The Orphic Voice, page 23
With Book x comes Orpheus, to whom Ovid gives greater prominence than to any other single figure in the work. He enters with the Eurydice story. The whole of Book x is his song, which falls in with the serial pattern of the earlier books, though framed now by the consciousness we have of the singer singing it. Book XI opens with the account of his power over natural things; then his death. In the very next story, that of Midas, he is kept in our minds by a reference as we go along, and then immediately we find ourselves watching the building of the walls of a city,71 Troy, which here as in the Aeneid is held to be the ancestor of Rome; and the cities continue to grow and change and struggle throughout the remaining books of the poem. In XIII and XIV the myths continue, but prehistory and history grow up with them now; the invasion of Troy; the pilgrimage of Aeneas which, divided into three parts, weaves through the two books in between the mythological themes; the deification of Aeneas; the founding of Rome. In Book xv the summing up begins, with a long speech by Pythagoras on Orphic cultic lore.72 Pythagoras also recapitulates the main theme. “Cuncta fluunt: omnisque vagans formatur imago,” he says, and then a little later:
coelum et quodcunque sub illo est,
Immutat formas, tellusque, et quicquid in illa est.
Nos quoque, pars mundi . . .
and in between, all the changes are mentioned, the slow revolutions of time on the earth’s surface, the workings of natural history, the growing and decaying of the cities and societies of no less mutable man. We end with the deification of Julius Caesar and the apostrophe to Augustus. The final passage is not merely a self-interested diversion. This is not to deny the aim of self-commendation, but a great poet can achieve such functional ends, if they can be called so, as he goes along, inside the texture of the poem itself. What this passage says is that politics are themselves part of the process the poem has been concerned with—an immense addition to the theme which we can only notice here and pass by.
This poem is one superb vision of growth and process taking form first in the purely natural world and then in the world of man, the changing figures of the one moving on continuously into those of the second. The work divides in the proportion of 3:2. Books I–IX form the first part, story following upon story. The profusion of connection and disconnection is not due to accident or failure of skill; it is a marvelous correspondence with the poet’s subject matter. This is exactly what, from one point of view, the world is—a seemingly endless series of stories, of powers and phenomena, birth, transformation, death, soon related and soon over, making way for other stories, connected or unconnected. What Ovid is doing is adopting the narrative approach to natural history— “as a tale that is told.” He gives three-fifths of his span of time to the workings of the natural world, and leaves the remaining two-fifths for the more human developments which grow directly up and out of it. Here cities begin to rise and civilizations to develop, seen in their turn as part of the great natural round of growth and change which time visits upon us all:
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die . . .
It is a vision that stands any poet worthy the name in good stead. So the forms of man’s thinking and society grow up, at one with the processes of the elemental powers and inanimate things and living bodies, but transcending them as part of the same process.
At the hinge of the work, mediating that shift from inorganic and organic to consciously human, is Orpheus. With his arrival the pattern of development (of universe and poem) begins to complicate itself and to move in new directions. In Orpheus’ position in this poem are implicit all the claims made for his civilizing influence in sphere after sphere. But Orpheus is not merely an individual mythological figure; he is the figure of poetry as power. So poetry, as myth and language, and as the instrument of human consciousness (it is with Book x that the song of the poem becomes, as it were, conscious of itself) becomes also the instrument of progress into society and culture, the development from organismic into organizational activity.
Far from being a collection of imaginary if pretty stories, the poem begins now to assume such proportions that it is hard to speak of it adequately. The Metamorphoses is a vast postlogic in its own right: in the reciprocal dynamics of its subject matter and method; in its affirmation of the central position of language and poetry in the person of Orpheus; in its preoccupation with sex as one of the working principles in matter and method; in its use of myth as the instrument by which the whole span of natural process is to be understood and interpreted; in the reflexive use of that instrument to hold the universe and the mind together, the forms under consideration being always partly phenomenal and partly mental and imaginative. By all of this it takes its primal place in the direct tradition, as “a portion of that wider Science of Form which deals with the forms assumed by matter under all aspects and conditions, and, in a still wider sense, with forms which are theoretically imaginable.” So D’Arcy Thompson in chapter 17 of On Growth and Form characterizes the activity of morphology. It is here that Ovid belongs; as much a part of this, the Orphic tradition, as is D’Arcy Thompson himself, or Erasmus Darwin and Goethe and the Linnaeus they set out to metamorphose.
7
POET: And yet the very improbable monsters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses have entertained the world for many centuries.
BOOKSELLER: The monsters in your Botanic Garden, I hope, are of the latter kind.
POET: The candid reader must determine.
WE ARE doubly in a difficulty when we come to consider The Botanic Garden. We know it only as work which has been most successfully ridiculed; and we are hampered by the prevailing critical fashion, which is to read a poet not so much for matter or method as for style and attitude, and then to pass judgments of literary value. We shall never do justice to Erasmus Darwin in this way, and I want to propose two things to help us. First, since he is so little known, we will look at him at his best. Second, we will turn for assistance to his contemporary critic, Miss Anna Seward, part of the purpose of whose book on Dr. Darwin is, she says, “an investigation of the constituent excellencies and defects of his magnificent poem, the Botanic Garden.” (She does not deal with The Temple of Nature, which she had not seen at the time of writing her biography.)
To see Darwin at his best as a poet, we have to go, rather surprisingly, to Phytologia. Anyone reading that work, which is interesting in its own right, will be rewarded by coming upon a set of verses concealed in Part III, translated in part, so the author says, “from an elegant Latin poem of Edward Tighe Esq.” and bearing the title “The Cultivation of Brocoli.” It is a little too long to quote in full, but a selection follows:
There are of learned taste, who still prefer
Cos-lettuce, tarragon and cucumber;
There are, who still with equal praises yoke
Young peas, asparagus and artichoke;
Beaux there are still with lamb and spinach nurs’d,
And clowns eat beans and bacon till they burst.
This boon I ask of Fate, whene’er I dine,
O, be the Proteus-form of cabbage mine!—
Cale, colewort, cauliflower, or soft and clear
If BROCOLI delight thy nicer ear,
Give, rural Muse! the culture and the name
In verse immortal to the rolls of Fame.
When the bright Bull ascending first adorns
The Spring’s fair forehead with his golden horns,
Italian seed with parsimonious hand
The watchful gardener scatters o’er his land;
Quick moves the rake, with iron teeth divides
The yielding glebe, the living treasure hides;
O’er the smooth soil, with horrent horns beset,
Swells in the breeze the undulating net;
Bright shells and feathers dance on twisting strings,
And the scar’d Finch retreats on rapid wings . . .
Pants thy young heart to grasp the laurel’d prize,
And swell thy Brocoli to gigantic size?
Soon as each head with youthful grace receives
The verdant curls of six unfolding leaves:
O, still transplant them, on each drizzly morn,
Oft as the moon relights her waning horn;
Till her bright vest the star-clad Virgin trails,
Or corn-crown’d Autumn lifts his golden scales.
Then ply the shining hoe with artful toil,
E’er the grey night-frost binds the stiffen’d soil;
And as o’er heaven the rising Scorpion crawls,
Surround the shuddering stems with earthen walls.
So shall each plant erect its leafy form
Unshook by Autumn’s equinoxial storm;
And round and smooth, with silvery veins emboss’d,
Repel the dew-drops, and evade the frost.
Thus on the Stoic’s round and polish’d brows,
Her venom’d shafts in vain misfortune throws;
By virtue arm’d, he braves the tented field,
The innocuous arrows tinkling on his shield. . . .
Oft in each month, poetic Tighe! be thine
To dish green Brocoli with savory chine;
Oft down thy tuneful throat be thine to cram
The snow-white cauliflower with fowl and ham!
Nor envy thou, with such rich viands blest,
The pye of Perigord, or swallow’s nest.
This needs no commending: it commends itself, and if all of Darwin were of this kind we should have no difficulties. But this is not so, as even the two short passages of his verse already quoted will have shown. In the first, the Orpheus passage on page 174, he is competent and flat. In the second, the invocation to the Botanic Muse on page 196, he is competent and elegant. Both passages illustrate well enough the mean of his style, what one might call his middle register. The problem does not lie here, however, but in the extremes of his style. He is capable of considerable magnanimity of vision; he is also capable, and in the same breath, of fearful lapses into unconscious humour or bathos. His characters are all too apt to “titter” at solemn moments; his readers also. Let me give an example; it is from Canto 1 of The Temple of Nature and describes the Muse beginning the pilgrimage which the whole poem relates:
Charm’d at her touch the opening wall divides,
And rocks of crystal form the polish’d sides;
Through the bright arch the Loves and Graces tread,
Innocuous thunders murmuring o’er their heads;
Pair after pair, and tittering as they pass,
View their fair features in the walls of glass.
The opening has its points; indeed the whole passage has, and as it advances it becomes curiously reminiscent of Kubla Khan. All very well for Coleridge to object to the “palaces of ice” of Darwin’s verse; perhaps those who live in stately pleasure domes of the same stuff should not throw stones. The lapse at the end, however, is Darwin’s very own, and all of a piece with many other such, with the ladies “in slight undress” who sit about on the lawns, the poetized pump, the simperings, the “compliments to ingenious professors” (which Miss Seward reprobates, consigning them “more properly to the Notes”), the Homeric simile beginning “So the lone Truffle . . .” These are the features with which The Loves of the Triangles made merciless play. Yet if we are going to take too high-minded a view of poetry here, we shall not merely undervalue Darwin in every way but lose half the enjoyment he has to offer. For his verse is enjoyable precisely because of its extraordinary capacity to give the reader a sustained aesthetic pleasure punctuated with constant occasions of laughter. We gain in fact from Darwin what we should gain from a first-rate comic poet, but in alternating and not direct current. Darwin’s lapses are not weaknesses. They are examples of misdirected or miscalculated energy, and the energy is the delight.
It is here that Miss Seward comes in. She is trenchant in her criticism of Darwin yet never loses her enthusiasm for him whom she calls “this extraordinary man.” She diagnoses his case: his lack of simplicity which led him into “a meretricious rage for ornament”; his capacity to be seduced by his own poetic imagination; the fundamental division in this Orphic mind: “He wished to keep prose too plain, and his warmest admirers will surely acknowledge that he insists upon poetry being dressed with too elaborate magnificence.” She accords him experimental status: “Adapting the past and recent discoveries in natural and scientific philosophy to the purposes of heroic verse, the Botanic Garden forms a new class in poetry, and by so doing, gives to the British Parnassus a wider extent than it possessed in Greece, or in ancient, or modern Rome.” She gives a resume of the subject matter as she advances, in which we need not follow her, but her interest lies in interpreting Darwin’s interpretation of that subject matter; not in pursuing the Nymph of Botany in The Economy of Vegetation through her “astronomic, electric, aerial and mineralogic properties” as well as her vegetable ones, or through the transformations in The Loves of the Plants, but in assessing Darwin’s method and his success or failure as a postlogician. It is in no small part her perceptive commentary which encourages us to look at The Botanic Garden less as an expose of science than as a kind of Darwinian Discours de la méthode.
Darwin chose for his mythological machinery in the first part of this poem what he calls the myths of Rosicrucianism, which he mixes with occasional classical figures. It was a poor choice. The gnomes and sylphs who pervade the work are unfamiliar, superficial, and imaginatively quite inadequate to the breadth of Darwin’s conception. All they did was to provide material for parodists. This has obscured what is positive in Darwin here—his tremendous emphasis on, and enthusiasm for, myth, and his glimpses into its possibilities as an interpretative instrument. Wherever these insights occur, Miss Seward follows them up. She confirms Darwin’s general proceedings while criticizing him acutely at just his most vulnerable points, as for instance when she objects to the narrow frame of his mythology in The Economy of Vegetation, claiming that he should have taken Nature for his central figure; or when she complains that in his treatment of the Orphic creation myth, “the noble fable of Eros, or Divine Love, issuing from the great egg of night, floating in chaos,” he makes the “image of this celestial love too gay . . . the cyprian but not the hieroglyphic Cupid,” a remarkable phrase. Personification, Darwin’s second great mythological instrument in the Economy, also attracts her attention. “The deadly and salubrious winds; the volcanic and pestilential airs; the Tornado, dreadful to mariners, etc; every thing here has animal life and consciousness,” she says. (There are fine illustrations of these very things by Fuseli and Blake in early editions of The Botanic Garden.) “Universal personification was the order of the Muse in this work, not to be infringed; else, when circumstances are in themselves sublime . . . they are more likely to be of diminished than increased force, by the addition of fabled endowment.” Personification may take the form of ascribing life to the inanimate, which is what mostly goes on in the Economy, or of interchanging types of life as in the Loves, where, according to Miss Seward, “the floral ladies, and their harems, rise to the amused eye in all the glow of poetic colouring.”
Now to ascribe life to everything is not mere fabling. It comes straight from Bacon’s trio of pretergenerations, generations, and arts as methods of natural history and embodies two mythological working principles. It is an experiment in flexibility inside that Baconian range of metaphor for natural subjects, the range running from organisms through “monsters” to mechanical arts. Orphic minds must be friendly to that whole range, including the machines, just as they are friendly to logic as well as postlogic. Darwin possesses this friendliness, as his work shows; but the personifications in this poem indicate his final choice of myth: the organism envisaged as in itself an interpretative instrument for a wide range of structures and happenings in nature. This leads on to the second stage of mythological operation in personification, for it is also an experiment in inclusive mythology, the use of figures inclusive of the body and of the thinker’s mind as part of the interpretative situation.
Darwin proves, as working mythologizer or poet, inadequate on each count, as Miss Seward realizes: “the passions are generally asleep, and seldom are the nerves thrilled by his imagery, impressive and beauteous as it is, or by his landscapes, with all their vividness.” Yet she recognizes in him something else, no less postlogical: “the lavish magnificence of the imagery in this work, genius alone, bold, original, creative and fertile in the extreme, could have produced.” However inadequate the execution, she seizes upon the operational principle, the fertility of genius bodying forth the figures by which to interpret no less fertile nature (she quotes Shakespeare’s Theseus at this point, and applies his words to Darwin). We can hardly expect the lady to discuss fertility and sex as part of the Doctor’s matter or method, but it is interesting to find her vindicating him from charges of sensuality, on grounds not of poetic license but of scientific realism. “As to the amours of the Plants and Flowers . . . the floral harems do not form an imaginary but a real system, which philosophy has discovered, and with which poetry sports. The impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not on the pages of the poet, when the Botanic Garden is considered, on the whole, as an immodest composition.” So the principle of sex, in Darwin’s method and in postlogic, is upheld. And last of all Miss Seward for all her criticism of him compares her “daring Bard” with Ovid, and on more than one occasion; thus, for instance: “He is surely not inferior to Ovid; and if poetic taste is not much degenerated, or shall not hereafter degenerate, the Botanic Garden will live as long as the Metamorphoses.”
