The Orphic Voice, page 22
The task of Nature’s secretary, however, is never just that of taking dictation, “mere stenography” as Emerson calls it. The speculative mind of the poet comes in also. So Emerson adds the wonderful sentences which head this section, above, where the Orphic mentality is seen in its fullness, part of the evolutionary processes of nature which it is to interpret under the joint forms of poetry and natural science.
We have to think of the Orphic mind as a natural phenomenon. This is certainly how Goethe thought of himself. He was in his own eyes the “organic agent” Emerson speaks of, and it is this that he records so carefully and at such length in all his work. He is secretary to the universe and to himself, the two being indivisible. To think of him in this way will at first make matters not easier but harder. A natural living phenomenon on which we possess a multitude of data is one of the most difficult things to think about in the world; worse still when it is conscious of its matrix in nature and thinks about this, these thoughts being then also part of the data we have to work with. Goethe is bedded down into nature like a huge thinking tree, and to come to terms with this will need some other method than dislodging or dismembering. Here Erasmus Darwin is going to be helpful. He is a like phenomenon but a less gigantic one, and he does not complicate his state or ours by thinking about it himself. Clear, straightforward, detached, not much interested in himself but much interested in almost everything else, he has nonetheless an Orphic mind, as Goethe has. Silent about himself on the whole, he yet does not go unrecorded, for fate allotted him a remarkable biographer, Anna Seward the poetess (the feminine gender is wholly appropriate in her case). Her Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin is a minor classic in its own right, fascinatingly florid in style, frequently irrelevant, but never dull, exhibiting from time to time unmistakable and enjoyable feminine malice, unreliable in its facts, but containing shrewd critical judgments on Darwin’s literary work. Where Goethe is vast, general, and profound, Darwin will be, in the same direction, much more specific, and will tell us what to look for in the operations both he and Goethe are engaged on.
In a well-known passage in the Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums appended to the Metamorphose der Pflanzen, Goethe says that after Spinoza, whom we shall not be concerned with here, and Shakespeare, the greatest single influence upon him had been Linnaeus, “precisely because he aroused so much antagonism in me.” Goethe maintained a life-long relationship with Shakespeare. Bacon appears too in Goethe’s work, but in a minor capacity. “Einen bewundernswürdigen Geist,” Goethe calls him, and gives a quiet and judicious assessment of him as a scientist in the historical section of the Farbenlehre. For Darwin, too, Linnaeus is central. The Loves of the Plants is one long celebration of the work of “the Swedish sage,” and he appears frequently elsewhere in Darwin’s work, never without reverent and enthusiastic comment. For his Orphic ancestry, however, in the light of which the work upon Linnaeus is to be done, Darwin turns back not so much to Shakespeare (though he mentions him often and with affectionate admiration, singling out for special mention two of the mythological plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, in the Interludes between the Cantos in The Loves of the Plants) as to Bacon. It is not Bacon the scientist whom he invokes, however, but the mythologist and postlogician. In the “Apology” preceding The Economy of Vegetation Darwin says: “many of the important operations of Nature were shadowed or allegorized in the heathen mythology, as the first Cupid springing from the Egg of Night, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche . . . etc, many of which are ingeniously explained in the works of Bacon.” He returns to these mythological interpretations of Bacon in the notes to these poems. In that same Apology he talks about hieroglyphics and then the Eleusinian Mysteries. These are dealt with at some length in note XXII to the Economy, in connection with the Portland Vase, where Darwin mentions Warburton, that more immediate Orphic ancestor of his; and eventually they become the “machinery” for The Temple of Nature.
It seems right that Goethe should hold particularly to Shakespeare, for the latter’s Orpheus, the lute strung with poets’ sinews, expresses Goethe’s position too, the poet his own instrument and an agent of the power which controls and directs nature itself. That Darwin should opt for Bacon and postlogic is more surprising. By doing so he lands at one bound right into the middle of myth as a methodology. More than this, he places himself full in that long steady tradition which in England goes back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and elsewhere goes back further still.
Darwin is not yet done, however. He shows an Orphic insight when it comes to Linnaeus himself and to the inadequacy which both he and Goethe sense in the Linnaean taxonomy. What did this sense of inadequacy spring from, and what could be done about it? Goethe makes a number of direct attempts at self-examination on the subject. We find him making the cryptic remark that he had learned infinitely much from Linnaeus with the sole exception of botany.63 He takes his Linnaeus with him, touchingly, on his mad dash into Italy, an essential piece of luggage apparently; but he is not happy with him: “True, I have my Linnaeus with me, and his terminology dutifully in my head; but will the time and the quietude of mind necessary for analysis be forthcoming?— and in any case, if I know my own nature, analysis is never going to be my strong point” (Italienische Reise, entry for September 7, 1786). Later he is haunted by Linnaeus again, no less uncomfortably:
Confronted with so many new and renewed plantforms, I found that old obsession of mine turning up again: whether amongst all this crowd I could discover the Urpflanze. There must be such a thing! How otherwise should we recognize that such and such a form was a plant at all unless they were all built on the same model? I made an effort to find out in what ways the many differing forms were really distinct from one another. And all the time I kept seeing them as more alike than unlike, and when I called up the reinforcements of my botanical terminology, that was well and good but it facilitated nothing; it merely made me uneasy without helping me forward. [Ibid., April 17, 1787]
In the Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums, immediately after the mention of the trinity of Spinoza, Shakespeare, and Linnaeus, Goethe goes on to discuss the latter’s system and his reaction to it:
Through sheer repetition the names imprinted themselves on my memory; in analysis too I acquired rather more skill, but the success was more apparent than real . . . Were I to try consciously to clear up my situation, I should say: think of me as a born poet, whose aim was to shape his words and forms of expression directly to fit his subject-matter, whatever that might be, in order to do it justice as far as possible. Such a one was now called upon to memorize a ready-made terminology, to have a squad of terms and sub-terms at the ready, so that when a specimen came his way he would be able, after some quick selective thinking, to line it up in its due order according to its particular characteristics. This way of going to work always reminded me of a sort of mosaic, where ready-made pieces are put together one by one so as ultimately to produce out of hundreds of petty details some semblance of a picture. The demands made by this method always went against my judgment.
Although I have come to see the necessity for this kind of thing, aiming as it does at enabling the student, by means of a general body of information, to come to terms with certain external characteristics of plants, and to do away with uncertainty about plantforms, yet I found that this would-be precise use of terms created the worst difficulty of all, plant organs being so versatile.
There is a suggestion of the same sort of difficulty in a conversation reported by Falk, “This is this and that is that! But what good does it do me to have all this nomenclature in my head? . . . What use are bits and pieces, and the names of bits and pieces? What I want to know is what it is that so breathes through each part of the universe that each seeks its fellow, serving it or commanding it according to that intellectual law, innate in all in greater or lesser degree, which fits out one for one role, another for another. But it is just at this very point that complete and universal silence reigns.”64
Goethe demands greater dynamics and flexibility in Linnaean taxonomy. So did Darwin in the passage in Phytologia quoted above, p. 214; he then adds, “I profess myself incapable to execute the plan, which I have suggested here, as it would . . . demand a genius which few possess, capable of reducing the complex and intricate to the simple and explicit.” It is as if he left the actual task to Goethe, but he tells us more clearly than Goethe and in the purest Orphic and postlogical terms the nature of the change Goethe must work on Linnaeus. He tells us this in his poetry, not in his scientific prose. Miss Seward describes, inimitably, the birth of the idea in his mind.
“The Linnaean System is unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants, and trees. You should make flowers, plants and trees into men and women. I,” continued he, “will write the notes, which must be scientific; and you shall write the verse.”
Miss Seward observed that, besides her want of botanic knowledge, the subject was not strictly proper for a female pen; that she felt how eminently it was adapted to the efflorescence of his own fancy.65
Darwin himself, in the “Proem” to the work in question, The Loves of the Plants, takes up the tale: “Whereas P. OVIDIUS NASO, a great necromancer in the famous Court of AUGUSTUS CAESAR, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here exhibited them before thee.”
The clue Darwin offers, for himself and for Goethe, is an attempt to turn Linnaeus into Ovid. Darwin and Goethe are to transform systematics into metamorphoses. Darwin is explicit about his own intentions. How will Goethe’s work respond to such an interpretation of it?
A connection between Goethe and Ovid exists already, established by Goethe himself. We come across Ovid in the middle of Goethe’s scientific thinking, just as we do in Darwin’s; Goethe mentions him in connection with comparative anatomy, animal and human, Darwin in connection with hybrid plants.66 But the Goethe-Ovid relationship is a matter not simply of classical or scientific reference, but of love. Ovid, so Goethe tells us in Dichtung und Wahrheit, entered his life early. “I early became acquainted with the Ovidian transformations, and so my young head was filled soon enough with a mass of images and events, forms and happenings full of significance and wonder” (Vol. 1, Bk. 1). Later he mentions that he formed in childhood the rather strange habit of learning by heart opening passages of books, and says that he did this with the Pentateuch, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses. And what an opening that last is!
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!
If that young growing mind of Goethe’s had needed a device for its present and future activity, it could scarcely have found a better.
Metamorphosis is for Goethe one of the great underlying principles of all natural phenomena. “Everything in life is metamorphosis,” he says to Sulpiz Boisseree in 1815 (Goethe im Gespräch, p. 185), “in plants, and in animals, up to and including mankind as well.” It is to this last and crucial kind of metamorphosis that the Urworte have been held to refer.67 Agnes Arber records that in his lifetime his use of the word Metamorphose in his scientific treatises produced Ovidian misconceptions:
The word Metamorphose, in the title of Goethe’s book, was not altogether a happy one for his purpose. From classical times it had had poetical associations, which might well lead the reader to expect a work of fancy rather than of science, especially when the author was already famous for imaginative writing. Goethe himself complains that, on telling one of his friends that he had published a little volume upon the metamorphoses of plants, the friend expressed his delight in the prospect of enjoying Goethe’s charming description in the Ovidian manner of narcissus, hyacinth and daphne. [Goethe’s Botany, p. 74]
It is possible, however, that this was a “good” error. A man as steeped in Ovid as Goethe was cannot have failed to realize the associations of the word “metamorphosis” which he chose to use for scientific purposes. The fault may have lain with that particular friend’s notion of Ovid, the conventional one perhaps, which Herder also held. In his autobiography (Vol. 1, Bk. x) Goethe describes the battle he had with Herder about Ovid. Herder took what is still the general critical view of the Latin poet: “No real and direct truths were to be found in these poems; this was neither Greece nor Rome, neither a primeval nor a civilized world, merely imitation of what was already in existence, presented with the kind of affectation one might expect from a hypersophisticate.” Goethe counters this judgment with one of his own, remarkable in itself and for its conformity with what we have seen already of Orphic ways of thinking about poets and their relation to natural history: “I tried to maintain that the productions of an outstanding individual are themselves products of nature.” That is to say that nature interprets herself through the figuring mind, in taxonomy and in myth alike, at that dynamic point where the mind thinks with language.
Coleridge implies this when he says, “As for the study of the ancients, so of the works of nature, an accidence and a dictionary are the first and indispensable requisites.” The metaphor once again is of nature as a language, and the study of the classics is set on a par with natural history, excellent for our purpose for we need an approach to Ovid, unequipped as we are through our system of education in the Latin classics, which teaches them, if they are taught at all, as exercises in translating or in pedantic footnotage, never as poetry or ideas. After this opening Coleridge comes directly to Linnaeus, for it is thither that he is proceeding. He says that for the dictionary and accidence68 of the works of nature we are indebted to “the illustrious Swede.” But, he goes on, “neither was the central idea of vegetation itself, by the light of which we might have seen the collateral relations of the vegetable to the inorganic and to the animal world; nor the constitutive and inner necessity of sex itself, revealed to Linnaeus.” Here is a remarkable diagnosis of the Linnaean case. Do Orphic minds call in Ovid to the rescue in hopes of finding in him a central idea of vegetation, collateral relations between the orders of nature, and the constitutive necessity of sex? It is possible at least. A little later Coleridge goes on, “What is botany at this present hour? Little more than an enormous nomenclature; a huge catalogue . . . The terms, system, method, science, are mere improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging by endless appositions but without a nerve that oscillates, or a pulse that throbs in sign of growth and inward sympathy.”69 It is at this point that we are referred by Darwin and Goethe to Ovid’s poem.
In the meager critical literature available, Ovid tends to be set down as a witty but only half-serious compiler of traditional myths, whose ingenuity, great as it is, is insufficient to give unity to this compendium of stories he strung together on the single thread that each of them contains a change of form of some kind. He becomes a high-class hack cataloguer. Yet there is evidence that this view of him is inadequate, simply because of his central position among Orphic minds.70 Did Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth find in Ovid merely a useful dictionary of mythology?
The Metamorphoses are of epic length; there are fifteen books of them. The poet in his own person speaks the first peerless four lines as prologue, and the last-nine lines as epilogue. In the first four he claims the whole of time for his poetic province, explicitly, from the beginning of the world to his own day, with all the changes there may be between. Then at the end he moves almost casually into eternity, partly as immortal soul and immortal poet, partly on the strength of the civilization to which he belongs, though the claim is made with what looks like a slight lift of the eyebrow:
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
Astra ferar: nomenque erit indelibile nostrum.
Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
Ore legar populi: perque omnia saecula fama
(Si quid habent veri vatum praesagia) vivam.
If the divinations of poets are to be trusted—it is a nice point; but at least life has the last word in the poem, just as novelty had the first, and between the two runs a long span of about a hundred stories, beginning with the creation of the world out of chaos and ending with the deification of Julius Caesar. Most of the stories contain a transformation, some more than one. Those involved may be gods, demigods, heroes, mortals, living creatures of all kinds, plants and trees, rocks, earth, water, the elements.
Book I, after the poet has spoken in his own voice, starts with the creation of the world out of chaos, first the elements of the world itself, then the living creatures, then the creation of man. After a description of the Four Ages, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron, a decline from beauty and innocence into human crime and rebellion, comes the first metamorphosis, the retrogression of man into wolf; then comes the Flood and the second metamorphosis, the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha which turn into men and women. So in 450 lines the world is settled and ready to proceed, and we come to what is the first type-metamorphosis of the vast majority that are to follow: Apollo constrained by Cupid to love Daphne, daughter of a river god, who eludes him by turning into a laurel tree. Now we are fairly launched, and from here until the end of Book IX story succeeds story in a series that might well be infinite. There seems to be a gradual progression from preoccupation with the gods, who are powers in human shape, and with half-gods such as nymphs and local geniuses, the embodiments of natural objects, to more purely human stories; but the gods and godlings do not vanish, they continue to weave in and out of the stories of men all the time. So the first nine books go.
