ANATOMY OF CRITICISM
Four Essays
Anatomy or
Criticism
FOUR ESSAYS
t y NORTHROP FRYE
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright 1957, by Princeton University Press
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First PRINCETON PAPERBACK Edition, 1971
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HELENAE UXORI
PREFATORY STATEMENTS AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS book forced itself on me while I was trying to write some
thing else, and it probably still bears the marks of the reluctance
with which a great part of it was composed. After completing a
study of William Blake (Fearful Symmetry, 1947), I determined
to apply the principles of literary symbolism and Biblical typology
which I had learned from Blake to another poet, preferably one
who had taken these principles from the critical theories of his
own day, instead of working them out by himself as Blake did.
I therefore began a study of Spenser's Faerie Queene, only to dis
cover that in my beginning was my end. The introduction to
Spenser became an introduction to the theory of allegory, and that
theory obstinately adhered to a much larger theoretical structure.
The basis of argument became more and more discursive, and less
and less historical and Spenserian. I soon found myself entangled
in those parts of criticism that have to do with such words as
"myth," "symbol," "ritual," and "archetype," and my efforts to
make sense of these words in various published articles met with
enough interest to encourage me to proceed further along these
lines. Eventually the theoretical and the practical aspects of the
task I had begun completely separated. What is here offered is
pure critical theory, and the omission of all specific criticism, even,
in three of the four essays, of quotation, is deliberate. The present
book seems to me, so far as I can judge at present, to need a com
plementary volume concerned with practical criticism, a sort of
morphology of literary symbolism.
I am grateful to the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
for a Fellowship (1950-1951) which gave me leisure and freedom
to deal with my Protean subject at the time when it stood in the
greatest need of both.
I am also grateful to the Class of 1932 of Princeton University,
and to the Committee of the Special Program in the Humanities
at Princeton, for providing me with a most stimulating term of
work, in the course of which a good deal of the present book took
its final shape. This book contains the substance of the four public
lectures delivered in Princeton in March 1954.
The "Polemical Introduction" is a revised version of "The
vn
PREFATORY STATEMENTS
Function of Criticism at the Present Time/' University of Toronto
Quarterly, October 1949, also reprinted in Our Sense of Identity,
ed. Malcolm Ross, Toronto, 1954. '^ ie ^ rst essa y * s a rey i se d an d
expanded version of "Towards a Theory of Cultural History,"
University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1953. The second essay
incorporates the material of "Levels of Meaning in Literature/'
Kenyon Review, Spring 1950; of "Three Meanings of Symbolism/'
Yale French Studies No. 9 (1952); of "The Language of Poetry/'
Explorations 4 (Toronto, 1955); and of "The Archetypes of Litera
ture/' Kenyon Review, Winter 1951. The third essay contains the
material of "The Argument of Comedy/' English Institute Essays
1948, Columbia University Press, 1949; ^ "Characterization in
Shakespearean Comedy," Shakespeare Quarterly,, July 1953; *
"Comic Myth in Shakespeare/' Transactions of the Royal Society
of Canada (Section II), June 1952; and of "The Nature of Satire,"
University of Toronto Quarterly, October 1944. The fourth essay
contains the material of "Music in Poetry," University of Toronto
Quarterly, January 1942; of "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres/'
Kenyon Review, Autumn 1951; of "The Four Forms of Prose
Fiction/' Hudson Review, Winter 1950; and of "Myth as Informa
tion," Hudson Review, Summer 1954. I am greatly obliged to the
courtesy of the editors of the above-mentioned periodicals, the
Columbia University Press, and the Royal Society of Canada, for
permission to reprint this material. I have also transplanted a few
sentences from other articles and reviews of mine, all from the same
periodicals, when they appeared to fit the present context.
For my further obligations, all that can be said here, and is not
less true for being routine, is that many of the virtues of this book
are due to others: the errors of fact, taste, logic, and proportion are
poor things, but my own,
N. F.
Victoria College
University of Toronto
vm
Contents
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION 3
FIRST ESSAY. Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes
Fictional Modes: Introduction 33
Tragic Fictional Modes 35
Comic Fictional Modes 43
Thematic Modes 52
SECOND ESSAY. Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols
Introduction 71
Literal and Descriptive Phases:
Symbol as Motif and as Sign 73
Formal Phase: Symbol as Image 82
Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype 95
Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad 115
THIRD ESSAY. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths
Introduction 131
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (i):
Apocalyptic Imagery 141
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (2):
Demonic Imagery 147
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (3):
Analogical Imagery 151
Theory of Mythos: Introduction 1 58
The Mythos of Spring: Comedy 163
The Mythos of Summer: Romance 186
The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy 206
The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire 223
^_ *
FOURTJTESSAY. Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres
Introduction 243
The Rhythm of Recurrence: Epos 251
ix
CONTENTS
The Rhythm of Continuity: Prose 263
The Rhythm of Decorum: Drama 268
The Rhythm of Association: Lyric 270
Specific Forms of Drama 282
Specific Thematic Forms (Lyric and Epos) 293
Specific Continuous Forms (Prose Fiction) 303
Specific Encyclopaedic Forms 315
The Rhetoric of Non-Literary Prose 326
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION 341
NOTES 357
GLOSSARY 365
INDEX 369
ANATOMY OF CRITICISM
Four Essays
Polemical Introduction
THIS BOOK consists of "essays," in the word's original sense of a
trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view
of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.
The primary aim of the book is to give my reasons for believing in
such a synoptic view; its secondary aim is to provide a tentative
version of it which will make enough sense to convince my readers
that a view, of the kind that I outline, is attainable. The gaps in
the subject as treated here are too enormous for the book ever to
be regarded as presenting my system, or even rny theory. It is to
be regarded rather as an interconnected group of suggestions which
it is hoped will be of some practical use to critics and students of
literature. Whatever is of no practical use to anybody is expendable,
My approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting
the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been
much endeavor and little attempt at perspective. All the essays
deal with criticism, but by criticism I mean the whole work of
scholarship and taste concerned with literature which is a part
of what is variously called liberal education, culture, or the study
of the humanities. I start from the principle that criticism is not
simply a part of this larger activity, but an essential part of it.
The subject-matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism
is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criti
cism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on
pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On
this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but
lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it,
and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture
to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and
increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic
as a parasite or artist manque is still very popular, especially among
artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between
the creative and the procreative functions, so that we hear about
the "impotence" and "dryness" of the critic, of his hatred for
genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anti-
critical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but
some of its prejudices are still around.
However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through
"popular" art assumes that criticism is -artificial and public taste
natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste
which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spon
taneously creative "folk." These theories have had a fair trial;
they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history
and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An
extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated
with the "art for art's sake" catchword, thinks of art in precisely
the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically
civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic
gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs
of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to
both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of
art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation
assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.
One can find examples which appear to support both these
views; but it is clearly the simple truth that there is no real cor
relation either way between the merits of art and its public re
ception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not
because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than
Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet. Consequently
there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or
worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradi
tion. Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is
equally the result of the publicity of criticism. A public that tries
to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or
likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's
sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment
of civilized life itself. The only way to forestall the work of criti
cism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism
that lynching has to justice.
There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can
talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music
it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say
anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate
or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are
as silent as statues. Poetry is a disinterested use of words: it does
not address a reader directly. When it does so, we usually feel that
the poet has some distrust in the capacity of readers and critics to
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
interpret his meaning without assistance, and has therefore dropped
into the sub-poetic level of metrical talk ("verse" or "doggerel")
which anybody can learn to produce. It is not only tradition that
impels a poet to invoke a Muse and protest that his utterance is
involuntary. Nor is it strained wit that causes Mr. MacLeish, in
his famous Ars Poetica, to apply the words "mute," "dumb," and
"wordless" to a poem. The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a
wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard. The
axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what
he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows.
To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to
assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge
existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from
the art it deals with.
The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own,
and so be able to talk about his own work. But the Dante who
writes a commentary on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely
one more of Dante's critics. What he says has a peculiar interest,
but not a peculiar authority. It is generally accepted that a critic
is a better judge of the value of a poem than its creator, but there
is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous to regard
the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even though in practice
it is clear that he must be. The reason for this is an inability to
distinguish literature from the descriptive or assertive writing which
derives from the active will and the conscious mind, and which is
primarily concerned to "say" something.
Part of the critic's reason for feeling that poets can be properly
assessed only after their death is that they are then unable to pre
sume on their merits as poets to tease him with hints of inside
knowledge. When Ibsen maintains that Emperor and Galilean is
his greatest play and that certain episodes in Peer Gynt are not
allegorical, one can only say that Ibsen is an indifferent critic of
Ibsen. Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable
document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian, criticism nobody
would give it more than about a B plus. Critics of Shakespeare
are often supposed to be ridiculed by the assertion that if Shake
speare were to come back from the dead he would not be able to
appreciate or even understand their criticism. This in itself is
likely enough: we have little evidence of Shakespeare's interest in
criticism, either of himself or of anyone else. Even if there were
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
such evidence, his own account of what he was trying to do in
Hamlet would no more be a definitive criticism of that play, clearing
all its puzzles up for good, than a performance of it under his
direction would be a definitive performance. And what is true of
the poet in relation to his own work is still more true of his opinion
of other poets. It is hardly possible for the critical poet to avoid
expanding his own tastes, which are intimately linked to his own
practice, into a general law of literature. But criticism has to be
based on what the whole of literature actually does: in its light,
whatever any highly respected writer thinks literature in general
ought to do will show up in its proper perspective. The poet speak
ing as critic produces, not criticism, but documents to be examined
by critics. They may well be valuable documents: it is only when
they are accepted as directives for criticism that they are in any
danger of becoming misleading.
The notion that the poet necessarily is or could be the definitive
interpreter of himself or of the theory of literature belongs to the
conception of the critic as a parasite or jackal. Once we admit that
the critic has his own field of activity, and that he has autonomy
within that field, we have to concede that criticism deals with
literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework. The frame
work is not that of literature itself, for this is the parasite theory
again, but neither is it something outside literature, for in that case
the autonomy of criticism would again disappear, and the whole
subject would be assimilated to something else.
This latter gives us, in criticism, the fallacy of what in history is
called determinism, where a scholar with a special interest in geog
raphy or economics expresses that interest by the rhetorical device
of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with what
ever interests him less. Such a method gives one the illusion of
explaining one's subject while studying it, thus wasting no time.
It would be easy to compile a long list of such determinisms in
criticism, all of them, whether Marxist, Thomist, liberal-humanist,
neo-Classical, Freudian, Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a
critical attitude for criticism, all proposing, not to find a conceptual
framework for criticism within literature, but to attach criticism
to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. The axioms and
postulates of criticism, however, have to grow out of the art it deals
with. The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature,
to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that
field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from
theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.
To subordinate criticism to an externally derived critical attitude
is to exaggerate the values in literature that can be related to the
external source, whatever it is. It is all too easy to impose on litera
ture an extra-literary schematism, a sort of religio-political color-
filter, which makes some poets leap into prominence and others
show up as dark and faulty. All that the disinterested critic can do
with such a color-filter is to murmur politely that it shows things
in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to
criticism. Of course such filtering critics usually imply, and often
believe, that they are letting their literary experience speak for
itself and are holding their other attitudes in reserve, the coinci
dence between their critical valuations and their religious or politi
cal views being silently gratifying to them but not explicitly forced
on the reader. Such independence of criticism from prejudice, how
ever, does not invariably occur even with those who best under
stand criticism. Of their inferiors the less said the better.
If it is insisted that we cannot criticize literature until we have
acquired a coherent philosophy of life with its center of gravity
in something else, the existence of criticism as a separate subject
is still being denied. But there is another possibility. If criticism
exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a con
ceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary
field. The word "inductive" suggests some sort of scientific pro
cedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure"
or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nine
teenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. The writing
of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are
involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the
presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history
from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which
distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the
superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science
in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal,
from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safe
guarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions.
However, if there are any readers for whom the word "scientific"
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
conveys emotional overtones of unimaginative barbarism, they
may substitute "systematic" or "progressive" instead.
It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in
criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the
assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a
scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is ex
amined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically;
fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically.
Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology.
Either literary criticism is scientific, or all these highly trained and
intelligent scholars are wasting their time on some kind of pseudo-
science like phrenology. Yet one is forced to wonder whether schol
ars realize the implications of the fact that their work is scientific.
In the growing complication of secondary sources one misses that
sense of consolidating progress which belongs to a science. Research
begins in what is known as "background," and one would expect
it, as it goes on, to start organizing the foreground as well. Telling
us what we should know about literature ought to fulfil itself in
telling us something about what it is. As soon as it comes to this
point, scholarship seems to be dammed by some kind of barrier,
and washes back into further research projects.
So to "appreciate" literature and get more direct contact with
it, we turn to the public critic, the Lamb or Hazlitt or Arnold or
Sainte-Beuve who represents the reading public at its most expert
and judicious. It is the task of the public critic to exemplify how
a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how
literature is to be absorbed into society. But here we no' longer
have the sense of an impersonal body of consolidating knowledge.
The public critic tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the
familiar essay, and his work is not a science, but another kind of
literary art. He has picked up his ideas from a pragmatic study
of literature, and does not try to create or enter into a theoretical
structure. In Shakespearean criticism we have a fine monument of
Augustan taste in Johnson, of Romantic taste in Coleridge, of Vic
torian taste in Bradley. The ideal critic of Shakespeare, we feel,
would avoid the Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian limitations
and prejudices respectively of Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley.
But we have no clear notion of progress in the criticism of Shake
speare, or of how a critic who read all his predecessors could, as
8
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
a result, become anything better than a monument of contemporary
taste, with all its limitations and prejudices.
In other words, there is as yet no way of distinguishing what is
genuine criticism, and therefore progresses toward making the
whole of literature intelligible, from what belongs only to the
history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable
prejudice. I give an example of the difference between the two
which amounts to a head-on collision. In one of his curious, bril
liant, scatter-brained footnotes to Munera Pulveris, John Ruskin
says:
Of Shakspeare r s names I will afterwards speak at more length;
they are curiously often barbarously mixed out of various tradi
tions and languages. Three of the clearest in meaning have been
already noticed. Desdemona "Suo-Sat/zowa/'mzserabte fortune-
is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, "the careful"; all the
calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error
in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, "serviceable-
ness," the true, lost wife of Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek
name by that of her brother Laertes; and its signification is once
exquisitely alluded to in that brother's last word of her, where
her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churl
ish clergy: "A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou
liest howling."
On this passage Matthew Arnold comments as follows:
Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is! I will not
say that the meaning of Shakspeare's names (I put aside the
question as to the correctness of Mr. Ruskin's etymologies) has
no effect at all, may be entirely lost sight of; but to give it that
degree of prominence is to throw the reins to one's whim, to
forget all moderation and proportion, to lose the balance of one's
mind altogether. It is to show in one's criticism, to the highest
excess, the note of provinciality.
Now whether Ruskin is right or wrong, he is attempting genuine
criticism. He is trying to interpret Shakespeare in terms of a con
ceptual framework which belongs to the critic alone, and yet re
lates itself to the plays alone. Arnold is perfectly right in feeling
that this is not the sort of material that the public critic can
directly use. But he does not seem even to suspect the existence
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of a systematic criticism as distinct from the history of taste. Here
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. ,
What we have so far is, on one side of the "study of literature,"
the work of the scholar who tries to make it possible, and on the
other side the work of the public critic who assumes that it exists.
In between is "literature" itself, a game preserve where the student
wanders with his native intelligence his only guide. The assump
tion seems to be that the scholar and the public critic are connected
by a common interest in literature alone. The scholar lays down
his materials outside the portals of literature: like other offerings
brought to unseen consumers, a good deal of such scholarship
seems to be the product of a rather touching faith, sometimes only
a hope that some synthetizing critical Messiah of the future wijl
find it useful. The public critic, or the spokesman of the imposed
critical attitude, is apt to make only a random and haphazard use
of this material, often in fact to treat the scholar as Hamlet did
the grave-digger, ignoring evervthing he throws out except an odd
skull which he can pick up and moralize about.
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions,
not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they
are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions di
rectly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them. Most
of the answers, such as Newman's "liberal knowledge is its own
end," merely appeal to the experience of those who have had the
right experience. Similarly, most "defenses of poetry" are intel
ligible only to those well within the defenses. The basis of critical
apologetics, therefore, has to be the actual experience of art, and
for those concerned with literature, the first question to answer
is not "What use is the study of literature?" but, "What follows
from the fact that it is possible?"
Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the
mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study
10
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and
a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. If this unity
comes from literature itself, then literature itself must be shaped
like a science, which contradicts our experience of it; or it must
derive some informing power from an ineffable mystery at the
heart of being, which seems vague; or the mental benefits alleged
to be derived from it are imaginary, and are really derived from
other subjects studied incidentally in connection with it.
This is as far as we can get on the assumption that the scholar
and the man of taste are connected by nothing more than a com
mon interest in literature. If this assumption is true, the high
percentage of sheer futility in all criticism should be honestly
faced, for the percentage can only increase with its bulk, until
criticizing becomes, especially for university teachers, merely an
automatic method of acquiring merit, like turning a prayer-wheel.
But it is only an unconscious assumption at least, I have never
seen it stated as a doctrine and it would certainly be convenient if
it turned out to be nonsense. The alternative assumption is that
scholars and public critics are directly related by an intermediate
form of criticism, a coherent and comprehensive theory of litera
ture, logically and scientifically organized, some of which the stu
dent unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main principles
of which are as yet unknown to us. The development of such a
criticism would fulfil the systematic and progressive element in
research by assimilating its work into a- unified structure of knowl
edge, as other sciences do. It would at the same time establish an
authority within criticism for the public critic and the man of
taste.
We should be careful to realize what the possibility of such an
intermediate criticism implies. It implies that at no point is there
any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body
of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learn
ing physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished
from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore
impossible to "learn literature": one learns about it in a certain
way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature.
Similarly, the difficulty often felt in "teaching literature" arises
from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is
all that can be directly taught. Literature is not a subject of study,
but an object of study: the fact that it consists of words, as we
u
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
have seen, makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines.
The libraries reflect our confusion by cataloguing criticism as one
of the subdivisions of literature. Cniiasm,jrather, is to^arLwhat
history is to actionjyi^j^
of a "human productive power which in _itselTdoes not speak. And
jusfas "there is nothing which the philosopher cannot consider
philosophically, and nothing which the historian cannot consider
historically, so the critic should be able to construct and dwell in
a conceptual universe of his own. This critical universe seems to be
one of the things implied in Arnold's conception of culture.
I am not, therefore, saying that literary criticism at present must
be doing the wrong thing and ought to be doing something else.
I am saying that it should be possible to get a comprehensive view
of what it actually is doing. It is necessary that scholars and public
critics should continue to make their contributions to criticism.
It is not necessary that the thing they contribute to should be
invisible, as the coral island is invisible to the polyp. In the study
of literary scholarship the student becomes aware of an undertow
carrying him away from literature. He finds that literature is the
central division of the humanities, flanked on one side by history
and on the other by philosophy. As literature is not itself an or
ganized structure of knowledge, the critic has to turn to the con
ceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the
philosopher for ideas. Asked what he is working on, the critic will
invariably say that he is working on Donne, or Shelley's thought,
or the 1640-1660 period, or give some other answer implying that
history, philosophy, or literature itself is the conceptual basis of
his criticism. In the unlikely event that he was concerned with
the theory of criticism, he would say that he was working on a
"general" topic. It is clear that the absence of systematic criticism
has created a power vacuum, and all the neighboring disciplines
have moved in. Hence the prominence of the Archimedes fallacy
mentioned above: the notion that if we plant our feet solidly
enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be able
to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar. But
if the varied interests of critics could be related to a central expand
ing pattern of systematic comprehension, this undertow would
disappear, and they would be seen as converging on criticism in
stead of running away from it.
One proof that a systematic comprehension of a subject actually
12
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
exists is the ability to write an elementary textbook expounding
its fundamental principles. It would be interesting, to see what such
a book on criticism would contain. It would not start with a clear
answer to the first question of all: "What is literature?'' We have
no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary
from one that is not, and no idea what to do with the vast penumbra
of books that may be claimed for literature because they are written
with "style/' or are useful as "background," or have simply got
into a university course of "great books." We then discover that we
have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in
drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for
Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find
ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for
ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such
a thing as being foo deficient in the capacity to generalize.
So much for page one of our handbook. Page two would be the
place to explain what seems the most far-reaching of literary facts,
the distinction in rhythm between verse and prose. But it appears
that a distinction which anyone can make in practice cannot be
made as yet by any critic in theory. We continue to riffle through
the blank pages. The next thing to do is to outline the primary
categories of literature, such as drama, epic, prose fiction, and the
like. This at any rate is what Aristotle assumed to be the obvious
first step in criticism. We discover that the critical theory of
genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. The very word
"genre" sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable
and alien thing it is. Most critical efforts to handle such generic
terms as "epic" and "novel" are chiefly interesting as examples of
the psychology of rumor. Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish
tragedy from comedy in drama, and so we still tend to assume that
each is the half of drama that is not the other half. When we come
to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-
play, mystery-play, morality, commedia dell' arte, and Zauberspiel,
we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who
refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it.
The Greeks hardly needed to develop a classification of prose
forms. We do, but have never done so. We have, as usual, no word
for a work of prose fiction, so the word "novel" does duty for every
thing, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a
genre. The circulating-library distinction between fiction and non-
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
fiction, between books which are about things admitted not to be
true and books which are about everything else, is apparently ex
haustive enough for critics. Asked what form of prose fiction Gul
liver's Travels belongs to, there are few critics who, if they could
give the answer "Menippean satire," would regard it as knowledge
essential for dealing with the book, although some notion of what
a novel is is surely a prerequisite for dealing with a serious novelist.
Other prose forms are even worse off. Western literature has been
more influenced by the Bible than by any other book, but with all
his respect for "sources," the critic knows little more about that
influence than the fact that it exists. Biblical typology is so dead
a language now that most readers, including scholars, cannot con
strue the superficial meaning of any poem which employs it. And
so on. If criticism could ever be conceived as a coherent and sys
tematic study, the elementary principles of which could be ex
plained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old, then, from the point
of view of such a conception, no critic now knows the first thing
about criticism. What critics now have is a mystery-religion with
out a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or
quarrel, only with one another.
apply to the whole .of
valid fypp of cptiral procure is
what I think Aristotle meant . JyoJoeticSi Aristotle seems to me to
approach poetry as a biologist would approach a system of organ
isms, picking out its genera and species, formulating the broad laws
of literary experience, and in short writing as though he believed
that there is a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable
about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it,
but poetics. One would imagine that, after two thousand years of
post-Aristotelian literary activity, his views on poetics, like his views
on the generation of animals, could be re-examined in the light
of fresh evidence. Meanwhile, the opening words of the Poetics, in
the Bywater translation, remain as good an introduction to the
subject as ever, and describe the kind of approach that I have tried
to keep in mind for myself:
Our subject being poetry, I propose to speak not only of the
art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities;
of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number
and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of
'4
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
any other matters in the same line of inquiry. Let us follow the
natural order and begin with the primary facts.
Of course literature is only one of many arts, but this book is
compelled to avoid the treatment of aesthetic problems outside of
poetics. Every art, however, needs its own critical organization,
and poetics will form a part of aesthetics as soon as aesthetics be
comes the unified criticism of all the arts instead of whatever it
is now.
Sciences normally begin in a state of naive induction: they tend
first of all to take the phenomena they are supposed to interpret as
data. Thus physics began by taking the immediate sensations of
experience, classified as hot, cold, moist, and dry, as fundamental
principles. Eventually physics turned inside out, and discovered
that its real function was rather to explain what heat and moisture
were. History began as chronicle; but the difference between the
old chronicler and the modern historian is that to the chronicler
the events he recorded were also the structure of his history, where
as the historian sees these events as historical phenomena, to be
connected within a conceptual framework not only broader but
different in shape from them. Similarly each modern science has had
to ta'ke what Bacon calls (though in another context) an induc
tive leap, occupying a new vantage ground from which it can see
its former data as new things to be explained. As long as astronomers
regarded the movements of heavenly bodies as the structure of as
tronomy, they naturally regarded their own point of view as fixed.
Once they thought of movement as itself explicable, a mathema
tical theory of movement became the conceptual framework, and
so the way was cleared for the heliocentric solar system and the
law of gravitation. As long as biology thought of animal and
/egetable forms of life as constituting its subject, the different
branches of biology were largely efforts of cataloguing. As soon as
it was the existence of forms of life themselves that had to be ex
plained, the theory of evolution and the conceptions of protoplasm
and the cell poured into biology and completely revitalized it.
It occurs Jtojne thatlitoarycr^
naive induction as we findJrj_a_P ri ' rn ^ T ' vfi
as
be explained in terms of a conceptual framework which criticism
'5
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
alone possesses. They are still regarded as somehow constituting
theTmin^w6rk~or structure of criticism as well, ^suggest that it
is timeJoTjcriticism to leap_t<3 a new ground f roni_which it can
3i$cover what the_ organizing, or Foffimnglbrms of its_ conceptual
framework are. Criticism seems ; to J^e b^lyj^need^f_a_coprdinat-
ing principle, J^^ra^hj^^
IH^ology /will see the phenomena it deals with 5^P5^_5.C^-^o^ e -
~"The first postulate of this inductive leap is the same as that of
any science: the assumption of total coherence. Simple as this
assumption appears, it takes a long time for a science to discover
that it is in fact a totally intelligible body of knowledge. Until it
makes this discovery, it has not been bom as an individual science
but remains an embryo within the body of some other subject. The
birth of physics from "natural philosophy" and of sociology from
"moral philosophy" will illustrate the process. 4 j^Js also apprpxi-
mately true thatjhe moderrL^ciences > Jiave developed in the or3er
oFlKSiTcToseness to_mathenxa!^^
[issiii^^
in the eighteenth^century, biologvjn the nineteentE^_a3[ the
jnjhelv^^
a~jioaaL^^
Is~aFleast not an anachronism. Meanwhile, the myopia of speciali-
^liorTremaSis anTnseparable part of naive induction. From such
a perspective, "general" questions are humanly impossible to deal
with, because they involve "covering" a frighteningly large field.
The critic is in the position of a mathematician who has to deal
with numbers so large that it would keep him scribbling digits
until the next ice age even to write them out in their conventional
form as integers. Critic and mathematician alike will have some
how to invent a less cumbersome notation.
Naive induction thinks of literature entirely in terms of the
enumerative bibliography of literature: that is, it sees literature
as a huge aggregate or miscellaneous pile of discrete "works."
Clearly, if literature is nothing more than this, any systematic
mental training based on it becomes impossible. Only one organiz
ing principle has so far been discovered in literature, the principle
of chronology. This supplies the magic word "tradition/ 7 which
means that when we see the miscellaneous pile strung out along
a chronological line, some coherence is given it by sheer sequence.
But even tradition does not answer all our questions. Total literary
16
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
history gives us a glimpse of the possibility of seeing literature as
a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of
formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. We next realize
that the relation of later literature to these primitive formulas is
by no means purely one of complication, as we find the primitive
formulas reappearing in the greatest classics in fact there seems
to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to
them. This coincides with a feeling we have all had: that the
study of mediocre works of art remains a random and peripheral
form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece
draws us to a point at which we seem to see an enormous number
of converging patterns of significance. We begin to wonder if we
cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself in time, but
as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that
criticism could locate.
It is clear that criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there
is a quality in literature which enables it to be so. We have to adopt
the hypothesis, then, that just as there is an order of nature behind
the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of "works,"
but an order of words. A belief in an order of nature, however, is
an inference from the intelligibility of the natural sciences; and if
the natural sciences ever completely demonstrated the order of
nature they would presumably exhaust their subject. Similarly,
criticism, if a science, must be totally intelligible, but literature, as
the order of words which makes the science possible, is, so far as
we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries, and
would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written. If
so, then the search for a limiting principle in literature in order
to discourage the development of criticism is mistaken. The absurd
quantum formula of criticism, the assertion that the critic should
confine himself to "getting out" of a poem exactly what the poet
may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of "putting in," is one
of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of systematic criti
cism has allowed to grow up. This quantum theory is the literary
form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology. It
corresponds, in the natural sciences, to the assertion that a phe
nomenon is as it is because Providence in its inscrutable wisdom
made it so. That is, the critic is assumed to have no conceptual
framework: it is simply his job to take a poem into which a poet
has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties or effects, and
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
complacently extract them one by one, like his prototype Little
Jack Homer.
The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize
and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in
a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowl
edge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often
find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perora
tions, and other consequences of taking a large view of an unor
ganized subject. It includes all lists of the "best" novels or poems
or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or in-
clusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value-
judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputa
tions of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange.
That wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the
market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his
peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight
flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing
cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can
only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely
leisure-class gossip. The history of taste is no more a part of the
structure of criticism than the Huxley- Wilberforce debate is a part
of the structure of biological science.
I believe that if this distinction is maintained and applied to
the critics of the past, what they have said about real criticism will
show an astonishing amount of agreement, in which the outlines
of a coherent and systematic study will begin to emerge. In the
history of taste, where there are no facts, and where all truths have
been, in Hegelian fashion, split into half-truths in order to sharpen
their cutting edges, we perhaps do feel that the study of literature
is too relative and subjective ever to make any consistent sense. But
as the history of taste has no organic connection with criticism, it
can easily be separated. Mr. Eliot's essay The Function of Criticism
begins by laying down the principle that the existing monuments
of literature form an ideal order among themselves, and are not
simply collections of the writings of individuals. This is criticism,
and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to
annotate it. Its solidity is indicated by its consistency with a hun
dred other statements that could be collected from the better
critics of all ages. There follows a rhetorical debate which makes
tradition and its opposite into personified and contending forces,
18
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
the former dignified with the titles of Catholic and Classical, the
latter ridiculed by the epithet "Whiggery." This is the sort of
thing that makes for confusion until we realize how easy it is to
snip it off and throw it away. The debate is maintained against
Mr. Middleton Murry, who is spoken of approvingly because "he
is aware that there are definite positions to be taken, and that now
and then one must actually reject something and select something
else/' There are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or
philology, and if there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism
is not a field of genuine learning. For in any field of genuine learn
ing, the only sensible response to the challenge "stand" is Falstaffs
"so I do, against my will." One's "definite position" is one's weak
ness, the source of one's liability to error and prejudice, and to gain
adherents to a definite position is only to multiply one's weakness
like an infection.
The next step is to realize that criticism has a great variety of
neighbors, and that the critic must enter into relations with them
in any way that guarantees his own independence. He may want
to know something of the natural sciences, but he need waste no
time in emulating their methods. I understand that there is a
Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels
in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does
not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged. The
critic may want to know something of the social sciences, but
there can be no such thing as, for instance, a sociological "approach"
to literature. There is no reason why a sociologist should not work
exclusively on literary material, but if he does he should pay no
attention to literary values. In his field Horatio Alger and the
writer of the Elsie books may well be more important than Haw
thorne or Melville, and a single issue of the Ladies 7 Home Journal
worth all of Henry James. The critic is similarly under no obliga
tion to sociological values, as the social conditions favorable to the
production of great art are not necessarily those at which the social
sciences aim. The critic may need to know something of religion,
but by theological standards an orthodox religious poem will give
a more satisfactory expression of its content than a heretical one:
this makes nonsense in criticism, and there is nothing to be gained
by confusing the standards of the two subjects.
Literature has been always recognized to be a marketable product,
its producers being the creative writers and its consumers the culti-
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
vated readers, with the critics at their head. From this point of
view the critic is, in the metaphor of our opening page, the mid
dleman. He has some wholesaler's privileges, such as free review
copies, but his function, as distinct from the bookseller's, is essen
tially a form of consumer's research. I recognize a second division
of labor in literature, which, like other forms of mental construc
tion, has a theory and a practice. The practitioner of literature and
the producer of literature are not quite the same, though they
overlap a good deal; the theorist of literature and the consumer
of literature are not the same at all, even when they co-exist in
the same man. The present book assumes that the theory of litera
ture is as primary a humanistic and liberal pursuit as its practice.
Hence, although it takes certain literary values for granted, as
fully established by critical experience, it is not directly concerned
with value-judgements. This fact needs explanation, as the value-
judgement is often, and perhaps rightly for all I know, regarded as
the distinguishing feature of the humanistic and liberal pursuit.
Value-judgements are subjective in the sense that they can be_
indirectly but not directly communicated. When they are fashiona-
BlFor^enefally^accepted, they look objective, but that is all. The
demonstrable value-judgement is the donkey's carrot of literary
criticism, and every new critical fashion, such as the current fashion
for elaborate rhetorical analysis, has been accompanied by a belief
that criticism has finally devised a definitive technique for separat
ing the excellent from the less excellent. But this always turns out
to be an illusion of the history of taste. Value-judgements are
founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never
be founded on value- judgements. Shakespeare, we say, was one
of a group of English dramatists working around 1600, and also
one of the great poets of the world. The_firstj3art of this is a
statement of facf, the ^e^OT4jLy^ e i U( ^gg ment so _S?5?IIly ac ~
cegted^asjojgss for a statement of fact. BufirisTTot a statement
o^facLlLEgSOLiills a value-judgemenTpin^^
criticism can ever^be^attacfieBTtQ^it """"*"
There are two types of value-judgements, comparative and posi
tive. Criticism founded on comparative values falls into two main
divisions, according to whether the work of art is regarded as a prod
uct or as a possession. The former develops biographical criticism,
which relates the work of art primarily to the man who wrote it. The
20
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
latter we may call tropical criticism, and it is primarily concerned
with the contemporary reader. Biographical criticism concerns itself
largely with comparative questions of greatness and personal author
ity. It regards the poem as the oratory of its creator, and it feels most
secure when it knows of a definite, and preferably heroic, personal
ity behind the poetry. If it cannot find such a personality, it may
try to project one out of rhetorical ectoplasm, as Carlyle does in
his essay on Shakespeare as a "heroic" poet. T/opical criticism deals
comparatively with style and craftsmanship, with complexity of
meaning and figurative assimilation. It tends to dislike and be
little the oratorical poets, and it can hardly deal at all with heroic
personality. Both are essentially rhetorical forms of criticism, as
one deals with the rhetoric of persuasive speech and the other with
the rhetoric of verbal ornament, but each distrusts the other's
kind of rhetoric.
Rhetorical value-judgements are closely related to social values,
and are usually cleared through a customs-house of moral meta
phors: sincerity, economy, subtlety, simplicity, and the like. But
because poetics is undeveloped, a fallacy arises from the illegiti
mate extension of rhetoric into the theory of literature. The in
variable mark of this fallacy is the selected tradition, illustrated
with great clarity in Arnold's "touchstone" theory, where we pro
ceed from the intuition of value represented by the touchstone
to a system of ranking poets in classes. The practice of comparing
poets by weighing their lines (no new invention, as it was ridiculed
by Aristophanes in The Frogs) is used by both biographical and
tropical critics, mainly in order to deny first-class rating to those in
favor with the opposite group.
When we examine the touchstone technique in Arnold, how
ever, certain doubts arise about his motivation. The line from
The Tempest, "In the dark backward and abysm of time/' would
do very well as a touchstone line. One feels that the line "Yet a
tailor might scratch her where'er she did itch" somehow would
not do, though it is equally Shakespearean and equally essential
to the same play. (An extreme form of the same kind of criticism
would, of course, deny this and insist that the line had been inter
polated by a vulgar hack.) Some principle is clearly at work here
which is much more highly selective than a purely critical experi
ence of the play would be.
Arnold's "high seriousness" evidently is closely connected with
21
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
the view that epic and tragedy, because they deal with ruling-
class figures and require the high style of decorum, are the aristo
crats of literary forms. All his Class One touchstones are from, or
judged by the standards of, epic and tragedy. Hence his demotion
of Chaucer and Burns to Class Two seems to be affected by a
feeling that comedy and satire should be kept in their proper place,
like the moral standards and the social classes which they symbolize.
We begin to suspect that the literary value-judgements are pro
jections of social ones. Why does Arnold -want to rank poets? He
says that we increase our admiration for those who manage to stay
in Class One after we have made it very hard for them to do so.
This being clearly nonsense, we must look further. When we read
"in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior ... is of
paramount importance . . . because of the high destinies of poetry,"
we begin to get a clue. We see that Arnold is trying to create a
new scriptural canon out of poetry to serve as a guide for those
social principles which he wants culture to take over from religion.
The treatment of criticism as the application of a social attitude
is a natural enough result of what we have called the power vacuum
in criticism. A systematic study alternates between inductive ex
perience and deductive principles. In criticism rhetorical analysis
provides some of the induction, and poetics, the theory of criticism,
should be the deductive counterpart. There being no poetics, the
critic is thrown back on prejudice derived from his existence as a
social being. For prejudice is simply inadequate deduction, as a
prejudice in the mind can never be anything but a major premise
which is mostly submerged, like an iceberg.
It is not hard to see prejudice in Arnold, because his views have
dated: it is a little harder when "high seriousness" becomes "ma
turity," or some other powerful persuader of more recent critical
rhetoric. It is harder when the old question of what books one
would take to a desert island emerges from parlor games, where it
belongs, into an expensive library alleged to constitute the scrip
tural canon of democratic values. Rhetorical value- judgements usu
ally turn on questions of decorum, and the central conception of de
corum is the difference between high, middle, and low styles. These
styles are suggested by the class structure of society, and criticism,
if it is not to reject half the facts of literary experience, obviously
has to look at art from the standpoint of an ideally classless society.
Arnold himself points this out when he says that "culture seeks
22
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
to do away with classes." Every deliberately constructed hierarchy
of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social,
moral, or intellectual analogy. This applies whether the analogy is
conservative and Romantic, as it is in Arnold, or radical, giving the
top place to comedy, satire, and the values of prose and reason,
as it is in Bernard Shaw. The various pretexts for minimizing the
communicative power of certain writers, that they are obscure or
obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out
to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the
ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained
or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan
turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief
that posterity eventually discovers the whole truth about art.
A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some
ultra-critical joker concealed in it. There is no question of accept
ing the whole of literature as the basis of study, but a tradition
(or, of course, "the" tradition) is abstracted from it and attached
to contemporary social values, being then used to document those
values. The hesitant reader is invited to try the following exercise.
Pick three big names at random, work out the eight possible com
binations of promotion and demotion (on a simplified, or two-
class, basis) and defend each in turn. Thus if the three names
picked were Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, the agenda would
run:
1. Demoting Shelley, on the ground that he is immature in
technique and profundity of thought compared to the others.
2. Demoting Milton, on the ground that his religious obscurant
ism and heavy doctrinal content impair the spontaneity of his
utterance.
3. Demoting Shakespeare, on the ground that his detachment
from ideas makes his dramas a reflection of life rather than a
creative attempt to improve it.
4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an
integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by
didacticism.
5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the
highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare's unvary
ing worldliness and Shelley's callowness.
6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets
who accepted outworn social or religious values.
7, Promoting all three (for this a special style, which we may
call the peroration style, should be used).
8. Demoting all three, on the ground of the untidiness of Eng
lish genius when examined by French or Classical or Chinese
standards.
The reader may sympathize with some of these "positions/' as
they are called, more than with others, and so be seduced into
thinking that one of them must be right, and that it is important
to decide which one it is. But long before he has finished his assign
ment he will realize that the whole procedure involved is an anxiety
neurosis prompted by a moral censor, and is totally devoid of
content. Of course, in addition to the moralists, there are poets who
regard only those other poets as authentic who sound like them
selves; there are critics who enjoy making religious, anti-religious,
or political campaigns with toy soldiers labelled "Milton" or
"Shelley" more than they enjoy studying poetry; there are stu
dents who have urgent reasons for making as much edifying read
ing as possible superfluous. But a conspiracy even of all these still
does not make criticism.
The social dialectics applied externally to criticism, then, are,
within criticism, pseudo-dialectics, or false rhetoric. It remains to
try to define the true dialectic of criticism. On this level the bio
graphical critic becomes the historical critic. He develops from
hero-worship towards total and indiscriminate acceptance: there
is nothing "in his field" that he is not prepared to read with in
terest. From a purely historical point of view, however, cultural phe
nomena are to be read in their own context without contemporary
application. We study them as we do the stars, seeing their inter
relationships but not approaching them. Hence historical criticism
needs to be complemented by a corresponding activity growing out
of tropical criticism.
We may call this ethical criticism, interpreting ethics not as a
rhetorical comparison of social facts to predetermined values, but
as the consciousness of the presence of society. As a critical category
this would be the sense of the real presence of culture in the com
munity. Ethical criticism, then, deals with art as a communication
from the past to the present, and is based on the conception of the
total and simultaneous possession of past culture. An exclusive de-
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
votion to it, ignoring historical criticism, would lead to a naive
translation of all cultural phenomena into our own terms without
regard to their original character. As a counterweight to historical
criticism, it is designed to express the contemporary impact of all
art, without selecting a tradition. Every new critical fashion has
increased the appreciation of some poets and depreciated others,
as the increase of interest in the metaphysical poets tended to de
preciate the Romantics about twenty-five years ago. On the ethical
level we can see that eyery_increase of appreciation TiasJ:>een right,
^g^eyery decrease wrong: that criticism Has no business to react
againsj^tl^gs^butjhould sjiowjfste^
criminating Catholicity. Oscar Wilde said that only an auctioneer
could be equally appreciative of all kinds of art: he had of course
the public critic in mind, but even the public critic's job of getting
the treasures of culture into the hands of the people who want
them is largely an auctioneer's job. And if this is true of him, it
is a fortiori true of the scholarly critic. _^
The dialectic axis of criticism, then, has as one pole the total
acceptance of the data of literature, and as the other the total
acceptance of the potential values of those data. This is the real
level of culture and of liberal education, the fertilizing of life by
learning, in which the systematic progress of scholarship flows into
a systematic progress of taste and understanding. On this level
there is no itch to make weighty judgements, and none of the ill
effects which follow the debauchery of judiciousness, and have
made the word critic a synonym for an educated shrew. Compara
tive estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent
ones, from critical practice, not expressed principles guiding its
practice. The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is
a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore.
But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to
waste in belaboring the point. For belaboring the point is all he
can do: any criticism motivated by a desire to establish or prove it
will be merely one more document in the history of taste. There is
doubtless much in the culture of the past which will always be of
comparatively slight value to the present. But the difference be
tween redeemable and irredeemable art, being based on the total
experience of criticism, can never be theoretically formulated.
There are too many Cinderellas among the poets, too many stones
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
rejected from one fashionable building that have become heads
of the next corner.
There may, then, be such things as rules of critical procedure,
and laws, in the sense of the patterns of observed phenomena, of
literary practice. All efforts of critics to discover rules or laws in
the sense of moral mandates telling the artist what he ought to do,
or have done, to be an authentic artist, have failed. "Poetry," said
Shelley, "and the art which professes to regulate and limit its
powers, cannot subsist together/' There is no such art, and there
never has been. The substitution of subordination and value-judge
ment for coordination and description, the substitution of "all
poets should" for "some poets do," is only a sign that all the
relevant facts have not yet been considered. Critical statements
with "must" or "should" in their predicates are either pedantries
or tautologies, depending on whether they are taken seriously or
not. Thus a dramatic critic may wish to say "all plays must have
unity of action." If he is a pedant, he will then try to define unity
of action in specific terms. But creative power is versatile, and he
is sure to find himself sooner or later asserting that some perfectly
reputable dramatist, whose effectiveness on the stage has been
proved over and over again, does not exhibit the unity of action
he has defined, and is consequently not writing what he regards
as plays at all. The critic who attempts to apply such principles in
a more liberal or more cautious spirit will soon have to broaden his
conceptions to the point, not of course of saying, but of trying to
conceal the fact that he is saying, "all plays that have unity of
action must have unity of action," or, more simply and more com
monly, "all good plays must be good plays."
Criticism, in short, and aesthetics generally, must learn to do
what ethics has already done. There was a time when ethics could
take the simple form of comparing what man does with what he
ought to do, known as the good. The "good" invariably turned out
to be whatever the author of the book was accustomed to and
found sanctioned by his community. Ethical writers now, though
they still have values, tend to look at their problems rather dif
ferently. But a procedure which is hopelessly outmoded in ethics is
still in vogue among writers on aesthetic problems. It is still possible
for a critic to define as authentic art whatever he happens to like,
and to go on to assert that what he happens not to like is, in terms
of that definition, not authentic art. The argument has the great
26
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
advantage of being irrefutable, as all circular arguments are, but it
is shadow and not substance.
The odious compar^on_o^grj^
care of themselves, f or evenjyhen we feel gbligedjo assent to them
they are still only unproductive platitudes. Theleal concern" of the
evaluating critic is with positrve^al^^iflrfhe Jgoodnj&S
haps"1te"ge^ greatness
of its author. SiichTcriticism produces the direct value-judgement
of jnformed good taste, the PrcY*gjLg!j!i on the pulses, the dis
ciplined response^ jrf._a Jiighly organizedl^vQus^ystem to the im
pact of_EQg-try^No cnliainJijs .senses would try tofb^HelhsJni:
portance of thjjs^n.ey-githelesg Jherejire some caveats even here.
In the first place, it is superstition to believe that the swift intuitive
certainty of good taste is infallible. Good taste follows and is de
veloped by the study of literature; its precision results from knowl
edge, but does not produce knowledge. Hence the accuracy of any
critic's good taste is no guarantee that its inductive basis in literary
experience is adequate. This may still be true even after the critic
has learned to base his judgements on his experience of literature
and not on his social, moral, religious, or personal anxieties. Honest
critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they dis
cover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience
without being able to realize it for themselves.^ _ ^
In the second place, the positive value-judgement is founded on
a direct experience which is central to criticism yet forever ex
cluded from it. Criticism can account for it only in critical terminol
ogy, and that terminology can never recapture or include the
original experience. The original experience is like the direct vision
of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics "ex
plains" in what, from the point of view of the experience itself,
is a quite irrelevant way. However disciplined by taste and skill,
the experience of literature is, like literature itself, unable to speak.
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off/' said
Emily Dickinson, "I know this is poetry/' This remark is perfectly
sound, but it relates only to criticism as experience. The reading
of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the
talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of
literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary
experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories,
and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experience in the
2 7
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
center of criticism will always keep criticism an art, as long as the
critic recognizes that criticism comes out of it but cannot be
built on it.
Thus, though the normal development of a critic's taste is toward
greater tolerance and catholicity, still criticism as knowledge is one
thing, and value-judgements informed by taste are another. The
attempt to bring the direct experience of literature into the struc
ture of criticism produces the aberrations of the history of taste
already dealt with. The attempt to reverse the procedure and bring
criticism into direct experience will destroy the integrity of both.
Direct experience, even if it is concerned with something already
read hundreds of times, still tries to be a new and fresh experience
each time, which is clearly impossible if the poem itself has been
replaced by a critical view of the poem. To bring my own view
that criticism as knowledge should constantly progress and reject
nothing into direct experience would mean that the latter should
progress toward a general stupor of satisfaction with everything
written, which is not quite what I have in mind.
Finally, the skill developed from constant practice in the direct
experience of literature is a special skill, like playing the piano,
not the expression of a general attitude to life, like singing in the
shower. The critic has a subjective background of experience formed
by his temperament and by every contact with words he has made,
including newspapers, advertisements, conversations, movies, and
whatever he read at the age of nine. He has a specific skill in re
sponding to literature which is no more like this subjective back
ground, with all its private memories, associations, and arbitrary
prejudices, than reading a thermometer is like shivering. Again,
there is no one of critical ability who has not experienced intense
and profound pleasure from something simultaneously with a low
critical valuation of what produced it. There must be several dozen
critical and aesthetic theories based on the assumption that sub
jective pleasure and the specific response to art are, or develop
from, or ultimately become, the same thing. Yet every cultivated
person who is not suffering from advanced paranoia knows that
they are constantly distinct. Or, again, the ideal value may be quite
different from the actual one. A critic may spend a thesis, a book,
or even a life work on something that he candidly admits to be
third-rate, simply because it is connected with something else
that he thinks sufficiently important for his pains. No critical
theory known to me takes any real account of the different systems
28
POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION
of valuation implied by one of the most common practices of
criticism.
Now that we have swept out our interpreter's parlor in the spirit
of the law, and raised the dust, we shall try it again with whatever
unguents of revelation we may possess. It should hardly be neces
sary to point out that my polemic has been written in the first
person plural, and is quite as much a confession as a polemic. It is
clear, too, that a book of this kind can only be offered to a reader
who has enough sympathy with its aims to overlook, in the sense
not of ignoring but of seeing past, whatever strikes him as in
adequate or simply wrong. I am convinced that if we wait for a
fully qualified critic to tackle the subjects of these essays, we shall
wait a long time. In order to keep the book within the bounds that
would make it possible to write and publish it, I have proceeded
deductively, and been rigorously selective in examples and illustra
tions. The deductiveness does not extend further than tactical
method, and so far as I know there is no principle in the book which
is claimed as a perfect major premise, without exceptions or nega
tive instances. Such expressions as "normally/' "usually," "regu
larly," or "as a rule" are thickly strewn throughout. An objection
of the- "what about so-and-so?" type may always be made by the
reader without necessarily destroying statements based on collective
observations, and there are many questions of the "where would
you put so-and-so?" type that cannot be answered by the present
writer.
Still, the schematir r^t-nrp. gf this book is deliberate, and is a
feature of it that I am unable j jaftgr 'long reflection/to^apoTogize for
There is a plage for classification in criticism, as m any other disci-
pfinirwhich iTlnofe~1inpo^ andejgrr^
T^^
by_many critic^ towardany form of schematization in poeticjuii
ggin_Jhe result of aTfailure to""clistinguisfi cnticismas a_bflrty_,oi
knowlejdge^frpjn_jhe.3irect experience of literature, wh^rc_ey^ry act
is unique-and classificanonjias no place. Whenever schematization
appears in the following pages, no importance is attached to the
schematic form itself, which may be only the result of my own
lack of ingenuity. Much of it, I expect, and in fact hope, may be
mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better
shape. The rest of it belongs to the systematic study of the formal
causes of art.
29
FIRST ESSAY
Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes
First Essay
HISTORICAL CRITICISM: THEORY OF MODES
FICTIONAL MODES: INTRODUCTION
IN THE SECOND paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the
differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different
elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the
characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others
on the same level. This passage has not received much attention
from modern critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to good
ness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic
view of literature. Aristotle's words for good and bad, however, are
spouddos and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty
and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing
something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the
something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have
done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author
and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, there
fore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of
action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.
Thus:
1. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment
of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him
will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such
stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found
outside the normal literary categories.
2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment,
the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvel
lous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of
romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature
are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, un
natural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking
animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous
power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance
have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly
so called, into legend, folk tale, marchen, and their literary affiliates
and derivatives.
3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural en-
33
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
vironment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and
powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is
subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is
the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and
is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.
4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the
hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity,
and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we
find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the Zow
mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. "High" and
"low" have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely
diagrammatic, as they are when they refer to Biblical critics or
Anglicans. On this level the difficulty in retaining the word "hero,"
which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes,
occasionally strikes an author. Thackeray thus feels obliged to
call Vanity Fair a novel without a hero.
5. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we
have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration,
or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true
when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation,
as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.
Looking over this table, we can see that European fiction, during
the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity
down the list. In the pre-medieval period literature is closely at
tached to Christian, late Classical, Celtic, or Teutonic myths. If
Christianity had not been both an imported myth and a devourer of
rival ones, this phase of Western literature would be easier to
isolate. In the form in which we possess it, most of it has already-
moved into the category of romance. Romance divides into two main
forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and
a religious form devoted to legends of saints. Both lean heavily on
miraculous violations of natural law for their interest as stories. Fic
tions of romance dominate literature until the cult of the prince and
the courtier in the Renaissance brings the high mimetic mode into
the foreground. The characteristics of this mode are most clearly
seen in the genres of drama, particularly tragedy, and national epic.
Then a new kind of middle-class culture introduces the low mimetic,
which predominates in English literature from Defoe's time to
the end of the nineteenth century. In French literature it begins
and ends about fifty years earlier. During the last hundred years,
34
THEORY OF MODES
most serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in mode.
Something of the same progression may be traced in Classical
literature too, in a greatly foreshortened form. Where a religion is
mythological and polytheistic, where there are promiscuous in
carnations, deified heroes and kings of divine descent, where the
same adjective "godlike" can be applied either to Zeus or to Achilles,
it is hardly possible to separate the mythical, romantic, and high
mimetic strands completely. Where the religion is theological, and
insists on a sharp division between divine and human natures,
romance becomes more clearly isolated, as it does in the legends
of Christian chivalry and sanctity, in the Arabian Nights of Mo
hammedanism, in the stories of the judges and thaumaturgic proph
ets of Israel. Similarly, the inability of the Classical world to shake
off the divine leader in its later period has much to do with the
abortive development of low mimetic and ironic modes that got
barely started with Roman satire. At the same time the establish
ing of the high mimetic mode, the developing of a literary tradi
tion with a consistent sense of an order of nature in it, is one of
the great feats of Greek civilization. Oriental fiction does not, so
far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic
formulas.
We shall here deal chiefly with the five epochs of Western lit
erature, as given above, using Classical parallels only incidentally.
In each mode a distinction will be useful between naive and sophis
ticated literature. The word naive I take from Schiller's essay on
naive and sentimental poetry: I mean by it, however, primitive or
popular, whereas in Schiller it means something more like Classical.
The word sentimental also means something else in English, but
we do not have enough genuine critical terms to dispense with it.
In quotation marks, therefore, "sentimental" refers to a later re
creation of an earlier mode. Thus Romanticism is a "sentimental"
form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a "senti
mental" form of folk tale. Also there is a general distinction be
tween fictions in which the hero becomes isolated from his society,
and fictions in which he is incorporated into it. This distinction is
expressed by the words "tragic" and "comic" when they refer to
aspects of plot in general and not simply to forms of drama.
TRAGIC FICTIONAL MODES
Tragic stories, when they apply to divine beings, may be called
35
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Dionysiac. These are stories of dying gods, like Hercules with his
poisoned shirt and his pyre, Orpheus torn to pieces by the Bac
chantes, Balder murdered by the treachery of Loki, Christ dying
on the cross and marking with the words "Why hast thou forsaken
me?" a sense of his exclusion, as a divine being, from the society
of the Trinity.
The association of a god's death with autumn or sunset does not,
in literature, necessarily mean that he is a god "of" vegetation or
the sun, but only that he is a god capable of dying, whatever his
department. But as a god is superior to nature as well as to other
men, the death of a god appropriately involves what Shakespeare,
in Venus and Adonis, calls the "solemn sympathy" of nature, the
word solemn having here some of its etymological connections with
ritual. Ruskin's pathetic fallacy can hardly be a fallacy when a god
is the hero of the action, as when the poet of The Dream of the
Rood tells us that all creation wept at the death of Christ. Of course
there is never any real fallacy in making a purely imaginative align
ment between man and nature, but the use of "solemn sympathy"
in a piece of more realistic fiction indicates that the author is
trying to give his hero some of the overtones of the mythical mode.
Ruskin's example of a pathetic fallacy is "the cruel, crawling foam"
from Kingsley's ballad about a girl drowned in the tide. But the
fact that the foam is so described gives to Kingsley's Mary a faint
coloring of the myth of Andromeda.
The same associations with sunset and the fall of the leaf linger
in romance, where the hero is still half a god. In romance the sus
pension of natural law and the individualizing of the hero's ex
ploits reduce nature largely to the animal and vegetable world.
Much of the hero's life is spent with animals, or at any rate the
animals that are incurable romantics, such as horses, dogs, and
falcons, and the typical setting of romance is the forest. The hero's
death or isolation thus has the effect of a spirit passing out of
nature, and evokes a mood best described as elegiac. The elegiac
presents a heroism unspoiled by irony. The inevitability in the
death of Beowulf, the treachery in the death of Roland, the malig
nancy that compasses the death of the martyred saint, are of much
greater emotional importance than any ironic complications of
hybris and hamartia that may be involved. Hence the elegiac is
often accompanied by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the
passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new
36
THEORY OF MODES
one: one thinks of Beowulf looking, while he is dying, at the great
stone monuments of the eras of history that vanished before him.
In a very late "sentimental" form the same mood is well caught in
Tennyson's Passing of Arthur.
Tragedy in the central or high mimetic sense, the fiction of the
fall of a leader (he has to fall because that is the only way in which
a leader can be isolated from his society), mingles the heroic with
the ironic. In elegiac romance the hero's mortality is primarily a
natural fact, the sign of his humanity; in high mimetic tragedy it
is also a social and moral fact. The tragic hero has to be of a properly
heroic size, but his fall is involved both with a sense of his relation
to society and with a sense of the supremacy of natural law, both
of which are ironic in reference. Tragedy belongs chiefly to the two
indigenous developments of tragic drama in fifth-century Athens
and seventeenth-century Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. Both
belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy is fast
losing its effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological
prestige.
The central position of high mimetic tragedy in the five tragic
modes, balanced midway between godlike heroism and all-too-
human irony, is expressed in the traditional conception of catharsis.
The words pity and fear may be taken as referring to the two gen
eral directions in which emotion moves, whether towards an ob
ject or away from it. Naive romance, being closer to the wish-fulfil
ment dream, tends to absorb emotion and communicate it internally
to the reader. Romance, therefore, is characterized by the accept
ance of pity and fear, which in ordinary life relate to pain, as forms
of pleasure. It turns fear at a distance, or terror, into the adventur
ous; fear at contact, or horror, into the marvellous, and fear without
an object, or dread (Angst) into a pensive melancholy. It turns pity
at a distance, or concern, into the theme of chivalrous rescue; pity
at contact, or tenderness, into a languid and relaxed charm, and
pity without an object (which has no name but is a kind of
animism, or treating everything in nature as though it had human
feelings) into creative fantasy. In sophisticated romance the char
acteristics peculiar to the form are less obvious, especially in tragic
romance, where the theme of inevitable death works against the
marvellous, and often forces it into the background. In Romeo and
Juliet, for instance, the marvellous survives only in Mercutio's speech
on Queen Mab. But this play is marked as closer to romance than
37
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
the later tragedies by the softening influences that work in the
opposite direction from catharsis, draining off the irony, so to speak,
from the main characters.
In high mimetic tragedy pity and fear become, respectively,
favorable and adverse moral judgement, which are relevant to
tragedy but not central to it. We pity Desdemona and fear lago,
but the central tragic figure is Othello, and our feelings about him
are mixed. The particular thing called tragedy that happens to
the tragic hero does not depend on his moral status. If it is causally
related to something he has done, as it generally is, the tragedy is
in the inevitability of the consequences of the act, not in its moral
significance as an act. Hence the paradox that in tragedy pity and
fear are raised and cast out. Aristotle's hamartia or "flaw/' there
fore, is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it
may be simply a matter of being a strong character in an exposed
position, like Cordelia. The exposed position is usually the place
of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at
the same time, giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and
the incongruous which is peculiar to tragedy. The principle of the
hamartia of leadership can be more clearly seen in naive high
mimetic tragedy, as we get it in The Minor for Magistrates and
similar collections of tales based on the theme of the wheel of
fortune.
In low mimetic tragedy, pity and fear are neither purged nor
absorbed into pleasures, but are communicated externally, as sen
sations. In fact the word "sensational" could have a more useful
meaning in criticism if it were not merely an adverse value-judge
ment. The best word for low mimetic or domestic tragedy is,
perhaps, pathos, and pathos has a close relation to the sensational
reflex of tears. Pathos presents its hero as isolated by a weakness
which appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of
experience. I speak of a hero, but the central figure of pathos is often
a woman or a child (or both, as in the death-scenes of Little Eva
and Little Nell) , and we have a whole procession of pathetic female
sacrifices in English low mimetic fiction from Clarissa Harlowe
to Hardy's Tess and James's Daisy Miller. We notice that while
tragedy may massacre a whole cast, pathos is usually concentrated
on a single character, partly because low mimetic society is more
strongly individualized.
Again, in contrast to high mimetic tragedy, pathos is increased
38
THEORY OF MODES
by the inarticulateness of the victim. The death of an animal is
usually pathetic, and so is the catastrophe of defective intelligence
that is frequent in modern American literature. Wordsworth, who
as a low mimetic artist was one of our great masters of pathos, makes
his sailor's mother speak in a flat, dumpy, absurdly inadequate style
about her efforts to salvage her son's clothes and "other property"
or did before bad criticism made him spoil his poem. Pathos is a
queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or
simulated, seems to be peculiar to it. It will always leave a fluently
plangent funeral elegy to go and batten on something like Swift's
memoir of Stella. Highly articulate pathos is apt to become a fac
titious appeal to self-pity, or tear-jerking. The exploiting of fear in
the low mimetic is also sensational, and is a kind of pathos in
reverse. The terrible figure in this tradition, exemplified by Heath-
cliff, Simon Legree, and the villains of Dickens, is normally a
ruthless figure strongly contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue,
generally a helpless victim in his power.
The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our
own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence
the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the
isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like our
selves is. broken by a conflict between the inner and outer world,
between imaginative reality and the sort of reality which is estab
lished by a social consensus. Such tragedy may be concerned, as it
often is in Balzac, with a mania or obsession about rising in the
world, this being the central low mimetic counterpart of the fiction
of the fall of the leader. Or it may deal with the conflict of inner
and outer life, as in Madame Bovary and Lord Jim, or with the
impact of inflexible morality on experience, as in Melville's Pierre
and Ibsen's Brand. The type of character involved here we may
call by the Greek word alazon, which means impostor, someone
who pretends or tries to be something more than he is. The most
popular types of dazon are the miles gloriosus and the learned
crank or obsessed philosopher.
We are most familiar with such characters in comedy, where
they are looked at from the outside, so that we see only the social
mask. But the dazon may be one aspect of the tragic hero as well:
the touch of miles gloriosus in Tamburlaine, even in Othello, is
unmistakable, as is the touch of the obsessed philosopher in Faustus
and Hamlet. It is very difficult to study a case of obsession, or even
39
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
hypocrisy, from the inside, in a dramatic medium: even Tartuffe,
as far as his dramatic function is concerned, is a study of parasitism
rather than hypocrisy. The analysis of obsession belongs more
naturally to prose fiction or to a semi-dramatic medium like the
Browning monologue. For all the differences in technique and
attitude, Conrad's Lord Jim is a lineal descendant of the miles
gloriosus, of the same family as Shaw's Sergius or Synge's playboy,
who are parallel types in a dramatic and comic setting. It is, of
course, quite possible to take the alazon at his own valuation: this
is done for instance by the creators of the inscrutable gloomy heroes
in Gothic thrillers, with their wild or piercing eyes and their dark
hints of interesting sins. The result as a rule is not tragedy so much
as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without
humor. When it rises out of this, we have a study of obsession
presented in terms of fear instead of pity: that is, the obsession
takes the form of an unconditioned will that drives its victim be
yond the normal limits of humanity. One of the clearest examples
is Heathcliff, who plunges through death itself into vampirism;
but there are many others, ranging from Conrad's Kurtz to the
mad scientists of popular fiction.
The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle's Ethics, where
the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the
alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though
Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a pre
destined artist, just as the dazon is one of his predestined victims.
The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less
than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a tech
nique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a
more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct
statement or its own obvious meaning. (I am not using the word
ironic itself in any unfamiliar sense, though I am exploring some
of its implications.)
The ironic fiction-writer, then, deprecates himself and, like
Socrates, pretends to know nothing, even that he is ironic. Com
plete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgements
are essential to his method. Thus pity and fear are not raised in
ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art. When we
try to isolate the ironic as such, we find that it seems to be simply
the attitude of the poet as such, a dispassionate construction of a
literary form, with all assertive elements, implied or expressed,
40
THEORY OF MODES
eliminated. Irony, as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it
takes life exactly as it finds it. But the ironist fables without moral
izing, and has no object but his subject. Irony is naturally a sophisti
cated mode, and the chief difference between sophisticated and
naive irony is that the naive ironist calls attention to the fact that
he is being ironic, whereas sophisticated irony merely states, and
lets the reader add the ironic tone himself. Coleridge, noting an
ironic comment in Defoe, points out how Defoe's subtlety could
be made crude and obvious simply by over-punctuating the same
words with italics, dashes, exclamation points, and other signs of
being oneself aware of irony.
Tragic irony, then, becomes simply the study of tragic isolation
as such, and it thereby drops out the element of the special case,
which in some degree is in all the other modes. Its hero does not
necessarily have any tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession: he is
only somebody who gets isolated from his society. Thus the central
principle of tragic irony is that whatever exceptional happens to
the hero should be causally out of line with his character. Tragedy
is intelligible, not in the sense of having any pat moral to go with
it, but in the sense that Aristotle had in mind when he spoke of
discovery or recognition as essential to the tragic plot. Tragedy is
intelligible because its catastrophe is plausibly related to its situa
tion. Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrari
ness, of the victim's having been unlucky, selected at random or
by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone
else would be. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe,
it is an inadequate reason, and raises more objections than it
answers.
Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize
in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this
typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmdkos
figure in Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, in Melville's Billy Budd, in
Hardy's Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Ddloway, in stories of per
secuted Jews and Negroes, in stories of artists whose genius makes
them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither
innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens
to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the
mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty
in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a
world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence.
41
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
The two facts do not come together; they remain ironically apart.
The pharmakos, in short, is in the situation of Job. Job can defend
himself against the charge of having done something that makes
his catastrophe morally intelligible; but the success of his defense
makes it morally unintelligible.
Thus the incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined
in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. At one pole is the
inevitable irony of human life. What happens to, say, the hero of
Kafka's Tried is not the result of what he has done, but the end
of what he is, which is an "all too human" being. The archetype
of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence
of death. At the other pole is the incongruous irony of human life,
in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim
something of the dignity of innocence. The archetype of the in
congruously ironic is Christ, the perfectly innocent victim excluded
from human society. Halfway between is the central figure of
tragedy, who is human and yet of a heroic size which often has in
it the suggestion of divinity. His archetype is Prometheus, the
immortal titan rejected by the gods for befriending men. The Book
of Job is not a tragedy of the Promethean type, but a tragic irony
in which the dialectic of the divine and the human nature works
itself out. By justifying himself as a victim of God, Job tries to make
himself into a tragic Promethean figure, but he does not succeed.
These references may help to explain something that might
otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends
from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate ob
servation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and
dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear
in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle. This reap
pearance of myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in
Joyce. In Kafka, whose work, from one point of view, may be said
to form a series of commentaries on the Book of Job, the common
contemporary types of tragic irony, the Jew, the artist, Everyman,
and a kind of sombre Chaplin clown, are all found, and most of
these elements are combined, in a comic form, in Joyce's Shem.
However, ironic myth is frequent enough elsewhere, and many
features of ironic literature are unintelligible without it. Henry
James learned his trade mainly from the realists and naturalists of
the nineteenth century, but if we were to judge, for example, the
story called The Altar of the Dead purely by low mimetic standards,
42
THEORY OF MODES
we should have to call it a tissue of improbable coincidence, in
adequate motivation, and inconclusive resolution. When we look
at it as ironic myth, a story of how the god of one person is the
pharmakos of another, its structure becomes simple and logical.
COMIC FICTIONAL MODES
The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which
usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.
The mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac
god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society
of gods. In Classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part
of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a
probation to go through, and in Christian literature it is the theme
of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the
comedy that stands just at the end of Dante's Commedia. The
mode of romantic comedy corresponding to the elegiac is best de
scribed as idyllic, and its chief vehicle is the pastoral. Because of
the social interest of comedy, the idyllic cannot equal the intro
version of the elegiac, but it preserves the theme of escape from
society to the extent of idealizing a simplified life in the country
or on the frontier (the pastoral of popular modern literature is the
Western story). The close association with animal and vegetable
nature that we noted in the elegiac recurs in the sheep and pleasant
pastures (or the cattle and ranches) of the idyllic, and the same
easy connection with myth recurs in the fact that such imagery is
often used, as it is in the Bible, for the theme of salvation.
The clearest example of high mimetic comedy is the Old Comedy
of Aristophanes. The New Comedy of Menander is closer to the
low mimetic, and through Plautus and Terence its formulas were
handed down to the Renaissance, so that there has always been a
strongly low mimetic bias to social comedy. In Aristophanes there
is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society
in the teeth of strong opposition, driving off one after another all
the people who come to prevent or exploit him, and eventually
achieving a heroic triumph, complete with mistresses, in which he
is sometimes assigned the honors of a reborn god. We notice that
just as there is a catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy, so there is a
catharsis of the corresponding comic emotions, which are sympathy
and ridicule, in Old Comedy. The comic hero will get his triumph
whether what he has done is sensible or silly, honest or rascally.
43
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Thus Old Comedy, like the tragedy contemporary with it, is a blend
of the heroic and the ironic. In some plays this fact is partly con
cealed by Aristophanes 7 strong desire to get his own opinion of what
the hero is doing into the record, but his greatest comedy, The
Birds, preserves an exquisite balance between comic heroism and
comic irony.
New Comedy normally presents an erotic intrigue between a
young man and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of
opposition, usually paternal, and resolved by a twist in the plot
which is the comic form of Aristotle's "discovery," and is more
manipulated than its tragic counterpart. At the beginning of the
play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the play's so
ciety, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or
the heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage
around the hero and his bride. The action of the comedy thus
moves towards the incorporation of the hero into the society that
he naturally fits. The hero himself is seldom a very interesting
person: in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary
in his virtues, but socially attractive. In Shakespeare and in the
kind of romantic comedy that most closely resembles his there is a
development of these formulas in a more distinctively high mimetic
direction. In the figure of Prospero we have one of the few ap
proaches to the Aristophanic technique of having the whole comic
action projected by a central character. Usually Shakespeare achieves
his high mimetic pattern by making the struggle of the repressive
and the desirable societies a struggle between two levels of existence,
the former like our own world or worse, the latter enchanted and
idyllic. This point will be dealt with more fully later.
For the reasons given above the domestic comedy of later fiction
carries on with much the same conventions as were used in the
Renaissance. Domestic comedy is usually based on the Cinderella
archetype, the kind of thing that happens when Pamela's virtue is
rewarded, the incorporation of an individual very like the reader
into the society aspired to by both, a society ushered in with a
happy rustle of bridal gowns and banknotes. Here again, Shake
spearean comedy may marry off eight or ten people of approxi
mately equal dramatic interest, just as a high mimetic tragedy may
kill the same number, but in domestic comedy such diffusion of
sexual energy is more rare. The chief difference between high and
low mimetic comedy, however, is that the resolution of the latter
44
THEORY OF MODES
more frequently involves a social promotion. More sophisticated
writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success-
story formula with the moral ambiguities that we have found in
Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoun
drel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes
of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart
of the dazon seems to be the clever, likeable, unprincipled picaro
of the picaresque novel.
In studying ironic comedy we must start with the theme of
driving out the pharmakos from the point of view of society. This
appeals to the kind of relief we are expected to feel when we see
Jonson's Volpone condemned to the galleys, Shylock stripped of
his wealth, or Tartuffe taken off to prison. Such a theme, unless
touched very lightly, is difficult to make convincing, for the reasons
suggested in connection with ironic tragedy. Insisting on the theme
of social revenge on an individual, however great a rascal he may be,
tends to make him look less involved in guilt and the society more
so. This is particularly true of characters who have been trying to
amuse either the actual or the internal audience, and who are the
comic counterparts of the tragic hero as artist. The rejection of the
entertainer, whether fool, clown, buffoon, or simpleton, can be one
of the most terrible ironies known to art, as the rejection of Falstaff
shows, and certain scenes in Chaplin.
In some religious poetry, for example at the end of the Paradiso,
we can see that literature has an upper limit, a point at which an
imaginative vision of an eternal world becomes an experience of it.
In ironic comedy we begin to see that art has also a lower limit
in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which
comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy
in enduring it. Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scape
goat ritual and the nightmare dream, the human symbol that con
centrates our fears and hates. We pass the boundary of art when
this symbol becomes existential, as it does in the black man of a
lynching, the Jew of a pogrom, the old woman of a witch hunt, or
anyone picked up at random by a mob, like Cinna the poet in
Julius Caesar. In Aristophanes the irony sometimes edges very close
to mob violence because the attacks are personal: one thinks of
all the easy laughs he gets, in play after play, at the pederasty of
Cleisthenes or the cowardice of Cleonymus. In Aristophanes the
word pharmakos means simply scoundrel, with no nonsense about
45
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
it. At the conclusion of The Clouds, where the poet seems almost
to be summoning a lynching party to go and burn down Socrates'
house, we reach the comic counterpart of one of the greatest
masterpieces of tragic irony in literature, Plato's Apology.
But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from
savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important
theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of
deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be
very important. We notice this particularly in all forms of art in
which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as
in drama, and, still more obviously, in games. We notice too that
playing at sacrifice has nothing to do with any historical descent
from sacrificial ritual, such as has been suggested for Old Comedy.
All the features of such ritual, the king's son, the mimic death, the
executioner, the substituted victim, are far more explicit in Gilbert
and Sullivan's Mikado than they are in Aristophanes. There is cer
tainly no evidence that baseball has descended from a ritual of
human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much of a pharmakos
as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than
Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team
scream for his death. At play, mob emotions are boiled in an open
pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace
of what Blake would call moral virtue. The gladiatorial combat,
in which the audience has the actual power of life and death over
the people who are entertaining them, is perhaps the most con
centrated of all the savage or demonic parodies of drama.
The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely
accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of
how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him. The
detective story begins in the Sherlock Holmes period as an intensi
fication of low mimetic, in the sharpening of attention to details
that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living
leap into mysterious and fateful significance. But as we move
further away from this we move toward a ritual drama around a
corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes
over a group of "suspects" and finally settles on one. The sense of
a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is
only plausibly manipulated. If it were really inevitable, we should
have tragic irony, as in Crime and Punishment, where RaskolnikofFs
crime is so interwoven with his character that there can be no ques-
THEORY OF MODES
tion of any "whodunit" mystery. In the growing brutality of the
crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form,
as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be
mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer), de
tection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of
melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph
of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the
moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melo
drama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally
possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the
lynching mob.
We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the
detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the
police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob
violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not
to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. Serious
melodrama soon gets entangled with its own pity and fear: the
more serious it is, the more likely it is to be looked at ironically
by the reader, its pity and fear seen as sentimental drivel and owlish
solemnity, respectively. One pole of ironic comedy is the recogni
tion of the absurdity of naive melodrama, or, at least, of the ab
surdity of its attempt to define the enemy of society as a person
outside that society. From there it develops toward the opposite
pole, which is true comic irony or satire, and which defines the
enemy of society as a spirit within that society. Let us arrange the
forms of ironic comedy from this point of view.
Cultivated people go to a melodrama to hiss the villain with an
air of condescension: they are making a point of the fact that they
cannot take his villainy seriously. We have here a type of irony
which exactly corresponds to that of two other major arts of the
ironic age, advertising and propaganda. These arts pretend to ad
dress themselves seriously to a subliminal audience of cretins, an
audience that may not even exist, but which is assumed to be
simple-minded enough to accept at their face value the statements
made about the purity of a soap or a government's motives. The
rest of us, realizing that irony never says precisely what it means,
take these arts ironically, or, at least, regard them as a kind of
ironic game. Similarly, we read murder stories with a strong sense
of the unreality of the villainy involved. Murder is doubtless a
serious crime, but if private murder really were a major threat to
47
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
our civilization it would not be relaxing to read about it. We may
compare the abuse showered on the pimp in Roman comedy, which
was similarly based on the indisputable ground that brothels are
immoral.
The next step is an ironic comedy addressed to the people who
can realize that murderous violence is less an attack on a virtuous
society by a malignant individual than a symptom of that society's
own viciousness. Such a comedy would be the kind of intellectual-
ized parody of melodramatic formulas represented by 7 for instance,
the novels of Graham Greene. Next comes the ironic comedy
directed at the melodramatic spirit itself, an astonishingly per
sistent tradition in all comedy in which there is a large ironic
admixture. One notes a recurring tendency on the part of ironic
comedy to ridicule and scold an audience assumed to be hankering
after sentiment, solemnity, and the triumph of fidelity and ap
proved moral standards. The arrogance of Jonson and Congreve,
the mocking of bourgeois sentiment in Goldsmith, the parody of
melodramatic situations in Wilde and Shaw, belong to a consistent
tradition. Moliere had to please his king, but was not tempera
mentally an exception. To comic drama one may add the ridicule
of melodramatic romance in the novelists, from Fielding to Joyce.
Finally comes the comedy of manners, the portrayal of a chat-
tering-monkey society devoted to snobbery and slander. In this
kind of irony the characters who are opposed to or excluded from
the fictional society have the sympathy of the audience. Here we
are close to a parody of tragic irony, as we can see in the appalling
fate of the relatively harmless hero of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful
of Dust. Or we may have a character who, with the sympathy of
the author or audience, repudiates such a society to the point of
deliberately walking out of it, becoming thereby a kind of phar-
makos in reverse. This happens for instance at the conclusion of
Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves. It is more usual, however,
for the artist to present an ironic deadlock in which the hero is
regarded as a fool or worse by the fictional society, and yet impresses
the real audience as having something more valuable than his
society has. The obvious example, and certainly one of the greatest,
is Dostoievsky's The Idiot, but there are many others. The Good
Soldier Sch^eik, Heaven's My Destination and The Horse's Mouth
are instances that will give some idea of the range of the theme.
What we have said about the return of irony to myth in tragic
THEORY OF MODES
modes thus holds equally well for comic ones. Even popular litera
ture appears to be slowly shifting its center of gravity from murder
stories to science fiction or at any rate a rapid growth of science
fiction is certainly a fact about contemporary popular literature.
Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like
on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is
often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous.
It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to
myth.
The conception of a sequence of fictional modes should do
something, let us hope, to give a more flexible meaning to some of
our literary terms. The words "romantic" and "realistic," for in
stance, as ordinarily used, are relative or comparative terms: they
illustrate tendencies in fiction, and cannot be used as simply de
scriptive adjectives with any sort of exactness. If we take the se
quence De Raptu Proserpinae, The Man of Lmv's Tale, Much
Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, An American Tragedy,
it is clear that each work is "romantic" compared to its successors
and "realistic" compared to its predecessors. On the other hand,
the term "naturalism" shows up in its proper perspective as a
phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a
very different way, begins as an intensification of low mimetic, an
attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic
of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola's obsession with ironic
formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the
human scene.
The difference between the ironic tone that we may find in low
mimetic or earlier modes and the ironic structure of the ironic
mode itself is not hard to sense in practice. When Dickens, for
instance, uses irony the reader is invited to share in the irony,
because certain standards of normality common to author and
reader are assumed. Such assumptions are a mark of a relatively
popular mode: as the example of Dickens indicates, the gap be
tween serious and popular fiction is narrower in low mimetic than
in ironic writing. The literary acceptance of relatively stable social
norms is closely connected with the reticence of low mimetic as
compared to ironic fiction. In low mimetic modes characters are
usually presented as they appear to others, fully dressed and with
a large section of both their physical lives and their inner mono-
49
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
logue carefully excised. Such an approach is entirely consistent
with the other conventions involved.
If we were to make this distinction the basis of a comparative
value-judgement, which would, of course, be a moral value-judge
ment disguised as a critical one, we should be compelled either to
attack low mimetic conventions for being prudish and hypocritical
and leaving too much of life out, or to attack ironic conventions
for not being wholesome, healthy, popular, reassuring, and sound,
like the conventions of Dickens. As long as we are concerned simply
to distinguish between the conventions, we need only remark that
the low mimetic is one step more heroic than the ironic, and that
low mimetic reticence has the effect of making its characters, on
the average, more heroic, or at least more dignified, than the char
acters in ironic fiction.
We may also apply our scheme to the principles of selection on
which a writer of fiction operates. Let us take, as a random example,
the use of ghosts in fiction. In a true myth there can obviously be
no consistent distinction between ghosts and living beings. In
romance we have real human beings, and consequently ghosts are
in a separate category, but in a romance a ghost as a rule is merely
one more character: he causes little surprise because his appearance
is no more marvellous than many other events. In high mimetic,
where we are within the order of nature, a ghost is relatively easy
to introduce because the plane of experience is above our own, but
when he appears he is an awful and mysterious being from what
is perceptibly another world. In low mimetic, ghosts have been,
ever since Defoe, almost entirely confined to a separate category
of "ghost stories." In ordinary low mimetic fiction they are inad
missible, "in complaisance to the scepticism of a reader," as Field
ing puts it, a skepticism which extends only to low mimetic con
ventions. The few exceptions, such as Wuthering Heights, go a
long way to prove the rulethat is, we recognize a strong influence
of romance in Wuthering Heights. In some forms of ironic fiction,
such as the later works of Henry James, the ghost begins to come
back as a fragment of a disintegrating personality.
Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we
must then learn to recombine them. For while one mode consti
tutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the
other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of
the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counter-
5
THEORY OF MODES
point Chaucer is a medieval poet specializing mainly in romance,
whether sacred or secular. Of his pilgrims, the knight and the
parson clearly present the norms of the society m which he func
tions as a poet, and, as we have them, the Canterbury Tales are
contained by these two figures, who open and close the series. But
to overlook Chaucer's mastery of low mimetic and ironic techniques
would be as wrong as to think of him as a modern novelist who
got into the Middle Ages by mistake. The tonality of Antony and
Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader.
But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved
by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with our
selves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious
courage and endurance betrayed by a witch; there are even hints
of a superhuman being whose legs bestnd the ocean and whose
downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer. To
leave out any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play.
Through such an analysis we may come to realize that the two
essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its
own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed
but complementary facts.
Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the
mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and ac
curacy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other
pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's
word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a
tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters
who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward
a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge
into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of
tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into
plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social
context rather than of literary form, and the constructive prin
ciples of story-telling remain constant through them, though of
course they adapt to them. Tom Jones and Oliver Twist are typical
enough as low mimetic characters, but the birth-mystery plots in
which they are involved are plausible adaptations of fictional for
mulas that go back to Menander, and from Menander to Euripides'
Ion, and from Euripides to legends like those of Perseus and
Moses. We note in passing that imitation of nature m fiction pro
duces, not truth or reality, but plausibility, and plausibility varies
5 1
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
in weight from a mere perfunctory concession in a myth or folk
tale to a kind of censor principle in a naturalistic novel. Reading
forward in history, therefore, we may think of our romantic, high
mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths,
mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the
opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning
to move back.
THEMATIC MODES
Aristotle lists six aspects of poetry: three of them, melody, dic
tion, and spectacle, form a group by themselves, and we shall con
sider them in due course. The other three are mythos or plot,
ethos, which includes both characters and setting, and dianoia or
"thought." The literary works we have so far been considering are
works of fiction in which the plot is, as Aristotle called it, the
"soul" or shaping principle, and the characters exist primarily as
functions of the plot But besides the internal fiction of the hero
and his society, there is an external fiction which is a relation be
tween the writer and the writer's society. Poetry may be as com
pletely absorbed in its internal characters as it is in Shakespeare,
or in Homer, where the poet himself simply points to his story
and disappears, the second word of the Odyssey, moi, being all we
get of him in that poem. But as soon as the poet's personality ap
pears on the horizon, a relation with the reader is established
which cuts across the story, and which may increase until there
is no story at all apart from what the poet is conveying to his
reader.
In such genres as novels and plays the internal fiction is usually
of primary interest; in essays and in lyrics the primary interest is in
dianoia, the idea or poetic thought (something quite different, of
course, from other kinds of thought) that the reader gets from the
writer. The best translation of dianoia is, perhaps, "theme/* and
literature with this ideal or conceptual interest may be called
thematic. When a reader of a novel asks, "How is this story going
to turn out?" he is asking a question about the plot, specifically
about that crucial aspect of the plot which Aristotle calls discovery
or anagnorisis. But he is equally likely to ask, "What's the point
of this story?" This question relates to dianoia, and indicates that
themes have their elements of discovery just as plots do.
It is easy to say that some literary works are fictional and others
THEORY OF MODES
thematic in their main emphasis. But clearly there is no such thing
as a fictional or a thematic work of literature, for all four ethical
elements (ethical in the sense of relating to character), the hero,
the hero's society, the poet and the poet's readers, are always at
least potentially present. There can hardly be a work of literature
without some kind of relation, implied or expressed, between its
creator and its auditors. When the audience the poet had in mind
is superseded by posterity, the relation changes, but it still holds.
On the other hand, even in lyrics and essays the writer is to some
extent a fictional hero with a fictional audience, for if the element
of fictional projection disappeared completely, the writing would
become direct address, or straight discursive writing, and cease to
be literature. A poet sending a love poem to his lady complaining
of her cruelty has stereoscoped his four ethical elements into two,
but the four are still there.
Hence every work of literature has both a fictional and a thematic
aspect, and the question of which is more important is often simply
a matter of opinion or emphasis in interpretation. We have cited
Homer as the very type of impersonal fiction writer, but the main
emphasis of Homeric criticism, down to about 1750 at least, has
been overwhelmingly thematic, concerned with the dianoia or ideal
of leadership implicit in the two epics. The History of Tom Jones,
a Foundling, is a novel named after its plot; Sense and Sensibility
is named after its theme. But Fielding has as strong a thematic
interest (revealed chiefly in the introductory chapters to the dif
ferent books) as Jane Austen has in telling a good story. Both
novels are strongly fictional in emphasis compared to Uncle Tom's
Cabin or The Grapes of Wrath, where the plot exists primarily to
illustrate the themes of slavery and migratory labor respectively.
They in their turn are fictional in emphasis compared to The
Pilgrim's Progress, and The Pilgrim's Progress is fictional in em
phasis compared to an essay of Montaigne. We note that as we
move from fictional to thematic emphasis, the element represented
by the term mythos tends to mean increasingly "narrative" rather
than "plot."
When a work of fiction is written or interpreted thematically,
it becomes a parable or illustrative fable. All formal allegories have,
ipso facto, a strong thematic interest, though it does not follow, as
is often said, that any thematic criticism of a work of fiction will
turn it into an allegory (though it may and does allegorize, as we
53
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
shall see). Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it
has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation
alone.
Again, nearly every civilization has, in its stock of traditional
myths, a particular group which is thought of as more serious,
more authoritative, more educational and closer to fact and truth
than the rest. For most poets of the Christian era who have used
both the Bible and Classical literature, the latter has not stood
on the same plane of authority as the former, although they are
equally mythological as far as literary criticism is concerned. This
distinction of canonical and apocryphal myth, which can be found
even in primitive societies, gives to the former group a particular
thematic importance.
We have now to see how our sequence of modes works out in
the thematic aspect of literature. We shall have to confine our
selves here more strictly to Western literature, as the foreshorten
ing process that we noticed in Classical fiction is even more marked
on the thematic side.
In fiction, we discovered two main tendencies, a "comic" tend
ency to integrate the hero with his society, and a "tragic" tendency
to isolate him. In thematic literature the poet may write as an
individual, emphasizing the separateness of his personality and the
distinctness of his vision. This attitude produces most lyrics and
essays, a good deal of satire, epigrams, and the writing of "eclogues"
or occasional pieces generally. The frequency of the moods of
protest, complaint, ridicule, and loneliness (whether bitter or
serene) in such works may perhaps indicate a rough analogy to the
tragic modes of fiction. Or the poet may devote himself to being
a spokesman of his society, which means, as he is not addressing
a second society, that a poetic knowledge and expressive power
which is latent or needed in his society comes to articulation in him.
Such an attitude produces poetry which is educational in the
broadest sense: epics of the more artificial or thematic kind, didactic
poetry and prose, encyclopaedic compilations of myth, folklore,
and legend like those of Ovid and Snorri, where, though the stories
themselves are fictional, the arrangement of them and the motive
for collecting them is thematic. In poetry which is educational in
this sense, the social function of the poet figures prominently as a
theme. If we call the poetry of the isolated individual a "lyric"
and the poetry of the social spokesman an "epic" tendency (in
54
THEORY OF MODES
comparison to the more "dramatic" fictions of internal characters)
we shall perhaps gain some preliminary conception of them. But it
is obvious that we are not here using these terms in any generic
sense, and as they certainly should be used in a generic sense, we
shall drop them at once and substitute "episodic" and "encyclo
paedic" instead. That is, when the poet communicates as an indi
vidual, his forms tend to be discontinuous; when he communicates
as a professional man with a social function, he tends to seek more
extended patterns.
On the mythical plane there is more legend than evidence,
but it is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often con
sidered to be singing as one, or as an instrument of one. His
social function is that of an inspired oracle; he is frequently an
ecstatic, and we hear strange stories of his powers. Orpheus
could draw trees after him; the bards and ollaves of the Celtic
world could kill their enemies with their satire; the prophets of
Israel foretold the future. The poet's visionary function, his
proper work as a poet, is on this plane to reveal the god for
whom he speaks. This usually means that he reveals the god's
will in connection with a specific occasion, when he is consulted
as an oracle in a state of "enthusiasm" or divine possession. But
in time the god in him reveals his nature and history as well
as his will, and so a larger pattern of myth and ritual is built
up out of a series of oracular pronouncements. We can see this
very clearly in the emergence of the Messiah myth from the
oracles of the Hebrew prophets. The Koran is one clear historical
instance at the beginning of the Western period of the mythical
mode in action. Authentic examples of oracular poetry are so
largely pre- and extra-literary that they are difficult to isolate.
For more recent examples, such as the ecstatic oracles which are
said to be an important aspect of the culture of the Plains In
dians, we have to depend on anthropologists.
Two principles of some importance are already implicit in
our argument. One is a conception of a total body of vision that
poets as a whole class are entrusted with, a total body tending
to incorporate itself in a single encyclopaedic form, which can
be attempted by one poet if he is sufficiently learned or inspired,
or by a poetic school or tradition if the culture is sufficiently
homogeneous. We note that traditional tales and myths and
histories have a strong tendency to stick together and form en-
55
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
cyclopaedic aggregates, especially when they are in a conventional
metre, as they usually are. Some such process as this has been
postulated for the Homeric epics, and in the Prose Edda the
themes of the fragmentary lays of the Elder Edda are organized
into a connected prose sequence. The Biblical histories obviously
developed in a similar way, and in India, where the process of
transmission was more relaxed, the two traditional epics, the
Mdhabharata and the Ramayana, apparently went on distending
themselves for centuries, like pythons swallowing sheep. The
expansion of The Romaunt of the Rose into an encyclopaedic
satire by a second author is a medieval example. In the Finnish
Kalevala everything that is unified or continuous about the
poem is a nineteenth-century reconstruction. It does not follow
that the Kdevda, considered as a single epic, is a fake: on the
contrary, what follows is that the material of the Kdevda is the
sort of material that lends itself readily to such reconstruction.
In the mythical mode the encyclopaedic form is the sacred
scripture, and in the other modes we should expect to find en
cyclopaedic forms which constitute a series of increasingly human
andogies of mythical or scriptural revelation.
The other principle is that while there may be a great variety
of episodic forms in any mode, in each mode we may attach a
special significance to the particular episodic form that seems to
be the germ out of which the encyclopaedic forms develop. In
the mythical mode this central or typical episodic product is the
oracle. The oracle develops a number of subsidiary forms, notably
the commandment, the parable, the aphorism, and the prophecy.
Out of these, whether strung loosely together as they are in the
Koran or carefully edited and arranged as they are in the Bible,
the scripture or sacred book takes shape. The Book of Isaiah,
for example, can be analyzed into a mass of separate oracles,
with three major foci, so to speak, one mainly pre-exilic, one
exilic and one post-exilic. The "higher critics" of the Bible are
not literary critics, and we have to make the suggestion our
selves that the Book of Isaiah is in fact the unity it has always
been traditionally taken to be, a unity not of authorship but of
theme, and that theme in epitome the theme of the Bible as a
whole, as the parable of Israel lost, captive, and redeemed.
In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding
hero, has become a human being, and the god has retreated to
56
THEORY OF MODES
the sky. His function now is primarily to remember. Memory,
said Greek myth at the beginning of its historical period, is the
mother of the Muses, who inspire the poets, but no longer in
the same degree that the god inspires the oraclethough the
poets clung to the connection as long as they could. In Homer,
in the perhaps more primitive Hesiod, in the poets of the heroic
age of the North, we can see the kind of thing the poet had to
remember. Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealo
gies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom,
taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal
heroes, were some of the things that came out when the poet
unlocked his word-hoard. The medieval minstrel with his reper
tory of memorized stories and the clerical poet who, like Gower
or the author of the Cursor Mundi, tries to get everything he
knows into one vast poem or poetic testament, belong in the
same category. The encyclopaedic knowledge in such poems is
regarded sacramentally, as a human analogy of divine knowledge.
The age of romantic heroes is largely a nomadic age, and its
poets are frequently wanderers. The blind wandering minstrel
is traditional in both Greek and Celtic literature; Old English
poetry expresses some of the bleakest loneliness in the language;
troubadours and Goliardic satirists roam over Europe in the
Middle Ages; Dante himself was an exile. Or, if the poet stays
where he is, it is poetry that travels: folk tales follow the trade
routes; ballads and romances return from the great fairs; or
Malory, writing in England, tells his readers what the "French
book" says that has come to his hand. Of all fictions, the marvel
lous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted, and it
is this fiction that is employed as a parable in the definitive
encyclopaedic poem of the mode, Dante's Commedia. Poetry
in this mode is an agent of catholicity, whether Hellenic in one
age or Roman Christian in another.
Its typical episodic theme is perhaps best described as the
theme of the boundary of consciousness, the sense of the poetic
mind as passing from one world to another, or as simultaneously
aware of both. The poem of exile, the lay of the Widsith or
wayfarer who may be a wandering minstrel, a rejected lover, or
a nomadic satirist, normally contrasts the worlds of memory and
of experience. The poem of vision, conventionally dated on a
May morning, contrasts the worlds of experience and dream. The
57
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
poem of revelation through female or divine grace contrasts the
old dispensation with the vita nuova. In the opening lines of
the Inferno the affinity of the great encyclopaedic poem with
both the poem of exile and the poem of vision is clearly marked.
The high mimetic " period brings in a society more strongly
established around the court and capital city, and a centripetal
perspective replaces the centrifugal one of romance. The distant
goals of the quest, the Holy Grail or the City of God, modulate
into symbols of convergence, the emblems of prince, nation, and
national faith. The encyclopaedic poems of this period, The
Faerie Queene, The Lusiad, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost,
are national epics unified by patriotic and religious ideas. The
reasons for the exceptional role of the political elements in
Paradise Lost are familiar, and constitute no real difficulty in
seeing it as a national epic. Along with The Pilgrim's Progress,
it also constitutes a kind of introduction to English low mimetic,
being in one of its essential aspects the story of Everyman. Such
thematic epics are as a rule recognizably different in emphasis
from narratives where the primary interest is in telling the story,
as in most epic poetry of the heroic age, most Icelandic sagas
and Celtic romances, and, in the Renaissance period, in the
greater part of Orlando Furioso, though Renaissance critics showed
that it was quite possible to interpret Ariosto thematically.
The central episodic theme of the high mimetic is the theme
of cynosure or centripetal gaze, which, whether addressed to
mistress, friend, or deity, seems to have something about it of
the court gazing upon its sovereign, the court-room gazing upon
the orator, or the audience gazing upon the actor. For the high
mimetic poet is pre-eminently a courtier, a counsellor, a preacher,
a public orator or a master of decorum, and the high mimetic is
the period in which the settled theatre comes into its own as
the chief medium of fictional forms. In Shakespeare the control
of decorum is so great that his personality disappears behind it
altogether, but this is unlikely to happen with a dramatist who
has a strong thematic interest, like Ben Jonson. As a rule the
high mimetic poet tends to think of his function in relation to
social or divine leadership, the theme of leadership being at the
center of his normal fictional mode. The courtier-poet devotes
his learning to the court and his life to courtesy: the function
of his education is the service of his prince and the climax of
58
THEORY OF MODES
it is courtly love, conceived as the fulfilling of the gaze upon
beauty in the union with it. The religious poet may transfer
this imagery to the spiritual life, as the English metaphysicals
often do, or he may find his centripetal images in the liturgy.
Jesuit poetry of the seventeenth century, and its English counter
part in Crashaw, have a unique quality of iconic intensity:
Herbert, too, draws his reader step by step into a visible "temple."
The literary Platonism of the high mimetic period is of a kind
appropriate to the mode. Most of the Renaissance humanists show
a strong sense of the importance of symposium and dialogue, the
social and educational aspects respectively of an elite culture. There
is also a widespread assumption that the dianoia of poetry repre
sents a form, pattern, ideal, or model in nature. "Nature's world
is brazen/' says Sidney: "the poets only deliver a golden." He makes
it clear that this golden world is not something separated from
nature but is "in effect a second nature": a unification of fact, or
example, with model, or precept. What is usually called the "neo
classical" in art and criticism is chiefly, in our terms, a sense of
poetic dianoia as a manifestation of the true form of nature, the
true form being assumed to be ideal.
With the low mimetic, where fictional forms deal with an in
tensely individualized society, there is only one thing for an analogy
of myth to become, and that is an act of individual creation. The
typical result of this is "Romanticism," a thematic development
which to a considerable extent turns away from contemporary
forms of fiction and develops its own contrasting kind. The qualities
necessary to create Hyperion and the qualities necessary to create
Pride and Prejudice, though contemporary, seem curiously opposed
to each other, as though there were a sharper division "between
fictional and thematic in the low mimetic than in other modes. To
some extent this is true, for a sense of contrast between subjective
and objective, mental state and outward condition, individual and
social or physical data, is characteristic of the low mimetic. In this
age the thematic poet becomes what the fictional hero was in the
age of romance, an extraordinary person who lives in a higher and
more imaginative order of experience than that of nature. He creates
his own world, a world which reproduces many of the characteristics
of fictional romance already touched on. The Romantic poet's
mind is normally in a state of pantheistic rapport with nature, and
seems curiously invulnerable to the assaults of real evil. A tendency,
59
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
also paralleled in the earlier fictional romance, to transmute pain
and terror into a form of pleasure is reflected in the sadism and
diabolic imagery of the "Romantic agony." The encyclopaedic
tendency of this period is toward the construction of mythological
epics in which the myths represent psychological or subjective
states of mind. Faust, especially in the second part, is the most
nearly definitive example; the prophecies of Blake and the mytho
logical poems of Keats and Shelley are the best known English
representatives.
The thematic poet of this period is interested in himself, not
necessarily out of egotism, but because the basis of his poetic skill
is individual, and hence genetic and psychological. He uses bio
logical metaphors; he contrasts the organic with the dead or
mechanical; he thinks socially in terms of a biological difference
between the genius and the ordinary man, and genius to him is a
fertile seed among abortive ones. He confronts nature directly, as
an individual, and, in contrast to most of his predecessors, is apt
to think of literary tradition as a second-hand substitute for per
sonal experience. Like the hero of low mimetic comedy, the
Romantic poet is often socially aggressive: the possession of creative
genius confers authority, and its social impact is revolutionary.
Romantic critics often develop theories of poetry as the rhetoric
of personal greatness. The central episodic theme is the analysis or
presentation of the subjective mental state, a theme usually taken
to be typical of the literary movements accompanying Rousseau
and Byron. The Romantic poet finds it much easier than his
predecessors to be at once individual in content and attitude and
continuous in form. The fact that so many of Wordsworth's shorter
poems could be absorbed into the Prelude, in much the way in
which primitive lays stick together to form epics, represents a tech
nical innovation of some significance.
The poets who succeed the Romantics, the poets of French
symbolisme for example, begin with the ironic gesture of turning
away from the world of the market-place, with all its blurred
sounds and imprecise meanings: they renounce rhetoric, moral
judgement, and all other idols of the tribe, and devote their entire
energy to the poet's literal function as a maker of poems. We said
that the ironic fiction-writer is influenced by no considerations ex
cept craftsmanship, and the thematic poet in the ironic age thinks
of himself more as a craftsman than as a creator or "unacknowl-
60
THEORY OF MODES
edged legislator." That is, he makes the minimum claim for his
personality and the maximum for his arta contrast which under
lies Yeats's theory of the poetic mask. At his best he is a dedicated
spirit, a saint or anchorite of poetry. Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarm6,
Proust, were all in their very different ways "pure" artists. Hence
the central episodic theme is the theme of the pure but transient
vision, the aesthetic or timeless moment, Rimbaud's illumination,
Joyce's epiphany, the Augeriblick of modern German thought, and
the kind of non-didactic revelation implied in such terms as sym~
bolisme and imagism.
The comparison of such instants with the vast panorama un
rolled by history ("temps perdu") is the main theme of the encyclo
paedic tendency. In Proust the repetitions of certain experiences at
widely scattered intervals create these timeless moments out of
time; in Finnegans Wake the whole of history itself is presented as
a single gigantic anti-epiphany. On a smaller but still encyclopaedic
scale, Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf s last and most
profound book, Between the Acts, have in common (a fact more
striking because they have nothing else in common) a sense of
contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny
flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning. And just
as the Romantic poet found it possible to write as an individual in
continuous forms, so the ironic mode is rationalized by critical
theories of the essential discontinuity of poetry. The paradoxical
technique of the poetry which is encyclopaedic and yet discontinu
ous, the technique of The Waste Land and of Ezra Pound's
Cantos, is, like its direct opposite in Wordsworth, a technical in
novation heralding a new mode.
Details of the same technique fit the general pattern of thematic
irony. The ironic method of saying one thing and meaning some
thing rather different is incorporated in Mallarm6's doctrine of the
avoidance of direct statement. The practice of cutting out predica
tion, of simply juxtaposing images without making any assertions
about their relationship, is consistent with the effort to avoid ora
torical rhetoric. The same is true of the elimination of apostrophes
and similar devices for including some mimesis of direct address.
One study has even demonstrated a substantial increase in the use
of the definite article in the ironic mode, a use said to be linked
with the implicit sense of an initiated group aware of a real mean
ing behind an ironically baffling exterior.
61
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
The return of irony to myth that we noted in fiction is paralleled
by some tendencies of the ironic craftsman to return to the oracular.
This tendency is often accompanied by cyclical theories of history
which help to rationalize the idea of a return, the appearance of
such theories being a typical phenomenon of the ironic mode. We
have Rimbaud and his "drglement de tous les sens" designed to
make himself a reincarnation of the Prometheus who brought the
divine fire to man and to restore the old mythical connection be
tween the manic and the mantic. We have Rilke and his lifetime
of tense listening to an oracular voice within him. We have
Nietzsche proclaiming the advent of a new divine power in man,
a proclamation which is somewhat confused by including a the
ory of identical recurrence. We have Yeats telling us that the
Western cycle is nearly over and that a new Classical one, with
Leda and the swan taking the place of the dove and the virgin, is
about to begin. We have Joyce and his Viconian theory of history
which sees our own age as a frustrated apocalypse followed instantly
by a return to a period before Tristram.
As for the inferences which may be made from the above survey,
one is clearly that many current critical assumptions have a limited
historical context. In our day an ironic provincialism, which looks
everywhere in literature for complete objectivity, suspension of
moral judgements, concentration on pure verbal craftsmanship, and
similar virtues, is in the ascendant. A Romantic provincialism, which
looks everywhere for genius and evidences of great personality, is
more old-fashioned, but it is still around. The high mimetic mode
also had its pedants, some of them still trying to apply canons of
ideal form in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries. The
suggestion made here is that no set of critical standards derived
from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about
poetry.
There may be noticed a general tendency to react most strongly
against the mode immediately preceding, and, to a lesser extent,
to return to some of the standards of the modal grandfather. Thus
the humanists of the high mimetic age were in general contemptu
ous of the "fablers and loud lyars," as Spenser's E.K. calls them,
who produced medieval romance. But, as we can see in Sidney,
they were never tired of justifying poetry by referring to the social
importance of the original mythical phase. They tended to think
62
THEORY OF MODES
of themselves as secular oracles of the order of nature, responding
to the occasions of public aEairs like the oracular poets, within a
context of social and natural law. The Romantics, the thematic
poets of the low mimetic period, set their faces against their prede
cessors' methods of following nature, and went back to the mode
of romance.
The Romantic standards, in English literature, were in the main
carried on by the Victorians, indicating a continuity of mode; the
long anti-Romantic revolt that began around 1900 (several decades
earlier in French literature) indicated a shift to the ironic. In the
new mode the fondness for the small closely-knit group, the sense
of the esoteric, and the nostalgia for the aristocratic that has pro
duced such very different phenomena as the royalism of Eliot, the
fascism of Pound, and the cult of chivalry in Yeats, are all in a way
part of a reversion to high mimetic standards. The sense of the poet
as courtier, of poetry as the service of a prince, of the supreme im
portance of the symposium or elite group, are among the high
mimetic conceptions reflected in twentieth-century literature, es
pecially in the poetry of the symboliste tradition from Mallarme
to George and Rilke. The exceptions to this tendency are sometimes
less exceptional than they seem. The Fabian Society, when Bernard
Shaw first joined it, was a group esoteric enough to satisfy Yeats
himself: after Fabian socialism became a mass movement, Shaw
turned into what became at length unmistakably a frustrated
royalist.
Again, we may note that each period of Western culture has
made a conspicuous use of the Classical literature nearest to it in
mode: romanticized versions of Homer in the Middle Ages; Vir-
gilian epic, Platonic symposium, and Ovidian courtly love in the
high mimetic; Roman satire in the low mimetic; the products of
the latest possible period of Latin in the ironic phase of Huysmans'
A Rebours.
We saw in our survey of fictional modes that the poet never
imitates "life" in the sense that life becomes anything more than
the content of his work. In every mode he imposes the same kind
of mythical form on his content, but makes different adaptations
of it. In thematic modes, similarly, the poet never imitates thought
except in the same sense of imposing a literary form on his thought.
The failure to understand this produces a fallacy to which we may
give the general term "existential projection/' Suppose a writer
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
finds that he is most successful with tragedies. His works will in
evitably be full of gloom and catastrophe, and in his final scenes
there will be characters standing around making remarks about the
sternness of necessity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the inelucta
bility of fate. Such sentiments are part of the dianoia of tragedy;
but a writer who specializes in tragedy may well come to feel that
they speak for the profoundest of all philosophies, and begin to
emit similar utterances himself when asked what his own philos
ophy of life is. On the other hand, a writer whose specialty is
comedy and happy endings will have his characters standing around
at the end talking about the beneficence of providence, the miracles
that come when we least expect them, the spirit of thankfulness
and joy which we all ought to feel for the mercies of life.
It is natural, then, for tragedy and comedy to throw their shad
ows, so to speak, into philosophy and shape there a philosophy of
fate and a philosophy of providence respectively. Thomas Hardy
and Bernard Shaw both flourished around 1900 and both were in
terested in evolution. Hardy did better with tragedy, and saw
evolution in terms of a stoical meliorism, a Schopenhauerian im
manent will, and an activity of "chance" or "hap" in which any
individual life may be expendable. Shaw, who wrote comedies, saw
evolution as creative, leading to revolutionary politics, the advent
of a Superman, and to whatever metabiology is. But it is obvious
that Hardy and Shaw are not substantial philosophers, and they
must stand or fall by their achievements in poetry, fiction, and
drama.
Similarly, each mode of literature develops its own existential
projection. Mythology projects itself as theology: that is, a mytho-
poeic poet usually accepts some myths as "true" and shapes his
poetic structure accordingly. Romance peoples the world with fan
tastic, normally invisible personalities or powers: angels, demons,
fairies, ghosts, enchanted animals, elemental spirits like those in
The Tempest and Comus. Dante wrote in this mode, but not
specula tively: he accepted the spiritual beings recognized by Chris
tian doctrine, and concerns himself with no others. But for a late
poet interested in the techniques of romance Yeats, for instance
the question of whether and which of these mysterious creatures
"really exist" is likely to project itself. The high mimetic projects
mainly a quasi-Platonic philosophy of ideal forms, like the love
and beauty of Spenser's hymns or the virtues of The Faerie Queene,
THEORY OF MODES
and the low mimetic mainly a philosophy of genesis and organism,
like that of Goethe, which finds unity and development in every
thing. The existential projection of irony is, perhaps, existentialism
itself; and the return of irony to myth is accompanied, not only
by the cyclical theories of history mentioned above, but, in a later
stage, by a widespread interest in sacramental philosophy and dog
matic theology.
Mr. Eliot distinguishes between the poet who creates a philos
ophy for himself, and the poet who takes over one that he finds
to hand, and advances the view that the latter course is better, or
at least safer, for most poets. The distinction is fundamentally a
distinction between the practice of the thematic poets of the low
mimetic and of the ironic modes. Such poets as Blake, Shelley,
Goethe, and Victor Hugo were compelled by the conventions of
their mode to present the conceptual aspect of their imagery as
self-generated; the poets of the last century have different con
ventions and different compulsions. But if the view taken here of
the relation of form to content in poetry is sound, then no matter
which he does the poet will still have much the same technical
problems to face.
Ever since Aristotle criticism has tended to think of literature as
essentially mimetic, and as divided between a "high" form of epic
and tragedy dealing with ruling-class figures, and a "low" form con
fined to comedy and satire and more concerned with characters
like ourselves. The larger scheme set forth in this chapter will, it
is hoped, afford a useful background against which to relate the
different and apparently contradictory remarks of Plato about
poetry. Phaedrus deals largely with poetry as myth, and forms a
commentary on Plato's treatment of myth; Ion, which is centered
on the figure of a minstrel or rhapsode, sets forth both the en
cyclopaedic and the memorial conceptions of poetry which are
typical of the romantic mode; the Symposium, which introduces
Aristophanes, adopts the high mimetic canons which are probably
nearest to Plato's own views. The famous discussion at the end
of the Republic then falls into its place as a polemic against the
low mimetic element in poetry, and in the Crdtylus we are intro
duced to the ironic techniques of ambiguity, verbal association,
paronomasia, and the apparatus now being revived by criticism to
65
FIRST ESSAY: HISTORICAL CRITICISM
deal with the poetry of the ironic modethe criticism which, by
a further refinement of irony, is called "new" criticism.
Again, the difference in emphasis that we have described as
fictional and thematic corresponds to a distinction between two
views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism.
These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian
and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view
of literature as process. For Aristotle, the poem is a techne or
aesthetic artifact: he is, as a critic, mainly interested in the more
objective fictional forms, and his central conception is catharsis.
Catharsis implies the detachment of the spectator, both from the
work of art itself and from the author. The phrase "aesthetic dis
tance" is generally accepted now in criticism, but it is almost a
tautology: wherever there is aesthetic apprehension there is emo
tional and intellectual detachment. The principles of catharsis in
other fictional forms than tragedy, such as comedy or satire, were
not worked out by Aristotle, and have therefore never been worked
out since.
In the thematic aspect of literature, the external relation between
author and reader becomes more prominent, and when it does, the
emotions of pity and terror are involved or contained rather than
purged. In catharsis the emotions are purged by being attached to
objects; where they are involved with the response they are unat
tached and remain prior conditions in the mind. We have noticed
that terror without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being
afraid of anything, is now conceived as Angst or anxiety, a some
what narrow term for a feeling that extends from the pleasure of
II Penseroso to the pain of the Fleurs du Md. In the general area
of pleasure comes the conception of the sublime, in which austerity,
gloom, grandeur, melancholy, or even menace are a source of
romantic or penseroso feelings.
Similarly, we defined pity without an object as an imaginative
animism which finds human qualities everywhere in nature, and
includes the "beautiful," traditionally the corresponding term to the
sublime. The beautiful has the same relation to the diminutive that
the sublime has to bigness, and is closely related to the sense of the
intricate and exquisite. The fairies of English folklore become
Shakespeare's Mustard-Seed and Drayton's Pigwiggen, and Yeats's
animism is linked to his sense of "many ingenious lovely things,"
and to his image of the toy bird in Sailing to Byzantium.
66
THEORY OF MODES
Just as catharsis is the central conception of the Aristotelian
approach to literature, so ecstasis or absorption is the central con
ception of the Longinian approach. This is a state of identification
in which the reader, the poem, and sometimes, at least ideally, the
poet also, are involved. We say reader, because the Longinian con
ception is primarily that of a thematic or individualized response:
it is more useful for lyrics, just as the Aristotelian one is more
useful for plays. Sometimes, however, the normal categories of ap
proach are not the right ones. In Hamlet, as Mr. Eliot has shown,
the amount of emotion generated by the hero is too great for its
objects; but surely the correct conclusion to draw from this fine
insight is that Hamlet is best approached as a tragedy of Angst or
of melancholy as a state in itself, rather than purely as an Aristo
telian imitation of an action. On the other hand, the lack of
emotional involvement in Lycidas has been thought by some, in
cluding Johnson, to be a failure in that poem, but surely the correct
conclusion is that Lycidas, like Samson Agonistes, should be read
in terms of catharsis with all passion spent.
SECOND ESSAY
Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols
Second Essay
ETHICAL CRITICISM: THEORY OF SYMBOLS
INTRODUCTION
OF THE PROBLEMS arising from the lack of a technical vocabulary
of poetics, two demand special attention. The fact, already men
tioned, that there is no word for a work of literary art is one that
I find particularly baffling. One may invoke the authority of Aris
totle for using "poem" in this sense, but usage declares that a poem
is a composition in metre, and to speak of Tom Jones as a poem
would be an abuse of ordinary language. One may discuss the ques
tion whether great works of prose deserve to be called poetry in
some more extended sense, but the answer can only be a matter of
taste in definitions. The attempt to introduce a value-judgement
into a definition of poetry (e.g., "What, after all, do we mean by
a poem that is, something worthy of the name of poem?") only
adds to the confusion. So of course does the antique snobbery about
the superiority of metre which has given "prosy" the meaning of
tedious and "prosaic" the meaning of pedestrian. As often as I
can, I use "poem" and its relatives by synecdoche, because they are
short words; but where synecdoche would be confusing, the reader
will have to put up with such cacophonous jargon as "hypothetical
verbal structure" and the like.
foejaseof the word "symbol," which
rnnrprns
in .this essay means any unit of anv^ literary structured that can
isolated for critical attention. A word, a phrase, or an image used
with some kmcTof special reference (which is what a symbol is
usually taken to mean) are all symbols when they are distinguisha
ble elements in critical analysis. Even the letters a writer spells
his words with form part of his symbolism in this sense: they would
be isolated only in special cases, such as alliteration or dialect spell
ings, but we are still aware that they symbolize sounds. Criticism
as a whole, in terms of this definition, would begin with, and
largely consist of, the systematizing of literary symbolism. It fol
lows that other words must be used to classify the different types
of symbolism.
For there must be different types: the criticism of literature can
hardly be a simple or one-level activity. The more familiar ooe is
71
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
with a great work of literature, the more one's understanding of it
grows. Further, one has the feeling of growing in the understanding
of the work itself, not in the number of things one can attach to it.
The conclusion that a work of literary art contains a variety or
sequence of meanings seems inescapable. It has seldom, however,
been squarely faced in criticism since the Middle Ages, when a
precise scheme of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic meanings
was taken over from theology and applied to literature. Today
there is more of a tendency to consider the problem of literary
meaning as subsidiary to the problems of symbolic logic and
semantics. In what follows I try to work as independently of the
latter subjects as I can, on the ground that the obvious place to
start looking for a theory of literary meaning is in literature.
The principle of manifold or "polysemous" meaning, as Dante
calls it, is not a theory any more, still less an exploded superstition,
but an established fact. The thing that has established it is the
simultaneous development of several different schools of modem
criticism, each making a distinctive choice of symbols in its
analysis. The modern student of critical theory is faced with a body
of rhetoricians who speak of texture and frontal assaults, with
students of history who deal with traditions and sources, with
critics using material from psychology and anthropology, with
Aristotelians, Coleridgians, Thomists, Freudians, Jungians, Marx
ists, with students of myths, rituals, archetypes, metaphors, ambi
guities, and significant forms. The student must either admit the
principle of polysemous meaning, or choose one of these groups
and then try to prove that all the others are less legitimate. The
former is the way of scholarship, and leads to the advancement of
learning; the latter is the way of pedantry, and gives us a wide
choice of goals, the most conspicuous today being fantastical learn
ing, or myth criticism, contentious learning, or historical criticism,
and delicate learning, or "new" criticism.
Once we have admitted the principle of polysemous meaning,
we can either stop with a purely relative and pluralistic position,
or we can go on to consider the possibility that there is a finite num
ber of valid critical methods, and that they can all be contained in a
single theory. It does not follow that all meanings can be arranged,
as the medieval four-level scheme implies, in a hierarchical se
quence, in which the first steps are comparatively elementary and
apprehension gets more subtle and rarefied as one goes on. The
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
term "level" is used here only for convenience, and should not be
taken as indicating any belief on my part in a series of degrees of
critical initiation. Again, there is a general reservation to be made
about the conception of polysemous meaning: the meaning of a
literary work forms a part of a larger whole. In the previous essay
we saw that meaning or dianoia was one of three elements, the other
two being mythos or narrative and ethos or characterization. It is
better to think, therefore, not simply of a sequence of meanings,
but of a sequence of contexts or relationships in which the whole
work of literary art can be placed, each context having its charac
teristic mythos and ethos as well as its dianoia or meaning. I call
these contexts or relationships "phases."
LITERAL AND DESCRIPTIVE PHASES:
SYMBOL AS MOTIF AND AS SIGN
Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in
two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in
which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words
to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the con
ventional association between them. The other direction is inward
or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of
the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with
symbols, but when we attach an external meaning to a word we
have, in addition to the verbal symbol, the thing represented or
symbolized by it. Actually we have a series of such representations:
the verbal symbol "cat" is a group of black marks on a page repre
senting a sequence of noises representing an image or memory
representing a sense experience representing an animal that says
meow. Symbols so understood may here be called signs, verbal
units which, conventionally and arbitrarily, stand for and point
to things outside the place where they occur. When we are trying
to grasp the context of words, however, the word "cat" is an ele
ment in a larger body of meaning. It is not primarily a symbol "of"
anything, for in this aspect it does not represent, but connects. We
can hardly even say that it represents a part of the author's inten
tion in putting it there, for the author's intention ceases to exist
as a separate factor as soon as he has finished revising, ygbal
elements understood inwardly g^ggg^^^lfeL as LBEJSjtf a ygg!
^
^ b
73
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
in mind.) We may, borrowing a term from music, call such ele
ments motifs.
These two modes of understanding take place simultaneously
in all reading. It is impossible to read the word "cat" in a context
without some representational flash of the animal so named; it
is impossible to see the bare sign "cat" without wondering what
context it belongs to. But verbal structures may be classified ac
cording to whether the find direction of meaning is outward or
inward. In descriptive or assertive writing the final direction is
outward. Here the verbal structure is intended to represent things
external to it, and it is valued in terms of the accuracy with which
it does represent them. Correspondence between phenomenon and
verbal sign is truth; lack of it is falsehood; failure to connect is
tautology, a purely verbal structure that cannot come out of itself.
In all literary verbal structures the final direction of meaning is
inward. In literature the standards of outward meaning are second
ary, for literary works do not pretend to describe or assert, and
hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological either, or
at least not in the sense in which such a statement as "the good is
better than the bad" is tautological. Literary meaning may best be
described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed
relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by
the word "imaginative." This word is to be distinguished from
"imaginary," which usually refers to an assertive verbal structure
that fails to make good its assertions. In literature, questions of fact
or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing
a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols
are subordinated to their importance as a structure of intercon
nected motifs. Wherever we have an autonomous verbal structure
of this kind, we have literature. Wherever this autonomous struc
ture is lacking, we have language, words used instrumentally to help
human consciousness do or understand something else. Literature
is a specialized form of language, as language is of communication.
The reason for producing the literary structure is apparently that
the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field
of the responses connected with pleasure, beauty, and interest. The
contemplation of a detached pattern, whether of words or not, is
clearly a major source of the sense of the beautiful, and of the
pleasure that accompanies it. The fact that interest is most easily
aroused by such a pattern is familiar to every handler of words, from
74
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
the poet to the after-dinner speaker who digresses from an assertive
harangue to present the self-contained structure of verbal inter
relationships known as a joke. It often happens that an originally
descriptive piece of writing, such as the histories of Fuller and
Gibbon, survives by virtue of its "style/' or interesting verbal pat
tern, after its value as a representation of facts has faded.
The old precept that poetry is designed to delight and instruct
sounds like an awkward hendiadys, as we do not usually feel that
a poem does two different things to us, but we can understand it
when we relate it to these two aspects of symbolism. In literature,
what entertains is prior to what instructs, or, as we may say, the
reality-principle is subordinate to the pleasure-principle. In assertive
verbal structures the priority is reversed. Neither factor can, of
course, ever be eliminated from any kind of writing.
One of the most familiar and important features of literature is
the absence of a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy. We should,
perhaps, like to feel that the writer of a historical drama knew
what the historical facts of his theme were, and that he would not
alter them without good reason. But that such good reasons may
exist in literature is not denied by anyone. They seem to exist only
there: the historian selects his facts, but to suggest that he had
manipulated them to produce a more symmetrical structure would
be grounds for libel. Some other types of verbal structures, such as
theology and metaphysics, are declared by some to be centripetal in
final meaning, and hence to be tautological ("purely verbal"). I
have no opinion on this, except that in literary criticism theology
and metaphysics must be treated as assertive, because they are out
side literature, and everything that influences literature from with
out creates a centrifugal movement in it, whether it is directed
toward the nature of absolute being or advice on the raising of
hops. It is clear, too, that the proportion between the sense of being
pleasantly entertained and the sense of being instructed, or awak
ened to reality, will vary in different forms of literature. The sense
of reality is, for instance, far higher in tragedy than in comedy, as
in comedy the logic of events normally gives way to the audience's
desire for a happy ending.
The apparently unique privilege of ignoring facts has given the
poet his traditional reputation as a licensed liar, and explains why
so many words denoting literary structure, "fable," "fiction,"
"myth," and the like, have a secondary sense of imtratfa, like the
75
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
Norwegian word digter which is said to mean liar as well as poet.
But, as Sir Philip Sidney remarked, "the poet never affirmeth," and
therefore does not lie any more than he tells the truth. The poet,
like the pure mathematician, depends, not on descriptive truth,
but on conformity to his hypothetical postulates. The appearance
of a ghost in Hamlet presents the hypothesis "let there be a ghost
in Hamlet" It has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not,
or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. A reader
who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does
not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters,
clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction
from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send
cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap
operas. We may note here, as the point will be important later,
that the accepted postulate, the contract agreed on by the reader
before he can start reading, is the same thing as a convention.
The person who cannot be brought to understand literary con
vention is often said to be "literal-minded." But as "literal" surely
ought to have some connection with letters, it seems curious to use
the phrase "literal-minded" for imaginative illiterates. The reason
for the anomaly is interesting, and important to our argument.
Traditionally, the phrase "literal meaning" refers to descriptive
meaning that is free from ambiguity. We usually say that the
word cat "means literally" a cat when it is an adequate sign for
a cat, when it stands in a simple representative relation to the
animal that says meow. This sense of the term literal comes down
from medieval times, and may be due to the theological origin
of critical categories. In theology, the literal meaning of Scripture
is usually the historical meaning, its accuracy as a record of facts
or truths. Dante says, commenting on the verse in the Psalms,
"When Israel went out of Egypt," "considering the letter only,
the exodus of the Israelites to Palestine in the time of Moses is
what is signified to us (signiftcdtur nobfs)." The word "signified"
shows that the literal meaning here is the simplest kind of descrip
tive or representational meaning, as it would still be to a Biblical
"literalist"
But this conception of literal meaning as simple descriptive
meaning will not do at all for literary criticism. An historical event
cannot be literally anything but an historical event; a prose narra
tive describing it cannot be literally anything but a prose narrative.
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
The literal meaning of Dante's own Commedia is not historical,
not at any rate a simple description of what ''really happened" to
Dante. And if a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem,
then the literal basis of meaning in poetry can only be its letters, its
inner structure of interlocking motifs. We are always wrong, in the
context of criticism, when we say "this poem means literally"
and then give a prose paraphrase of it. All paraphrases abstract a
secondary or outward meaning. Understanding a poem literally
means understanding the whole of it, as a poem, and as it stands.
Such understanding begins in a complete surrender of the mind
and senses to the impact of the work as a whole, and proceeds
through the effort to unite the symbols toward a simultaneous per
ception of the unity of the structure, (This is a logical sequence of
critical elements, the integrity, consonantia, and claritas of Ste
phen's argument in Joyce's Portrait. I have no idea what the psy
chological sequence is, or whether there is a sequence I suppose
there would not be in a Gestalt theory.) Literal understanding
occupies the same place in criticism that observation, the direct
exposure of the mind to nature, has in the scientific method. "Every
poem must necessarily be a perfect unity/' says Blake: this, as the
wording implies, is not a statement of fact about all existing poems,
but a statement of the hypothesis which every reader adopts in
first trying to comprehend even the most chaotic poem ever written.
Some principle of recurrence seems to be fundamental to all
works of art, and this recurrence is usually spoken of as rhythm
when it moves along in time, and as pattern when it is spread out
in space. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern
of painting. But a slight increase of sophistication will soon start
us talking about the pattern of music and the rhythm of painting.
The inference is that all arts possess both a temporal and a spatial
aspect, whichever takes the lead when they are presented. The
score of a symphony may be studied all at once, as a spread-out
pattern: a painting may be studied as the track of an intricate
dance of the eye. Works of literature also move in time like music
and spread out in images like painting. The word narrative or
mythos conveys the sense of movement caught by the ear, and
the word meaning or dianoia conveys,, or at least preserves, the sense
of simultaneity caught by the eye. We listen to the poem as it
moves from beginning to end, but as soon as the whole of it is in
our minds at once we "see" what it means. More exactly, this re-
77
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
sponse is not simply to the whole of it, but to a whole in it: we
have a vision of meaning or dianoia whenever any simultaneous
apprehension is possible.
Now as a poem is literally a poem, it belongs, in its literal con
text, to the class of things called poems, which in their turn form
part of the larger class known as works of art. The poem from this
point of view presents a flow of sounds approximating music on
one side, and an integrated pattern of imagery approximating the
pictorial on the other. Literally, then, a poem's narrative is its
rhythm or movement of words. If a dramatist writes a speech in
prose, and then rewrites it in blank verse, he has made a strategic
rhythmical change, and therefore a change in the literal narrative.
Even if he alters "came a day" to "a day came" he has still made
a tiny alteration of sequence, and so, literally, of his rhythm and
narrative. Similarly, a poem's meaning is literally its pattern or in
tegrity as a verbal structure. Its words cannot be separated and at
tached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are ab
sorbed into a complexity of verbal relationships.
The word's meaning is therefore, from the centripetal or in
ward-meaning point of view, variable or ambiguous, to use a term
now familiar in criticism, a term which, significantly enough, is
pejorative when applied to assertive writing. The word "wit" is said
to be employed in Pope's Essay on Criticism in nine different
senses. In assertive writing, such a semantic theme with variations
could produce nothing but hopeless muddle. In poetry, it indicates
the ranges of meanings and contexts that a word may have. The
poet does not equate a word with a meaning; he establishes the
functions or powers of words. But when we look at the symbols
of a poem as verbal signs, the poem appears in a different context
altogether, and so do its narrative and meaning. Descriptively, a
poem is not primarily a work of art, but primarily a verbal structure
or set of representative words, to be classed with other verbal struc
tures like books on gardening. In this context narrative means the
relation of the order of words to events resembling the events in
"life" outside; meaning means the relation of its pattern to a body
of assertive propositions, and the conception of symbolism involved
is the one which literature has in common, not with the arts, but
with other structures in words.
A considerable amount of abstraction enters at this stage. When
we think of a poem's narrative as a description of events, we no
7 s
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
longer think of the narrative as literally embracing every word and
letter. We think rather of a sequence of gross events, of the obvious
and externally striking elements in the word-order. Similarly, we
think of meaning as the kind of discursive meaning that a prose
paraphrase of the poem might reproduce. Hence a parallel abstrac
tion comes into the conception of symbolism. On the literal level,
where the symbols are motifs, any unit whatever, down to the
letters, may be relevant to our understanding, But only large and
striking symbols are likely to be treated critically as signs: nouns
and verbs, and phrases built up out of important words. Preposi
tions and conjunctions are almost pure connectives. A dictionary,
which is primarily a table of conventional sign-values, can tell us
nothing about such words unless we already understand them.
So literature in its descriptive context is a body of hypothetical
verbal structures. The latter stand between the verbal structures
that describe or arrange actual events, or histories, and those that
describe or arrange actual ideas or represent physical objects, like
the verbal structures of philosophy and science. The relation of the
spatial to the conceptual world is one that we obviously cannot
examine here; but from the point of view of literary criticism, de
scriptive writing and didactic writing, the representation of natural
objects and of ideas, are simply two different branches of cen
trifugal meaning. We may use the word "plot" or "story" for the
sequence of gross events, and the connection of story with his
tory is indicated in its etymology. But it is more difficult to use
"thought," or even "thought-content," for the representational as
pect of pattern, or gross meaning, because "thought" also describes
what we are here trying to distinguish it from. Such are the prob
lems of a vocabulary of poetics.
The literal and the descriptive phases of symbolism are, of course,
present in every work of literature. But we find (as we shall also
find with the other phases) that each phase has a particularly close
relationship to a certain kind of literature, and to a certain type
of critical procedure as well. Literature deeply influenced by the
descriptive aspect of symbolism is likely to tend toward the realistic
in its narrative and toward the didactic or descriptive in its mean
ing. Its prevailing rhythm will be the prose of direct speech, and
its main effort will be to give as clear and honest an impression of
external reality as is possible with a hypothetical structure. In the
documentary naturalism generally associated with such names as
79
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
Zola and Dreiser, literature goes about as far as a representation
of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by
its integrity as a structure of words, as it could go and still remain
literature. Beyond this point, the hypothetical or fictional element
in literature would begin to dissolve. The limits of literary expres
sion of this type are, of course, very wide, and nearly all the great
empire of realistic poetry, drama, and prose fiction lies well within
them. But we notice that the great age of documentary naturalism,
the nineteenth century, was also the age of Romantic poetry, which,
by concentrating on the process of imaginative creation, indicated
a feeling of tension between the hypothetical and the assertive
elements in literature.
This tension finally snaps off in the movement generally called
symbolisme, a term which we expand here to take in the whole
tradition which develops with a broad consistency through Mal-
larm< and Rimbaud to Valery in France, Rilke in Germany,
and Pound and Eliot in England. In the theory of symbolisme we
have the complement to extreme naturalism, an emphasis on the
literal aspect of meaning, and a treatment of literature as centripetal
verbal pattern, in which elements of direct or verifiable statement
are subordinated to the integrity of that pattern. The conception
of "pure" poetry, or evocative verbal structure injured by assertive
meaning, was a minor by-product of the same movement. The
great strength of symbolisme was that it succeeded in isolating the
hypothetical germ of literature, however limited it may have been
in its earlier stages by its tendency to equate this isolation with the
entire creative process. All its characteristics are solidly based on
its conception of poetry as concerned with the centripetal aspect
of meaning. Thus the achieving of an acceptable theory of literal
meaning in criticism rests on a relatively recent development in
literature.
Symbolisme, as expressed for instance in Mallarm6, maintains
that the representational answer to the question "what does this
mean?" should not be pressed in reading poetry, for the poetic
symbol means primarily itself in relation to the poem. The unity
of a poem, then, is best apprehended as a unity of mood, a mood
being a phase of emotion, and emotion being the ordinary word
for the state of mind directed toward the experiencing of pleasure
or the contemplating of beauty. And as moods are not long sus
tained, literature, for symbolisme, is essentially discontinuous,
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
longer poems being held together only by the use of the gram
matical structures more appropriate to descriptive writing. Poetic
images do not state or point to anything, but, by pointing to each
other, they suggest or evoke the mood which informs the poem.
That is, they express or articulate the mood. The emotion is not
chaotic or inarticulate: it merely would have remained so if it had
not turned into a poem, and when it does so, it is the poem, not
something else still behind it Nevertheless the words suggest and
evoke are appropriate, because in symbolisme the word does not
echo the thing but other words, and hence the immediate impact
symbolisme makes on the reader is that of incantation, a harmony
of sounds and the sense of a growing richness of meaning unlimited
by denotation.
Some philosophers who assume that all meaning is descriptive
meaning tell us that, as a poem does not describe things rationally,
it must be a description of an emotion. According to this the literal
core of poetry would be a cri de coeur, to use the elegant expression,
the direct statement of a nervous organism confronted with some
thing that seems to demand an emotional response, like a dog
howling at the moon. U Allegro and II Penseroso would be respec
tively, according to this theory, elaborations of "I feel happy" and
"I feel pensive." We have found, however, that the real core of
poetry is a subtle and elusive verbal pattern that avoids, and does
not lead to, such bald statements. We notice too that in the
history of literature the riddle, the oracle, the spell, and the kenning
are more primitive than a presentation of subjective feelings. The
critics who tell us that the basis of poetic expression is irony, or a
pattern of words that turns away from obvious (i.e., descriptive)
meaning, are much closer to the facts of literary experience, at
least on the literal level. The literary structure is ironic because
"what it says" is always different in kind or degree from "what it
means." In discursive writing what is said tends to approximate,
ideally to become identified with, what is meant.
The criticism as well as the creation of literature reflects the dis
tinction between literal and descriptive aspects of symbolism. The
type of criticism associated with research and learned journals treats
the poem as a verbal document, to be related as fully as possible
to the history and the ideas that it reflects. The poem is most valua
ble to this kind of criticism when it is most explicit and descriptive,
and when its core of imaginative hypothesis can be most easily
81
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
separated. (Note that I am speaking of a kind of criticism, not of
a kind of critic.) What is now called "new criticism," on the other
hand, is largely criticism based on the conception of a poem as
literally a poem. It studies the symbolism of a poem as an ambigu
ous structure of interlocking motifs; it sees the poetic pattern of
meaning as a self-contained "texture," and it thinks of the external
relations of a poem as being with the other arts, to be approached
only with the Horatian warning of favete linguis, and not with the
historical or the didactic. The word texture, with its overtones of a
complicated surface, is a most expressive one for this approach.
These two aspects of criticism are often thought of as antithetical,
as were, in the previous century, the corresponding groups of writ
ers. They are of course complementary, not antithetical, but still
the difference in emphasis between them is important to grasp
before we go on to try to resolve the antithesis in a third phase
of symbolism.
FORMAL PHASE: SYMBOL AS IMAGE
We have now established a new sense of the term 'literal mean
ing" for literary criticism, and have also assigned to literature, as
one of its subordinate aspects of meaning, the ordinary descriptive
meaning that works of literature share with all other structures of
words. But it seems unsatisfactory to stop with this quizzical an
tithesis between delight and instruction, ironic withdrawal from
reality and explicit connection with it. Surely, it will be said, we
have overlooked the essential unity, in works of literature, expressed
by the commonest of all critical terms, the word form. For the
usual associations of "form" seem to combine these apparently
contradictory aspects. On the one hand, form implies what we have
called the literal meaning, or unity of structure; on the other, it
implies such complementary terms as content and matter, expres
sive of what it shares with external nature. The poem is not natural
in form, but it relates itself naturally to nature, and so, to quote
Sidney again, "doth grow in effect a second nature."
Here we reach a more unified conception of narrative and mean
ing. Aristotle speaks of mimesis praxeos, an imitation of an action,
and it appears that he identifies this mimesis praxeos with mythos.
Aristotle's greatly abbreviated account here needs some reconstruc
tion. Human action (praxis) is primarily imitated by histories, or
verbal structures that describe specific and particular actions. A
82
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
mythos is a secondary imitation of an action, which means, not that
it is at two removes from reality, but that it describes typical actions,
being more philosophical than history. Human thought (theoria) is
primarily imitated by discursive writing, which makes specific and
particular predications. A dianoia is a secondary imitation of
thought, a mimesis logon, concerned with typical thought, with
the images, metaphors, diagrams, and verbal ambiguities out of
which specific ideas develop. Poetry is thus more historical than
philosophy, more involved in images and examples. For it is clear
that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of
that elusive psychological and physiological process known as
thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements,
sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, ra
tionalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to
reach a completely incommunicable intuition. Anyone who im
agines that philosophy is not a verbal imitation of this process,
but the process itself, has clearly not done much thinking.
The form of a poem, that to which every detail relates, is the
same whether it is examined as stationary or as moving through
the work from beginning to end, just as a musical composition has
the same form when we study the score as it has when we listen
to the performance. The mythos is the dianoia in movement; the
dianoia is the mythos in stasis. One reason why we tend to think
of literary symbolism solely in terms of meaning is that we have
ordinarily no word for the moving body of imagery in a work of
literature. The word form has normally two complementary terms,
matter and content, and it perhaps makes some distinction whether
we think of form as a shaping principle or as a containing one. As
shaping principle, it may be thought of as narrative, organizing
temporally what Milton called, in an age of more exact terminology,
the "matter" of his song. As containing principle it may be thought
of as meaning, holding the poem together in a simultaneous
structure.
The literary standards generally called "Classical" or "neo-
Classical," which prevailed in Western Europe from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth centuries, have the closest affinity with this formal
phase. Order and clarity are particularly emphasized: order because
of the sense of the importance of grasping a central form, and
clarity because of the feeling that this form must not dissolve or
withdraw into ambiguity, but must preserve a continuous relation-
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ship to the nature which is its own content. It is the attitude char
acteristic of "humanism" in the historical sense, an attitude marked
on the one hand by a devotion to rhetoric and verbal craftsmanship,
and on the other by a strong attachment to historical and ethical
affairs.
Writers typical of the formal phase Ben Jonson for instance-
are sure that they are in contact with reality and that they follow
nature, yet the effect they produce is quite different from the de
scriptive realism of the nineteenth century, the difference being
largely in the conception of imitation involved. In formal imitation,
or Aristotelian mimesis, the work of art does not reflect external
events and ideas, but exists between the example and the precept.
Events and ideas are now aspects of its content, not external fields
of observation. Historical fictions are not designed to give insight
into a period of history, but are exemplary; they illustrate action,
and are ideal in the sense of manifesting the universal form of
human action. (The vagaries of language make "exemplary" the
adjective for both example and precept.) Shakespeare and Jonson
were keenly interested in history, yet their plays seem timeless; Jane
Austen did not write historical fiction, yet, because she represents
a later and more externalized method of following nature, the
picture she gives of Regency society has a specific historical value.
A poem, according to Hamlet, who, though speaking of acting,
is following a conventional Renaissance line of poetics, holds the
mirror up to nature. We should be careful to notice what this
implies: the poem is not itself a mirror. It does not merely repro
duce a shadow of nature; it causes nature to be reflected in its
containing form. When the formal critic comes to deal with sym
bols, therefore, the units he isolates are those which show an
analogy of proportion between the poem and the nature which it
imitates. The symbol in this aspect may best be called the image,
We are accustomed to associate the term "nature" primarily with
the external physical world, and hence we tend to think of an
image as primarily a replica of a natural object. But of course both
words are far more inclusive: nature takes in the conceptual or
intelligible order as well as the spatial one, and what is usually
called an "idea" may be a poetic image also.
One could hardly find a more elementary critical principle than
the fact that the events of a literary fiction are not real but hypo
thetical events. For some reason it has never been consistently
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
understood that the ideas of literature are not real propositions, but
verbal formulas which imitate real propositions. The Essay on
Man does not expound a system of metaphysical optimism founded
on the chain of being: it uses such a system as a model on which
to construct a series of hypothetical statements which are more
or less useless as propositions, but inexhaustibly rich and suggestive
when read in their proper context as epigrams. As epigrams, as
solid, resonant, centripetal verbal structures, they may apply point
edly to millions of human situations which have nothing to do with
metaphysical optimism. Wordsworth's pantheism, Dante's Thom-
ism, Lucretius' Epicureanism, all have to be read in the same way,
as do Gibbon or Macaulay or Hume when they are read for style
instead of subject-matter.
Formal criticism begins with an examination of the imagery of
a poem, with a view to bringing out its distinctive pattern. The
recurring or most frequently repeated images form the tonality, so
to speak, and the modulating, episodic and isolated images relate
themselves to this in a hierarchic structure which is the critical
analogy to the proportions of the poem itself. Every poem has its
peculiar spectroscopic band of imagery, caused by the requirements
of its genre, the predilections of its author, and countless other
factors. In Macbeth, for instance, the images of blood and of
sleeplessness have a thematic importance, as is very natural for a
tragedy of murder and remorse. Hence in the line "Making the
green one red," the colors are of different thematic intensities.
Green is used incidentally and for contrast; red, being closer to the
key of the play as a whole, is more like the repetition of a tonic
chord in music. The opposite would be true of the contrast between
red and green in Marvell's The Garden.
The form of the poem is the same whether it is studied as narra
tive or as meaning, hence the structure of imagery in Macbeth
may be studied as a pattern derived from the text, or as a rhythm
of repetition falling on an audience's ear. There is a vague notion
that the latter method produces a simpler result, and may therefore
be used as a commonsense corrective to the niggling subtleties of
textual study. The analogy of music again may be helpful. The
average audience at a symphony knows very little about sonata
form, and misses practically all the subtleties detected by an
analysis of the score; yet those subtleties are really there, and as
the audience can hear everything that is being played, it gets them
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all as part of a linear experience; the awareness is less conscious,
but not less real. The same is true of the response to the imagery
of a highly concentrated poetic drama.
The analysis of recurrent imagery is, of course, one of the chief
techniques of rhetorical or "new" criticism as well: the difference
is that formal criticism, after attaching the imagery to the central
form of the poem, renders an aspect of the form into the proposi
tions of discursive writing. Formal criticism, in other words, is
commentary, and commentary is the process of translating into
explicit or discursive language what is implicit in the poem. Good
commentary naturally does not read ideas into the poem; it reads
and translates what is there, and the evidence that it is there is
offered by the study of the structure of imagery with which it
begins. The sense of tact, of the desirability of not pushing a point
of interpretation "too far," is derived from the fact that the pro
portioning of emphasis in criticism should normally bear a rough
analogy to the proportioning of emphasis in the poem.
The failure to make, in practice, the most elementary of all dis
tinctions in literature, the distinction between fiction and fact,
hypothesis and assertion, imaginative and discursive writing, pro
duces what in criticism has been called the "intentional fallacy,"
the notion that the poet has a primary intention of conveying
meaning to a reader, and that the first duty of a critic is to re
capture that intention. The word intention is analogical: it implies
a relation between two things, usually a conception and an act.
Some related terms show this duality even more clearly: to "aim
at" something means that a target and a missile are being brought
into alignment. Hence such terms properly belong only to discursive
writing, where the correspondence of a verbal pattern with what
it describes is of primary importance. But a poet's primary concern
is to produce a work of art, and hence his intention can only be
expressed by some kind of tautology.
In other words, a poet's intention is centripetally directed. It is
directed towards putting words together, not towards aligning
words with meanings. If we had the privilege of Gulliver in Glubb-
dubdrib to call up the ghost of, say, Shakespeare, to ask him
what he meant by such and such a passage, we could only get,
with maddening iteration, the same answer: "I meant it to form
part of the play." One may pursue the centripetal intention as far
as genre, as a poet intends to produce, not simply a poem, but a
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
certain kind of poem. In reading, for instance, Zuleika Dobson as a
description of life in Oxford, we should be well advised to allow
for ironic intention. One has to assume, as an essential heuristic
axiom, that the work as produced constitutes the definitive record
of the writer's intention. For many of the flaws which an inex
perienced critic thinks he detects, the answer "But it's supposed
to be that way" is sufficient. All other statements of intention,
however fully documented, are suspect. The poet may change his
mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another,
and then rationalized what he did. (A cartoon in a New Yorker
of some years back hit off this last problem beautifully: it depicted
a sculptor gazing at a statue he had just made and remarking to a
friend: "Yes, the head is too large. When I put it in exhibition I
shall call it The Woman with the Large Head/ ") If intention is
still thought to be apparent in the poem itself, the poem is being
regarded as incomplete, like a freshman's essay where the reader
has continually to speculate about what the author may have had
in his mind. If the author has been dead for centuries, such specu
lation cannot get us very far, however irresistibly it may suggest
itself.
What the poet meant to say, then, is, literally, the poem itself;
what he meant to say in any given passage is, in its literal meaning,
part of the poem. But literal meaning, we have seen, is variable and
ambiguous. The reader may be dissatisfied with the ghost of Shake
speare's answer: he may feel that Shakespeare, unlike, say, Mal-
larme, is a poet he can trust, and that he also meant his passage to
be intelligible in itself (i.e., have descriptive or rephrasable mean
ing). Doubtless he did, but the relationship of the passage to the
rest of the play creates myriads of new meanings for it. Just as a
vivid sketch of a cat by a good draughtsman may contain in a few
crisp lines the entire feline experience of everyone who looks at it,
so the powerfully constructed pattern of words that we know as
Hamlet may contain an amount of meaning which the vast and
constantly growing library of criticism on the play cannot begin
to exhaust. Commentary, which translates the implicit into the
explicit, can only isolate the aspect of meaning, large or small,
which is appropriate or interesting for certain readers to grasp at a
certain time. Such translation is an activity with which the poet
has very little to do. The relation in bulk between commentary and
a sacred book, such as the Bible or the Vedic hymns, is even more
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
striking, and indicates that when a poetic structure attains a certain
degree of concentration or social recognition, the amount of com
mentary it will carry is infinite. This fact is in itself no more in
credible than the fact that a scientist can state a law illustrated by
more phenomena than he could ever observe or count, and there
is no occasion for wondering, like the yokels in Goldsmith, how
one small poet's head can carry the amount of wit, wisdom, in
struction, and significance that Shakespeare and Dante have given
the world.
Still there is a genuine mystery in art, and a real place for wonder.
In Sartor Resartus Carlyle distinguishes extrinsic symbols, like the
cross or the national flag, which are without value in themselves
but are signs or indicators of something existential, from intrinsic
symbols, which include works of art. On this basis we may dis
tinguish two kinds of mystery. (A third kind, the mystery which
is a puzzle, a problem to be solved and annihilated, belongs to dis
cursive thought, and has little to do with the arts, except in matters
of technique.) The mystery of the unknown or unknowable essence
is an extrinsic mystery, which involves art only when art is also made
illustrative of something else, as religious art is to the person con
cerned primarily with worship. But the intrinsic mystery is that
which remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is,
and hence is not a mystery separated from what is known. The
mystery in the greatness of King Lear or Macbeth comes not from
concealment but from revelation, not from something unknown
or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it.
It could be said, of course, that poetry is the product, not only
of a deliberate and voluntary act of consciousness, like discursive
writing, but of processes which are subconscious or preconscious
or half-conscious or unconscious as well, whatever psychological
metaphor one prefers. It takes a great deal of will power to write
poetry, but part of that will power must be employed in trying to
relax the will, so making a large part of one's writing involuntary.
This is no doubt true, and it is also true that poetic technique, like
all technique, is a habitual, and therefore an increasingly uncon
scious, skill But I feel that literary data are in the long run only
explicable within criticism, and I am reluctant to explain literary
facts by psychological cliches. Still, it seems now almost impossible
to avoid the term "creative," with all the biological analogies it
suggests, when speaking of the arts. And creation, whether of God,
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
man, or nature, seems to be an activity whose only intention is to
abolish intention, to eliminate final dependence on or relation to
something else, to destroy the shadow that falls between itself
and its conception.
One wishes that literary criticism had a Samuel Butler to formu
late some of the paradoxes involved in this parallel between the
work of art and the organism. We can describe objectively what
happens when a tulip blooms in spring and a chrysanthemum in
autumn, but we cannot describe it from the inside of the plant, ex
cept by metaphors derived from human consciousness and ascribed
to some agent like God or nature or environment or lan vital,
or to the plant itself. It is projected metaphor to say that a flower
"knows" when it is time for it to bloom, and of course to say that
"nature knows" is merely to import a faded mother-goddess cult
into biology. I can well understand that in their own field biologists
would find such teleological metaphors both unnecessary and con
fusing, a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The same would be true
of criticism to the extent that criticism has to deal with impondera
bles other than consciousness or logically directed will. If one
critic says that another has discovered a mass of subtleties in a
poet of which that poet was probably quite unconscious, the phrase
points up the biological analogy. A snowflake is probably quite
unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth
study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical inter
pretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery.
The instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine com
ment about a poem (e.g., "In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be
portraying the tragedy of irresolution") he has begun to allegorize.
Commentary thus looks at literature as, in its formal phase, a
potential allegory of events and ideas. The relation of such com
mentary to poetry itself is the source of the contrast which was
developed by several critics of the Romantic period between "sym
bolism" and "allegory," symbolism here being used in the sense
of thematically significant imagery. The contrast is between a "con
crete" approach to symbols which begins with images of actual
things and works outward to ideas and propositions, and an "ab
stract" approach which begins with the idea and then tries to ind
a concrete image to represent it. This distinction is valid enough
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
in itself, but it has deposited a large terminal moraine of confusion
in modern criticism, largely because the term allegory is very loosely
employed for a great variety of literary phenomena.
We have actual allegory when a poet explicitly indicates the
relationship of his images to examples and precepts, and so tries
to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed. A writer
is being allegorical whenever it is clear that he is saying "by this I
also (dlos) mean that." If this seems to be done continuously, we
may say, cautiously, that what he is writing "is" an allegory. In
The Faerie Queene, for instance, the narrative systematically refers
to historical examples and the meaning to moral precepts, besides
doing their own work in the poem. Allegory, then, is a contrapuntal
technique, like canonical imitation in music. Dante, Spenser, Tasso,
and Bunyan use it throughout: their works are the masses and
oratorios of literature. Ariosto, Goethe, Ibsen, Hawthorne write in
a freistimmige style in which allegory may be picked up and
dropped again at pleasure. But even continuous allegory is still
a structure of images, not of disguised ideas, and commentary has
to proceed with it exactly as it does with all other literature, trying
to see what precepts and examples are suggested by the imagery
as a whole.
The commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory with
out knowing the real reason, which is that continuous allegory
prescribes the direction of his commentary, and so restricts its
freedom. Hence he often urges us to read Spenser and Bunyan,
for example, for the story alone and let the allegory go, meaning
by that that he regards his own type of commentary as more inter
esting. Or else he will frame a definition of allegory that will exclude
the poems he likes. Such a critic is often apt to treat all allegory
as though it were naive allegory, or the translation of ideas into
images.
Naive allegory is a disguised form of discursive writing, and
belongs chiefly to educational literature on an elementary level:
schoolroom moralities, devotional exempla, local pageants, and
the like. Its basis is the habitual or customary ideas fostered by
education and ritual, and its normal form is that of transient
spectacle. Under the excitement of a particular occasion familiar
ideas suddenly become sense experiences, and vanish with the
occasion. The defeat of Sedition and Discord by Sound Govern
ment and Encouragement of Trade would be the right sort of
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
theme for a pageant designed only to entertain a visiting monarch
for half an hour. The apparatus of "mass media" and "audiovisual
aids" plays a similar allegorical role in contemporary education.
Because of this basis in spectacle, naive allegory has its center of
gravity in the pictorial arts, and is most successful as art when
recognized to be a form of occasional wit, as it is in the political
cartoon. The more solemn and permanent naive allegories of official
murals and statuary show a marked tendency to date.
At one extreme of commentary, then, there is the naive allegory
so anxious to make its own allegorical points that it has no real
literary or hypothetical center. When I say that naive allegory
"dates," I mean that any allegory which resists a primary analysis
of imagery that is, an allegory which is simply discursive writing
with an illustrative image or two stuck into it will have to be
treated less as literature than as a document in the history of ideas.
When the author of II Esdras, for instance, introduces an alle
gorical vision of an eagle, and then says, "Behold, on the right
side there arose one feather, which reigned over all the earth/ 7 it
is clear that he is not sufficiently interested in his eagle as a poetic
image to remain within the normal boundaries of literary expres
sion. The basis of poetic expression is the metaphor, and the basis
of naive allegory is the mixed metaphor.
Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding
scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with
being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-
explicit and anti-allegorical at the other. First we meet the con
tinuous allegories, like The Pilgrim's Progress and The Faerie
Queene, and then the free-style allegories just mentioned. Next
come the poetic structures with a large and insistent doctrinal
interest, in which the internal fictions are exempla, like the epics
of Milton. Then we have, in the exact center, works in which the
structure of imagery, however suggestive, has an implicit relation
only to events and ideas, and which includes the bulk of Shake
speare. Below this, poetic imagery begins to recede from example
and precept and become increasingly ironic and paradoxical. Here
the modern critic begins to feel more at home, the reason being
that this type is more consistent with the modern literal view of
art, the sense of the poem as withdrawn from explicit statement.
Several types of this ironic and anti-allegorical imagery are fa
miliar. One is the typical symbol of the metaphysical school of the
9 1
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
Baroque period, the "conceit" or deliberately strained union of
normally disparate things. The paradoxical techniques of meta
physical poetry are based on a sense of the breakdown of the in
ternal relation of art and nature into an external one. Another is
the substitute-image of symbolisme, part of a technique for suggest
ing or evoking things and avoiding the explicit naming of them. Still
another is the kind of image described by Mr. Eliot as an objective
correlative, the image that sets up an inward focus of emotion in
poetry and at the same time substitutes itself for an idea. Still
another, closely related to if not identical with the objective cor
relative, is the heraldic symbol, the central emblematic image which
comes most readily to mind when we think of the word "symbol"
in modern literature. We think, for example, of Hawthorne's
scarlet letter, Melville's white whale, James's golden bowl, or Vir
ginia Woolf s lighthouse. Such an image differs from the image of
the formal allegory in that there is no continuous relationship be
tween art and nature. In contrast to the allegorical symbols of
Spenser, for instance, the heraldic emblematic image is in a para
doxical and ironic relation to both narrative and meaning. As a unit
of meaning, it arrests the narrative; as a unit of narrative, it per
plexes the meaning. It combines the qualities of Carlyle's intrinsic
symbol with significance in itself, and the extrinsic symbol which
points quizzically to something else. It is a technique of symbolism
which is based on a strong sense of a lurking antagonism between
the literal and the descriptive aspects of symbols, the same antago
nism that made Mallarm and Zola so extreme a contrast in nine
teenth-century literature.
Below this we run into still more indirect techniques, such as
private association, symbolism intended not to be fully understood,
the deliberate spoofing of Dadaism, and kindred signs of another
approaching boundary of literary expression. We should try to keep
this whole range of possible commentary clearly in mind, so as to
correct the perspective both of the medieval and Renaissance critics
who assumed that all major poetry should be treated as far as
possible as continuous allegory, and of the modern ones who
maintain that poetry is essentially anti-allegorical and paradoxical.
What we have now is a conception of literature as a body of
hypothetical creations which is not necessarily involved in the
worlds of truth and fact, nor necessarily withdrawn from them,
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
but which may enter into any kind of relationship to them, rang
ing from the most to the least explicit. We are strongly reminded
of the relationship of mathematics to the natural sciences. Mathe
matics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal
consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature.
When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its ap
plicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the
cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point
comes out sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge
Moore over the problem of Ruskin's cat, the animal that was
picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was
not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality
has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an
empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and
cannot be logically proved. It is "proved" only by the practical
and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet,
qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason
why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real
or Ruskinian.
The conception of art as having a relation to reality which is
neither direct nor negative, but potential, finally resolves the di
chotomy between delight and instruction, the style and the mes
sage. "Delight" is not readily distinguishable from pleasure, and
hence opens the way to that aesthetic hedonism we glanced at in
the introduction, the failure to distinguish personal and impersonal
aspects of valuation. The traditional theory of catharsis implies
that the emotional response to art is not the raising of an actual
emotion, but the raising and casting out of actual emotion on a
wave of something else. We may call this something else, perhaps,
exhilaration or exuberance: the vision of something liberated from
experience, the response kindled in the reader by the transmuta
tion of experience into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into
play. At the center of liberal education something surely ought to
get liberated. The metaphor of creation suggests the parallel image
of birth, the emergence of a new-born organism into independent
life. The ecstasy of creation and its response produce, on one level
of creative effort, the hen's cackle; on another, the quality that the
Italian critics called spTezzatura and that Hoby's translation of
Castiglione calls "recklessness," the sense of buoyancy or release
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
that accompanies perfect discipline, when we can no longer know
the dancer from the dance.
It is impossible to understand the effect of what Milton called
"gorgeous Tragedy" as producing a real emotion of gloom or sor
row. Aeschylus's The Persians and Shakespeare's Macbeth are cer
tainly tragedies, but they are associated respectively- with the victory
of Salamis and the accession of James I, both occasions of national
rejoicing. Some critics carry the theory of real emotion over into
Shakespeare himself, and talk about a "tragic period/' in which
he is supposed to have felt dismal from 1600 to 1608. Most people,
if they had just finished writing a play as good as King Lear,
would be in a mood of exhilaration, and while we have no right
to ascribe this mood to Shakespeare, it is surely the right way to
describe our response to the play. On the other hand, it comes
as something of a shock to realize that the blinding of Gloucester
is primarily entertainment, the more so as the pleasure we get from
it obviously has nothing to do with sadism. If any literary work is
emotionally "depressing/' there is something wrong with either
the writing or the reader's response. Art seems to produce a kind of
buoyancy which, though often called pleasure, as it is for instance
by Wordsworth, is something more inclusive than pleasure. "Ex
uberance is beauty," said Blake. That seems to me a practically
definitive solution, not only of the minor question of what beauty
is, but of the far more important problem of what the conceptions
of catharsis and ecstasis really mean.
Such exuberance is, of course, as much intellectual as it is emo
tional: Blake himself was willing to define poetry as "allegory ad
dressed to the intellectual powers." We live in a world of threefold
external compulsion: of compulsion on action, or law; of com
pulsion on thinking, or fact; of compulsion on feeling, which is
the characteristic of all pleasure whether it is produced by the
Paradiso or by an ice cream soda. But in the world of imagination
a fourth power, which contains morality, beauty, and truth but
is never subordinated to them, rises free of all their compulsions.
The work of imagination presents us with a vision, not of the per
sonal greatness of the poet, but of something impersonal and far
greater: the vision of a decisive act of spiritual freedom, the vision
of the recreation of man.
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
MYTHICAL PHASE: SYMBOL AS ARCHETYPE
In the formal phase the poem belongs neither to the class "art/'
nor to the class "verbal": it represents its own class. There are thus
two aspects to its form. In the first place, it is unique, a techne or
artifact, with its own peculiar structure of imagery, to be examined
by itself without immediate reference to other things like it. The
critic here begins with poems, not with a prior conception or
definition of poetry. In the second place, the poem is one of a
class of similar forms. Aristotle knows that Oedipus Tyrannus is in
one sense not like any other tragedy, but he also knows that it be
longs to the class called tragedy. We, who have experienced Shake
speare and Racine, can add the corollary that tragedy is something
bigger than a phase of Greek drama. We may also find tragedy in
literary works which are not dramas. To understand what tragedy
is, therefore, takes us beyond the merely historical into the question
of what an aspect of literature as a whole is. With this idea of
the external relations of a poem with other poems, two considera
tions in criticism for the first time become important: convention
and genre.
The study of genres is based on analogies in form. It is charac
teristic of documentary and historical criticism that it cannot deal
with such analogies. It can trace influence with great plausibility,
whether it exists or not, but confronted with a tragedy of Shake
speare and a tragedy of Sophocles, to be compared solely because
they are both tragedies, the historical critic has to confine himself
to general reflections about the seriousness of life. Similarly, nothing
is more striking in rhetorical criticism than the absence of any
consideration of genre: the rhetorical critic analyzes what is in
front of him without much regard to whether it is a play, a lyric,
or a novel. He may in fact even assert that there are no genres in
literature. That is because he is concerned with his structure simply
as a work of art ? not as an artifact with a possible function. But
there are many analogies in literature apart altogether from sources
and influences (many of which, of course, are not analogous at
all) and noticing such analogies forms a large part of our actual
experience of literature, whatever its role so far in criticism.
The central principle of the formal phase, that a poem is an imi
tation of nature, is, though a perfectly sound one, still a principle
which isolates the individual poem. And it is clear that any poem
may be examined, not only as an imitation of nature, but as an
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
imitation of other poems. Virgil discovered, according to Pope, that
following nature was ultimately the same thing as following Homer.
Once we think of a poem in relation to other poems, as a unit
of poetry, we can see that the study of genres has to be founded
on the study of convention. The criticism which can deal with
such matters will have to be based on that aspect of symbolism
which relates poems to oneanother, and it will choose, as its main
field of operations, the symbols that link poems together. Its
ultimate object is to consider, not simply a poem as an imitation
of nature, but the order of nature as a whole as imitated by a
corresponding order of words.
All art is equally conventionalized, but we do not ordinarily
notice this fact unless we are unaccustomed to the convention. In
our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately dis
guised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is
an invention distinctive enough to be patented. Hence the conven
tionalizing forces of modern literature the way, for instance, that
an editor's policy and the expectation of his readers combine to
conventionalize what appears in a magazine often go unrecognized.
Demonstrating the debt of A to B is merely scholarship if A is dead,
but a proof of moral delinquency if A is alive. This state of things
makes it difficult to appraise a literature which includes Chaucer,
much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others;
Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes follow their sources almost
verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal
as much as possible out of the Bible. It is not only the inexperi
enced reader who looks for a residual originality in such works.
Most of us tend to think of a poet's real achievement as distinct
from, or even contrasted with, the achievement present in what
he stole, and we are thus apt to concentrate on peripheral rather
than on central critical facts. For instance, the central greatness
of Paradise Regained, as a poem, is not the greatness of the rhe
torical decorations that Milton added to his source, but the great
ness of the theme itself, which Milton passes on to the reader from
his source. This conception of the great poet's being entrusted with
the great theme was elementary enough to Milton, but violates
most of the low mimetic prejudices about creation that most of
us are educated in.
The underestimating of convention appears to be a result of,
may even be a pait of, the tendency, marked from Romantic times
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
on, to think of the individual as ideally prior to his society. The
view opposed to this, that the new baby is conditioned by a heredi
tary and environmental kinship to a society which already exists,
has, whatever doctrines may be inferred from it, the initial ad
vantage of being closer to the facts it deals with. The literary con
sequence of the second view is that the new poem, like the new
baby, is born into an already existing order of words, and is typical
of the structure of poetry to which it is attached. The new baby is
his own society appearing once again as a unit of individuality, and
the new poem has a similar relation to its poetic society.
It is hardly possible to accept a critical view which confuses the
original with the aboriginal, and imagines that a "creative" poet
sits down with a pencil and some blank paper and eventually pro
duces a new poem in a special act of creation ex nihilo. Human
beings do not create in that way. Just as a new scientific discovery
manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature,
and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of
the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that
was already latent in the order of words. Literature may have life,
reality, experience, nature, imaginative truth, social conditions,
or what you will for its content; but literature itself is not made out
of these things. Poetry can only be made out of other poems;
novels out of other novels. Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped
externally: the forms of literature can no more exist outside litera
ture than the forms of sonata and fugue and rondo can exist outside
music.
All this was much clearer before the assimilation of literature
to private enterprise concealed so many of the facts of criticism.
When Milton sat down to write a poem about Edward King, he
did not ask himself: "What can I find to say about King?" but
"How does poetry require that such a subject should be treated?"
The notion that convention shows a kck of feeling, and that a
poet attains "sincerity" (which usually means articulate emotion)
by disregarding it, is opposed to all the facts of literary experience
and history. The origin of this notion is, again, the view that
poetry is a description of emotion, and that its "literal" meaning
is an assertion about the emotions held by the individual poet.
But any serious study of literature soon shows that the real dif
ference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that
the former is more profoundly imitative. Originality returns to the
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
origins of literature, as radicalism returns to its roots. The remark
of Mr. Eliot that a good poet is more likely to steal than to imitate
affords a more balanced view of convention, as it indicates that the
poem is specifically involved with other poems, not vaguely with
such abstractions as tradition or style. The copyright law, and
the mores attached to it, make it difficult for a modern novelist to
steal anything except his title from the rest of literature: hence it
is often only in such titles as For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Grapes
of Wrath, or The Sound and the Fury, that we can clearly see how
much impersonal dignity and richness of association an author
can gain by the communism of convention.
As with other products of divine activity, the father of a poem
is much more difficult to identify than the mother. That the
mother is always nature, the realm of the objective considered as
a field of communication, no serious criticism can ever deny. But
as long as the father of a poem is assumed to be the poet himself,
we have once again failed to distinguish literature from discursive
verbal structures. The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious
will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he
employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.
But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not
the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately
still, the womb of Mother Nature herself: her privates he, so to
speak. The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make
changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because
they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the
poem as it passes through his mind. He is responsible for delivering
it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is
equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from
all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.
The true father or shaping spirit of the poem is the form of the
poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit
of poetry, the "onlie begetter" of Shakespeare's sonnets who was
not Shakespeare himself, much less that depressing ghost Mr.
W. H., but Shakespeare's subject, the master-mistress of his pas
sion. When a poet speaks of the internal spirit which shapes the
poem, he is apt to drop the traditional appeal to female Muses
and think of himself as in a feminine, or at least receptive, rela
tion to some god or lord, whether Apollo, Dionysus, Eros, Christ,
or (as in Milton) the Holy Spirit. Est deus in nobis, Ovid says:
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
in modern times we may compare Nietzsche's remarks about his
inspiration in Ecce Homo.
The problem of convention is the problem of how art can be
communicable, for literature is clearly as much a technique of
communication as assertive verbal structures are. Poetry, taken as
a whole, is no longer simply an aggregate of artifacts imitating
nature, but one of the activities of human artifice taken as a whole.
If we may use the word "civilization" for this, we may say that our
fourth phase looks at poetry as one of the techniques of civiliza
tion. It is concerned, therefore, with the social aspect of poetry,
with poetry as the focus of a community. The symbol in this phase
is the communicable unit, to which I give the name archetype:
that is, a typical or recurring image. I mean by an archetype a
symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps
to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype
is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily con
cerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communica
tion. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit
poems into the body of poetry as a whole.
The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like
the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be
called even "coincidence," which is the name we give to a piece
of design when we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a
certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates, and in the com
municating activity of which poetry forms part. Because of the
larger communicative context of education, it is possible for a story
about the sea to be archetypal, to make a profound imaginative
impact, on a reader who has never been out of Saskatchewan. And
when pastoral images are deliberately employed in Lycidas, for
instance, merely because they are conventional, we can see that the
convention of the pastoral makes us assimilate these images to
other parts of literary experience.
We think first of the pastoral's descent from Theocritus, where
the pastoral elegy first appears as a literary adaptation of the ritual
of the Adonis lament, and through Theocritus to Virgil and the
whole pastoral tradition to The Shepheardes Calender and beyond
to Lycidas itself. Then we think of the intricate pastoral symbolism
of the Bible and the Christian Church, of Abel and the twenty-third
Psalm and Christ the Good Shepherd, of the ecclesiastical over
tones of "pastor" and "flock," and of the link between the Classical
99
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
and Christian traditions in Virgil's Messianic Eclogue. Then we
think of the extensions of pastoral symbolism into Sidney's Arcadia,
The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's forest comedies, and the like;
then of the post-Miltonic development of pastoral elegy in Shelley,
Arnold, Whitman, and Dylan Thomas; perhaps too of pastoral
conventions in painting and music. In short, we can get a whole
liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and
following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature.
An avowedly conventional poem like Lycidas urgently demands
the kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature
as a whole, and this activity is expected to begin at once, with the
first cultivated reader. Here we have a situation in literature more
like that of mathematics or science, where the work of genius is as
similated to the whole subject so quickly that one hardly notices
the difference between creative and critical activity.
If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in
the imagery that links one poem with another, it is impossible to
get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature
alone. But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to
know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into
conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place
unconsciously in all our reading. A symbol like the sea or the
heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to ex
pand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as
a whole. Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville's novel: he is ab
sorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons
of the deep from the Old Testament onward. And what is true
for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly
that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the
monuments of its own magnificence.
In each phase of symbolism there is a point at which the critic
is compelled to break away from the range of the poet's own knowl
edge. Thus the historical or documentary critic has sooner or later
to call Dante a "medieval" poet, a notion unknown and unin
telligible to Dante. In archetypal criticism, the poet's conscious
knowledge is considered only so far as the poet may allude to or
imitate other poets ("sources") or make a deliberate use of a
convention. Beyond that, the poet's control over his poem stops
with the poem. Only the archetypal critic can be concerned with
its relationship to the rest of literature. But here again we have
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
to distinguish between explicitly conventionalized literature, such
as Lycidas, where the poet himself starts us off by referring to
Theocritus, Virgil, Renaissance pastoralists, and the Bible, and
literature which conceals or ignores its conventional links. The
conception of copyright and the revolutionary nature of the low
mimetic view of creation also extends to a general unwillingness
on the part of authors of the copyright age to have their imagery
studied conventionally, and in dealing with this period, most arche
types have to be established by critical inspection alone.
To give a random example, one very common convention of the
nineteenth-century novel is the use of two heroines, one dark and
one light. The dark one is as a rule passionate, haughty, plain,
foreign or Jewish, and in some way associated with the undesirable
or with some kind of forbidden fruit like incest. When the two
are involved with the same hero, the plot usually has to get rid
of the dark one or make her into a sister if the story is to end
happily. Examples include Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans,
The Woman in White, Ligeia, Pierre (a tragedy because the hero
chooses the dark girl, who is also his sister), The Marble Faun, and
countless incidental treatments. A male version forms the symbolic
basis of Wuthering Heights. This device is as much a convention
as Milton's calling Edward King by a name out of Virgil's Eclogues,
but it shows a confused, or, as we say, "unconscious" approach to
conventions. Again, when we meet the images of a man, a woman,
and a serpent in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, there is no doubt
of their conventional links with similar figures in the Book of
Genesis. In Hudson's Green Mansions the hero and heroine first
meet over a serpent in a quasi-Paradisal setting: here the conven
tional nature of the imagery is a matter on which the author gives
us no help. When a critic meets St. George the Redcross Knight
in Spenser, bearing a red cross on a white ground, he has some
idea what to do with this figure. When he meets a female in Henry
James's The Other House called Rose Armiger with a white dress
and a red parasol, he is, in the current slang, clueless. It is clear
that a deficiency in contemporary education often complained of,
the disappearance of a common cultural ground which makes a
modern poet's allusions to the Bible or to Classical mythology fall
with less weight than they should, has much to do with the decline
in the explicit use of archetypes.
Whitman, as is well known, was a spokesman of an anfi-
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
archetypal view of literature, and urged the Muse to forget the
matter of Troy and develop new themes. This is a low mimetic
prejudice, and is consequently appropriate enough for Whitman,
who is both right and wrong. He is wrong because the matter of
Troy will always be, in the foreseeable future, an integral part of
the Western cultural heritage, and hence references to Agamemnon
in Yeats's Leda or Eliot's Sweeney among the Nightingales have as
much cumulative power as ever for the properly instructed reader.
But he is of course perfectly right in feeling that the content of
poetry is normally an immediate and contemporary environment.
He was right, being the kind of poet he was, in making the content
of his own When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed an elegy
on Lincoln and not a conventional Adonis lament. Yet his elegy
is, in its form, as conventional as Lycidas, complete with purple
flowers thrown on coffins, a great star drooping in the west, imagery
of "ever-returning spring" and all the rest of it. Poetry organizes
the content of the world as it passes before the poet, but the forms
in which that content is organized come out of the structure of
poetry itself.
Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being
complex variables. Within the complex is often a Targe jfuinGe^f
specific learned associations which are communicable because a
.large numbe^jrfjge^^ to be familiar
with tKerr^When we speak of "symbolism" in "o^SaryTffe^e
usuallyTKink of such learned cultural archetypes as the cross or
the crown, or of conventional associations, as of white with purity
or green with jealousy, ^sanarche^typg^ green, may s
a
olpr Some archetypes are so deeply rooted in conventional
association that they can hardly avoid suggesting that association,
as the geometrical figure of the cross inevitably suggests the death
of Christ. Ajcomfletely conye^JiMSl^J^
which the archetypesTl^
s. This can happen in the artsfor instance iu
some of the sacred dances of India but it has not happened in
Western literature yet, and the resistance of modem writers to
having their archetypes "spotted," so to speak, is due to a natural
anxiety to keep them as versatile as possible, not pinned down ex
clusively to one interpretation. A poet may be showing sn esoteric
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
tendency if he specifically points out one association, as Yeats does
in his footnotes to some of his early poems. There are no necessary
associations: there are some exceedingly obvious ones, such as the
association of darkness with terror or mystery, but there are no
intrinsic or inherent correspondences which must invariably be
present. As we shall see later, there is a context in which the phrase
"universal symbol" makes sense, but it is not this context. The
stream of literature, however, like any other stream, seeks the easiest
channels first: the poet who uses the expected associations will
communicate more rapidly.
At one extreme of literature we have the pure convention, which
a poet uses merely because it has often been used before in the
same way. This is most frequent in naive poetry, in the fixed epi
thets and phrase-tags of medieval romance and ballad, in the in
variable plots and character types of naive drama, and, to a lesser
degree, in the topoi or rhetorical commonplaces which, like other
ideas in literature, are so dull when stated as propositions, and so
rich and variegated when they are used as structural principles in
literature. At the other extreme we have the pure variable, where
there is a deliberate attempt at novelty or unfamiliarity, and con
sequently a disguising or complicating of archetypes. Such tech
niques come very close to a distrust of communication itself as a
function of literature. However, extremes meet, as Coleridge said,
and anti-conventional poetry soon becomes a convention in its
turn, to be explored by hardy scholars accustomed to the dreari
ness of literary bad lands. Between these extreme points conven
tions vary from the most explicit to the most indirect, along a scale
parallel to the scale of allegory and paradox already dealt with.
The two scales may be often confused or identified, but translating
imagery into examples and precepts is a quite distinct process from
following images into other poems.
Near the extreme of pure convention is translation, paraphrase,
and the kind of use which Chaucer makes of Boccaccio in Troilus
and The Knight's Tde. Next we come to deliberate and explicit
convention, such as we have noted in Lycidas. Next comes para
doxical or ironic convention, including parody often a sign that
certain vogues in handling conventions are getting worn out. Then
comes the attempt to reach originality through turning one's back
on explicit convention, an attempt which results in implicit con
vention of the kind we detected in Whitman. Then comes a tend-
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ency to identify originality with "experimental" writing, based in
our day on an analogy with scientific discover}', and which is fre
quently spoken of as "breaking with convention." And, of course,
at every stage of literature, including this last one, there is a great
deal of superficial and inorganic convention, producing the kind
of writing that most students of literature prefer to keep in the
middle distance: run-of-the-mill Elizabethan sonnets and love lyrics,
Plautine comedy-formulas, eighteenth-century pastorals, nineteenth-
century happy-ending novels, works of followers and disciples and
schools and trends generally.
It is clear from all this that archetypes are most easily studied in
highly conventionalized literature: that is, for the most part, naive,
primitive, and popular literature. In suggesting the possibility of
archetypal criticism, then, I am suggesting the possibility of ex
tending the kind of comparative and morphological study now
made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature. This
should be more easily conceivable now that it is no longer fashiona
ble to mark off popular and primitive literature from ordinary liter
ature as sharply as we used to do. Also, we shall find that super
ficial literature, of the kind just spoken of, is of great value to arche
typal criticism simply because it is conventional. If throughout
this book I refer to popular fiction as frequently as to the greatest
novels and epics, it is for the same reason that a musician attempt
ing to explain the rudimentary facts about counterpoint would be
more likely, at least at first, to illustrate from "Three Blind Mice"
than from a complex Bach fugue.
Every phase of symbolism has its particular approach to narrative
and to meaning. In the literal phase, narrative is a flow of significant
sounds, and meaning an ambiguous and complex verbal pattern.
In the descriptive phase, narrative is an imitation of real events,
and meaning an imitation of actual objects or propositions. In the
formal phase, poetry exists between the example and the precept.
In the exemplary event there is an element of recurrence; in the
precept, or statement about what ought to be, there is a strong ele
ment of desire, or what is called "wish-thinking." These elements
of recurrence and desire come into the foreground in archetypal
criticism, which studies poems as units of poetry as a whole and
symbols as units of communication,
From such a point of view, the narrative aspect of literature is
104
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
a recurrent act of symbolic communication: in other words a ritual.
Narrative is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation
of human action as a whole, and not simply as a mimesis praxeos
or imitation of an action. Similarly, in archetypal criticism the
significant content is the conflict of desire and reality which has
for its basis the work of the dream. Ritual and dream, therefore,
are the narrative and significant content respectively of literature
in its archetypal aspect. The archetypal analysis of the plot of a
novel or play would deal with it in terms of the generic, recurring,
or conventional actions which show analogies to rituals: the wed
dings, funerals, intellectual and social initiations, executions or
mock executions, the chasing away of the scapegoat villain, and
so on. The archetypal analysis of the meaning or significance of
such a work would deal with it in terms of the generic, recurring,
or conventional shape indicated by its mood and resolution, whether
tragic, comic, ironic, or what not, in which the relationship of
desire and experience is expressed.
Recurrence and desire interpenetrate, and are equally important
in both ritual and dream. In its archetypal phase, the poem imi
tates nature, not (as in the formal phase) nature as a structure or
system, but nature as a cyclical process. The principle of recurrence
in the rhythm of art seems to be derived from the repetitions in
nature that make time intelligible to us. Rituals cluster around the
cyclical movements of the sun, the moon, the seasons, and human
life. Every crucial periodicity of experience: dawn, sunset, the
phases of the moon, seed-time and harvest, the equinoxes and the
solstices, birth, initiation, marriage, and death, get rituals attached
to them. The pull of ritual is toward pure cyclical narrative, which,
if there could be such a thing, would be automatic and unconscious
repetition. In the middle of all this recurrence, however, is the
central recurrent cycle of sleeping and waking life, the daily frustra
tion of the ego, the nightly awakening of a titanic self.
JTie archetypal critic studies the l^m^jasjggjd^^
poetryas^part of tjke tflUytH^^
Civilization. 'TSvil'igtion is notin^e^^
oFniaking a total human form out ot natur^Tnd itjs
justcalleci desiiff The~desire
for food and shelter is not content with roots and caves: it produces
the human forms of nature that we call farming and architecture.
Desire is thus not a simple response to need^forjijj^ammal liisij?
105
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
need food without planting a garden to get it, nor is it a simple
response to want, or desire for something in particular. It is neither
limited to nor satisfied by objects, but is the energy that leads
human society to develop its own form. Desire in this sense is the
5OpaL-aspcLj3f sdaat we meLoj^theJi|xal level as emotion, an
impulse toward expression which would have remained amorphous
ijpjbe-poeiix hgd not liberated it by providing the fo
pression. The form of desire, similarly, is liberated and made ap
parent by civilization. The efficient cause of civilization is work,
and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as
a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of
desire.
T^^ie is however a moral dialectic in desire, lie CQi]tp e ptiop of a
garden develops the conception weed/ and biiilding a sheepfoTS
maker the wolf a greater enemy tM Poetry in its social or arcKetypil
aspect, therefore, not only tries to illustrate the fulfilment of desire,
but to define the obstacles to it. Ritual is not only a recurrent act,
but an act expressive of a dialectic of desire and repugnance: desire
for fertility or victory, repugnance to drought or to enemies. We
have rituals of social integration, and we have rituals of expulsion,
execution, and punishment. In dream there is a parallel dialectic,
as there is both the wish-fulfilment dream and the anxiety or night
mare dream of repugnance. Archetypal criticism, therefore, rests
on two organizing rhythms or patterns, one cyclical, the other
dialectic.
The union of ritual and dream in a form of verbal communica
tion is myth. This is a sense of the term myth slightly different
from that used in the previous essay. But, first, the sense is equally
familiar, and the ambiguity not mine but the dictionary's; and,
second, there is a real connection between the two senses which will
become more apparent as we go on. The myth accounts for, and
makes communicable, the ritual and the dream. Ritual, by itself,
cannot account for itself: it is pre-logical, pre-verbal, and in a sense
pre-human. Its attachment to the calendar seems to link human
life to the biological dependence on the natural cycle which plants,
and to some extent animals, still have. Everything in nature that
we think of as having some analogy with works of art, like the
flower or the bird's song, grows out of a synchronization between
an organism and the rhythms of its natural environment, especially
that of the solar year. With animals some expressions of syn-
106
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
chronization, like the mating dances of birds, could almost be
called rituals. Myth is more distinctively human, as the most in
telligent partridge cannot tell even the most absurd story explain
ing why it drums in the mating season. Similarly, the dream, by
itself, is a system of cryptic allusions to the dreamer's own life,
not fully understood by him, or so far as we know of any real use
to him. But in all dreams there is a mythical element which has
a power of independent communication, as is obvious, not only
in the stock example of Oedipus, but in any collection of folk
tales. Myth, therefore, not only gives meaning to ritual and narra
tive to dream: it is the identification of ritual and dream, in which
the former is seen to be the latter in movement. This would not be
possible unless there were a common factor to ritual and dream
which made one the social expression of the other; the investiga
tion of this common factor we must leave for later treatment. All
that we need to say here is that ritual is the archetypal aspect of
mythos and dream the archetypal aspect of dianoia.
The same distinction in emphasis that we noted in the first essay
between fictional and thematic literature recurs here. Some literary
forms, such as drama, remind us with particular vividness of anal
ogies to rituals, for the drama in literature, like the ritual in religion,
is primarily a social or ensemble performance. Others, such as
romance, suggest analogies to dreams. Ritual analogies are most
easily seen, not in the drama of the educated audience and the
settled theatre, but in naive or spectacular drama: in the folk
play, the puppet show, the pantomime, the farce, the pageant, and
their descendants in masque, comic opera, commercial movie, and
revue. Dream analogies are best studied in naive romance, which
includes the folk tales and fairy tales that are so closely related
to dreams of wonderful wishes corning true, and to nightmares of
ogres and witches. Naive drama and naive romance, of course, also
interpenetrate. What naive drama dramatizes is usually some kind
of romance, and the close relation of romance to ritual can be seen
in the number of medieval romances that are linked to some part
of the calendar, the winter solstice, a May morning, or a saint's
eve; or else to some class ritual like the tournament. The fact that
the archetype is primarily a communicable symbol largely accounts
for the ease with which ballads and folk tales and mimes travel
through the world, like so many of their heroes, over all barriers
of language and culture. We come back here to the fact that litera-
107
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ture most deeply influenced by the archetypal phase of symbolism
impresses us as primitive and popular.
By these words I mean possessing the ability to communicate
in time and space respectively. Otherwise they mean much the
same thing. Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the culti
vated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience
as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the
softer lighting of "quaint," and cultivated people become inter
ested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the
primitive. This sense of the archaic recurs whenever we find great
art using popular forms, as Shakespeare does in his last period, or
as the Bible does when it ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in dis
tress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city
glittering with jewels. Archaism is a regular feature of all social
uses of archetypes. Soviet Russia is very proud of its production of
tractors, but it will be some time before the tractor replaces the
sickle on the Soviet flag.
It is at this point that we must notice and avoid the fallacy of a
theory of mythological contract. That is, there may be such a thing
as a social contract in political theory, if we keep the discussion to
observable facts about the present structure of society. But when
these facts are attached to a fable about something that happened
in a past too remote for any evidence to disturb the fabler's as
sertions, and we are told that once upon a time men surrendered
or delegated or were tricked into surrendering their power, political
theory has merely become one of Plato's indoctrinating lies. And
because the only evidence for this remote event is its analogy to
the present facts, the present facts are being compared with their
own shadows. A precisely similar fabling process has taken place
in the literary criticism concerned with myth, which has hardly
yet emerged from its historical contract stage.
As the archetypal critic is concerned with ritual and dream, it is
likely that he would find much of interest in the work done by
contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psy
chology in dreams. Specifically, the work done on the ritual basis
of naive drama in Frazer's Golden Bough, and the work done on
the dream basis of naive romance by Jung and the Jungians, are
of most direct value to him. But the three subjects of anthropology,
psychology, and literary criticism are not yet clearly separated, and
the danger of determinism has to be carefully watched. To the
108
THEORY OF SYMBOLS
literary critic, ritual is the content of dramatic action, not the source
or origin of it. The Golden Bough is, from the point of view of
literary criticism, an essay on the ritual content of naive drama:
that is, it reconstructs an archetypal ritual from which the struc
tural and generic principles of drama may be logically, not chrono
logically, derived. It does not matter two pins to the literary critic
whether such a ritual had any historical existence or not. It'is very
probable that Frazer's hypothetical ritual would have many and
striking analogies to actual rituals, and collecting such analogies
is part of his argument. But an analogy is not necessarily a source,
an influence, a cause, or an embryonic form, much less an identity.
The literary relation of ritual to drama, like that of any other aspect
of human action to drama, is a relation of content to form only,
not one of source to derivation.
The critic, therefore, is concerned only with the ritual or dream
patterns which are actually in what he is studying, however they
got there. The work of the Classical scholars who have followed
Frazer's lead has produced a general theory of the spectacular or
ritual content of Greek drama. The Golden Bough purports to be
a work of anthropology, but it has had more influence on literary
criticism than in its own alleged field, and it may yet prove to be
really a work of literary criticism. If the ritual pattern is in the
plays and it is fact, not opinion, that one of the main themes of
Iphigeneia in Tauris, for example, is human sacrificethe critic
need not take sides in the quite separate historical controversy
over the ritual origin of Greek drama. Hence ritual, as the content
of action, and more particularly of dramatic action, is something
continuously latent in the order of words, and is quite independent
of direct influence. Even in the nineteenth century, we find that
the instant drama becomes primitive and popular, as it does in
The Mikado, to repeat an example given before, back comes all
Frazer's apparatus, the king's son, the mock sacrifice, the analogy
with the festival of the Sacaea, and many other things that Gilbert
knew and cared nothing about. It comes back because it is still
the best way of holding an audience's attention, and the experi
enced dramatist knows it.
The prestige of documentary criticism, which deals entirely with
sources and historical transmission, has misled some archetypal
critics into feeling that all such ritual elements ought to be traced
directly, like the lineage of royalty, as far back as a willing sus-
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pension of disbelief will allow. The vast chronological gaps result
ing are usually bridged by some theory of race memory, or by
some conspiratorial conception of history involving secrets jealously
guarded for centuries by esoteric cults or traditions. It is curious
that when archetypal critics hang on to a historical framework
they almost invariably produce some hypothesis of continuous de
generation from a golden age lost in antiquity. Thus the prelude
to Thomas Mann's Joseph series traces back several of our central
myths to Atlantis, Atlantis being clearly more useful as an arche
typal idea than as a historical one. When archetypal criticism re
vived in the nineteenth century with a vogue for sun myths, an
attempt was made to ridicule it by proving with equal plausibility
that Napoleon was a sun myth. The ridicule is effective only
against the historical distortion of the method. Archetypally, we
turn Napoleon into a sun myth whenever we speak of the rise of
his career, the zenith of his fame, or the eclipse of his fortunes.
Social and cultural history, which is anthropology in an ex
tended sense, will always be a part of the context of criticism, and
the more clearly the anthropological and the critical treatments of
ritual are distinguished, the more beneficial their influence on
each other will be. The same is true of the relation of psychology
to criticism. The first and most striking unit of poetry larger than
the individual poem is the total work of the man who wrote the
poem. Biography will always be a part of criticism, and the biog
rapher will naturally be interested in his subject's poetry as a per
sonal document, recording his private dreams, associations, ambi
tions, and expressed or repressed desires. Studies of such matters
form an essential part of criticism. I am not of course speaking
of the silly ones, which simply project the author's own erotica,
in a rationalized clinical disguise, on his victim, but only of the
serious studies which are technically competent both in psychology
and in criticism, which are aware how much guesswork is involved
and how tentative all the conclusions must be.
Such an approach is easiest, and most rewarding, with what we
have called thematic writers of the low mimetic that is, chiefly,
the Romantic poets, where the poet's own psychological processes
are often part of the theme. With other writers, say a dramatist
who is aware from the first word he writes that "They who live
to please must please to live," there is danger of making an unreal
abstraction of the poet from his literary community. Suppose a
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
critic finds that a certain pattern is repeated time and again in the
plays of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is unique or anomalous, or
even exceptional, in using this pattern, the reason for his use of it
may be at least partly psychological. If there were any evidence
that he had persisted in using it when it failed to please an audi
ence, the probability of a personal psychological element would be
very high. But if we can find the same pattern in half a dozen of
his contemporaries, we clearly have to allow for convention. And
if we find it in a dozen dramatists of different ages and cultures,
we have to allow for genre, for the structural requirements of
drama itself. Now as a matter of fact we do find in Shakespeare's
comedies that the same devices are used over and over, and it is
the business of the literary critic to compare these devices with
those of other dramatists, in a morphological study of comic form.
Otherwise we shall deprive ourselves of the perfectly legitimate
appreciation of the scholarly qualities of Shakespeare, of seeing in
the repeated devices of his comedies a kind of Art of Fugue of
comedy.
A psychologist examining a poem will tend to see in it what
he sees in the dream, a mixture of latent and manifest content
For the literary critic the manifest content of the poem is its form,
hence its latent content becomes simply its actual content, its
dianoia or theme. And this dutnoia on the archetypal level is a
dream, a presentation of the conflict of desire and actuality. We
seem to be going around in a circle, but not quite. For the critic,
a problem appears which does not exist for a purely psychological
analysis, the problem of communicable latent content, of intel
ligible dream, Plato's conception of art as a dream for awakened
minds. For the psychologist all dream symbols are private ones,
interpreted by the personal life of the dreamer. For the critic there
is no such thing as private symbolism, or, if there is, it is his job
to make sure that it does not remain so.
This problem is already present in Freud's treatment of Oedipus
Tyrannus as a play which owes much of its power to the fact that
it dramatizes the Oedipus complex. The dramatic and psychological
elements can be linked without any reference to the personal life
of Sophocles, of which we know nothing whatever, This emphasis
on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school,
where the communicabflity of archetypes is accounted for by a
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theory of a collective unconscious an unnecessary hypothesis in
literary criticism, so far as I can judge.
What we have found to be true of the writer's intention is also
true of the audience's attention. Both are centripetally directed,
and implications exist in the response to art as they do in the
creation of it, implications of which the audience is not explicitly
aware. Discrete conscious awareness can take in only a very few
details of the complex of response. This state of things enabled
Tennyson, for instance, to be praised for the chastity of his lan
guage and read for his powerful erotic sensuousness. It also makes
it possible for a contemporary critic to draw on the fullest resources
of modern knowledge in explicating a work of art without any real
fear of anachronism.
For instance, Le Malade Imagmaire is a play about a man who,
in seventeenth-century terms, including no doubt Molire's own
terms, was not really sick but just thought he was. A modern critic
might object that life is not so simple: that it is perfectly possible
for a malade imaginaire to be a malade veritable, and that what is
wrong with Argan is clearly an unwillingness to see his children
grow up, an infantile regression which his wife his second wife,
incidentally shows that she understands completely by coddling
him and murmuring such phrases as "pauvre petit fils." Such a
critic would find the clue to Argan's whole behavior in his unguarded
remark after the scene with the little girl Louison (the erotic nature
of which the critic would also notice): "II n'y a plus d'enfants."
Now whether this reading is right or wrong, it does not swerve
from Molire's text, yet it tells us nothing about Molire himself.
The play is generically a comedy; it must therefore end happily;
Argan must therefore be brought to see some reason; his wife,
whose dramatic function it is to keep him within his obsession,
must therefore be "exposed" as inimical to him. The plot is a ritual
moving toward a scapegoat rejection followed by a marriage, and
the theme is a dream-pattern of irrational desire in conflict with
reality.
Another essay in this book will be concerned with the details
and practice of archetypal criticism: here we are concerned only
with its place in the context of criticism as a whole. In its arche
typal aspect, art is a part of civilization, and civilization we defined
as the process of making a human form out of nature. The shape
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of this human form is revealed by civilization itself as it develops:
its major components are the city, the garden, the farm, the sheep
fold, and the like, as well as human society itself. An archetypal
symbol is usually a natural object with a human meaning, and it
forms part of the critical view of art as a civilized product, a vision
of the goals of human work.
Such a vision is bound to idealize some aspects of civilization
and ridicule or ignore others; in other words the social context of
art is also the moral context. All artists have to come to terms with
their communities: many artists, and many great ones, are content
to be the spokesmen of them. But in terms of his moral significance,
the poet reflects, and follows at a distance, what his community
really achieves through its work. Hence the moral view of the
artist is invariably that he ought to assist the work of his society by
framing workable hypotheses, imitating human action and thought
in such a way as to suggest realizable modes of both. If he does
not do this, his hypotheses should at least be clearly labelled as
playful or fantastic. Marxism takes more or less this view of art,
and thereby repeats the argument reached at the end of the Re
public. We are told there, if we follow the argument simply as it
stands, that according to justice, or social work properly done, the
painter's bed is an external imitation of the craftsman's bed. The
artist, therefore, is confined either to reflecting or to escaping from
the world that the true worker is realizing.
We have adopted the principle in this essay that the events and
ideas of poetry are hypothetical imitations of history and discursive
writing respectively, which in their turn are verbal imitations of
action and thought. This principle brings us close to the view of
poetry as a secondary imitation of reality. We are interpreting
mimesis, however, not as a Platonic "recollection" but as an
emancipation of externality into image, nature into art. From
this point of view the work of art must be its own object: it cannot
be ultimately descriptive of something, and can never be ultimately
related to any other system of phenomena, standards, values, or
final causes. All such external relations form part of the "inten
tional fallacy." Poetry is a vehicle for morality, truth, and beauty,
but the poet does not aim at these things, but only at inner verbal
strength. The poet qua poet intends only to write a poem, and
as a rule it is not the artist, but the ego in the artist, who turns
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away from his proper work to go and chase these other seductive
marshlights.
It is an elementary axiom in criticism that morally the lion lies
down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen,
The Miller's Tde and The Second Nun's Tale, are all equally
elements of a liberal education, and the only moral criterion to be
applied to them is that of decorum. Similarly, the moral attitude
taken by the poet in his work derives largely from the structure
of that work. Thus the fact that Le Mdade Imaginaire is a comedy
is the only reason for making Argan's wife a hypocriteshe must
be got rid of to make the play end happily.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than
the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temp
tation to the ego. Beauty, like truth and goodness, is a quality that
may in one sense be predicated of all great art, but the deliberate
attempt to beautify can, in itself, only weaken the creative energy.
Beauty in art is like happiness in morals: it may accompany the
act, but it cannot be the goal of the act, just as one cannot "pursue
happiness," but only something else that may give happiness. Aim
ing at beauty produces, at best, the attractive: the quality of beauty
represented by the word loveliness, a quality which depends on a
carefully restricted choice of both subject and technique. A re
ligious painter, for instance, can produce this quality only as long
as churches keep commissioning Madonnas: if a church asks for a
Crucifixion he must paint cruelty and horror instead.
When we speak of the human body as "beautiful," we usually
mean the body of someone in good physical condition between
eighteen and about thirty, and if Degas, for example, shows us
pictures of thick-bottomed matrons squatting in hip baths, we
interpret the shock to our propriety as an aesthetic judgement.
Whenever the word beauty means loveliness or attractiveness, as
it is bound to do whenever it is made the intention of art, it be
comes reactionary: it tries to restrict either what the artist may
choose for a subject or the method in which he may choose to treat
it, and it marshals all the forces of prudery to keep him from ex
panding his vision beyond an arid and insipid pseudo-classicism.
Ruskin spoiled many of his finest critical insights with this fallacy;
Tennyson often hampered the vigor of his poetry by it, and in some
of the lesser beauticians of the same period we can see clearly
what the neurotic compulsion to beautify everything leads to. It
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leads to an exaggerated cult of style, a technique of making every
thing in a work of art, even a drama, sound all alike, and like the
author, and like the author at his most impressive. Here again the
vanity of the ego has replaced the honest pride of the craftsman.
The formal or third phase of narrative and meaning, although
it includes the external relations of literature to events and ideas,
nevertheless brings us back ultimately to the aesthetic view of the
work of art as an object of contemplation, a techne designed for
ornament and pleasure rather than use. This view encourages us
to separate aesthetic objects from other kinds of artifacts and to
postulate an aesthetic experience different in kind from other
experiences. Corresponding to the bibliographical view of litera
ture as the aggregate or pile of all the books and plays and poems
that have been written, we find the aesthetic view of criticism as a
discrete series of special (sometimes vaguely sacramental) appre
hensions. There is no reason for not granting this view of literary
experience its own validity; one objects to it only when it excludes
other approaches.
The archetypal view of literature shows us literature as a total
form and literary experience as a part of the continuum of life,
in which one of the poet's functions is to visualize the goals of
human work. As soon as we add this approach to the other three,
literature becomes an ethical instrument, and we pass beyond
Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" dilemma between aesthetic idolatry
and ethical freedom, without any temptation to dispose of the
arts in the process. Hence the importance, after accepting the
validity of this view of literature, of rejecting the external goals of
morality, beauty, and truth. The fact that they are external makes
them ultimately idolatrous, and so demonic. But if no social, moral,
or aesthetic standard is in the long run externally determinative of
the value of art, it follows that the archetypal phase, in which art
is part of civilization, cannot be the ultimate one. We need still
another phase where we can pass from civilization, where poetry
is still useful and functional, to culture, where it is disinterested
and liberal, and stands on its own feet.
ANAGOGIC PHASE; SYMBOL AS MONAD
In tracing the different phases of literary symbolism, we have
been going up a sequence parallel to that of medieval criticism.
We have, it is true, established a different meaning for the word
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
"literal." It is our second or descriptive level that corresponds to
the historical or literal one of the medieval scheme, or at any rate
of Dante's version of it Our third level, the level of commentary
and interpretation, is the second or allegorical level of the Middle
Ages. Our fourth level, the study of myths, and of poetry as a
technique of social communication, is the third medieval level
of moral and tropological meaning, concerned at once with the
social and the figurative aspect of meaning. The medieval dis
tinction between the allegorical as what one believes (quid credas)
and the moral as what one does (quid Qgds} is also reflected in our
conception of the formal phase as aesthetic or speculative and the
archetypal phase as social and part of the continuum of work. We
have now to see if we can establish a modern parallel to the medieval
conception of anagogy or universal meaning.
Again, the reader may have noticed a parallelism gradually
shaping up between the five modes of our first essay and the phases
of symbolism in this one. Literal meaning, as we expounded it, has
much to do with the techniques of thematic irony introduced by
symbolisme, and with the view of many of the "new" critics that
poetry is primarily (i.e., literally) an ironic structure. Descriptive
symbolism, shown at its most uncompromising in the documentary
naturalism of the nineteenth century, seems to bear a close con
nection with the low mimetic, and formal symbolism, most easily
studied in Renaissance and neo-Classical writers, with the high
mimetic. Archetypal criticism seems to find its center of gravity
in the mode of romance, when the interchange of ballads, folk
tales, and popular stories was at its easiest. If the parallel holds,
then, the last phase of symbolism will still be concerned, as the
previous one was, with the mythopoeic aspect of literature, but
with myth in its narrower and more technical sense of fictions and
themes relating to divine or quasi-divine beings and powers.
We have associated archetypes and myths particularly with
primitive and popular literature. In fact we could almost define
popular literature, admittedly in a rather circular way, as literature
which affords an unobstructed view of archetypes. We can find this
quality on every level of literature: in fairy tales and folk tales, in
Shakespeare (in most of the comedies), in the Bible (which would
still be a popular book if it were not a sacred one), in Bunyan, in
Richardson, in Dickens, in Poe, and of course in a vast amount
of ephemeral rubbish as well. We began this book by remarking
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that we cannot correlate popularity and value. But there is still
the danger of reduction, or assuming that literature is essentially
primitive and popular. This view had a great vogue in the nine
teenth century, and is by no means dead yet, but if we were to
adopt it we should cut off a third and most important source of
supply for archetypal criticism.
We notice that many learned and recondite writers whose work
requires patient study are explicitly mythopoeic writers. Instances
include Dante and Spenser, and in the twentieth century embrace
nearly all the "difficult" writers in both poetry and prose. Such
work, when fictional, is often founded on a basis of naive drama
(Faust, Peer Gynt) or naive romance (Hawthorne, Melville: one
may compare the sophisticated allegories of Charles Williams and
C. S. Lewis in our day, which are largely based on the formulas
of the Boy's Own Paper). Learned mythopoeia, as we have it in
the last period of Henry James and in James Joyce, for example,
may become bewilderingly complex; but the complexities are de
signed to reveal and not to disguise the myth. We cannot assume
that a primitive and popular myth has been swathed like a mummy
in elaborate verbiage, which is the assumption that the fallacy of
reduction would lead to. The inference seems to be that the learned
and the subtle, like the primitive and the popular, tend toward a
center of imaginative experience.
Knowing that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early Shake
speare comedy and The Winter's Tale a late one, the student would
expect the later play to be more subtle and complex; he might not
expect it to be more archaic and primitive, more suggestive of
ancient myths and rituals. The later play is also more popular,
though not popular of course in the sense of giving a lower-middle
class audience what it thinks it wants. As a result of expressing the
inner forms of drama with increasing force and intensity, Shake
speare arrived in his last period at the bedrock of drama, the ro
mantic spectacle out of which all the more specialized forms of
drama, such as tragedy and social comedy, have come, and to which
they recurrently return. In the greatest moments of Dante and
Shakespeare, in, say The Tempest or the climax of the Pwgatorio,
we have a feeling of converging significance, the feeling that here
we are close to seeing what our whole literary experience has been
about, the feeling that we have moved into the stiH center of tfae
order of words. Criticism as knowledge, the criticism which is
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
compelled to keep on talking about the subject, recognizes the
fact that there is a center of the order of words.
Unless there is such a center, there is nothing to prevent the
analogies supplied by convention and genre from being an endless
series of free associations, perhaps suggestive, perhaps even tantaliz
ing, but never creating a real structure. The study of archetypes
is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole. If there are such
things as archetypes at all, then, we have to take yet another step,
and conceive the possibility of a self-contained literary universe.
Either archetypal criticism is a will-o'-the-wisp, an endless laby
rinth without an outlet, or we have to assume that literature is a
total form, and not simply the name given to the aggregate of
existing literary works. We spoke before of the mythical view
of literature as leading to the conception of an order of nature as
a whole being imitated by a corresponding order of words,
If archetypes are communicable symbols, and there is a center
of archetypes, we should expect to find, at that center, a group of
universal symbols. I do not mean by this phrase that there is any
archetypal code book which has been memorized by all human
societies without exception. I mean that some symbols are images
of things common to all men, and therefore have a communicable
power which is potentially unlimited. Such symbols include those
of food and drink, of the quest or journey, of light and darkness,
and of sexual fulfilment, which would usually take the form of
marriage. It is inadvisable to assume that an Adonis or Oedipus
myth is universal, or that certain associations, such as the serpent
with the phallus, are universal, because when we discover a group
of people who know nothing of such matters we must assume that
they did know and have forgotten, or do know and won't tell, or
are not members of the human race. On the other hand, they may
be confidently excluded from the human race if they cannot un
derstand the conception of food, and so any symbolism founded on
food is universal in the sense of having an indefinitely extensive
scope. That is, there are no limits to its intelligibility.
In the archetypal phase the work of literary art is a myth, and
unites the ritual and the dream. By doing so it limits the dream: it
makes it plausible and acceptable to a social waking consciousness.
Thus as a moral fact in civilization, literature embodies a good
deal of the spirit which in the dream itself is called the censor.
But the censor stands in the way of the impetus of the dream.
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When we look at the dream as a whole, we notice three things
about it. First, its limits are not the real, but the conceivable. Sec
ond, the limit of the conceivable is the world of fulfilled desire
emancipated from all anxieties and frustrations. Third, the uni
verse of the dream is entirely within the mind of the dreamer.
In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of
man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the
circumference and not at the center of its reality. We see here the
completion of the imaginative revolution begun when we passed
from the descriptive to the formal phase of symbolism. There, the
imitation of nature shifted from a reflection of external nature to
a formal organization of which nature was the content. But in the
formal phase the poem is still contained by nature, and in the
archetypal phase the whole of poetry is still contained within the
limits of the natural, or plausible. When we pass into anagogy,
nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and
the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest,
the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs
inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is
now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out
of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or
imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence
apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative
conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and
eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human
than to being inanimate. "The desire of man being infinite," said
Blake, "the possession is infinite and himself infinite/' If Blake is
thought a prejudiced witness on this point, we may cite Hooker:
"That there is somewhat higher than either of these two (sensual
and intellectual perfection), no other proof doth need than the
very process of man's desire, which being natural should be frus
trate, if there were not some farther thing wherein it might rest at
the length contented, which in the former it cannot do."
If we turn to ritual, we see there an imitation of nature which
has a strong element of what we call magic in it. Magic seems to
begin as something of a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport
with the natural cycle. This sense of a deliberate recapturing of
something no longer possessed is a distinctive mark of human
ritual. Ritual constructs a calendar and endeavors to imitate the
precise and sensitive accuracy of the movements of the heavenly
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
bodies and the response of vegetation to them. A farmer must
harvest his crop at a certain time of the year, but because he must
do this anyway, harvesting itself is not precisely a ritual. It is the
expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at
that time which produces the harvest songs, harvest sacrifices, and
harvest folk customs that we associate with ritual. But the impetus
of the magical element in ritual is clearly toward a universe in
which a stupid and indifferent nature is no longer the container
of human society, but is contained by that society, and must rain
or shine at the pleasure of man. We notice too the tendency of
ritual to become not only cyclical but encyclopaedic, as already
noted. In its anagogic phase, then, poetry imitates human action
as total ritual, and so imitates the action of an omnipotent human
society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.
Anagogically, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social
action, with total dream, or unlimited individual thought. Its uni
verse is infinite and boundless hypothesis: it cannot be contained
within any actual civilization or set of moral values, for the same
reason that no structure of imagery can be restricted to one al
legorical interpretation. Here the dianoia of art is no longer a mi
mesis Zogou, but the Logos, the shaping word which is both
reason and, as Goethe's Faust speculated, praxis or creative act.
The ethos of art is no longer a group of characters within a natural
setting, but a universal man who is also a divine being, or a divine
being conceived in anthropomorphic terms.
The form of literature most deeply influenced by the anagogic
phase is the scripture or apocalyptic revelation. The god, whether
traditional deity, glorified hero, or apotheosized poet, is the central
image that poetry uses in trying to convey the sense of unlimited
power in a humanized form. Many of these scriptures are docu
ments of religion as well, and hence are a mixture of the imaginative
and the existential. When they lose their existential content they
become purely imaginative, as Classical mythology did after the
rise of Christianity. They belong in general, of course, to the
mythical or theogonic mode. We see the relation to anagogy also
in the vast encyclopaedic structure of poetry that seems to be a
whole world in itself, that stands in its culture as an inexhaustible
storehouse of imaginative suggestion, and seems, like theories of
gravitation or relativity in the physical universe, to be applicable
to, or have analogous connections with, every part of the literary
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universe. Such works are definitive myths, or complete organiza
tions of archetypes. They include what in the previous essay we
called analogies of revelation: the epics of Dante and Milton and
their counterparts in the other modes.
But the anagogic perspective is not to be confined only to works
that seern to take in everything, for the principle of anagogy is not
simply that everything is the subject of poetry, but that anything
may be the subject of a poem. The sense of the infinitely varied
unity of poetry may come, not only explicitly from an apocalyptic
epic, but implicitly from any poem. We said that we could get a
whole liberal education by picking up one conventional poem,
Lycidas for example, and following its archetypes through litera
ture. Thus the center of the literary universe is whatever poem we
happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears
as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the
total order of words. Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad,
all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal
symbol which is, as dianoid, the Logos, and, as mythos, total creative
act. It is this conception which Joyce expresses, in terms of subject-
matter, as "epiphany," and Hopkins, in terms of form, as "inscape."
If we look at Lycidas anagogically, for example, we see that the
subject of the elegy has been identified with a god who personifies
both the sun that falls into the western ocean at night and the
vegetable life that dies in the autumn. In the latter aspect Lycidas
is the Adonis or Tammuz whose "annual wound," as Milton calls it
elsewhere, was the subject of a ritual lament in Mediterranean
religion, and has been incorporated in the pastoral elegy since
Theocritus, as the title of Shelley's Adonais shows more clearly. As
a poet, Lycidas's archetype is Orpheus, who also died young, in
much the same role as Adonis, and was flung into the water. As
priest, his archetype is Peter, who would have drowned on the
"Galilean lake" without the help of Christ. Each aspect of Lycidas
poses the question of premature death as it relates to the life of
man, of poetry, and of the Church. But all of these aspects are
contained within the figure of Christ, the young dying god who
is eternally alive, the Word that contains all poetry, the head and
body of the Church, the good Shepherd whose pastoral world sees
no winter, the Sun of righteousness that never sets, whose power
can raise Lycidas, like Peter, out of the waves, as it redeems sotds
from the lower world, which Orpheus failed to do. Christ does not
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
enter the poem as a character, but he pervades every line of it so
completely that the poem, so to speak, enters him.
Anagogic criticism is usually found in direct connection with
religion, and is to be discovered chiefly in the more uninhibited
utterances of poets themselves. It comes out in those passages of
Eliot's quartets where the words of the poet are placed within
the context of the incarnate Word. An even clearer statement is
in a letter of Rilke, where he speaks of the function of the poet as
revealing a perspective of reality like that of an angel, containing
all time and space, who is blind and looking into himself. Rilke's
angel is a modification of the more usual god or Christ, and his
statement is all the more valuable because it is explicitly not Chris
tian, and illustrates the independence of the anagogic perspective,
of the poet's attempt to speak from the circumference instead of
from the center of reality, from the acceptance of any specific re
ligion. Similar views are expressed or implied in Valry's conception
of a total intelligence which appears more fancifully in his figure
of M. Teste; in Yeats's cryptic utterances about the artifice of eter
nity, and, in The Tower and elsewhere, about man as the creator
of all creation as well as of both life and death; in Joyce's non-
theological use of the theological term epiphany; in Dylan Thomas's
exultant hymns to a universal human body. We may note in passing
that the more sharply we distinguish the poetic and the critical
functions, the easier it is for us to take seriously what great writers
have said about their work.
The anagogic view of criticism thus leads to the conception of
literature as existing in its own universe, no longer a commentary
on life or reality, but containing life and reality in a system of
verbal relationships. From this point of view the critic can no longer
think of literature as a tiny palace of art looking out upon an in
conceivably gigantic "life." "Life" for him has become the seed-plot
of literature, a vast mass of potential literary forms, only a few
of which will grow up into the greater world of the literary universe.
Similar universes exist for all the arts. "We make to ourselves
pictures of facts/' says Wittgenstein, but by pictures he means
representative illustrations, which are not pictures. Pictures as pic
tures are themselves facts, and exist only in a pictorial universe.
"Tout, au monde," says Mallarm6, "existe pour aboutir a un livre."
So far we have been dealing with symbols as isolated units, but
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
clearly the unit of relationship between two symbols, corresponding
to the phrase in music, is of equal importance. The testimony of
critics from Aristotle on seems fairly unanimous that this unit of
relationship is the metaphor. And the metaphor, in its radical form,
is a statement of identity of the "A is B" type, or rather, putting it
into its proper hypothetical form, of the "let X be Y" type (letters
altered for euphony). Thus the metaphor turns its back on ordinary
descriptive meaning, and presents a structure which literally is
ironic and paradoxical. In ordinary descriptive meaning, if A is B
then B is A, and all we have really said is that A is itself. In the
metaphor two things are identified while each retains its own
form. Thus if we say "the hero was a lion" we identify the hero
with the lion, while at the same time both the hero and the lion
are identified as themselves. A work of literary art owes its unity to
this process of identification with, and its variety, clarity, and in
tensity to identification as.
On the literal level of meaning, metaphor appears in its literal
shape, which is simple juxtaposition. Ezra Pound, in explaining
this aspect of metaphor, uses the illustrative figure of the Chinese
ideogram, which expresses a complex image by throwing a group
of elements together without predication. In Pound's famous black
board example of such a metaphor, the two-line poem "In a Sta
tion of the Metro/' the images of the faces in the crowd and the
petals on the black bough are juxtaposed with no predicate of any
kind connecting them. Predication belongs to assertion and descrip
tive meaning, not to the literal structure of poetry.
On the descriptive level we have the double perspective of the
verbal structure and the phenomena to which it is related. Here
meaning is "literal" in the common sense which we explained
would not do for criticism, an unambiguous alignment of words
and facts. Descriptively, then, all metaphors are similes. When we
are writing ordinary discursive prose and use a metaphor, we are
not asserting that A is B; we are "really" saying that A is in some
respects comparable with B; and similarly when we are extracting
the descriptive or paraphrasable meaning of a poem. "The hero
was a lion," then, on the descriptive level, is a simile with the word
"like" omitted for greater vividness, and to show more clearly that
the analogy is only a hypothetical one. In Whitman's poern Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, we find shadows "twining and twist
ing as if they were alive," and the moon swollen "as if with tears."
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
As there is no poetic reason why shadows should not be alive or the
moon tearful, we may perhaps see in the cautious "as if" the work
ing of a low mimetic discursive prose conscience.
On the formal level, where symbols are images or natural phe
nomena conceived as matter or content, the metaphor is an analogy
of natural proportion. Literally, metaphor is juxtaposition; we say
simply "A; B." Descriptively, we say "A is (like) B." But formally
we say "A is as B." An analogy of proportion thus requires four
terms, of which two have a common factor. Thus "the hero was a
lion" means, as a form of expression which has nature for its in
ternal content, that the hero is to human courage as the lion is to
animal courage, courage being the factor common to the third and
fourth terms.
Archetypally, where the symbol is an associative cluster, the
metaphor unites two individual images, each of which is a specific
representative of a class or genus. The rose in Dante's Paradise and
the rose in Yeats's early lyrics are identified with different things,
but both stand for all roses all poetic roses, of course, not all
botanical ones. Archetypal metaphor thus involves the use of what
has been called the concrete universal, the individual identified
with its class, Wordsworth's "tree of many one." Of course there
are no real universals in poetry, only poetic ones. All four of these
aspects of metaphor are recognized in Aristotle's discussion of met
aphor in the Poetics, though sometimes very briefly and elliptically.
In the anagogic aspect of meaning, the radical form of metaphor,
"A is B," comes into its own. Here we are dealing with poetry in
its totality, in which the formula "A is B" may be hypothetically
applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even "black is
white," which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance.
The literary universe, therefore, is a universe in which everything
is potentially identical with everything else. This does not mean
that any two things in it are separate and very similar, like peas in
a pod, or in the slangy and erroneous sense of the word in which
we speak of identical twins. If twins were really identical they would
be the same person. On the other hand, a grown man feels identical
with himself at the age of seven, although the two manifestations
of this identity, the man and the boy, have very little in common
as regards similarity or likeness. In form, matter, personality, time,
and space, man and boy are quite unlike. This is the only type of
image I can think of that illustrates the process of identifying two
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
independent forms. All poetry, then, proceeds as though all poetic
images were contained within a single universal body. Identity is
the opposite of similarity or likeness, and total identity is not uni
formity, still less monotony, but a unity of various things.
Finally, identification belongs not only to the structure of poetry,
but to the structure of criticism as well, at least of commentary.
Interpretation proceeds by metaphor as well as creation, and even
more explicitly. When St. Paul interprets the story of Abraham's
wives in Genesis, for instance, he says that Hagar "is" Mount Sinai
in Arabia. Poetry, said Coleridge, is the identity of knowledge.
The universe of poetry, however, is a literary universe, and not
a separate existential universe. Apocalypse means revelation, and
when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals. But it reveals only on its
own terms, and in its own forms: it does not describe or represent
a separate content of revelation. When poet and critic pass from
the archetypal to the anagogic phase, they enter a phase of which
only religion, or something as infinite in its range as religion, can
possibly form an external goal. The poetic imagination, unless it
disciplines itself in the particular way in which the imaginations
of Hardy and Housman were disciplined, is apt to get claustro
phobia when it is allowed to talk only about human nature and
subhuman nature; and poets are happier as servants of religion than
of politics, because the transcendental and apocalyptic perspec
tive of religion comes as a tremendous emancipation of the im
aginative mind. If men were compelled to make the melancholy
choice between atheism and superstition, the scientist, as Bacon
pointed out long ago, would be compelled to choose atheism, but
the poet would be compelled to choose superstition, for even super
stition, by its very confusion of values, gives his imagination more
scope than a dogmatic denial of imaginative infinity does. But the
loftiest religion, no less than the grossest superstition, comes to the
poet, qua poet, only as the spirits came to Yeats, to give him meta
phors for poetry.
The study of literature takes us toward seeing poetry as the imi
tation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the
mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is
all words. About this man and word we can, speaking as critics,
say only one thing ontologically: we have no reason to suppose
either that they exist or that they do not exist. We can call them
divine if by divine we mean the unlimited or projected human.
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SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
But the critic, qua critic, has nothing to say for or against the
affirmations that a religion makes out of these conceptions. If
Christianity wishes to identify the infinite Word and Man of the
literary universe with the Word of God, the person of Christ, the
historical Jesus, the Bible or church dogma, these identifications
may be accepted by any poet or critic without injury to his work
the acceptance may even clarify and intensify his work, depending
on his temperament and situation. But they can never be accepted
by poetry as a whole, or by criticism as such. The literary critic,
like the historian, is compelled to treat every religion in the same
way that religions treat each other, as though it were a human
hypothesis, whatever else he may in other contexts believe it to be.
The discussion of the universal Word at the opening of the
Chhandogya Upanishad (where it is symbolized by the sacred
word "Aum") is exactly as relevant and as irrelevant to literary
criticism as the discussion at the opening of the Fourth Gospel.
Coleridge was right in thinking that the "Logos" was the goal of
his work as a critic, but not right in thinking that his poetic Logos
would so inevitably be absorbed into Christ as to make literary
criticism a kind of natural theology.
The total Logos of criticism by itself can never become an
object of faith or an ontological personality. The conception of a
total Word is the postulate that there is such a thing as an order
of words, and that the criticism which studies it makes, or could
make, complete sense. Aristotle's Physics leads to the conception
of an unmoved first mover at the circumference of the physical
universe. This, in itself, means essentially that physics has a uni
verse. The systematic study of motion would be impossible unless
all phenomena of motion could be related to unifying principles,
and those in their turn to a total unifying principle of movement
which is not itself merely another phenomenon of motion. If
theology identifies Aristotle's unmoved mover with a creating God,
that is the business of theology; physics as physics will be unaffected
by it. Christian critics may see their total Word as an analogy of
Christ, as medieval critics did, but as literature itself may be ac
companied in culture by any religion, criticism must detach itself
accordingly. In short, the study of literature belongs to the "hu
manities," and the humanities, as their name indicates, can take
only the human view of the superhuman.
The close resemblance between the conceptions of anagogic
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THEORY OF SYMBOLS
criticism and those of religion has led many to assume that they
can only be related by making one supreme and the other sub
ordinate. Those who choose religion, like Coleridge, will, like
him, try to make criticism a natural theology; those who choose
culture, like Arnold, will try to reduce religion to objectified cul
tural myth. But for the purity of each the autonomy of each must
be guaranteed. Culture interposes, between the ordinary and the
religious life, a total vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality
for whatever is excluded from culture by religion or state will
get its revenge somehow. Thus culture's essential service to a re
ligion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in
religion to replace the object of its worship with its present under
standing and forms of approach to that object. Just as no argument
in favor of a religious or political doctrine is of any value unless it
is an intellectually honest argument, and so guarantees the au
tonomy of logic, so no religious or political myth is either valuable
or valid unless it assumes the autonomy of culture, which may be
provisionally defined as the total body of imaginative hypothesis in
a society and its tradition. To defend the autonomy of culture in
this sense seems to me the social task of the "intellectual" in the
modern world: if so, to defend its subordination to a total syn
thesis of any kind, religious or political, would be the authentic
form of the trahison des dercs.
Besides, it is of the essence of imaginative culture that it tran
scends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally
acceptable. The argument that there is no room for poets in any
human society which is an end in itself remains unanswerable
even when the society is the people of God. For religion is also a
social institution, and so far as it is one, it imposes limitations on
the arts just as a Marxist or Platonic state would do. Christian
theology is no less of a revolutionary dialectic, or indissoluble union
of theory and social practice. Religions, in spite of their enlarged
perspective, cannot as social institutions contain an art of un
limited hypothesis. The arts in their turn cannot help releasing
the powerful acids of satire, realism, ribaldry, and fantasy in their
attempt to dissolve all the existential concretions that get in their
way. The artist often enough has to find that, as God says in
Faust, he "muss als Teufel schaffen," which I suppose means
rather more than that he has to work like the devil. Between re-
127
SECOND ESSAY: ETHICAL CRITICISM
ligion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is," there must
always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual
meet at infinity. Nobody wants a poet in the perfect human state,
and, as even the poets tell us, nobody but God himself can tolerate
a poltergeist in the City of God.
128
THIRD ESSAY
Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths
Tkird Essay
ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM: THEORY OF MYTHS
INTRODUCTION
IN THE ART of painting it is easy to see both structural and repre
sentational elements. A picture is normally a picture "of" some
thing: it depicts or illustrates a "subject" made up of things analo
gous to "objects" in sense experience. At the same time there are
present certain elements of pictorial design: what a picture repre
sents is organized into structural patterns and conventions which
are found only in pictures. The words "content" and "form" are
often employed to describe these complementary aspects of paint
ing. "Realism" connotes an emphasis on what the picture repre
sents; stylization, whether primitive or sophisticated, connotes an
emphasis on pictorial structure. Extreme realism of the illusive
or trompe Voeil type is about as far as the painter can go in one
kind of emphasis; abstract, or, more strictly, non-objective painting
is about as far as he can go in the other direction. (The phrase
"non-representational painting" seems to me illogical, a painting
being itself a representation.) The illusive painter however cannot
escape from pictorial conventions, and non-objective painting is
still an imitative art in Aristotle's sense, and so we may say without
much fear of effective contradiction that the whole art of painting
lies within a combination of pictorial "form" or structure and pic
torial "content" or subject.
For some reason the traditions of both practice and theory in
Western painting have weighed down heavily on the imitative
or representational end. Even from Classical painting we have in
herited a numl^er of depressing stories, of birds pecking painted
grapes and the like, suggesting that Greek painters took their
greatest pride in concocting trompe r&il puzzles. The develop
ment of perspective painting in the Renaissance gave a great
prestige to such skills, the suggesting of three dimensions in a two-
dimensional medium being essentially a trompe I'ceil device. An
eavesdropper in a modern art gallery may easily discover the strength
and persistence of the feeling that to achieve recognizable likeness
in a subject, and to make this likeness the primary thing in his
picture, is a moral obligation on the painter. A good deal of the
131
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
freakishness of experimental movements in painting during the
last half-century or so has been due to the energy of its revolt
against the tyranny of the representational fallacy.
An original painter knows, of course, that when the public de
mands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite,
likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with. Hence
when he breaks with these conventions, he is often apt to assert
that he is nothing but an eye, that he merely paints what he sees
as he sees it, and the like. His motive in talking such nonsense is
clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not merely facile
decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real
spatial problems. But this may be freely admitted without agreeing
that the formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an as
sertion which would destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously.
What he has actually done is to obey an obscure but profound
impulse to revolt against the conventions established in his own
day, in order to rediscover convention on a deeper level. By break
ing with the Barbizon school, Manet discovered a deeper affinity
with Goya and Velasquez; by breaking with the impressionists,
Cezanne discovered a deeper affinity with Chardin and Masaccio,
The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional;
it drives him further into convention, obeying the law of the art
itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths,
and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it
works through minor talents for mutation.
Music affords a refreshing contrast to painting in its critical
theory. When perspective was discovered in painting, music might
well have gone in a similar direction, but in fact the development
of representational or "program" music has been severely restricted.
Listeners may still derive pleasure from hearing external sounds
cleverly imitated in music, but no one asserts that a composer is
being a decadent or a charlatan if he fails to produce such imita
tions. Nor is it believed that these imitations are prior in im
portance to the forms of music itself, still less that they constitute
those forms. The result is that the structural principles of music
are clearly understood, and can be taught even to children.
Suppose, for example, that the present book were an introduction
to musical theory instead of poetics. Then we could begin by
isolating, from the range of audible sounds, the interval of the
octave, and explain that the octave is divided into twelve theoreti-
132
THEORY OF MYTHS
cally equal semitones, forming a scale of twelve notes which contains
potentially all the melodies and harmonies that the reader of the
book will ordinarily hear. Then we could abstract the two points
of repose in this scale, the major and minor common chords, and
explain the system of twenty-four interlocking keys and the con
ventions of tonality which require that a piece should normally
open and close in the same key. We could describe the basis of
rhythm as an accentuation of every second or every third beat,
and so on through the whole list of rudiments.
Such an outline would give a rational account of the structure
of Western music from 1600 to 1900, and, in a qualified and more
flexible but not essentially different form, of everything that the
user of the book would be accustomed to call music. If we chose,
we could lock up all the music outside the Western tradition in
the solitary confinement of a prefatory chapter, before we got
down to serious business. Someone might object that the system
of equal temperament, in which C$ and Db are the same note, is
an arbitrary fiction. Another might object that a composer ought
not to be tied down to so rigidly conventionalized a set of musical
elements, and that the resources of expression in music ought to
be as free as the air. A third might object that we are not talking
about music at all: that while the Jupiter Symphony is in C major
and Beethoven's Fifth is in C minor, explaining the difference
between the two keys will give nobody any real notion of the dif
ference between the two symphonies. All these objectors could be
quite safely ignored. Our handbook would not give the reader a
complete musical education, nor would it give an account of music
as it exists in the mind of God or the practice of angels but it
would do for its purposes.
In this book we are attempting to outline a few of the gram
matical rudiments of literary expression, and the elements of it
that correspond to such musical elements as tonality, simple and
compound rhythm, canonical imitation, and the like. The aim is
to give a rational account of some of the structural principles of
Western literature in the context of its Classical and Christian
heritage. We are suggesting that the resources of verbal expression
are limited, if that is the word, by the literary equivalents of rhythm
and key, though that does not mean, any more than it means in
music, that its resources are artistically exhaustible. We doubtless
have objectors similar to those just imagined for music, saying
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
that our categories are artificial, that they do not do justice to the
variety of literature, or that they are not relevant to their own
experiences in reading. However, the question of what the struc
tural principles of literature actually are seems important enough
to discuss; and, as literature is an art of words, it should be at least
as easy to find words to describe them as to find such words as
sonata or fugue in music.
In literature, as in painting, the traditional emphasis in both
practice and theory has been on representation or "lifelikeness."
When, for instance, we pick up a novel of Dickens, our immediate
impulse, a habit fostered in us by all the criticism we know, is to
compare it with "life," whether as lived by us or by Dickens's con
temporaries. Then we meet such characters as Keep or Quilp, and,
as neither we nor the Victorians have ever known anything much
"like" these curious monsters, the method promptly breaks down.
Some readers will complain that Dickens has relapsed into "mere"
caricature (as though caricature were easy); others, more sensibly,
simply give up the criterion of lifelikeness and enjoy the creation
for its own sake.
The structural principles of painting are frequently described in
terms of their analogues in plane geometry (or solid, by a further
reach of analogy). A famous letter of Cezanne speaks of the ap
proximation of pictorial form to the sphere and the cube, and the
practice of abstract painters seems to confirm his point. Geometri
cal shapes are analogous only to pictorial forms, not by any means
identical with them; the real structural principles of painting are
to be derived, not from an external analogy with something else,
but from the internal analogy of the art itself. The structurdprin-
be
of
. But we law in ffie^ first essay that^a? the
modes of fiction move from the mythical to the low mimetic and
ironic, they approach a point of extreme "realism" or representa
tive likeness to life. It follows that the mythical mode, the stories
about gods, in which characters have the greatest possible power of
action, is the most abstract and conventionalized of all literary
modes, just as the corresponding modes in other arts religious
Byzantine painting, for example show the highest degree of styli-
zation in their structure. Hence the structural principles of literature
are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as
THEORY OF MYTHS
those of painting are to geometry. In this essay we shall be using
the symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythol
ogy, as a grammar of literary archetypes.
In the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers, thought to be the
source of the Potiphar's wife story in the Joseph legend, an elder
brother's wife attempts to seduce an unmarried younger brother who
lives with them, and, when he resists her, accuses him of attempting
to rape her. The younger brother is then forced to run away, with
the enraged elder brother in pursuit. So far, the incidents reproduce
more or less credible facts of life. Then the younger brother prays
to Ra for assistance, pleading the justice of his cause; Ra places
a large lake between him and his brother, and, in a burst of divine
exuberance, fills it full of crocodiles. This incident is no more a
fictional episode than anything that has preceded it, nor is it less
logically related than any other episode to the plot as a whole.
But it has given up the external analogy to "life": this, we say,
is the kind of thing that happens only in stories. The Egyptian
tale has acquired, then, in its mythical episode, an abstractly literary
quality; and, as the story-teller could just as easily have solved
his little problem in a more "realistic" way, it appears that literature
in Egypt, like the other arts, preferred a certain degree of stylization.
Similarly, a medieval saint with a huge decorated halo around
his head may look like an old man, but the mythical feature, the
halo, both imparts a more abstract structure to the painting and
gives the saint the kind of appearance that one sees only in pic
tures. In primitive societies, a flourishing development in myth
and folk tale usually accompanies a taste for geometrical ornament
in the plastic arts. In our tradition we have a place for verisimili
tude, for human experience skilfully and consistently imitated.
The occasional hoaxes in which fiction is presented, or even accepted,
as fact, such as Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year or Samuel
Butler's The Fair Haven, correspond to trompe Voeil illusions in
painting. At the other extreme we have myths, or abstract fictional
designs in which gods and other such beings do whatever they
like, which in practice means whatever the story-teller likes. The
return of irony to myth that we noted in the first essay is con
temporary with, and parallel to, abstraction, expressionism, cubism,
and similar efforts in painting to emphasize the self-contained
pictorial structure. Sixty years ago, Bernard Shaw stressed the social
significance of the themes in Ibsen's plays and his own. Today,
'35
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
Mr. Eliot calls our attention to the Alcestis archetype in The
Cocktail Party, to the Ion archetype in The Confidential Clerk. The
former is of the age of Manet and Degas; the latter of the age
of Braque and Graham Sutherland.
We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth,
an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design,
unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience.
In terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at
the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women,
fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man,
or else watch his miseries from the height of their immortal free
dom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of human desire
does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as attained or
attainable by human beings. In terms of meaning or dianoia, myth
is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing
in mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a
structure of imagery with conceptual implications. The world of
mythical imagery is usually represented by the conception of heaven
or Paradise in religion, and it is apocalyptic, in the sense of that
word already explained, a world of total metaphor, in which every
thing is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were
all inside a single infinite body.
Realism, or the art of verisimilitude, evokes the response "How
like that is to what we know!" When what is written is like what
is known, we have an art of extended or implied simile. And as
realism is an art of implicit simile, myth is an art of implicit meta
phorical identity. The word "sun-god/' with a hyphen used in
stead of a predicate, is a pure ideogram, in Pound's terminology, or
literal metaphor, in ours. In myth we see the structural principles
of literature isolated; in realism we see the same structural prin
ciples (not similar ones) fitting into a context of plausibility. (Simi
larly in music, a piece by Purcell and a piece by Benjamin Britten
may not be in the least like each other, but if they are both in D
major their tonality will be the same. ) The presence of a mythical
structure in realistic fiction, however, poses certain technical prob
lems for making it plausible, and the devices used in solving these
problems may be given the general name of displacement.
Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the
other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using that
term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the
THEORY OF MYTHS
tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a
human direction and yet, in contrast to "realism," to convention
alize content in an idealized direction. The central principle of dis
placement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth
can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy,
significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the
like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance
we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun
or trees. In more realistic modes the association becomes less sig
nificant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or ac
cidental, imagery. In the dragon-killing legend of the St. George
and Perseus family, of which more hereafter, a country under an
old feeble king is terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands
the king's daughter, but is slain by the hero. This seems to be a
romantic analogy (perhaps also, in this case, a descendant) of a
myth of a waste land restored to life by a fertility god. In the myth,
then, the dragon and the old king would be identified. We can in
fact concentrate the myth still further into an Oedipus fantasy in
which the hero is not the old king's son-in-law but his son, and
the rescued damsel the hero's mother. If the story were a private
dream such identifications would be made as a matter of course.
But to make it a plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable
story a good deal of displacement is necessary, and it is only after
a comparative study of the story type has been made that the
metaphorical structure within it begins to emerge.
In Hawthorne's The Marble Faun the statue which gives the
story that name is so insistently associated with a character named
Donatello that a reader would have to be unusually dull or inat
tentive to miss the point that Donatello "is" the statue. Later on
we meet a girl named Hilda, of singular purity and gentleness, who
lives in a tower surrounded by doves. The doves are very fond of
her; another character calls her his "dove," and remarks indicating
some special affinity with doves are made about her by both author
and characters. If we were to say that Hilda is a dove-goddess like
Venus, identified with her doves, we should not be reading the
story quite accurately in its own mode; we should be translating
it into straight myth. But to recognize how close Hawthorne is to
myth here is not unfair. That is, we recognize that The Marble
Faun is not a typical low mimetic fiction: it is dominated by an
interest that looks back to fictional romance and forward to the
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
ironic mythical writers of the next century to Kafka, for instance,
or Cocteau. This interest is often called allegory, but probably
Hawthorne himself was right in calling it romance. We can see
how this interest tends toward abstraction in character-drawing,
and if we know no other canons than low mimetic ones, we com
plain of this.
Or, again, we have, in myth, the story of Proserpine, who dis
appears into the underworld for six months of every year. The pure
myth is clearly one of death and revival; the story as we have it
is slightly displaced, but the mythical pattern is easy to see. The
same structural element often recurs in Shakespearean comedy,
where it has to be adapted to a roughly high mimetic level of
credibility. Hero in Much Ado is dead enough to have a funeral
song, and plausible explanations are postponed until after the end
of the play. Imogen in Cymbeline has an assumed name and an
empty grave, but she too gets some funeral obsequies. But the
story of Hermione and Perdita is so close to the Demeter and
Proserpine myth that hardly any serious pretence of plausible ex
planations is made. Hermione, after her disappearance, returns
once as a ghost in a dream, and her coming to life from a statue,
a displacement of the Pygmalion myth, is said to require an awak
ening of faith, even though, on one level of plausibility, she has
not been a statue at all, and nothing has taken place except a
harmless deception. We notice how much more abstractly mythical
a thematic writer can be than a fictional one: Spenser's Florimell,
for instance, disappears under the sea for the winter with no ques
tions asked, leaving a "snowy lady" in her place and returning with
a great outburst of spring floods at the end of the fourth book.
In the low mimetic, we recognize the same structural pattern
of the death and revival of the heroine when Esther Summerson
gets smallpox, or Lorna Doone is shot at her marriage altar. But
we are getting closer to the conventions of realism, and although
Lorna's eyes are "dim with death/' we know that the author does
not really mean death if he is planning to revive her. Here again
it is interesting to compare The Marble Faun, where there is so
much about sculptors and the relation of statues to living people
that we almost expect some kind of denouement like that of The
Winter's Tale. Hilda mysteriously disappears, and during her ab
sence her lover, the sculptor Kenyon, digs out of the earth a
THEORY OF MYTHS
statue that he associates with Hilda, After that Hilda returns, with
a plausible reason eventually assigned for her absence, but not
without some rather pointed and petulant rernarlcs from Hawthorne
himself to the effect that he has no interest in concocting plausible
explanations, and that he wishes his reading public would give him
a bit more freedom. Yet Hawthorne's inhibitions seem to be at
least in part self-imposed, as we can see if we turn to Poe's Ligeia,
where the straight mythical death and revival pattern is given with
out apology. Poe is clearly a more radical abstractionist than Haw
thorne, which is one reason why his influence on our century is
more immediate.
This affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary
illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular
fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and
yet romantic enough to be a "good story," which means a clearly
designed one. The introduction of an omen or portent, or the device
of making a whole story the fulfilment of a prophecy given at the
beginning, is an example. Such a device suggests, in its existential
projection, a conception of ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent
will. Actually, it is a piece of pure literary design, giving the be
ginning some symmetrical relationship with the end, and the only
ineluctable will involved is that of the author. Hence we often find
it even in writers not temperamentally much in sympathy with
the portentous. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the death of the
railway porter in the opening book is accepted by Anna as an omen
for herself. Similarly, if we find portents and omens in Sophocles,
they are there primarily because they fit the structure of his type
of dramatic tragedy, and prove nothing about any clear-cut beliefs
in fate held by either dramatist or audience.
We have, then, three organizations of myths and archetypal
symbols in literature. First, there is undisplaced myth, generally
concerned with gods or demons, and which takes the form of two
contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desira
ble and the other undesirable. These worlds are often identified
with the existential heavens and hells of the religions contemporary
with such literature. These two forms of metaphorical organization
we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively. Second, we
have the general tendency we have called romantic, th tendency
to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely asso-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
ciated with human experience. Third, we have the tendency of
"realism" (my distaste for this inept term is reflected in the quo
tation marks) to throw the emphasis on content and representation
rather than on the shape of the story. Ironic literature begins with
realism and tends toward myth, its mythical patterns being as a
rule more suggestive of the demonic than of the apocalyptic, though
sometimes it simply continues the romantic tradition of stylization.
Hawthorne, Poe, Conrad, Hardy and Virginia Woolf all provide
examples.
In looking at a picture, we may stand close to it and analyze the
details of brush work and palette knife. This corresponds roughly
to the rhetorical analysis of the new critics in literature. At a little
distance back, the design comes into clearer view, and we study
rather the content represented: this is the best distance for realistic
Dutch pictures, for example, where we are in a sense reading the
picture. The further back we go, the more conscious we are of the
organizing design. At a great distance from, say, a Madonna, we
can see nothing but the archetype of the Madonna, a large cen
tripetal blue mass with a contrasting point of interest at its center.
In the criticism of literature, too, we often have to "stand back"
from the poem to see its archetypal organization. If we "stand
back" from Spenser's Mutdbilitie Cantoes, we see a background
of ordered circular light and a sinister black mass thrusting up into
the lower foreground much the same archetypal shape that we
see in the opening of the Book of Job. If we "stand back" from
the beginning of the fifth act of Hamlet, we see a grave opening
on the stage, the hero, his enemy, and the heroine descending into
it, followed by a fatal struggle in the upper world. If we "stand
back" from a realistic novel such as Tolstoy's Resurrection or
Zola's Germinal, we can see the mythopoeic designs indicated by
those titles. Other examples will be given in what follows.
We proceed to give an account first of the structure of imagery,
or dianoid, of the two undisplaced worlds, the apocalyptic and the
demonic, drawing heavily on the Bible, the main source for un
displaced myth in our tradition. Then we go on to the two inter
mediate structures of imagery, and finally to the generic narratives
or mythoi which are these structures of imagery in movement.
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THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (i):
APOCALYPTIC IMAGERY
Let us proceed according to the general scheme of the game of
Twenty Questions, or, if we prefer, of the Great Chain of Being, the
traditional scheme for classifying sense data.
The apocalyptic world, the heaven of religion, presents, in the
first place, the categories of reality in the forms of human desire,
as indicated by the forms they assume under the work of human
civilization. The form imposed by human work and desire on the
vegetable world, for instance, is that of the garden, the farm, the
grove, or the park. The human form of the animal world is a world
of domesticated animals, of which the sheep has a traditional prior-
it)' in both Classical and Christian metaphor. The human form of
the mineral world, the form into which human work transforms
stone, is the city. The city, the garden, and the sheepfold are the or
ganizing metaphors of the Bible and of most Christian symbolism,
and they are brought into complete metaphorical identification in
the book explicitly called the Apocalypse or Revelation, which has
been carefully designed to form an undisplaced mythical conclusion
for the Bible as a whole. From our point of view this means that
the Biblical Apocalypse is our grammar of apocalyptic imagery.
Each of these three categories, the city, the garden, and the
sheepfold, is, by the principle of archetypal metaphor dealt with
in the previous essay, and which we remember is the concrete uni
versal, identical with the others and with each individual within it.
Hence the divine and human worlds are, similarly, identical with
the sheepfold, city and garden, and the social and individual aspects
of each are identical. Thus the apocalyptic world of the Bible
presents the following pattern:
divine world = society of gods = One God
human world = society of men = One Man
animal world = sheepfold = One Lamb
vegetable world = garden or park = One Tree (of Life)
mineral world = city = One Building, Temple,
Stone
The conception "Christ" unites all these categories in identity:
Christ is both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of God,
the tree of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone
141
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
which the builders rejected, and the rebuilt temple which is
identical with his risen body. The religious and poetic identifica
tions differ in intention only, the former being existential and the
latter metaphorical. In medieval criticism the difference was of
little importance, and the word "figura," as applied to the identi
fication of a symbol with Christ, usually implies both kinds.
Now let us expand this pattern a little. In Christianity the con
crete universal is applied to the divine world in the form of the
Trinity. Christianity insists that, whatever dislocations of customary
mental processes may be involved, God is three persons and yet one
God. The conceptions of person and substance represent a few of
the difficulties in extending metaphor to logic. In pure metaphor,
of course, the unity of God could apply to five or seventeen or a
million divine persons as easily as three, and we may find the divine
concrete universal in poetry outside the Trinitarian orbit. When
Zeus remarks, at the beginning of the eighth book of the Iliad,
that he can pull the whole chain of being up into himself when
ever he likes, we can see that for Homer there was some conception
of a double perspective in Olympus, where a group of squabbling
deities may at any time suddenly compose into the form of a single
divine will. In Virgil we first meet a malicious and spoiled Juno,
but the comment of Aeneas to his men a few lines later on, "deus
dabit his quoque finem," indicates that a similar double perspective
existed for him. We may compare perhaps the Book of Job, where
Job and his friends are much too devout for it ever to occur to them
that Job could have suffered so as a result of a half-jocular bet
between God and Satan. There is a sense in which they are right,
and the information given to the reader about Satan in heaven
wrong. Satan is dropped out of the end of the poem, and whatever
rewritings may be responsible for this, it is still difficult to see how
the final enlightenment of Job could ever have returned completely
from the conception of a single divine will to the mood of the open
ing scene.
As for human society, the metaphor that we are all members of
one body has organized most political theory from Plato to our own
day. Milton's "A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge
Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest
man" belongs to a Christianized version of this metaphor, in which,
as in the doctrine of the Trinity, the full metaphorical statement
"Christ is God and Man" is orthodox, and the Arian and Docetic
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THEORY OF MYTHS
statements in terms of simile or likeness condemned as heretical.
Hobbes's Leviathan, with its original frontispiece depicting a num
ber of mannikins inside the body of a single giant, has also some
connection with the same type of identification. Plato's Republic,
in which the reason, will, and desire of the individual appear as the
philosopher-king, guards, and artisans of the state, is also founded
on this metaphor, which in fact we still use whenever we speak of
a group or aggregate of human beings as a "body."
In sexual symbolism, of course, it is still easier to employ the
"one flesh" metaphor of two bodies made into the same body by
love. Donne's The Extasie is one of the many poems organized
on this image, and Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle makes
great play with the outrage done to the "reason" by such identity.
Themes of loyalty, hero-worship, faithful followers, and the like
also employ the same metaphor.
The animal and vegetable worlds are identified with each other,
and with the divine and human worlds as well, in the Christian
doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the essential human forms
of the vegetable world, food and drink, the harvest and the vintage,
the bread and the wine, are the body and blood of the Lamb who
is also Man and God, and in whose body we exist as in a city or
temple. -Here again the orthodox doctrine insists on metaphor as
against simile, and here again the conception of substance illustrates
the struggles of logic to digest the metaphor. It is clear from the
opening of the Lmvs that the symposium had something of the
same communion symbolism for Plato. It would be hard to find a
simpler or more vivid image of human civilization, where man at
tempts to surround nature and put it inside his (social) body, than
the sacramental meal.
The conventional honors accorded the sheep in the animal world
provide us with the central archetype of pastoral imagery, as well as
with such metaphors as "pastor" and "flock" in religion. The met
aphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient
Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the
fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stam
peded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. But
of course in poetry any other animal would do as well if the poet's
audience were prepared for it: at the opening of the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad, for instance, the sacrificial horse, whose body contains
the whole universe, is treated in the same way that a Christian poet
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
would treat the Lamb of God. Of birds, too, the dove has tradi
tionally represented the universal concord or love both of Venus
and of the Christian Holy Spirit. Identifications of gods with ani
mals or plants and of those again with human society form the
basis of totemic symbolism. Certain types of etiological folk tale,
the stories of how supernatural beings were turned into the animals
and plants that we know, represent an attentuated form of the
same type of metaphor, and survive as the "metamorphosis" arche
type familiar from Ovid.
Similar flexibility is possible with vegetable images. Elsewhere
in the Bible the leaves or fruit of the tree of life are used as com
munion symbols in place of the bread and wine. Or the concrete
universal may be applied not simply to a tree but to a single fruit
or flower. In the West the rose has a traditional priority among
apocalyptic flowers: the use of the rose as a communion symbol in
the Paradiso comes readily to mind, and in the first book of The
Faerie Queene the emblem of St. George, a red cross on a white
ground, is connected not only with the risen body of Christ and
the sacramental symbolism which accompanies it, but with the
union of the red and white roses in the Tudor dynasty. In the East
the lotus or the Chinese "golden flower" often occupied the place
of the rose, and in German Romanticism the blue cornflower en
joyed a brief vogue.
The identity of the human body and the vegetable world gives
us the archetype of Arcadian imagery, of Marvelfs green world, of
Shakespeare's forest comedies, of the world of Robin Hood and
other green men who lurk in the forests of romance, these last the
counterparts in romance of the metaphorical myth of the tree-god.
In Marvell's The Garden we meet a further but still conventional
extension in the identification of the human soul with a bird sitting
in the branches of the tree of life. The olive tree and its oil has sup
plied another identification in the "anointed" ruler.
The city, whether called Jerusalem or not, is apocalyptically iden
tical with a single building or temple, a "house of many mansions,"
of which individuals are "lively stones," to use another New Testa
ment phrase. The human use of the inorganic world involves the
highway or road as well as the city with its streets, and the metaphor
of the "way" is inseparable from all quest-literature, whether ex
plicitly Christian as in The Pilgrim's Progress or not. To this cate-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
gory also belong geometrical and architectural images: the tower
and the winding stairway of Dante and Yeats, Jacob's ladder, the
ladder of the Neo-platonic love poets, the ascending spiral or cor
nucopia, the "stately pleasure dome" that Kubla Khan decreed, the
cross and quincunx patterns which Browne sought in every corner
of art and nature, the circle as the emblem of eternity, Vaughan's
"ring of pure and endless light," and so on.
On the archetypal level proper, where poetry is an artifact of
human civilization, nature is the container of man. On the anagogic
level, man is the container of nature, and his cities and gardens are
no longer little hollowings on the surface of the earth, but the forms
of a human universe. Hence in apocalyptic symbolism we cannot
confine man only to his two natural elements of earth and air, and,
in going from one level to the other, symbolism must, like Tamino
in The Magic Flute, pass the ordeals of water and fire. Poetic sym
bolism usually puts fire just above man's life in this world, and water
just below it. Dante had to pass through a ring of fire and the river
of Eden to go from the mountain of purgatory, which is still on the
surface of our own world, to Paradise or the apocalyptic world
proper. The imagery of light and fire surrounding the angels in the
Bible, the tongues of Same descending at Pentecost, and the coal
of fire applied to the mouth of Isaiah by the seraph, associates fire
with a spiritual or angelic world midway between the human and
the divine. In Classical mythology the story of Prometheus indi
cates a similar provenance for fire, as does the association of Zeus
with the thunderbolt or fire of lightning. In short, heaven in the
sense of the sky, containing the fiery bodies of sun, moon, and stars,
is usually identified with, or thought of as the passage to, the heaven
of the apocalyptic world.
Hence all our other categories can be identified with fire or thought
of as burning. The appearance of the Judaeo-Christian deity in fire,
surrounded by angels of fire (seraphim) and light (cherubim),
needs only to be mentioned. The burning animal of the ritual of
sacrifice, the incorporating of an animal body in a communion be
tween divine and human worlds, modulates into all the imagery
connected with the fire and smoke of the altar, ascending incense,
and the like. The burning man is represented in the saint's halo and
the king's crown, both of which are analogues of the sun-god: one
may compare also the "burning babe" of Southwell's Christmas
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
poem. The image of the burning bird appears in the legendary phoe
nix. The tree of life may also be a burning tree, the unconsumed
burning bush of Moses, the candlestick of Jewish ritual, or the
"rosy cross" of later occultism. In alchemy the vegetable, mineral,
and water worlds are identified in its rose, stone, and elixir; flower
and jewel archetypes are identified in the "jewel in the lotus" of
the Buddhist prayer. The links between fire, intoxicating wine, and
the hot red blood of animals are also common.
The identification of the city with fire explains why the city of
God in the Apocalypse is presented as a glowing mass of gold and
precious stones, each stone presumably burning with a hard gem-
like flame. For in apocalyptic symbolism the fiery bodies of heaven,
sun, moon, and stars, are all inside the universal divine and human
body. The symbolism of alchemy is apocalyptic symbolism of the
same type: the center of nature, the gold and jewels hidden in the
earth, is eventually to be united to its circumference in the sun,
moon, and stars of the heavens; the center of the spiritual world,
the soul of man, is united to its circumference in God. Hence there
is a close association between the purifying of the human soul and
the transmuting of earth to gold, not only literal gold but the fiery
quintessential gold of which the heavenly bodies are made. The
golden tree with its mechanical bird in Sailing to Byzantium identi
fies vegetable and mineral worlds in a form reminiscent of alchemy.
Water, on the other hand, traditionally belongs to a realm of
existence below human life, the state of chaos or dissolution which
follows ordinary death, or the reduction to the inorganic. Hence the
soul frequently crosses water or sinks into it at death. In apocalyptic
symbolism we have the "water of life," the fourfold river of Eden
which reappears in the City of God, and is represented in ritual by
baptism. According to Ezekiel the return of this river turns the sea
fresh, which is apparently why the author of Revelation says that
in the apocalypse there is no more sea. Apocalyptically, therefore,
water circulates in the universal body like the blood in the indi
vidual body. Perhaps we should say "is held within" instead of
"circulates," to avoid the anachronism of connecting a knowledge
of the circulation of the blood with Biblical themes. For centuries,
of course, the blood was one of four "humors," or bodily liquids,
just as the river of life was traditionally fourfold.
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THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (2):
DEMONIC IMAGERY
Opposed to apocalyptic symbolism is the presentation of the
world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and
the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion; the world as it is
before the human imagination begins to work on it and before any
image of human desire, such as the city or the garden, has been
solidly established; the world also of perverted or wasted work, ruins
and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly. And
just as apocalyptic imagery in poetry is closely associated with a re
ligious heaven, so its dialectic opposite is closely linked with an
existential hell, like Dante's Inferno, or with the hell that man
creates on earth, as in 1984, No Exit, and Darkness at Noon,
where the titles of the last two speak for themselves. Hence one
of the central themes of demonic imagery is parody, the mocking
of the exuberant play of art by suggesting its imitation in terms of
"real life."
The demonic divine world largely personifies the vast, menacing,
stupid powers of nature as they appear to a technologically unde
veloped society. Symbols of heaven in such a world tend to become
associated with the inaccessible sky, and the central idea that crys
tallizes from it is the idea of inscrutable fate or external necessity.
The machinery of fate is administered by a set of remote invisible
gods, whose freedom and pleasure are ironic because they exclude
man, and who intervene in human affairs chiefly to safeguard their
own prerogatives. They demand sacrifices, punish presumption, and
enforce obedience to natural and moral law as an end in itself.
Here we are not trying to describe, for instance, the gods in Greek
tragedy: we are trying to isolate the sense of human remoteness
and futility in relation to the divine order which is only one element
among others in most tragic visions of life, though an essential one
in all. In later ages poets become much more outspoken about
this view of divinity: Blake's Nobodaddy, Shelley's Jupiter, Swin
burne's "supreme evil, God," Hardy's befuddled Will, and Hous-
man's "brute and blackguard" are examples.
The demonic human world is a society held together by a kind of
molecular tension of egos, a loyalty to the group or the leader which
diminishes the individual, or, at best, contrasts his pleasure with
his duty or honor. Such a society is an endless source of tragic di-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
lemmas like those of Hamlet and Antigone. In the apocalyptic con
ception of human life we found three kinds of fulfilment: indi
vidual, sexual, and social. In the sinister human world one individual
pole is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and
with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty only if he is ego
centric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers. The
other pole is represented by the pharmdkos or sacrificed victim,
who has to be killed to strengthen the others. In the most con
centrated form of the demonic parody, the two become the same.
The ritual of the killing of the divine king in Frazer, whatever it
may be in anthropology, is in literary criticism the demonic or un-
displaced radical form of tragic and ironic structures.
In religion the spiritual world is a reality distinct from the physi
cal world. In poetry the physical or actual is opposed, not to the
spiritually existential, but to ^he hypothetical. We met in the first
essay the principle that the transmutation of act into mime, the
advance from acting out a rite to playing at the rite, is one of the
central features of the development from savagery into culture. It
is easy to see a mimesis of conflict in tennis and football, but,
precisely for that very reason, tennis and football players represent
a culture superior to the culture of student duellists and gladiators.
The turning of literal act into play is a fundamental form of the
liberalizing of life which appears in more intellectual levels as lib
eral education, the release of fact into imagination. It is consistent
with this that the Eucharist symbolism of the apocalyptic world,
the metaphorical identification of vegetable, animal, human, and
divine bodies, should have the imagery of cannibalism for its de
monic parody. Dante's last vision of human hell is of Ugolino
gnawing his tormentor's skull; Spenser's last major allegorical vi
sion is of Serena stripped and prepared for a cannibal feast. The
imagery of cannibalism usually includes, not only images of torture
and mutilation, but of what is technically known as sparagmos or
the tearing apart of the sacrificial body, an image found in the
myths of Osiris, Orpheus, and Pentheus. The cannibal giant or
ogre of folk tales, who enters literature as Polyphemus, belongs
here, as does a long series of sinister dealings with flesh and blood
from the story of Thyestes to Shylock's bond. Here again the form
described by Frazer as the historically original form is in literary
criticism the radical demonic form. Flaubert's Sdammbo is a study
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THEORY OF MYTHS
of demonic imagery which was thought in its day to be archaeo
logical but turned out to be prophetic.
The demonic erotic relation becomes a fierce destructive passion
that works against loyalty or frustrates the one who possesses it.
It is generally symbolized by a harlot a ^witch^jiren^ or other tanta
lizing female^ a physical oBject of desire which is sougrTt "aTai
possession and therefore can never be possessed. The demonic
parody of marriage, or the union of two souls in one flesh, may
take the form of hermaphroditism, incest (the most common
form), or homosexuality. The social relation is that of the rnob,
which is essentially human society looking for a pharmakos, and
the mob is often identified with some sinister animal image such as
the hydra, Virgil's Fama, or its development in Spenser's Blatant
Beast.
The other worlds can be briefly summarized. The animal world
is portrayed in terms of monsters or beasts of prey. The wolf, the
traditional enemy of the sheep, the tiger, the vulture, the cold and
earth-bound serpent, and the dragon are all common. In the Bible,
where the demonic society is represented by Egypt and Babylon,
the rulers of each are identified with monstrous beasts: Nebuchad
nezzar turns into a beast in Daniel, and Pharaoh is called a river-
dragon by Ezekiel. The dragon is especially appropriate because it
is not only monstrous and sinister but fabulous, and so represents
the paradoxical nature of evil as a moral fact and an eternal nega
tion. In the Apocalypse the dragon is called "the beast that was,
and is not, and yet is."
The vegetable world is a sinister forest like the ones we meet in
Comus or the opening of the Inferno, or a heath, which from
Shakespeare to Hardy has been associated with tragic destiny, or
a wilderness like that of Browning's Childe Roland or Eliot's Waste
Land. Or it may be a sinister enchanted garden like that of Circe
and its Renaissance descendants in Tasso and Spenser. In the Bible
the waste land appears in its concrete universal form in the tree of
death, the tree of forbidden knowledge in Genesis, the barren fig-
tree of the Gospels, and the cross. The stake, with the hooded
heretic, the black man or the witch attached to it, is the burning
tree and body of the infernal world. Scaffolds, gallows, stocks, pil
lories, whips, and birch rods are or could be modulations. The con
trast of the tree of life and the tree of death is beautifully expressed
in Yeats's poem The Two Trees.
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The inorganic world may remain in its unworked form of deserts,
rocks, and waste land. Cities of destruction and dreadful night
belong here, and the great ruins of pride, from the tower of Babel
to the mighty works of Ozymandias. Images of perverted work be
long here too: engines of torture, weapons of war, armor, and
images of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanize
nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman. Corresponding to the
temple or One Building of the apocalypse, we have the prison or
dungeon, the sealed furnace of heat without light, like the City of
Dis in Dante. Here too are the sinister counterparts of geometrical
images: the sinister spiral (the maelstrom, whirlpool, or Charyb-
dis), the sinister cross, and the sinister circle, the wheel of fate or
fortune. The identification of the circle with the serpent, conven
tionally a demonic animal, gives us the ouroboros, or serpent with
its tail in its mouth. Corresponding to the apocalyptic way or
straight road, the highway in the desert for God prophesied by
Isaiah, we have in this world the labyrinth or maze, the image of
lost direction, often with a monster at its heart like the Minotaur.
The labyrinthine wanderings of Israel in the desert, repeated by
Jesus when in the company of the devil (or "wild beasts/' accord
ing to Mark), fit the same pattern. The labyrinth can also be a
sinister forest, as in Comus. The catacombs are effectively used in
the same context in The Marble Faun, and of course in a further
concentration of metaphor, the maze would become the winding
entrails inside the sinister monster himself.
The world of fire is a world of malignant demons like the will-
o'-the-wisps, or spirits broken from hell, and it appears in this world
in the form of the auto da je 7 as mentioned, or such burning cities
as Sodom. It is in contrast to the purgatorial or cleansing fire, like
the fiery furnace in Daniel. The world of water is the water of
death, often identified with spilled blood, as in the Passion and
in Dante's symbolic figure of history, and above all the "unplumbed,
salt, estranging sea," which absorbs all rivers in this world, but dis
appears in the apocalypse in favor of a circulation of fresh water.
In the Bible the sea and the animal monster are identified in the
figure of the leviathan, a sea-monster also identified with the social
tyrannies of Babylon and Egypt.
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THEORY OF MYTHS
THEORY OF ARCHETYPAL MEANING (3):
ANALOGICAL IMAGERY
Most imagery in poetry has of course to deal with much less ex
treme worlds than the two which are usually projected as the
eternal unchanging worlds of heaven and hell. Apocalyptic imagery
is appropriate to the mythical mode, and demonic imagery to the
ironic mode in the late phase in which it returns to myth. In the
other three modes these two structures operate dialectically, pulling
the reader toward the metaphorical and mythical undisplaced core
of the work. We should therefore expect three intermediate struc
tures of imagery, corresponding roughly to the romantic, high
mimetic, and low mimetic modes. We shall give little attention to
high mimetic imagery, however, in order to preserve the simpler
pattern of the romantic and "realistic" tendencies within the two
undisplaced structures given at the beginning of this essay.
These three structures are less rigorously metaphorical, and are
rather significant constellations of images, which, when found to
gether, make up what is often called, somewhat helplessly, "at
mosphere/' The mode of romance presents an idealized world: in
romance heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous,
and the frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary
life are made little of. Hence its imagery presents a human counter
part of the apocalyptic world which we may call the analogy of in
nocence. It is best known to us, not from the age of romance itself,
but from later romanticizings: Comus, The Tempest, and the third
book of The Faerie Queene in the Renaissance; Blake's songs of
innocence and "Beulah" imagery, Keats's Endymion and Shelley's
Epipsychidion in the Romantic period proper.
In the analogy of innocence the divine or spiritual figures are
usually parental, wise old men with magical powers like Prospero,
or friendly guardian spirits like Raphael before Adam's fall. Among
the human figures children are prominent, and so is the virtue most
closely associated with childhood and the state of innocence chas
tity, a virtue which in this structure of imagery usually includes
virginity. In Comus the Lady's chastity is, like Prosperous wisdom,
associated with magic, as is the invincible chastity of Spenser's
Britomart It is easiest to associate with young women Dante's
Matelda and Shakespeare's Miranda are examples but male chas
tity is important too, as the Grail romances show. Sir Galahad's
15*
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
remark in Tennyson about his purity of heart giving him tenfold
strength is consistent with the imagery of the world he belongs in.
Fire in the innocent world is usually a purifying symbol, a world
of flame that none but the perfectly chaste can pass, as in Spenser's
castle of Busirane, the refining fire at the top of Dante's purgatory,
and the flaming sword that keeps the fallen Adam and Eve away
from Paradise. In the story of the sleeping beauty, which belongs
here, the wall of flame is replaced by one of thorns and brambles:
Wagner's Die Walkure, however, retains the fire, to the discom
posure of stage managers. The moon, the coolest and hence most
chaste of all the fiery heavenly bodies, has a special importance for
this world.
Of animals, the most obvious are the pastoral sheep and lambs,
along with the horses and hounds of romance, in their gentler as
pects of fidelity and devotion. The unicorn, the traditional emblem
of chastity and the lover of virgins, has an honored place here; so
does the dolphin, whose association with Arion makes him the
innocent contrast to the devouring leviathan; and also, for its
humility and submissiveness, a very different animal the ass. The
dramatic festival of the ass, no less than that of the Boy Bishop,
belongs to this structure of imagery, and when Shakespeare put an
ass's head in Fairyland he was not doing something unique, as
Robinson's poem implies, but following a tradition that goes back
to the transformed Lucius listening to the story of Cupid and
Psyche in Apuleius. Birds, butterflies (for this is Psyche's world,
and Psyche means butterfly), and spirits with their qualities, like
Ariel and Hudson's Rima, are other naturalized denizens.
The paradisal garden and the tree of life belong in the apocalyp
tic structure, as we saw, but the garden of Eden itself, as presented
in the Bible and Milton, belongs rather to this one, and Dante
puts it just below his Paradiso. Spenser's Gardens of Adonis, from
which the attendant spirit in Comus comes, are parallel, along with
all the medieval developments of the theme of the locus amoenus.
Of special significance is the symbol of the body of the Virgin as a
hortus condusus, derived from the Song of Songs. A romantic coun
terpart to the tree of life appears in the magician's life-giving wand,
and such parallel symbols as the blossoming rod in Tannhailser.
Cities are more alien to the pastoral and rural spirit of this world,
and the tower and the castle, with an occasional cottage or hermit
age, are the chief images of habitation. Water symbolism features
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THEORY OF MYTHS
chiefly fountains and pools, fertilizing rains, and an occasional
stream separating a man from a woman and so preserving the chas
tity of each, like the river of Lethe in Dante. The opening rose-
garden episode of Burnt Norton gives a brief but extraordinarily
complete summary of the symbols of the analogy of innocence; one
may also compare the second section of Auden's Kairos and Logos.
The innocent world is neither totally alive, like the apocalyptic
one, nor mostly dead, like ours: it is an animistic world, full of
elemental spirits. All the characters of Comus are elemental spirits
except the Lady and her brothers, and the connections of Ariel
with air-spirits, of Puck with fire-spirits (Burton says of fire-spirits
that "we commonly call them Pucks"), and of Caliban with earth-
spirits are clear enough. In Spenser we find Florimell and Marinell,
whose names indicate that they are spirits of flowers and water, a
Proserpine and an Adonis. Often, too, as in Comus and the Nativity
Ode, innocent or unfallen nature, nature as a divinely sanctioned
order, is represented by the inaudible harmony of the music of the
spheres.
Just as the organizing ideas of romance are chastity and magic,
so the organizing ideas of the high mimetic area seem to be love
and form. And as the field of romantic images may be called an
analogy of innocence, so the field of high mimetic imagery may be
called an analogy of nature and reason. We find here the emphasis
on cynosure or centripetal gaze, and the tendency to idealize the
human representatives of the divine and the spiritual world, which
are characteristic of the high mimetic. Divinity hedges the king and
the Courtly Love mistress is a goddess; love of both is an educating
and informing power which brings one into unity with the spiritual
and divine worlds. The fire of the angelic world blazes in the king's
crown and the lady's eyes. The animals are those of proud beauty:
the eagle and the lion stand for the vision of the royal by the loyal,
the horse and falcon for "chivalry" or the aristocracy on horseback;
the peacock and the swan are the birds of cynosure, and the phoenix
or unique fire-bird is a favorite poetic emblem, especially, in Eng
land, for Queen Elizabeth. Garden symbolism recedes into the back
ground, as city symbolism does in romance; there are formal gar
dens in close association with buildings, but the idea of a garden
world is still a romantic one. The magician's wand is irieraniOT-
phosed into the royal sceptre, and the magic tree to the fluttering
banner. The city is preeminently the capital city, with the court
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
at its center and a series of initiatory degrees of approach within
the court, climaxed by the royal "presence." We note that as we
go down the modes an increasing number of poetic images are
taken from actual social conditions of life. Water-symbolism cen
ters on the disciplined river, in England the Thames which runs
softly in Spenser and in neo-Classical rhythms in Denham, a river
whose most appropriate ornament is the royal barge.
In the low mimetic area we enter a world that we may call the
analogy of experience, and which bears a relation to the demonic
world corresponding to the relation of the romantic innocent world
to the apocalyptic one. Except for this potentially ironic connec
tion, and except for a certain number of hieratic or specially indi
cated symbols like Hawthorne's scarlet letter and Henry James's
golden bowl and ivory tower, the images are the ordinary images
of experience, and need no further explanation here beyond a few
comments about some particular features that may be of use. The
organizing low mimetic ideas seem to be genesis and work. Divine
and spiritual beings have little functional place in low mimetic
fiction, and in thematic writing they are often deliberately redis
covered or treated as aesthetic surrogates. The advice is given to
the unborn in Erewhon (apparently close to Butler's own view, as
he repeats the idea in Life and Habit] that if there is a spiritual
world, one should turn one's back on it and find it again in immedi
ate work. The same doctrine of the rediscovery of faith through
works may be found in Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Shaw. In po
ets, even in explicitly sacramental ones, there are parallel tenden
cies. From many points of view there could hardly be a greater
contrast than the contrast between the "motion and a spirit" dis
covered by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey and the "chevalier"
discovered by Hopkins in the windhover, yet the tendency to anchor
a spiritual vision in an empirical psychological experience is com
mon to both.
The low mimetic treatment of human society reflects, of course,
Wordsworth's doctrine that the essential human situations, for the
poet, are the common and typical ones. Along with this goes a
good deal of parody of the idealization of life in romance, a parody
that extends to religious and aesthetic experience. As for the animal
world, Thomas Huxley's reference to the qualities that humanity
shares with the ape and the tiger is a significantly low mimetic
choice. The ape has always been par excellence the mimetic ani-
THEORY OF MYTHS
mal, and long before evolution he was specifically the imitator of
man. The rise of evolution however suggested an analogy of pro
portion in which present man becomes the ape of his counterpart
in the future, as in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Huxley's coupling of
the ape and the tiger recalls the popular belief in the implacable
and invariable ferocity of both apes and "cavemen," a belief for
which there seems to be little more evidence than for unicorns and
phoenixes, but which, like them, shows a tendency to look at nat
ural history from within the appropriate framework of poetic meta
phors. The low mimetic is not a rich field for animal symbolism,
but Huxley's ape and tiger recur in Kipling's Jungle Book, where
the monkeys chatter in the tree-tops to no purpose, like intellectu
als, while the human animal learns instead the dark predatory wis
dom of the panther in the jungle below.
Gardens in the low mimetic give place to farms and the painful
labor of the man with the hoe, the peasant or furze cutter who
stands in Hardy as an image of man himself, "slighted and endur
ing." Cities take of course the shape of the labyrinthine modern
metropolis, where the main emotional stress is on loneliness and
lack of communication. And just as water symbolism in the world
of innocence consists largely of fountains and running streams, so
low mimetic imagery seeks Conrad's "destructive element" the sea,
generally with some humanized leviathan or bateau ivre on it of
any size from the Titanic in Hardy to the capsizable open boat
which is, with an irony rare even in literature, a favorite image of
Shelley. Moby Dick returns us to a more traditional form of the
leviathan. The destroyer which appears at the end of H. G. Wells's
Tono-Bungay is notable as coming from a low mimetic writer not
much given to introducing hieratic symbols. Fire symbolism is often
ironic and destructive, as in the fire which ends the action of The
Spoils of Poynton. In the industrial age, however, Prometheus, who
stole fire for man's use, is one of the favorite, if not the actual fa
vorite, mythological figure among poets.
The relation of innocence and experience to apocalyptic and
demonic imagery illustrates an aspect of displacement which we
have so far said little about: displacement in the direction of the
moral The two dialectical structures are, radically, the desirable and
the undesirable. Racks and dungeons belong in the sinister vision
not because they are morally forbidden but because it is impossible
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
to make them objects of desire. Sexual fulfilment, on the other
hand, may be desired even if it is morally condemned. Civilization
tends to try to make the desirable and the moral coincide. The stu
dent of comparative mythology occasionally turns up, in a primitive
or ancient cult, a bit of uninhibited mythopoeia that makes him real
ize how completely all the higher religions have limited their apoca
lyptic visions to morally acceptable ones. A good deal of expurga
tion clearly lies behind the development of Jewish, Greek, and other
mythologies; or, as Victorian students of myth used to say, a repul
sive and grotesque barbarism has been purified by a growing ethical
refinement. Egyptian mythology begins with a god who creates the
world by masturbation a logical enough way of symbolizing the
process of creation de Deo 7 but not one that we should expect to
find in Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament. As long as
poetry follows religion towards the moral, religious and poetic arche
types will be very close together, as they are in Dante. Under such
influence apocalyptic sexual imagery, for instance, tends to become
matrimonial or virginal; the incestuous, the homosexual, and the
adulterous go on the demonic side. The quality in art that Aristotle
called sfooudaios and that Matthew Arnold translated as "high seri
ousness" results from this rapprochement of religion and poetry
within a common moral framewoik.
But poetry continually tends to right its own balance, to return
to the pattern of desire and away from the conventional and moral.
It usually does this in satire, the genre which is furthest removed
from "high seriousness," but not always. The moral and the de
sirable have many important and significant connections, but still
morality, which comes to terms with experience and necessity, is
one thing, and desire, which tries to escape from necessity, is quite
another. Thus literature is as a rule less inflexible than morality,
and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to that fact. The quali
ties that morality and religion usually call ribald, obscene, sub
versive, lewd, and blasphemous have an essential place in literature,
but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious tech
niques of displacement.
The simplest of such techniques is the phenomenon that we may
call "demonic modulation," or the deliberate reversal of the cus
tomary moral associations of archetypes. Any symbol at all takes
its meaning primarily from its context: a dragon may be sinister in
a medieval romance or friendly in a Chinese one; an island may be
THEORY OF MYTHS
Prospero's island or Circe's. But because of the large amount of
learned and traditional symbolism in literature, certain secondary
associations become habitual. The serpent, because of its role in
the garden of Eden story, usually belongs on the sinister side of our
catalogue in Western literature; the revolutionary sympathies of
Shelley impel him to use an innocent serpent in The Revolt of
Islam. Or a free and equal society may be symbolized by a band
of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or true love may be symbolized by
the triumph of an adulterous liaison over marriage, as in most tri
angle comedy; by a homosexual passion (if it is true love that is
celebrated in Virgil's second eclogue) or an incestuous one, as in
many Romantics. In the nineteenth century, with demonic myth
approaching, this kind of reversed symbolism is organized into all
the patterns of the "Romantic agony," chiefly sadism, Promethean-
ism, and diabolism, which in some of the "decadents" seem to
provide all the disadvantages of superstition with none of the ad
vantages of religion. Diabolism is not however invariably a sophis
ticated development: Huckleberry Finn, for example, wins our sym
pathy and admiration by preferring hell with his hunted friend
to the heaven of the white slave-owners* god. On the other hand,
imagery traditionally demonic may be used for the starting-point
of a movement of redemption, like the City of Destruction in The
Pilgrims Progress. Alchemical symbolism takes the ouroboros and
the hermaphrodite (res bina], as well as the traditional romantic
dragon, in this redemptive context.
Apocalyptic symbolism presents the infinitely desirable, in which
the lusts and ambitions of man are identified with, adapted to, or
projected on the gods. The art of the analogy of innocence, which
includes most of the comic (in its happy-ending aspect), the idyl
lic, the romantic, the reverent, the panegyrical, the idealized, and
the magical, is largely concerned with an attempt to present the
desirable in human, familiar, attainable, and morally allowable
terms. Much the same is true of the relation of the demonic world
to the analogy of experience. Tragedy, for instance, is a vision of
what does happen and must be accepted. To this extent it is a
moral and plausible displacement of the bitter resentments that
humanity feels against all obstacles to its desires. However malig
nant we may feel Athene to be in Sophocles* A/dX, the tragedy
clearly implies that we must come to terms with her possession of
power, even in our thoughts. A Christian who believed the Greek
'57
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
gods to be nothing but devils would, if he were criticizing a tragedy
of Sophocles, make an undisplaced or demonic interpretation of it
Such an interpretation would bring out everything that Sophocles
was trying not to say; but it could be a shrewd criticism of its latent
or underlying demonic structure for all that. The same kind of
interpretation would be equally possible for many passages of Chris
tian poetry dealing with the just wrath of God, the demonic con
tent of which is often a hated father-figure. In pointing out the
latent apocalyptic or demonic patterns in a literary work, we should
not make the error of assuming that this latent content is the red
content hypocritically disguised by a lying censor. It is simply one
factor which is relevant to a full critical analysis. It is often, how
ever, the factor which lifts a work of literature out of the category
of the merely historical.
THEORY OF MYTHOS: INTRODUCTION
The meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery, is a static pat
tern. The five structures of meaning we have given are, to use an
other musical analogy, the keys in which they are written and finally
resolve; but narrative involves movement from one structure to
another. The main area of such movement obviously has to be the
three intermediate fields. The apocalyptic and demonic worlds, be
ing structures of pure metaphorical identity, suggest the eternally
unchanging, and lend themselves very readily to being projected
existentially as heaven and hell, where there is continuous life but
no process of life. The analogies of innocence and experience rep
resent the adaptation of myth to nature: they give us, not the city
and the garden at the final goal of human vision, but the process
of building and planting. The fundamental form of process is cycli
cal movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and
repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process. Hence our
seven categories of images may also be seen as different forms of
rotary or cyclical movement. Thus:
i. In the divine world the central process or movement is that of
the death and rebirth, or the disappearance and return, or the in
carnation and withdrawal, of a god. This divine activity is usually
identified or associated with one or more of the cyclical processes
of nature. The god may be a sun-god, dying at night and reborn at
dawn, or else with an annual rebirth at the winter solstice; or he
THEORY OF MYTHS
may be a god of vegetation, dying in autumn and reviving in spring,
or (as in the birth stones of the Buddha) he may be an incarnate
god going through a series of human or animal life-cycles. As a god
is almost by definition immortal, it is a regular feature of all such
myths that the dying god is reborn as the same person. Hence the
mythical or abstract structural principle of the cycle is that the
continuum of identity in the individual life from birth to death is
extended from death to rebirth. To this pattern of identical recur
rence, the death and revival of the same individual, all other cyclical
patterns are as a rule assimilated. The assimilation can be of course
much closer in Eastern culture, where the doctrine of reincarnation
is generally accepted, than in the West
2. The fire-world of heavenly bodies presents us with three im
portant cyclical rhythms. Most obvious is the daily journey of the
sun-god across the sky, often thought of as guiding a boat or chariot,
followed by a mysterious passage through a dark underworld, some
times conceived as the belly of a devouring monster, back to the
starting point. The solstitial cycle of the solar year supplies an ex
tension of the same symbolism, incorporated in our Christmas lit
erature. Here there is more emphasis on the theme of a newborn
light threatened by the powers of darkness. The lunar cycle has
been on the whole of less importance to Western poetry in historic
times, whatever its prehistoric role. But its crucial sequence of old
moon, "interlunar cave," and new moon may be the source, as it is
clearly a close analogy, of the three-day rhythm of death, disap
pearance, and resurrection which we have in our Easter symbolism.
3. The human world is midway between the spiritual and the
animal, and reflects that duality in its cyclical rhythms. Closely
parallel to the solar cycle of light and darkness is the imaginative
cycle of waking and of dreaming life. This cycle underlies the an
tithesis of the imagination of experience and of innocence already
dealt with. For the human rhythm is the opposite of the solar
one: a titanic libido wakes when the sun sleeps, and the light of day
is often the darkness Of desire. Then again, in common with ani
mals, man exhibits the ordinary cycle of life -and death, in which
there is generic but not individual rebirth.
4. It is rare, in literature as in life, to find even a domesticated
animal peacefully living through its full span of life to reach a final
nunc dimittis. The exceptions, such as Odysseus' dog, are appropri
ate to the theme of nost os or full close of a cyclical movement. Ani-
'59
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
mal lives, and human lives similarly subject to the order of nature
suggest more frequently the tragic process of life cut off violently
by accident, sacrifice, ferocity, or some overriding need, the continu
ity which flows on after the tragic act being something other than
the life itself.
5. The vegetable world supplies us of course with the annual cycle
of seasons, often identified with or represented by a divine figure
which dies in the autumn or is killed with the gathering of the
harvest and the vintage, disappears in winter, and revives in spring.
The divine figure may be male (Adonis) or female (Proserpine),
but the symbolic structures resulting differ somewhat.
6. Poets, like critics, have generally been Spenglerians, in the
sense that in poetry, as in Spengler, civilized life is frequently as
similated to the organic cycle of growth, maturity, decline, death,
and rebirth in another individual form. Themes of a golden or
heroic age in the past, of a millennium in the future, of the wheel
of fortune in social affairs, of the ubi sunt elegy, of meditations over
ruins, of nostalgia for a lost pastoral simplicity, of regret or exulta
tion over the collapse of an empire, belong here.
7. Water-symbolism has also its own cycle, from rains to springs,
from springs and fountains to brooks and rivers, from rivers to the
sea or the winter snow, and back again.
These cyclical symbols are usually divided into four main phases,
the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods of the
day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cy
cle (rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth,
maturity, age, death), and the like. We find a great number of
symbols from phases one and two in Keats's Endymion, and of
symbols from phases three and four in The Waste Land (where
we have to add four stages of Western culture, medieval, Renais
sance, eighteenth-century, and contemporary). We may note that
there is no cycle of air: the wind bloweth where it listeth, and
images dealing with the movement of "spirit" are likely to be as
sociated with the theme of unpredictability t)r sudden crisis.
In studying poems of immense scope, such as the Commedia or
Paradise Lost, we find that we have to learn a good deal of cos
mology. This cosmology is presented, quite correctly of course, as
the science of its day, a schematism of correspondences which, after
supplying us with a not too efficient calendar and a few words like
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THEORY OF MYTHS
"phlegmatic" and "jovial/* became defunct as science. There are
also other poems incorporating equally obsolete science, such as
The Purple Island, The Loves of the Plants, The Art of Preserv
ing Health, which survive chiefly as curiosities. A literary critic
should not overlook the compliment to poetry implied by the
existence of such poems, but still versified science, as such, keeps
the descriptive structure of science, and so imposes a non-poetic
form on poetry. To make it successful as poetry a great deal of
tact is required, yet those most attracted to such themes are very
apt to be tactless poets. Dante and Milton were certainly better
poets than Darwin or Fletcher: perhaps, however, it would be more
fruitful to say that it was their finer instincts and judgements that
led them to cosmological, as distinct from scientific or descriptive,
themes.
For the form of cosmology is clearly much closer to that of po
etry, and the thought suggests itself that symmetrical cosmology
may be a branch of myth. If so, then it would be, like myth, a struc
tural principle of poetry, whereas in science itself, symmetrical
cosmology is exactly what Bacon said it was, an idol of the theatre.
Perhaps, then, this whole pseudo-scientific world of three spirits,
four humors, five elements, seven planets, nine spheres, twelve
zodiacal signs, and so on, belongs in fact, as it does in practice,
to the grammar of literary imagery. It has long been noticed that
the Ptolemaic universe provides a better framework of symbolism,
with all the identities, associations, and correspondences that sym
bolism demands, than the Coperaican one does. Perhaps it not
only provides a framework of poetic symbols but is one, or at any
rate becomes one after it loses its validity as science, just as Clas
sical mythology became purely poetic after its oracles had ceased.
The same principle would account for the attraction of poets in
the last century or two to occult systems of correspondences, and
to such constructs as Yeats's Vision and Poe's Eureka,
The conception of a heaven above, a hell beneath, and a cyclical
cosmos or order of nature in between forms the ground plan, mu
tatis mutandis, of both Dante and Milton. The same plan is in
paintings of the Last Judgement, where there is a rotary movement
of the saved rising on the right and the damned falling on the left.
We may apply this construct to our principle that there are two
fundamental movements of narrative: a cyclical movement within
the order of nature, and a dialectical movement from that order
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
into the apocalyptic world above. (The movement to the demonic
world below is very rare, because a constant rotation within the
order of nature is demonic in itself.)
The top half of the natural cycle is the world of romance and the
analogy of innocence; the lower half is the world of "realism" and
the analogy of experience. There are thus four main types of mythi
cal movement: within romance, within experience, down, and up.
The downward movement is the tragic movement, the wheel of
fortune falling from innocence toward hamartia, and from hamar-
tia to catastrophe. The upward movement is the comic movement,
from threatening complications to a happy ending and a general
assumption of post-dated innocence in which everyone lives hap
pily ever after. In Dante the upward movement is through purga
tory.
We have thus answered the question: are there narrative cate
gories of literature broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary
literary genres? There are four such categories: the romantic, the
tragic, the comic, and the ironic or satiric. We get the same answer
by inspection if we look at the ordinary meanings of these terms.
Tragedy and comedy may have been originally names for two
species of drama, but we also employ the terms to describe general
characteristics of literary fictions, without regard to genre. It would
be silly to insist that comedy can refer only to a certain type of
stage play, and must never be employed in connection with Chau
cer or Jane Austen. Chaucer himself would certainly have defined
comedy, as his monk defines tragedy, much more broadly than that.
If we are told that what we are about to read is tragic or comic, we
expect a certain kind of structure and mood, but not necessarily
a certain genre. The same is true of the word romance, and also of
the words irony and satire, which are, as generally employed, ele
ments of the literature of experience, and which we shall here
adopt in place of "realism." We thus have four narrative pregeneric
elements of literature which I shall call mythoi or generic plots.
If we think of our experience of these mythoi, we shall realize
that they form two opposed pairs. Tragedy and comedy contrast
rather than blend, and so do romance and irony, the champions
respectively of the ideal and the actual. On the other hand, comedy
blends insensibly into satire at one extreme and into romance at
the other; romance may be comic or tragic; tragic extends from
high romance to bitter and ironic realism.
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THE MYTHOS OF SPRING: COMEDY
Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly de
scended, has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles
and character types. Bernard Shaw remarked that a comic drama
tist could get a reputation for daring originality by stealing his
method from Moli&re and his characters from Dickens: if we were
to read Menander and Aristophanes for Moliere and Dickens the
statement would be hardly less true, at least as a general principle.
The earliest extant European comedy, Aristophanes' The Achar-
nians, contains the miles gloriosus or military braggart who is still
going strong in Chaplin's Great Dictator; the Joxer Daly of O 'Ca
sey's Juno and the Paycock has the same character and dramatic
function as the parasites of twenty-five hundred years ago, and the
audiences of vaudeville, comic strips, and television programs still
laugh at the jokes that were declared to be outworn at the opening
of The Frogs.
The plot structure of Greek New Comedy, as transmitted by
Plautus and Terence, in itself less a form than a formula, has be
come the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly con
ventionalized dramatic form, down to our own day. It will be most
convenient to work out the theory of comic construction from
drama, using illustrations from fiction only incidentally. What nor
mally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his
desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near
the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have
his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements.
In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement
from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play
the obstructing characters are in charge of the play's society, and
the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the
play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together
causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the mo
ment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in
the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.
The appearance of this new society is frequently signalized by
some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end
of the play or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Wed
dings are most common, and sometimes so many of them occur, as
in the quadruple wedding at the end of As You Like If, that they
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
suggest also the wholesale pairing off that takes place in a dance,
which is another common conclusion, and the normal one for the
masque. The banquet at the end of The Taming of the Shrew has
an ancestry that goes back to Greek Middle Comedy; in Plautus
the audience is sometimes jocosely invited to an imaginary banquet
afterwards; Old Comedy, like the modern Christmas pantomime,
was more generous, and occasionally threw bits of food to the au
dience. As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the
audience has recognized all along to be the proper and desirable
state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience is in order.
Tragic actors expect to be applauded as well as comic ones, but
nevertheless the word "plaudite" at the end of a Roman comedy,
the invitation to the audience to form part of the comic society,
would seem rather out of place at the end of a tragedy. The resolu
tion of comedy comes, so to speak, from the audience's side of the
stage; in a tragedy it comes from some mysterious world on the
opposite side. In the movie, where darkness permits a more eroti-
cally oriented audience, the plot usually moves toward an act
which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is
symbolized by a closing embrace.
The obstacles to the hero's desire, then, form the action of the
comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution. The
obstacles are usually parental, hence comedy often turns on a clash
between a son's and a father's will. Thus the comic dramatist as
a rule writes for the younger men in his audience, and the older
members of almost any society are apt to feel that comedy has
something subversive about it. This is certainly one element in the
social persecution of drama, which is not peculiar to Puritans or
even Christians, as Terence in pagan Rome met much the same
kind of social opposition that Ben Jonson did. There is one scene
in Plautus where a son and father are making love to the same
courtesan, and the son asks his father pointedly if he really does
love mother. One has to see this scene against the background of
Roman family life to understand its importance as psychological
release. Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of baiting
older men, and in contemporary movies the triumph of youth is
so relentless that the moviemakers find some difficulty in getting
anyone over the age of seventeen into their audiences.
The opponent to the hero's wishes, when not the father, is gen
erally someone who partakes of the father's closer relation to es-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
tablished society: that is, a rival with less youth and more money.
In Plautus and Terence he is usually either the pimp who owns the
girl, or a wandering soldier with a supply of ready cash. The fury
with which these characters are baited and exploded from the stage
shows that they are father-surrogates, and even if they were not,
they would still be usurpers, and their claim to possess the girl
must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short, im
postors, and the extent to which they have real power implies some
criticism of the society that allows them their power. In Plautus
and Terence this criticism seldom goes beyond the immorality of
brothels and professional harlots, but in Renaissance dramatists,
including Jonson, there is some sharp observation of the rising
power of money and the sort of ruling class it is building up.
The tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible
in its final society: the blocking characters are more often recon
ciled or converted than simply repudiated. Comedy often includes
a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some irreconcilable
character, but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even
tragedy. The Merchant of Venice seems almost an experiment in
coming as close as possible to upsetting the comic balance. If the
dramatic role of Shylock is ever so slightly exaggerated, as it gen
erally is -when the leading actor of the company takes the part, it
is upset, and the play becomes the tragedy of the Jew of Venice
with a comic epilogue. Volpone ends with a great bustle of sen
tences to penal servitude and the galleys, and one feels that the de
liverance of society hardly needs so much hard labor; but then
Volpone is exceptional in being a kind of comic imitation of a
tragedy, with the point of Volpone's hybris carefully marked.
The principle of conversion becomes clearer with characters
whose chief function is the amusing of the audience. The original
miles gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who has killed
an elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one day's
fighting. In other words, he is trying to put on a good show: the
exuberance of his boasting helps to put the play over. The con
vention says that the braggart must be exposed, ridiculed, swindled,
and beaten. But why should a professional dramatist, of all people,
want so to harry a character who is putting on a good show Tits
show at that? When we find Falstaff invited to the final feast in
The Merry Wives, Caliban reprieved, attempts made to mollify
Malvolio, and Angelo and Parolles allowed to live down their dis-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
grace, we are seeing a fundamental principle of comedy at work.
The tendency of the comic society to include rather than exclude
is the reason for the traditional importance of the parasite, who has
no business to be at the final festival but is nevertheless there. The
word "gr ace >" with all its Renaissance overtones from the graceful
courtier of Castiglione to the gracious God of Christianity, is a most
important thematic word in Shakespearean comedy.
The action of comedy in moving from one social center to an
other is not unlike the action of a lawsuit, in which plaintiff and
defendant construct different versions of the same situation, one
finally being judged as real and the other as illusory. This resem
blance of the rhetoric of comedy to the rhetoric of jurisprudence
has been recognized from earliest times. A little pamphlet called
the Tractatus Coislinianus, closely related to Aristotle's Poetics,
which sets down all the essential facts about comedy in about a
page and a half, divides the dianoia of comedy into two parts,
opinion (pistis) and proof (gnosis). These correspond roughly to
the usurping and the desirable societies respectively. Proofs (i.e.,
the means of bringing about the happier society) are subdivided
into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws
in other words the five forms of material proof in law cases listed
in the Rhetoric. We notice how often the action of a Shakespearean
comedy begins with some absurd, cruel, or irrational law: the law
of killing Syracusans in the Comedy of Errors, the law of compul
sory marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the law that con
firms Shylock's bond, the attempts of Angelo to legislate people
into righteousness, and the like, which the action of the comedy
then evades or breaks. Compacts are as a rule the conspiracies
formed by the hero's society; witnesses, such as overhearers of con
versations or people with special knowledge (like the hero's old
nurse with her retentive memory for birthmarks), are the com
monest devices for bringing about the comic discovery. Ordeals
(basanoi) are usually tests or touchstones of the hero's character:
the Greek word also means touchstones, and seems to be echoed
in Shakespeare's Bassanio whose ordeal it is to make a judgement
on the worth of metals.
There are two ways of developing the form of comedy: one is to
throw the main emphasis on the blocking characters; the other is
to throw it forward on the scenes of discovery and reconciliation.
One is the general tendency of comic irony, satire, realism, and
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THEORY OF MYTHS
studies of manners; the other is the tendency of Shakespearean
and other types of romantic comedy. In the comedy of manners
the main ethical interest falls as a rule on the blocking characters.
The technical hero and heroine are not often very interesting peo
ple: the adulescentes of Plautus and Terence are all alike, as hard
to tell apart in the dark as Demetrius and Lysander, who may be
parodies of them. Generally the hero's ch?racter has the neutrality
that enables him to represent a wish-fulfilment. It is very different
with the miserly or ferocious parent, the boastful or foppish rival,
or the other characters who stand in the way of the action. In Mo-
licre we have a simple but fully tested formula in which the ethical
interest is focussed on a single blocking character, a heavy father,
a miser, a misanthrope, a hypocrite, or a hypochondriac. These are
the figures that we remember, and the plays are usually named after
them, but we can seldom remember all the Valentins and An-
geliques who wriggle out of their clutches. In The Merry Wives
the technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and
this play has picked up a hint or two from Plautus's Casina, where
the hero and heroine are not even brought on the stage at all. Fic
tional comedy, especially Dickens, often follows the same practice
of grouping its interesting characters around a somewhat dullish
pair of technical leads. Even Tom Jones, though far more fully
realized, is still deliberately associated, as his commonplace name
indicates, with the conventional and typical.
Comedy usually moves toward a happy ending, and the normal
response of the audience to a happy ending is "this should be,"
which sounds like a moral judgement. So it is, except that it is not
moral in the restricted sense, but social. Its opposite is not the vil
lainous but the absurd, and comedy finds the virtues of Malvolio
as absurd as the vices of Angelo. Molire's misanthrope, being com
mitted to sincerity, which is a virtue, is morally in a strong posi
tion, but the audience soon realizes that his friend Philinte, who
is ready to lie quite cheerfully in order to enable other people to
preserve their self-respect, is the more genuinely sincere of the two.
It is of course quite possible to have a moral comedy, but the re
sult is often the kind of melodrama that we have described as com
edy without humor, and which achieves its happy ending with a
self-righteous tone that most comedy avoids. It is hardly possible
to imagine a drama without conflict, and it is hardly possible to
imagine a conflict without some kind of enmity. But just as love,
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
including sexual love, is a very different thing from lust, so enmity
is a very different thing from hatred. In tragedy, of course, enmity
almost always includes hatred; comedy is different, and one feels
that the social judgement against the absurd is closer to the comic
norm than the moral judgement against the wicked.
The question then arises of what makes the blocking character
absurd. Ben Jonson explained this by his theory of the "humor/'
the character dominated by what Pope calls a ruling passion. The
humor's dramatic function is to express a state of what might be
called ritual bondage. He is obsessed by his humor, and his func
tion in the play is primarily to repeat his obsession. A sick man is
not a humor, but a hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac,
he can never admit to good health, and can never do anything in
consistent with the role that he has prescribed for himself. A miser
can do and say nothing that is not connected with the hiding of
gold or saving of money. In The Silent Woman, Jonson's nearest
approach to Molieie's type of construction, the whole action re
cedes from the humor of Morose, whose determination to eliminate
noise from his life produces so loquacious a comic action.
The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental
repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny. In a
tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus is the stock example repetition leads
logically to catastrophe. Repetition overdone or not going anywhere
belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other
reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern. In
Synge's Riders to the Sea a mother, after losing her husband and
five sons at sea, finally loses her last son, and the result is a very
beautiful and moving play. But if it had been a full-length tragedy
plodding glumly through the seven drownings one after another,
the audience would have been helpless with unsympathetic laughter
long before it was over. The principle of repetition as the basis of
humor both in Jonson's sense and in ours is well known to the crea
tors of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite,
a glutton (often confined to one dish), or a shrew, and who begins
to be funny after the point has been made every day for several
months. Continuous comic radio programs, too, are much more
amusing to habitues than to neophytes. The girth of Falstaff and
the hallucinations of Quixote are based on much the same comic
laws. Mr. E. M. Forster speaks with disdain of Dickens's Mrs.
Micawber, who never says anything except that she will never de-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
sert Mr. Micawber: a strong contrast is marked here between the
refined writer too finicky for popular formulas, and the major one
who exploits them ruthlessly.
The humor in comedy is usually someone with a good deal of
social prestige and power, who is able to force much of the play's
society into line with his obsession. Thus the humor is intimately
connected with the theme of the absurd or irrational law that the
action of comedy moves toward breaking. It is significant that the
central character of our earliest humor comedy, The Wasps, is ob
sessed by law cases: Shylock, too, unites a craving for the law with
the humor of revenge. Often the absurd law appears as a whim of
a bemused tyrant whose will is law, like Leontes or the humorous
Duke Frederick in Shakespeare, who makes some arbitrary decision
or rash promise: here law is replaced by "oath," also mentioned in
the Tractatus. Or it may take the form of a sham Utopia, a society
of ritual bondage constructed by an act of humorous or pedantic
will, like the academic retreat in Love's Labor's Lost, This theme is
also as old as Aristophanes, whose parodies of Platonic social
schemes in The Birds and Ecclesiazusae deal with it.
The society emerging at the conclusion of comedy represents, by
contrast, a kind of moral norm, or pragmatically free society. Its
ideals are seldom defined or formulated: definition and formulation
belong to the humors, who want predictable activity. We are sim
ply given to understand that the newly-married couple will live
happily ever after, or that at any rate they will get along in a rela
tively unhumorous and clear-sighted manner. That is one reason
why the character of the successful hero is so often left undevel
oped: his real life begins at the end of the play, and we have to
believe him to be potentially a more interesting character than he
appears to be. In Terence's Adelphoi, Demea, a harsh father, is
contrasted with his brother Micio, who is indulgent. Micio being
more liberal, he leads the way to the comic resolution, and converts
Demea, but then Demea points out the indolence inspiring a good
deal of Micio's liberality, and releases him from a complementary
humorous bondage.
Thus the movement from pistis to gnosis, from a society con
trolled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older char
acters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom is
fundamentally, as the Greek words suggest, a movement from fflu-
siom to reality. Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality
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is best understood as its negation: whatever reality is, it's not that
Hence the importance of the theme of creating and dispelling il
lusion in comedy: the illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hy
pocrisy, or unknown parentage.
The comic ending is generally manipulated by a twist in the plot.
In Roman comedy the heroine, who is usually a slave or courtesan,
turns out to be the daughter of somebody respectable, so that the
hero can marry her without loss of face. The cognitio in comedy,
in which the characters find out who their relatives are, and who is
left of the opposite sex not a relative, and hence available for mar
riage, is one of the features of comedy that have never changed
much: The Confidential Clerk indicates that it still holds the atten
tion of dramatists. There is a brilliant parody of a cognitio at the
end of Major Barbara (the fact that the hero of this play is a pro
fessor of Greek perhaps indicates an unusual affinity to the con
ventions of Euripides and Menander), where Undershaft is en
abled to break the rule that he cannot appoint his son-in-law as
successor by the fact that the son-in-law's own father married his
deceased wife's sister in Australia, so that the son-in-law is his own
first cousin as well as himself. It sounds complicated, but the plots
of comedy often are complicated because there is something inher
ently absurd about complications. As the main character interest in
comedy is so often focussed on the defeated characters, comedy
regularly illustrates a victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of
character. Thus, in striking contrast to tragedy, there can hardly be
such a thing as inevitable comedy, as far as the action of the indi
vidual play is concerned. That is, we may know that the convention
of comedy will make some kind of happy ending inevitable, but
still for each play the dramatist must produce a distinctive "gim
mick" or "weenie," to use two disrespectful Hollywood synonyms
for anagnorisis. Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as
desirable, and they are brought about by manipulation. The watcher
of death and tragedy has nothing to do but sit and wait for the in
evitable end; but something gets born at the end of comedy, and the
watcher of birth is a member of a busy society.
The manipulation of plot does not always involve metamor
phosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum
when it does. Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations,
and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy. Further,
whatever emerges is supposed to be there for good: if the cur-
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mudgeon becomes lovable, we understand that he will not im
mediately relapse again into his ritual habit. Civilizations which
stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as op
posed to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely
in terms of comedy. In the classical drama of India, we are told,
the tragic ending was regarded as bad taste, much as the manipu
lated endings of comedy are regarded as bad taste by novelists in
terested in ironic realism.
The total mythos of comedy, only a small part of which is ordi
narily presented, has regularly what in music is called a ternary
form: the hero's society rebels against the society of the senex and
triumphs, but the hero's society is a Saturnalia, a reversal of social
standards which recalls a golden age in the past before the main
action of the play begins. Thus we have a stable and harmonious
order disrupted by folly, obsession, forgetfulness, "pride and prej
udice," or events not understood by the characters themselves, and
then restored. Often there is a benevolent grandfather, so to speak,
who overrules the action set up by the blocking humor and so
links the first and third parts. An example is Mr. Burchell, the
disguised uncle of the wicked squire, in The Vicar of Wakefteld. A
very long play, such as the Indian Sakuntala, may present all three
phases; a very intricate one, such as many of Menander's evidently
were, may indicate their outlines. But of course very often the first
phase is not given at all: the audience simply understands an ideal
state of affairs which it knows to be better than what is revealed
in the play, and which it recognizes as like that to which the action
leads. This ternary action is, ritually, like a contest of summer and
winter in which winter occupies the middle action; psychologically,
it is like the removal of a neurosis or blocking point and the restor
ing of an unbroken current of energy and memory. The Jonsonian
masque, with the antimasque in the middle, gives a highly conven
tionalized or "abstract" version of it.
We pass now to the typical characters of comedy. In drama,
characterization depends on function; what a character is follows
from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn
depends on the structure of the play; the character has certain
things to do because the play has such and such a shape. The struc
ture of the play in its turn depends on the category of the play;
if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a
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prevailing comic mood. Hence when we speak of typical characters,
we are not trying to reduce lifelike characters to stock types, though
we certainly are suggesting that the sentimental notion of an antith
esis between the lifelike character and the stock type is a vulgar
error. All lifelike characters, whether in drama or fiction, owe their
consistency to the appropriateness of the stock type which belongs
to their dramatic function. That stock type is not the character
but it is as necessary to the character as a skeleton is to the actor
who plays it.
With regard to the characterization of comedy, the Tractatus
lists three types of comic characters: the dazons or impostors, the
eirons or self-deprecators, and the buffoons (bomolochoi] . This
list is closely related to a passage in the Ethics which contrasts the
first two, and then goes on to contrast the buffoon with a character
whom Aristotle calls agroikos or churlish, literally rustic. We may
reasonably accept the churl as a fourth character type, and so we
have two opposed pairs. The contest of eiron and dazon forms the
basis of the comic action, and the buffoon and the churl polarize
the comic mood.
We have previously dealt with the terms eiron and dazon. The
humorous blocking characters of comedy are nearly always impos
tors, though it is more frequently a lack of self-knowledge than
simple hypocrisy that characterizes them. The multitudes of comic
scenes in which one character complacently soliloquizes while an
other makes sarcastic asides to the audience show the contest of
eiron and dazon in its purest form, and show too that the audience
is sympathetic to the eiron side. Central to the dazon group is the
senex iratus or heavy father, who with his rages and threats, his
obsessions and his gullibility, seems closely related to some of the
demonic characters of romance, such as Polyphemus. Occasionally
a character may have the dramatic function of such a figure with
out his characteristics: an example is Squire All worthy in Tom
Jones, who as far as the plot is concerned behaves almost as stupidly
as Squire Western. Of heavy-father surrogates, the miles gloriosus
has been mentioned: his popularity is largely due to the fact that
he is a man of words rather than deeds, and is consequently far
more useful to a practising dramatist than any tight-lipped hero
could ever be. The pedant, in Renaissance comedy often a student
of the occult sciences, the fop or coxcomb, and similar humors,
require no comment. The female dazon is rare: Katharina the
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THEORY OF MYTHS
shrew represents to some extent a female miles gloriosus, and the
precieuse ridicule a female pedant, but the "menace" or siren who
gets in the way of the true heroine is more often found as a sinister
figure of melodrama or romance than as a ridiculous figure in com
edy.
The eiron figures need a little more attention. Central to this
group is the hero, who is an eiron figure because, as explained, the
dramatist tends to play him down and make him rather neutral
and unformed in character. Next in importance is the heroine, also
often played down: in Old Comedy, when a girl accompanies a
male hero in his triumph, she is generally a stage prop, a muta per
sona not previously introduced. A more difficult form of cognitio
is achieved when the heroine disguises herself or through some
other device brings about the comic resolution, so that the person
whom the hero is seeking turns out to be the person who has
sought him. The fondness of Shakespeare for this "she stoops to
conquer" theme needs only to be mentioned here, as it belongs
more naturally to the mythos of romance.
Another central eiron figure is the type entrusted with hatching
the schemes which bring about the hero's victory. This character in
Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus servus),
and in Renaissance comedy he becomes the scheming valet who is
so frequent in Continental plays, and in Spanish drama is called
the gracioso. Modern audiences are most familiar with him in Figaro
and in the Leporello of Don Giovanni. Through such intermediate
nineteenth-century figures as Micawber and the Touchwood of
Scott's St. Ronan's Well, who, like the gracioso, have buffoon affilia
tions, he evolves into the amateur detective of modern fiction. The
Jeeves of P. G. Wodehouse is a more direct descendant. Female
confidantes of the same general family are often brought in to oil
the machinery of the well-made play. Elizabethan comedy had
another type of trickster, represented by the Matthew Merrygreek
of Ralph Roister Doister, who is generally said to be developed
from the vice or iniquity of the morality plays: as usual, the analogy
is sound enough, whatever historians decide about origins. The
vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist
because he acts from pure love of mischief, and can set a comic
action going with the minimum of motivation. The vice may be as
light-hearted as Puck or as malignant as Don John in Much Ado,
but as a rule the vice's activity is, in spite of his name, benevolent
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One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he
is the architectus of the comic action: such a character carries out
the will of the author to reach a happy ending. He is in fact the
spirit of comedy, and the two clearest examples of the type in
Shakespeare, Puck and Ariel, are both spiritual beings. The tricky
slave often has his own freedom in mind as the reward of his exer
tions: Ariel's longing for release is in the same tradition.
The role of the vice includes a great deal of disguising, and the
type may often be recognized by disguise. A good example is the
Brainworm of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, who calls the
action of the play the day of his metamorphoses. Similarly Ariel
has to surmount the difficult stage direction of "Enter invisible."
The vice is combined with the hero whenever the latter is a cheeky,
improvident young man who hatches his own schemes and cheats
his rich father or uncle into giving him his patrimony along with
the girl.
Another eiron type has not been much noticed. This is a char
acter, generally an older man, who begins the action of the play
by withdrawing from it, and ends the play by returning. He is often
a father with the motive of seeing what his son will do. The action
of Every Man in His Humour is set going in this way by Knowell
Senior. The disappearance and return of Lovewit, the owner of the
house which is the scene of The Alchemist, has the same dramatic
function, though the characterization is different. The clearest
Shakespearean example is the Duke in Measure for Measure, but
Shakespeare is more addicted to the type than might appear at
first glance. In Shakespeare the vice is rarely the real architectus:
Puck and Ariel both act under orders from an older man, if one may
call Oberon a man for the moment. In The Tempest Shakespeare
returns to a comic action established by Aristophanes, in which an
older man, instead of retiring from the action, builds it up on the
stage. When the heroine takes the vice role in Shakespeare, she is
often significantly related to her father, even when the father is not
in the play at all, like the father of Helena, who gives her his medi
cal knowledge, or the father of Portia, who arranges the scheme of
the caskets. A more conventionally treated example of the same
benevolent Prospero figure turned up recently in the psychiatrist
of The Cocktail Party, and one may compare the mysterious alche
mist who is the father of the heroine of The Lady's Not for Burn
ing. The formula is not confined to comedy: Polonius, who shows
THEORY OF MYTHS
so many of the disadvantages of a literary education, attempts the
role of a retreating paternal eiron three times, once too often. Ham
let and King Lear contain subplots which are ironic versions of
stock comic themes, Gloucester's story being the regular comedy
theme of the gullible senex swindled by a clever and unprincipled
son.
We pass now to the buffoon types, those whose function it is to
increase the mood of festivity rather than to contribute to the plot.
Renaissance comedy, unlike Roman comedy, had a great variety of
such characters, professional fools, clowns, pages, singers, and inci
dental characters with established comic habits like malapropism
or foreign accents. The oldest buffoon of this incidental nature is
the parasite, who may be given something to do, as Jonson gives
Mosca the role of a vice in Volpone, but who, qua parasite, does
nothing but entertain the audience by talking about his appetite.
He derives chiefly from Greek Middle Comedy, which appears to
have been very full of food, and where he was, not unnaturally,
closely associated with another established buffoon type, the cook,
a conventional figure who breaks into comedies to bustle and order
about and make long speeches about the mysteries of cooking. In
the role of cook the buffoon or entertainer appears, not simply as
a gratuitous addition like the parasite, but as something more like
a master of ceremonies, a center for the comic mood. There is no
cook in Shakespeare, though there is a superb description of one
in the Comedy of Errors, but a similar role is often attached to a
jovial and loquacious host, like the "mad host" of The Merry
Wives or the Simon Eyre of The Shoemakers Holiday. In Middle-
ton's A Trick to Catch the Old One the mad host type is com
bined with the vice. In Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch we can see the
affinities of the buffoon or entertainer type both with the parasite
and with the master of revels. If we study this entertainer or host
role carefully we shall soon realize that it is a development of what
in Aristophanic comedy is represented by the chorus, and which
in its turn goes back to the komos or revel from which comedy is
said to be descended.
Finally, there is a fourth group to which we have assigned the
word agroikos, and which usually means either churlish or rustic,
depending on the context. This type may also be extended to cover
the Elizabethan gull and what in vaudeville used to be called the
straight man, the solemn or inarticulate character who allows the
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humor to bounce off him, so to speak. We find churls in the
miserly, snobbish, or priggish characters whose role is that of the
refuser of festivity, the killjoy who tries to stop the fun, or, like
Malvolio, locks up the food and drink instead of dispensing it. The
melancholy Jaques of As You Like It, who walks out on the final
festivities, is closely related. In the sulky and self-centered Bertram
of All's Well there is a most unusual and ingenious combination
of this type with the hero. More often, however, the churl belongs
to the dazon group, all miserly old men in comedies, including
Shylock, being churls. In The Tempest Caliban has much the same
relation to the churlish type that Ariel has to the vice or tricky slave.
But often, where the mood is more light-hearted, we may translate
agroikos simply by rustic, as with the innumerable country squires
and similar characters who provide amusement in the urban set
ting of drama. Such types do not refuse the mood of festivity, but
they mark the extent of its range. In a pastoral comedy the ideal
ized virtues of rural life may be represented by a simple man who
speaks for the pastoral ideal, like Corin in As You Like It Corin
has the same agroikos role as the "rube" or "hayseed" of more
citified comedies, but the moral attitude to the role is reversed.
Again we notice the principle that dramatic structure is a perma
nent and moral attitude a variable factor in literature.
In a very ironic comedy a different type of character may play
the role of the refuser of festivity. The more ironic the comedy,
the more absurd the society, and an absurd society may be con
demned by, or at least contrasted with, a character that we may
call the plain dealer, an outspoken advocate of a kind of moral
norm who has the sympathy of the audience. Wycherley's Manly,
though he provides the name for the type, is not a particularly
good example of it: a much better one is the Clante of Tartuffe.
Such a character is appropriate when the tone is ironic enough to
get the audience confused about its sense of the social norm: he
corresponds roughly to the chorus in a tragedy, which is there for
a similar reason. When the tone deepens from the ironic to the
bitter, the plain dealer may become a malcontent or railer, who
may be morally superior to his society, as he is to some extent in
Marston's play of that name, but who may also be too motivated
by envy to be much more than another aspect of his society's evil,
like Thersites, or to some extent Apemantus.
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In tragedy, pity and fear, the emotions of moral attraction and
repulsion, are raised and cast out. Comedy seems to make a more
functional use of the social, even the moral judgement, than trage
dy, yet comedy seems to raise the corresponding emotions, which
are sympathy and ridicule, and cast them out in the same way.
Comedy ranges from the most savage irony to the most dreamy
wish-fulfilment romance, but its structural patterns and characteri
zation are much the same throughout its range. This principle of
the uniformity of comic structure through a variety of attitudes is
clear in Aristophanes. Aristophanes is the most personal of writers,
and his opinions on every subject are written all over his plays. We
know that he wanted peace with Sparta and that he hated Cleon,
so when his comedy depicts the attaining of peace and the defeat
of Cleon we know that he approved and wanted his audience to
approve. But in Ecclesidzusae a band of women in disguise railroad
a communistic scheme through the Assembly which is a horrid
parody of a Platonic republic, and proceed to inaugurate its sexual
communism with some astonishing improvements. Presumably Aris
tophanes did not altogether endorse this, yet the comedy follows
the same pattern and the same resolution. In The Birds the Peisthe-
tairos who defies Zeus and blocks out Olympus with his Cloud-
Cuckoo-Land is accorded the same triumph that is given to the
Trygaios of the Peace who flies to heaven and brings a golden age
back to Athens.
Let us look now at a variety of comic structures between the
extremes of irony and romance. As comedy blends into irony and
satire at one end and into romance at the other, if there are dif
ferent phases or types of comic structure, some of them will be
closely parallel to some of the types of irony and of romance. A
somewhat forbidding piece of symmetry turns up in our argument
at this point, which seems to have some literary analogy to the
circle of fifths in music. I recognize six phases of each mythos,
three being parallel to the phases of a neighboring mythas. The
first three phases of comedy are parallel to the first three phases of
irony and satire, and the second three to the second three of ro
mance. The distinction between an ironic comedy and a comic
satire, or between a romantic comedy and a comic romance, is
tenuous, but not quite a distinction without a difference.
The first or most ironic phase of comedy is, naturally, the one is
which a humorous society triumphs or remains undefeated. A good
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
example of a comedy of this type is The Alchemist, in which the
returning eiron Lovewit joins the rascals, and the plain dealer Surly
is made a fool of. In The Beggar's Opera there is a similar twist to
the ending: the (projected) author feels that the hanging of the
hero is a comic ending, but is informed by the manager that the
audience's sense of comic decorum demands a reprieve, whatever
Macheath's moral status. This phase of comedy presents what Ren
aissance critics called speculum consuetudinis, the way of the
world, cosi fan tutte. A more intense irony is achieved when the
humorous society simply disintegrates without anything taking its
place, as in Heartbreak House and frequently in Chekhov.
We notice in ironic comedy that the demonic world is never far
away. The rages of the senex iratus in Roman comedy are directed
mainly at the tricky slave, who is threatened with the mill, with
being flogged to death, with crucifixion, with having his head dipped
in tar and set on fire, and the like, all penalties that could be and
were exacted from slaves in life. An epilogue in Plautus informs us
that the slave-actor who has blown up in his lines will now be
flogged; in one of the Menander fragments a slave is tied up and
burned with a torch on the stage. One sometimes gets the impres
sion that the audience of Plautus and Terence would have guffawed
uproariously all through the Passion. We may ascribe this to the
brutality of a slave society, but then we remember that boiling
oil and burying alive ("such a stuffy death") turn up in The Mi
kado. Two lively comedies of the modern stage are The Cocktail
Party and The Lady's Not for Burning, but the cross appears in the
background of the one and the stake in the background of the
other. Shylock's knife and Angelo's gallows appear in Shakespeare:
in Measure for Measure every male character is at one time or an
other threatened with death. The action of comedy moves toward a
deliverance from something which, if absurd, is by no means invaria
bly harmless. We notice too how frequently a comic dramatist tries
to bring his action as close to a catastrophic overthrow of the hero as
he can get it, and then reverses the action as quickly as possible. The
evading or breaking of a cruel law is often a very narrow squeeze.
The intervention of the king at the end of Tartuffe is deliberately
arbitrary: there is nothing in the action of the play itself to prevent
Tartuffe's triumph. Tom Jones in the final book, accused of murder,
incest, debt, and double-dealing, cast off by friends, guardian, and
sweetheart, is a woeful figure indeed before all these turn into illu-
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sions. Any reader can think of many comedies in which the fear of
death, sometimes a hideous death, hangs over the central character
to the end, and is dispelled so quickly that one has almost the sense
of awakening from nightmare.
Sometimes the redeeming agent actually is divine, like Diana in
Pericles; in Tartuffe it is the king, who is conceived as a part of
the audience and the incarnation of its will. An extraordinary num
ber of comic stories, both in drama and fiction, seem to approach
a potentially tragic crisis near the end, a feature that I may call the
"point of ritual death" a clumsy expression that I would gladly
surrender for a better one. It is a feature not often noticed by critics,
but when it is present it is as unmistakably present as a stretto in
a fugue, which it somewhat resembles. In Smollett's Humphry
Clinker (I select this because no one will suspect Smollett of de
liberate mythopoeia but only of following convention, at least as
far as his plot is concerned) , the main characters are nearly drowned
in an accident with an upset carriage; they are then taken to a
nearby house to dry off, and a cognitio takes place, in the course
of which their family relationships are regrouped, secrets of birth
brought to light, and names changed. Similar points of ritual death
may be marked in almost any story that imprisons the hero or
gives the heroine a nearly mortal illness before an eventually happy
ending.
Sometimes the point of ritual death is vestigial, not an element
in the plot but a mere change of tone. Everyone will have noted
in comic actions, even in very trivial movies and magazine stories,
a point near the end at which the tone suddenly becomes serious,
sentimental, or ominous of potential catastrophe. In Aldous Hux
ley's Chrome Yellow, the hero Denis comes to a point of self -evalu
ation in which suicide nearly suggests itself: in most of Huxley's
later books some violent action, generally suicidal, occurs at the
corresponding point. In Mrs. Dalloway the actual suicide of Septi
mus becomes a point of ritual death for the heroine in the middle
of her party. There are also some interesting Shakespearean varia
tions of the device: a clown, for instance, will make a speech near
the end in which the buffoon's mask suddenly falls off and we look
straight into the face of a beaten and ridiculed slave. Examples
are the speech of Dromio of Ephesus beginning "I am an ass in
deed" in the Comedy of Errors, and the speech of the Clown ia
AZFs Well beginning "I am a woodland fellow."
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The second phase of comedy, in its simplest form, is a comedy
in which the hero does not transform a humorous society but
simply escapes or runs away from it, leaving its structure as it was
before. A more complex irony in this phase is achieved when a
society is constructed by or around a hero, but proves not sufficiently
real or strong to impose itself. In this situation the hero is usually
himself at least partly a comic humor or mental runaway, and we
have either a hero's illusion thwarted by a superior reality or a
clash of two illusions. This is the quixotic phase of comedy, a dif
ficult phase for drama, though The Wild Duck is a fairly pure ex
ample of it, and in drama it usually appears as a subordinate theme
of another phase. Thus in The Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon's
dream of what he will do with the philosopher's stone is, like Qui
xote's, a gigantic dream, and makes him an ironic parody of Faustus
(who is mentioned in the play), in the same way that Quixote is
an ironic parody of Amadis and Lancelot. When the tone is more
light-hearted, the comic resolution may be strong enough to sweep
over all quixotic illusions. In Huckleberry Finn the main theme is
one of the oldest in comedy, the freeing of a slave, and the cognitio
tells us that Jim had already been set free before his escape was
bungled by Tom Sawyer's pedantries. Because of its unrivalled op
portunities for double-edged irony, this phase is a favorite of Henry
James: perhaps his most searching study of it is The Sacred Fount,
where the hero is an ironic parody of a Prospero figure creating
another society out of the one in front of him.
The third phase of comedy is the normal one that we have been
discussing, in which a senex iratus or other humor gives way to a
young man's desires. The sense of the comic norm is so strong that
when Shakespeare, by way of experiment, tried to reverse the pat
tern in All's Well, in having two older people force Bertram to
marry Helena, the result has been an unpopular "problem" play,
with a suggestion of something sinister about it. We have noted
that the cognitio of comedy is much concerned with straightening
out the details of the new society, with distinguishing brides from
sisters and parents from foster-parents. The fact that the son and
father are so often in conflict means that they are frequently rivals
for the same girl, and the psychological alliance of the hero's bride
and the mother is often expressed or implied. The occasional
"naughtiness" of comedy, as in the Restoration period, has much
to do, not only with marital infidelity, but with a kind of comic
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THEORY OF MYTHS
Oedipus situation in which the hero replaces his father as a lover.
In Congreve's Love for Love there are two Oedipus themes in coun
terpoint: the hero cheats his father out of the heroine, and his best
friend violates the wife of an impotent old man who is the hero
ine's guardian. A theme which would be recognized in real life as
a form of infantile regression, the hero pretending to be impotent
in order to gain admission to the women's quarters, is employed in
Wycherley's Country Wife, where it is taken from Terence's Eu-
nuchus.
The possibilities of incestuous combinations form one of the
minor themes of comedy. The repellent older woman offered to
Figaro in marriage turns out to be his mother, and the fear of vio
lating a mother also occurs in Tom Jones. When in Ghosts and
Little Eyolf Ibsen employed the old chestnut about the object of
the hero's affections being his sister (a theme as old as Menander),
his startled hearers took it for a portent of social revolution. In
Shakespeare the recurring and somewhat mysterious father-daughter
relationship already alluded to appears in its incestuous form at the
beginning of Pericles, where it forms the demonic antithesis of
the hero's union with his wife and daughter at the end. The pre
siding genius of comedy is Eros, and Eros has to adapt himself to
the moral facts of society: Oedipus and incest themes indicate that
erotic attachments have in their undisplaced or mythical origin a
much greater versatility.
Ambivalent attitudes naturally result, and ambivalence is appar
ently the main reason for the curious feature of doubled characters
which runs all through the history of comedy. In Roman comedy
there is often a pair of young men, and consequently a pair of
young women, of which one is often related to one of the men
and exogamous to the other. The doubling of the senex figure
sometimes gives us a heavy father for both the hero and the hero
ine, as in The Winter's Tde, sometimes a heavy father and benevo
lent uncle, as in Terence's Adelphoi and in Tartuffe, and so on.
The action of comedy, like the action of the Christian Bible, moves
from law to liberty. In the law there is an element of ritual bondage
which is abolished, and an element of habit or convention which is
fulfilled. The intolerable qualities of the senex represent the former
and compromise with him the latter in the evolution of the comic
nomos.
With the fourth phase of comedy we begin to move out of the
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world of experience into the ideal world of innocence and romance.
We said that normally the happier society established at the end
of the comedy is left undefined, in contrast to the ritual bondage
of the humors. But it is also possible for a comedy to present its
action on two social planes, of which one is preferred and conse
quently in some measure idealized. At the beginning of Plato's Re-
public we have a sharp contest between the alazon Thrasymachus
and the ironic Socrates. The dialogue could have stopped there, as
several of Plato's dialogues do, with a negative victory over a humor
and the kind of society he suggests. But in the Republic the rest
of the company, including Thrasymachus, follow Socrates inside
Socrates's head, so to speak, and contemplate there the pattern
of the just state. In Aristophanes the comic action is often ironic,
but in The Acharnians we have a comedy in which a hero with the
significant name of Dicaeopolis (righteous city or citizen) makes
a private peace with Sparta, celebrates the peaceful festival of
Dionysos with his family, and sets up the pattern of a temperate
social order on the stage, where it remains throughout the play,
cranks, bigots, sharpers, and scoundrels all being beaten away from
it. One of the typical comic actions is at least as clearly portrayed
in our earliest comedy as it has ever been since.
Shakespeare's type of romantic comedy follows a tradition estab
lished by Peele and developed by Greene and Lyly, which has affini
ties with the medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual-play. We may
call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to
the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the hero Valentine becomes
captain of a band of outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters
are gathered into this forest and become converted. Thus the action
of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world,
moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in
which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal
world. The forest in this play is the embryonic form of the fairy
world of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Forest of Arden in As
You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives, and the pastoral
world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter's Tale.
In all these comedies there is the same rhythmic movement from
normal world to green world and back again. In The Merchant of
Venice the second world takes the form of Portia's mysterious
house in Belmont, with its magic caskets and the wonderful cos-
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THEORY OF MYTHS
mological harmonies that proceed from it in the fifth act. We no
tice too that this second world is absent from the more ironic come
dies All's Well and Measure for Measure.
The green world charges the comedies with the symbolism of
the victory of summer over winter, as is explicit in Love's Labor's
Lost, where the comic contest takes the form of the medieval de
bate of winter and spring at the end. In The Merry Wives there is
an elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter known to folklorists as
"carrying out Death/' of which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff
must have felt that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up
as a witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally sup
plied with a beast's head and singed with candles, he had done
about all that could reasonably be asked of any fertility spirit.
In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is
generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disap
pearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy
generally involves the heroine. The fact that the heioine often
brings about the comic resolution by disguising herself as a boy is
familiar enough. The treatment of Hero in Much Ado, of Helena
in AZZ's Well, of Thaisa in Pericles, of Fidele in Cymbeline, of
Hermione in The Winter's Tale, show the repetition of a device in
which progressively less care is taken of plausibility and in which
in consequence the mythical outline of a Proserpine figure becomes
progressively clearer. These are Shakespearean examples of the
comic theme of ritual assault on a central female figure, a theme
which stretches from Menander to contemporary soap operas. Many
of Menander's plays have titles which are feminine participles in
dicating the particular indignity the heroine suffers in them, and
the working formula of the soap opera is said to be to "put the
heroine behind the eight-ball and keep her there," Treatments of
the theme may be as light-hearted as The Rape of the Lock or as
doggedly persistent as Pamela. However, the theme of rebirth is not
invariably feminine in context: the rejuvenation of the senex in
Aristophanes' The Knights, and a similar theme in All's Well based
on the folklore motif of the healing of the impotent king, come
readily to mind.
The green world has analogies, not only to the fertile world of
ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own de
sires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded
follies of the world of experience, of Theseus' Athens with its idi-
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
otic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny,
of Leontes and his mad jealousy, of the Court Party with their
plots and intrigues, and yet proves strong enough to impose the
form of desire on it. Thus Shakespearean comedy illustrates, as
clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of litera
ture in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from "real
ity," but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries
to imitate.
In the fifth phase of comedy, some of the themes of which we
have already anticipated, we move into a world that is still more
romantic, less Utopian and more Arcadian, less festive and more
pensive, where the comic ending is less a matter of the way the
plot turns out than of the perspective of the audience. When we
compare the Shakespearean fourth-phase comedies with the late
fifth-phase "romances/' we notice how much more serious an
action is appropriate to the latter: they do not avoid tragedies but
contain them. The action seems to be not only a movement from
a "winter's tale" to spring, but from a lower world of confusion
to an upper world of order. The closing scene of The Winter's Tale
makes us think, not simply of a cyclical movement from tragedy
and absence to happiness and return, but of bodily metamorphosis
and a transformation from one kind of life to another. The ma
terials of the cognitio of Pericles or The Winter's Tale are so
stock that they would be "hooted at like an old tale," yet they
seem both far-fetched and inevitably right, outraging reality and
at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence
which has always made more sense than reality.
In this phase the reader or audience feels raised above the action,
in the situation of which Christopher Sly is an ironic parody. The
plotting of Cleon and Dionyza in Pericles, or of the Court Party in
The Tempest, we look down on as generic or typical human be
havior: the action, or at least the tragic implication of the action,
is presented as though it were a play within a play that we can see
in all dimensions at once. We see the action, in short, from the
point of view of a higher and better ordered world. And as the
forest in Shakespeare is the usual symbol for the dream world in
conflict with and imposing its form on experience, so the usual
symbol for the lower or chaotic world is the sea, from which the
cast, or an important part of it, is saved. The group of "sea" come
dies includes A Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, and
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THEORY OF MYTHS
The Tempest. A Comedy of Errors, though based on a Plautine
original, is much closer to the world of Apuleius than to that of
Plautus in its imagery, and the main action, moving from shipwreck
and separation to reunion in a temple in Ephesus, is repeated in
the much later play of Pericles. And just as the second world is
absent from the two "problem" comedies, so in two of the "sea"
group, Twelfth Night and The Tempest, the entire action takes
place in the second world. In Measure for Measure the Duke dis
appears from the action and returns at the end; The Tempest seems
to present the same type of action inside out, as the entire cast
follows Prospero into his retreat, and is shaped into a new social
order there.
These five phases of comedy may be seen as a sequence of stages
in the life of a redeemed society. Purely ironic comedy exhibits
this society in its infancy, swaddled and smothered by the society
it should replace. Quixotic comedy exhibits it in adolescence, still
too ignorant of the ways of the world to impose itself. In the third
phase it comes to maturity and triumphs; in the fourth it is already
mature and established. In the fifth it is part of a settled order
which has been there from the beginning, an order which takes on
an increasingly religious cast and seems to be drawing away from
human experience altogether. At this point the undisplaced corn-
media, the vision of Dante's Paradiso, moves out of our circle of
mythoi into the apocalyptic or abstract mythical world above it.
At this point we realize that the crudest of Plautine comedy-
formulas has much the same structure as the central Christian
myth itself, with its divine son appeasing the wrath of a father
and redeeming what is at once a society and a bride.
At this point too comedy proper enters its final or sixth phase,
the phase of the collapse and disintegration of the comic society.
In this phase the social units of comedy become small and esoteric,
or even confined to a single individual. Secret and sheltered places,
forests in moonlight, secluded valleys, and happy islands become
more prominent, as does the penseroso mood of romance, the love
of the occult and the marvellous, the sense of individual detach
ment from routine existence. In this kind of comedy we have finally
left the world of wit and the awakened critical intelligence for the
opposite pole, an oracular solemnity which, if we surrender un
critically to it, will provide a delightful frisson. This is the world
of ghost stories, thrillers, and Gothic romances, and, on a more
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
sophisticated level, the kind of imaginative withdrawal portrayed
in Huysmans' A Rebours. The somberness of Des Esseintes' sur
roundings has nothing to do with tragedy: Des Esseintes is a dilet
tante trying to amuse himself. The comic society has run the full
course from infancy to death, and in its last phase myths closely
connected psychologically with a return to the womb are appro
priate.
THE MYTHOS OF SUMMER: ROMANCE
The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment
dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical
role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to
project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous
heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains
the threats to their ascendancy. This is the general character of
chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the
Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and
revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia. Yet there is a
genuinely "proletarian" element in romance too which is never
satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations
themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take
place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever,
looking for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially child
like quality of romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent
nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in
time or space. There has never to my knowledge been any period
of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists
stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf
poet to writers of our own day.
The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which
means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional
form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At
its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character
who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an
other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in
comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a
state of refrigerated deathlessness. However, no book can rival
the continuity of the newspaper, and as soon as romance achieves
a literary form, it tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor ad-
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ventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually
announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds
off the story. We may call this major adventure, the element that
gives literary form to the romance, the quest.
The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful
quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage
of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the
crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the
hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.
We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms,
the agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anag
norisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly
proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict.
Thus the romance expresses more clearly the passage from struggle
through a point of ritual death to a recognition scene that we
discovered in comedy. A threefold structure is repeated in many
features of romance in the frequency, for instance, with which
the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the
quest, or successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly
in the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which
is found in the myth of Attis and other dying gods, and has been
incorporated in our Easter.
A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a pro
tagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy. (No doubt I should
add, for the benefit of some readers, that I have read the article
"Protagonist" in Fowler's Modern English Usage.) The enemy
may be an ordinary human being, but the nearer the romance is
to myth, the more attributes of divinity will cling to the hero and
the more the enemy will take on demonic mythical qualities. The
central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focussed on a
conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values
are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analo
gous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an
upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic pow
ers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at
any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle,
and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature.
Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated
to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is as
sociated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life,
THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor,
and youth. As all the cyclical phenomena can be readily associ
ated or identified, it follows that any attempt to prove that a ro
mantic story does or does not resemble, say, a solar myth, or that
its hero does or does not resemble a sun-god, is likely to be a
waste of time. If it is a story within this general area, cyclical
imagery is likely to be present, and solar imagery is normally promi
nent among cyclical images. If the hero of a romance returns
from a quest disguised, flings off his beggar's rags, and stands forth
in the resplendent scarlet cloak of the prince, we do not have a
theme which has necessarily descended from a solar myth; we
have the literary device of displacement. The hero does something
which we may or may not, as we like, associate with the myth of
the sun returning at dawn. If we are reading the story as critics,
with an eye to structural principles, we shall make the association,
because the solar analogy explains why the hero's act is an effective
and conventional incident. If we are reading the story for fun, we
need not bother: that is, some murky "subconscious" factor in our
response will take care of the association.
We have distinguished myth from romance by the hero's power
of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper
he is human. This distinction is much sharper theologically than
it is poetically, and myth and romance both belong in the general
category of mythopoeic literature. The attributing of divinity to
the chief characters of myth, however, tends to give myth a further
distinction, already referred to, of occupying a central canonical
position. Most cultures regard certain stories with more reverence
than others, either because they are thought of as historically true
or because they have come to bear a heavier weight of conceptual
meaning. The story of Adam and Eve in Eden has thus a canonical
position for poets in our tradition whether they believe in its his
toricity or not. The reason for the greater profundity of canonical
myth is not solely tradition, but the result of the greater degree
of metaphorical identification that is possible is myth. In literary
criticism the myth is normally the metaphorical key to the displace
ments of romance, hence the importance of the quest-myth of the
Bible in what follows. But because of the tendency to expurgate
and moralize in canonical myth, the less inhibited area of legend
and folk tale often contains an equally great concentration of
mythical meaning.
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THEORY OF MYTHS
The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme
exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus, already re
ferred to. A land ruled by a helpless old king is laid waste by a sea-
monster, to whom one young person after another is offered to be
devoured, until the lot falls on the king's daughter: at that point
the hero arrives, kills the dragon, marries the daughter, and suc
ceeds to the kingdom. Again, as with comedy, we have a simple
pattern with many complex elements. The ritual analogies of the
myth suggest that the monster is the sterility of the land itself,
and that the sterility of the land is present in the age and impo
tence of the king, who is sometimes suffering from an incurable
malady or wound, like Amfortas in Wagner. His position is that
of Adonis overcome by the boar of winter, Adonis's traditional
thigh-wound being as close to castration symbolically as it is
anatomically.
In the Bible we have a sea-monster usually named leviathan,
who is described as the enemy of the Messiah, and whom the Mes
siah is destined to kill in the "day of the Lord/ 7 The leviathan is
the source of social sterility, for it is identified with Egypt and
Babylon, the oppressors of Israel, and is described in the Book of
Job as "king over all the children of pride." It also seems closely
associated with the natural sterility of the fallen world, with the
blasted world of struggle and poverty and disease into which Job
is hurled by Satan and Adam by the serpent in Eden. In the Book
of Job God's revelation to Job consists largely of descriptions of the
leviathan and a slightly less sinister land cousin named behemoth.
These monsters thus apparently represent the fallen order of nature
over which Satan has some control. (I am trying to make sense
of the meaning of the Book of Job as we now have it, on the
assumption that whoever was responsible for its present version
had some reason for producing that version. Guesswork about what
the poem may originally have been or meant is useless, as it is
only the version we know that has had any influence on our litera
ture.) In the Book of Revelation the leviathan, Satan, and the
Edenic serpent are all identified. This identification is the basis
for an elaborate dragon-killing metaphor in Christian symbolism
in which the hero is Christ (often represented in art standing on
a prostrate monster), the dragon Satan, the impotent old king
Adam, whose son Christ becomes, and the rescued bride the
Church.
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Now if the leviathan is the whole fallen world of sin and death
and tyranny into which Adam fell, it follows that Adam's children
are born, live, and die inside his belly. Hence if the Messiah is to
deliver us by killing the leviathan, he releases us. In the folk tale
versions of dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the
previous victims of the dragon come out of him alive after he is
killed. Again, if we are inside the dragon, and the hero comes to
help us, the image is suggested of the hero going down the monster's
open throat, like Jonah (whom Jesus accepted as a prototype of
himself), and returning with his redeemed behind him. Hence the
symbolism of the Harrowing of Hell, hell being regularly repre
sented in iconography by the "toothed gullet of an aged shark,"
to quote a modern reference to it. Secular versions of journeys
inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and perhaps even
the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme.
The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly
is a natural one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests,
notably that of Theseus. A less displaced version of the story of
Theseus would have shown him emerging from the labyrinth at
the head of a procession of the Athenian youths and maidens
previously sacrificed to the Minotaur. In many solar myths, too,
the hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld
full of monsters between sunset and sunrise. This theme may be
come a structural principle of fiction on any level of sophistication.
One would expect to find it in fairy tales or children's stories, and
in fact if we "stand back" from Tom Sawyer we can see a youth
with no father or mother emerging with a maiden from a laby
rinthine cave, leaving a bat-eating demon imprisoned behind him.
But in the most complex and elusive of the later stories of Henry
James, The Sense of the Past, the same theme is used, the laby
rinthine underworld being in this case a period of past time from
which the hero is released by the sacrifice of a heroine, an Ariadne
figure. In this story, as in many folktales, the motif of the two
brothers connected by sympathetic magic of some sort is also
employed.
In the Old Testament the Messiah-figure of Moses leads his
people out of Egypt. The Pharaoh of Egypt is identified with the
leviathan by Ezekiel, and the fact that the infant Moses was
rescued by Pharaoh's daughter gives to the Pharaoh something of
the role of the cruel father-figure who seeks the hero's death, a role
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THEORY OF MYTHS
also taken by the raging Herod of the miracle plays. Moses and
the Israelites wander through a labyrinthine desert, after which
the reign of the law ends and the conquest of the Promised Land
is achieved by Joshua, whose name is the same as that of Jesus.
Thus when the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin to call her son Jesus,
the typological meaning is that the era of the law is over, and the
assault on the Promised Land is about to begin. There are thus
two concentric quest-myths in the Bible, a Genesis-apocalypse myth
and an Exodus-millennium myth. In the former Adam is cast out
of Eden, loses the river of life and the tree of life, and wanders
in the labyrinth of human history until he is restored to his original
state by the Messiah. In the latter Israel is cast out of his inherit
ance and wanders in the labyrinths of Egyptian and Babylonian
captivity until he is restored to his original state in the Promised
Land. Eden and the Promised Land, therefore, are typologically
identical, as are the tyrannies of Egypt and Babylon and the wilder
ness of the law. Paradise Regained deals with the temptation of
Christ by Satan, which is, Michael tells us in Paradise Lost, the
true form of the dragon-killing myth assigned to the Messiah.
Christ is in the situation of Israel under the law, wandering in the
wilderness: his victory is at once the conquest of the Promised Land
typified by his namesake Joshua and the raising of Eden in the
wilderness.
The leviathan is usually a sea-monster, which means metaphori
cally that he is the sea, and the prophecy that the Lord will hook
and land the leviathan in Ezekiel is identical with the prophecy
in Revelation that there shall be no more sea. As denizens of his
belly, therefore, we are also metaphorically under water. Hence
the importance of fishing in the Gospels, the apostles being "fish
ers of men" who cast their nets into the sea of this world. Hence,
too, the later development, referred to in The Waste Land, of
Adam or the impotent king as an ineffectual ''fisher king/' In the
same poem the appropriate link is also made with Prosperous
rescuing of a society out of the sea in The Tempest In other
comedies, too, ranging from Sakuntala to Rudens, something in
dispensable to the action or the cognitio is fished out of the sea,
and many quest heroes, including Beowulf, achieve their greatest
feats under water. The insistence on Christ's ability to command
the sea belongs to the same aspect of symbolism. And as the
leviathan, in his aspect as the fallen world, contains all forms of
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
life imprisoned within himself, so as the sea he contains the im
prisoned life-giving rain waters whose corning marks the spring.
The monstrous animal who swallows all the water in the world
and is then teased or tricked or forced into disgorging it is a favorite
of folk tales, and a Mesopotamian version lies close behind the
story of Creation in Genesis. In many solar myths the sun god
is represented as sailing in a boat on the surface of our world.
Lastly, if the leviathan is death, and the hero has to enter the
body of death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the
final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and, dialectically, resurrection.
In the St. George plays the hero dies in his dragon-fight and is
brought to life by a doctor, and the same symbolism runs through
all the dying-god myths. There are thus not three but four dis
tinguishable aspects to the quest-myth. First, the agon or conflict
itself. Second, the pathos or death, often the mutual death of
hero and monster Third, the disappearance of the hero, a theme
which often takes the form of sparagmos or tearing to pieces. Some
times the hero's body is divided among his followers, as in Eucharist
symbolism: sometimes it is distributed around the natural world,
as in the stories of Orpheus and more especially Osiris. Fourth, the
reappearance and recognition of the hero, where sacramental Chris
tianity follows the metaphorical logic: those who in the fallen
world have partaken of their redeemer's divided body are united
with his risen body.
The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance,
tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central
unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme
of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous
adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in de
feat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense
that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or fore
doomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the
world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or
recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still
somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme
of comedy.
We have spoken of the Messianic hero as a redeemer of society,
but in the secular quest-romances more obvious motives and re
wards for the quest are more common. Often the dragon guards
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THEORY OF MYTHS
a hoard: the quest for buried treasure has been a central theme of
romance from the Siegfried cycle to Nostromo, and is unlikely
to be exhausted yet. Treasure means wealth, which in mythopoeic
romance often means wealth in its ideal forms, power and wisdom.
The lower world, the world inside or behind the guarding dragon,
is often inhabited by a prophetic sibyl, and is a place of oracles
and secrets, such as Woden was willing to mutilate himself to
obtain. Mutilation or physical handicap, which combines the
themes of sparagmos and ritual death, is often the price of unusual
wisdom or power, as it is in the figure of the crippled smith Wey-
land or Hephaistos, and in the story of the blessing of Jacob. The
Arabian Nights are full of stories of what may be called the
etiology of mutilation. Again, the reward of the quest usually is
or includes a bride. This bride-figure is ambiguous: her psycho
logical connection with the mother in an Oedipus fantasy is more
insistent than in comedy. She is often to be found in a perilous,
forbidden, or tabooed place, like Brunnhilde's wall of fire or the
sleeping beauty's wall of thorns, and she is, of course, often rescued
from the unwelcome embraces of another and generally older male,
or from giants or bandits or other usurpers. The removal of some
stigma from the heroine figures prominently in romance as in
comedy, and ranges from the "loathly lady" theme of Chaucer's
Wife of Bath's Tale to the forgiven harlot of the Book of Hosea.
The "black but comely" bride of the Song of Songs belongs in
the same complex.
The quest-romance has analogies to both rituals and dreams,
and the rituals examined by Frazer and the dreams examined by
Jung show the remarkable similarity in form that we should expect
of two symbolic structures analogous to the same thing. Trans
lated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the
libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the
anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality. The antago
nists of the quest are often sinister figures, giants, ogres, witches
and magicians, that clearly have a parental origin; and yet redeemed
and emancipated paternal figures are involved too, as they are in
the psychological quests of both Freud and Jung. Translated into
ritual terms, the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the
waste land. Fertility means food and drink, bread and wine, body
and blood, the union of male and female. The precious objects
brought back from the quest, or seen or obtained as a result of it,
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
sometimes combine the ritual and the psychological associations.
The Holy Grail, for instance, is connected with Christian Eucharist
symbolism; it is related to or descended from a miraculous food-
provider like the cornucopia, and, like other cups and hollow
vessels, it has female sexual affinities, its masculine counterpart
being, we are told, the bleeding lance. The pairing of solid food
and liquid refreshment recurs in the edible tree and the water
of life in the Biblical apocalypse.
We may take the first book of The Faerie Queene as representing
perhaps the closest following of the Biblical quest-romance theme
in English literature: it is closer even than The Pilgrims Progress,
which resembles it because they both resemble the Bible. Attempts
to compare Bunyan and Spenser without reference to the Bible,
or to trace their similarities to a common origin in secular romance,
are more or less perverse. In Spenser's account of the quest of St.
George, the patron saint of England, the protagonist represents the
Christian Church in England, and hence his quest is an imitation
of that of Christ. Spenser's Redcross Knight is led by the lady
Una (who is veiled in black) to the kingdom of her parents, which
is being laid waste by a dragon. The dragon is of somewhat unusual
size, at least allegorically. We are told that Una's parents held "all
the world" in their control until the dragon "Forwasted all their
land, and them expelled." Una's parents are Adam and Eve; their
kingdom is Eden or the unfallen world, and the dragon, who is
the entire fallen world, is identified with the leviathan, the serpent
of Eden, Satan, and the beast of Revelation. Thus St. George's
mission, a repetition of that of Christ, is by killing the dragon to
raise Eden in the wilderness and restore England to the status of
Eden. The association of an ideal England with Eden, assisted by
legends of a happy island in the western ocean and by the similarity
of the Hesperides story to that of Eden, runs through English litera
ture at least from the end of Greene's Friar Bacon to Blake's "Jeru
salem" hymn. St. George's wanderings with Una, or without her,
are parallel to the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness,
between Egypt and the Promised Land, bearing the veiled ark of
the covenant and yet ready to worship a golden calf.
The battle with the dragon lasts, of course, three days: at the
end of each of the first two days St. George is beaten back and
is strengthened, first by the water of life, then by the tree of life.
These represent the two sacraments which the reformed church
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THEORY OF MYTHS
accepted; they are the two features of the garden of Eden to be
restored to man in the apocalypse, and they have also a more gen
eral Eucharist connection. St. George's emblem is a red cross on
a white ground, which is the flag borne by Christ in traditional
iconography when he returns in triumph from the prostrate dragon
of hell. The red and white symbolize the two aspects of the risen
body, flesh and blood, bread and wine, and in Spenser they have
a historical connection with the union of red and white roses in
the reigning head of the church. The link between the sacramental
and the sexual aspects of the red and white symbolism is indicated
in alchemy, with which Spenser was clearly acquainted, in which
a crucial phase of the production of the elixir of immortality is
known as the union of the red king and the white queen.
The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic
structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much
favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If
they assist it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they
obstruct it they are caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly.
Hence every typical character in romance tends to have his moral
opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess
game. In romance the "white" pieces who strive for the quest corre
spond to the eiron group in comedy, though the word is no longer
appropriate, as irony has little place in romance. Romance has a
counterpart to the benevolent retreating eiron of comedy in its
figure of the "old wise man/' as Jung calls him, like Prospero, Mer
lin, or the palmer of Spenser's second quest, often a magician who
affects the action he watches over. The Arthur of The Faerie
Queene, though not an old man, has this function. He has a
feminine counterpart in the sibylline wise mother-figure, often a
potential bride like Solveig in Peer Gynt, who sits quietly at home
waiting for the hero to finish his wanderings and come back to her.
This latter figure is often the lady for whose sake or at whose bid
ding the quest is performed: she is represented by the Faerie
Queene in Spenser and by Athene in the Perseus story. These are
the king and queen of the white pieces, though their power of
movement is of course reversed in actual chess. The disadvantage
of making the queen-figure the hero's mistress, in anything more
than a political sense, is that she spoils his fun with the distressed
damsels he meets on his journey, who are often enticingly tied
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
naked to rocks or trees, like Andromeda or Angelica in Ariosto. A
polarization may thus be set up between the lady of duty and the
lady of pleasure- we have already glanced at a late development
of this in the light and dark heroines of Victorian romance. One
simple way out is to make the former the latter's mother-in-law:
a theme of reconciliation after enmity and jealousy most commonly
results, as in the relations of Psyche and Venus in Apuleius. Where
there is no reconciliation, the older female remains sinister, the
cruel stepmother of folk tale.
The evil magician' and the witch, Spenser's Archimago and
Duessa, are the black king and queen. The latter is appropriately
called by Jung the "terrible mother," and he associates her with
the fear of incest and with such hags as Medusa who seem to have
a suggestion of erotic perversion about them. The redeemed figures,
apart from the bride, are generally too weak to be strongly charac
terized. The faithful companion or shadow figure of the hero has
his opposite in the traitor, the heroine her opposite in the siren
or beautiful witch, the dragon his opposite in the friendly or help
ing animals that are so conspicuous in romance, among which the
horse who gets the hero to his quest has naturally a central place.
The conflict of son and father that we noted in comedy recurs in
romance: in the Bible the second Adam comes to the rescue of the
first one, and in the Grail cycle the pure son Galahad accomplishes
what his impure father Lancelot failed in.
The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and
villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature. They represent
partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature
and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and
which retreats when approached. Among female characters of this
type are the shy nymphs of Classical legends and the elusive half-
wild creatures who might be called daughter-figures, and include
Spenser's Florimell, Hawthorne's Pearl, Wagner's Kundry, and Hud
son's Rima. Their male counterparts have a little more variety. Kip
ling's Mowgli is the best known of the wild boys; a green man lurked
in the forests of medieval England, appearing as Robin Hood and as
the knight of Gawain's adventure; the "salvage man," represented
in Spenser by Satyrane, is a Renaissance favorite, and the awkward
but faithful giant with unkempt hair has shambled amiably through
romance for centuries.
Such characters are, more or less, children of nature, who can
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THEORY OF MYTHS
be brought to serve the hero, like Crusoe's Friday, but retain the
inscrutability of their origin. As servants or friends of the hero,
they impart the mysterious rapport with nature that so often marks
the central figure of romance. The paradox that many of these
children of nature are "supernatural" beings is not as distressing
in romance as in logic. The helpful fairy, the grateful dead man,
the wonderful servant who has just the abilities the hero needs
in a crisis, are all folk tale commonplaces. They are romantic in
tensifications of the comic tricky slave, the author's architectus.
In James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks this character type is
called the "Golux," and there is no reason why the word should not
be adopted as a critical term.
In romance, as in comedy, there seem to be four poles of char
acterization. The struggle of the hero with his enemy corresponds
to the comic contest of eiron and dazon. In the nature-spirits just
referred to we find the parallel in romance to the buffoon or master
of ceremonies in comedy: that is, their function is to intensify and
provide a focus for the romantic mood. It remains to be seen if
there is a character in romance corresponding to the agroikos type
in comedy, the refuser of festivity or rustic clown.
Such a character would call attention to realistic aspects of life,
like fear in the presence of danger, which threaten the unity of
the romantic mood. St. George and Una in Spenser are accom
panied by a dwarf who carries a bag of "needments." He is not a
traitor, like the other bag-carrier Judas Iscariot, but he is "fearful,"
and urges retreat when the going is difficult. This dwarf with his
needments represents, in the dream world of romance, the shrunken
and wizened form of practical waking reality: the more realistic
the story, the more important such a figure would become, until,
when we reach the opposite pole in Don Quixote, he achieves his
apotheosis as Sancho Panza. In other romances we find fools and
jesters who are licensed to show fear or make realistic comments,
and who provide a localized safety valve for realism without allow
ing it to disrupt the conventions of romance. In Malory a similar
role is assumed by Sir Dinadan, who, it is carefully explained, is
really a gallant knight as well as a jester: hence when he makes
jokes "the king and Launcelot laughed that they might not sit"
the suggestion of excessive and hysterical laughter being psycho
logically very much to the point.
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Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases, and as it moves
from the tragic to the comic area, the first three are parallel to
the first three phases of tragedy and the second three to the second
three phases of comedy, already examined from the comic point
of view. The phases form a cyclical sequence in a romantic hero's
life.
The first phase is the myth of the birth of the hero, the mor
phology of which has been studied in some detail in folklore. This
myth is often associated with a flood, the regular symbol of the
beginning and the end of a cycle. The infant hero is often placed
in an ark or chest floating on the sea, as in the story of Perseus;
from there he drifts to land, as in the exordium to Beowulf, or is
rescued from among reeds and bulrushes on a river bank, as in the
story of Moses. A landscape of water, boat, and reeds appears at
the beginning of Dante's journey up the mount of Purgatory,
where there are many suggestions that the soul is in that stage a
newborn infant On dry land the infant may be rescued either
from or by an animal, and many heroes are nurtured by animals
in a forest during their nonage. When Goethe's Faust begins to
look for his Helena, he searches in the reeds of the Peneus, and
then finds a centaur who carried her to safety on his back when
she was a child.
Psychologically, this image is related to the embryo in the womb,
the world of the unborn often being thought of as liquid; anthropo
logically, it is related to the image of seeds of new life buried in a
dead world of snow or swamp. The dragon's treasure hoard is closely
linked with this mysterious infant life enclosed in a chest. The fact
that the real source of wealth is potential fertility or new life,
vegetable or human, has run through romance from ancient myths
to Ruskin's King of the Golden River, Ruskin's treatment of wealth
in his economic works being essentially a commentary on this fairy
tale. A similar association of treasure hoard and infant life appears
in more plausible guise in Silas Marner. The long literary history
of the theme of mysterious parentage from Euripides to Dickens
has already been mentioned,
In the Bible the end of a historical cycle and the birth of a new
one is marked by parallel symbols. First we have a universal deluge
and an ark, with the potency of all future life contained in it, float
ing on the waters; then we have the story of the Egyptian host
drowned in the Red Sea and the Israelites set free to carry their
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ark through the wilderness, an image adopted by Dante as the basis
of his purgatorial symbolism. The New Testament begins with an
infant in a manger, and the tradition of depicting the world outside
as sunk in snow relates the Nativity to the same archetypal phase.
Images of returning spring soon follow: the rainbow in the Noah
story, the bringing of water out of a rock by Moses, the baptism of
Christ, all show the turning of the cycle from the wintry water of
death to the reviving waters of life. The providential birds, the
raven and dove in the Noah story, the ravens feeding Elijah in the
wilderness, the dove hovering over Jesus, belong to the same com
plex.
Often, too, there is a search for the child, who has to be hidden
away in a secret place. The hero being of mysterious origin, his
true paternity is often concealed, and a false father appears who
seeks the child's death. This is the role of Acrisius in the Perseus
story, of the Cronos of Hesiodic myth who tries to swallow his
children, of the child-killing Pharaoh in the Old Testament, and
of Herod in the New. In later fiction he often modulates to the
usurping wicked uncle who appears several times in Shakespeare.
The mother is thus often the victim of jealousy, persecuted or
calumniated like the mother of Perseus or like Constance in the
Man of Law's Tale. This version is very close psychologically to the
theme of the rivalry of the son and a hateful father for possession
of the mother. The theme of the calumniated girl ordered out of
the house with her child by a cruel father, generally into the snow,
still drew tears from audiences of Victorian melodramas, and lit
erary developments of the theme of the hunted mother in the same
period extend from Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin
to Adam Bede and Far from the Madding Crowd. The false mother,
the celebrated cruel stepmother, is also common: her victim is of
course usually female, and the resulting conflict is portrayed in
many ballads and folktales of the Cinderella type. The true father
is sometimes represented by a wise old man or teacher: this is the
relation of Prospero to Ferdinand, as well as of Chiron the centaur
to Achilles. The double of the true mother appears in the daughter
of Pharaoh who adopts Moses, In more realistic modes the cruel
parent speaks with the voice of, or takes the form of, a narrow-
minded public opinion.
The second phase brings us to the innocent youth of the hero,
a phase most familiar to us from the story of Adam and Eve in
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Eden before the Fall. In literature this phase presents a pastoral
and Arcadian world, generally a pleasant wooded landscape, full
of glades, shaded valleys, murmuring brooks, the moon, and other
images closely linked with the female or maternal aspect of sexual
imagery. Its heraldic colors are green and gold, traditionally the
colors of vanishing youth: one thinks of Sandburg's poem Between
Two Worlds. It is often a world of magic or desirable law, and it
tends to center on a youthful hero, still overshadowed by parents,
surrounded by youthful companions. The archetype of erotic in
nocence is less commonly marriage than the kind of "chaste" love
that precedes marriage; the love of brother for sister, or of two boys
for each other. Hence, though in later phases it is often recalled as
a lost happy time or Golden Age, the sense of being close to a moral
taboo is very frequent, as it is of course in the Eden story itself.
Johnson's Rasselas, Poe's Eleanora, and Blake's Book of Thel in
troduce us to a kind of prison-Paradise or unborn world from which
the central characters long to escape to a lower world, and the same
feeling of malaise and longing to enter a world of action recurs in
the most exhaustive treatment of the phase in English literature,
Keats's Endymion.
The theme of the sexual barrier in this phase takes many forms:
the serpent of the Eden story recurs in Green Mansions, and a bar
rier of fire separates Amoret in Spenser from her lover Scudamour.
At the end of the Purgatorio the soul reaches again its unfallen
childhood or lost Golden Age, and Dante consequently finds him
self in the garden of Eden, separated from the young girl Matelda
by the river Lethe. The dividing river recurs in William Morris's
curious story The Sundering Flood, where an arrow shot over it has
to do for the symbol of sexual contact. In Kubla Khan, which is
closely related both to the Eden story in Paradise Lost and to Ras-
selas, a "sacred river" is closely followed by the distant vision of a
singing damsel. Melville's Pierre opens with a sardonic parody of
this phase, the hero still dominated by his mother but calling her
his sister. A good deal of the imagery of this world may be found in
the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, especially in the stories of
Tristram and Pastorella.
The third phase is the normal quest theme that we have been
discussing, and needs no further comment at this point. The fourth
phase corresponds to the fourth phase of comedy, in which the
happier society is more or less visible throughout the action instead
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of emerging only in the last few moments. In romance the central
theme of this phase is that of the maintaining of the integrity of
the innocent world against the assault of experience. It thus often
takes the form of a moral allegory, such as we have in Milton's
Comtzs, Bunyan's Holy War, and many morality plays, including
The Castell of Perseveraunce. The much simpler scheme of the
Canterbury Tales, where the only conflict is to preserve the mood
of holiday and festivity against bickering, seems for some reason to
be less frequent.
The integrated body to be defended may be individual or social,
or both. The individual aspect of it is presented in the allegory of
temperance in the second book of The Faerie Queene, which forms
a natural sequel to the first book, dealing as it does with the more
difficult theme of consolidating heroic innocence in this world after
the first great quest has been completed. Guyon, the knight of tem
perance, has as his main antagonists Acrasia, the mistress of the
Bower of Bliss, and Mammon. These represent "Beauty and
money," in their aspects as instrumental goods perverted into ex
ternal goals. The temperate mind contains its good within itself,
continence being its prerequisite, hence it belongs to what we have
called the innocent world. The intemperate mind seeks its good in
the external object of the world of experience. Both temperance
and intemperance could be called natural, but one belongs to na
ture as an order and the other to nature as a fallen world. Comus's
temptation of the Lady is based on a similar ambiguity in the mean
ing of nature. A central image in this phase of romance is that of
the beleaguered castle, represented in Spenser by the House of
Alma, which is described in terms of the economy of the human
body.
The social aspect of the same phase is treated in the fifth book
of The Faerie Queene, the legend of justice, where power is the
prerequisite of justice, corresponding to continence in relation to
temperance. Here we meet, in the vision of Isis and Osiris, the
fourth-phase image of the monster tamed and controlled by the
virgin, an image which appears episodically in Book One in con
nection with Una, who tames satyrs and a lion. The Classical proto
type of it is the Gorgon's head on the shield of Athene. The theme
of invincible innocence or virginity is associated with similar images
in literature from the child leading the beasts of prey in Isaiah to
Marina in the brothel in Pericles, and it reappears in later fictions
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in which an unusually truculent hero is brought to heel by the
heroine. An ironic parody of the same theme forms the basis of
Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
The fifth phase corresponds to the fifth phase of comedy, and
like it is a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above, in which
the movement of the natural cycle has usually a prominent place.
It deals with a world very similar to that of the second phase except
that the mood is a contemplative withdrawal from or sequel to
action rather than a youthful preparation for it. It is, like the sec
ond phase, an erotic world, but it presents experience as compre
hended and not as a mystery. This is the world of most of Morris's
romances, of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, of the mature in
nocent wisdom of The Franklin's Tale, and of most of the imagery
of the third book of The Faerie Queene. In this last, as well as in
the late Shakespearean romances, notably Pericles, and even The
Tempest, we notice a tendency to the moral stratification of char
acters. The true lovers are on top of a hierarchy of what might be
called erotic imitations, going down through the various grades of
lust and passion to perversion (Argante and Oliphant in Spenser;
Antiochus and his daughter in Pericles). Such an arrangement of
characters is consistent with the detached and contemplative view
of society taken in this phase.
The sixth or penseroso phase is the last phase of romance as of
comedy. In comedy it shows the comic society breaking up into
small units or individuals; in romance it marks the end of a move
ment from active to contemplative adventure. A central image of
this phase, a favorite of Yeats, is that of the old man in the tower,
the lonely hermit absorbed in occult or magical studies. On a more
popular and social level it takes in what might be called cuddle fic
tion: the romance that is physically associated with comfortable
beds or chairs around fireplaces or warm and cosy spots generally.
A characteristic feature of this phase is the tale in quotation marks,
where we have an opening setting -with a small group of congenial
people, and then the real story told by one of the members. In The
Turn of the Screw a large party is telling ghost stories in a country
house; then some people leave, and a much smaller and more in
timate circle gathers around the crucial tale. The opening dis
missal of catechumens is thoroughly in the spirit and conventions
of this phase. The effect of such devices is to present the story
through a relaxed and contemplative haze as something that enter-
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tains us without, so to speak, confronting us, as direct tragedy con
fronts us.
Collections of tales based on a symposium device like the De
cameron belong here. Morris's Earthly Paradise is a very pure ex
ample of the same phase: there a number of the great archetypal
myths of Greek and Northern culture are personified as a group of
old men who forsook the world during the Middle Ages, refusing
to be made either kings or gods ? and who now interchange their
myths in an ineffectual land of dreams. Here the themes of the
lonely old men, the intimate group, and the reported tale are
linked. The calendar arrangement of the tales links it also with the
symbolism of the natural cycle. Another and very concentrated
treatment of the phase is Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts,
where a play representing the history of English life is acted before
a group. The history is conceived not only as a progression but as
a cycle of which the audience is the end, and, as the last page in
dicates, the beginning as well.
From Wagner's Ring to science fiction, we may notice an increas
ing popularity of the flood archetype. This usually takes the form
of some cosmic disaster destroying the whole fictional society ex
cept a small group, which begins life anew in some sheltered spot.
The affinities of this theme to that of the cosy group which has
managed to shut the rest of the world out are clear enough, and it
brings us around again to the image of the mysterious newborn
infant floating on the sea.
One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be con
sidered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the
undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature
come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of
epiphany. Its most common settings are the mountain-top, the
island, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder or staircase. Folk
tales and mythologies are full of stories of an original connection
between heaven or the sun and earth. We have ladders of arrows,
ropes pecked in two by mischievous birds, and the like: such stories
are often analogues of the Biblical stories of the Fall, and survive
in Jack's beanstalk, Rapunzel's hair, and even the curious bit of
floating folklore known as the Indian rope trick. The movement
from one world to the other may be symbolized by the golden fire
that descends from the sun, as in the mythical basis of the Danae
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THIRD ESSAY: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
story, and by its human response, the fire kindled on the sacrificial
altar. The "gold bug" in Poe's story, which reminds us that the
Egyptian scarab was a solar emblem, is dropped from above on the
end of a string through the eyehole of a skull on a tree and falls on
top of a buried treasure: the archetype here is closely related to the
complex of images we are dealing with, especially to some alchemi
cal versions of it.
In the Bible we have Jacob's ladder, which in Paradise Lost is
associated with Milton's cosmological diagram of a spherical cos
mos hanging from heaven with a hole in the top. There are several
mountain-top epiphanies in the Bible, the Transfiguration being
the most notable, and the mountain vision of Pisgah, the end of
the road through the wilderness from which Moses saw the distant
Promised Land, is typologically linked. As long as poets accepted
the Ptolemaic universe, the natural place for the point of epiphany
was a mountain-top just under the moon, the lowest heavenly
body. Purgatory in Dante is an enormous mountain with a path
ascending spirally around it, on top of which, as the pilgrim gradu
ally recovers his lost innocence and casts off his original sin ? is the
garden of Eden. It is at this point that the prodigious apocalyptic
epiphany of the closing cantos of the Purgatorio is achieved. The
sense of being between an apocalyptic world above and a cyclical
world below is present too, as from the garden of Eden all seeds of
vegetable life fall back into the world, while human life passes on.
In The Faerie Queene there is a Pisgah vision in the first book,
when St. George climbs the mountain of contemplation and sees
the heavenly city from a distance. As the dragon he has to kill is
the fallen world, there is a level of the allegory in which his dragon
is the space between himself and the distant city. In the correspond
ing episode of Ariosto the link between the mountain-top and the
sphere of the moon is clearer. But Spenser's fullest treatment of
the theme is the brilliant metaphysical comedy known as the Mut-
abilitie Cantoes, where the conflict of being and becoming, Jove
and Mutability, order and change, is resolved at the sphere of the
moon. Mutability's evidence consists of the cyclical movements of
nature, but this evidence is turned against her and proved to be a
principle of order in nature instead of mere change. In this poem
the relation of the heavenly bodies to the apocalyptic world is not
metaphorical identification, as it is, at least as a poetic convention,
in Dante's Paradiso, but likeness: they are still within nature, and
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only in the final stanza of the poem does the real apocalyptic world
appear.
The distinction of levels here implies that there may be analo
gous forms of the point of epiphany. For instance, it may be pre
sented in erotic terms as a place of sexual fulfilment, where there
is no apocalyptic vision but simply a sense of arriving at the summit
of experience in nature. This natural form of the point of epiphany
is called in Spenser the Gardens of Adonis. It recurs under that
name in Keats's Endymion and is the world entered by the lovers at
the end of Shelley's Revolt of Islam. The Gardens of Adonis, like
Eden in Dante, are a place of seed, into which everything subject
to the cyclical order of nature enters at death and proceeds from
at birth. Milton's early poems are, like the Mutabilitie Cantoes,
full of the sense of a distinction between nature as a divinely sanc
tioned order, the nature of the music of the spheres, and nature
as a fallen and largely chaotic world. The former is symbolized by
the Gardens of Adonis in Comus, from whence the attendant spirit
descends to watch over the Lady. The central image of this arche
type, Venus watching over Adonis, is (to use a modern distinction)
the analogue in terms of Eros to the Madonna and Son in the
context of Agape.
Milton picks up the theme of the Pisgah vision in Paradise Re
gained, which assumes an elementary principle of Biblical typology
in which the events of Christ's life repeat those of the history of
Israel. Israel goes to Egypt, brought down by Joseph, escapes a
slaughter of innocents, is cut off from Egypt by the Red Sea, organ
izes into twelve tribes, wanders forty years in the wilderness, re
ceives the law from Sinai, is saved by a brazen serpent on a pole,
crosses the Jordan, and enters the Promised Land under "Joshua,
whom the Gentiles Jesus call." Jesus goes to Egypt in infancy, led
by Joseph, escapes a slaughter of innocents, is baptized and recog
nized as the Messiah, wanders forty days in the wilderness, gathers
twelve followers, preaches the Sermon on the Mount, saves man
kind by dying on a pole, and thereby conquers the Promised Land
as the real Joshua. In Milton the temptation corresponds to the
Pisgah vision of Moses, except that the gaze is turned in the oppo
site direction. It marks the climax of Jesus' obedience to the law,
just before his active redemption of the world begins, and the
sequence of temptations consolidates the world, flesh, and devil
into the single form of Satan, The point of epiphany is here rep-
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resented by the pinnacle of the temple, from which Satan falls
away as Jesus remains motionless on top of it. The fall of Satan
reminds us that the point of epiphany is also the top of the wheel
of fortune, the point from which the tragic hero falls. This ironic
use of the point of epiphany occurs in the Bible in the story of the
Tower of Babel.
The Ptolemaic cosmos eventually disappeared, but the point of
epiphany did not, though in more recent literature it is often ironi
cally reversed, or brought to terms with greater demands for credibil
ity. Allowing for this, one may still see the same archetype in the
final mountain-top scene of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and
in the central image of Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. In
the later poetry of Yeats and Eliot it becomes a central unifying
image. Such titles as The Tower and The Winding Stair indicate
its importance for Yeats, and the lunar symbolism and the apoca
lyptic imagery of The Tower and Sailing to Byzantium are both
thoroughly consistent. In Eliot it is the flame reached in the fire
sermon of The Waste Land, in contrast to the natural cycle which
is symbolized by water, and it is also the "multifoliate rose" of
The Hollow Men. Ash Wednesday brings us back again to the
purgatorial winding stair, and Little Gidding to the burning rose,
where there is a descending movement of fire symbolized by the
Pentecostal tongues of flame and an ascending one symbolized by
Hercules' pyre and "shirt of flame."
THE MYTHOS OF AUTUMN: TRAGEDY
Thanks as usual to Aristotle, the theory of tragedy is in con
siderably better shape than the other three mythoi y and we can
deal with it more briefly, as the ground is more familiar. Without
tragedy, all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expres
sions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of
repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested
quality in literary experience. It is largely through the tragedies of
Greek culture that the sense of the authentic natural basis of hu
man character comes into literature. In romance the characters are
still largely dream-characters; in satire they tend to be caricatures;
in comedy their actions are twisted to fit the demands of a happy
ending. In full tragedy the main characters are emancipated from
dream, an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction,
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because the order of nature is present. However thickly strewn a
tragedy may be with ghosts, portents, witches, or oracles, we know
that the tragic hero cannot simply rub a lamp and summon a genie
to get him out of his trouble.
Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily studied in drama,
but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in disaster.
Plays that are usually called or classified with tragedies end in
serenity, like Cymbeline, or even joy, like Alcestis or Racine's
Esther, or in an ambiguous mood that is hard to define, like Phi-
loctetes. On the other hand, while a predominantly sombre mood
forms part of the unity of the tragic structure, concentrating on
mood does not intensify the tragic effect: if it did, Titus Andronicus
might well be the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. The
source of tragic effect must be sought, as Aristotle pointed out, in
the tragic mythos or plot-structure.
It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends to deal with
characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated
on a single individual. We have given reasons in the first essay for
thinking that the typical tragic hero is somewhere between the di
vine and the "all too human." This must be true even of dying gods:
Prometheus, being a god, cannot die, but he suffers for his sympathy
with the "dying ones" (brotoi) or "mortal" men, and even suffer
ing has something subdivine about it. The tragic hero is very great
as compared with us, but there is something else, something on
the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is
small. This something else may be called God, gods, fate, accident,
fortune, necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these, but
whatever it is the tragic hero is our mediator with it.
The 
