17 Frye and Henry Reynolds

202 17 Frye and Henry Reynolds Not previously published. Blake being a mythological poet, Frye had to school himself early on in myth. The sources of his reading on myth are not wholly known but we do have a fairly complete list of the mythographers that he began to explore at the beginning of his career. In The Critical Path he observed that ―[s]tudents of mythology often acquire the primitive qualities of mythopoeic poets. I have read a good many of them, from medieval writers through Bacon and Henry Reynolds and Warburton and Jacob Bryant and Ruskin to our own time, and I have noted two things in particular. First, a high proportion of them are cranks, even nuts, and, second, they often show a superstitious reverence for the ‗wisdom of the ancients‘‖ (Critical, 67). Bacon, Warburton, and Ruskin are well known, and S. Foster Damon describes Bryant as ―the outstanding figure among the mythagogues who flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries‖ (61). But who was Henry Reynolds? In the 1960s Frye wrote a preface to a collection of essays in myth criticism, covering the period from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the aim of which was ―to relate the study of mythology to the criticism of literature‖ (Fiction, 327).1 About this collection, Frye wrote to Richard Schoeck, ―You may know that Marshall [McLuhan] and Ernest [Sirluck] have asked me to do a collection of comments on myth and criticism as one of the Gemini books. I gather that their original idea was to collect contemporary essays on the subject, but I thought it might be more interesting and useful to go back into the history of the tendency. Things like Raleigh‘s History, the opening of Purchas, Camden, Reynolds‘ Mythomystes, Bacon‘s Wisdom of the Ancients, Sandys‘ Ovid, from that period; some of the ―Druid‖ stuff from around Blake‘s time; some of the material used by Shelley and Keats, and so on down to Ruskin‘s Queen of the Air‖ (Selected Letters, 82). Here Reynolds appears again, and his Mythomystes also shows up on a list of books in the mythological tradition that Frye provided for his 1956 course in Spenser.2 Very little is known about Reynolds. In 1628 he translated Tasso‘s pastoral drama Aminta, and his Mythomystes appeared in 1632. Michael Drayton dedicated an Epistle to Reynolds, ―my most dearly-loved friend.‖ Otherwise, the biographical information is scant.3 J.E. Spingarn calls Mythomystes a ―tropical forest of strange fancies‖ (xxi) and Donald Lemen Clark believes Reynolds‘s book offers little more than ―wool-gathering‖ (39). Frye has a very different opinion. In one of his late notebooks he makes the extraordinary remark that Reynolds was ―the greatest critic before Johnson‖ (Late, 236). He is apparently referring only to the English critical tradition, but if Frye thinks that the little-known Reynolds is greater than Bacon and Jonson, better than Hume and Burke, better than Campion and Sidney, better than Milton and John Dennis, better than Pope and Dryden, better than Samuel Daniel and Edward Young, then the matter is worth looking into. Outside of Spingarn, whose anthology is Frye‘s source for Mythomystes, one is hard pressed to find even passing references to Reynolds in the histories and anthologies of criticism.4 In the Wimsatt and Brooks history of criticism he does not merit even a footnote, and he is absent from all of the standard anthologies of criticism, including Hardison‘s English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. What then leads Frye to assert that so relatively obscure a mythographer is ―the greatest critic before Johnson‖? What little Frye has to say about Reynolds can be briefly summarized. In addition to the two passages already cited, Frye remarks in his essay on Lycidas that ―Milton and his learned contemporaries, Selden, for example, or Henry Reynolds, knew at least as much about the symbolism of the ‗dying god‘ as any modern student could get out of The Golden Bough, which 203 depends mainly on the same Classical sources that were available to them‖ (Milton, 25).5 He says in his Late Notebooks that the fact there is so much resistance to writers such as Samuel Purchas and Reynolds, whom Spingarn thinks of as ―an idiot crackpot,‖ means that Reynolds and Purchas are ―supremely important,‖ adding that he does not understand the reasons for the resistance (236). In Notebook 34, where Frye outlines an unrealized twelve-chapter book on anagogy ―as a morphological study of the symbols of art,‖ ―Henry Reynolds & his tradition‖ are projected as part of chapter 10––on rhetoric. By ―his tradition‖ Frye means the new theory of allegory that sprang from Renaissance Platonism, with its occult developments, primarily Cabbalism, found in Pico della Mirandola and others (Romance Notebooks, 49, 51). In Fearful Symmetry Frye notes that Reynolds makes an etymological connection between ―Eden‖ and ―Adonis‖ (228).6 Twice Frye mentions Reynolds in connection with Spenser, saying that he is one of ―Spenser‘s earliest and acutest critics‖ (Educated, 315) and that Reynolds thought ―Spenser overdid the moral allegory‖ in The Faerie Queene (Renaissance Notebooks, 27). In the reference to Reynolds and others from The Critical Path, quoted above, Frye goes on to say about their crankiness and their reverence for the ancients, that [t]hese qualities are not hard to account for: their crankiness is partly the result of the intensely associative quality of myth, where almost any kind of analogy may be significant, and their respect for antiquity is connected with the fact that literature does not improve, but revolves around its classics. Even the greatest mythological explorers of the last generation, Frazer and Freud, are apt to sound dated as soon as they attempt to be rational. The modern critic‘s approach, however, is, in the terms of my opening section, not allegorical but archetypal: he seeks not so much to explain a poem in terms of its external relation to history or philosophy, but to preserve its identity as a poem and see it in its total mythological context. (Critical, 67) These quotations hardly provide sufficient grounds for the claim that Reynolds is the ―greatest critic before Johnson.‖ But there is one passage––from Fearful Symmetry––where we begin to get a sense of why Frye was attracted to Reynolds: Most of the Elizabethan methods of interpretation, deriving as they did partly from the Plutarchan attempt to varnish the gods into images of moral virtue and partly from the medieval homiletic tradition, were allegorical in the wrong sense, concerned with extracting moral platitudes and general ideas. But in Reynolds‘ Mythomystes, apart from much Cabbalistic pedantry of the sort that derives Bacchus from Noah by way of Boachus, there is a keen sense of myth as the ―essential form‖ of poetry: . who can make that Rape of Proserpine,––whom her mother Ceres (that vnder the Species of Corne might include as well the whole Genus of the Vegetable nature) sought so long for in the earth,––to meane other then the putrefaction and suceeding generation of the Seedes we commit to Pluto, or the earth. Reynolds is generally thought to be an antiquarian curiosity, but this explanation of the Proserpine myth is at least as ―modern,‖ if that is the opposite of the obsolete, as anything we can find in Dryden. Subsidiary allegorical traditions, like Bacon‘s attempt to explain Classical myths as Baconian and the alchemists‘ to explain them as alchemic, helped to encourage contemporary readers to read all poetry in the same way that one must read Blake‘s Prophecies. (Fearful, 160)7 204 For Frye, Reynolds breaks from the Elizabethan tendency, derived from the Plutarchan and medieval traditions, which generally interpreted the ancient myths in moral terms. But for Frye the form of the ancient myths is poetic rather than moral, and they are to be read allegorically. To understand better what Frye means we need to examine the argument of Mythomystes. Mythomystes ―Mythomystes‖ is Reynolds‘s neologism, combining ―myth‖ and ―mists,‖ the latter in the sense of obscuring something hidden. On one occasion, he uses the word in this sense: ―Wee liue in a myste, blind and benighted‖ (163). It seems likely that Reynolds also wants to suggest ―mystical.‖8 As we will see, concealed meanings are central to his apology. Mythomystes begins with a critique of the poetry of the time. Reynolds‘s contemporaries, he says, have focused on what he calls the accidents and adjuncts of poetry (extrinsic features such as rhetorical tropes, meter, and rhyme), which have little to do with ―the Forme and reall Essence of true Poësy‖ (143). Reynolds spares little scorn in his attack on the ―heresies‖ of his contemporaries who profess humane learning, and of these ―none so grosse, nor indeed any so great scandall . as in the almost generall abuse and violence offered to the excellent art of Poesye‖ by those who call themselves poets (145). He does exempt several Spanish, French, and Italian writers from his scathing attack, and among English writers he commends Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Daniells, and Drayton for the ―fancy and imagination they possesse‖ and especially for their drawing on ―the rich fountes of our reuerend Auncients‖ (147). They are, he says, the ―children of obedience.‖ Otherwise, ―most of our ordinary pretenders to Poesy now a dayes are to their owne and diseased times ill habits, as the racke will not be able to make the most aduised among twenty of them confesse to haue further inquired or attended to more in the best of their Authours they haue chosen to read and study‖ (148).

Load more