The Orphic Voice, page 14
It is here that Bottom has his particular significance. If we turn back a moment to the question of his name, we find that this technical term in weaving has other connections. The Oxford English Dictionary says: “BOTTOM: A clew or nucleus on which to wind thread; also a skein or ball of thread.” The first example given is 1490, from Caxton’s Eneydos: “He must take wyth hym a bottome of threade.” Later among the examples comes this, from Ralegh’s History of the World, “He received from her [Ariadne] a bottome of threde.” It is interesting that the word “bottom” should apparently have a peculiar right of entry into the story of Theseus and Ariadne and the labyrinth, the combination of names reappearing in the Dream where Theseus is a character and Ariadne is mentioned. Is Bottom the weaver the “clew” to this play and what it says about postlogic?
So far we have been looking at natural history, which in Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s hands gives the range of postlogic (the natural universe considered as alive throughout) and its terms of reference (process as a whole, seen as fertility and generation and as operation of all kinds, through nature and up to and including man). Man is language; and here Bottom is to the fore. Others of the mechanicals show a tendency toward poetry or rhetoric, as in Quince’s confusion of “paragon” and “paramour” for instance. Only a noble feeling for rhetoric would induce so risky an extension of vocabulary; it is easy for anyone to be correct in Basic English. But it is Bottom, regarded by his peers as the fine flower of their society, the best wit in all Athens, the sine qua non of their play, who carries this tendency furthest. Their play with its mythological subject from the Metamorphoses is a communal effort, but it is Bottom who is on familiar terms with myths outside the play, who speaks of Ercles and Phibbus with a breezy and inaccurate familiarity. They play in verse, but it is Bottom who quotes verse outside the play, and who when put to it has a rude vein of poetry in his own imagination. Bottom is the mind working with language; he is also dynamics, for he alone moves out of the framework of the little play into that of the larger one, by his “dream” which gives him, even if only briefly, the entry to another universe. With him we shall move on now to the Baconian forms which have been shadowing us for some time, and to the transformations in the Dream itself.
7
A Collection of all varieties of Natural Bodies . . . where an Inquirer . . . might peruse, and turn over, and spell, and read the Book of Nature, and observe the Orthography, Etymologia, Syntaxis, and Prosodia of Nature’s Grammar, and by which as with a Dictionary, he might readily turn to and find the true Figures, Composition, Derivation, and Use of the Characters, Words, Phrases and Sentences of Nature written with indelible, and most exact, and most expressive Letters, without which Books it will be very difficult to be thoroughly a Literatus in the Language and Sense of Nature
INCOMPLETE as it is, Bacon’s doctrine of forms has given rise to accusations of slovenliness and imprecision. It is certainly not easy, but we must remember that Bacon is, after all, trying to say something new. Forms are touched on in Valerius Terminus, chapter 11, where he calls the discovery of a form “the freeing of a direction”; they are outlined in the Advancement and De Augmentis, and are eventually treated more fully, though not definitively, in Novum Organum, Book II, which deals with forms and induction, “being,” as he says of this work in the De Augmentis (Bk. v, chap. 2), “the most important thing of all.”
This is how that second book begins:
On a given body to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures, is the work and aim of Human Power. Of a given nature to discover the form, or true specific difference, or nature-engendering nature, [the Latin is natura naturans, a phrase with a wonderful tradition of its own through Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas] or source of emanation (for these are the terms which come nearest to a description of the thing), is the work and aim of Human Knowledge. Subordinate to these primary works are two others that are secondary and of inferior mark; to the former, the transformation of concrete bodies, so far as this is possible; to the latter, the discovery, in every case of generation of motion, of the latent process carried on from the manifest efficient and the manifest material to the form which is engendered; and in like manner the discovery of the latent configuration of bodies at rest and not in motion.
From this Aphorism till the 9th, Bacon explains and adds to the opening statement. Part of the uncertainty of his doctrine lies in the question whether his forms are in matter or in the mind. Bacon realized this, and comments on it in Aphorism 2:
Nor have I forgotten that in a former passage I noted and corrected as an error of the human mind the opinion that Forms give existence. For though in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual acts according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy this very law, and the investigation, discovery and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law, with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of Forms; a name which I the rather adopt because it has grown into use and become familiar.
By “forms” Bacon means the inner laws of working of natural phenomena as they may be perceived, expressed, or translated by the mind. (As a professional lawyer, he must have had a dynamic and living concept of law itself which one would do well to remember, the lay mind tending to think of the law in this sense as a fixed codex rather than as its practitioners think of it: “an indubitable structure, organic and living.”)45 These are the “laws of motion and alteration” mentioned in Valerius Terminus, the “laws of action” in matter in Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism 51, the “laws of pure act” of 85. To them there must correspond a mental method which shall register and control these working laws of phenomena. For Bacon knowledge is the primary form of operation:
From the discovery of Forms therefore results truth in speculation and freedom in operation. [Aphorism 3]
Now these two directions, the one active the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true. [Aphorism 4]
Action in matter becomes, through forms and mind, action upon it. In Aphorism 9 he says that the investigation of these forms is the task of metaphysics; and then to physics he assigns the more operative part by which “latent process” and “latent configuration” are to be examined, although here too the mind remains the fundamental instrument for all operation upon matter.
What Bacon seems to have in mind is that all matter is in a constant state of hidden motion and change which is to be investigated. “For what I understand by it is not certain measures or signs or successive steps of process in bodies which can be seen; but a process perfectly continuous, which for the most part escapes the sense” (6). He relates this part of the investigation to individual natures rather than to nature as a whole, adding that it will almost certainly be easier in operation, because less general and fundamental, than the inquiry into forms themselves. “Latent process” is touched on in Aphorisms 5 and 6. It is related to generation, growth, and development, but also to other motions and operations of nature. In Aphorism 7 he speaks of “latent configuration” as also “a new thing,” discussing anatomy and similar disciplines in connection with this process yet finding them insufficient so far, since this investigation needs not merely material analysis (whether physical or chemical or mechanical) but also the right type of mental analysis and method. “We must pass from Vulcan to Minerva,” says Bacon, “if we intend to bring to light the true textures of bodies; on which all the occult, and, as they are called, specific properties and virtues in things depend; and from which too the rule of every powerful alteration and transformation is derived.” So we are brought back to the need for method, and it becomes clearer why in Bacon’s mind the natural history, the forms and the induction could not be separated the one from the other.
No apology is needed for so dynamic and modern a vision, of matter in particular and of nature in general as forms, inner and outer, which are the products of laws of motion discoverable by the mind if it has the right way of working. Its greatness and interest have been seen by Bacon’s more perceptive commentators, Orphic minds such as Shelley, Coleridge, or—perhaps supremely—Robert Hooke, one of the first members of the Royal Society and an Orphic scientist of the first order. (His Orphic title includes—besides his estimation of the “incomparable Verulam,” as he calls Bacon in his posthumous work on natural philosophy, and a mention of Orpheus as an early conveyor of scientific knowledge—a remarkable interpretation of the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as figured descriptions of early geological eras of the world.) This is what Hooke has to say about that area of postlogical activity where the Baconian forms operate:
To observe the Transitions of Nature in the Forms and Proprieties of Creatures, how it passes from one to the other. . . . Another way of discovering Nature, is by taking more especial notice of such of her Works, wherein she seems to act yet more secretly and farther remov’d from the Detection of our Senses, such as in the Formation and Configuration of Bodies. . . . Another way of discovering Nature, is by taking notice of the Transitions of Nature, by what degrees and steps it passes from one thing to another in the Formation of Species. . . . But as for the Discovery of the more internal Texture and Constitution, as also of the Motion, Energy, and operating Principle of Concrete Bodies, together with the Method and Course of Nature’s proceeding in them: these will require much deeper Researches and Ratiocinations.46
This is the Baconian vision of experiment and thought together aiming at the discovery of the motion, energy, and operating principles of the forms of nature. Coleridge picks up this point in his essay on Bacon in The Friend,47 talking of the relationship between laws and ideas in Bacon’s concept of nature; and some of Bacon’s most modern commentators have at length come to appreciate (perhaps because we are only now, scientifically speaking, in a position to do so) the potentialities of Bacon’s concept of form as a working principle of nature and mind both, of his vision of things as patterns and laws of motion, and of matter as essentially alive with an inherent law of motion, to which the mind must apply a kind of logic or method which also moves in time.48 D’Arcy Thompson sets out something remarkably close to this in the first chapter of On Growth and Form. “Now the state, including the shape or form, of a portion of matter is the resultant of a number of forces, which represent or symbolise the manifestations of energy,” he says, and it is particularly interesting to find this beautifully exact mind sorting out in this field from the start what is matter and what is mind, so to speak, and— in my terms if not in his—characterizing the terms “form” and “force” as poetry: “It [force] is a term as subjective and symbolic as form itself, and so is used appropriately in connection therewith.” This is the point of working where mind and matter cannot separate themselves, as Bacon saw, and where the operation necessarily becomes myth, the operative point for each man’s art or science or interpretation of nature, whether that man be Bacon or D’Arcy Thompson—or Shakespeare, for he is at work here too.
Forms in transformation—forms in nature and in the mind—are part of the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare as dramatist cannot discuss his forms; he has to present them. So the forms of nature become forms indeed, the forms of Titania and Oberon, spirits visible to the audience admitted to the mythological situation or the dream, but invisible to the mortals in the play (“I am invisible,” Oberon says to make things quite clear, when Demetrius and Helena enter, Act II, Scene 1). In mortal form but not of mortal kind, as Titania explains when she says to Bottom:
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go,
these are spirits which can nonetheless partake of mortal shape, and their motions, of love or jealousy and disharmony, are joined with the general course of nature, so that disturbance in the one breeds a like disturbance in the other. These are shadows of what will happen in the storm scene in Lear, where not spirit-in-human-shape and nature but man and nature are set in this same relationship of analogy and unity. Again when Shakespeare comes to forms as the working of the mind he can only present us with a character, and what we are given is Bottom. The two meet in Bottom’s interlude with Titania: forms as operative powers in natural phenomena, and forms as instruments of the thinking mind. Behind these, however, the whole of nature is seen to be in movement. Everything is changing. The seasons change; the lovers exchange partners; myth itself may alter: “Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase.” (11.1). The word “change” comes round over and over again.
The spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, [II.1]
Run when you will, the story shall be changed. [II.1]
O Bottom, thou art chang’d; what do I see on thee? [III.1]
What change is this, sweet love? [111.2]
And there is a marvelous refrain throughout the play of words for inner and outer changings, of natural and mental forms. “The rest I’ld give to be to you translated” we begin with, Helena wishing to be Hermia and Demetrius’ beloved. This word occurs twice more: “Bless thee Bottom, bless thee; thou art translated,” says Peter Quince, a phrase caught up later by Puck, “And left sweet Pyramus translated there.” But there are others too. “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity,” Helena says. At the end of Bottom’s idyll, Puck is bidden by Oberon to take “This transformed scalp / From off the head of this Athenian swain.” Later it is said of Bottom, “He cannot be heard of. Out of doubt he is transported.” And lastly Hippolyta says of the lovers and the whole dream they have undergone, “all their minds transfigur’d so together.”
The forms in this play are in movement as they were in that dark Orpheus scene with which we began, and Bottom’s metamorphosis and translation are part of this (he moves in his double capacity—as Bottom translated and as “sweet Pyramus translated”). This is the nature of mythological thinking made manifest, and because Shakespeare is wholly committed to it he can afford to make it as funny as it is, our animal affinities somehow drawn up among the powers of nature which we as yet neither understand nor control, but to which we are united. Bottom is the human condition, the newly thinking mind subjected to natural forms and trying to make forms of its own by which to understand them.
We have arrived now at the point where, in both these great Orphic inquirers, forms in natural history converge on the method to be employed. It is a crucial point, for with it comes the question, in Bacon and in general: what is that interpretation of nature which Bacon aimed at?
There is one remark of Bacon’s, set in a place of honor as the opening word of the Novum Organum, which comes close to a brief definition of it. “Homo naturae minister et interpres” it runs: man the interpreter of nature and its servant (perhaps one needs to think of the English “servant” and “minister” to get its meaning more fully). Bacon insists continually that “the work of the Interpreter” is the heart of the matter. There is a general statement on it in the “Plan of the Work”: “For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation. For man is but the servant and interpreter of nature; what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of nature’s order in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing. For the chain of causes cannot by any force be loosed or broken, neither can nature be commanded except by being obeyed. And so those twin objects, human knowledge and human Power, do really meet in one.” The same points are repeated more formally in Aphorisms 3 and 4 of Book I of the Organum.
Shakespeare does not claim such functions for himself. It is not consonant with his role as dramatist. It is therefore the more interesting to find them claimed for him, explicitly, in Bacon’s terms, by one of his later Orphic commentators, Herder. In the essay on Shakespeare in Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Herder calls him “Dollmetscher der Natur in all’ ihren Zungen,” interpreter of nature in all her tongues; a little later he says, “Da ist nun Shakespeare der grosste Meister, eben weil er nur und immer Diener der Natur ist”; this poet is the greatest master because he is always and only the servant of nature. Homo naturae minister et interpres.
Interpretation involves language. At this point the method of each has to fit itself to that point at which nature may be made to speak. Each method, and each of these two minds, has to declare its vision of language at the meeting-place of mind and nature. Orpheus has to be revealed in his dark powers as a re-former of the natural order.
Bacon’s Orpheus, we remember, stood for philosophy. He might well be a very modern one, for in and through him Bacon wrestles with method as logic and language.
He conceives of his whole task in the first place as logic. In the De Augmentis, Book v, chapter 1, we find the phrase twice repeated, “the Interpretation of Nature, or the New Organon,” an echo of that entry at the beginning of the “Plan of the Work” where the Novum Organum is given the subtitle “Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature.” For Bacon, the interpretation is the logic. That same “Plan of the Work” sets the theme plainly:
The art which I introduce with this view (which I call Interpretation of Nature, is a kind of logic; though the difference between it and the ordinary logic is great; indeed immense. For the ordinary logic professes to contrive and prepare helps and guards for the understanding, as mine does; and in this one point they agree. But mine differs from it in three points especially; viz. in the end aimed at; in the order of demonstration; and in the starting point of the inquiry.
