The Orphic Voice, page 27
Hugo, in true Orphic fashion, takes one of the supreme minds in the poetic genealogy for his starting point. His inquiry moves beyond the individual, however, into the history and natural history of genius. But it is not just the incidence and format of genius which interests Hugo. His standpoint is genetic. It is the making and emergence of mind that he is concerned with, in individual man or in the race. “Dieu n’a pas fait ce merveilleux alambic de l’idée, le cerveau de l’homme, pour ne point s’en servir,” he says in Part I, Book II. “Le génie a tout ce qu’il faut dans son cerveau. La pensée est la résultante de l’homme.” The point of view here is conceived almost in terms of body chemistry in the processes of evolution. Later Hugo will contemplate the equal mystery of the making of the individual mind, in particular that of the genius. “La production des âmes, c’est le secret de l’abîme. L’inné, quelle ombrel Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette condensation d’inconnu qui se fait dans les ténèbres, et d’où jaillit brusquement cette lumière, un génie? Quelle est la règle de ces événements-là? O amour! Le coeur humain fait son oeuvre sur la terre, celà émeut les profondeurs . . . Deux urnes, les sexes, puisent la vie dans l’infini, et le renversement de l’une dans l’autre produit l’être. Ceci est le norme pour tous, pour l’animal comme pour l’homme. Mais l’homme qui est plus qu’homme, d’où vient-il?” (Book v). So love and sex are brought in, as in the Metamorphoses, alongside those scientific “condensations” and “rules.”
Hugo first considers genius as synthesis within itself— thus Dante is a visionary and an exact grammarian, Newton a physicist and an expounder of the Apocalypse. Then he summarizes what has been gained so far: humanity develops from within—this is civilization properly speaking; radiating outward from itself, the human mind wins, masters, and humanizes matter; this work has particular phases, and each phase is introduced or concluded by one of those beings whom we call by the name of genius. Now follow the lists of them, with Orpheus at the head and Shakespeare in his due place in time to follow.
Genius, now being considered as poetry, is no narrow calling. “Poet,” Hugo says, implies historian and philosopher, and the history is both fact and fiction, or history and fairy tale. He sees poetry now as an instrument of research, into such things as the enigmas of the mind, and of nature, which is also a mind, vague premonitions of the future, amalgams of thinking and events—all of which can be translated by the mind into delicate figurations. For Hugo this is the task of the poetic imagination, as in Shakespeare, who is at once genius, poet, and scientist.
Shakespeare est, avant tout, une imagination . . . Aucune faculté de l’esprit ne s’enfonce et ne creuse plus que l’imagination; c’est la grande plongeuse. La science, arrivée aux derniers abîmes, la rencontre. Dans les sections coniques, dans les logarithmes, dans le calcul différentiel et intégral, dans le calcul des probabilités, dans le calcul infinitésimal, dans le calcul des ondes sonores, dans l’application de l’algèbre à la géometrie, l’imagination est le coefficient du calcul, et les mathematiques deviennent poésie.
This passage stands with Puttenham’s Enginers and Captaines Stratagematique as one of the great statements on the relations between postlogic and the exact sciences, akin to Poe’s Eureka and Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, and predating Poincare by a considerable period.
Hugo is not hypnotized by the exact sciences, however, despite his friendliness toward them. His real concern is nature, in itself and in the mind and art of genius which he identifies with nature. In the workings of these, nature may be observed, and that observation is the task of the poet. Yet, he maintains, instead of comprehending nature and her ways by conforming to them, we have, in poetry as in thinking, fallen away into exaggerated sobriety, sterility, hypercriticism. He draws a wonderful picture of the Garden of the Muses, all a-growing and a-blowing, fertility of mind and nature being of the same kind: “partout l’image idée, partout la pensée fleur, partout les fruits, les figures . . . ne touchez à rien, soyez discret. C’est à ne rien cueillir que se reconnait le poète.” A little later he adds the passage of this work we quoted above, page 150; it ends thus, “la fécondation, la plénitude, la production, c’est trop; celà viole le droit des neutres.” This is Ovid; it is also postlogic, and Hugo goes on to tell us that postlogic is postcritical.3 In Book IV it runs, “Quoi donc? pas de critique? Non. Pas de blâme? Non. Vous expliquez tout? Oui. Le génie est une entité comme la nature, et veut, comme elle, être accepté purement et simplement . . . Quant a moi, qui parle ici, j’admire tout, comme une brute. C’est pourquoi j’ai écrit ce livre. Admirer. Être enthousiaste. Il m’a paru que dans notre siècle cet exemple était bon à donner.” It is no less good in the following century also.
Hugo directs us from science into poetry. Renan does the same in L’Avenir de la science. After a preface written in 1890 in which he says that his youthful self was “evolutionniste décidé en tout ce qui concerne les produits de l’humanité, langues, écritures, littératures, législations, formes sociales,” Renan in section 1 of the essay proper considers the intervalidity of the mind’s disciplines, poetry among them: “Un système de philosophie vaut un poème, un poème vaut une découverte scientifique . . . L’homme parfait serait celui qui serait à la fois poète, philosophe, savant, homme vertueux, et cela non par intervalles et a des moments distincts . . . mais par une intime compénétration à tous les moments de la vie . . . La faiblesse de notre âge d’analyse ne permet pas cette haute unité; la vie devient un métier, il faut afficher le titre de poète, d’artiste ou de savant, se créer un petit monde où l’on vit à part, sans comprendre tout le reste et souvent en le niant.” Poetry as Renan sees it is not a calling restricted to those who manipulate words; it is a general vocation, and minds abdicate from it, as also from religion or science, at their peril. In section 3 Renan embarks on a nostalgic celebration of myth as a noble form of thought; he holds it now no longer possible, but still envisages a new form of thought to come, less analytical, less critical, which would closely resemble it. “Le passé n’a été qu’une introduction nécessaire à la grande ère de la raison. La réflexion ne s’est point encore montrée créatrice. Attendez! Attendez!” In section 8 there is a wonderful discussion of grammar and the part played by that study and by philology in the understanding of language and the human mind. Philology and natural science are parallel ways of making nature comprehensible, and Renan postulates accordingly a science of the human mind (it is significant that Vico enters the essay at this point), a science not just of the cogwheels of the mind, Renan says, but its very history. He sees the possibility of this in the great advance of modern thought: the shift of attention from static to dynamic, each phenomenon seen as in process of making itself (section 10). In section 15 he discusses the relation of sex and divinity, and affirms that in order to understand myth it is necessary in some sense to believe in it and live with it on its own terms, this being the truly scientific approach. Goethe and Hugo are brought in, with Lamartine, as examples of great modern nature poets whose work is subtended by all the resources of modern learning and scholarship. Then in section 16 he puts forward a last plea for a synthesis of disciplines again, “Une science . . . qui, en devenant complète, deviendrait religieux et poétique.” He sees this as the task of the future, when Orpheus will arise once more.
In each of these men, the middle-aged Hugo and the young Renan, there is wide confirmation of the Orphic tradition, and a hint of the particular form the Orphic research is to take in the modern period. Renan in his later work makes the modern task clearer. He does not again make a general statement on the nature of postlogic, as he does in L’Avenir de la science, but his own evolution carries him forward on postlogical lines, into writing on the origins of language; into history; into the relations between myth, science, and religion which he considers in the Vie de Jésus; into the “drames philosophiques” (he believed that only in dramatic form could philosophy be adequately communicated), the two sequels he wrote to The Tempest—Caliban and L’Eau de Jouvence of 1878 and 1880—nonetheless interesting for being very bad plays indeed. But wherever he goes, he shows the same preoccupation Hugo manifested in his essay on Shakespeare: the interest in mind in the making. Renan interprets The Tempest in this very way,4 saying in the preliminary notice “Au Lecteur,” “Prospero, duc de Milan, inconnu à tous les historiens;— Caliban, être informe, à peine dégrossi, en voie de devenir homme;— Ariel, fils de l’air, symbole de l’idéalisme, sont les trois créations les plus profondes de Shakespeare.” The same note is heard in the preface to the Vie de Jésus: “Notre planète, croyez-moi, travaille à quelque oeuvre profonde . . . La nature, qui a doué l’animal d’un instinct infaillible, n’a mis dans l’humanité rien de trompeur.” Perhaps the clearest indication of all comes in De l’Origine du langage, 1848. Here Renan gives us outright a wonderful phrase for what Orphic minds are now to pursue: “Il y aurait a créer une embryogénie de l’esprit humain” (italics in the original). To this he adds a few pages later, “Mais il y a un monument sur lequel sont écrites toutes les phases de cette Genèse merveilleuse . . . poème merveilleux qui est ne et s’est developpe avec l’homme . . . Ce monument, ce poème, c’est le langage.”5
Renan and Hugo give two points of emphasis for the Orphic research. Renan directs us to the postlogical unity of science with language, poetry and myth. Hugo agrees with this, and directs us to the history and natural history of Orphic genius. The titles of those two essays are very significant in themselves. Together they pick up that challenging vision of a biology extended into study of the human mind, with language and poetry as part of its essential methodology. We noticed already, in Pt. 1, how in the last century plea after plea was made to biology for just this extension; but the pleas were not met, and have still not been met today.6 This was to be the form taken by that “explication orphique de la terre” of which Mallarmé spoke. Yet he himself did not pursue it on those terms, and his case is significant. He went another way, toward the exact sciences and a kind of verbal algebra— “Enfin du moi et du langage mathématique.” So to some extent did Valéry, who is also an Orphic poet, and both of them in so doing missed the main theme of their time. Our literary fashions obscure such a possibility from us, ranking as they do Mallarmé and Valéry considerably above Hugo and Renan. But the Orphic line suggests otherwise—that on grounds of depth and fertility, exact and up-to-date intuition of what poetry has to accomplish in our day and the prophetic strength which comes from such insight, Hugo and Renan are incomparably more important. The Orphic tradition, which is the mainstream of poetry, lies with life and words, not with pure forms; misunderstanding this, Mallarmé and Valéry lead into an impasse into which a great deal of contemporary literature has followed them. Science has taken a rather similar road, for attempts at extending biology into the realm of mind met with the same fate in the second half of the nineteenth century as did Orphic poetry—a substitution of mathematics for poetry as the gauge of exactitude and reliability in research. The two comparatively new disciplines which bear the magnificent names of “psyche” and “anthropos” bear the mark of this from their beginnings. It is the poets who have to begin the task of extending the range of biology so that it shall include thinking man, and to see how poetry can function as methodology in such a study. This is the specific task of Orphic minds in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2
Suddenly around Milton on my Path the Starry Seven
Burn’d terrible; my Path became a solid fire, as bright
As the clear Sun, and Milton silent came down on my Path
THE ORPHIC QUESTION and methodology are given their shape early in the nineteenth century in England by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Each of these voices agrees in its own way with the endeavor to be set out at greater length by Renan and Hugo: the need to keep science and poetry together, the reaffirmation of the great Orphic tradition in which particular minds will be selected for special love and attention, the research into the natural history of thinking.
The clearest prose statement about the relations between poetry and science is to be found in the Preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Coleridge said was almost a child of his own brain but in which he also noted “considerable additions” by Wordsworth, “one on the Dignity and character of a Poet, that is very grand, and of a sort of Verulamian Power and Majesty.”7 The exposition in the Preface begins quietly, with a comparison of the ways in which poet and man of science—chemist and mathematician—go to work. Gradually as the comparison advances the writing takes fire:
The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love . . . Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
I know of no finer statement anywhere on the human functions of postlogic in the interpretation of the natural world. But far more important than any prose statement, however much to the point, is what is happening in poetry, for it is only there that Orphic question and method can really be worked on.
There hovered before both Coleridge and Wordsworth a vision of a great poem on man’s place in nature. Coleridge in 1797 describes his aspirations thus:
I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician—I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend 10 years—the next 5 to the composition of the poem—and the last 5 to the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and rightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering.8
The burden of such a task was in the end to fall to Wordsworth, not to Coleridge; yet it is Coleridge who recognizes immediately, authoritatively, and with a moving generosity and gratitude the significance and greatness of Wordsworth’s accomplishment of the task, in The Prelude. This is the theme of his poem To William Wordsworth, from which we have already drawn that testimony to The Prelude as “an Orphic song indeed.” In the poem he laments his own infertility but comes nonetheless “a welcomer in herald’s guise,” as he says, “Singing of glory and futurity.” Two passages are especially significant:
Friend of the wise! and teacher of the good!
Into my heart have I received that lay
More than historic, that prophetic lay
Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
Of the foundations and the building up
Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable; and what within the mind
By vital breathings secret as the soul
Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
Thoughts all too deep for words!—
Theme hard as high . . .
Coleridge recognizes at once the central Orphic intent of Wordsworth’s poem, that investigation into the growth of the mind, and sees it as partly history and partly prophecy, as if here a discipline were being founded for future as much as for present use. Later he develops this note further, relating Wordsworth’s task to the great genealogy of minds of genius, and to truth, twice repeated.
O great Bard!
Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
Of ever-enduring men. The truly great
Have all one age, and from one visible space
Shed influence! They, both in power and act,
Are permanent, and Time is not with them,
Save as it worketh for them, they in it.
Nor less a sacred roll, than those of old,
And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame,
Among the archives of mankind, thy work
Makes audible a linked lay of Truth,
Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
