The Orphic Voice, page 10
May now perchance both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know that I one Snug the joiner am,
No lion fell, nor yet no lion’s dam.
Here, too, myth is being interpreted. Bacon’s and Chapman’s interpretations were philosophical. Shakespeare shows myth being interpreted dramatically as cipher, and the utter inappropriateness of the deciphering method. But instead of turning the myth into dead boredom by this method (though this threatens the stage audience at least, for Hippolyta complains, “I am a-weary of this moon; would he would change!” and even the courteous Theseus implores finally, “No epilogue, I pray you”), as Bacon and Chapman do unwittingly, he turns it to burlesque and laughter.
And then he does a marvelous thing. For at the end, when the lovers are gone to bed and Puck returns to bring back the fairies and so wind all up, Shakespeare—who is beyond question mythologizing in the whole of this play —takes back, as it were, his own mythological material into his own hands and out of those of the “hard-handed men, that work in Athens here,” and recreates as hieroglyphic and myth and poetry all the elements which the cipher has annulled. Shakespeare is strong enough to admit a parody of mythology and drama into his own mythological play, and then to restore everything at the end.
What are the elements in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude? Darkness first; and if you ask “Of what nature?” the answer is Pyramus-Bottom’s invocation of it,
O grim-lookt night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night!
After darkness, there is classical mythology. There was sorrow and death and a tomb, or more than one. There was a lion, who with moonshine was “left to bury the dead,” and with whom, as in the old fables, a mouse is associated: “Well moused, lion.” Last of all, there are the hempen homespuns themselves. Now recall Puck’s speech almost at the end of the play,
Now the hungry lion roars,
And the wolf behowls the moon;
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,
All with weary task fordone.
Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
Now it is the time of night,
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide:
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic: not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallow’d house:
I am sent, with broom, before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.
The shift from palpable-gross ciphering back to hieroglyphic is perfected in twenty lines, so swiftly that the mind has no time to remember that these are the same elements it has been invited to make merry with when they were being subjected to the wrong method. Shakespeare is clearer about the right and wrong handling of myth than either Chapman or Bacon. He employs interpretation only to demonstrate its absurdity, but his method of bringing the myth back to life is to unite the figuring mind with the myth again. After showing us what might almost seem the fundamental absurdity of myth and drama, Shakespeare then shows that the absurdity is because we are not far enough into either. So he draws us out of a mismanaged play-within-a-play back into his own play, which is so perfectly managed that we do not even notice the transition, nor remember that Puck who now takes the stage is no less fabulous than Bottom’s Pyramus.
The exact equivalent happens in Bacon’s interpretations of the natural philosophy myths. Of these twelve, seven are directly concerned with method, and the remaining five touch on it; not keys to natural phenomena themselves but keys to ways of thinking about them or working upon them. Bacon’s triple passion, for facts about nature, for method in the mind, and for the just relating of those two, finds here, as it does in the rest of his work, a unified expression. So each man identifies his own vocation, the passion of his mind, with the mythical figures he is using. We are back, in fact, to the Shakespearean and the Baconian Orpheus.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins to assert itself as an early, shadowy, yet convincingly Orphic statement of exactly the kind we are looking for. (Orpheus makes a fleeting personal appearance in the play, or almost makes one, for one of the entertainments offered to Theseus and Hippolyta by Philostrate is “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage”; but it is not chosen for presentation.) Orphic statements, it will be remembered, are reflexive, comment on themselves, and thus this play becomes also an experimental essay on myth and mind and universe. This may help us with Bacon’s poetic-philosophic Orpheus in the De Sapientia Veterum, to which we now turn.
In his dedication to Lord Salisbury, Bacon defends or explains his subject matter of myth on the following grounds: “For if time be regarded,— primaeval antiquity is an object of the highest veneration; if the form of exposition,— parable has ever been a kind of ark, in which the most precious portions of the sciences were deposited; if the matter of the work, it is philosophy, the second grace and ornament of life and the human soul.” The preface expands these three ideas; and we are likely to think them commonplace enough until we begin to ask just what he meant by each of them. For antiquity proves to be not classical antiquity, but something far older. Parable is not just classical myth, nor any work of the poet. And philosophy is not classical philosophy, nor any philosophy that has followed it. Yet in these three, antiquity, parable, philosophy (or call them time, poetry, and science), we have the key to the whole of Bacon’s speculative work.
The opening sentence gives us the mystery and the method at one and the same time.
The most ancient times (except what is preserved of them in the scriptures) are buried in oblivion and silence: to that silence succeeded the fables of the poets: to those fables the written records which have come down to us. Thus between the hidden depths of antiquity and the days of tradition and evidence that followed there is drawn a veil, as it were, of fables, which come in and occupy the middle region that separates what has perished from what survives.
We who live in the latter days of tradition and evidence have to penetrate records, poetry, myths themselves, if we are to arrive at what Bacon is calling wisdom. The search is a serious one. Bacon makes this clear at once, realizing how fantastic such an endeavor may seem. “Now I suppose most people will think I am but entertaining myself with a toy, and using much the same kind of license in expounding the poets’ fables which the poets themselves did in inventing them.” He adds, “But that is not my meaning.” By implying his own seriousness, by the parallel he draws between his own endeavor and that of the poets, he implies the seriousness of their task also, and sets his task and theirs side by side. He is realistic about the dangers of this:
Not but that I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it. Neither have I forgotten that there has been old abuse of the thing in practice; that many, wishing only to gain the sanction and reverence of antiquity for doctrines and inventions of their own, have tried to twist the fables of the poets into that sense.
He gives an example or two of this distortion, but then he speaks his mind: “I do certainly for my own part (I freely and candidly confess) incline to this opinion,— that beneath no small number of the fables of the ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and an allegory.” This is, fittingly, a profession of faith in a hypothesis. He now gives the grounds for his opinion. The first is the inherent absurdity of so many myths: “they may be said to give notice from afar and cry out that there is a parable below.” (They are even more monstrous than dreams, Bacon says; once again myths and dreams are neighbors in his thought.) The second reason is this:
But the consideration which has most weight with me is this, that few of these fables were invented, as I take it, by those who recited and made them famous,— Homer, Hesiod, and the rest. For had they been certainly the production of that age and of those authors by whose report they have come down to us, I should not have thought of looking for anything great or lofty from such a source. But it will appear in an attentive examination that they are delivered not as new inventions then first published, but as stories already received and believed. . . . so they must be regarded as neither being the inventions nor belonging to the age of the poets themselves, but as sacred relics and light airs breathing out of better times, that they caught from the traditions of more ancient nations and so received into the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks.
So, for Bacon, behind myths are figures (he uses that word himself in The Advancement of Learning, where he discusses whether fables are pleasure or figure). These figures are of deep antiquity, older than their embodiments in the known myths; in these are laid up “the most precious portions of the sciences,” coming down from “better times.” It is these figures or meanings which are the Wisdom.
Then, after that lovely statement—an echo of another passage of Bacon’s, as so often in his work—and just when we seem to be moving toward a real unification of science and poetry, his doubleness reasserts itself and he scuttles back on his tracks.
Nevertheless, if anyone be determined to believe that the allegorical meaning of the fable was in no case original and genuine, but that always the fable was first and the allegory put in after, I will not press that point; but allowing him to enjoy that gravity of judgment (of the dull and leaden order though it be) which he affects, I will attack him, if indeed he be worth the pains, in another manner upon a fresh ground.
Parables have been used in two ways, and (which is strange) for contrary purposes. For they serve to disguise and veil the meaning, and they also serve to clear and throw light upon it. To avoid dispute then, let us give up the former of these uses. Let us suppose that these fables were things without any definite purpose, made only for pleasure. Still there remains the latter use. No force of wit can deprive us of that . . . On this account it was that in the old times, when the inventions and conclusions of human reason (even those that are not trite and vulgar) were as yet new and strange, the world was full of all kinds of fables, and enigmas, and parables, and similitudes: and these were used as a device not for shadowing and concealing the meaning, but as a method of making it understood.
The argument now stands thus: There is an essential contradiction in the function of myth. It can be used to “retire and obscure” the knowledge or learning it bears, something significant having been deliberately hidden within it, to be discovered by investigation. Or it can be used to “demonstrate and illustrate” it (the phrases are from the discussion in the Advancement). Here, myths, the product of pure chance, can be employed as similitudes by which knowledge can be made impressive and memorable; there will be no intrinsic connection, however, between the knowledge and the figure serving as visual aid or mnemonic. Bacon then tries to affirm both halves of the contradiction he has himself set up: “Upon the whole I conclude with this: the wisdom of the primitive ages was either great or lucky; great, if they knew what they were doing and invented the figure to shadow the meaning; lucky, if without meaning or intending it they fell upon matter which gives occasion to such worthy contemplations. My own pains, if there be any help in them, I shall think well bestowed either way: I shall be throwing light either upon antiquity or upon nature itself.”
Bacon is faced with two dilemmas here. The first is his inability or unreadiness to decide—when confronted with a series of forms in which his mind perceives symmetries, related patterns, and hence significance—whether to ascribe the origins and propagation of this series of forms to accident or design. We are in no position to be superior about this difficulty, for it is parallel to the modern problem, unsolved, of the nature of evolution. Bacon’s second difficulty is that he mistakes the basis of his own thinking in this preface, the “concealment versus illustration” theme. He supposes he has been arguing on the basis of concealment, and turns at the end to take up the case for illustration. This is not so. All the first and positive part rests on the tacit assumption that such an antithesis in myth between concealment and enlightenment is unnecessary.
There is something deep in Bacon which assents to concealment and hence to this antithesis, an urge to make his work deliberately dark, to keep it from the vulgar. Chapman had it too, to a more marked degree, and perhaps it springs from that lack of self-confidence and that intellectual pride to which poets are peculiarly liable. There is a hint of it in Bacon’s Valerius Terminus (speculatively dated 1603), an early work on knowledge. In the notes for chapter 18—the work was never completed—Bacon says, “That the discretion anciently observed . . . of publishing part, and reserving part to a private succession, and of publishing in a manner whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all, but shall as it were single and adopt his reader, is not to be laid aside.” More revealing still is the remark from the “Epistle to the Reader” by which Dr. Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain and biographer, introduced Bacon’s fragmentary natural history, Sylva Sylvarum: “I have heard his lordship say also, that one great reason why he would not put these particulars into any exact method (though he that looketh attentively into them shall find that they have a secret order) was because he conceived that other men would now think that they could do the like.” On the other hand, light or enlightenment for Bacon is never just a function of the pedagogue only. “Therefore do thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first fruits of creation, and didst breathe into the face of man the intellectual light as the crown and consummation thereof, guard and protect this work, which coming from thy goodness returneth to thy glory.” The beauty of such passages—this is from the “Plan of the Work” preceding the Instauration—bespeaks a vision beyond that to which he tries to restrict myth’s second function in this perverse end to his preface.
This is the struggle between the cipherer and the hieroglyphic poet in Bacon. He ascribes to myth a double function, but the two functions turn out to resemble one another, each depending on “This stands for that,” which is cipher and not myth. Deliberately to encode knowledge so as to hide it from the vulgar is the task of cipher but never of myth or poetry. Nor is it part of poetry’s task to supply chance pictures which will make ideas or bits of learning memorable. Bacon does not have the option he allows himself here of saying something either about nature or about the ancients, according to which way you take his supposed antithesis. He has the option of saying nothing whatever about either because he is using the wrong instrument, or of saying something about both. A bid each way is hopeless. The stakes are very high: all or nothing. Bacon playing safe is a sad spectacle, for there is another Bacon who is a monumental gambler, as a poet must be: “Certain it is that all other ambition whatsoever seemed poor in his eyes compared with the work which he had in hand; seeing that the matter at issue is either nothing, or a thing so great that it may well be content with its own merit, without seeking other recompense.” That is the final sentence of the “Proœmium” to the Magna Instauratio.
He was right. The “matter at issue” is the same in The Wisdom of the Ancients and in the Instauration, and it is incomparably great. It is a vision of a method of thinking, in which enfoldment and enlightenment are one and the same thing, in which there is no division between figure and meaning. This is hieroglyphic, myth, and poetry, the Orphic darkness to which Bacon, whether he would or no, was dedicated. It is a darkness which is its own light, or, to change the Baconian figure for a moment, a labyrinth which is its own clue. In the De Sapientia Bacon says in the “Daedalus” fable, “the same man who devised the mazes of the labyrinth disclosed likewise the use of the clue,” as if figure and meaning belong by right together. One of his earliest works is called Filum Labyrinthi sive Formula Inquisitionis. His labyrinth is sometimes method (as in the fable “Sphinx,” where the riddling monster is not Nature but Science), and sometimes nature itself: “But the universe to the eye of human understanding is framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, such deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled” (preface to the Instauration). Yet where the figure is the answer is.30
5
The best in this kind are but shadows
SO THE Baconian Orpheus begins to unfold, no longer as allegory but as hieroglyphic or true myth or poem, in which are exhibited those three elements which Bacon introduced in his dedication—antiquity, parable, and philosophy, or, as we paraphrased them, time, poetry, and science. Bacon’s Orpheus embodies a failure: “whereupon the charm being broken that had been the bond of that order and good fellowship, confusion began again; the beasts returned each to his several nature and preyed one upon the other as before; the stones and woods stayed no longer in their places: while Orpheus himself was torn to pieces in their fury by the women.” Yet this failure is not complete, “the waters of Helicon being sunk under the ground, until, according to the appointed vicissitude of things, they break out and issue forth again, perhaps among other nations and not in the places where they were before.” So there is a venerable tradition and a good hope for the future in some union of poetry and science, partly achieved but waiting to be perfected.
And waiting to be perfected by Bacon. He realized this very early, and is, as a great mind must be, astonished at his vocation, but unable to gainsay it. So in the Novum Organum he calls himself “a birth of Time,” insisting on his election by time and luck and not by his own merits. The phrase also occurs among those hieroglyphic titles to his works which are part of his poetic genius, Temporis Partus Masculus,31 the masculine birth of time, by which he meant his own system.
