The Orphic Voice, page 41
47. Darwiniana (London, 1902), p. 26.
48. Essay entitled “The Progress of Science” in Methods and Results, London, 1904.
49. What is a fact? “Das Höchste ware: zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist,” Goethe says in Aphorismen und Fragmente, Gedenkausgabe (Zürich, 1952), 17, 723. Whether in a matter of fact or opinion, Charles Darwin seems to have had a considerable barrier in his mind against his grandfather’s work. He appears in the Origin of Species only in a footnote in the “Historical Sketch” preceding the 1872 edition: “It is curious how my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his Zoonomia, published in 1794.”
50. Darwiniana, p. 25. Huxley returns to this subject later: “Long occupation with the work has led the present writer to believe that the ‘Origin of Species’ is one of the hardest books to master.” [Footnote: “Sir J. Hooker writes, ‘It is the very hardest work to read, to profit, that I ever tried.’ ”]
51. Darwinism, p. 461.
52. The first quotation is from Methods and Results, p. 6, the second from Huxley’s Scientific Memoirs, ed. Foster and Lankester (London, 1898), 1, 311.
53. Methods and Results, pp. 60, 62. Huxley’s pursuit of logic at times betrays him out of a scientific attitude. The contrast with another type of scientific mind can be seen in the passage where he relates how Clerk Maxwell told him that two atoms can occupy the same space simultaneously. Huxley goes on, “I am loth to dispute any dictum of a philosopher as remarkable for the subtlety of his intellect as for his vast knowledge; but the assertion . . . appears to me to violate the principle of contradiction, which is the foundation not only of physical science but of logic in general. It means that A can be not-A.”
54. Darwiniana, pp. 245, 246.
55. Ibid., pp. 72, 248–49.
56. Ibid., p. 93. The passage is also characteristic of Huxley in that it goes on to suggest a genetic origin for inanimate matter in embryological terms, a lovely reversion to the Baconian metaphor of generations, and quite un-Darwinian.
57. See Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums, written in 1817 and reworked in 1831, appended to the Metamorphose der Pflanzen.
58. See Anna Seward’s Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (London, 1804) for this and subsequent details.
59. The proper name of the Lunatics was the Lunar Society, so called because it met at the full moon to enable members to see their way home. For particulars see James Venable Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (Princeton, 1936), p. 15.
60. Erasmus Darwin by Ernst Krause, trans. W. S. Dallas, London, 1879.
61. In Biographia Literaria, chap. 1, Coleridge says: “I remember to have compared Darwin’s work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory.” In No. 6 of the Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn, London, 1949, pp. 213–14, he says: “He [Darwin] told me he had some wish to employ a young man of a metaphysical turn to read the books of all former philosophers to him and to give him a syllabus of their opinions which he was not acquainted with. ‘For,’ says he, ‘I can reconcile the whole to my system and I think it will be doing a great service to confute them when I establish the great doctrine of physics and the understanding of man.’ This took place with a man who was deemed a great philosopher some time ago and I believe in the hospitals and elsewhere you may hear his name now, and there was a time when he was a great poet likewise. Both the one and the other appear to have been in rapid decay.” In private Coleridge is yet more positive: “and I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s Poem” he says in a letter to John Thelwall, May 13, 1796. Yet he read the poem, and its notes, in considerable detail, as Livingston Lowes traces out in The Road to Xanadu.
62. Opinions differ very widely on the question of Goethe’s status as a scientist. Cassirer, for instance, makes great claims for his scientific standing in The Problem of Knowledge (pp. 137 ff.), while Sherrington considers it negligible. The question is discussed fairly fully in Agnes Arber’s Goethe’s Botany, Chronica Botanica, 10, No. 2 (1946), 67 ff.
63. Quoted by Adolph Hansen, Goethes Morphologie (Giessen, 1919), p. 127.
64. Goethe im Gespräch (Leipzig, 1907), p. 252. Date before 1826.
65. There is an amusing sequel to this account. Apparently Miss Seward did in fact pen some verses on the occasion, which the Doctor then quietly purloined and incorporated in The Botanic Garden without any acknowledgment, to Miss Seward’s considerable indignation.
66. Gedenkausgabe (Zürich, 1950), 17, 699: “Bei Ovid ist die Analogie der tierischen und menschlichen Glieder im Übergang trefflich ausgedrückt.” See also Darwin’s Phytologia, Sec. 7, p. 108.
67. By Ermatinger. See n. 6 above.
68. That strange fantastical scientist of Goethe’s own time, Oken, uses much this same metaphor. In his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (2d ed. Jena, 1831) he says, “Natural philosophy is therefore a divine philology or a divine logic” (p. 15). Later he says: “The artificial systems of plant classification stand in the same relation to the plant kingdom as a lexicon does to language. The hitherto so-called ‘natural’ systems, which really ought to be called merely ‘methodical’ systems, stand in the same relation to the plant kingdom as ordinary grammar does to language. But the true system of plant classification must bear the same relation to the plant kingdom as philosophic or genetic grammar bears to language” (p. 218). Later commentaries on this man are interesting. He figures in one of Emerson’s Swedenborg genealogies. Shaw in the preface to Back to Methuselah says of him: “Oken defined natural science as ‘the science of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world.’ . . . The man who was scientific enough to see that the Holy Ghost is a scientific fact got easily in front of the blockheads who could only sin against it.” Agnes Arber in The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Cambridge, 1950), says, “his extravagant nature philosophy is illumined here and there by flashes of genuine insight” (p. 158).
69. The Friend. This and the subsequent passages are from Sec. 2, Essay 6.
70. In a recent article in The Sunday Times in England, in connection with the centenary of the Origin of Species, Rebecca West claims Ovid outright as the poet-founder of evolution as a way of thinking.
71. This is not a break but a sequence. The poet, as Orpheus or Amphion, is the builder of cities. Cf. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Bk. III, chap. 8: “Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.”
72. I am indebted for information on the predominance of Orphic elements in the Metamorphoses to Wade C. Stephens, who very kindly put at my disposal his dissertation for the Ph.D. Degree at Princeton University, entitled “The Function of Religious and Philosophical Ideas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” 1957.
73. Darwin knew Paradise Lost well enough to steal from it. The line, “And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay” turns up shamelessly in The Temple of Nature.
74. See notes to poems in Vol. 2 of the Festausgabe of Goethe’s Werke, p. 440. The so-called Nature Ode or Fragment, whether it be by Goethe or by Tobler under Goethe’s influence, is flat on the whole and of no use here. See Arber, Goethe’s Botany, and Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, for a discussion of this latter work.
75. Goethe im Gespräch, p. 176. Conversation with von Müller and Riemer, May 29, 1814.
76. In a most interesting passage on this subject, in Aus meinem Leben, Fragmentarisches. Spätere Zeit, he says this: “I have never encountered a more presumptuous human being than myself, and since it is I who bear witness to this, it shows that what I say is true. I never thought of anything as still to be attained, rather that I possessed it already. They could have set a crown on my head and I should have taken it for granted. And yet all the time I was just a human being like any other, and just because of this. Only the fact that I tried to do justice to the things I took on that were beyond my strength, and tried to deserve the things I received that were beyond my deserts—this and this alone distinguished me from an out-and-out madman.”
77. From Über die neue Ausgabe der Goetheschen Werke, 1816; Tag- und Jahresheften, 1807; Ferneres in Bezug auf mein Verhältnis zu Schiller; conversation with von Müller, and with Soret, 1832, both from Goethe im Gespräch, pp. 306, 311.
78. Goethe im Gespräch, p. 95; conversation with Riemer, August 2, 1807.
79. See Notiz of 1809 to the novel.
80. Novalis early in Pt. II of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais speaks of the spectrum as if it were an instrument of the mind.
81. See Arber, Goethe’s Botany, passim, and The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form, chap. 4; Hansen, Goethes Morphologie, p. 21; Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, p. 140.
82. I have borrowed bits of this translation from that given in Magnus, Goethe as a Scientist, New York, Schuman, 1949 (originally published 1906), p. 82. The passage is so important I give the original: “Ich war völlig überzeugt, ein allgemeiner, durch Metamorphose sich erhebender Typus gehe durch die sämtlichen organischen Geschöpfe durch, lasse sich in allen seinen Teilen auf gewissen mittleren Stufen gar wohl beobachten und müsse auch noch da anerkannt werden, wenn er sich auf der hochsten Stufe der Menschheit ins Verborgene bescheiden zurückzieht.”
83. Emil Staiger, in the notes to Goethe’s poems in the Manesse-Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 2, 480, says very beautifully that the poem is to effect this final transformation in the two, and so takes its place in the metamorphic process of nature. I am in general indebted to these notes.
84. Ibid., p. 487.
85. Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit suggests such a possibility, and it might offer a different development of taxonomic and morphological thought from that offered by Charles Darwin in his would-be fixing of the Linnaean system in serial, historical time, which he took to be the consummation of the Linnaean vision of natural classification. See on this subject Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form, pp. 162–63.
86. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, Beck, 1923), intro. p. 67 n., and chap. 2, p. 132. The Goethe quotation is given as from the Nachlass. Rilke recommends Spengler and his “überragende Bedeutung” to Katharina Kippenberg in a letter of March 7, 1919.
Part IV
1. I have borrowed this translation from the version given in the translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus by J. B. Leishman (London, Hogarth Press, 1949), notes on the First Part, p. 149. The letter is to Frau Wunderly-Volkart.
2. Shakespeare, Pt. III, Bk. II: “Or ce mouvement est un fait d’intelligence, un fait de civilisation, un fait d’âme; et c’est pourquoi celui qui écrit ces lignes n’a jamais employé les mots romantisme ou romantique.”
3. I have taken this term from Michael Polanyi, who gives Personal Knowledge the subtitle “Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.”
4. In his 1888 preface to these plays Renan says, “Coriolan et Jules César ne sont pas des peintures de moeurs romaines; ce sont des études de psychologie absolue.”
5. Fourth ed. (Paris, 1864), sec. 1, pp. 66, 69.
6. See, for instance, Lance Whyte, “The Growth of Ideas,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 23 (Zürich, 1955), p. 370: “But there is as yet no philosophical anthropology, no history of human consciousness, no adequately grounded natural history of ideas.” And Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Pt. IV, pp. 387, 399: “Biology can be extended by continuous stages into epistemology . . . I would expect, on the contrary, that biology would gain greatly in scope and depth by addressing itself more candidly to the fundamental features of life.”
7. Collected Letters, ed. Griggs (Oxford, 1956), 2, 830; to Southey, July 29, 1802. Wordsworth was raised on Bacon’s work. Mary Moorman in William Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1770–1803 (Oxford, 1957), to which in general I am much indebted, says that in school “the boys were made familiar with the name of Francis Bacon and with the more experimental and ‘scientific’ approach to knowledge which had been gaining ground during the last two centuries” (pp. 56–57). Elsewhere in this work (especially pp. 582–85), Wordsworth’s attitude to science is discussed. The writer takes the view that Wordsworth shows a “lack of imagination about the scientist’s task,” particularly the taxonomic side of it. I would prefer to put it that he was opposing, as Goethe did, a rigid or mechanically logical approach in favor of a more post-logical one, closer to the true nature of science. But Wordsworth may well, in his isolation as time went on from the living science of his day, have withdrawn into increasing suspicion of it.
8. Collected Letters, 1, 320–21. Letter to Joseph Cottle, early April 1797. The passage is preceded by a mention of Milton.
9. Moorman, p. 367; but see also chap. 18, regarding the series of epic themes in The Prelude. “Significantly, he aims at completing Milton” (p. 607).
10. Garrod, Wordsworth (Oxford, 1923), p. 27, quotes Hazlitt as saying, “Milton is his great idol and he sometimes dares to compare himself with him.” Garrod adds, “The comparison, as Hazlitt quite well knew, was not so absurd as he would have us suppose.” Moorman, pp. 506–7, quotes a letter from Lamb to Manning, February 15, 1801, in which he talks of a letter from Wordsworth, “with a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakespeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets: which Union, as the highest species of poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, ‘he was most proud to aspire to’; . . . After one has been reading Shakespeare twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality, which Shakespeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!!” Lamb’s real indignation comes right through the humor.
11. From Kunst und Altertum, included in Maximen und Reflexionen, in Gedenkausgabe (Zürich, 1949), 9, 508; and conversation with Sulpiz Boisseree and Anton Thibaut, September 20, 1815, Goethe im Gesprach, p. 193.
12. The Art of Wordsworth (London, 1952), pp. 41–42, 55. See also Moorman, p. 609: “Yet during the next two years Wordsworth did indeed write an epic, of which the ‘hero’ is himself and the story that of his own spiritual adventures, discoveries, and sufferings. The Prelude is the only kind of epic he could ever successfully have written.”
13. Letter to Sir George Beaumont, April 11, 1805. Early Letters, ed. Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 489.
14. See C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, Macmillan, 1945), p. 246, and elsewhere.
15. Ibid., pp. 15, 58.
16. This is most beautifully said by an anthropologist writing on epic—G. R. Levy, The Sword from the Rock (London, Faber, 1953): “Thither he drove the spear, and Hector fell in the dust. Then you and I and all of us fell down . . . In this climax, unlike the earlier duels, the two heroes have drawn into themselves the whole fate of camp and city” (p. 191).
17. Published in Vol. 5 of Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Selincourt and Darbishire (Oxford, 1949), appendix A. I am indebted to the Moorman biography of Wordsworth for directing me to this “little-known poem,” as the author calls it there.
18. Rilke, Letters, 1892–1910, tr. Greene and Norton (New York, Norton, 1945), letter to Clara Rilke (June 26, 1907), 1, 287.
19. Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, n.d.), p. 11; February 17, 1903.
20. See Briefwechsel mit Katharina Kippenberg (Wiesbaden, Insel-Verlag, 1954), letters of December 11, 1915, and February 7, 1917, pp. 155, 215.
21. Ibid., letter of August 17, 1919; and Letters, Vol. 1, letter to Clara Rilke, June 24, 1907, p. 287.
22. Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé (Zurich and Wiesbaden, Insel-Verlag, 1952), letters of August 10, 1903, p. 99; May 12, 1904, p. 161; May 13, 1904, pp. 166–67; October 19, 1904, p. 192.
23. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, letter of August 12, 1904, p. 47.
24. Letters, Vol. 1, letter to Clara Rilke, June 28, 1907, p. 289; and to Friedrich Westhoff, April 29, 1904, p. 151.
25. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, July 16, 1903, p. 25.
26. The phrase, from a letter of Wordsworth’s, is quoted in Mary Moorman’s biography, p. 260. The same writer also quotes Coleridge as writing in a letter to Thomas Poole in 1799: “but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated and isolated his being. Doubtless his delights are more deep and sublime; but he has likewise more hours that prey upon the flesh and blood” (pp. 435–36).
27. “Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth has the least femineity in his mind. He is all man” (Inquiring Spirit, ed. Coburn, p. 296).
28. See the introductions to the companion volumes of translation of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets, by Leishman and Spender and by Leishman respectively, London, Hogarth Press, 1952, 1949.
29. See Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Selincourt (Oxford, 1944), Vol. 2, notes, p. 526.
30. The whole poem is reminiscent of Milton. Barron Field, writing to Wordsworth on December 17, 1836, says of this poem, “Milton should have written it when blind.”
31. It is not surprising that the opening of St. John’s Gospel should haunt Orphic poets: one remembers Goethe and Valery on it, among others. There is a very brief and very wise discussion of Rilke’s disjointed relation to the Logos in Rudolf Kassner’s introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke und Marie von Thurn und Taxis: Briefwechsel, Vol. 1, Zürich, Insel-Verlag, 1951.
32. See G. R. Levy, The Gate of Horn: A Study of the Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, and Their Influence upon European Thought (London, Faber, 1948), p. 52: “Both the winding path, and the rope or clue, appear in European tales of entry into an actual or subjective spiral maze [footnote: Cf. the kitten who unwinds the ball of wool before Alice penetrates the looking-glass, and the fatal spindle of the Sleeping Beauty] and with these savage analogies before us it does not seem unreasonable to connect such a pathway between the two worlds, both with the winding entrance signs of the Palaeolithic caves, and with the choice of intricate and difficult passages to their inner sanctuaries.” Also p. 159, concerning mazes and labyrinths: “The primitive conception of the divine body as the road travelled by itself and by its seeker, will again be recalled in the Australians’ interpretation of their ground drawings, as will its possible origins in Palaeolithic cave religion.” In her other work, The Sword from the Rock, this writer specifically links Wordsworth’s Prelude with ancient figures, p. 138, n. 1: “In the Greek version of Ut-napishtim’s story of the Flood Xisuthros has to bury his archives before the waters are loosed, just as the Arab has to bury the symbols of poetry and mathematics before the pursuing sea in The Prelude. Had Wordsworth read Berossus?” He may have done, of course; but I think the connection is postlogical and goes far deeper than scholarship.
