The Orphic Voice, page 25
Dich im Unendlichen zu finden,
Musst unterscheiden und dann verbinden;
Drum danket mein beflügelt Lied
Dem Manne, der Wolken unterschied.
(“The world is vast, the world is wide,
The heavens reach out on every side;
I take it in with my two eyes,
But how to grasp and realize?”
To cope with boundless breadth and height,
You first divide and then unite.
So wing, my song, in praises vowed
Of him who classified the cloud.)
The second, longer, poem, with an Indian mythological setting, describes the cloud forms and celebrates Howard’s work in these terms, surely the perfect answer to those who think of poetry as a dim and vague business:
Was sich nicht halten, nicht erreichen lasst,
Er fasst es an, er halt zuerst es fest;
Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schrankt es ein,
Benennt es treffend!— Sei die Ehre dein!
(What had no grip or substance for the mind,
He, first of any, holds it well-defined,
Limits the illimitable in a frame,
And names it duly!— Honour to thy name!)
Characteristically, Goethe in the third poem says that when once the systematic divisions are made, we must lend them our own living gifts if they are not to die themselves; so painter and poet, familiar with Howard’s classification, will move on from there into further worlds of airy and yet human interpretation. It is a perfect statement, in a microcosm, of how he works; and it is how he will work with himself.
It is interesting that in this little poem about method Goethe commends that transmigration, from systematic to postlogical thinking, to poet and painter, just as Ruskin did in the passage about botanical systematics with which the present section is headed. Not just poet, but painter too. This is the first and the most fundamental of Goethe’s attempts at self-classification, and one which, in my experience, is not sufficiently emphasized. We hear a lot about the supposed scientist-poet dilemma, as if this were a real parting of the ways, whereas for an Orphic mind it need and should not be so at all. But we hear far less about the choice Goethe had to make between devoting himself principally to painting or poetry, although it gave him, I think, more concern and went very deep. This makes sense, for these are genuinely separate ways of handling figures and nature, much more so than poetry and science, and Goethe rightly felt that he had to make up his mind between them, not as to which was the better form of interpretation, but which suited his own nature. In the end this was something his Italian Journey accomplished for him. Toward the end of his journal on that occasion he says (Rome, February 22, 1788): “It is daily becoming plainer to me that really and truly I am born to be a poet, and that I must spend the next ten years—the most I can count on for active work—in cultivating this talent and making something solid out of it; in the past my success had been largely due to youth and its fire, without much trouble having been taken. I shall draw this advantage from my long stay in Rome—that I renounce any further activity as a working painter.” I think one can hear the note of regret there, the more so since it turns up elsewhere. Nine years later (August 30, 1797), in his journal of his travels in Switzerland, we find him saying it is sheer folly of painters to make themselves out as rivals of poets, since they, the former, have at their command that which could drive a poet to despair. And there are recurring instances of Goethe speaking in dispraise of language and, occasionally, of poetry itself. The plastic artist’s method seemed to him perhaps more direct, less dependent on an ambiguous medium. If he could have had such a direct method, or the even more direct one by which the figuring is done with no medium at all but one’s own life raised to the power of an interpretative art and methodology, he would have been glad; but the latter form of interpretation is reserved for heroes and saints, neither of which callings forms part of the poet’s professional vocation, and Goethe was too good a self-taxonomer not to recognize in the end that he was a poet born.
He says as much in an interesting autobiographical fragment, Selbstschilderung, written in the third person, of the year 1797, one of the clearest of his attempts at self-definition:
The central point and the very basis of his existence was poetry as a kind of life-force, increasingly active and developing inwardly and outwardly. Once this is grasped, all the apparent contradictions can be resolved. The drive of this force is unceasing, and if it is not to devour itself for lack of material it has to be directed outwards; once this is done, since it is active and not contemplative by nature, it is bound to begin to work on what it comes upon. This accounts for the numerous wrong turnings taken here: toward painting and art, for which he was not fitted by nature; toward active public life for which he had insufficient adaptability; toward the sciences, for which he lacked the necessary staying power. But because his approach to all three was based on self-adaptation and development, and he tried in each case to come at the true nature of what they had to offer and at the unity and elegance of form that would fit them, even these mistaken endeavors were fruitful, in outer life and in the life of the mind.
This is the point where, as if in a Linnaean taxonomy, a name can be affixed. Goethe is a poet: well and good. But this is only the beginning. For the name is in this method of thought merely the starting point for the development of a system of morphological figures designed to express the nature and activity of this living being so named. This Goethe has already begun to describe in the passage above. The first activity is ruled out; to have “no organ,” as it stands in the German, cannot be got over. But the second and third wrong turnings, toward public and political life and science, are interesting and are almost certainly, for a powerful enough Orphic mind, not wrong turnings at all. Goethe himself says in Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums that every energetic talent is universal. (There is a whole field of relations between the Orphic tradition and political thinking which we cannot go into here but which is part of the picture, for these too are structures within the Ovidian scope of speculation, metamorphosis, and myth.) Poetry and science in the Orphic mind spring from the same fundamental activity, and it is this which Goethe is concerned to identify and interpret in himself.
Poetry as life-force, as living activity, is what he is interested in, the interest that makes him say in the first of the Episteln that it is the life that forms the man and words count for little; that made Faust alter the opening of Saint John’s Gospel to “In the beginning was the Deed”; that made Goethe call his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, implying not merely an ambiguity between truth and fiction but a triple unity between truth, poetry and the life that lay behind them. It is characterization of life under this form that Goethe is after, not a private introspective venture nor a limited professional inquest. We find him saying to Eckermann, January 31, 1827, “I realize more and more that poetry is common property among men, and that it has appeared in hundreds and hundreds of people, and in all ages . . . We must each say to ourselves that poetic gifts are nothing out of the way, and no-one has any call to be puffed up about them.” It is the commonness of poetry that gives it its morphological value. For Goethe, the poet’s morphology will be a way of understanding man himself, and out of the self-characterization Goethe gives us there emerges a more remarkable and fundamental image still, of the poet as in some way the sheer archetype of the living organism as such, self-regardant it is true, but only in that way differing from all the other living creatures of which it can be the type and, because of its consciousness, the interpretative key.
There are four things which Goethe says about the poetic genius and its being and working.
(1) Goethe’s works are evidence of a talent which does not develop step by step, any more than it gropes around at random and aimlessly; on the contrary, working from one particular central point it tries out its strength in every direction at one and the same time, striving to act upon things that are close at hand no less than upon those that are further away. [1816]
Nobody has a right to prescribe to the gifted individual the areas in which he should be active. The mind from its center shoots out its radii toward the periphery; as soon as it comes up against something it comes to rest there and sends out fresh lines of experiment from the center. The aim is, if not to reach beyond its own limits, which it is not given it to do, at least to know those limits as far as possible, and fill them to the full. [1807]
(2) I was possessed of the developing, growing, unfolding method, and absolutely not of the method that sets things side by side and orders and arranges them. [1794]
(3) I let objects produce their effects on me, in all patience and quietness, then I observe these effects and take pains with myself to give them back or reproduce them, true and undistorted. This is the whole secret of what people are pleased to call genius. [Between 1812 and 1832]
(4) The very greatest genius would not get very far if it had to bring forth everything out of itself. What is genius if it is not the capacity to make use of everything that it meets with? . . . Everything I have ever seen, heard or taken notice of, I have stored up and turned to good account. [1832]77
Outlining a behavioral morphology of poetic genius, Goethe seems to be outlining life itself: the central phenomenon of the individual as a discrete living center working outward from its central vitality to grope and extend its own given boundaries of form; the nature of growth in any organic being, and the kinship of this with the methods of the mind; living and thinking considered as the establishment of a favorable relationship, an equilibrium between action and passivity, between the organism and its ecological surroundings; the ability of the living creature to nourish itself with, and adapt itself to, external material, to be flexible and resourceful.
That is, in part at least, what genius, and the poet, is for—to provide in itself a working system by which to interpret other systems in nature, animate and perhaps even inanimate as well. It is of course anthropomorphism, in its most highly specialized and beautiful form. Goethe was quite clear about this; good postlogician that he is, he adds that all thinking, no matter how apparently “scientific” or detached, is going to be anthropomorphic, and we shall do well to recognize this. “The mind of man,” he says, “when it is really at one with itself, shares this oneness with everything that is not itself, draws it into its own unity, until mind and object are one.”78 This is like Coleridge and is the great postlogical interpretative process. It is not merely one way, but reciprocal. For a mind so attuned there is not subject and object but two dynamic systems interpreting each other. So in the Wahlverwandschaften the workings of chemical elements interpret human relations, since, as Goethe says in this connection, there is but one nature.79 So it is too with the scientific treatise on botany which Goethe published in 1780 and which he called An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants.
It is upon this one small work at present that Goethe’s status as a scientist mainly rests. (We have made little yet of the Farbenlehre, Goethe’s anti-Newtonian foray into the world of physics, but that too may follow the same method as the Metamorphose though in a different field, akin to Poe’s Eureka as a speculative treatise on the cooperation of phenomena and the postlogical imagination.)80 The Metamorphose, Goethe himself thought, would be unreadable to any except experts. An exercise in the morphology of plant development, it was not, we are told by Agnes Arber, even a wholly new idea; she also points out the vagueness of the concept of metamorphosis as Goethe used it, and his inadequate knowledge of the relevant literature and of the practical research which had been done in the field. Yet she compares him, in nature and stature, to Bacon, and another critic says that Linnaean thought and Goethean thought in botany bear the same relation to each other as alchemy to chemistry.81
It would have been helpful from the start if, from the purely scientific point of view, this work had never been unnaturally isolated from its fellow works and commentaries, the two poems Metamorphose der Pflanzen and the Metamorphose der Tiere where Goethe moves over to the animals; or, no less important, the passage in the autobiographical writings where he describes, in an unused introduction to the third volume of his autobiography, how he conceived and wrote the first three volumes according to the laws demonstrated by the plant-metamorphosis of his more scientific preoccupations. In an extended metaphor of great beauty Goethe says that the child was to resemble the first seedling with its root-making activity and cotyledons; then the boy was to come, more full-fledged with leaves; and in the third volume the young man would appear, in the flower of youth and full of promise. Then Goethe goes on sadly, “In the next period I was to come to, the flowers fall; the fruit does not set in all of them, and even where it does it seems insignificant, swells only very slowly, and ripeness seems as if it will never come . . . Thus it is with the works of nature, and thus it was with myself and with my works.” If it could be accepted that this is not fancy but postlogical method, we could avoid much uncertainty about this work and Goethe’s work in general.
Goethe’s theme in this treatise is that a plant consists fundamentally of one single organ, from which all its other organs, however varied and seemingly different from one another, can be deduced and are in fact developed. He takes the leaf as the type-organ, the one basic plastic unit of identity. This is what the plant, a highly flexible system within its own due limits, reworks and transforms into its other parts. Each part is the metamorphic manifestation of a single adaptable unity.
In this lies the whole of Goethe’s systematics. Just as Goethe attempts to classify his own nature from within, so here taxonomy as a working principle is applied first within the organism, not to a group of organisms. The ordering starts with the single living being, but when it is extended it does not lose its nature. It is, as again Goethe shows in his consideration of himself, based upon a morphology of form and behavior, which can also apply to the wider forms or figures of a group. When Goethe moves on to consider organisms collectively, as genera and species, he works in exactly the same fashion. Within each group he will postulate a single basic plastic unity, the equivalent of that Protean leaf in the plant. With plants this is the Urpflanze, the plastic original plant form and plant stuff from which all plants of any shape or form might be derived, which he sought so earnestly in the profusion and beauty of the gardens at Padua, on September 27, 1786: “In these manifold forms, which are new to me and here present themselves, it is borne in upon me more and more that perhaps one could elaborate all plant forms out of One Form. Only so would it be possible to draw the genuine limits of genera and species, which, so it seems to me, has only been done very arbitrarily so far” (Italienische Reise). With animals, the Urtier appears when Goethe turns his attention to zoology. In his comparative anatomy and osteology the same principle holds. “An inner, original, fundamental community (Gemeinschaft) lies at the base of all organization,” he says in Die Skelette der Nagethiere (1823–24). The most general expression of the principle, showing the whole range Goethe envisaged for it, appears in his journal for 1790: “I was absolutely convinced that one common type, progressing through metamorphosis, ran through the whole of organic life, every feature of which could be observed without undue difficulty in certain intermediate stages, and which must and should be recognized even where it reached its highest level in mankind and there discreetly withdrew into invisibility.”82
A taxonomic formulation providing the framework and principle for, and shading over into, a behavioral morphology, the whole system to include the thinker’s mind: here are Linnaeus, Ovid, and Goethe in conjunction. Goethe uses it cumulatively; to discover plants and himself, in the prose Metamorphose der Pflanzen; to explain the human love-relationship by the plant kingdom, in the poem of that name, of 1798; to inquire into the animal kingdom and thence into man’s social activities and relationships in the Metamorphose der Tiere poem of 1806; lastly into the whole shape and significance of human life in the Urworte of 1817.
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But Life is in every movement and in every form; for every movement reveals a force in the act of expressing itself, and every form reveals a force which has taken expression . . . Our spirit, recognizing itself under another guise in both, contemplates itself in the plant, which is a power, just as it contemplated itself in the animal which is a thought
THE TWO LONG Metamorphose poems provide a kind of progression toward the Urworte that are eventually going to take shape in the mouth of Orpheus. They reaffirm Linnaeus and Ovid, but give only hints as yet of their relation to language-as-poetry. In his arrangement of them in the Gott und Welt poems (they were first published in the scientific volumes) Goethe puts them in a group, introduced, divided, and concluded by much smaller, lyric poems on nature and ways of thinking about her. To this group he applies the names Parabase, Epirrhema, and Antepirrhema, the names for sections or figures of the chorus in a Greek play. It is as if he were putting forward these two poems, with lyrical accompaniment, as part of a great nature-play.
The poem Metamorphose der Pflanzen is addressed to Goethe’s wife, Christiane. It begins with her in the garden, in a prospect of flowers as it were, bewildered by the profusion and confusion of it all and her ear besieged by the barbaric sounds of its nomenclature. Linnaeus and language appear together, in all their seeming stiffness. Goethe suggests that plant forms and words together make up a riddle and he desires if he can to give her the answer, the password, the resolution, “das lösende Wort,” to this. Then immediately, with the injunction “Werdend betrachte sie nun”— look at them as in a state of “becoming”— we shift to Ovid. First the metamorphoses of the individual plant are described, up to the final transformation into the flower where sex and fertility appear and the circle is at once closed and reopened. But, the poem says, this process applies more widely than just in the individual plant; not just the individual but the whole of nature is to be thought of as belebt, alive or enlivened, according to the same laws. These laws the plant forms speak, so that here we come back to language again:
