The Orphic Voice, page 40
42. Bacon’s signature is attached to the record of the examination under torture of Father John Gerard, S. J., in April 1597. Bacon was one of the official Lords Commissioners who had to be present. The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, John Gerard, trans. Philip Caraman (New York, 1952), p. 106 n.
43. Who writes their play? Peter Quince is encouraged by Bottom (III.1) to write a prologue, and it is he who eventually speaks that composition, presumably his own work, at the performance. Similarly, when Bottom wants to express his own vision he says he will ask Peter Quince to make a ballad of it (IV.1).
44. Notes to the New Shakespeare Edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge, 1924), p. 102.
45. Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, Papers and Addresses (New York, Knopf, 1952), p. 16.
46. From A General Scheme or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, included in Posthumous Works (London, 1705), pp. 43–61.
47. Essay 9 of Section 2 (London, 1866), pp. 325–26: “He has shown and established the true criterion between the ideas and the idola of the mind—namely, that the former are manifested by their adequacy to those ideas in nature, which in them and through them are contemplated . . . Bacon names the laws of nature, ideas; and represents what we have . . . called facts of science and central phenomena, as signatures, impressions and symbols of ideas.”
48. See, on Bacon’s method in this respect, Whyte, James, and Farrington.
49. In Philosophical Works.
50. Ellis, Spedding, and Robertson, all of whom are friendly to Bacon, point this out turn by turn in their respective editorial comments in the Philosophical Works.
51. Posthumous Works, pp. 6–7.
52. Pt. II, Bk. 1.
53. Vol. 2 of the Michelet edition, p. 33.
54. Cf. his conversation with Falk, 1826: “At the same time he laid it down as a principle that Nature accidentally and as it were willy-nilly blurts out many of her secrets. Everything has been let out at some point only not in the places where we expect it . . . It is because of this that our knowledge of Nature has its riddling, sibylline, incoherent character” (Goethe im Gespräch, Leipzig, 1907, p. 253).
55. Hugo, Shakespeare, Pt. II, Bk. 1; Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare, Sec. 1; Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Vol. 2, Bk. XVI.
56. Coleridge, The Friend, Essay 11.
57. Quoted by Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lecture 3, “The Hero as Poet.” See also Middleton Murry’s Shakespeare (London, Cape, 1936), pp. 287, 289: “We must take the plunge into meaningful nonsense: Shakespeare is Life, uttering itself . . . In this sense we may say that the flower utters the plant and the earth and the rain and the sun which nourish it.”
58. Both these passages are from Lectures on Shakespeare, Section 1.
59. John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (London, Faber, 1949), p. 15. See also James, The Dream of Learning, and Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship.
60. Danby’s whole book (see above) is admirable in its discussion of this. See also Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage (University of Louisiana Press, 1948), p. 11: “It seems safer to assume, as a working hypothesis, that when there is repeated speculation upon nature, the play is to that extent an essay upon nature.”
61. Dr Johnson confessed that he could not bear to reread the last act until he had to annotate it for his edition of the play. The Nahum Tate happy-ending version held the stage for 150 years. The old play of King Leir ended happily, and the histories are not wholly tragic; it is Shakespeare who chooses to depart from them. (R. C. Bald, intro. to Crofts Classics ed. of King Lear, New York, 1949, p. VI.) Our involvement in the play is discussed by Danby, p. 181: “We occupy the same heath as Lear and are fellow agents and patients. Sympathy with Lear’s sufferings will not explain this turn. Nor is it a case of daydream identification with a hero. What happens is that the root of the mind is reached and activated.” Middleton Murry also, in Shakespeare, p. 19, says: “In Shakespeare we seem to watch Nature involved in her destiny of self-discovery; and since this is a process which cannot be merely watched, we ourselves are caught up in it.”
62. Cf. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, on the subject of King Lear: “every kind of bodily movement, generally involving pain, is used to express mental and abstract as well as physical facts.”
63. The answer is staggering. Lear calls him “blind Cupid.” “The sign over a brothel,” say the notes to the Penguin edition of the play (ed. G. B. Harrison). Yet Cupid is not only the god of “love,” licit or illicit, as in our shrunken mythology, but the Eros who in the Orphic hymns creates the world, and on whom Bacon comments in his De Principiis—On Principles and Origins according to the Fables of Cupid and Coelum.
64. If King Lear is prehistory and legend, it is also fairy tale. It is impossible to narrate the fable of the play without its sounding like the conventional opening to a fairy tale; Middleton Murry has pointed this out. Myth is brought in further by the references to classical myths—Apollo, Jupiter, etc.— and the mention of fairies (IV.6).
65. We are not concerned with the truth and prayer functions of language here, but they are vital to the play and to poetry itself. Kent, Cordelia, and the Fool carry forward language-as-truth. Kent introduces language-as-prayer, and Edgar picks this up later. The logicians are precluded from certainty of truth, their system appealing not to truth but to consistency. Thus Regan begs Edmund, “Tell me but truly, but then speak the truth” (V.1), but receives no assurance. The affirmation of language-as-prayer in the play, particularly in Lear and Gloucester, does not mean that the prayers will be answered. Here, too, logical conclusions are not dodged.
66. Schriften, ed. Kluckhohn and Samuel (Leipzig, n.d.), 2, 331, 350.
Part III
1. I have simplified here. The second part of the poem was actually published first, anonymously, in 1789.
2. In the Anti-Jacobin in 1798. The interesting thing is that while the excellent parody of the style holds firm, the ridicule of the subject matter seems now, in the light of modern knowledge, to vindicate Darwin. Here is one of the parodists’ notes to Canto 1: “Upon this view of things it seems highly probable that the first effort of Nature terminated in the production of Vegetables, and that these being abandoned to their own energies, by degrees detached themselves from the surface of the earth, and supplied themselves with wings or feet, according as their different propensities determined them in favour of aerial and terrestrial existence.” We do now indeed think something of this sort happened; of course it sounds absurd.
3. Cambridge, 1941, chap. 2, pp. 62 ff. See also chap. 1, p. 23, for a discussion of Goethe’s first acquaintance with Orpheus.
4. See particularly his work Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784 (Suphan edition, Vol. 13). He speaks there of the globe as an immense workshop or laboratory directed toward the organization of differing forms (p. 47).
5. Vol. 1, Bk. x.
6. Critics insist on it also. For instance, Gundolf in Goethe (Berlin, 1922), p. 671, says that with two or three other poems they are the most concentrated formulation of Goethe’s Weltanschauung that we have. Ermatinger in Goethe und die Natur (Zürich and Leipzig, 1932), p. 31, calls these verses the most cryptic Goethe ever wrote and says that they deal with the metamorphoses of man. Emil Staiger in his intro. to the first volume of Goethe’s poems in the Gedenkausgabe (Zürich, 1950), pp. 748–49, says that the Urworte are an attempt to put the whole sense of existence into a single poem.
7. See particularly the essay on Bacon in The Friend, and the Shakespeare lectures. Coleridge is very shrewd about Bacon— “no man was ever more inconsistent” (Table Talk, October 3, 1830)— but there is no holding back on the final assessment: “in the persons of . . . Shakespeare, Milton and Lord Bacon were enshrined as much of the divinity of intellect as the inhabitants of this planet can hope will ever take up its abode among them” (The Friend, intro. to Vol. 3).
8. The last poet to be admitted to the Society that I know of was Byron. He was elected in 1816, but left England permanently a few months later, so that his membership never became an active one. I owe this information to Mr. John Jump.
9. “Il n’est peut-être aucun inventeur dont on puisse moins indiquer les précédens,” Michelet says in the intro. to Vico’s works, selected and translated, which Michelet had published in Paris in 1835. It is difficult in England to get hold of an English translation of his works; the Michelet is still the most accessible.
10. H. P. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (London, Allen and Unwin, 1935), p. 71. This is an excellent and sympathetic introduction to Vico and his work.
11. See Vico’s Autobiography, translated by M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin (Cornell, 1944), pp. 83, 84.
12. Croce in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London, 1913), p. 271, gives details of the Hamann-Herder connection. Herder refers to Vico in Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanitât, Sammlung 10, 1797 (Suphan edition, Vol. 18, p. 245), in a rather dull passage. Cassirer discusses this line of influence in The Problem of Knowledge, chap. 18. The Goethe reference is dated March 5, 1787, in the Italienische Reise.
13. See The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2, intro. and The Problem of Knowledge, chap. 18.
14. The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, p. 71: “in the late eighteenth century . . . German scholars discovered Vico and attached a great value to him, thus exemplifying his own doctrine that ideas are propagated not by ‘diffusion,’ like articles of commerce, but by the independent discovery by each nation of what it needs at any given stage in its own development.”
15. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, p. 219.
16. 1, 412, and 2, 196, in the Michelet edition.
17. Croce, p. 60; Adams, p. 120.
18. In Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous, ed. Derwent Coleridge, London, 1853: “Note on the Treatise ‘De Cultu et Amore Dei’ of Emmanuel Swedenborg,” September 22, 1821.
19. Essays, Second Series, Boston, 1860: Essay 1, “The Poet,” p. 25.
20. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
21. The three genealogies are from (1) Essays, Second Series, Essay 1, p. 10; (2) ibid., p. 36; (3) Representative Men (Boston, 1860), section on Swedenborg, p. 104.
22. Table Talk, entry for September 1, 1832.
23. Representative Men, essay on Swedenborg, p. 133: “The universe is a gigantic crystal . . . The universe in his poem suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer . . . All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech.”
24. It is interesting that the real unraveller of hieroglyphs, Champollion, shows all the flexibility of the true poet and scientist. See his Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens (Paris, 1828), particularly chap. 10.
25. Second ed. Cambridge, 1942, Vol. 1, p. 411.
26. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, p. 127: “Linnaeus was not only a brilliant observer but an indefatigable and inexorable logician as well, and it was said of him that he was possessed at times by a veritable mania for classification. The urge to codify and arrange phenomena has never been so strongly developed in any other great naturalist.” A. J. Wilmott, “Systematic Botany from Linnaeus to Darwin,” in Lectures on the Development of Taxonomy, Linnean Society (London, 1950), p. 34: “Linnaeus was a collector and codifier.”
27. See A. J. Boerman, “Carolus Linnaeus: A Psychological Study,” Taxon (Utrecht, 1953), 2, 145–56: “Another point that deserves our attention is his pronounced artistic temperament” (p. 148). See also Knut Hagberg, Carl Linnaeus, trans. from the Swedish by Alan Blair (London, Cape, 1952), pp. 60–65.
28. In the intro. to Pt. III of the Philosophie zoologique, Lamarck asks whether we must not consider “si les idées, la pensée, l’imagination même, ne sont que des phénomènes de la nature, et consequemment que de véritables faits d’organisation; il appartient principalement au zoologiste, qui s’est appliqué a l’étude des phénomènes organiques, de rechercher ce que sont les idées, comment elles se produisent . . . et comment encore des actes de pensees et des jugemens multipliés peuvent faire naître l’imagination, cette faculté si profonde en création d’idées.”
29. From Amoenitas Academici, Vol. 10, ed. Schreber, Erlangen, 1790. Hagberg in his biography of Linnaeus gives an account of the list and its contents, p. 187.
30. On account of his concern with internal structure, Cuvier has sometimes been ranked above Linnaeus. See P. Flourens, Analyse raisonnée des travaux de Georges Cuvier (Paris, 1841), “Éloge historique de M. Cuvier” (1834), p. 4: “il est évident que ce qui avait manqué à Linnaeus et à Buffon, soit pour classer les animaux, soit pour expliquer convenablement leurs phénomenès, c’était de connaître assez leur structure intime ou leur organisation.” Sainte-Beuve seems to demand of Cuvier that he should himself have recognized the connection between science and art. In Premiers Lundis (Paris, 1886), he discusses Cuvier’s reception to the Académie Françcaise, where he took the poet Lamartine’s place and had to make the customary panegyric upon his predecessor. Sainte-Beuve says: “M. Cuvier est un homme de génie lui-même; arrivé à ces hauteurs de la science où elle se confond presque avec la poésie, il était digne de comprendre et de célébrer le poëte philosophique qui, dans l’incertitude de ses pensés, avait plus d’une fois plongé jusqu’au chaos, et demandé aux éléments leur origine, leur loi, leur harmonie: Aristote pouvait donner la main à Platon. Il nous coûte d’avouer qu’il est resté au-dessous de sa tâche” (p. 315). Cassirer says in The Problem of Knowledge, p. 131: “The knowledge of a single form, if it is really to penetrate to the heart of the matter, always presupposes a knowledge of the world of forms in its entirety. Systematic biology, therefore, as understood and practiced by Cuvier, was no mere device of classification and arrangement that can be easily apprehended, but a disclosure of the very framework of nature herself.”
31. Quoted in the “Life of Gray” prefaced to the poet’s Works, by J. Mitford (London, 1847), pp. lxx, lxxv.
32. Quoted by Charles Eliot Norton, The Poet Gray as a Naturalist (Boston, 1903), p. 18. The drawings as reproduced are exquisite in their exact detail. Part of Gray’s work on Linnaeus, so Mitford says, consisted in turning the Swedish sage into Latin hexameters.
33. Linnean Society lectures on taxonomy (n. 26 above), pp. 72–74.
34. Ibid., p. 37.
35. Gustave Theodor Fechner, Nanna, oder Über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen; in the foreword the author says that in his searches for a title for his book he thought of Flora or Hamadryas, but rejected the first as too botanical, the second as too stiffly antiquarian and too much restricted to trees. He found the name of Nanna, Baldur’s wife, in the German poet Uhland. Fechner quotes poetry and myth as precedent for his standpoint, and speaks of a deep spring of poetry in nature itself.
36. This is quoted verbatim, with complete approval in each case as an example of the true nature of science, by Poe in Eureka and Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge.
37. Second ed., London, 1897 (the first ed. was 1889), p. 300. The idea of Nature as a poem is repeated: “In Nature’s workshop but a shaving, Of her poem but a word, But a tint brushed from her pallette, This feather of a bird!” Then, fourteen lines later, “What then must be the poem, This but its lightest word!”
38. The four references are Schriften, ed. Kluckhohn and Samuel, 3, 183; 1, 32; 2, 322, 325.
39. Ibid., 2, 346.
40. “A state of Spirit . . . analogous to mine own when I am at once waiting for, watching, and organically constructing and being constructed by, the Ideas, the living Truths . . .” Inquiring Spirit: a New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1951), p. 214.
41. There is an indirect reference to Orpheus in Pt. 1, chap. 2. More interestingly still, Novalis’ notes for the completion of the novel, never finished, show that he meant to identify his hero’s death with the death of Orpheus. See Walter Rehm, Orpheus: Der Dichter und die Toten (Düsseldorf, Schwann, 1950), p. 100.
42. From Schriften, 2, 326; 3, 272, 290. One of Novalis’ own collections of thoughts is called Blütenstaub or pollen.
43. The Elements of Botany, trans. Hugh Rose from the Philosophia Botanica (London, 1775), pp. 282, 334. A case could be made out for Linnaeus as a poet in his own right. His biographer Hagberg says, “The task which professional writers have often set themselves, namely, to describe the sexual act in beautiful resounding words . . . is here admirably accomplished by Linnaeus. In his presentment a floral radiance is even shed upon the vital animal functions. This can only be attained by a writer who is a poet by nature” (Linnaeus, p. 65). Other passages in Linnaeus suggest the same thing—this, for instance, from Vol. 4 of the Systema Naturae: “Mollusca: Are naked, furnished with tentacula or arms, for the most part inhabitants of the sea; and by their phosphorous quality, illuminate the dark abyss of waters, reflecting their lights to the firmament. Thus what is beneath the water corresponds with that which is above.”
44. Each has his own protagonists too. Thus we find C. E. Raven in John Ray, Naturalist (Cambridge, 1942), p. 200, saying, “It could easily be argued that Ray in fact laid down lines of classification more in accord with genuinely scientific and evolutionary principles than those of his illustrious successor,” i.e. Linnaeus.
45. The Elements of Botany, trans. James Hewetson (London, 1849), pp. 526–27, 530.
46. Section 20, p. 512. The passage is particularly interesting because it leads into a discussion of the variability of flowers as an instance of evolution at work, “the perpetual progress of all organized beings from less to greater perfection existing from the beginning of time to the end of it! a power impressed on nature by the great father of all” (p. 515).
