305, even among those who did
not share his austere, geometrical abstract goalspartly driven by his theosophical beliefsfor the art of painting.
99 Andre Malraux coined the expression "museum without walls" and used it
as the title for pt. i of The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1953),
11-128.
100 See Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), 103.
Lewis in fact uses the phrase "cavemen of the new mental wilderness."
101 The Quebec chansons have a distinct identity. Strong preservation efforts
began with Ernest Gagnon's Chansons Populaires du Canada (1865). Gilles
Vigneault was born in Quebec and made his debut as a chansonnier in Montreal in 1960. Although favoured by separatists, he emphasizes the craft and
emotion that go into his work, not its political allegiances.
102 The Canada Council, an independent agency, was created by an act of Parliament in October 1957 following recommendations by the Massey Commission. Its first full-time chairman was Brooke Claxton and its aim was "to
foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of
works in, the arts, humanities and social sciences." It administers grants
and fellowships and derives funds from three main sources: i) an annual
grant made by the Canadian government, ii) an endowment established
when the Council was created, and iii) private funds willed or donated to
the Council. In 1977, many of the Council's responsibilities for the funding
of research in the humanities and social sciences were transferred to the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC),
which was founded by an act of Parliament in that year.
103 "Psychotherapy" is another word coined during "the modern century."
OED records 1923 as its first usage and cites the London Daily Mail as its
source. In his description of dramatic analogues for psychotherapy NF may
have been thinking of the work of Canadian-born sociologist Ervin Goffman, whose The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) enjoyed great popular esteem and used a dramaturgical perspective as its theoretical basis.
104 OED attributes the earliest usage of "totalitarian" to B.S. Carter in a comment made in 1926 on the rise of fascism in Italy. NF's own reference point
is Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1951). His comment on "our dislike of the word 'totalitarian'" may have
been provoked by the title given to Arendt's work by its British publishers:
The Burden of Our Time (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1951).
105 In "A Word About America," Arnold remarks, "The Americans . . . have
liberty; they have, too, over and above what we have, they have an excellent

344

Notes to pages 58-66

thingequality." See Philistinism in England and America, ed. R.H. Super,

vol. 10 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 21.
106 Faulkner's address of 10 December 1950, on receiving the Nobel Prize,
repeatedly invokes the "universal" features of art. See The Portable Faulkner,
ed. Malcolm Cowley, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1967), 723-4.
107 As the context of Voltaire's famous line, "If God didn't exist, we'd have to
invent him" (A L'Auteur du Lime des Trois Imposteurs, 1. 22), makes clear.
108 Barbara Barksdale Clowse's Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis
and National Education Act of 1958 (Freeport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981),
163-7, usefully tabulates the enormous explosion of federal programs and
quantifies the massive injection of U.S. federal funds for education that
occurred in the years following Sputnik.
109 NF may be alluding to the famous reply of French scientist the Marquis de
la Place, who, when asked by Napoleon about the absence of any mention of
God in his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825), is said to have
remarked, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."
no NF probably has in mind Sir James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe (1930).
in See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford, 1967), 39-41,
for a different point of view. See also the contributions by NF and Kermode
to The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966) on myth and fiction. NF's
essay "Speculation and Concern" was subsequently reprinted in StS, 38-55.
The central difference between the two thinkers lies in NF's willingness to
view the future of humanity as inseparable from the "reservoir of truth"
available solely through the perpetually adjusted narratives he calls an
"open mythology." Kermode, on the other hand, throws his intellectual
weight behind the repeated habit of self-correction he describes as "clerical
skepticism" (The Sense of an Ending, 57,109). Taken together, these works
amount to two important efforts by mature humanists to make sense of the
turbulent late 19605.
112 See chap. 2 of Culture and Anarchy (1869), "Doing As One Likes."
113 See Pascal, Pensees, 2nd sen, "The Wager."
114 Vaihinger's The Theory of "As If": A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and
Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1935), 283n. 4, defines "assumed fictions" as fictions that stand in a
demonstrable relationship to empirical reality. Their relationship to practical realityas distinct from questions of methodis therefore, as NF points
out, a much closer one than that possessed by the other fictions Vaihinger
analyses.
115 The "General Strike," described most expansively in Reflections on Violence
(1907), was Georges Sorel's central social myth, and the end to which

Notes to pages 66-9

345

he thought all authentic working class politics logicallyand bloodily

gravitated.
116 Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958 as a right-wing organization strongly opposed to Communism and the welfare state.
117 See T.S. Eliot, "Matthew Arnold," in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
(London: Faber and Faber, 1933): "For Arnold the best poetry supersedes
both religion and philosophy.... The most generalised form of my own
view is simply this: that nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for
anything else; and if you find that you must do without something, such as
religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must just do without it" (113).
Two critics express these sentiments most openly. In "The Study of Poetry,"
Matthew Arnold affirms that "The future of poetry is immense, because in
poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on,
will find an ever surer and surer stay . . . The strongest part of our religion
today is its unconscious poetry." See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism,
ist and 2nd ser., introduced by G.K. Chesterton and revised by Kenneth
Allott (London: Everyman, 1964), 235. In Science and Poetry (London: Paul,
Trench, Tubner, 1926), LA. Richards sees the "pseudo-statements" of poetry
as the best solution to the "pseudo-questions" science cannot answer, questions that "prove, when we examine them, not to be questions at all; but
requestsfor emotional satisfaction" (58). Richards looks to poetry to provide these for bewildered modern citizens. See also chap. 5, "The Neutralization of Nature."
118 In chap. 20 of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), Stein, the reclusive German
entrepreneur and insect collector, judges Jim's only hope for redemption to
be in his seizure of the opportunity to "in the destructive element immerse"
(Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1986), 200.
119 A new official Canadian flag had been in use for less than two years when
NF delivered his lecture. It was officially adopted on 15 February 1965. The
national anthem, O Canada, had to wait until 1980 for official adoption.
120 In the spirit of Canadian unity, NF balances two painters from Quebec with
two English-speaking painters. He also ranges nicely across "the modern
century." Paul-Emile Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, and was,
with his student Jean-Paul Riopelle, a member of les automatistes, a Surrealist-inspired group. His manifesto Refus Global was a challenging eye-opener
for the province. In its contrast between a daily world ruled by fear and
conformity and the visionary fraternity glimpsed in art, it possesses many
affinities with MC. Riopelle, a co-signatory to this document, became one of
North America's foremost abstract artists and was also a leading member of
the tachiste group. Emily Carr and Tom Thomson were inspirational figures
in Canadian experimental art, championed in the pages of the Canadian
Forum by Barker Fairley.

346

Notes to pages 69-75

121 See Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, 11. 97-8: "Ah, but a man's reach
should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?"
122 Edwin John Pratt (1882-1964), NF's teacher and subsequently his colleague
at Victoria College, was the author of learned, expansive poems, including
The Witches' Brew (1925) and The Titanic (1935). German-born Philip Grove
(1879-1948) was the author of several important novels about the harshness of life in Canada, including The Master of the Mill (1944) and In Search
of Myself (1946). See also Search for America (1927). For Emile Nelligan,
see n. i, above.
2. Current Opera: A Housecleaning
1 See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.22, for Hamlet's famous analysis of drama in
performance and the responsibility of actors to "hold as 'twere the mirror
up to nature."
2 Some readers may welcome expansion of NF's quickfire musical history.
The comedie larmoyante was in fact an eighteenth-century operatic vehicle,
the result of the successive efforts made by Egidio Duni (1756) and Niccolo
Piccini (1760) to set Carlo Goldoni's sentimental comedy Cecchina ossia la
buona figliuola (Cecchina, or, the Good Girl) to music. Handel and Bononcini
were rival composers at the Royal Academy; at the time the acclaim for Bononcini's operas outstripped that extended to Handel's. NF's remark about a
feud between the supporters of Gliick and Piccini refers to the fact that Piccini's court supporters were fiercely critical of Gliick's operas.
3 Adelina Patti, Italian soprano, made her stage debut at the New York Academy of Music in 1859. For NF, she served as a perpetual reminder of the
"star" fetish that blemished the genre of opera. In an interview with Carl
Mollins conducted just six weeks before his death, NF laughed at "how Patti
... used to make a career out of farewell tours." See Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 8. The Italian tenor Enrico Caruso enjoyed a similar celebrity status in the early twentieth century.
4 John Gay's comic-satirical The Beggar's Opera was first performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, on 29 January 1728. Dame Ethyl Smyth, composer
and advocate for female suffrage, enjoyed great success with her comedy
The Boatswain's Mate (1916), adapted from the sea stories of W.W. Jacobs.
5 Faust, the French composer Charles Gounod's first popular success, was
performed in Paris on 19 March 1859.
6 This distinction connects Wagnerian opera to the destructive, ecstatic energies that Nietzsche invests in the Dionysian deity in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872).
7 Alban Berg's Wozzeck was first performed on 14 December 1925. Its protagonist, a humble, bullied soldier-servant, is a long way from the Nazi military
elite. By the "catacomb period" NF may be referring to the intense, revela-

Notes to pages 77-84

347

tory strain in modern art. In the first two chapters of MC, he discusses this at
length as a standing rebuke to what is referred to in no. 2 as the "ermine and
diamond pseudo-culture" (75), which he here recognizes as an inescapable
feature of the artistic scene in the twentieth century.
3. Ballet Russe
1 Wagner's ideas of "unending" or "infinite" melody are developed in his
essay of 1860 on "Zukunftmusik" ("the music of the future"). Here he emphasizes the functional necessity of every element in a musical work in a manner
that literary students may find analogous to Coleridge's view of the
"organic" properties of a Shakespeare play.
2 The distinction between allegory and symbol NF makes here, conventional
wisdom for this phase of critical history, is described most clearly in Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual (1816). For Coleridge, allegory is
only "a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language," while symbol
participates in "the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal." See Lay Sermons, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
ed. R.J. White (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 30.
4. The Jooss Ballet
1 NF frequently acknowledged his debt to the so-called "Cambridge school" of
ritual anthropology, whose number included P.M. Cornford, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray. All these scholars argued strongly for the origins
of Greek drama in religious ritual. See Gilbert Murray, "Excursus on the
Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy," included in Jane Harrison's
Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 341-63, a work NF
owned and annotated. Here Murray states that he "assumes that Tragedy is
in origin a Ritual Dance, a Sacer Ludus" (341).
2 First performed 3 July 1932 in Paris, The Green Table, described as "a dance of
death in eight scenes," became the best-known work of the Jooss ballet.
3 "Program music" is a term introduced by Franz Liszt, who saw it as a means
of protecting his music from the arbitrary projections and misinterpretations
of its listeners. In the entry on program music in the Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), Roger Scruton laments that the
term now frequently stretches to include all music attempting "to represent
extra-musical concepts without resort to sung words" (15:283).
5. Frederick Delius

i The "variation form" allows for successive statements of a musical theme to

be altered or presented in altered settings. The theme may vary from a short

348

Notes to pages 84-8

motif to a complete melody. Elizabethan masters in this form include William Byrd and John Bull.
2 Cesar Franck, French composer, was born in Belgium. His formal skills in
balancing traditional forms and counterpoint are shown to their fullest in his
Piano Quintet (1879), Prelude, Choral, et Fugue for piano (ca. 1884), and Violin
Sonata (1886). Claude Debussy was a French composer for whom the early
influence of Wagner receded as he encountered the work of symbolistes like
Mallarme and Maeterlinck. He put the former's work to music in Prelude a
I'apres-midi d'un faune (1894) and worked with the latter on Pelleas et Melisande
(1902).
3 Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian pianist, composer, and mystic. A frequent performer in Western Europe, Scriabin promulgated his theosophist and spiritual philosophy in ambitious atonal compositions like Poem
of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1910).
4 See Blake's letter of 2 October 1800mainly in verseto Thomas Butts:
"Cloud, Meteor & Star, / Are Men Seen Afar" in Blake: Complete Writings, ed.
Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 805 (11. 31-2). All
subsequent references to Blake in this volume are keyed to the Keynes edition.
5 NF is referring here to Ernest Dowson's Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub
Regno Cynarae ("I am not as I was in the reign of Cynara the Good"), sometimes
described as the most famous lyric poem of the decadent 18905.
6 Gustav Hoist, an English composer and a close friend of Vaughan Williams,
shared Williams's interests in the English folk tradition. In The Planets (1916)
and The Hymn of Jesus (1917) his astrological and occult concerns are very
prominent. Cyril Scott, English composer and pianist, was also a well-known
writer on occultism with a keen interest in Blake. Among his works is The
Alchemist (1917).
7 George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer, whose eagerness to
integrate satire of contemporary American life into his compositions in Airplane Sonata (1922), Sonata Sauvage (1923), and Ballet mecanique (1925) brought
his work to worldwide attention.
6. Three-Cornered Revival at Headington
1 The edge of the page of the photocopy of the article, acquired courtesy of
Robert D. Denham, is cut off here, and a replacement could not be obtained.
2 In this film, first known as Bombshell (1933), Jean Harlow played a manipulated, edgy star whose life strongly resembled the actress's own.
7. Music and the Savage Breast
i See no. 4, n. i.

Notes to pages 89-93

349

2 See The Merchant of Venice, in which Lorenzo declares:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus;
Let no such man be trusted. (5.1.83-8)
3 See the description of a cosmic music in Paradise Lost, bk. 5,11. 624-5 (ed.
Fowler): "Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem."
4 Juvenal, Satires, 10.81.
5 The Sung dynasty reigned over all China from 960 to 1127, retaining command of southern China until 1279. In the more commercial atmosphere of
their reign, covered theatres became more and more common in the country
and were frequented by all classes. In the north, the plays were a multimedia
experience, combining music, acrobatics, comic exchanges, masks, and a core
play, short and sometimes satirical. From the twelfth century, the south
developed longer and more complex theatre with a repertoire of male and
female roles and singing by all characters.
6 See Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1. 70.
8. Men As Trees Walking
1 The title of the article is taken from the Biblical story of the blind man who,
recovering his sight in a miracle performed by Jesus, said, "I see men as trees,
walking" (Mark 8:24). I am grateful to Jean O'Grady for this reference.
2 Robert Denham describes the significance of the CNE [Canadian National
Exhibition] in the national life at this time in NFHK, 1:61.
3 The Group of Seven, Canada's earliest experimental group of painters, were
based in Toronto. Their inspiration was the landscape of northern Ontario,
and they were championed in the Canadian Forum by Barker Fairley. The
seven painters were Frank Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank
Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Fred Varley.
4 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 11. 5,13, for
references to the "glittering eye" of the mariner.
5 In A Short History of Surrealism (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1936), David
Gascoyne declares that "surrealism possesses its devotee like the voice of the
ancient oracles" (66).
6 See Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford, 1933), for extensive
examples of the imagery of pain, suffering, violence, and sadism in European
Romantic literature.
7 German-born artist Max Ernst played a leading role in launching the Dada
and Surrealist movements. His interest in the comic book and "collage nov-

35O

Notes to pages 93-5

els," especially Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness) (1934), substantiates

NF's comment about the popular basis for his work.
8 Yves Tanguy was spurred to become a painter by the work of Giorgio de
Chirico, which he saw in 1923. Two years later a meeting with Andre Breton
led him into the Surrealist movement. From 1939 he lived in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1948. Tanguy's work is often compared to Dali's, and taps the
same trance-like presentation of the sea and sky.
9 Norman Dawson did not achieve great esteem among historians of surrealism, but Blue Mouth of Paradise, the painting that NF describes here, with its
deep suspicion of official institutions of authority, is a typical example of his
work. His later painting British Diplomacy, exhibited in 1938, uses a tangled
mass of springs, darts, and limbs to reiterate its outrage at official handling of
international politics at that time.
10 Spanish artist Salvador Dali encountered Andre Breton in 1928, and began
collaborating with Surrealists like Luis Bunuel in the same year. His public
notoriety, even among this infamous group, often leads to slighting of the
skill visible in paintings like The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Inventions of
the Monsters (1937).
11 NF's list shows the variety of surrealist art and its international range. Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915, where he
befriended Apollinaire and Picasso. His Surrealist art questions accepted
reality by presenting it with geometrical fidelity, but stripped of all conventional spatio-temporal associations and familiar landmarks. NF wrote to
Helen Kemp Frye a month after the publication of this review that he had just
been "to see a show of early Chiricos, the clapboarding and egg-face period"
in London (NFHK, 2:811). For Andre Breton, the purified abstraction of Joan
Miro the Spanish artist made him "probably the most Surrealistic of us all"
(Surrealism in Painting [London: Macdonald, 1972], 86). In Paul Nash: A Portfolio of Colour Plates (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1948), Herbert
Read describes how, on returning from World War I, he discovered in Nash
"someone who could convey, as no other artist, the phantasmagoric atmosphere of No Man's Land" (8).
12 David Gascoyne's A Short History of Surrealism (1936) preceded the London
Surrealist exhibition by a year, and, with its combination of party-line Marxism and avant-garde artistic sympathies, displays much of the "idealism" NF
describes here. Pt. 4 of Gascoyne's Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) contains his "Surrealist Poems, 1933-36."
13 Sir Roland Penrose, a British patron, painter, sculptor, and collagist, organized the first international surrealist exhibition at the New Brighton Galleries, London, in 1936. He subsequently played a significant role in the
institutional advancement of modern and experimental art as one of the

Notes to pages 95-9

351

founding members of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, serving as

its chair from 1947 to 1969, and as its president from 1969 to 1976.
14 Paul Klee was in fact Swiss; his collaborations with the Russian Wassily Kandinsky in the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter [Blue Rider] group between 1911
and 1914 may have confused NF.
15 Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter and printmaker.
16 Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) was one of Mexico's most significant
mural painters for his own and subsequent generations.
9. K.R. Srinivasa's Lytton Strachey
1 "Babu" is a rather condescending term that refers to an Anglo-Indian version of correct written English notorious for its florid and grandiloquent
quality. According to British observers, its currency was particularly strong
among the superficially educated, minor clerical functionaries of the Bengal region.
2 Guy Boas's study Lytton Strachey (1935) appeared as an English Association
Pamphlet published by the Oxford University Press.
3 In All and Sundry (London: T.F. Unwin, 1919), E.T. Raymond reports: "Young
England thinks lightly enough of the old men who could neither ensure
peace nor prepare to make war with vigour. 'You got the country into this
mess; we got it out: we (and not you) are going to have the say in the future.'
Such, in effect, is what the young men are thinking, and what many of them
are saying" (10).
4 NF alludes here to "Lenvoy de Chaucer." Chaucer appends to The Clerk's
Tale:
Griselde is deed and eek hir pacience,
And bothe atones buried in Itaile.
10. The Great Charlie
1 PWA was the Provincial Workman's Association, Canada's equivalent of the
Works Projects Administration in the U.S. (see no. i, n. 52), and with allied
objectives of finding work for the unemployed.
2 Lenin's interest in cinema as a revolutionary force led him in 1917 to set up a
film subsection of his newly-formed State Department of Education. His wife
Nadezhda Krupskaya headed the unit, and massive changes in production
distribution and film content followed.
3 Madeleine Carroll was at that time a famous leading lady in British and
American cinema. The New York Times praised her "charming and skillful"
performance in Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935).

352

Notes to pages 100-4

4 In his preface to An Evening's Love: or The Mock Astrologer (1671), Dryden

complains about how, to a vulgar audience, his own work or "the zany of a
mountebank or ... the appearance of an antic on the theatre" each promotes
equal laughter and applause among his audience. See OfDramatick Poesy and
Other Essays, ed. George Watson (London: J.M. Dent, 1962), 1:145.
5 See the short poem To the States, in Walt Whitman: Collected Poetry and Prose
(New York: Library of America, 1982), 172:
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much,
obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward
resumes its liberty.
6 Dorothy Thompson was an important syndicated newspaper columnist with
extensive experience in Europe. Archibald MacLeish, poet, librarian of Congress, and subsequently assistant secretary of state from 1944 to 1945, made
the switch from avant-garde experiment to intensely political verse in 1932
when he published Conquistador.
7 Isaiah 35:8 promises: "And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall
be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be
for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein." In Plato's
Phaedrus, 2443, Socrates observes that "the greatest of good things come to us
through madness, when sent as a gift from the gods" (trans. Jowett).
8 In a journal entry for 7 September 1851, Thoreau records that "Atheism may
comparatively be popular with God himself." Thoreau goes on to explain
this by saying that most "faith" is no more than timid habit "guiltless of
thought and reflection." See Henry David Thoreau's Journal, ed. Leonard N.
Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1992), 4:468-9.
9 Apelles, a Greek painter, is said to have been the sole painter granted the
privilege of portraying Alexander the Great. Praised as the greatest artist of
antiquity, his most famous work, now lost, portrayed Aphrodite rising from
the sea.
11. Reflections at a Movie
1 Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the U.S., occupied the White
House from 1923 to 1929. He was renowned for his taciturnity. The first talking picture, Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was released
in October 1927.
2 The preface of W.M. Thayer's From Log Cabin to White House (1882) rehearses the log cabin childhoods of presidents Abraham Lincoln and
James Garfield.

Notes to pages 104-7

353

3 Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet To R.B. describes "the roll, the rise, the
carol, the creation."
4 Amy Lowell was an American poet, biographer of Keats, and promoter of
the the Imagist movement. Between 1915 and 1917 she edited three Imagist
anthologies, leading Ezra Pound, who had launched the movement with Des
Imagistes in 1914, to rename the movement Amygism. Edgar Lee Masters is
best known as the author of the Spoon River Anthology (1915), a book-length
collection of mordant epitaphs voiced by the occupants of a cemetery in rural
Illinois.
5 These are the very different mounts of Don Quixote and Alexander the
Great.
6 "Erse" is the name given by Lowland Scots to the language of the West Highlands, but is also sometimes used more generally for Irish Gaelic.
7 Founded in Montreal in 1900, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire
(IODE) was created to encourage a body of women committed to furthering Britain and British imperialism, primarily through education and the
schools. The Order was active in both world wars; also in immigration, public health, and child welfare. With the waning of British influence in Canada
membership has declined but the organization still has more than 9000 members in more than 400 branches across the country, active mainly in educational and cultural activities. I am grateful to Alvin Lee for this reference.
8 Here NF courted trouble and found it. Two months later James Muir, a
Canadian civil servant, wrote to the Canadian Forum protesting against NF's
assumptions about "the universality of cowshed," championing the Canadian credentials of "byre," and concluding that "to gibe at Marjorie Pickthall
. . . must be offensive to a vast number of Canadian people." NF apologized
and withdrew his comment, although at the same time he repeated his claim
that Ms. Pickthall was an exotic and derivative poet, unable to see rural Canada with the direct vision Robert Frost brought to his poems of rural New
England. See Canadian Forum, 22 (December 1942): 274.
9 In his famous essay "Lardner," reprinted in Prejudices, 5th ser. ([New York:
Knopf, 1926], 49-56), H.L. Mencken praises American humorist Ring
Lardner by declaring, "I doubt that anyone who has not given close and
deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how magnificently Lardner handles it" (51). The fourth edition of Mencken's The American Language, "corrected, enlarged, and rewritten" (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1936), contains a lengthy discussion of "the American vulgate" in chap. 9,
"The American Common Speech."
10 NF's reference is to Sir Winston Churchill's celebrated comments to the
House of Commons about the war effort: "I would say to the House, as I
have said to those who have joined this Government: 'I have nothing to offer
but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'" See Hansard, 13 May 1940, col. 1502.

354

Notes to pages 108-14

12. Music in the Movies

1 NF refers to Erno Rapee's Motion-Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists:

A Rapid-Reference Collection of Selected Pieces Adapted to 52 Moods and Situations (1924).
2 George Cukor directed Romeo and Juliet in 1936. It starred Norma Shearer,
Leslie Howard, and John Barrymore, with music by Herbert Stothart.
3 Harold Lloyd, a star of silent comedy, combined a nondescript appearance
with breathtakingly risky stunts that called for considerable understated athleticism.
4 Sigmund Romberg composed several scores directly for film, including The
Desert Song (1929) and New Moon (1931). George Gershwin composed the
scores of King of Jazz (1930) and Girl Crazy (1932) for screen. Jerome Kern
composed the Oscar-winning score for Show Boat (1936). Irving Berlin won an
Oscar for the song White Christmas, which he wrote for Holiday Inn (1942).
5 A 1930 film directed by Rene Clair and starring Albert Prejean and Polla
Illery.
6 The Reluctant Dragon (1941) is a Walt Disney production in which Robert
Benchley receives a tour of Disney's studio at work.
13. Max Graf's Modern Music
i This is an allusion to the "Chicago Semite Viennese" origins of the second
eponymous protagonist of Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a
Cigar. The phrase also, by implication, supplies an evaluation of the book's
"tourist" view of musical history.
15. Russian Art
1 Eliezar Lissitsky was a Russian Suprematist draughtsman and architect.
From 1919, he produced a series of abstract paintings called Proun. Kazimir
Malevich, a Russian painter born in Ukraine, was a pioneer of Suprematist
art, producing works like Black Square on White (1913), and White on White
(1918). However, his mystic tendencies and overtly stated sympathies with
the peasant class led him to fall foul of the Soviet authorities. Marc Chagall
and Wassily Kandinsky, probably best known for their other major contributions to twentieth-century art, were energetically involved in Soviet artistic
and political activity from 1914 to 1922.
2 The adoption of "socialist realism" followed a resolution from the Party Central Committee in 1932. In the volume reviewed here by NF, Helen Rubissow
suggests that in this phase "the theme of social struggle was replaced with
that of social construction" (20).

Notes to pages 114-25

355

3 For the WPA, see no. i, n. 52.

16. Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye

1 In his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London:
Faber and Gwyer, 1927), T.S. Eliot controversially declared himself to be
"classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion"
(vii).
2 Herbert Read's volume Surrealism (1936) includes his own proselytizing
introduction on behalf of the surrealist movement, together with contributions by Andre Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Eluard, and Georges
Hugnet.
17. The Eternal Tramp
1 One reason for the identification of Chaplin with Communism may lie in his
speeches and actions during the period following the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941. At large meetings throughout the summer
and fall of 1942, Chaplin spoke of his sympathy for the Russian people, and
hinted at greater involvement with left-wing political organizations targeted
by American authorities. See the artist's own bewildered but revealing discussion in Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1964), chap. 26.
2 The U.S.'s entry into World War II followed the Japanese air attack on Pearl
Harbor of 7 December 1941 that left approximately 2,300 Americans dead.
3 George Mosse's Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third
Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), supplies the following Nazi
grace:
Fiihrer, my Fiihrer, bequeathed to me by the Lord,
Protect and preserve me as long as I live!
Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress,
I thank thee today for my daily bread. (241)
4 Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) starred Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane,
Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre.
5 Actress, singer, and comedienne Martha Raye was well known for rambunctious roles.
18. On Book Reviewing
1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 333.
2 In S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-),

356

Notes to pages 125-9

Kierkegaard complains about the tyranny exerted over an author by the

subscription list of any magazine. He describes this as "power like bedbugs
or a foul smell, which always has the advantage of denying pathos to the
one being abused" (4:197). Kierkegaard is probably the most colourful and
pathological reporter on the author's relationship to his reviewers; however, after a long sojourn in the menagerie Kierkegaard builds to commemorate this relationship, the present editor has been unable to track NF's
exact reference.
3 "The truth is, the consideration of so vain a creature as man, is not worth our
pains." See "To the Right Honourable, John, Earl of Mulgrave," dedication to
Aureng-Zebe, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12, Plays, ed. Vinton A. Dearing
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 154.
19. Academy without Walls
1 NF's title alludes to Andre Malraux's "museum without walls" in The Voices
of Silence. See no. i, n. 99.
2 The Haida, an Indian population indigenous to the coast of the Pacific
Northwest, particularly British Columbia, are famous for the art displayed in
their masks, totem poles, dwellings, and canoes.
3 Tachism, a European movement in abstract art, dated from the 19405 and
19505. The term entered into common usage among art critics in 1952 with
the publication of Michel Tapie's Un art autre (1952). The "otherness" of
tachism lies in the search for living rhythms expressed through the medium
of paint.
4 Plain chant (often one word) is, according to both the Oxford Encyclopedic Dictionary and the New Oxford Companion to Music, the same thing as plainsong.
Plainsong is traditional church music in medieval modes and free rhythm
depending on accentuation of the words, sung in unison, with a single line of
vocal melody taken for the liturgy, as in "Gregorian" chant, after Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604). Gregory probably standardized the various schools of
chant then in use. It was Pepin, King of the Franks, however, who in the
eighth century enthusiastically composed plain chant.
5 See no. 18, n. i.
6 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: Modern Library, 1955), 126. NF's quotation from Butler is not quite accurate. The original reads: "it must be born
anew and grow up from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear and trembling."
7 NF refers to a controversial series of seven articles written by Harold Greer
for the Toronto Globe and Mail between Monday, 27 March 1961, and Tuesday, 4 April 1961. In a familiar argument, Greer pointed to the gap in taste
between the taxpayers subsidizing art and the artists producing it. Greer's

Notes to pages 130-7

10

11

12

357

coverage of the conference itself appears to have proceeded in the mocking,

satirical vein of the philistine ratepayer.
In the final sentence of his monograph T.S. Eliot (Edinburgh and London:
Oliver and Boyd, 1963), NF observes that "The greatness of his achievement
will finally be understood, not in the context of the tradition he chose, but in
the context of the tradition that chose him" (99).
"Salon de Refuses" was the famous art exhibition held in 1863by command of Napoleon IIIfor those artists the official salon jury had turned
down. Exhibitors included Cezanne, Whistler, and Manet, whose Dejeuner
sur I'herbe caused enormous controversy.
T.S. Eliot's Order of Merit was conferred in 1948. The "drunken helot" tag is
Ezra Pound's recasting of the "drunken slave" label Arthur Waugh fastened
on Eliot in "The New Poetry," Quarterly Review, 226 (October 1916): 386. See
Ezra Pound, "Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot," Egoist, 4, no. 3 (June 1917): 724. Waugh saw in Eliot's poetry an exemplification of the absurd claims made
by modern poetry and used him, in the way Spartans used their drunken
slaves, as a warning of what would happen to English verse if its young
practitioners were to attempt to emulate Eliot's modern methods. In the
essay "Tradition in Poetry," collected in Lay Thoughts of a Dean ([New York
and London: Putnam's, 1926], 28-34), me Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, W.R.
Inge, numbered Eliot among the "cultural Bolsheviks" dedicated to the overthrow of conventional English poetry. These quotations are NF's markers for
an avant-garde art before its absorption into society.
For the Canada Council, see no. i, n. 102. NF obviously aims to quash any of
the familiar arguments that associate public funding of artists with their control by the public.
In "Notes of a Journey through France and Italy," William Hazlitt wrote that
"music . . . requires the deepest feeling, and admits the least of the impertinence of explanation . . . has no witness or vouchers but the inward sense of
delight, the rich, circling intoxication of heart-felt sounds." See The Complete
Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: J.M. Dent, 1932), 10:169.
20. Communications

1 At this time demands for independence or participation in a loose confederation were mounting in Quebec, and three months after this article's
publication revolutionary separatists from the Front de liberation du Quebec
kidnapped a British cultural attache and a Liberal cabinet minister.
2 In his broadcast, NF added, "And even of the genuinely directed radicals it
may be said that they can never win until they know what they are fighting."
3 See particularly McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1962).

358

Notes to pages 139-48

4 In his broadcast, NF included this closing sentence: "For a long time the
tolerance of Hyde Park oratory was taken to be a symbol of the maturity of
British society: now that Hyde Park oratory has become visible as well as
audible, and has entered our cars, our homes, our beds, and our dreams, the
ability to contain it becomes a much more serious test."
21. The Renaissance of Books
1 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1920), 52 (chap.
4, sec. 4).
2 NF may have overestimated the amount of Baudelaire available in the ten
volumes of The World's Best Essays, ed. David Brewer (St. Louis: P.P. Kaiser,
1900). The collection contains translations of just three prose poems by
Charles Baudelaire, The Gallant Marksman, At Twilight, and The Clock. A brief
and discerning introductory section defends the poet against the charges of
decadence levelled against him by Tolstoy.
3 Alexander Woollcott's Reunion in Paris, described as a "true story" by its
author, has been collected by Joseph Hennessey in The Portable Woollcott
(New York: Viking Press, 1946), 58-61. NF has slightly misquoted the ending,
in which Woollcott refers to occasions in our lives "when we thus catch life in
the very act of rhyming" (61).
4 The first Penguins appeared in July 1935. The firm's official historians emphasize the low-key, amateur nature of the advertising methods employed
by the founder of the operation, Allen Lane. Consequently, they pay no
attention to the "hard sell" feature of the firm's operations described by NF.
See W.E. Williams, The Penguin Story (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books,
1956) and J.E. Morpurgo, King Penguin (London: Hutchinson, 1979).
5 NF's comments arguably underplay Brett's versatility. He was also the first
editor of UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], and the author of "Shelley's
Relation to Berkeley and Drummond," in Studies in English by Members of
University College, compiled by Malcolm W. Wallace (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1931), 170-202.
6 Ayer made his most famous assault on metaphysics in Language, Truth, and
Logic (1936).
7 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953),
300.
8 NF here very slightly misquotes from chap. 2, sec. 2 of Main Street: "they say
he writes regular poetry" (17).
9 These comments come from Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying: An Observation," in Wilde's Intentions (New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1920), 17, 53.
10 Truman Capote based his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966) on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.

Notes to pages 148-59

359

Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel: The Novel as History (1968) focuses on his attempts to participate in a protest march on the
Pentagon against the war in Vietnam.
11 See Edmund Burke's reference to society as "a partnership . . . between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," in
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 85.
12 The Watergate hearings were televised in 1973, incriminating senior members of President Richard Nixon's administration, including Attorney General John Mitchell, in burglary and phone tapping. On 9 August 1974, Nixon,
whose involvement subsequent investigation has revealed to be of major
proportions, resigned from office. In notes written on file cards contained in
NFF, 1991, box 28, file 3, NF characterizes the transcripts of the Watergate
tapes as "intolerable, interminable drivel. Seven or eight speakers, but without the initials you couldn't tell one from another. A language of pure dither.
No power of choice and no leadership. Any teacher of literature and language would feel at once that this is the enemy: this is what we have to fight.
So the same problem comes to us, as it must to every country."
22. Violence and Television
1 The typescript continues, "and it has much the same relationship to genuine
energy that Playboy and the movies have to sexual love. And, consequently,
the controlling of violence is really a matter of setting energy free to its
appointed and proper tasks."
2 This speech was delivered at a time of escalating terrorist violence. One of
the most visible and appalling of these episodes occurred before dawn on
5 September 1972, when eight Palestinians entered the Israeli compound at
Olympic Village, Munich, killed two residents, and took nine hostages. They
demanded the release of two hundred Palestinians held in Israel. Twentythree hours later in a shootout at a Munich airport, five Palestinians, a German policeman, and all the hostages were killed.
3 Ted Kotcheff, a director of features for the CBC with experience as a Hollywood director, contributed an essay called "How Can the Quality of Popular
Programming Be Improved?" to the symposium. See Symposium, 125-36.
4 Garth Jowett, then an associate professor of communication studies at
the University of Windsor, gave the first paper of the conference, "A Brief
History of Opinion on the Social Effects of Mass Media." See Symposium,
1-11.
5 In 1919 the i8th amendment established Prohibition in the United States. Following much violence and illegality, the 2ist amendment repealed it in 1933.
6 Les Brown, then television correspondent for the New York Times, contrib-

360

Notes to pages 160-3

uted to the panel discussion "Canadian Industry RealitiesCan We Do

without Violence?" See Symposium, 141-5.
7 The Pastore hearings were held before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on
Communications of the Committee of Commerce on 21-24 March 1972 under
the chairmanship of Senator John O. Pastore of Rhode Island. They examined
closely the publication in 1971 of the five-volume Surgeon General's Advisory
Report on Television and Social Behavior and attempted, despite much sensationalized and confused media reporting, to build some broad consensus
about the effects of televised violence.
8 Robert M. Liebert, at that time a professor of psychology and psychiatry at
the State University of New York (SUNY)-Stonybrook, reported to the symposium on "The Effects of Violence: Experimental and Research Findings."
See Symposium, 87-90.
9 The typescript reads, "Education, so far as it is schooling, falls into my own
area, I think, of literary criticismbecause the medium, whether it is cold or
hot, whether it is electronic or linear, can only convey sounds and images
and this means that the conveyance of words is always a central part of it."
10 Jean Basile, a journalist and author, participated in the panel discussion on
"Violence as a Dramatic Convention in the Arts and Mass Media."
11 J.W. Mohr, then a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of
Canada, spoke on "Media and Controls." See Symposium, 200-5.
12 The typescript begins a new paragraph with the statement, "Similarly, when
television deals with the current issues of the day, the easiest way is to polarize them."
13 See Daniel Boorstin, The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream (New
York: Atheneum, 1961), particularly the first two chapters.
14 This is added to the manuscript as published and is not in the typescript of
the talk.
15 See the first chapter of McLuhan's Understanding Media for an explanation of
the phrase "the medium is the message." The same author's The Gutenberg
Galaxy asks, "Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fallout?" (246).
16 The typescript continues, "That, as I say, is a traditional distinction, it's a
morbid distinction. It is something civilization has to outgrow sooner or
later, and the electronic media are doing a good job, I think, in helping us to
outgrow it. It is no virtue of theirs, it is simply the nature of the medium itself
that does this."
17 Mannix, a prime time television production from the U.S., starred Mike Connors as Joe Mannix and ran for eight seasons between 1967 and 1975. The
hero worked as a private investigator for a computer-obsessed company
called Intertect during the show's first season but was afterwards selfemployed.

Notes to pages 163-8

361

18 The typescript adds, "That is, all concerned citizens should learn as soon as
possible that what they have is not a mirror on the world, but a prism." The
following paragraph begins, "Another educational operation is the education of the emotions."
19 The typescript reads "a little while longer."
20 The typescript adds, "Consequently, it is a very important step in emotional
education whether we identify with the agent or with the victim of violence."
21 Guy Cote, a film producer with the National Film Board of Canada at that
time, did not deliver a paper, but participated in group discussion by recalling "the socially positive effects" narrated in "that tale of injustice" the
Crucifixion. See Symposium, 102.
22 The typescript reads, "Everything that is civilizing in our traditionsClassical and Biblical, all comes to focus on the same point, that every development of emotional education and character runs through that sense of
concern for the victim."
23 The new paragraph in the typescript begins, "With tragedy, the reaction is
very different. In tragedy everything is focused on the tragic hero, and the
tragic hero is a person capable of being an agent of violence who ends up a
victim of violence, and for him we feel a certain concern. We may feel that
he got what was coming to him, like Macbeth, or we may feel sympathetic
with him as we do with Romeo and Juliet. But that doesn't matter. When we
see a violent action, we are intended to pass through certain violent feelings
of our own, then emerge from them and look at what is happening as concerned people, detached but not indifferent, concerned but not involved,
for or against the violence." NF then resumes at "This attitude of detached
concern..."
24 See Aristotle, Poetics, i449b.
23. Introduction to Art and Reality
1 Robert Irwin's "The Elements of 'Art'" is the first essay in this collection.
Irwin was at that time a painter and sculptor from Los Angeles.
2 All these contributors appeared in the section of Art and Reality dedicated to
"Patronage: The Double-Edged Sword." Andrea Hull, then Director of Public Policy and Planning for The Australia Council, and Jean-Claude Germain,
Artistic Director of Theatre Aujourd'hui in Montreal, both delivered papers under this title, and Michael Straight, former Deputy Director for the
National Endowment for the Arts at Washington D.C., acted as respondent.
Andre Fortier, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, delivered a paper "On Patronage." Uriel Luft delivered a
paper on "Arts in Society: The Economic and Business Factors."
3 Giordano Bruno, the "terrible heretic" Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait

362

Notes to pages 168-71

of the Artist as a Young Man thought had been "terribly burned" by the Roman
Catholic Church, defended the Copernican theory in La Cena de le Ceneri (The
Ash Wednesday Supper) (1584).
4 John Bentley Mays, at that time art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, spoke
on "Art and Reality?" For Irwin's paper, see n. i, above.
5 This is NF's witty and rueful recognition of the popularity of Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, filmed in 1939, famous ever
since, and a tribute to the commercial success of escapism even when escape
seems inconceivable.
6 John Ayto's Twentieth-Century Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
defines "back-to-basics" as "a catch phrase applied to a movement or enthusiasm for a return to fundamental principles, (e.g., in education), or to policies reflecting them." Ayto sees the mid-1970s and the 19805 as the peak
period for the politicization of this phrase.
7 Jorge Alberto Lozoya, professor and research fellow at El Colegio de Mexico,
delivered a paper on "Culture, Freedom and Change." The remainder of the
contributors NF mentions here comprise the members of the panel on "Art
and National Survival." David Watmough, listed as a writer and critic from
Vancouver, offered "A Vertical Viewpoint." Jean Gagne, Director-General of
the Quebec Institute for Research on Culture, spoke on "Art and National
Survival: A View from Quebec." John Hirsch, Artistic Director, Stratford Festival, Ontario, served as respondent to the panelists.
8 Jan van der Marck, Director of the Centre for the Fine Arts in Metropolitan
County, Miami, Florida, spoke on "Museum Strategies: Sisyphus or Lysistrata?"
9 Sisyphus was in Greek mythology the most cunning of men, able to outwit
deities and even Death with repeated success. However, the punishment
devised for him by the gods required him to repeatedly roll a rock up a hill,
only to have it roll back down again as it reached the summit. His myth has
thus become a byword for futile labour.
10 Prem Kirpal, Founder-President of the Institute of Cultural Relations and Development Studies in New Delhi, India, spoke on "Arts and Internationalism."
11 UNESCO is an acronym for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization, founded in 1946. The League of Nations, formed after
World War I with the intention of promoting world peace and international
security, has passed into English usage as the locus dassicus of good intentions blasted by political machinations.
12 Carl Oglesby's paper was titled "Art and the Apocalypse." Oglesby, a writer
and activist from Cambridge, Mass., was a leading member of the Students
for a Democratic Society. D. Paul Schafer, a Canadian cultural adviser based
in Toronto, spoke on "The Cultural Interpretation of History: Beacon of the
Future."

Notes to pages 175-7

3^3
24. Pro Patria Mori

1 This famous Oxford Union debate took place 9 February 1933, when a proposal that "This house will under no circumstances fight for King and Country" was carried by a substantial majority of the membership present at the
meeting. The British popular press subsequently denounced this as a victory
for the "sexual indeterminates of Oxford." Yet student response throughout
the Empire was sympathetic, and in the final session of Victoria College's
Debating Parliament the same motion passed by a majority of six, triggering
derisive and patronizing responses from the local press. See also Norm
Knight's "For King and Country," Ada Victoriana, 57 (April 1933): 39, and
Arthur R. Cragg's "Young Men in Their Teens Have Queer Notions," Acta
Victoriana, 57 (May 1933): 19-22.
2 A variation on the Victoria College motto abeunt studia in mores, i.e., "studies
are moulded into habits" (Ovid, Heroides, 15.83). The Rowland version might
be rendered as "studies trail off into follies." Henry Edgar (Hank) Rowland
was an active and energetic contemporary of NF's at Victoria College.
3 Lytton Strachey's public opposition to the Military Service bill of January
1916 brought him before a draft board on 7 March 1916, where he declared
that his opposition to conscription was "not based on religious belief, but
upon moral considerations." Although Strachey was subsequently exempted
from service on medical grounds on 10 April, by the end of May 1917 he was
re-examined, medically reclassified, and subsequently ordered to report to
the board every six months.
4 J.A. Hobson's The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) and The German Panic (1913)
are valuable studies of the relationship between media ownership, opinion
formation, and the role of manufactured hysteria in the modern state.
5 Hansard, 11 November 1918, col. 2463, records Lloyd George's announcement of "an end to all wars." An earlier possible derivation for this phrase is
H.G. Wells's The War That Will End War (1914). In 1934, Wells told Liberty
Magazine that "I launched the phrase The War to End War' and that was not
the least of my crimes."
6 Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, entered
World War I as late as 1917 with the expressed hope of making the world
"safe for democracy." He conducted peace negotiations in the same spirit,
but is widely felt to have been out-manoeuvred by French premier Georges
Clemenceau and British prime minister Lloyd George. His hopes for a
League of Nations that would further the cause of world peace were stymied
when the U.S. itself did not join the organization.
7 The Hindenburg line was the ninety-mile line the German commander Paul
von Hindenburg formed on the Western Front. From March 1917 to September 1918 it proved impossible to dislodge German troops from this position.

364

Notes to pages 177-90

8 "It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country" (Horace, Odes, 3.2.13).
25. Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian
1 Ezra Pound contributed poetry and prose to the two issues of Lewis's frenetic Blast (1914-15) and made many energetic efforts to find him financial
support and to promote his work. Their relationship understandably cooled
following the appearance of Lewis's typically patronizing comments about
him in Time and Western Man. See Time and Western Man, bk. i, chap. 9, "Ezra
Pound, etc."
2 Vilfredo Pareto's discussion of these "mental states" is in vol. i of Mind and
Society (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), pars. 172-6.
3 John Gawsworth, author of the enthusiastic and belle-lettristic Apes, Japes,
and Hitlerism: A Study and Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Unicorn
Press, 1932), claimed Lewis "ground Spengler's pretensions to powder" (312). (John Gawsworth is the pseudonym of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong.)
26. War on the Cultural Front
1 Otto Strasser was a German politician and author who joined the Nazi Party
in 1925, but subsequently broke with Hitler. Following his exile in 1933 he
lived in Vienna, Prague, Zurich, and Paris. He published Germany Tomorrow
in 1940, and in the same year fled to Canada.
2 Zollverein, a customs union that abolished tariffs between German states. By
1854 it included most German states. It proved to be a crucial agent in Prussia's hegemony over Austria, and subsequently of Germany's unification.
27. Two Italian Sketches, 1939
1 From Browning's Responses to Challenges to Rhyme, 11. 8-9.
2 See William Wordsworth, Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland,
11.1-4:
Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice.
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!
3 Art historians have viewed the Florentine Domenico Ghirlandaio as an excellent and industrious craftsman but not a particularly inspired artist. To many
of his contemporaries, Ghirlandaio's fame lay in his ability to integrate episodes of the sacred narrative with the manners and decor of contemporary
bourgeois Florence.
4 Taddeo di Bartolo was an Italian painter. Son of a barber, he is first listed as

Notes to pages 190-2

365

an independent painter in 1389. His fresco series Roman Gods and Heroes and
Cardinal and Political Virtues (1413-14) are exemplary efforts in the Renaissance tradition of civic humanism.
5 In Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), chap. 9, "The Moral of the
Story," G.K. Chesterton observes that "Medieval philosophy and culture,
with all the crimes and errors of its exponents, was always seeking equilibrium. It can be seen in every line of its rhythmic and balanced art; in every
sentence of its carefully qualified and self-questioning philosophy" (277).
6 Bartolo di Fredi produced innovative altar designs that combined realistic
surfaces with mystical meanings. His Trinity for the altarpiece of S. Domenico, Siena, is his most famous work. Bernhard Berenson's "The Central
Italian Painters," in The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1930) (Glasgow:
Collins, 1966), sees Taddeo di Bartolo, Barna, and Bartolo di Fredi as representative of a Sienese art that had reached its peak, and would "never again
. . . receive that replenishment of force without which art is doomed to dwindle away" (127).
7 According to Ghiberti's I Commentari and the first edition of Vasari's Lives
(1550), Barna (da Siena), a Sienese painter, painted many Old and New Testament scenes in Tuscany. Vasari's second edition of the Lives (1568) refers
only to New Testament scenes in the San Gemignano church. The slenderness of documentation referring to any single artist and the stylistic variety
of the frescoes has led modern art historians to posit collaborative production rather than the work of a single hand.
8 Veronese was born in Verona but worked in Venice from mid-century. His
extravagant, ornamental paintings were frequently considered excessive by
the more orthodox institutions which commissioned them. Among the generation of artists in Venice who emerged after Titian's death, Tintoretto vied
with Veronese for public esteem. His paintings, like Veronese's, exhibit some
liking for the unexpected and even grotesque. Carpaccio is most famous for
his two cycles of saints' lives, Scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula and Scenes
from the Lives of Saint George and Saint Jerome. His love for crowded detail and
fantasy features in both works.
9 NF is referring to T.S. Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar. In
this poem, Bleistein is described as "Chicago Semite Viennese" (1. 16). Cf.
also:
. . . On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.... (11. 21-4)
10 NF's handwritten version adds, "And of course they hate him because he
won't be a hypocrite and pretend to believe in anything beyond trading and
keeping bargains."

366

Notes to pages 193-8

11 NF initially closed his essay with the harsher comment that "They understand each other, wop and rat. Anti-red ant, not degenerate stuffhas a real
place in the New Germany's Dept. of Propaganda. Germany has accelerated
her production of cannon, and the doctore must stimulate the output of
fodder."
12 NF refers to the Italian translation of Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and
Influence People (Milan: V. Bompiani, 1938).
28. G.M. Young's Basic
i The Cambridge linguist C.K. Ogden invented Basic English between 1925
and 1927, hoping that its total vocabulary of 850 words would operate as an
"auxiliary international language" able to ease everyday communication
across the globe. In the 19405, however, LA. Richards, convinced that the
threat to world peace derived from problems in communication, took the
lead in a renewed crusade for the adoption of Basic English as a world
language. See Richards's "reconstruction book" Basic English and Its Uses
(1943)29. Revenge or Justice?
1 NF's title alludes to Sir Francis Bacon's essay "Of Revenge." In his Essays: or
Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), Bacon states that "Revenge is a kind of wild
justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it
out" (Essays [London: J.M. Dent, 1906], 13).
2 The Soviet judge I.T. Nikitchenko dissented from the verdicts of acquittal for
three of the defendantsHans Fritzsche, Hjamar Schacht, and Franz Von
Papenand from the decision to stop short of asserting the criminality of the
German General Staff and High Command. He also called for the defendant
Rudolf Hess to be executed.
3 Of Streicher, Airey Neave, remembering the trial in On Trial at Nuremberg
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), wrote: "Streicher represented the most revolting aspects of Nazism. He was the true anti-semite who delighted in the
destruction of synagogues, the burning of shops, and beatings in the streets.
Without him and his followers, who whipped up racial fury, Hitler could
never have carried out the Final Solution" (88).
30. F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West
1 "America is a Utopia.... It is the name of a human hope." See Alfonso Reyes,
Ultima Tule (Imprenta Universitaria: Mexico, 1942), 93,89.
2 The contrast between civilization, the total acquired skills and machinery of a

Notes to pages 198-208

367

society, and culture, the shaping spirit that informs them, is one familiar to
late eighteenth-century thought, but is sharpened to an extreme degree in
Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, where each stands for a radically
opposite phase of human history. It seems likely that NF had Spengler's
work in mind when he made this distinction.
3 Northrop's essay appeared in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 56 (November
1941): 1-17. It undertakes a comparative study of models in Newtonian
mechanics and economic theory, concluding that no economic model so far
devised can predict the future operations of a complex, dynamic system of
market behaviour. Of course, as NF's review points out, such conclusions
hardly advance the case for centralized economic planning along Soviet
lines.
31. Wallace Notestein's The Scot in History
i NF is referring to John Duns Scotus, critic of Aquinas, whose major work
Opus Oxoniense includes commentaries on Aristotle, the Bible, and Peter of
Lombard's Sentences.
32. Toynbee and Spengler
1 The philosopher's stone was an apocryphal entity, much sought after in
medieval and Renaissance Europe because of its alleged capacity to turn
base metals into gold. NF views the equivalent for modern thought in the
"philosophy of history" with deep ambivalence, displaying a quizzical
scepticism as well as a profound interest in the quest of modern intellectuals for a set of scientific laws that will enable them to understand historical
change.
2 NF refers to the following articles: "Civilization: Crisis in Britain," Time,
17 March 1947,71-81; and James A. Linen, "A Letter from the Publisher,"
Time, 28 April 1947,17.
3 A two-volume edition of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough
appeared in 1890. The full twelve-volume work was completed in 1915.
4 In A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), Toynbee comments that, where the issue of whether Western civilization is disintegrating
is concerned, "In our generation . . . we must be content to leave this question unanswered" (4:4).
5 See Pascal, Pensees, no. 413.
6 The United Nations was at this time a relatively new institution, founded
only after World War II. The term was first used, however, in 1941 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to describe the countries fighting against
Axis powers. On i January 1942 a joint declaration by twenty-six nations to

368

Notes to pages 210-20

continue the war effort and not to make a separate peace grouped these
states together as "the United Nations."
33. Gandhi
i Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary leader who overthrew the C'hing
dynasty and formed the Chinese republic in 1912. Influenced by Karl Marx,
his forging of the Three People's Principles of nationalism, democracy, and
the people's livelihood led to his heroic reputation as the founder of modern
China.
35. Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor
1 John Davidson Ketchum, who reviewed the Kinsey report for the Forum (see
Canadian Forum, 28 [May 1948]: 44-5), was editor of the Canadian Journal of
Psychology between 1953 and 1958 and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
2 NF continued to worry about the anomaly of the continuing existence of censorship in a civilized democracy. In "Culture and the National Will," an
address delivered at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1957, he lamented to
his audience that "Canada, like all other countries, has laws of book censorship no serious student of literature can have the slightest respect for" (NFF,
1991, box 38, file 2).
3 In 1950, a subsection was added to Section 207 of the Criminal Code of Canada making it an offence to publish or distribute "crime comics."
4 NF discusses the censorship of Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County in
"Undemocratic Censorship," Canadian Forum, 26 (July 1946): 76. James T. Farrell protests against Canadian censorship and the banning of his novel Bernard Clare in "Canada Bans Another Book," Canadian Forum, 26 (November
1946): 176-8.
5 On its publication in 1944, Kathleen Winsor's historical novel Forever Amber
was greeted by A.D.H. Smith in the Saturday Review of Literature, 14 October
1944, as "the bawdiest novel I have read in years."
36. Cardinal Mindszenty
i Following the recommendations of a hastily convened Royal Commission, a
number of suspected Communist spies were detained on 15 February 1946
at the RCMP training barracks at Rockcliffe, near Ottawa. They were not
allowed contact with lawyers or relatives for security reasons. This provoked
widespread criticism from press and public as did the subsequent in camera
investigation undertaken by the Commission.

Notes to pages 221-6

369

2 J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey was chair of the constantly vigilant Senate
Committee on Un-American Activities from 1947.
37. The Two Camps
1 As early as 1946, Liu Shao-chi had spoken of "a Chinese or Asiatic form
of Marxism" ripe for export throughout all Asia. After the declaration of
China as a People's Republic six months after NF's article was written in
October 1949, the whole of Southeast Asia was considered vulnerable to
Communist takeover. A month later, Maoto the considerable dismay of
the Western powersmade his way to Moscow for a dialogue with
Stalin.
2 Chiang Kai-shek's ascent to the presidency of Nationalist China, Taiwan, in
1950 owed much to U.S. aid. At that time, the U.S. government hoped to
overturn the Communist government of China.
38. Law and Disorder
1 William Leuchtenberg's The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (1958) narrates the
course of this earlier "red scare" and the many bizarre incidents surrounding
it. In 1919, for example, conservative Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee
proposed the construction of a penal colony in Guam to house native-born
American radicals.
2 Senator Martin Dies of Texas was the first chair of the Special House Committee on Un-American activities created 6 June 1938. In 1946, Dies wrote to
President Harry Truman to inform him of the broad base of national support
for the stiffer anti-Communist measures to which NF alludes here. For
Thomas, see no. 36, n. 2, above.
3 In September 1950, the U.S. Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security
bill. This required all Communist organizations to register with the attorney
general. Since the Smith Act of 1940 prohibited membership of any group
calling for the violent overthrow of the government, such registration
amounted to an admission of guilt. Further measures provided for the
deportation of aliens who had been Communists at any time. The act passed
despite presidential veto.
39. Two Books on Christianity and History
i Karl Lowith was in fact a philosopher of Jewish origin, who had left Germany in 1934 as Nazi control over the universities tightened. When NF
wrote, he may have thought Lowith would continue in his appointment at
the Hartford Theological Seminary, but 1949 was the year of his move to the

370

4
5

Notes to pages 226-32

New School of Social Research. I am grateful to Nick Halmi for alerting me to

this problem.
Joachim of Floris, or Fiore, left the Cistercian order to found his own order in
Calabria. His three ages were the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the
imminent age of the Spirit, a time of new religious orders, world conversion,
and the advent of a "Spiritual Church."
Charles Norris Cochrane shared NF's Canadian roots, Protestant beliefs, and
intellectual energy. From 1929 he was professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto. He published Thucydides and the Science of History in 1929
and Christianity and Classical Culture in 1940.
See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (1932),
for the standard account of this concept.
See Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), which NF
thought possibly Lewis's best book. In the introduction to pt. 2 Lewis
declares, "We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness" (103).
40. Nothing to Fear but Fear

1 Barker Fairley was the author of Goethe as Revealed in His Poetry (1932) and
A Study of Goethe (1947) as well as translator of Goethe's Selected Poems
(1954) and Faust (1970). Fairley was also a poet, the first literary editor of
the Canadian Forum, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Group of Seven.
See also Introduction, xxvi-xxvii, xxix. Stephen Endicott's Rebel out of China
reports that Mrs. Margaret Fairley had a much stronger interest in Marxism
than her husband. She was in fact a member of the Labour Progressive
Party. Professor Glen Shortliffe's work includes his Cornell doctoral thesis
The Socialist Novel before Naturalism (1939) and (co-authored with Edouard
Sonet) Review of Standard French (1954). Stephen Endicott suggests that
Shortliffe's greatest crime against the state may have been driving Hewlett
Johnson from Malton airport to Hamilton (Rebel out of China [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980], 274). Dr. Hewlett Johnson, known as the
"Red Dean" of Canterbury, was from 1938 a champion of the Communist
state and Marxist ideas and the author of The Socialist Sixth of the World
(1939).
2 Burdick Anderson Trestrail, an American-born millionaire and entrepreneur, published a series of apocalyptic postwar pamphlets against the trend
toward "statism" and government control. Trestrail used the methods and
vocabulary of tabloid journalism to make his point, as his Is Democracy in
Canada Doomed? (Toronto: Public Information Association, 1949) demonstrates. (Thanks to the staff at the Northrop Frye Centre for information on
Trestrail and a sample of his work.)

Notes to pages 236-42

371
41. The Ideal of Democracy

1 See the abridged edition of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1947), 230-40, 421-5, 460-5, for further discussion
of "creative minorities."
2 OED offers 1941 as its earliest entry for "welfare state," and cites William
Temple's Citizen and Churchman. Temple observes that modern citizens have
moved from the "conception of the Power-State . . . to that of the WelfareState."
42. The Church and Modern Culture
1 A reference to Tennyson, In Memoriam, 56,11.15-16:
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
2 NF refers to Oswald Spengler's book The Hour of Decision (1934).
3 Lister Sinclair, a key figure in the history of broadcast drama in Canada,
has acted, written, adapted, and supervised many CBC productions. His
own plays, now numbering over eighty, include All about Emily (1945) and
Socrates (1947).
4 Spring Thaw began as a makeshift response to a production emergency at the
Museum Theatre in 1948 and became an annual national institution until
1971. Often a showcase for emerging Canadian talent, it has exerted an
immeasurable influence on the flourishing contemporary field of Canadian
satire.
5 Fridolin was the Chaplinesque central character of Gratien Gelinas's satirical
revue Fridolinons, first heard in 1937 as part of a radio series. From 1938 a
stage revue ran in tandem with the radio series, but after 1941 an annual theatrical revue became the sole focus of Gelinas's creative energies.
6 Open City (1945) and Shoeshine (1946) both belong to the golden age of Italian
neorealism. The first of these films, directed by Roberto Rossellini, co-written
by Federico Fellini, and starring Anna Magnani, concerns the Italian resistance movement in Rome. The second, directed by Vittoria de Sica and using
a nonprofessional cast, follows the fortunes of two poor youths in an impoverished Italy just after the fall of Fascism. Commedia dell'arte was the popular comedy, complete with stock characters, situations, and grotesque stage
properties, of Italian drama from the middle of the sixteenth century. Its
European influence stretched wide and readers of English drama can sample
it in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607).
7 Charles Williams and Clive Staples Lewis were scholars, amateur theologians, members of the Oxford-based Inkling group, and writers of romance

372

Notes to pages 244-6

and fantasy. Lewis dedicated his A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), an important document in the twentieth-century Milton controversy, to Williams. Williams described his own fictional works as "metaphysical thrillers." They
include War in Heaven (1930) and Descent into Hell (1937). Lewis's allegorical
works include, among others, his scientific trilogy, comprising Out of the
Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1939), and That Hideous Strength (1945).
43. And There Is No Peace
1 In the spring of 1950, the World Council of Peace, formed a year before in
Paris, made an international delegation to Moscow to call for arms reduction
and the outlawing of nuclear weapons. Its members included Chinese-born
James Endicott, chair of the Canadian Peace Congress, former missionary for
the United Church in China, and self-styled Christian Marxist.
2 Lester Pearson was at that time the Canadian Minister of External Affairs
and a Liberal MP. Major J.W. Coldwell was House Leader of the CCF. They
responded unfavourably to Endicott's overtures. Pearson, a former student,
teacher, and chancellor at Victoria College, became prime minister of Canada
in 1963.
3 This was the second visit of Dr. Hewlett Johnson (see no. 40, n. i), and it
brought an audience of three thousand to Massey Hall in Toronto. Efforts at
intimidation were made at his meetings and public denunciation of his character and political affiliations were common on both his visits. Norman Penner's analysis of the Canadian Peace Congress in Canadian Communism: The
Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988), 226-7, corroborates NF's
assertions about Communist influence over the movement.
4 NF appears to be referring to Clarence Eugene Duffy, author of Christian
Democracy: End of the Conquest and Death Knell of Capitalism (1936), and frequent contributor to Catholic Worker (1937-).
5 Proposed by the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front was a
political alliance of left-wing parties against dictatorships in the light of the
Fascist threat. A Popular Front government formed in Spain in 1936 soon met
brutal nationalist opposition led by General Franco. NF's use of the phrase
appears to recall the currents of militant sympathy for the Socialist cause
among young Western intellectuals in the 19305 and to indicate the changing
political climate of contemporary society.
44. Caution or Dither?
i Robert Schuman, then foreign minister in the fourth French Republic, projected a plan for a European Coal and Steel Committee in 1950 that was realized two years later. This economic union of six European nations proved to

Notes to pages 246-60

373

be the foundation for the subsequent formation of the European Economic

Community, known popularly as the Common Market. The newly re-elected
British Labour Government's opposition to these ideas, referred to later in
this article, appeared in the National Executive Committee's European Policy
a month before NF wrote this column.
2 General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff from 1939 to 1945, proposed his plan for European economic recovery on 5 June 1947, clearing the
way for the dispensing of more than $12 billion in American aid.
3 Clement Attlee assumed office as prime minister after the Labour victory in
the general election of 1945 and again in the short-lived government of 1950
after his win by a slim majority.
4 The Bevan-Dalton group was a more radical wing of the governing Labour
party led by Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health, and Dr. Hugh Dalton,
formerly of the treasury.
45. Trends in Modern Culture
1 In Romans 12:6 St. Paul observes, "Having then gifts differing according to
the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to
the proportion of faith." The Greek reading "kata ten analogian tes pisteos"
translates as "analogy of faith."
2 Spengler's third book according to H. Stuart Hughes's Oswald Spengler: A
Critical Estimate (1952). Decline of the West (1918,1923) and Man and Technics
(1931) preceded it.
3 For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between the leadership
structure of Russian Communism and that of Counter-Reformation Roman
Catholicism, see NF's "Turning New Leaves" column in Canadian Forum, 26
(December 1946): 211-12. In these pages NF reviews George Orwell's Animal
Farm.
4 See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1942).
5 Juvenal, Satires, 10.81, refers to the famed "bread and circuses" necessary to
keep the plebeians docile.
6 See no. i, n. 34.
7 See NF's essay "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," in StS, 200-17, where NF explores the relationship between chialistic
sacred imagery and radical political ideas.
8 NF refers to the well-known limerick:
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

374

Notes to pages 262-73

46. Regina versus the World

1 Queen Victoria was invested with the title Empress of India in 1876.
2 A sequel to pressures described in this article occurred in 1954, when the
British government signed an agreement with the Egyptians to evacuate their
troops from the nation's Suez Canal base.
3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Heritage
Press, 1946), 1:151-2.
4 The Unknown Soldier is the body of a British soldier who died in France during World War I. The body was randomly chosen by a blindfolded officer
from a number of unidentifiable corpses and symbolically "buried among
the Kings" at Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920. The implication
appears to be that NF sees the monarchy as remote from narrower political
considerations.
5 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's postwar campaign against Communism specialized in public disgrace, innuendo, and the fueling of suspicion of a vast
conspiracy against the American way of life. The condemnation of the Senate
in 1954 began his rapid descent from power. Georgy Maksimilianovich
Malenkov, whose administrative and political skills raised him to favour
with Stalin, was, as NF wrote, at the apex of his career as a reforming Soviet
politician. Although he was prime minister between 1953 and 1955, Malenkov's rivalry with Nikita Khrushchev and their gradual estrangement forced
his resignation in 1955.
6 Following the publication of his anti-Lutheran work Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in 1521, Henry VIII was given the title Defender of the Faith by
Pope Leo X. By 1534, he had moved the country outside papal jurisdiction
altogether and had assumed the title of "supreme head" of the English
church.
47. Oswald Spengler
1 See Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 1. 184.
2 See no. 32, no. 5, above.
3 Spengler's "murky biological language" reaches its peak in vol. 2 of Decline
of the West, particularly in the first two chapters. Spengler makes several references to man as a "beast of prey" [e.g., 2:474], but I have been unable to
trace any reference to man as a "splendid beast of prey."
4 Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.230: "The lady doth protest too much,
methinks."
5 Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.166-7:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Notes to pages 275-86

375
48. Preserving Human Values

1 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Harvard-educated and of wealthy background,

was elected as the thirty-fifth president of the United States and assumed
office in January 1961, just four months before NF's address.
2 James Riddle Hoffa was an American labour leader who became president of
the Teamsters Union in 1957, the year the union was expelled from the AFLCIO on corruption charges. Following his disappearance in 1975, Hoffa's
body was never recovered, but his links with organized crime have since
made his name synonymous with union corruption in the United States.
3 South Africa was to leave the Commonwealth in May 1961, only a week after
the delivery of this lecture.
4 The author of all three of these books was Vance Packard, an American popular sociologist. NF recognized the greatly expanded market for studies of
this sort in postwar society and appears to have read widely and critically in
them. See the last lecture of MC (63-4) for his views about the psychological
needs they serve.
5 The title of the Thurber story is "You Could Look It Up," published in the
Saturday Evening Post, 5 April 1941, 9-11,114,116. Ten years later, the owner
of the St. Louis Browns signed a midget as a pinch-hitter.
49. The War in Vietnam
1 Rebecca West shared NF's long memory and his sentiments, and noted that
it was "a great pity" that "before Vietnam nobody troubled to remember
Nuremberg." See her foreword to Airey Neave, On Trial at Nuremberg (Boston: Little Brown, 1978), 5-9.
2 Historians see the Monroe Doctrine, declared 2 December 1823, not only as a
bid to erect a "keep out" notice to European powers with designs on the
Americas, but also as a claim on behalf of U.S. sovereignty in the region. NF's
application of the doctrine implies that the U.S. should practise a similar policy of nonintervention outside its own borders.
50. The Two Contexts
i Compare NF's position on the pathological society with that taken by Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) or R.D. Laing and A. Esterson in
Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964).
51. The Quality of Life in the '705
i Compare NF's comment to Harold Innis's note that "Most forward-looking

376

Notes to pages 288-96

people have their heads turned sideways," in The Idea File of Harold Adams
Innis, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 18.
2 See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970).
3 Charles Wilson, president of General Motors from 1941 to 1953, is credited
with coining this phrase.
4 The threat of what Rosemary Donegan, in Spadina Avenue (Vancouver and
Toronto: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1985), calls "a concrete and asphalt weapon
aimed at the heart of downtown" (30) was averted when the provincial government stopped construction in 1971.
5 NF refers to The Uncertain Mirror: Report of the Special Senate Committee on
Mass Media, 3 vols. (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1970).
6 See William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Writings, 1902-1910
(New York: Library of America, 1987), 1281-93.
7 As U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on
the moon on 20 July 1969, President Richard Nixon, speaking by telephone,
told them, "For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one."
8 The Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) was created in
1968; it was renamed the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 1976. NF worked as a part-time commissioner for the
CRTC, viewing television programs and writing reports on them for the
Commission's research department, from 1968 until April 1976. For a more
detailed description of NF's work for the Commission and his articles and
reviews written for it, see LS, xxvi, 266-301.
9 Rochdale College was founded and run by a cooperative from September
1958 until May 1975. Funding for the building, located at 341 Bloor St. W.
on the northern edge of the University of Toronto campus, came from the
federal government under the National Housing Act, through the Central
Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The college, which was not part of the
University of Toronto, became a "hippie" haven with unstructured educational programs and few regulations. I am grateful to Barbara McDonald for
this reference.
10 Both threatened by pollution in the 19605, and both outstanding sites of natural beauty. NF's comments emphasize that pollution extends to the western
and eastern extremities of the country.
11 NF is referring to John Lennon's Christmas 1970 release Happy Christmas
(War Is Over). Lennon himself paid for a billboard on Yonge St. that proclaimed this message to the citizens of Toronto.
12 NF's words are an adjustment of the exchange between Glendower and
Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1,3.1.52-4. When Owen Glendower boasts that,
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur rejoins:
Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?

Notes to pages 298-309

377
52. Spengler Revisited

1 Bernard Lonergan was a major Catholic thinker and theologian. Born in

Buckingham, Quebec, he taught at Harvard and Boston College as well as
other major institutions in North America and Europe. Lonergan's thinking
was influenced deeply by Aquinas, and he seems to have shared Frye's
eagerness to understand how human beings make sense of experience in
ways that transcend orthodox academic boundaries. Frederick E. Crowe and
Robert H. Doran edited The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan in 1988.
2 See W.B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962), 258-60.
3 The typescript reads "its religion of Communism," in keeping with NF's
firmly stated assessment of the institutional structure and philosophic direction of Soviet Communism as analogous to Roman Catholicism.
4 See no. 47, n. i, above.
5 One of the most sustained indictments of Hegel appears in the second volume of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, subtitled The High Tide
of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (1945). The typescript reads "made
the Prussian state of his day the embodiment of the inner purpose of history."
6 See no. 32, n. 5, above.
7 Pound was intensely excited by his discovery of Brooks Adams's philosophical history The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Macmillan, 1895).
The reference in Canto 80 to "(Napoleon etc.) Since Waterloo / Nothing etc.,"
almost certainly derives from Adams's observation in chap. 12 that "after
Waterloo" money-lenders began their steady ascent into the driving seat of
the modern world. At the same time, "the decay of the soldier... in progress
since the fall of Napoleon," accelerated rapidly (see pp. 352 ff.).
8 The typescript reads "cycles," but NF decides to go consistently with Spengler's world view rather than to slip into Yeats's.
9 See The Waste Land, pt. i, "The Burial of the Dead," 11. 69-70:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!"
10 In "What Should Children Tell Parents?" chap. 6 of 7s Sex Necessary?
(Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1960), 87-9, Thurber describes the
"remarkable case history" of Francois Delamater, a thirty-year-old parent,
whose search for sex education took him to the gutters of eighteen cities in
the United States. The results did not constitute a scientific breakthrough:
Delamater, despite his name, ended up thinking that children were born to
fathers.
11 See, for example, no. 25 in the present volume, where what NF says
Wyndham Lewis does to Spengler seems particularly germane.
12 See no. 47, n. 3, above.
13 The typescript adds "obedient to history and her husband at once."

378

Notes to pages 310-16

14 For a history of the development of the myth of progress, see no. 39 and n. 4,
above. See also MC, chap, i (11,15-19), above.
15 The typescript reads "obsession."
16 Trofim Denisovic Lysenko, a biologist and agriculturalist, was the czar of
Soviet biology. On 7 August 1948, in a speech delivered to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences on "The Situation in Biological Science,"
Lysenko denounced the theory of modern genetics and proposed a "theory
of acquired characters" that harmonized much more unthreateningly with
Stalinist and Marxist canons than any predecessor. Much of Lysenko's prestige did not survive Stalin's death.
17 The typescript reads "Relativity theory. He is evidently not sure ..."
18 The typescript reads "which will" rather than "it can."
19 The typescript reads "situation" rather than "perspective."
53. The Bridge of Language
1 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
2 Snow gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959 and his lecture appeared
in book form in that same year. Snow compared the students of the humanities to the machine-breaking Luddites of the Industrial Revolution on the
grounds that they, too, feared the future that science and technology was
bringing to humanity. F.R. Leavis's "Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P.
Snow" (Spectator, 9 March 1962, 297-303) chose to reopen the topic of the
relationship between scientific and literary culture and to disagree violently
with Snow's arguments. Lea vis also made an extremely harsh assessment of
the intelligence exhibited in Snow's fiction, commenting that "as a novelist,
Snow doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a
novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions" (299). The
controversy, and the lengthy correspondence in The Spectator contributed by
supporters of the two combatants, still ranks as a high point of acrimony in
the history of postwar criticism in English. Leavis's discussion subsequently
appeared as a book, Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1962), and Snow weighed in with The Two Cultures and a
Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
3 See William Hazlitt, "Why the Arts Are not Progressive?A Fragment," in
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London and Toronto: Dent, 1930),
4:160-4.
4 NF is referring to the "goofus bird" of Jorges Luis Borges's The Book of
Imaginary Beings (1969). See the chapter titled "Fauna of the United States"
([Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1974], 69).

Notes to pages 317-27

379

5 NF is quoting from John Henry Newman's The Hymn of a Perplexed Soul, 11.
5-6 (1833), commonly known as "Lead, Kindly Light.".
6 NF's source is Sir Richard Blackmore, Creation, bk. 2,11. 636-7.
7 In a General Scholium added to a second edition of Principia, Sir Isaac Newton announced that "hypotheses non fingo" adding that "Quicquid enim ex
phaenomenis non deducitur, Hypothesis vocanda est; & hypotheses, seu
Metaphysicae, seu Physicae, seu Qualitatum Occultarum, seu Mechanicae, in
Philosophia Experimentali locum non habent." ("I do not frame hypotheses . . . . Whatever cannot be deduced from the phenomena must be called
hypotheses, and whether they be metaphysical, physical, concerning the
occult properties, or mechanical, hypotheses have no place in experimental
philosophy.") See Isaac Newton, Opera Quae Extant Omnia (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann, 1964), 3:174. However, Alexander Koyre has argued that the
proper translation is "I do not feign hypotheses."
8 The satire Mundus Alter et Idem (1605) was written by Joseph Hall (15741656), the self-styled "first English satirist," who subsequently became
Bishop of Exeter and Norwich. A translation appeared in 1609.
9 In Solitude and Society (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), Berdyaev complains
that "the philosopher's position is never secure; he can never be sure of his
independence" (11). Berdyaev protests throughout his work at the pressure
which groups exert on independent thinking.
10 An allusion to stanzas 3 and 5 of Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light
Brigade.
11 See Zeus Rants, in Lucian, vol. 2, ed. and trans. A.M. Harmon (London:
William Heinemann, 1915), 101-9.
12 NF's Late Notebooks indicate his great interest in Pynchon's baroque novel
Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. NF thought the book one of the few
works of literature to deal seriously with the relationship between art and
creative paranoia. See LN, 1:124, 381, 385,402. See also DG, 17-18, and DV,
25-6, or NFR, 185-6.
13 For Einstein's "cryptic and mystical utterances," sample his Cosmic Religion
with Other Opinions and Aphorisms (New York: Covici Friede, 1931), esp.
"On Science," 97-103.
14 Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)
reports that Einstein and Bohr thrashed out their arguments most ferociously
over hotel breakfasts during the Solvay Congress held in Brussels in the fall
of 1927. Einstein clung tenaciously to his view that "God does not throw
dice" before planning the physical universe, while the more sceptical Bohr
replied, "Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the
world" (81).

This page intentionally left blank

Emendations

page/line

6/33-4
23/14
29/26-7
46/20-2

64/2
65/28
74/10
74/14
74/31
74/35
74/23
83/23
90/39
91/16
93/28
94/31
96/12-13
102/34
109/10
111/15
114/17
123/23
148/15
152/34

to be immature for to be mature (as in NFF, 1988, box 16, file 11134)
Mind at the End for The Mind at the End
Notes towards the Definition for Notes toward a Definition

organizing ideas of religionoriginal sin, Incarnation, a personal

power of evil, and the likeas for organizing ideas of religion,
original sin, Incarnation, a personal power of evil, and the like, as
Being and Nothingness for Being and Nothing
essay On Liberty for Essay on Liberty

Gluck-Piccini for Gluck-Puccini

Germans expended on for Germans bent on
appeared for appears
serious than for serious that
Tschaikowsky's for his
advantage for advantages
sane for saner
a free hand to two authentic geniuses for two authentic geniuses a
free hand
with both Jung and for both with Jung and
socialist realism for social realism
E.T. Raymond for Ernest Raymond
destroyed. Giotto's for destroyed, Giotto's
latter for later
than tuttis for that tuttis
"socialist realism" for "social realism"
of the book reviewer for of the book reviewers
Armies of the Night for Armies in the Night (as in SM)

when the king had heard for when the king heard (AV)

382

153/21
163/7
176/1
*79/37
182/26
183/2
188/19
194/22
200/17
213/12
215/18
218/39
229/4
242/15-16
247 /13-14
251 / 37
252 / 6-7
2
55/!7
264/4
278/23-4
280/9
281/16
286/29
295/26
318/36

Emendations
Bias of Communication for Bias of Communications
the hypercritical for and hypercritical
strikes for strike
mass murder for massed murder
octave counterpoint for octave counterpart (as in "The Diatribes of
Wyndham Lewis")
retired-colonel for retired colonial
You may for One may (as in Browning's original)
Mr. Young for Mr. Young's
in his for in him in his
film Alexander Nevsky for film of Alexander Nevsky
hole-and-corner for hole-in-corner
require for requires
Mind for The Mind
nothing like the outburst of technical experiment for nothing like
the outburst of technical experiment like the one
throw Socialism for throwing Socialism
but with the for but the
narcissism for narcism
secondly, the removal for secondly, in the removal
narcissism for narcism
giving a social function to large groups, of people who for giving
large groups of people a social function who
a religion/or a religious
above his own interests for above those of his own interests
and how they said for and of how they said
socialist realism for social realism
northern California for southern California

Index

Abstract Expressionism, 34
Abstraction (in painting), 54, 94, 129.
See also Formalism
Absurd, the, 25
Ada Victoriana, NF edits, 175
Action-painting, 34
Activism, 65
Acts of the Apostles, 18, 259
Adam: in Beckett, 25; in Paradise, 128;
and progress, 230
Adams, Brooks (1848-1927): The Law of
Civilization and Decay (1895), 302-3

Advertising, 9, 33, 36, 40, 49, 51, 56,

242; and convention, 163; as interested art, 39; and propaganda, 13,
14; and television, 135. See also
Propaganda
Aeroplane, 21-2, 136, 170; view from,
128
Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 B.C.), 91
Aesthetics, democratization of, 53
Africa, 22; communist revolt of, 223
Agency: in literature, 164-5; NF
champions, xl
Agincourt, Battle of, 322
Air travel. See Aeroplane
Alaska, 6
Albee, Edward (b. 1928), 56; Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), 26

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), 22

Algebra, 131
Alienation, 18, 22, 25; creative form
of, 39; and mechanization, 292-3; of
progress, 11-12, 15, 16, 21, 25, 41,
44; technology causes, 136
Allegory, 78; in fiction, 242; in Kafka,
40-1
American Civil War, 8, 24; and Communism, 223
American Revolution, 17, 27, 61, 250
American Senate Committee on UnAmerican Activities, 276. See also
McCarthyism; Dies, Martin
Analogy: mythological, 65; Spengler's
method of, 298, 303-4, 305
Anarchism, 115; American, 101; in
American literature, 42-3; in art,
100-1; and Chaplin, 117; and
democracy, 294; and the media,
291; and oral media, 139; production as, 288-9; and television, 150
Anarchy: and democracy, 186
Angel, 61
Antheil, George (1900-59), 86
Anthropology, 53, 93, 185
Antichrist, 101, 118-19, 121; and the
modern age, 239
Anti-Semitism, 101, 164, 192

384
Anxiety, 12-13, 18, 22, 25, 27, 172
Apelles (4th century B.C.)/ 102
Apocalypse: aesthetic, 53; in history,
238-9
Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-74), i&2
Archaeology, 53
Arendt, Hannah (1906-75): The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 64
Aria form, 84
Aristocracy, children as, 276
Aristophanes (ca. 448-388 B.C.), 116
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 60, 123; Poetics, 88, 128, 316
Arms race, 171
Arnold, Matthew (1844-88), 96, 142;
Culture and Anarchy, xxi, 65
Artist, the, 79; and audience, 38; contemporary, 126-7, 130-1; as criminal, 46-8, 121-2; and museums, 52;
as neighbour, 58; in the nineteenth
century, 85; sells out, 132; and society, 41-2, 62; struggles of, 167; and
tradition, 45-6; 128-9; and the university, 55-6
Arts: creative, 9, 26; authority of, 169;
autonomy of, 31; concern and style
in, 323; cooperative, 90-1; decentralizing tendencies of, 318-19;
emancipating force of, 34-5; and
the First World War, 93; freedom
of, 128-9; function of, 295; imperfect versus masterpiece in, 38-9;
and labour, 42; and laissez-faire,
186; and leisure structure, 52-5;
mechanization of, 35-7; minor, 53;
and nature, 127-8, 133; primitive,
316; as prophetic, 62, 67; response
to, 21; and society, 79-80, 132-3,
167-72; Spengler's view of, 270;
and tradition, 45-6, 127-8; vision
of, 281. See also Contemporary art;
Modern art

Index
Arts and sciences (as subjects of
study), 324-5
Ashcan school, 34
Asia, 22; communist revolt of, 222
Assassination, 209-10
Astronomy, 168; in the Middle Ages,
60
Atheism, 61, 101
Athens, Periclean, 29
Atkinson, C(harles) F(rancis) (b.
1880), 265
Atomic bomb, 208, 223, 228, 245, 250,
325
Attlee, Clement Richard, ist Earl
(1883-1967), 246
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73),
38, 183, 242; The Fall of Rome (1947),
305; For the Time Being (1944), 305
Audience: agency of, 166; in the modern age, 163
Augustine, St. (A.D. 354-430): City of
God (A.D. 412-27), 229-30
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 27;
Northanger Abbey (1818), 147
Australia, 30
Author, the, 240. See also Novelist;
Writer
Authority, two kinds of, 168-9
Autobiography, 115
Automobile, 21, 136, 160, 167; evil of,
289
Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules (1910-89),
144-5
Babel, Isaak Emmanuelovich (1894I94i)/ 34
Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750),
80, 84, 91; as Christian, 90; as peasant, 83; St. Matthew Passion (1729),
90
Ballads, oral, 54
Ballet, 76-8; as cooperative art, 91; as

Index
new art form, 80-2; Russian, 74, 78,
81
Ballet Russe, 76-8
Balzac, Honore de (1799-1856), chef
d'oeuvre inconnu, 38-9
Barna da Siena (fl. ca. 1350), 190
Bartolo di Fredi (ca. 1330-1410), 190
Baseball, 9, 14
Basile, Jean (1932-92), 161
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67),
19, 27, 54, 102, 142; his antagonism
to society, 43
Beatle(s): haircuts, 28; in Toronto, 296
Beatnik movement, 31, 44, 55, 129
Beckett, Samuel (1906-89), 27, 38, 56;
Waiting for Godot (1956), 25
Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827),
85, 90; Opus 106, 35; Symphony
No. 6 (Pastoral) (1808), no; Rasoumovsky Quartet (1806), 35
Belief: defined, 274-5; and mythology, 65; structure of, 65-6, 67-8
Bellamy, Edward (1850-98): Looking
Backward (1888), 17
Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich
(1874-1948): Solitude and Society
(1938), 323
Berg, Alban (1885-1935): Wozzeck
(1925), 75
Bergman, Ingmar (b. 1918), 56
Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 181, 182;
influences Wyndham Lewis, 306
Berlin, Irving (1888-1989), no
Berne, Eric (1910-70): Games People
Play (1964), 63
Between-the-wars period, 96
Bevan, Aneurin (1897-1960), 247
Bible, 59, 60, 153, 226
Billings, William (1746-1800), 35
Bismarck, Prince Otto Edward
Leopold von (1815-98): Spengler
on, 299, 300

385
Blackmore, Sir Richard (1655-1729):
Creation, 320
Blake, William (1757-1827), 54, 85,
171; innocence and experience in,
68; new Jerusalem of, 70; on tyranny, 24; Jerusalem (1804-20), 120;
The Lamb (1789), 68; The Mental
Traveller (i8oo?-4), 54; The Tyger
(1794), 68
Blond Bombshell (film) (1933), 87
Body, mechanical extension of, 19
Boer War, 262
Bohemians, 43-4
Bohr, Niels (1885-1962), 327
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount (1678-1751), 23
Bononcini, Giovanni Battista (16701747)/ 74
Book(s): and freedom, 154; God writes,
139; and the individual, 150; in the
modern age, 240; NF's early, 140-2;
reviewing, 123-5; sacred, 150, 153;
technological efficiency of, 144
Border, Canada-U.S., 8, 232
Borduas, Paul-Emile (1905-60): Refus
Global (1948), 69
Borges, Jorge Luis (1898-1986): Book
of Imaginary Beings (1969), 316
Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro Filipepi) (1444-1510), 95
Brahms, Johannes (1833-97), 40, 102
Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), 39, 42
Brett, George Sidney (1879-1944):
History of Psychology (1912-21), 144
Brewer, David (1837-1910): The
World's Best Essays (1900), 142
Britain. See Great Britain
Brown, Les: "Canadian Industry
Realities: Can We Do without
Violence?" (1975), 159
Brown, Norman O. (b. 1913): Life
against Death (1959), 64

386
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (180662), 141
Browning, Robert (1812-89): Responses to Challenges to Rhyme (1914),
188
Brueghel, Pieter (ca. 1525-69): Slaughter of the Innocents, 35
Bruno, Giordano (1548-1600), 168
Bryn Mawr College, 233
Buber, Martin (1878-1965): land Thou
(1923), 64
Bucephalus (Alexander the Great's
horse), 105
Bunyan, John (1628-88): The Pilgrim's
Progress (1678-84), 11, 39
Buonaparte, Napoleon (1769-1821),
176
Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 23; Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), 148
Butler, Samuel (1835-1902): Erewhon
(1872), 129
Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron
of Rochdale (1788-1824), 27, 37
Byzantine art, 31, 34-5
Caesar (generic), 118
Cage, John (1912-92), 40
Cain and Abel: in Beckett, 25
Camus, Albert (1913-60): L'Etranger
(1941), 47, 119; La Peste (1946), 1819, 325
Canada, 50; accent in, 103; Americanization of, 28, 30; Americans as seen
by, 234; censorship in, 215, 216-17;
Centennial of, 8, 13, 26, 27; character of, 6; Confederation of, 5-6,
21; cooperation in, xix, xxvi, xliii;
culture of, 6-7; drama in, 240; elementary teaching in, 62-3; French
language in, 28, 30; grain elevators
in, 192; identity of, 69-70; language

Index
of, 105; literature of, 318-19; loyalty
in, 69-70; and the monarchy, 263;
national status of, 7-8; and Nazism,
185; novel in, 146; peace movement
in, 244-5; railway journeys in, 14;
separatism in, 136; and Spengler,
270; spy trails in, 220; television in,
157; and the U.S., 232-3; writers in,
55/ 105
Canada Council, 56, 132
Canadian Art, 132
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
SeeCQC
Canadian content, 292
Canadian Forum: on censorship, 217;
funding of, 132; NF edits, xx, xxxvi;
NF writes for, xxv-xxvi, 29
Canadian National Exhibition. See
CNE
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. See
CRTC
Canon, the, 67
Capitalism, 12, 57, 184-5, 288; and literature, 152; wartime conditions of,
253
Capital punishment, 158
Caplow, Theodore (b. 1920): The Academic Market-Place (1958), 63
Capote, Truman (1924-84): In Cold
Blood (1966), 148
Capra, Frank (1897-1991): Arsenic and
Old Lace (film) (1944), 119
Car. See Automobile
Caricature: and satire, 81
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 36
Carnegie, Dale (1888-1955): How to
Win Friends and Influence People
(1936), 193
Carpaccio, Vittore (1472-1526),
192
Carr, Emily (1871-1945), 69

Index
Carrel, Alexis (1873-1944): Man, the
Unknown (1935), 228
Carroll, Madeleine (1906-87), 99
Cartoons, 113
Caruso, Enrico (1873-1921), 74
Castiglione, Baldassare (1478-1529),

China, 184, 223; drama in, 90, no;

future of, 287; modern, 237, 250;
and the U.S., 13-14
Chirico, Giorgio de (1888-1978), 94
Chopin, Frederic-Francois (1810-49),

39
Catharsis, 165
Catholicism, 45-6; Communism parodies, 239; and Deism, 255
CBC, 55, 240
CCF, xxvi, 232-3
Censorship, 159; and democracy,
215-17; of literature, 217-18; and
the mob, 169; and sex, 218-19; as
violence, 159
Ceramics, 53
Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de
(1547-1616): Don Quixote (1605-15),
24, 116, 147, 316
Cezanne, Paul (1839-1906), 34, 35
Chagall, Marc (1887-1985), 114
Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) (18891977)/ 43/ 91/ 181; masterpieces of,
98-102; NF on, xxxv-xxxvi; as
tramp, 116-22; City Lights (1931),
100, 117, 118, 119; The Gold Rush
(1925), 100, 117; The Great Dictator
(1940), 101-2, 116, 118-19, 121, 214;
Modern Times (1936), 100-1, no,
118; Monsieur Verdoux (1947), 47/
116, 119-22
Charity: imaginative, xlvi; present
value of, 259; radical, 277
Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400),
152; The Clerk's Tale, 97
Chefd'oeuvre inconnu, 38-9
Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (18741936): Chaucer (1925), 190
Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), 223, 282
Children, 329; as aristocracy, 276; and
stories, 161; and violence, 164

Chosisme, 40
Christ, 68; and Chaplin, 121, 122;
power of, 261
Christianity, 60; and Chaplin, 101; as
closed mythology, 66; and Communism, 239-40; early, 23; and history,
227, 230; radical charity of, 277; and
violence, 164; and war, 177
Christian mythology, 62-3, 88
Christmas, commercialization of, 13
Church, the, 57; and modern culture,

109

243

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965), 103, 107, 186

Cinema: as cooperative art, 91
Circus, the, 89-90
City, the, 19-20, 60-1; as experience,
44-5; of God, 257; real, 231
Clair, Rene (1898-1981): Sous les toits
de Paris (film) (1930), in
Class conflict, 252
Claudel, Paul (1868-1955), 47, 242
Cliche, 15, 18, 36, 62, 63
Clown, 116-17
CNE, 92
Cochrane, Charles Norris (18891945), and NF, xxiv-xxv; Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), 227
Cocteau, Jean (1889-1963), 47
Codex, creation of, 143
Coffee table book, 144
Cohen, Leonard (b. 1934): Beautiful
Losers (1966), 39
Coldwell, Major James William
(1888-1974), 244
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-

388
1834): Lyrical Ballads (1798), 54; The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798),

92
Comedie larmoyante, 74

Comedy, 116-17; as myth of deliverance, 328; in opera, 74

Comic books, 217, 241
Comic strips, 43
Commedia dell'arte, 241

Commerce: and literature, 241-2

Commonwealth Cooperative Federation. See CCF
Commonwealth of Nations, 247; and
royalty, 263-4
Communications media. See Mass
media; Media
Communication theory, 134-5
Communism, 12, 50, 184-5, 236/ 23840, 288; analogy in, 249; and Chaplin, 117; collapse in America of,
42; culture in, 30; as dystopia, 24;
persecution for, 14, 220-1, 224-5,
245; and progress, 228; resists the
modern, 28; social good of, 277;
socialist realism in, 33-4; theology
of, 17; and war, 254; world view of,
222-3
Community, 12, 19-20, 150; loyalty
to, 293; of readers, 138; spiritual
and intellectual, 257; and technology, 136-7; true, 280-1; ultimate, 61
Concern: and myth, 59, 321-2; mythologies of, 63-5, 323-5; and panic, 293; two levels of, 168-9,
171-2
Condorget, Antoine Nicolas, Marquis
de (1743-94), 17
Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 146; Lord
Jim (1900), 147
Contemporary art, 126-7; academic,
129; educational, 131, 132-3. See also
Modern art

Index
Contemporary culture: and the university, 55-6, 58-9, 298
Contemporary literature, 9, 59. See
also Modern literature
Continuity: and art, 45-6
Continuum of life, 148-9, 161
Convention: and art, 127, 128-9; in literature, 163. See also Tradition
Coolidge, John Calvin (1872-1933),
103
Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851),
42
Cooperation: and art, 90-1; in Canada, xix, xxvi, xliii
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. See CCF
Copyright, 152
Cornford, F(rancis) M(acdonald)
(1874-1943): influence on NF, xxxv
Cote, Guy, 164
Cox, Harvey (b. 1929): The Secular
City (1965), 64
Creation: and sex, 44
Criminal: as artist, 46-8, 121-2
Criticism, 169; free, 15, 293; as science
of literature, 123; as simultaneous
response, 138; and Spengler, 306;
Wilde begins, 147
Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 176
Crown. See Monarchy; Royalty
CRTC, 157, 159, 163; and Canadian
content, 292
Crucifixion, 164
Cruden's Concordance, 141

Cubism, 37, 94
Culture: active and passive responses
to, 9, 21, 26-7, 38, 153, 162-3, 16970, 327; Canadian, 6-7; coherence
of, 30; as cult, 129-30; cycle of, 35;
decentralized, 28-9; dialectic of, 89; expansion of, 144; genuine, 243;
mass, 9, 33; and nature, 321; popu-

Index
lar, 31; as prophetic, 62; revolutionary, 31-2, 241; and teaching, 58-9;
visionary, xlii; Western as reborn
Classical, 311-12
Czechoslovakia, 184
Dadaism, 93, 94
Dali, Salvador (1904-89), 94; Autumnal Cannibalism (1936), 95; Great
Dreamer, 95
Dalton, Baron Hugh (1887-1962), 247
Dance: in ballet, 78; as origin of music
and drama, 79-80, 91
Daniel, Book of, 45
Daniel, Yuli (Nikolai Arzhak) (192588), 34
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 182;
Inferno, 22, 23
Darwin, Charles (1809-82), 28, 62, 64,
179, 260, 271
Daumier, Honore (1808-78), 34
Dawson, P. Norman (b. 1902): Blue
Mouth of Paradise, 93-4
Dean, Abner (b. 1910): It's a Long Way
to Heaven (1945), 113
Death: consciousness of, 18; -wish, 12
Debussy, Claude Achille (1862-1918),
84,85
Decadence in art, 99
Degas, Edgar (1834-1917), 33
Deism, American culture as, 237-8,
254-9
Delius, Frederick (1862-1934), 83-6;
Brigg Fair (1907), 83; On Hearing the
First Cuckoo in Spring (1912), 83;
A Mass of Life (1904), 86; Sea Drift
(1904), 86; Songs of Sunset (1907), 86
Deliverance. See Emancipation; Myth
of deliverance
Democracy, 14-15, 41, 49, 50, 57-8, 65,
160, 184-5; action in, 229; aims of,
274-5; in America, 250-4; and anar-

389
chism, 294; and the arts, 129, 168;
the arts vulgarized by, 179-80; the
book creates, 155; and censorship,
215-17; classless society of, 276-7;
closed myth in, 66-7; and Communism, 223, 224-5; and concern, 169;
and the depravity of man, 279; as
dystopia, 24; and freedom, 259; the
ideal of, 235-6; and the Kinsey report, 219; and laissez-faire, 185-6,
238; and the mass media, 149; and
the police, 233-4; and the university, 169; writing creates, 138-9
Depression, the, 26, 42, 51, 119, 276
Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), 260
De Sica, Vittorio (1901-74): Shoeshine
(film) (1946), 241
Design: in nature, 60, 62; unifies the
arts, 53
Destiny, genuine human, 27
Detective fiction, 38, 39, 318
Deuteronomy, Book of, 153
Devil. See Satan
De Vries, Peter (1910-93), 318
Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich (18721929), 81
Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 141, 147;
and the city, 20; read aloud, 150;
David Copperfield (1849-50), 116
Dictatorship. See Totalitarianism;
Tyranny
Dictionary of accepted ideas, 63
Dies, Martin (1900-72), 225
Discontinuity in modern poetry, 36,

38
Discordia concors, 37
Disney, Walt (1901-66), 91; Fantasia
(1940), 108, no; Farmyard Symphony
(1938), no; Reluctant Dragon (1941),
in; Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937), 91
Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 6

390
Dos Passes, John (1896-1970), 48, 104
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich
(1821-81), 28; Notes from Underground (1864), 37; The Possessed
(1872), 47
Dowson, Ernest (1867-1900): Non
Sum Qualis Emm Bonae Sub Regno
Cynarae (1896), 86
Dragon: as bondage, 261
Drama, 56, 105, 170; and the book,
150; in Canada, 240; Elizabethan,
82; and music, 79-80, 88-9; and the
news media, 162; and society, 98
Dream(s), 40; and Dadaism, 93
Dryden, John (1631-1700): An
Evening's Love: or The Mock Astrologer (1671), 100; Aureng-Zebe (1675),
125
Duffy, Clarence Eugene (Father),
245
Duke Ellington (1899-1974), no
Duns Scotus, Johannes (ca. 12651308): Opus Oxoniense, 201
Dutch realism, 33
Dystopia, 23, 24. See also Progress,
Myth of
Ecclesiasticus, Book of, 108
Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley (18821944), 65; The Nature of the Physical
World (1928), 64
Eden, garden of, 61, 165, 230
Education: adult, 52; and art, 129, 131,
132; democratic, 235-6; genuine,
170; and leisure, 50; as leisure structure, 57-9; and production, 49; as
real life, 294-5; and society, 51-2;
and the victim, 164; and violence,
161; writing creates, 138
Egypt, 30
Eighteenth century, 61-2, 171; natural
society of, 23; and primitivism, 45

Index
Einstein, Albert (1879-1955), 182, 271,
327
Eisenhower, Dwight David (18901969), 292
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich
(1898-1948): Alexander Nevsky
(film) (1938), 213
Electronic media: and anarchism, 139;
and the book, 150; and oral culture,
137-8; and tyranny, 153-4; and violence, 163
Elgar, Sir Edward (1857-1934), 86; as
patriot, 83
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)
(1819-80), 146; Daniel Deronda
(1876), 147; Middlemarch (1871-2),
147; Romola (1862-3), *47
Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965),
30, 36, 67, 127, 145-6, 242; NF on,
xxix-xxxii; odour of sanctity, 131-2;
poet and snob, 307; as royalist, 46;
self -defined, 115; table of imagery
for, 305; Burbank with a Baedeker:
Bleistein with a Cigar (1919), 112,
192; Cousin Nancy (1915), 142; Notes
towards the Definition of Culture
(1948), 29; The Waste Land (1921),
10, 36, 38, 45, 46, 131-2
Elizabeth I (1533-1603), 262-3
Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 69, 262-4
Elizabethan drama, 90, no
Elizabethan England, 30. See also
Great Britain
Ellison, Ralph (1914-94): Invisible Man
(1952), 295
Emancipation: concern of, 325-7;
myths of, 328
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82),
142
Encyclopedists, French, 27
English language, dominance of, 28
Epicurus (ca. 341-271 B.C.), 182

Index
Equality, 57; charity the basis of,
277-8
Erie, Lake, 296
Ernst, Max (1891-1976): The Burning
Woman, 93
Erotic, the, 218-19
Europe: education in, 58; imperialism of, 260-1; unification of, 246-7
Everyman, Chaplin as, 121, 122
Evolution, analogies of, 64-5
Existentialism, 63, 145; and mythology, 64; as thriller, 242-3
Exodus (not the book), 24
Experience: and innocence, 44-5
Expressionism, 180
Fairley, Barker (1887-1986), 232, 233;
influence on NF, xxvi-xxvii, xxix,
xxxi
Fairy tales, 161
Faith, 66; loss of, 67; royalty stands
for, 264; and truth, 259
Fall of man, 291
Falstaff, 116
Fantasy, 40, 146, 147, 148
Farmers, diction of, 105
Farrell, James (1904-79): Bernard Clare
(1946), 217
Fascism, 46, 86, 176, 181, 236, 238-9;
as oligarchy, 252
Fashion: as symbol, 10
Faulkner, William (1897-1962), 58, 318
Fear. See Anxiety
Fellini, Federico (1920-93), 56
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814),
298
Fiction: and accepted ideas, 63; development of, 146-8; in the modern
age, 242-3
Fiedler, Leslie (b. 1917): An End to
Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), 64

391
Fielding, Henry (1707-54): Joseph
Andrews (1742), 147
Film. See Movies
Finance, conspiracies of, 46
First World War, 176, 177, 180; art
after, 93; and Spengler, 297
Flag, Canadian, 69
Flanders, 35
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 28, 97;
Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881), 63;
Madame Bovary (1856), 147
Flemish, 28
Florence, Medicean, 29
Folk singing, 54
Folk song, 146
Fool, the, 116
Formalism, 34-5, 36; and museums,
53; in poetry, 54
Fortier, Andre (b. 1927): "On Patronage" (1986), 167
France, 22; and Germany, 246; modern, 237, 250
Franck, Cesar Auguste (1822-90), 84,
86
Frankenstein (film), 109, 241
Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 100
Fraternity: and community, 280; and
leisure structure, 57-8
Frazer, Sir James George (1854-1941),
28; The Golden Bough (1907-15),
206
Frederick II (the Great) (1712-86), 182
Freedom, 23, 24, 26; of the arts, 128-9;
battles of, 154-5; and Chaplin, 117,
122; and death, 326; and democracy, 235-6; and imagination, 53;
and the individual, 293; and liberal
education, 259; and print, 139; and
the self, 278-80; and the Word, 243
Freemasonry, 254
Free press, 154, 159
Free verse, 129

Index

392
French Canada: chansonniers in, 54;
in the nineteenth century, 45
French language in Canada, 28, 30
French Revolution, 17, 27, 61, 180,
237; fraternity in, 280
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 28, 63,
137, 180, 185, 260, 271; and Dadaism, 93; -inspired artistic movements, 40; reality and illusion in,

327

Freudian proletariat, 44-5

Friedan, Betty (b. 1921): The Feminine
Mystique (1963), 49
Frost, Robert (1874-1963), 318
Frye, Herman Northrop (1912-91):
and Acta Victoriana, 175; and
agency, xl; bookshelf of, 63-4; and
Canadian Forum, xx, xxv-xxvi,
xxxvi, 29; as cultural critic, xlviiixlix; cultural criticism in three
phases, xix-xxi; early life with
books, 140-2; in Italy, 188-92; lectures at McMaster, 5; and myth of
deliverance, xlv-xlvi; on postindustrial society, xliv-xlv; and the
postwar world, xxxvi-xxxvii; predicts future, 291-2; and radio, 134;
on reading, xlvi-xlvii; and secondhand bookshops, 142-3; as semiotician, xliv; speaking voice of, 104; as
student, 317; teachers of, xxiv-xxv;
and television, 134; and Toronto,
xxiii; on university, xlvii-xlviii
- works: Anatomy of Criticism (1957),
xix, xxii-xxiii; "Conclusion," Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1965), 5; "The
Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary
Element in Romanticism" (1963),
260; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xix,
xxii; The Modern Century (1967), xx,
xxxiv, xxxvii-xxxviii; "The Renais-

sance of Books" (1973), xlvi-xlvii;

"Tenets of Modern Culture" (1950),
xliii-xliv
Future, 17, 18, 26, 288; as destruction,
24; NF predicts, 291-2; of society,
316-17; and technology, 134-5; as
unknowable, 286
Futurist movement, 35
Futurology, 285, 316-17
Gable, Clark (1901-60), 87
Gagne, Jean (b. 1929), 170
Galbraith, John Kenneth (b. 1908): The
Affluent Society (1958), 63
Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564-1642),

168
Gandhi, Mahatma (1869-1948), 162,
209-10
Gascoyne, David (1916-2001), 94;
A Short History of Surrealism (1936),

93

Gawsworth, John (Terence Ian Fytton

Armstrong) (1912-70): Apes, Japes,
and Hitlerism: A Study and Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (1932), 183
Gay, John (1685-1732): The Beggar's
Opera (1728), 74-5
Gelinas, Gratien (1909-99): Fridolinons
(1945), 240
General Motors, 289
Genesis, Book of, 124, 141, 231
Genet, Jean (1910-86): Le Balcon
(1956), 47-8
George, St.: as liberty, 261
George, Stefan (1868-1933), 46
Germain, Jean-Claude (b. 1939),

168
German language, 29-30
Germany, 22, 30; and France, 246;
intellectuals in, 211; modern, 90,
237, 250; and music, 74; painting
in, 95; Romantics in, 46; Romanti-

Index
cism in, 212; as Rome, 300; volkisch
aspect of, 45
Gershwin, George (1898-1937), no
Ghirlandaio, Domenico (di Tommaso
Bigordi) (1449-94), 189, 191
Ghosts: and television, 162
Gibbon, Edward (1737-94): Decline

and Fall of the Roman Empire (177688), 60, 206, 263

Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume (1869-

1951), 102; Les Caves du Vatican

(1914), 47; The Counterfeiters (1926),
39
Ginsberg, Allen (1926-97): Howl
(1956), 146
Giono, Jean (1895-1970), 45
Giotto (di Bondone) (ca. 1266-1337),
34, 102
Global village, 136
Gliick, Christoph Willibald (1714-87),
74, 77, 80
God, 64; alienation from, n; and the
book, 139; as creator, 60-1; hypothesis of, 61-2; as infinite, 259; and
the lunatic, 101; in man, 261; in
poetry, 242
Goebbels, Joseph (1897-1945), 193
Golding, William (1911-93): Lord of
the Flies (1954), 23
Goodman, Paul (1911-72): Growing up
Absurd (1960), 43
Good Samaritan, 58
Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936), 42
Gospels, the 18
Gounod, Charles (1818-93): Faust
(1859), 75
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de
(1746-1828), 34, 127
Graf, Max (1873-1958): Modern Music
(1946), 112
Grant, George (1918-88): Lament for a
Nation (1965), xxxix

393
Great Britain, 6, 50, 184; accent in, 103;
decentralization of, 29; empire of,
262; Labour Government of, 246-7;
modern, 237, 250; the monarchy in,
235; and war, 175-7
Great Chain of Being, 260
Great War. See First World War
Greece, ancient, 29, 30; drama in, 734; religious philosophy of, 88
Greene, Graham (1904-91), 243
Grieg, Edvard (1843-1907), 84, 109
Group of Seven, 92
Grove, Frederick Philip (1879-1948):

A Search for America (1927), 43, 69

Guggenheim Museum, 132
Gutenberg syndrome, 21
Hamilton, 20
Hamsun, Knut (1859-1952), 45
Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685-1759),
74, 80, 84
Hapsburg Empire, 30
Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928): 1967
(1867), 6
Harlequin, 116
Harlow, Jean (1911-37), 87
Harmony, 89
Havelock, Eric Alfred (1903-88):
influence on NF, xxvii-xxix
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64),
100
Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732-1809), 40
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 132
Heaven, 61
Hebrew: culture, 30; language, 28
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
(1770-1831): on history, 301-2; Phe-

nomenology of Mind (1807), 143

Heliocentrism, 168
Hell, 22
Hemingway, Ernest Miller (18991961), 318

394
Hemon, Louis (1880-1913): Maria
Chapdelaine (1914 and 1916), 45
Hero, totalitarian, 249
Hindenburg Line, 177
Hiroshima, 291
Hirsch, John (1930-89), 170
History: apocalypse in, 238-9; deliverance from, 24; development of,
137; progress in, 227-31
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945), 100, 103,
171, 179, 268; and Chaplin, 102, 118,
119-20, 121; and Romanticism, 212;
Spengler on, 307; and Wagner, 81,
90; Mein Kampf (1925-27), 223
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679): on
social contract, 41; Leviathan (1651),
187
Hobo figure, 43, 44
Hoffa, Jimmy (1913-75?), 276
Holland, 30
Hollywood, 91, 99, 109, 111, 240
Hoist, Gustav (1874-1934), 86
Holy sinner, 47
Homer (8th c. B.C.): as oratory, 104;
Odyssey, 89
Homo ludens, 38
Hooker, Richard (1553/4-1600), 61
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89),
36
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
(65-8 B.C.): Ars Poetica, 124, 129;
Odes, 177
Howe, Irving (1920-93): Steady Work:
Essays in the Politics of Democratic
Radicalism, 1953-1966 (1966), 64
Hughes, H[enry] Stuart (1916-99):
Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate
(1952), 298
Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802-85), 36, 102
Huizinga, Johan (1872-1945): Homo
Ludens (1938), 328
Hull, Andrea, 167

Index
Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (18831917), 37
Humanists: and scientists, 315-16,
329
Humanities: and contemporary culture, 58-9
Human nature, 281
Hungary, 30, 220
Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963): Antic
Hay (1923), 180; Brave New World
(1932), 23
Hysteria, 13; and the future, 286; and
war, 291
Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906): Nora
(1879), 309
Identity, personal, 134
Illusion, 14-15; breakdown in, 44; and
reality, 26, 327-8
Imagination, 94, 95, 281; contemporary, 26-7; education of, 161; free,
295; and freedom, 53; modern, 56;
and myth, 67-8; and mythology,
323-4; in primitive art, 53; and
society, 132-3, 148; violence as
lack of, 158
Imitation, 128; in the arts, 52; of
nature, 32-3. See also Tradition
Immanence, language of, 321
Immigration, Canada-U.S., 232-4
Imperial Order Daughters of the
Empire. See IODE
Impressionism, 28, 32-3, 35, 180. See
also Painting
Improvement. See Progress
Incidental music. See Movies; Music
Index, bad, 226
India, 184, 209-10; Empress of, 262;
modern, 250
Individual: and the book, 150; and
freedom, 293; and progress, 18; and
society, 151, 259-60

Index
Indonesia, 8, 282
Industrialization. See Mechanization
Industrial Revolution, 27, 207, 230,
248-50, 318; modern age begins
with, 48-9; and Spengler, 179, 313;
and the will, 85-6
Industry, 57; as rival society, 49, 50
Innis, Harold Adams (1894-1952):
and NF, xxiv-xxv; The Bias of Communication (1951), 21, 153
Innocence: and experience, 44-5
International modern. See International style; Modern age
International style: begins in 1867,
27-8; resistance to, 28-31
Introversion: technology causes, 136,
170, 292
IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of
the Empire), 105
Ireland, 30
Irish language, 28
Irony, 18; and advertising, 13
Irrational in modern art, 40
Irving, Washington (1753-1859): Rip
Van Winkle (1819), 42, 117
Irwin, Robert (b. 1928): "The Elements of 'Art'" (1986), 167, 168
Isaiah, 19; Book of, 101
Italy, 29; Communism in, 252; futurist
movement in, 35; modern, 237, 250;
NF visits, 188-92; and opera, 74
lyengar, K.R. Srinivasa (1908-99): Lytton Strachey (1939), 96-7
James, Henry (1843-1916), 146; Portrait of a Lady (1881), 147
James, William (1842-1910): The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902),
291
Japan, modern, 250
Jasper Park, 296
Jazz, 31

395
Jeans, Sir James Hopwood (18771946), 65
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 117
Jeremiah, Book of, 151
Jews: and the Nazis, 101-2; Spengler
on, 308-9
Joachim of Fiore (or Floris) (ca. 11351202), 226
John Birch Society, 66. See also the
American Way
John, Gospel of, 176, 221
Johnson, Hewlett (1874-1966), 245
Johnson, Lionel (1867-1902), 46
Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 43; on
mental life, 130
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) (b. 1934),

47
Jonson, Ben (1572-1637): publishes
plays, 150; The Works of Ben Jonson
(1616), 328
Jooss Ballet, 81-2
Jooss, Kurt (1901-79): The Green Table
(1932), 81
Josephus, Flavius (ca. A.D. 37-100),
141
Jowett, Garth: "A Brief History of
Opinion on the Social Effects of
Mass Media" (1975), 158
Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius
(1882-1941), 181; influences
Wyndham Lewis, 306; Finnegans
Wake (1939), 38; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 46;
Ulysses (1922), 146, 218
Judaeo-Christian tradition, 277
Judaism: Nazism parodies, 239;
Torah in, 321; and violence, 164
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961), 46, 93,
185; and Chaplin, 117
Jiinger, Ernst (1895-1998): On the
Marble Cliffs (1939), 211-14
Justice: and torture, 221

396
Juvenal (ca. A.D. 55-127): Satires, 89
Kafka, Franz (1883-1924): The Castle
(1926), 40-1
Kandinsky, Vasily (Wassily) (18661944), 95, H4
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 260;
and Spengler, 298
Keats, John (1795-1821), 27; La Belle
Dame sans Merci (1820), 54
Keats, John (b. 1920): The Insolent
Chariots (1958), 63
Kern, Jerome (1885-1945), no
Kerouac, Jack (1922-69): The Dharma
Bums (1958), 44
Ketchum, John Davidson (18931962), 215
Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (1813-55),
124, 260; Either/Or (1843), 115
King Arthur, 312
Kings, Book of, 152, 177
Kinsey, Alfred C. (1894-1956): Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (1948),
215
Kirpal, Prem: "Arts and Internationalism" (1986), 171
Klee, Paul (1879-1940), 94, 95
Knowledge: advance of, 295; coffins
and flux of, 141; in a democracy,
217; as revolutionary, 287
Koestler, Arthur (1905-83): Darkness
at Noon (1940), 229
Kotcheff, Ted (b. 1931): "How Can the
Quality of Popular Programming
be Improved?" (1975), 158, 161, 163
Kubrick, Stanley (1928-99): Dr.
Strangelove (film) (1964), 12
Labour, 57; alienation of, 11; in the
arts, 42; unions, 276
Laissez-faire, 16, 49, 50, 236; democracy as, 185-6; destroys democracy,

Index
238, 251; dinosauric, 253; and science, 169
Lampman, Archibald (1861-99), 5
Language: American, 104; of poetry,
319-20; purification of, 29-30; spoken, 103-7; three modes of, 321
Lao-tzu (6th c. B.C.), 200
Law (of God), 61-2, 321-2
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (18851930), 46; pastoralism in, 44, 45;
poet and hysteric, 307; The Plumed
Serpent (1926), 47; Women in Love
(1920), 180
Layton, Irving (b. 1912), 5
League of Nations, 171
Leavis, Frank Raymond (1895-1978),
146; attacks C.P. Snow, 315
Leger, Fernand (1881-1955), 37
Leisure, 139; creates the arts, 295;
growth of, 49-50; sphere of, xli;
Leisure structure, 50-1; and the arts,
52-5; and education, 57-9; loyalty
to, 57; and the university, 55-6
L'Enfant, Pierre Charles (1754-1825),
19
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870-1924),
114, 210, 233, 249; and deism, 255;
and movies, 98; What is to be Done?
(1902), 41
Levant, Oscar (1906-72), in; A Smattering of Ignorance (1940), 108
Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898-1963):
religious allegory of, 242
Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885-1951):
Main Street (1920), 141-2, 145
Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (18821957), 37; on Canada, 7; on Spengler, 181-3; The Apes of God (1930),
180; The Art of Being Ruled (1926),
179, 182; The Dithyrambic Spectator
(1931), 182; Hitler (1931), 182; The
Lion and the Fox (1927), 181-2; Men

Index
without Art (1934), 180; Paleface
(1934), 180; Tan (1918), 180; Time
and Western Man (1927), 179, 181,
182, 306
Liberal education, 58-9; and freedom,
259
Liberalism, 256-9
Liberty, 57, 61, 259, 278-80; and terrorism, 261
Liebert, Robert M. (b. 1942): "The
Effects of Violence: Experimental
and Research Findings" (1975), 160
Life: genuine human, 69-70; new, 11;
present, 329; real, 18; strong as
death, 151
Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65), 69; as
orator, 104
Linear apprehension, 137-8
Linguistics, 54
Lissitsky, El (1890-1941), 114
Literature: authority of, 169; censorship of, 217-18; change from
Romantic to modern, 35-7; and
community, 150; development of,
152; erotic, 219; as hypothesis, 320;
imitated by life, 147-50; language
of, 319; in the modern age, 240-3;
movies' impact on, 104, 107; phenomenal nature of, 150; principle
of, 152; realism in, 54; regional, 31,
318-19; and totalitarianism, 211
Lloyd, Harold (1894-1971), no
Locke, John (1632-1704), 260
Logos in poetry, 242
Lonergan, Bernard (1904-84): Insight
(1957), 298
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
(1807-82), 141, 145
Long hair, 44
Loos, Anita (1893-1981), 181
Lowell, Amy (1874-1925), 104
Lowith, Karl (1897-1973): Meaning in

397
History: The Theological Implications
of the Philosophy of History (1949),
226-31
Loy, Myrna (1905-93), 87
Loyalty, 57; in Canada, 69-70; problem of, 168; warranted by criticism,
293
Lozoya, Jorge Alberto: "Culture,
Freedom and Change" (1986),
170
Lucian (ca. A.D. 120-80): Zeus Rants,
324
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca.
94-55 B.C.), 182
Luddites, humanists as, 315
Luke, Gospel of, 257
Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 229
Lutheran tradition, n
Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (18981976), 312
MacDiarmid, Hugh (1892-1978), 48
Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527), 150,
182
MacLeish, Archibald (1892-1982), 100
Magazine(s), 51; little, 241
Magdalene, Mary, 31
Magic, 53; and books, 143; grammar
as, 141
Maginot line, 40
Mailer, Norman Kingsley (b. 1923),
47; Armies of the Night (1968), 148
Malaysia, 282
Malevich, Kasimir (1878-1935), 114
Malraux, Andre (1901-76), 39
Man, 60; in God, 261; united with
God, 259
Managerial dictatorship, 236, 238, 251
Mannix (television series), 163
Mantegna, Andrea (1431-1506), 95
Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979): Eros
and Civilization (1955), 64

398
Marinetti, Emilio (1876-1944), 181
Mark, Gospel of, 101, 122
Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st
Duke of (1650-1722), 176
Marshall Plan, 246
Marx, Karl (1818-83), 28, 63, 69, 103,
239, 260, 271, 273, 313; on production, 249; on the social contract, 41;
and Spengler, 202, 207; Das Kapital
(1867), 6
Marxism, 24, 41, 44, 49, 202; artists
under, 168; classless society of, 252;
as closed mythology, 66; criticism,
34; and Deism, 255, 258; the Depression and, 317; on the future,
287-8; and leisure, 51; as religion,
67, 185; and revolution, 222-3; sci~
ence in, 66
Massine, Leonide (1896-1979), 81
Mass media, 51; and democracy, 149;
resistance to, 135-6. See also Electronic media; Media
Masterpiece, 316; decline of, 38-9
Masters, Edgar Lee (1869-1950):
Spoon River Anthology (1915), 104

Matthew, Gospel of, 256

Maurras, Charles (1868-1952), 46
Mays, John Bentley (b. 1941): "Art
and Reality?" (1986), 168
McCarthyism, 42, 149
McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (191180): on media fallout, 162; and the
news, 290; and NF, xxxix-xli; on
print, 137, 139, 154; and progress,
20-1; Understanding Media (1964), 64

McMaster University, 3-5

Meaning: reader determines, 40; and
reality, 167
Mechanization, 35-7, 77-8, 118, 317;
and alienation, 292-3; autonomous,
288-9; and violence, 158
Media, 20-1; and anarchism, 291; fall-

Index
out, 162; and memory, 24; and the
movies, 148. See also Electronic
media
Melodrama, 161, 164-5
Melody, 82, 84; in opera, 77
Melville, Herman (1819-91), 100;
Moby Dick (1851), 101
Memory: destruction of, 24; and
verse, 152; and writing, 135
Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956):
Prejudices: Fifth Series (1926), 105

Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy), Felix

(1809-47), 84, 109
Mental health, 283-4
Mesopotamia, 30
Messiah, totalitarian, 249
Metaphor, 54
Mexico, 30, 197
Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di
Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475-1564),
32
Middle Ages, 60, 66; culture of, 168;
music and drama in, 88
Middle class: and the university, 55
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), *7; On
Liberty (1859), 65
Miller, Henry (1891-1980), 44, 45
Millet, Jean-Francois (1814-75): The
Angelus (1859), 45
Milton, John (1608-74), 61; chaos of,
40; on music, 89; on oral society,
138-9
Mindszenty, Cardinal Jozsef (18921975), 220-1
Miro, Joan (1893-1983), 94
Mirror, 26-7
Mitchell, Margaret (1900-49): Gone
with the Wind (1936), 108, 169
Mob rule, 24
Modern age, 22-3, 26, 27-8; antisocial
attitudes in, 48; the arts in, 38, 41,
172; artists in, 126-7; audience in,

Index
163; ballet in, 78; begins with industrial revolution, 48-9; centre and
orbit in, 128; cultural trends in,
248-61; defining characteristic, 8;
information in, 151-2; literature in,
240-3; mythology of, 60, 62-3, 64;
pollution of, 296; speed of change
in, 10-11, 35, 295, 317; streamlining
of, 35; tenets of, 237-40; Third Reich
parodies, 314; ugliness of, 326
Modern art: irrational, 40; "isms" in,
94; militant, 38; movies in, 98; process over product in, 38-9
Modern culture. See Contemporary
culture; Modern age
Modern literature: anti-hero in, 37;
discontinuity in, 36. See also Contemporary literature
Modern poetry. See Poetry
Modern style. See International style;
Modern art
Modigliani, Amadeo (1884-1920), 37
Mohr, J.W.: "Media and Controls"
(1975), 161
Moloch, 18
MOMA (Museum of Modern Art),
132
Monarchy: and democracy, 235;
power of, 263
Mondrian, Piet (1872-1944), 53
Monet, Claude (1840-1926), 32
Monroe Doctrine, 282
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (153392), 182
Moon landing, 291
Morris, William (1834-96), 20; on culture, 29; "The Lesser Arts" (1878), 53
Moscow Peace Congress, 244
Mother goddess, 62
Movies, 9, 14, 31, 56, 103, 105, 136;
concentrates all art forms, 99; and
literature, 104, 107; and the media,

399
148; as the modern art form, 98;
music in, 108-11; and oratory, 240
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (175691), 77, 80, 84, 90, 91, 127, 144; and
opera, 74; Symphony in C (Linz)
d783),35
Museums, 53-4; birth of, 52; without
walls, 53
Music, 56, 128, 129, 132; contemporary and classical, 40; and drama,
79-80, 88-9; and Germany, 74, 81;
language of, 83; melody in, 77; in
movies, 99, 108-11; popular, 89;
and recordings, 52; rhythm in, 778; and Romanticism, 84-6; and
technology, 170
Musical drama, 79-80, 81, 90-1, 111.
See also Ballet; Opera
Musil, Robert (1880-1942): The Man
without Qualities (1930-43), 145
Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 118,
186; his pug-ugly sourpuss, 189
Myth, 54, 63; and concern, 59, 321-2;
of concern, xli-xlii, 64; contemporary, 25; of deliverance, xlv-xlvi; as
idea, 65. See also Mythology
Mythological constructions, two primary, 60-5
Mythology: Christian, 88; closed,
65-7; of concern, 63-5, 323-5; modern, 62-3; open, 65, 68; premodern,
60-1, 62; social, 62-3; as structure,
59-60, 321-2. See also Myth
My thopoeia, 146-8
Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977): Pale
Fire (1962), 48
Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte)
(1769-1821), 22, 118
Narcissism, 14
Narcissus, 27
Nash, Paul (1899-1946), 94

Index

400

National Film Board, 55

Nationalism: cultural 30; in the modern age, 249-50; and music, 83; and
regionalism, 23-4; Scottish, 29;
Welsh, 29
Nationality: and the postnational
world, 7-8
Nature, 60; and art, 127-8, 133; and
culture, 321; and design, 62; and
human nature, 326-7; as natura
naturata or natura naturans, 32; and
sadism, 46-7; scientific vision of, 25
Nazism, 28, 29-30, 45, 75, 102, 119;
analogy in, 249; closed myth in, 66;
denies charity, 277; insane, 283; and
the Jews, 101-2; and literature, 211;
as nationalism, 184-5; and race,
185-6; and Spengler, 307
Negroes, 42, 252, 278; alienation of, 12
Neighbour, defined, 58
Nelligan, Emile (1879-1941), 5, 69
Newman, Cardinal John Henry
(1801-90): The Grammar of Assent
(1870), 66; Hymn of a Perplexed Soul
(1883), 317
News media, 148-50, 161-2; as bad
news, 290. See also Electronic media; Mass media; Media
Newspapers, 9, 51, 154; and the book,
150
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 320,
327
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971): Faith
and History (1949), 226-31
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (18441900), 28, 75, 118, 180, 181, 212; The
Will to Power (1901), 86
Nigeria, 8
Nijinsky, Vaslav Fomich (1890-1950),
81
19605: middle-class activists of, 317;
revolution of, 288-90; as war, 291

19705; life in the, 285-96

Nineteenth century: museums born
in, 52; pastoralism of, 44-5; and
progress, 15-16
Nixon, Richard Milhous (1913-94): on
the moon landing, 291
Nonviolence, 157, 162
Northrop, F.S.C. (1894-1992): The
Meeting of East and West (1946),
197-200
Nostalgie de la boue, 45
Notestein, Wallace (1878-1969): The
Scot in History (1941), 201
Novel, the, 56, 127-8; development
of, 146-8; and society, 98
Novelist, the, 241. See also Author;
Writer
Nuremberg trials, 24, 195-6, 282
O Canada, 69
O'Flaherty, Liam (1897-1984): Man of
Aran (1934), m
Oglesby, Carl (b. 1935): "Art and the
Apocalyse" (1986), 171
One body, 259; the Queen as, 264
Ontario towns, 19
Opera, 80; and ballet, 77; and Italy, 74;
Mozartian, 82; state of, 73-5
Oracular: in poetry, 37-8
Oral: culture, 137, 138-9; tradition,
135, 146
Oratorio, 80
Oratory, 104; revival of, 240
Orozco, Jose Clemente (1883-1949), 95
Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair)
(1903-50), 24; ip&j (1949), 23, 154,
326
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.A.D. 17): Metamorphoses (ca. A.D. 8),
89
Oxford Union debate, 175, 176-7
Pacifism, 175-6

401

Index
Packard, Vance Oakley (b. 1914): The
Hidden Persuaders (1957), 63, 279;
The Status Seekers (1959), 63, 279;
The Waste Makers (1960), 279
Paganism, 85-6
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 100
Painting, 9, 21, 34, 56, 127, 128, 129;
action-, 38; ashcan, 34; and ballet,
91; and design, 53; fashions in, 11;
formalism, 36, 54; Impressionist,
28, 32-3; medieval, 31; Renaissance,
31-2; representation in, 147; Russian, 114; sketch in, 39; Surrealist,
92-5
Panic: and concern, 293; over sex,
218-19
Pantaloon, 116
Pantomime, 80, 81, 91
Papacy, 30, 241; impact of the, 143-5
Pareto, Vilfredo (1848-1923): Mind
and Society (1916), 181
Parkinson, C. Northcote (1909-93):
Parkinson's Law (1958), 49
Pascal, Blaise (1623-62): wager of, 66;
Pensees (1669), 207, 269
Passion, the, 190-1
Past, the, 26, 286; the arts reshape,
295; humanism and, 316
Pasternak, Boris (1890-1960), 34
Pastoral, the, 44-5, 46
Pastore hearings, 160
Pathos: of royalty, 263; as unbearable,

117
Patriotism, 102
Patti, Adelina (1843-1919), 74
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849-1936),

13

Peace movement, 244-5

Pearl Harbor, 117
Pearson, Lester Bowles (1897-1972),

244
Peguy, Charles (1873-1914), 242

Penguin paperbacks, 143

Penrose, Sir Roland (1900-84): The
Human Frame or Nude in Window
d937)/ 95
Persia, 30
Persian language, 29
Perspective: in painting, 31-2
Philosophy: development of, 137; and
mythology, 64
Photocopying, impact of, 144
Photography: and movies, 109
Piano: as percussive, 81-2
Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 94, 127,
182; Guernica (1937), 35; Weeping
Woman (1937), 94
Piccini, Niccolo (1728-1800), 74
Pickthall, Marjorie (1883-1922), 105
Pinter, Harold (b. 1930), 56
Plain chant, 129
Plane. See Aeroplane
Plato (ca. 428-0. 348 B.C.), 57, 101,
259-60; Phaedrus, 135, 137; Republic, 164
Play: and work, 328-9
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49): Mellonta
tauta (1850), 318; Tell-tale Heart
(1843), 16
Poet, the, 241
Poetry, 9, 128, 129; cultural authority
of, 145; double nature of, 37-8; language of, 319-20, 327; manuscript
sales of, 39; modern, 10-11, 36, 3940; in the modern age, 240, 242; and
the oral tradition, 135; and religion,
67; and rhetoric, 104; Romantic, 32;
structure of, 320; as teaching, 137,

152
Poland, 30, 187
Polanyi, Karl (1886-1964): The Great
Transformation (1944), 16-17
Police: and democracy, 233-4
Politics, radical, 56

Index

4O2

Pollution, 296
Pop art, 34
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 37
Pope, the, 37
Popeye (comic book): Olive Oyl as
character in, 93
Popular Front, 245
Popular music, 89
Pornography, 44, 216
Pottery, 53
Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 145;
poet and crank, 307; and Spengler,
303, 305; and Wyndham Lewis, 179
Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882-1964),
xxiv, 69
Praz, Mario (1896-1982): The Romantic
Agony (1930), 93
Presence: real, 259, 261
Present, the, 17, 26; the arts reshape,
295; life, 329
Primitive art, 53, 54
Primitivism, 93, 180
Print: and freedom, 139, 154; as linear,
137-8; men of, 165; and society, 148.
See also Writing
Printing press, 143
Privacy, 20, 136, 139
Production: as anarchic force, 288-9;
as revolutionary, 287
Progress, 25; and the individual, 18;
myth of, 11, 15-19, 20-1, 22-4, 36,
310; theory of, 227-31, 259
Prohibition, 159
Proletariat, 41, 43; Freudian, 44-5
Propaganda, 9, 13-14/ 24, 33/ 36-7/ 38,
40, 56, 150, 242; Communist, 244; as
interested art, 39; of war, 177. See
also Advertising
Prophecy, function of, 286
Prose, development of, 137
Prostitution, 157
Protestant Reformation, 153

Protestantism: and the American

way, 254-7; laissez-faire parodies,
239
Protest movements, 296
Proust, Marcel (1871-1922), 181, 182
Proverbs, Book of, 329
Prudery: the church supports, 243;
function of, 218-219
Psychology, 93
Psychotherapy, 56
Public library, the paperback attacks,
143
Publishing industry, 241
Publish-or-perish fetish, 144
Puccini, Giacomo (1858-1924):
Madame Butterfly (1904), 73-5
Punishment: and pleasure, 165
Puttenham, George (d. 1590), 32
PWA (Provincial Workman's Association), 98
Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937), 146; Gravity's Rainbow (1973), 324-5
Quebec, separatism in, 24
Rabelais, Francois (14947-1553), 218
Radical politics, 56
Radio, 103, 105; drama, 240; and
literature, 104, 106; and tyranny,
153
Railway, 170; and Beethoven, 35;
Canadian Confederation from, 21;
impact on landscape of, 19
Railway carriage, figure of, 14, 15, 26.
See also mirror
Rapee, Erno (1891-1945): MotionPicture Moods for Pianists and
Organists (1924), 108
Raye, Martha (1916-94), 120
Raymond, E.T. (1872-1928): All and
Sundry (1919), 96
RCMP, 157

403

Index
Read, Sir Herbert (1893-1968): The
Innocent Eye (1946), 115

Reade, Charles (1814-84): The Cloister

and the Hearth (1861), 147
Reader's Digest, 14

Reading: and freedom, 154; NF on,

xlvi-xlvii
Realism, 54; Dutch, 33; in fiction, 1467; growth of, 31-4; prophetic, 33;
socialist, 114; stupid, 33-5, 36, 47
Reality, 281; in Deism, 258; and illusion, 26, 327-8; and meaning, 167
Reaney, James Crerar (b. 1926): Listen
to the Wind (1972), 39
Reason, 60, 62
Recreation, 48
Reform Bill of 1832, 237, 250
Regeneration, infinite, 259
Regionalism: and nationalism, 23-4
Religion: and art, 67-8, 79; and the
book, 150; and closed mythology,
67; and literature, 242-3
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz
van Rijn) (1606-69), 32
Renaissance: as Classicism reborn,
311-12; painting, 31-2
Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841-1919),
32-3
Repetition, 170; and education, 294; in
the oral tradition, 54
Reprints, 144
Revelation, Book of, 95
Revolution: in the 19605, 288-90; and
leisure, 50-1; and television, 149; as
war, 291; world, 222
Revolutionary realism. See Realism,
prophetic
Reyes, Alfonso (1889-1959): Ultima
Tule (1942), 197
Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 102
Rhetoric, 104; and continuity, 36-7
Rhythm, 81-2, 84; and ballet, 77-8

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761): read

aloud, 150
Riesman, David (1909-2002): The
Lonely Crowd (1950), 63

Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (185491), 28, 43, 46; The Drunken Boat
(1871), 260; Lettres du Voyant (1871),
40
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich (1844-1908), 76
Riopelle, Jean-Paul (1923-2002), 69
Ritual, 88; and art, 80; and television,
148-9
Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922), 40
Rochdale College, 292
Rock music, 136
Romance: in fiction, 146-8. See also
Romanticism
Romans, Epistle to the, 249
Romanticism, 115, 130, 180; German,
212; and music, 84-6. See also
Romance
Romantic movement, 27-8, 43-4, 62,
67, 260; in Germany, 46; poetry of,
32; and primitivism, 54; theories of,
29
Romberg, Sigmund (1887-1951),
no
Rome, ancient, 22-3, 50
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (18821945), 103, 105, 186
Rosenberg, Alfred (1893-1946): The
Myth of the Twentieth Century
(1930), 66
Rosenberg, Harold (1906-78): The
Tradition of the New (1960), 64

Rossellini, Roberto (1906-77): Open

City (1945), 241
Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (17921868), 74
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 23,
46-7, 61, 63; and American life,

Index

404

251-2; and Sleeping Beauty, 60; on

the social contract, 41
Rowland, Henry Edgar (Hank) (b.
1910), 175
Royalty, 263-4
Rozinante (Don Quixote's horse), 105
Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640), 32, 33
Rubissow, Helen: The Art of Russia
(1946), 114
Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 20, 36
Russia, 6, 184; and the arms race, 171;
ballet in, 74, 78, 81; modern, 237,
250; movies in, 98; painting in, 114;
Tolstoy's, 146; and war, 244-5;
world view of, 222-3; writers jailed
in, 295. See also Soviet Union
Russian Revolution, 114, 180
Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Franc,ois,
Marquis de (1740-1814), 46-7
Sadism, 46-7, 93
Salinger, J(erome) D(avid) (b. 1919):
The Catcher in the Rye (1951), 43
Salon des Refuses, 131
Samuel, Book of, 89
San Gemignano, NF visits, 188
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 47; Being
and Nothingness (1943), 64
Satan, 11, 12, 59, 101, 102, 120, 138; as
accuser, 41; modern, 102
Satire: and ballet, 81
Schafer, D. Carl: "The Cultural Interpretation of History: Beacon of the
Future" (1986), 171
Scholar: and the artist, 129, 130; as
neighbour, 58
Scholarship, 141; changes in, 144-5;
community of, 280-1; and the
mythology of concern, 65
Schonberg, Arnold (1874-1951), 85,

86
School. See University

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860),

260
Schubert, Franz (1797-1828), 85
Schuman Plan, 246-7
Science, 16, 62; authority of, 168; and
freedom, 278; global unity and, 318;
language of, 319; and the myth of
concern, 65; and nature, 25, 60; and
play, 328-9; progressive, 316; and
Spengler, 312-13; structure of, 320;
and truth, 22; vision of, 281
Science fiction, 146, 318; as romance,
320-1
Scientists: and humanists, 315-16, 329
Scotland, culture of, 201
Scott, Cyril (1879-1970), 86
Scott, Frank R. (1899-1985): The Canadian Authors Meet (1945), 7
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 141;
Waverly (1814), 147
Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich
(1872-1915), 85
Scroll, change from, 143
Sculpture: and design, 53; late Roman, 34-5
Sebastian, St., 31
Self: the selfish and the genuine, 279-

80
Sex, 157, 159; censorship of, 218-19;
and creation, 44
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 56,
91; and his audience, 100, 165; and
comedy, 116; and conciousness, 37;
illusion in, 328; Wyndham Lewis
on, 181; and Montaigne, 182; as oratory, 104; and tradition, 152; Hamlet
(1604-5), 15, 73/ 125, 272; Henry IV
(1600), 116; King Lear (1604-5), *63;
Macbeth (1623), 37, 99; Measure for
Measure (1604), 116; The Merchant of
Venice (1600), 89, 192; Romeo and
Juliet (1594-8), 109; The Tempest

Index
(i6n), 141; Timon of Athens (1607),
48; Titus Andronicus (1623), 164; The
Winter's Tale (ca. 1610), 32
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950),
35, 183; and evolution, 64
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 54;
Ode to the West Wind (1820), 91;
Ozymandias (1818), 151; Prometheus
Unbound (1820), 29; The Witch of
Atlas (1824), 35
Sherrington, Sir Charles (1857-1952),
65; Man on His Nature (1941), 64
Shortliffe, Glen (b. 1913), 232, 233
Siena, NF visits, 189-91
Simultaneous apprehension, 138
Sinclair, Lister (b. 1921): Socrates
(1952), 240
Slavery, 23, 61
Smiles, Samuel (1812-1904): Self-Help
(1859), 39
Smyth, Dame Ethyl (1858-1944): The
Boatswain's Mate (1916), 74-5
Snow, Sir C(harles) P(ercy) (1905-80),
326; The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), 315-16
Social contract, 41-3, 46
Socialism in Great Britain, 246-7; and
the mass media, 135
Socialist realism, 33-4, 94, 114, 295
Social work: and the university, 274
Society: as anti-art, 48; and the artist,
41-2, 62; and the arts, 79-80, 16772, 132-3; classless, 276-7; creation
of a better, 69; destroys life, 119;
freedom of, 154-5; future of, 31617; growth of, 6-7; ideal, 17; and
imagination, 295; and the individual, 151, 259-60; introverted, 20;
leisure structure of, 50-1; mechanization of, 118; mob rule in, 24; and
nationalism, 8; natural, 23-4; new,
328; and the outcast, 43; participa-

405
tion in, 51-2; as repressive, 44, 48;
as sadistic, 46-7; and science, 22;
as a structure, 160; and symbols,
xxxv; and violence, 157-8; and
youth, 44
Sonata form, 85
Sorel, Georges (1847-1922), 180, 181;
Reflections on Violence (1907), 66
South Africa: denies equality, 277
Soviet Union, 8, 23, 28; conservative
nature of, 287-8; as federation, 199;
liberalization of, 30; science in, 22
Spain, 35, 184
Speech, manner of, 103-7
Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903): and
evolution, 64
Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), 179,
180, 185, 230; influence on NF,
xxxiii-xxxiv, 310; in Wyndham
Lewis's Time and Western Man, 181,
182; as militarist manque, 307; total
impact of, 272; and Toynbee, 202-8;
as visionary, 268; The Decline of the
West (1918-22), 22-3, 63, 178, 202-5,
248-9, 265-73, 297-314; Hour of
Decision (1934), 182, 204, 238, 249,
268, 307, 308; Man and Technics
(1931), 304; Prussianism and Socialism (1919), 304
Spiritual world, 61
Spring Thaw (Museum Theatre production), 240
Stalin, Joseph (losif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili) (1879-1953), 165,
171, 249; purge-trials, 149, 154
Stars and Stripes (flag), 237, 250
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), 38,
181
Steinbeck, John Ernst (1902-68), 104,
318
Sterne, Laurence (1713-68): A Sentimental Journey (1767), 22

406
Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955): Description without Place, 323
Stock response, 15, 62, 65, 244
Strachey, Lytton (1880-1932), 96-7;
and war, 176; Elizabeth and Essex
(1928), 96-7; Portraits in Miniature
(1931), 96; Queen Victoria (1921),
96-7
Straight, Michael, 167
Stravinsky, Igor (1882-1971), 86, 127;
and ballet, 80-1; Petroushka (1911),
78
Stream of conciousness, 38
Struther, Jan (1901-53): Mrs. Miniver
(1942), 108
Stuart Hughes (1916-99): Oswald
Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952),
298
Student(s): demonstrations, 149; and
teaching, 58
Subject-object relation, 60, 326-7
Suez Canal, 262
Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), 210
Surrealism, 40, 115; exhibition of, 925. See also Painting
Survival, concern of, 325-7
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745): Gulliver's
Travels (1726), 23
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909)7 36, 86
Symbolism: in art, 95; in movies, 10910

Symbolisme, 54
Symbol(s): language of, 93; and society, XXXV

Syncopation, no
Tabloids, 12
Tachism, 129
Taddeo di Bartolo (ca. 1362-1422), 190
Tanguy, Yves (1900-55): The Questioning, 93

Index
Taoism, 115
Teaching: literature, 163; via poetry,
137, 152; students determine, 58; in
university, 59; and writing, 138
Technological revolution, 49. See also
Industrial Revolution
Technology, 16, 23; and the arts, 170;
and freedom, 21-2; and the future,
134-5, 286-7; introversion due to,
136, 292
Television, 9, 14, 20-1, 51, 155, 170;
and advertising, 135; and anarchy,
150; and the continuum of life, 1489; as drug culture, 292; and imagination, 161; in the 19605, 290; and
tyranny, 153-4; and violence, 15666
Temperance movement, 45
Tennyson, Alfred, ist Baron Tennyson (1809-92): In Memoriam (1850),
237; Locksley Hall (1842), 266
Terrorism, 158; and liberty, 261
Textiles, 53
Theatre. See Drama
Third World, 171
Thomas, John Parnell (1895-1970),
221,225
Thompson, Dorothy (1894-1961),
100
Thomson, Tom (1877-1917), 69
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 69,
117; and civil disobedience, 100;
Journal, 101; Walden (1854), 42-3
Thriller (genre): as existentialist,
242-3
Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961):
"You Could Look It Up" (1941),
281; Is Sex Necessary? (1929), 305
Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886-1965):
The Courage to Be (1952), 64; Systematic Theology (1951, 1957, 1963), 145
Time, awareness of, 16, 18, 25-6

Index
Time magazine, 154, 202
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518-94),
33, 192
Titanic, the, 120
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (1488-1576),

32
Tito, Josip Broz (1892-1980), 249
Toffler, Alvin (b. 1928): Future Shock
(1970), 288, 317
Toleration in democracy, 236, 257
Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel)
(1892-1973): The Lord of the Rings
(1954-55), 146
Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich
(1828-1910): Anna Karenina (187577), 147; War and Peace (1863-69),

146
Toronto, 20; Art Gallery of, 131; the
Beatles visit, 296; NF remembers,
xxiii; Royal York Hotel, 276; second-hand bookshops in, 142-3;
Social Planning Council, 274; Spadina Expressway in, 289; street cars
in, 106; the two Torontos, 281
Torture: and Communism, 220-1
Totalitarianism, 56, 57; and the arts,
129, 168; the author under, 241-2;
and literature, 211; music and, 90;
revolutionary, 249-50; and war, 254
Tower of Babel, 200, 325; as progress,
230-1
Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889-1975),
230; on Spengler, 202-8, 271; A
Study of History (1934-61), 63-4,
202-8, 236, 310-12
Trade unions. See Labour
Tradition: and art, 45-6; and the artist, 128-9. See also Imitation
Tragedy, 164, 165; in opera, 74
Tramp, Chaplin's, 116-22
Transcendence, language of, 321
Translation, 144

407

Trestrail, Burdick Anderson (b. 1891),

232-3
Trollope, Anthony (1815-82): The Eustace Diamonds (1873), 147
Trotsky, Leon (alias of Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879-1940), 249
Truth: and faith, 259; liberalism aims
at, 257-8; and science, 316
Tschaikowsky, Piotr Ilyich (1840-93),
80; Symphony No. 5, 76
Turner, Joseph Mallord William
(1775-1851), 32, 54
Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) (1835-1910): an as anarchist,
100; authentic American language
of, 104; A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court (1889), 100; The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), 43, loo, 101, 106, 118; The
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
(1900), 100; The Prince and the Pauper (1882), 100
Twentieth-century poetry. See Poetry,
modern
Tyranny, 94; and the electronic
media, 153-4; music and, 90; and
the writer, 211-12; and writing, 138
Undefended border, 8
UNESCO, 171
Uniformity, civilization's progress
toward, 19-20, 28, 170-1
Unitarian movement, 256
United Nations, 207-8
United States, 8, 24, 50, 184; accent in,
103-4; Alaska purchase, 6; American way, 62, 66, 67; anarchism in
literature, 42-3; and the arms race,
171; art in, 100; buried, 69; and Canada, 232-3; and China, 13-14; Communism collapses in, 42; crash of
1929, 23; cruelty in literature of,

408

47; fiction in, 42; imperialism of,

199; mass media in, 135; as oldest
modern country, 237, 250-1; preindustrial, 35; president of, 103;
and progress, 228; science in, 22;
sex in, 215-19; social mythology of,
62; Southern agrarian movement
in, 45; as Utopia, 197-8, 239, 253; in
Vietnam, 282; violence in, 156-7;
war economy of, 244-5; world view
of, 223; WPA in, 114
University, 50; adult education in, 52;
and the artist, 55-6; and the arts,
127, 129; community of, 257, 281;
and contemporary culture, 58-9,
127; as counter-environment, 169,
171; and democracy, 169; NF imagines, xlvii-xlviii; and social work,
274; teaching in, 59; and youth,
51-2
University of Toronto, NF formed by,
xxiv-xxv
Unknown masterpiece, 39
Unknown Soldier, 263
U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union
Urban sprawl, 20
Utilitarians, 27
Utopia, xliii, 22, 23, 43, 57; and the
atomic bomb, 228; and Canada, 6970; and the Depression, 286-7; hippies create, 292; illusion of, 253;
U.S. as, 197-8, 239
Vaihinger, Hans (1852-1933): Theory
of "As If" (1911), 66
Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 38
Van der Marck, Jan (b. 1929):
"Museum Strategies: Sisyphus or
Lysistrata?" (1986), 171
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (18721958), 86
Venice, NF visits, 191-3

Index
Verdi, Giuseppe (1813-1901): Miserere
(1853), no
Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 36
Verona, NF visits, 191
Veronese, 192
Verse: and memory, 152
Vice, the figure of, 116
Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 230,
312
Victims of violence, 164-5
Victoria, Queen (1819-1901), coronation of, 262
Victoria College, 175
Victorian age, 56; and the novel, 146
Vietnam war, 13, 24; NF opposes, 282;
on television, 165-6
Vigneault, Gilles (b. 1928), 54
Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, Auguste de,
Compte (1838-89), 46
Violence: as counter-communication,
137; defined, 157; and education,
161; and television, 156-66
Violin: and melody, 84
Vision, 128; human, 321; imaginative,
328
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet
(1694-1778): A I'auteur du livre des
trois imposteurs, 61

Vonnegut, Kurt (1922), 146

Vuillard, Edouard (1868-1940): 33
Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (181383), 80, no, 212; endless melody,
77; and Hitler, 90; influences The
Waste Land, 305; and opera, 74-5;
Ring der Niebelungen (1876), 99

War, 175-6, 199, 244-5; as auto-eroticism, 177; and capitalism, 253; good
of, 254; over if we want it, 296; as
revolution, 291
Warner, Rex (1905-86): The Aerodrome
(1941), 213

409

Index
Washington, City of, 19
Washington University, 233
Watergate, 149-50, 154
Watmough, David (b. 1926), 170
Watteau, (Jean) Antoine (1684-1721),
127
Welfare state, 236
Welles, (George) Orson (1915-85):
Citizen Kane (1941), 109
Wellesley, Arthur (1769-1852), 176
Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (18661946): Men like Gods (1923), 229;
Mind at the End of its Tether (1945),
23, 229; A Modern Utopia (1905),
229
Whidden lectures, 3-5; NF gives,
xxxvii-xxxviii
Whitehead, Alfred North (18611947): Science and the Modern World
(1925), 64
Whitman, Walt (ca. 1819-92), 54, 69,
86; To the States, 100
Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-92),
141
Whyte, William Hollingsworth
(1917-99): The Organization Man
(1956), 63
Wife versus Secretary (film) (1936), 87
Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
(1854-1900): "The Decay of Lying"
(1889), 147-8
Wild Hunt, Legend of the, 11
Williams, Charles Walter Stansby
(1886-1945), 242
Wilson, Edmund (1895-1972): and
NF, xxxii-xxxiii; Memoirs of Hecate
Country (1946), 217
Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (18561924), 177
Winsor, Kathleen (b. 1919): Forever
Amber (1944), 219
Wisdom, 59, 62, 329

Wit in poetry, 37-8

Women, education of, 52
Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (18821941), 26
Woollcott, Alexander (1887-1943):
"Reunion in Paris" (1934), 142
Word, the: community of, 257; and
freedom, 243; vitality of, 151
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850),
37-8; Idiot Boy (1798), 35; Lyrical
Ballads (1798), 54; Michael (1800), 45;
Peter Bell (1819), 35; The Prelude
(1805, 1850), 115; Thoughts of a
Briton in the Subjugation of Switzerland (1807) 189; The Waggoner
(1805), 35
Work: and play, 328-9
Working Class, 51
World Council of Peace, 244
World picture, 64
World state, 187
WPA (Works Progress Administration), 114; murals, 34
Writer, the: in Canada, 55, 105; and
the novel, 146-7; as prophetic, 43;
and the reader, 125; two sides of,
306-7; and tyranny, 211-12. See also
Author; Novelist
Writing, 137; automatic, 36-7; and
democracy, 138; and memory, 135,
152; teleological, 39
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), 46,
145-6; poet and poseur, 307; Spengler influences, 305; A Vision (1937),
301, 302-3
Young, George Malcolm (1882-1959):
Basic (1943), 194
Youth: and society, 44; and university, 51-2
Zollverein, worldwide, 187