Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye

The demonic aspect of historical time is clearer in Vico than in Spengler, though Vico came later into my reading. In Vico there is also a projecting of authority, first on gods, then on "heroes" or human leaders, then on the people themselves. Vico lived at a time when there had been no permanently successful example of a democracy, and from his study of Roman history he concluded that the people cannot recover the authority they project on others, and hence the third age of the people is followed by a ricorso that starts the cycle over again. In Spengler there is no general cyclical movement of this kind, but there is one latent in his argument. Spengler's sense of a historically finite culture, exploiting and exhausting a certain range of imaginative possibilities, provided the basis for the conception of modes outlined in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism. I soon scrapped his loaded term "decline" for a more neutral conception of cultural aging, but his vision of cultural history superseded the onward- and-upward people I had read still earlier in youth, such as Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, who had obviously got it wrong.