The Orphic Voice, page 7
With this new stage in a long development we begin our natural history. The evidence consists of the writings of the two men, but we should be clear from the start about what is happening. We are not observing in detachment a clearly defined, rational event. We are assisting at a metamorphosis.
The first figure of the Orpheus story calls up such a transformation. It is so well known, Orpheus playing to beasts and the mountain tops that freeze and plants and flowers and so on, in the words of that song from King Henry VIII, that it seems overfamiliar and banal, like those tasteless Bible pictures where lions lie down with lambs in an impossible countryside, and the imagination is not moved to recognize any sort of reality. It is curious but I think true that we always picture the scene, perhaps because of the “sun and showers” of that best-known of Orpheus lyrics, as taking place in the clear light of day. It will help the figure to help us—by waking a jaded imagination and incidentally by producing a much closer image of our own state in this inquiry—if we shift the happening from day into night. Imagine, then, something happening in a night which includes ourselves, the singer in almost complete darkness in which his reordering of creation has just begun, but as if it were a dream he is having, or that of the beasts whose masks, fierce or gentle, appear suddenly like emblems or heraldic devices out of the darkness only to puzzle the mind catching at beauty and significance which vanish again from moment to moment; or even the still less explicable dream of the moving trees and stones, sliding to a pattern not their own. Nothing is seen except in glimpses, a phantasmagoria out of which nevertheless a world of new order is shaping, half unknown to the one who wields the power and suffers the terror that accompanies all transformation.
Orpheus and myth are the methods for our natural history, and they warrant a figure of darkness for they are in themselves riddles, dark sayings, hieroglyphics, in that field where minds and language engender their productions of thought. We shall meet Orpheus and classical myth explicitly in Shakespeare and Bacon and elsewhere in this period, for Greek and Roman mythology flourished in Renaissance England, and Orpheus is one of the favorite figures. Bacon discusses, retells, and interprets myths; Shakespeare is steeped in Ovid (either direct or at second-hand by translation only, as critics discuss).2 One part of our task is to see what Bacon and Shakespeare make of Orpheus and classic mythology, and this leads on to that wider field which I am calling “myth,” the activity between mind and language in poetry whereby the mind invents new models and methods to understand new things.
I am going to assume that the Magna Instauratio, of which the Novum Organum forms part,3 is just such a living myth, that it can be explored in poetic and mythological terms and compared with works such as King Lear. One of the aims of such works (which does not exclude others) is the discovery, fostering, and development of poetic and mythological thought. I shall call this postlogical thinking or, more briefly, postlogic.
In the first stage of the Orpheus story we shall be restricted to thinking about natural phenomena, those three great orders of stones, plants, and animals which are drawn in the myth under Orpheus’ power. It may be that the method of thinking which Shakespeare and Bacon propose is designed to draw the mind and body into a closer working relationship with these things, and to help it to understand its own nature by means of them. To limit Bacon and Shakespeare to this range would be absurd; it is ourselves we shall limit, for we have enough to cope with as it is, groping about in the dark with our own beginnings. Thinking about human nature must wait until Orpheus can carry us forward to it. But even at this stage, and even though in darkness, Orpheus will help, standing as he does for the reflection of myth upon its own nature.
From that time Orpheus betook himself to solitary places . . . where, by the same sweetness of his song and lyre, he drew to him all kinds of wild beasts, in such manner that . . . they all stood about him gently and sociably, as in a theatre, listening only to the concords of his lyre. Nor was that all: for so great was the power of his music that it moved the woods and the very stones to shift themselves and take their station decently and orderly about him.
This is Bacon’s description of the scene, in De Sapientia Veterum, published in 1609.4 Its grave dignity is characteristic of its writer. If nature is set dancing by Orpheus, in Bacon’s scheme of things that dance is stately and measured. It takes quite another form in Shakespeare, who speaks of Orpheus as one
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands,
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, III.2)
We have here two differing conceptions of the Orphic activity. Bacon, who recounts the whole of the myth, begins by offering his interpretation. “The story of Orpheus,” he says, “which though so well known has not yet been in all points perfectly well interpreted, seems meant for a representation of universal Philosophy. For Orpheus himself,— a man admirable and truly divine, who being master of all harmony subdued and drew all things after him by sweet and gentle measures,— may pass by an easy metaphor for philosophy personified.” Shakespeare’s introduction takes the form of one marvelous line:
For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews.
These two visions of Orpheus suggest that here we have two things to think about. First, the two passages fall in quite naturally with the distinction we make nowadays between poetry and philosophy. Secondly, each writer identifies himself—as he sees himself—with Orpheus. To the poet, Orpheus’ instrument is the poet’s body. To the philosopher, Orpheus is the embodiment of philosophy.
Shakespeare’s figure is, in a sense, simple. In that splendid, painful metaphor he unites himself, as poet, immediately with the Orphic power and becomes the myth he is describing, that inclusive myth we were talking about earlier where instrument and agent are one. The image holds also a muted anguish at the notion of being strung, fiber by fiber, on something. It almost suggests the rack in those tight, drawn sinews, with a further hint of intimate dissection, for sinews used as lute strings can come only from a body that has been unpicked. It is as if the finale of the Orpheus story were present also, poets sharing of necessity the dismemberment of their master. Orpheus draws from Shakespeare the declaration that, body and mind, the poet is his own instrument; and when we look for Shakespeare’s own myth in his work, the active moving principle of organism and language in form and content, we shall find there a complete integrity, the moving-all-of-one-piece which befits such a poet. This simplicity makes our task doubly difficult. The more perfect and unitary a system, the harder it is to find your way in.
This is why we shall turn our attention to Bacon first. For Bacon is not simple. His Orpheus is already doubled back upon itself. Orpheus is philosophy, says Bacon—that is, poetry and myth are philosophy; but Bacon is in his own eyes a philosopher, and so by his metaphor he is made one with the Orpheus myth—and the imaginative fusion of self and instrument and subject matter is a poetic, not a philosophic, way of thinking.
Doubleness, ambiguity, and contradiction are the essential characteristics of this man and his work. We think we know, by virtue of general knowledge and often without reading him, what Bacon was about. He is ranked as a philosopher, the innovator or supporter of inductive reasoning and the experimental method in science, opponent of Aristotelian logic, forerunner of utilitarianism and the development of technology,5 a figure in the history of scientific and social philosophy. Yet this widespread image of Bacon proves, when looked into, to be completely untrustworthy.
There is controversy about the nature of his method, about his crucial contribution to thought, about his importance or the reasons for it. Some maintain he was not himself clear on these matters.6 The volume of disagreement must be almost without parallel in literary history. Here are some examples: Bacon is the Moses of the new experimental science (Cowley), a spiritual ancestor of the founding of the Royal Society (Sprat), a genius in the history of science (Macaulay), the prophet of modern science (James); he is the most terrible enemy science has ever had (de Maistre), a dilettante insufficiently informed in scientific matters (Fowler). He was interested in method, but his inquiries proved fruitless (James); we do not really know what his method was (Dean Church, Ellis); he tries to shift logic into time (Farrington); he is deficient in logic (Macaulay). He insists on the importance of abstract ideas (Ellis); he can think in no form but the concrete (de Maistre). His notion of a natural history is what is most important (Spedding); it is unimportant (Ellis, Robertson). His doctrine of forms is his most important contribution (James), a forerunner of modern concepts of matter (Farrington, Whyte); it is quite extraneous to Bacon’s system (Ellis).7
It seems we know next to nothing about Bacon. He is held to be important, although it is not clear why. He is concerned with a new kind of thinking or method, which has to do with power over nature, with natural history and an understanding of forms, whatever he means by that; this can be gathered from his work. And that work vibrates with a passion of excitement which he communicates, unexplained, to his reader. On one point all those who write about him agree: he has a marvelous power of words.
A man dealing with the moving and changing forms of natural things, organic and inorganic, who enchants us without our knowing why by thought and words, which are also what he is thinking about—this suggests not a philosopher in the modern sense at all but a myth-maker. It is Bacon’s most implacable opponent, de Maistre, who throws him this very title: “his writings, considered as fables, are still very entertaining.”8 The qualified title of poet is allowed to Bacon by several of his critics and biographers,9 but it is to the poets themselves to whom we turn for ratification of the title, to Shelley and Poe.
The Orpheus line of descent among the poets establishes its own subsidiary lines of spiritual heredity, whereby later Orphic voices recognize and acknowledge their ancestors. So it is Shelley who in his Defence of Poetry says, “Lord Bacon was a poet.” We shall take this to be true, and consider Bacon from now on as a dark, riddling, emblematic poet, struggling with a metamorphosis of his own thinking and of man’s power over the universe, a counterpart of the darkling Orpheus with whom we began. Poets of this kind are not common, and a second example will be helpful, the mind that struggles to interpret itself and the universe in Poe’s Eureka. In his essay Poe mentions Bacon, but with his characteristic wrongheadedness (equaled only by Bacon’s own) mentions him only in derision, rejecting Deduction and Aristotle, and Induction and Bacon, and going on to exalt imaginative speculation as the true form of scientific thinking. The first part of the passage exhibits Poe at his most vulgar, and he must have had a particular liking for it, since it appears twice in his work, in the story Mellonta Tauta as well as in Eureka. One strongly suspects that Poe knew Bacon only by hearsay, for even he could hardly have failed to recognize in the Magna Instauratio a mind attempting the same kind of task as his own in Eureka, a reshaping of thought about the universe, a suppressed excitement, a splendor of language, a preoccupation with science, and a feeling that the poet has a new way of thinking about the world. Bacon and Poe resemble each other, too, in that each found and displayed something other than he thought he had found. Poe through a vast cosmology displays the workings of the poetic mind. What Bacon displays we have yet to work out.
For all his unevenness, however, Poe’s endeavor has greater unity than Bacon’s. He took the precaution, or had the insight, to preface Eureka with the injunction, “Nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.” Bacon knows no such unity of purpose. It is not that he was a poet who thought himself a philosopher, as his version of Orpheus at first sight suggests. He was a poet who did not trust poetry.
2
They contain some haunting beauty that is mysteriously knit up with some vaguely apprehended truth . . . They are not merely beautiful, or they could be admired and let us go; they are not merely true, or they could be understood and put away
THE FIRST ORPHEUS figure we are using, the singer who moves a world in darkness, is a figure of movement and change. We are hoping by it to see what Bacon and Shakespeare will tell us of a poet and his powers, but we shall learn nothing unless we are ready to submit to it and to change ourselves; and we have to begin here and now.
We have first to recognize the disadvantages of twentieth-century minds in coming to an understanding even of conventional mythology. Our rigidity of mind and a sense of superiority are bred and educated into us. To connect mythology and science seems to us unlikely enough, while to go back to Bacon for help in that quest after the “Wisdom of the Ancients,” which will take us yet farther back —into fable and myth—may seem absurd. Yet we have to do both these things now; and possibly each stage in this inquiry may challenge our conventionalisms. We have to believe that the “ancients,” Bacon among them, meant what they said, and, at least as much as we ourselves, talked sense. It is not a question of abdicating from any knowledge which modern minds possess. It is more a matter of new beliefs.
A second disadvantage has to do with history. We have two great periods of interest in mythology behind us. The first was the Renaissance, when mythology meant classical Greek and Roman mythology. The second was the nineteenth century, when the scope of mythology was broadened to include the myths of the world. Each period has a similar shape. In its opening, one Orphic voice proclaims what is necessary for understanding and developing mythology as an instrument of inquiry. A few later minds can hear what this voice has said, but the instrument ends each time by being broken in prolonged battles. By the end of the first period myths had become mechanical ornament, affronts to desirable common sense,10 or even burlesques. At the end of the second period, where we now find ourselves, myth, ill-comprehended and isolated from its fellow disciplines, has gone from poetry and is consigned uneasily to two branches of science, anthropology and psychology.11
If we are to learn about myth, we must first of all go back to those two Orphic harbingers. They will tell us what to believe. We are not going to ask them what myth is, not being yet in a position to put that question. What they can suggest is how we must modify ourselves in order to find out; they can give us back the instrument they originally offered, since broken in our hands.
The first voice, back in the late fifteenth century, is Pico della Mirandola. Bacon knew and quoted his work.12 The second, nearer, voice, more anguished but unanimous with that serene predecessor 300 years earlier, is Hölderlin, the contemporary of Goethe and Schelling, who has been only recently restored, as if out of the darkness into which his mind fell in the latter half of his life, to his due rank as a prophetic poet of the first order. What is the message of these two?
What Pico della Mirandola set out to do, in his De Dignitate Hominis, was in the first place to show how mythology, Christian theology, and natural philosophy could be regarded as a unity. By a gesture of high intellectual courtesy he gives to pagan myths the title of the theology of the ancients, and seeks to establish correspondences between these mysteries and those of Moses and Christ. For Pico, however, it is not just a question of reconciling two theologies; there is a second step in the process, for these mysteries are connected with natural philosophy and the secrets of nature. Where we should speak of science, Pico speaks of magic, as a name for that high knowledge and power which he was seeking (as Bacon was), but which he distinguishes meticulously from evil magic. Pico’s “magic” is this, in his own words: “Altera nihil est aliud, cum bene exploratur, quam naturalis philosophiae absoluta consummatio.” Theology, mythology, and natural philosophy are, in conjunction, the means to this end, tending toward “profundissimam rerum secretissimarum contemplationem, et demum totius naturae cognitionem.” For Pico, Orpheus and his mysteries are veiled theology and natural philosophy, while Apollo is philosopher as well as poet and the true Apollo is Christ. He does not argue, though arguments on this score were ancient even in his day. He simply unites the three disciplines on a footing of mutual charity, as forms of inquiry into the better understanding of the world.
Hölderlin, in the different language of his time, says the same thing. In his late poem Der Einzige he unites, though with a troubled questioning which is absent in Pico, the Greek gods with Christ in a common bond of love and in relationship with the world of nature. In another, shorter, poem, Die scheinheiligen Dichter or seeming-holy poets, he makes a great protest against myth being used simply as empty ornament; here, too, belief in the gods, in a due and loving sense, is joined with a turning toward nature and our need to understand it. Here is a rough translation:
Cold lying mouths, how dare you name the Gods!
Reason’s your line. You never gave belief
To Helios, the Thunderer, the Sea-God.
The earth is dead—and shall we thank you for it?
Take comfort, Gods! for still you bless the song
Though from your names the soul of life is fled;
And should we need a high and reverent word,
