The Orphic Voice, page 8
All-mothering Nature—that shall serve our turn.
Each voice says that myth as a discipline of inquiry is to be united with theology and science (as I shall call natural philosophy for the present) in the endeavor to discover and comprehend the universe; and so for Pico Orpheus is a bearer of secret and mysterious teaching. Also we have in some sense to believe in myth as in those other two disciplines, before we can learn from it; and so for Hölderlin, Orpheus is the bearer of a love which embraces the whole universe and runs from heaven to hell.13 I propose that we should accept this, seeing myth as part of the corpus of learning and giving it its meed of belief, as a means to truth and reality. But in that case we had better think about what this implies.
Christian theology in its speculative aspect, mythology or poetry, and science are three disciplines of discovery and learning. They differ in their subject matter; they are united in their structure and aim. Thought of in this way, they may all three appear less as a body of knowledge, something you possess, than as a particular activity founded on an appropriate set of beliefs. Much of religion, apart from dogma, seems to fit with this. Myth we have already thought of as an activity, and are inquiring into the beliefs behind it; and it is becoming gradually clear that, as Goethe saw, science too can be regarded in this way.14 These three disciplines do not merely have a common structure. They have a common aim. That is truth, taken in its most simple everyday sense.
For each of these disciplines, to deny its obligation to truth is to deny its whole existence. It is fatal to say of myth and poetry that it is beautiful but a lie; or to say of religion that it is morally useful even if only symbolic; or of science that its first duty is to practical or political ends and not to truth. When this is done, beauty and moral expediency and practical usefulness disappear, for they are inseparable from the obligation to truth. With myth and poetry, no truth, no beauty, as was found out in the eighteenth century15 and as we are finding out in our own wasteland nowadays. The denial of one discipline’s truth usually took place because another discipline was claiming truth as its own private monopoly. This meant the loss of the charity in which they are founded and in which Pico and Hölderlin rooted them. When they fight each other, the whole endeavor of learning is maimed, each discipline is weakened by isolation, and in the end, as we have learned in the last forty years, all three are liable to be laid waste by an external aggressor in the form of a state system which denies freedom to literature, science, and religion alike, and admits no obligation to truth at all. If the three disciplines had not been so busy fighting one another for hundreds of years, they might have seen this danger more clearly. But in this respect our history is one long noisy battle.
In the more recent period science was the main aggressor, claiming, as it still does in many quarters, an exclusive primacy of certainty and truth. In the first period religion was on the attack, the Catholic establishment tussling with Galileo, the Puritan franc-tireurs battling with myth.16 In each period there is a great Orphic casualty in the battle. In the modern period, it is Renan. Renan, in adopting science, feels he must renounce religion and myth, but he cannot cure himself of his love for them, and in L’Avenir de la science argues in favor of a reunion of the disciplines, as Newman was to do from a different standpoint. Renan goes further, for he hints that belief, in some sense, is necessary if we are to understand myth at all, and is indeed the true scientific attitude toward it. But he sees this as a task for the future, saying of the synthesis, “Alors il y aura de nouveau des Orphée.”
The Orphic casualty of the first period is Milton. He, like his counterpart Renan, espouses the discipline which is on the attack, in this case religion, and supposes that it excludes him from admitting myth as well, except as ornament secularly hallowed by classical traditions and scholarship. By Milton’s time there was already a history of attacks by Puritans, on religious grounds, against poetry— particularly poetic drama—and myth. It begins with Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse in 1579, to which Sidney replies in his Apologie for Poesie. (But even for Sidney the religious question was so ticklish that the theologian is omitted from the great list of disciplines of learning which he gives in the Apologie; similarly Bacon insulates his religious beliefs, which he firmly held and nobly expressed, from his thought on science or myth, and even so did not escape the charge of atheism.) The attack reaches a climax in Histriomastix (1633), with a marvelous prodigal wealth of invective. There are various counts in the indictment. One is that of immorality, “the very Rapes, Adulteries, Murthers, Thefts, Deceites, Lasciviousnesse, and other execrable Villanies of Dung-Hill, Idole, Pagan-gods and Goddesses,” as Prynne puts it. The other two accusations are those of idolatry and lying. They frequently occur together, and continue for a surprisingly long time.17
Milton raises the question of the truth of myth in his latest Orpheus reference, the opening of Book VII of Paradise Lost. The progress of Orpheus through Milton’s work is interesting. In L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, which are primarily secular and have no deep bearing on the nature of the poet or of poetry, Orpheus can come and go freely, in connection with music, as if he were freed from content and could appear as pure form. In Lycidas, as Rachel Trickett has pointed out (in Essays and Studies, 1953), Orpheus represents the poet’s task and its agonies, and introduces the passage where first Apollo and then Saint Peter make their appearance in a rather uneasy sequence. In Paradise Lost Orpheus embodies Milton’s thought about the poet’s vocation in the great invocation to Urania as heavenly muse: “The meaning, not the name I call.” The poet is in darkness which is not merely Milton’s blindness, that great allegorical suffering, nor the threatening of outward circumstance, though both these are present,
In darkness, and with dangers compast round
And solitude;
it is also the darkness of an Orphic mind torn from its proper synthesis of religion and myth and knowledge of the universe. As in Lycidas, the singing and wonderworking Orpheus becomes the dismembered corpse,
In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Eares
To rapture, till the savage clamor dround
Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her Son. So fail not thou, who thee implores,
For thou are Heav’nlie, shee an empty dreame.
Is myth, then, an empty dream? It is a question which exercised many minds in Bacon’s time, and rightly, for it is profoundly important. An immense theme lies here: the relation of the world of creation, and of poetry, to the Logos. It is out of reach of the theme to which this study will be limited. But upon theology and what it stands for depends that charity of learning which Pico and Hölderlin proposed for us, and in the end the appeal to truth returns there. It is a moral and religious issue, and it tacitly upholds and binds together poetry and natural philosophy or science, in the sixteenth or any other century.
3
Thus you see that poets may lye if they list Cum privilegio. But what if they lye least of all other men? what if they lye not at all?
AN AGE in its own eyes and in ours may look very different. We think of the Elizabethan period as almost a golden age for poetry and plays and myth. To the Elizabethans it did not seem so. “In this iron and malitious age of ours ... it is hard to find in these days of noblemen or gentlemen any good Mathematician, or excellent Musitian, or notable Philosopher, or els a cunning Poet.” That is Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Sidney complains that poor poetry is fallen to be the laughingstock of children. Bacon says of myths that they are left commonly to boys and grammarians and held in slight repute (De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. 11, chap. 13); he adds of the stage plays of his time: “of corruptions in this kind we have enough; but the discipline has in our times been plainly neglected.” (The probable date for the writing of this, Spedding conjectures, is 1605.)
The tone tends to be polemical: poetry and myths are felt to be under attack. As early as 1545 Ascham is saying in his Toxophilus, “Even as I am not so fonde but I knowe that these be fables, so I am sure you be not so ignoraunt, but you knowe what suche noble wittes as the Poetes had, ment by such matters: which oftentimes under the covering of a fable, do hyde and wrappe in goodlie preceptes of philosophic, with the true judgement of thinges.” Ascham hits off the point exactly. It concerned the connection between poetry and philosophy and the universe. This is why Bacon’s poetical-philosophical Orpheus is so central a figure. Poetry and myth had to be justified. The appeal to antiquity, though strong in an age which had so much veneration for tradition, was felt to be insufficient. Why had the ancients so written, and what value was there in their “fables” and in poetry in general?
Orpheus accompanies the discussion. He appears in Sidney’s Apologie, and in Bishop Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London written in 1665–66. Here, it seems, is poetry ranged against science, and one might expect the writers to differ widely on the relation of poetry to philosophy, science, reality, and truth. In fact they agree to a surprising extent, as a set of parallel passages will show:
Sidney Sprat
Orpheus, Linus, and some others are named, who having been the first of that country that made pens deliverers of their knowledge to posterity, may justly challenge to be called their fathers in learning. Hence it came to pass, that the first Masters of Knowledge amongst them, were as well Poets as Philosophers; for Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and Homer first softened Man’s natural rudeness.
Sidney a little earlier had spoken of philosophy used to the defacing of poetry, “with great danger of civil war among the Muses.” Both writers then agree on the original unity of poetry and philosophy. Each accepts the fact of their more recent separation, and on this each comments:
Sidney Sprat
After the philosophers had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry, the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forthwith, putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness . . . were not content to set up shop for themselves, but sought by all means to discredit their masters. When the fabulous Age was past, Philosophy took a little more courage; and ventured more to rely upon its own strength, without the Assistance of Poetry.
So the two disciplines are separated. Sidney regrets it, resenting the claims of a philosophy weaned from its nursing-mother, poetry; Sprat applauds it as progress (and behind Sprat one hears Comte and all the voices down to the present day). Sidney claims knowledge as a part of poetry and its mysteries, but he wavers in his claim, as we shall see, by presenting the poet as exceptional, aloof from the general endeavor of knowledge and justified on other grounds. He thus plays straight into Sprat’s hands:
Sidney Sprat
There is no art delivered unto mankind, that hath not the works of nature for his principal object . . . [Sidney here ties in the astronomer, geometrician, arithmetician, musician (Quadrivium); the natural philosopher, lawyer, historian; grammarian, rhetorician, logician (Trivium); the physician and metaphysician.] Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection . . . doth grow, in effect, into another nature . . . Now, for the poet, he nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth. The poets began of old to impose the Deceit. They to make all things look more venerable than they were, devis’d a thousand false Chimaeras; on every Field, River, Grove, and Cave they bestow’d a Fantasm of their own making . . . The Wit of the Fables and Religions of the antient World is well-nigh consumed; they have already serv’d the poets long enough, and it is now high time to dismiss them, especially seeing they have this peculiar Imperfection, that they were only Fictions at first.
Sprat at least is logical: poets are liars, and the sooner scientists and other true minds are free of them the better. Sidney is illogical: poetry is philosophy and the source of true knowledge, but it is not to be classed with natural philosophy and the other branches of true knowledge; it says nothing about the real world and so is neither true nor false. (What a modern view it sounds when put that way!) This logic and illogic, however, are not the product of a scientific and a poetic mind respectively. Neither voice is scientific, and neither voice is poetic. Sprat is saying half a thing; Sidney is saying two things at once which contradict one another. Sprat’s half-statement and half of Sidney’s statement agree: poetry is not true and is not concerned with reality and nature. The results are equally unfortunate for any vision, whether it be of science or poetry. Sprat is not troubled by any sense of inadequacy; it is we who must feel that his presentation of science is glaringly inadequate: humdrum pedestrian collecting, arranging, and experimenting, without imagination of any sort. Sidney in his turn does not seem troubled by the contradiction in his work. He was regarded as the mirror of his age, and in the Apologie he mirrors the muddle his century was in (the quotation at the head of this section, dated 1591, shows it clearly) about the connection between poetry and philosophy, myths and truth. We shall meet the same contradiction in Bacon.
Sprat claims Bacon for his ancestor, or for the ancestor of the Royal Society and its scientific proceedings as Sprat presents them. That he is so, in part, is undeniable. Bacon and Sidney agree upon this: that if poetry is not true, and is still to be justified, the justification will have to be in terms of moral effect, or of idealizing escapist beauty. “It raises the mind aloft,” Bacon says in De Augmentis (Bk. II, chap. 13), “accommodating the shows of things to the desires of the mind, not (like reason and history) buckling and bowing down the mind to the nature of things.” Such a view is the result of separating reason and imagination. Bacon assigns philosophy to reason (Bk. I, chap. 1) and poetry to the imagination. So poetry becomes (Bk. III, chap. 1), “a dream of learning; a thing sweet and varied, and that would be thought to have in it something divine; a character which dreams likewise affect. But now it is time for me to awake, and, rising above the earth, to wing my way through the clear air of Philosophy and the Sciences.”
If this were all there were to Bacon, or to poetry, we should be left with vain dreams on the one hand, and Sprat’s deadly science on the other. But Bacon’s essential vision was of neither of these two inadequacies, but of a synthesis, inspiring the cry in the “Plan of the Work” which precedes the Novum Organum: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world.” To this any good scientist and, no less, any good poet, will say Amen. Poetry is true knowledge, and about the real world. Sidney also says it, and others before and after him. This note is already there in Ascham (it is of course part of Pico’s view). Sandys, the translator of the Metamorphoses, voices it in 1632, in his introductory verses:
Phoebus Apollo, (sacred Poesy)
Thus taught: for in these ancient Fables lie
The mysteries of all Philosophie.
Some Nature’s secrets shew; in some appeare
Distempers staines; some teach us how to beare
Both Fortunes, bridling Joy, Griefe, Hope, and Feare.
This is Bacon’s Orpheus, the union of poetry and universal philosophy. Bacon is not clear about the relations between the two. He shares his age’s fondness, as does Sandys, for moral allegory, where we shall not follow him; but even when this is left out of account, he is in two minds about the nature of the instrument he is working with.
There are two minor Orphic voices of this period, one earlier than Bacon and one later, which show a remarkable grasp of the dilemma. The first is Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie deserves to be better known. Puttenham denies implicitly Sidney’s exclusion of the poet from the study of the works of nature, and Bacon’s division between reason and imagination. Poets, he says, “were the first that entended to the observation of nature and her works, and specially of the Celestiall courses . . . they were the first Astronomers and Philosophists and Metaphysicks . . . and historiographers.” Orpheus is behind all this, and is “first musitien” as well, arts and sciences converging, “so noble, profitable, ancient and divine a science as Poesie is.”18 When Puttenham turns his attention to the imagination, he produces one of the great passages in English literature on this subject:
So is that part well affected, not onely nothing disorderly or confused with any monstrous imaginations or conceits, but very formall, and in his much multi-formitie uniforme, that is well proportioned and so passing cleare, that by it as by a glasse or mirrour, are represented unto the soule all manner of bewtifull visions, whereby the inventive parte of the mind is so much holpen, as without it no man could devise any new or rare thing. . . . and of this sorte of phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines stratagematique, all cunning artificers and enginers, all Legislators, Polititiens and Counsellours of Estate, in whose exercises the inventive part is most employed and is to the sound and true judgement of man most needful.
Puttenham here comes to the root of the question, considering the mental activity which informs all living thought, under whatever discipline, as one. When he turns more specifically to poetry, he connects it with power, saying that poets by their works, “setting them with sundry relations, and variable formes, in the ministery and use of words, doe breede no little alteration in man. For to say truely, what els is man but his minde? which, whosoever have skil to compasse, and make yealding and flexible, what may not he commaund the body to performe?” The altering of the mind, power over bodies, by imaginative power and vision: this was Bacon’s Orphic vision too, but clouded by indirection and ambiguity.
Our second minor Orphic writer, Henry Reynolds, complains of this very thing in his essay Mythomystes (1632),19 a remarkable little work. This is his accusation against Bacon: “What shall we make of such willing contradictions, when a man to vent a few fancies of his own shall tell us first, they are the wisdom of the Ancients, and next, that those Ancient fables were but mere fables, and without wisdom or meaning till their expositors gave them a meaning; and then scornfully and contemptuously (as if all Poetry were but Play-vanity) shut up that discourse of his of Poetry with It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.” The criticism depends on Reynolds’ own understanding of poetry and of its connection with natural philosophy. He first disposes of the Sidney-Bacon view of poetry: “Nor expect here any Encomium or praise of any such thing as the world ordinarily takes Poesy for: that same thing being, as I conceive, a superficial mere outside of Sense, or gay bark only (without the body) of Reason: Witness so many excellent wits that have taken so much pains in these times to defend her; which sure they would not have done, if what is generally received nowadays for Poesy were not merely a faculty or occupation of so little consequence.” Poetry then is a serious endeavor of some kind; and poets and philosophers are both engaged in it: “I put them together, as who are or should be both professors of one and the same learning, though by the one received and delivered in the apparel of verse, the other of prose.”
Each voice says that myth as a discipline of inquiry is to be united with theology and science (as I shall call natural philosophy for the present) in the endeavor to discover and comprehend the universe; and so for Pico Orpheus is a bearer of secret and mysterious teaching. Also we have in some sense to believe in myth as in those other two disciplines, before we can learn from it; and so for Hölderlin, Orpheus is the bearer of a love which embraces the whole universe and runs from heaven to hell.13 I propose that we should accept this, seeing myth as part of the corpus of learning and giving it its meed of belief, as a means to truth and reality. But in that case we had better think about what this implies.
Christian theology in its speculative aspect, mythology or poetry, and science are three disciplines of discovery and learning. They differ in their subject matter; they are united in their structure and aim. Thought of in this way, they may all three appear less as a body of knowledge, something you possess, than as a particular activity founded on an appropriate set of beliefs. Much of religion, apart from dogma, seems to fit with this. Myth we have already thought of as an activity, and are inquiring into the beliefs behind it; and it is becoming gradually clear that, as Goethe saw, science too can be regarded in this way.14 These three disciplines do not merely have a common structure. They have a common aim. That is truth, taken in its most simple everyday sense.
For each of these disciplines, to deny its obligation to truth is to deny its whole existence. It is fatal to say of myth and poetry that it is beautiful but a lie; or to say of religion that it is morally useful even if only symbolic; or of science that its first duty is to practical or political ends and not to truth. When this is done, beauty and moral expediency and practical usefulness disappear, for they are inseparable from the obligation to truth. With myth and poetry, no truth, no beauty, as was found out in the eighteenth century15 and as we are finding out in our own wasteland nowadays. The denial of one discipline’s truth usually took place because another discipline was claiming truth as its own private monopoly. This meant the loss of the charity in which they are founded and in which Pico and Hölderlin rooted them. When they fight each other, the whole endeavor of learning is maimed, each discipline is weakened by isolation, and in the end, as we have learned in the last forty years, all three are liable to be laid waste by an external aggressor in the form of a state system which denies freedom to literature, science, and religion alike, and admits no obligation to truth at all. If the three disciplines had not been so busy fighting one another for hundreds of years, they might have seen this danger more clearly. But in this respect our history is one long noisy battle.
In the more recent period science was the main aggressor, claiming, as it still does in many quarters, an exclusive primacy of certainty and truth. In the first period religion was on the attack, the Catholic establishment tussling with Galileo, the Puritan franc-tireurs battling with myth.16 In each period there is a great Orphic casualty in the battle. In the modern period, it is Renan. Renan, in adopting science, feels he must renounce religion and myth, but he cannot cure himself of his love for them, and in L’Avenir de la science argues in favor of a reunion of the disciplines, as Newman was to do from a different standpoint. Renan goes further, for he hints that belief, in some sense, is necessary if we are to understand myth at all, and is indeed the true scientific attitude toward it. But he sees this as a task for the future, saying of the synthesis, “Alors il y aura de nouveau des Orphée.”
The Orphic casualty of the first period is Milton. He, like his counterpart Renan, espouses the discipline which is on the attack, in this case religion, and supposes that it excludes him from admitting myth as well, except as ornament secularly hallowed by classical traditions and scholarship. By Milton’s time there was already a history of attacks by Puritans, on religious grounds, against poetry— particularly poetic drama—and myth. It begins with Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse in 1579, to which Sidney replies in his Apologie for Poesie. (But even for Sidney the religious question was so ticklish that the theologian is omitted from the great list of disciplines of learning which he gives in the Apologie; similarly Bacon insulates his religious beliefs, which he firmly held and nobly expressed, from his thought on science or myth, and even so did not escape the charge of atheism.) The attack reaches a climax in Histriomastix (1633), with a marvelous prodigal wealth of invective. There are various counts in the indictment. One is that of immorality, “the very Rapes, Adulteries, Murthers, Thefts, Deceites, Lasciviousnesse, and other execrable Villanies of Dung-Hill, Idole, Pagan-gods and Goddesses,” as Prynne puts it. The other two accusations are those of idolatry and lying. They frequently occur together, and continue for a surprisingly long time.17
Milton raises the question of the truth of myth in his latest Orpheus reference, the opening of Book VII of Paradise Lost. The progress of Orpheus through Milton’s work is interesting. In L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, which are primarily secular and have no deep bearing on the nature of the poet or of poetry, Orpheus can come and go freely, in connection with music, as if he were freed from content and could appear as pure form. In Lycidas, as Rachel Trickett has pointed out (in Essays and Studies, 1953), Orpheus represents the poet’s task and its agonies, and introduces the passage where first Apollo and then Saint Peter make their appearance in a rather uneasy sequence. In Paradise Lost Orpheus embodies Milton’s thought about the poet’s vocation in the great invocation to Urania as heavenly muse: “The meaning, not the name I call.” The poet is in darkness which is not merely Milton’s blindness, that great allegorical suffering, nor the threatening of outward circumstance, though both these are present,
In darkness, and with dangers compast round
And solitude;
it is also the darkness of an Orphic mind torn from its proper synthesis of religion and myth and knowledge of the universe. As in Lycidas, the singing and wonderworking Orpheus becomes the dismembered corpse,
In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Eares
To rapture, till the savage clamor dround
Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her Son. So fail not thou, who thee implores,
For thou are Heav’nlie, shee an empty dreame.
Is myth, then, an empty dream? It is a question which exercised many minds in Bacon’s time, and rightly, for it is profoundly important. An immense theme lies here: the relation of the world of creation, and of poetry, to the Logos. It is out of reach of the theme to which this study will be limited. But upon theology and what it stands for depends that charity of learning which Pico and Hölderlin proposed for us, and in the end the appeal to truth returns there. It is a moral and religious issue, and it tacitly upholds and binds together poetry and natural philosophy or science, in the sixteenth or any other century.
3
Thus you see that poets may lye if they list Cum privilegio. But what if they lye least of all other men? what if they lye not at all?
AN AGE in its own eyes and in ours may look very different. We think of the Elizabethan period as almost a golden age for poetry and plays and myth. To the Elizabethans it did not seem so. “In this iron and malitious age of ours ... it is hard to find in these days of noblemen or gentlemen any good Mathematician, or excellent Musitian, or notable Philosopher, or els a cunning Poet.” That is Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Sidney complains that poor poetry is fallen to be the laughingstock of children. Bacon says of myths that they are left commonly to boys and grammarians and held in slight repute (De Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. 11, chap. 13); he adds of the stage plays of his time: “of corruptions in this kind we have enough; but the discipline has in our times been plainly neglected.” (The probable date for the writing of this, Spedding conjectures, is 1605.)
The tone tends to be polemical: poetry and myths are felt to be under attack. As early as 1545 Ascham is saying in his Toxophilus, “Even as I am not so fonde but I knowe that these be fables, so I am sure you be not so ignoraunt, but you knowe what suche noble wittes as the Poetes had, ment by such matters: which oftentimes under the covering of a fable, do hyde and wrappe in goodlie preceptes of philosophic, with the true judgement of thinges.” Ascham hits off the point exactly. It concerned the connection between poetry and philosophy and the universe. This is why Bacon’s poetical-philosophical Orpheus is so central a figure. Poetry and myth had to be justified. The appeal to antiquity, though strong in an age which had so much veneration for tradition, was felt to be insufficient. Why had the ancients so written, and what value was there in their “fables” and in poetry in general?
Orpheus accompanies the discussion. He appears in Sidney’s Apologie, and in Bishop Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London written in 1665–66. Here, it seems, is poetry ranged against science, and one might expect the writers to differ widely on the relation of poetry to philosophy, science, reality, and truth. In fact they agree to a surprising extent, as a set of parallel passages will show:
Sidney Sprat
Orpheus, Linus, and some others are named, who having been the first of that country that made pens deliverers of their knowledge to posterity, may justly challenge to be called their fathers in learning. Hence it came to pass, that the first Masters of Knowledge amongst them, were as well Poets as Philosophers; for Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and Homer first softened Man’s natural rudeness.
Sidney a little earlier had spoken of philosophy used to the defacing of poetry, “with great danger of civil war among the Muses.” Both writers then agree on the original unity of poetry and philosophy. Each accepts the fact of their more recent separation, and on this each comments:
Sidney Sprat
After the philosophers had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry, the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forthwith, putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness . . . were not content to set up shop for themselves, but sought by all means to discredit their masters. When the fabulous Age was past, Philosophy took a little more courage; and ventured more to rely upon its own strength, without the Assistance of Poetry.
So the two disciplines are separated. Sidney regrets it, resenting the claims of a philosophy weaned from its nursing-mother, poetry; Sprat applauds it as progress (and behind Sprat one hears Comte and all the voices down to the present day). Sidney claims knowledge as a part of poetry and its mysteries, but he wavers in his claim, as we shall see, by presenting the poet as exceptional, aloof from the general endeavor of knowledge and justified on other grounds. He thus plays straight into Sprat’s hands:
Sidney Sprat
There is no art delivered unto mankind, that hath not the works of nature for his principal object . . . [Sidney here ties in the astronomer, geometrician, arithmetician, musician (Quadrivium); the natural philosopher, lawyer, historian; grammarian, rhetorician, logician (Trivium); the physician and metaphysician.] Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection . . . doth grow, in effect, into another nature . . . Now, for the poet, he nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth. The poets began of old to impose the Deceit. They to make all things look more venerable than they were, devis’d a thousand false Chimaeras; on every Field, River, Grove, and Cave they bestow’d a Fantasm of their own making . . . The Wit of the Fables and Religions of the antient World is well-nigh consumed; they have already serv’d the poets long enough, and it is now high time to dismiss them, especially seeing they have this peculiar Imperfection, that they were only Fictions at first.
Sprat at least is logical: poets are liars, and the sooner scientists and other true minds are free of them the better. Sidney is illogical: poetry is philosophy and the source of true knowledge, but it is not to be classed with natural philosophy and the other branches of true knowledge; it says nothing about the real world and so is neither true nor false. (What a modern view it sounds when put that way!) This logic and illogic, however, are not the product of a scientific and a poetic mind respectively. Neither voice is scientific, and neither voice is poetic. Sprat is saying half a thing; Sidney is saying two things at once which contradict one another. Sprat’s half-statement and half of Sidney’s statement agree: poetry is not true and is not concerned with reality and nature. The results are equally unfortunate for any vision, whether it be of science or poetry. Sprat is not troubled by any sense of inadequacy; it is we who must feel that his presentation of science is glaringly inadequate: humdrum pedestrian collecting, arranging, and experimenting, without imagination of any sort. Sidney in his turn does not seem troubled by the contradiction in his work. He was regarded as the mirror of his age, and in the Apologie he mirrors the muddle his century was in (the quotation at the head of this section, dated 1591, shows it clearly) about the connection between poetry and philosophy, myths and truth. We shall meet the same contradiction in Bacon.
Sprat claims Bacon for his ancestor, or for the ancestor of the Royal Society and its scientific proceedings as Sprat presents them. That he is so, in part, is undeniable. Bacon and Sidney agree upon this: that if poetry is not true, and is still to be justified, the justification will have to be in terms of moral effect, or of idealizing escapist beauty. “It raises the mind aloft,” Bacon says in De Augmentis (Bk. II, chap. 13), “accommodating the shows of things to the desires of the mind, not (like reason and history) buckling and bowing down the mind to the nature of things.” Such a view is the result of separating reason and imagination. Bacon assigns philosophy to reason (Bk. I, chap. 1) and poetry to the imagination. So poetry becomes (Bk. III, chap. 1), “a dream of learning; a thing sweet and varied, and that would be thought to have in it something divine; a character which dreams likewise affect. But now it is time for me to awake, and, rising above the earth, to wing my way through the clear air of Philosophy and the Sciences.”
If this were all there were to Bacon, or to poetry, we should be left with vain dreams on the one hand, and Sprat’s deadly science on the other. But Bacon’s essential vision was of neither of these two inadequacies, but of a synthesis, inspiring the cry in the “Plan of the Work” which precedes the Novum Organum: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world.” To this any good scientist and, no less, any good poet, will say Amen. Poetry is true knowledge, and about the real world. Sidney also says it, and others before and after him. This note is already there in Ascham (it is of course part of Pico’s view). Sandys, the translator of the Metamorphoses, voices it in 1632, in his introductory verses:
Phoebus Apollo, (sacred Poesy)
Thus taught: for in these ancient Fables lie
The mysteries of all Philosophie.
Some Nature’s secrets shew; in some appeare
Distempers staines; some teach us how to beare
Both Fortunes, bridling Joy, Griefe, Hope, and Feare.
This is Bacon’s Orpheus, the union of poetry and universal philosophy. Bacon is not clear about the relations between the two. He shares his age’s fondness, as does Sandys, for moral allegory, where we shall not follow him; but even when this is left out of account, he is in two minds about the nature of the instrument he is working with.
There are two minor Orphic voices of this period, one earlier than Bacon and one later, which show a remarkable grasp of the dilemma. The first is Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie deserves to be better known. Puttenham denies implicitly Sidney’s exclusion of the poet from the study of the works of nature, and Bacon’s division between reason and imagination. Poets, he says, “were the first that entended to the observation of nature and her works, and specially of the Celestiall courses . . . they were the first Astronomers and Philosophists and Metaphysicks . . . and historiographers.” Orpheus is behind all this, and is “first musitien” as well, arts and sciences converging, “so noble, profitable, ancient and divine a science as Poesie is.”18 When Puttenham turns his attention to the imagination, he produces one of the great passages in English literature on this subject:
So is that part well affected, not onely nothing disorderly or confused with any monstrous imaginations or conceits, but very formall, and in his much multi-formitie uniforme, that is well proportioned and so passing cleare, that by it as by a glasse or mirrour, are represented unto the soule all manner of bewtifull visions, whereby the inventive parte of the mind is so much holpen, as without it no man could devise any new or rare thing. . . . and of this sorte of phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines stratagematique, all cunning artificers and enginers, all Legislators, Polititiens and Counsellours of Estate, in whose exercises the inventive part is most employed and is to the sound and true judgement of man most needful.
Puttenham here comes to the root of the question, considering the mental activity which informs all living thought, under whatever discipline, as one. When he turns more specifically to poetry, he connects it with power, saying that poets by their works, “setting them with sundry relations, and variable formes, in the ministery and use of words, doe breede no little alteration in man. For to say truely, what els is man but his minde? which, whosoever have skil to compasse, and make yealding and flexible, what may not he commaund the body to performe?” The altering of the mind, power over bodies, by imaginative power and vision: this was Bacon’s Orphic vision too, but clouded by indirection and ambiguity.
Our second minor Orphic writer, Henry Reynolds, complains of this very thing in his essay Mythomystes (1632),19 a remarkable little work. This is his accusation against Bacon: “What shall we make of such willing contradictions, when a man to vent a few fancies of his own shall tell us first, they are the wisdom of the Ancients, and next, that those Ancient fables were but mere fables, and without wisdom or meaning till their expositors gave them a meaning; and then scornfully and contemptuously (as if all Poetry were but Play-vanity) shut up that discourse of his of Poetry with It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.” The criticism depends on Reynolds’ own understanding of poetry and of its connection with natural philosophy. He first disposes of the Sidney-Bacon view of poetry: “Nor expect here any Encomium or praise of any such thing as the world ordinarily takes Poesy for: that same thing being, as I conceive, a superficial mere outside of Sense, or gay bark only (without the body) of Reason: Witness so many excellent wits that have taken so much pains in these times to defend her; which sure they would not have done, if what is generally received nowadays for Poesy were not merely a faculty or occupation of so little consequence.” Poetry then is a serious endeavor of some kind; and poets and philosophers are both engaged in it: “I put them together, as who are or should be both professors of one and the same learning, though by the one received and delivered in the apparel of verse, the other of prose.”
