The Orphic Voice, page 17
At the heart of the play the reduction of the King, through logic which is not merely an external tyranny but a system to which he has deliberately committed himself, is completed. This is the second death of the play. The reduction is total, the hovelling with swine and rogues forlorn as Cordelia says, the stripping of the bodily dignity, and the abasement of the mind, “past speaking of in a king.” Yet it is not just destruction. It is a total reassessment, by inclusion and not exclusion, of the relation between man and nature. Man is Poor Tom, nature is the storm, and in the end Lear unites himself with both. For background or chorus to this change, Shakespeare has set the voice of the storm, the inarticulate language of nature without man. Nature can speak no language of her own. For this she depends upon man. Lear has to learn to speak the universe. He does so gradually, even in the midst of madness, by regaining a kingship “Every inch a king!” which is yet still a man, “I am not ague-proof.” His speech in these acts too, particularly when directed toward the pitiful Gloucester, shows gleams of what is to come.
By the time Lear is reunited with Cordelia, in a sense his death is past. His awakening from sleep there is presented as a resurrection, and it is at this point that for Lear the figure of the engine finishes. He had sent himself to torture and death through his own choice of logic as interpretation. He sees himself as bound to a flaming wheel, made one bodily with a mechanism which has become an engine of torture, and from this, as from the misunderstood logic, he is here freed. The difference can be seen in what he says, his own use of language. Love, humility, uncertainty in this scene wander around blindfold still in his speech. “I am old and foolish.” “Pray you forget and forgive.” They are childish utterances, and rightly so, for here the counterpoint between age and youth is working. Age moves into renewal through the simple love of its own child.
Cordelia, the simple embodiment of naturalness and of language as truth, and Lear in his new childlike yet regal universe as befits a man, delivered from his false interpretations, appear before us in their last two scenes; yet neither of them is delivered from the workings of that analysis which keeps its power right to the end. It was because it cheated on this point that the “happy ending” version of the play was such a travesty. Cordelia, at the close of the play as at the opening, speaks by silence, by what she is. It is a masterstroke that she does not die on the stage, that it is her dead and dumb body which is carried in at the end—that last terrible inversion of the age and youth figure, where the young lie dead in their parent’s arms, for this is a Pietà and speaks that same language. “Never, never, never, never, never”— the absoluteness of logic is not for an instant evaded. Cordelia is speechless as nature is, and it is Lear who interprets in his speech, for man and nature, for Bacon, for us all.
Postlogic or myth is reflexive and inclusive. We can now remember also its other great characteristic, the one Bacon so particularly required of it: that it should be close to things. For it is this which begins to appear in the last speeches of Lear, in “No, no, no, no: come, let’s away to prison,” and what follows after “Howl, howl, howl,” at the end; the very repetition is extraordinary, seeming to image the endless iteration of nature, that stubborn self-affirmation which we suggested as the term of postlogic as opposed to analytic logic’s final nothingness.
No, no, no, no: come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies: and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow the moon.
This is fatidic or Orphic speech. It begins to gather up the universe—birds and butterflies (in the next speech the beasts come in too, with fire and food and flesh and fell); here is language as fairytale or prelogic, and as prayer, and in union with music. There is an astonishing sense of space, the heavens, the tides with humanity flowing with them, the vision of the world as a seat of mysterious royalty of which scattered and conflicting news may be got by language and from various messengers, of vast secrets yet to be discovered, and all this from a prison as small and enclosed as any one single human organism which is yet in relation with the whole of creation, in its metamorphic death as well as in life. The same theme will be taken up at the very end, when Lear rises to new vision and sorrow after Cordelia’s death. She is there the earth itself, dead as earth; and again the creatures of earth, inanimate and animate, are summoned, men or beasts to howl, the stones, a feather, a looking-glass which is itself a stone, and these two to be stirred or misted by Cordelia’s breath (as if an atmosphere of air and clouds) or by an imagined word, “What is’t thou sayest?” So it is that with “Look on her lips,” the bodily organ of speech and life, that Lear dies.
Language and the human mind and body are here raised to a new power, an instrument in their own right, set in a dynamic reciprocally interpretative relationship to nature. “Man = Metaphor,” Novalis says, and again, “We are looking for the blue-print of the world—that is what we are ourselves.”66 This is postlogic as King Lear expounds it. The play affirms that logic is not the sole or even the right instrument for the interpretation of nature. The method, the lute strung with poets’ sinews, consists in the use of the self, body, and mind, heart as well as intelligence, as an instrument of wider interpretation, with language assisting in the process. It will be for later Orphic voices to develop this vision further.
PART III
Erasmus Darwin and Goethe: Linnaean and Ovidian Taxonomy
1
For we poets have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families
ORPHIC GENIUS, each time it occurs, is more than just the appearance of one particular mind, active in thinking and writing. It constitutes itself a point of transformation or metamorphosis, a living instance of postlogic in the context of its own historical period. In this tradition, each such mind is itself an example of the process it seeks to discover and perfect. There is the closest possible connection between the nature of genius of this sort and its theme.
Its occurrences are not necessarily frequent. In terms of history—civil, literary, or scientific—the 200 years from Bacon and Shakespeare to Erasmus Darwin and Goethe, from early seventeenth to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may seem a long time. In terms of a natural history, however, the perspective would be different; and some such natural history, of the mind or of poetry, is our concern. It is also the concern of the Orphic minds themselves. Renan envisages something of the sort in 1848, seeing it as part of the transformation of scholarship from the static to the evolutionary; and in Emerson, the first American Orphic mind which I have come upon (he mentions Orpheus in the essays, published in 1848 also, “History” and “Nature”— what could be more appropriate?), we find the actual phrase “a natural history of the intellect.” Among Orphic minds we seem to have a genuine family descent. Having identified our species, earlier and later, we shall think about temporal relationships between them and trace the other specimens, during those 200 years, of the Orphic line, for it never dies out. It is identified by the appearance of Orpheus, varied and adapted according to the particular historical circumstances to which genius of this kind is highly sensitive. It seems possible that it is to be found operating always at the point of its century’s particular need.
I am using, to describe the task before us in this Part, the terminology of natural history, not through affectation but because it is to the point. The two centuries between Shakespeare and Goethe are valuable because they make us take history into account and think about temporal descent and a kind of evolution. This means that our own thinking will fall in with the general preoccupations of natural historians during these same two centuries. Classification and description of living beings, accompanied by the inquiries, which are bound to follow, into relationships in time as well as space—these are the classic achievements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in natural science, culminating in Linnaeus, who is of the Orphic line himself.
It is not surprising, then, that at this point in the context of taxonomy—which is the science of the classification of living beings—and morphology—which is the study of the characteristic shapes of such beings—the respective Orpheus figures of Erasmus Darwin and Goethe appear, at the point of the recognition and appraisal of natural forms and the application of words to them. We might have expected that the presiding deity of these two sciences would still be that Orpheus of Bacon and Shakespeare who reorders creation by his power. There is, however, a change in Orpheus at this point.
Erasmus Darwin’s Orpheus occurs in his second long poem, The Temple of Nature, published in 1803, one year after its author’s death (he was born in 1732). The first appeared in 1791.1 This was The Botanic Garden, with its two parts, “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of the Plants,” by which Erasmus Darwin is remembered nowadays, if he be remembered at all; but though we may know vaguely that he wrote such a work and it was parodied in The Loves of the Triangles,2 we should be hard put to it to say what the poem was really about. The author in his preface will tell us: “In the first poem the physiology of Plants is delivered, and the operation of the elements, as far as they may be supposed to affect the growth of vegetables. In the second poem . . . the Sexual System of Linnaeus is explained.” The second long poem, The Temple of Nature, though almost entirely forgotten now, is the better production. Here, too, in a preface the writer tells us what he is about: “to bring distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature, in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them.” We are going to talk about both poems later on, but already something interesting suggests itself, for what we seem to have is one poem on morphology and classification and one on evolution. I could say “the progress of Nature in time” or some such noncommittal phrase; but I hope to show that the term “evolution” is justified, fifty years before Erasmus Darwin’s grandson dealt with that matter.
His Orpheus makes a gradual appearance, revealing himself as he goes. It is as if this figure too, in its relation to the poem, has to work in an evolutionary or genetic way. The first hint of him is in the preface where Darwin (as I shall call him from now on, and if ever I mean Charles Darwin, I will say so) informs his reader that he has chosen the Eleusinian Mysteries for the fundamental image system of the poem. In other words, Darwin is choosing to image the progress of nature by means of a mystery religion; Orpheus was connected with such rites, but does not appear explicitly yet. The next hint of his coming is early in Canto 1, where there appears the creation myth of Orphism, as expressed in the Orphic hymns and fragments come down to us from classical times. A little later we come to Orpheus himself:
So when ill-fated Orpheus tuned to woe
His potent lyre, and sought the realms below,
Charm’d into life unreal forms respir’d
And listening shades the dulcet notes admir’d . . .
His trembling bride the bard triumphant led
From the pale mansions of the astonish’d dead,
Gave the fair phantom to admiring light,—
Ah, soon again to tread irremeable night.
It is the second of our Orpheus figures which Erasmus Darwin recommends to us for this stage in our thinking, once again an image of power and poetry in conjunction, but now with the closest, most loving, human connections in Eurydice. Darwin’s Orpheus is in a sense double, for in connection with myth and mystery he appears as the historical and not merely the mythological Orpheus, the founder of a cult and associated with Orphism in the literary tradition. This, however, is no concern of ours. We shall stick to our own Orphic line; here Darwin has two Orphic predecessors in his own country not long before him. He knew the work of the first and may have known that of the second.
The first is Bishop Warburton. In Book II of The Divine Legation of Moses, published in 1738, he embarks on a discussion of the classical Mysteries, and shows himself, if only by glints and flashes, a true Orphic man. After coming upon a “ritual composed in hieroglyphics” we meet “the SPECTACLES in the ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, where everything was done in show and machinery.” There are the Mysteries and the machinery set ready as if for Darwin’s hand, and before long we come, after a passing reference to Ovid, to Orpheus himself— “Orpheus, the most renowned of the European Lawgivers; but better known under the character of Poet: for the first laws being written in measure . . . the fable would have it, that by the force of harmony, he softened the savage inhabitants of Thrace.” It reminds one of Vico. Finally of the Mysteries he says, “Their MAGIC was of three sorts.” This is Pico’s or Bacon’s magic; and the second of the three sorts is, according to Warburton, “the Magic of Transformation or METAMORPHOSIS.”
Darwin’s second Orphic precursor is Thomas Taylor whose translation of the Orphic hymns appeared in 1787, under the title of The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, Translated from the Original Greek, with a Preliminary Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus. Here is another Orphic voice, who celebrates Orpheus in high and fitting words:
the founder of theology among the Greeks; the institutor of their life and morals; the first of prophets and the prince of poets; himself the offspring of a Muse; who taught the Greeks their sacred rites and mysteries and from whose wisdom, as from a perpetual and abundant fountain, the divine Must of Homer, and the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato flowed; and, lastly, who by the melody of his lyre, drew rocks, woods, and wild beasts, stopt rivers in their course, and even moved the inexorable king of hell, as every page, and all the writings of antiquity sufficiently evince.
So far so good—a recognition of the link between Orpheus and poetry and scientific philosophy, and a shift of the reader from the first Orpheus figure to the second, together with the mention of classical literature. But there is more in this classicist’s preface and dissertation, for he saw something of what might happen to the science of his day (that science which Sprat so distortedly commended) should it lose touch with mythological thinking in the fullest and best sense. He characterizes that science as “experimental enquiries, increased without end, and accumulated without order,” the split Baconian vision with the loss of the true method or interpretation. He uses the word “philosopher” in its Orphic Baconian sense: “This opinion a modern philosopher . . . will doubtless consider as too ridiculous to need a serious refutation . . . because he believes the phenomena may be solved by mechanical means”; and then he goes on to speak of a “philosophical mythology, as an accurate conception of its nature will throw a general light on the Hymns, and, I hope, contribute to the dispersion of that gloom in which this sublime subject has been hitherto involved, through the barbarous systems of modern mythologists.” What has been happening to Bacon in 200 years is plain.
Goethe’s Orpheus appears in 1817, among the later poems (Goethe’s own dates, to set the chronology, are 1749–1832). With Erasmus Darwin’s clear-cut Orpheus before our eyes, Goethe’s at first seems much more shadowy. Five stanzas, of eight lines each, with Greek names: Daimon, or individual life-force; Tyche, or fortune; Ananke, or necessity; Eros, or love; and Elpis, hope, are given the title Urworte: Orphisch.
Orphic words out of the beginnings of things—this is something of what that prefix Ur conveys. It has to do with distance in time, as in its use in Urgrossvater where we should say “great-grandfather,” or uralt, meaning “very old indeed.” There is no English equivalent. It turns up fairly constantly in Goethe. He has an Urpflanze or Ur-plant, an Urtier or Ur-beast; Ur-phenomena of various sorts, including, delightfully, the “Urschildkrote im Weltsumpf,” an Ur-tortoise in the primeval world-bog. It is like Kipling’s All-the-Camel-there-was; he would have been the Ur-camel when the world was so-new-and-all. These Urworte with which Orpheus is associated keep company by their prefix with some of Goethe’s deepest biological questioning into the forces which govern form in the organic world. Here the questioning includes man as well, for the forces in the Urworte apply to him.
Herder, Goethe’s mentor and associate from an early age, speaks in his Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts of the Orpheus story as the “Urgesang aller Wesen,” the original song of all created beings. It is fitting that Herder should come in here, for he was part of Goethe’s Orphic education. In a letter written in 1774 Goethe likens this essay of Herder’s to an Orphic song: “He has descended into the depths of his feeling, has stirred up from there all the holy might of simple Nature and now brings it up and sends it over the wide earth in half-conscious, summer-lightning-lit, sometimes morning-friendly-smiling, Orphic song.” That translation is Mr. Humphry Trevelyan’s, and he suggests, in Goethe and the Greeks,3 that the style of this letter may be modeled on that of the Orphic hymns, of which a new edition, with Latin translation, appeared in 1765 in Germany and was reviewed by Herder that same year; Herder may have introduced Goethe to these works or have furthered his interest in them. What is more interesting from our point of view is, however, the metaphor in the letter: Herder is tacitly identified with Orpheus in this second figure of our myth, as if Herder’s writing and thinking took him down to the underworld, to the roots of things. He was a developmental or evolutionary thinker in his whole concept of nature and history.4 He saw things primarily from the historian’s standpoint, and we find him dealing with the origin of language in his essay Über der Ursprung der Sprache in 1772, an interest he shares with a later Orphic thinker, Renan, who published his De l’Origine du langage in 1848. There is a reference in Dichtung und Wahrheit5 to this question of the origins of language, dating from the time of Goethe’s connection with Herder, but Goethe takes the origin, divine or natural, of languages for granted —which is to say he is not particularly interested in it. His Urworte are of another kind.
