His head in one respect is very good,
But in another very naughty food;
because, though it be very luscious to eat, yet it is thought to
disturb the fancy with frightful and confused dreams. And the like
observation may be made concerning poetry, that it affords sweet and
withal wholesome nourishment to the minds of young men, but yet it
contains likewise no less matter of disturbance and emotion to them
that want a right conduct in the study thereof. For of it also, as well
as of Egypt, may it be said that (to those who will use it)
Its over-fertile and luxuriant field
Medicines and poisons intermixt doth yield;
for therein
Love with soft passions and rich language drest
Oft steals the heart out of th’ ingenuous breast.[12]
And indeed such only are endangered thereby, for the charms of that
art ordinarily affect not those that are downright sots and naturally
incapable of learning. Wherefore, when Simonides was asked why of all
men he could not deceive the Thessalians, his answer was, Because they
are not so well bred as to be capable of being cajoled by me. And
Gorgias used to call tragical poems cheats, wherein he that did cheat
was juster than he that did not cheat, and he that was cheated was
wiser than he that was not cheated.
It deserves therefore our consideration, whether we shall put young
men into Epicurus’s boat,—wherein, having their ears stopped with wax,
as those of the men of Ithaca were, they shall be obliged to sail by
and not so much as touch at poetry,—or rather keep a guard on them,
so as to oblige their judgments by principles of right reason to use
it aright, and preserve them from being seduced to their hurt by that
which affords them so much delight. For neither did Lycurgus, the
valiant son of Dryas (as Homer[13] calls him) act like a man of sound
reason in the course which he took to reform his people that were much
inclined to drunkenness, by travelling up and down to destroy all the
vines in the country; whereas he should have ordered that every vine
should have a well of water near it, that (as Plato saith) the drunken
deity might be reduced to temperance by a sober one. For water mixed
with wine takes away the hurtful spirits, while it leaves the useful
ones in it. Neither should we cut down or destroy the Muses’ vine,
poetry; but where we perceive it luxuriates and grows wild through
an ungoverned appetite of applause, there ought we to prune away or
keep under the fabulous and theatrical branches thereof; and where we
find any of the Graces linked to any of the Muses,—that is, where the
lusciousness and tempting charms of language are not altogether barren
and unprofitable,—there let us bring in philosophy to incorporate with
it.
For as, where the mandrake grows near the vine and so communicates
something of its force thereto, the wine that is made of its grapes
makes the sleep of those that drink it more refreshing; so doth the
tempering poetry with the principles of philosophy and allaying their
roughness with its fictions render the study of them more easy and
the relish of them more grateful to young learners. Wherefore those
that would give their minds to philosophical studies are not obliged
to avoid poetry altogether, but rather to prepare themselves for
philosophy by poems, accustoming themselves to search for and embrace
that which may profit in that which pleaseth them, and rejecting
and discarding that wherein they find nothing of this nature. For
this discrimination is the first step to learning; and when this is
attained, then, according to what Sophocles saith,—
To have begun well what we do intend
Gives hope and prospect of as good an end.
2. Let us therefore in the first place possess those whom we initiate
in the study of poetry with this notion (as one which they ought always
to have at hand), that
’Tis frequently the poet’s guise
To intermingle truth with lies;—
which they do sometimes with and sometimes against their wills. They
do it with their wills, because they find strict truth too rigid to
comply with that sweetness and gracefulness of expression, which most
are taken with, so readily as fiction doth. For real truth, though it
disgust never so much, must be told as it is, without alteration; but
that which is feigned in a discourse can easily yield and shift its
garb from the distasteful to that which is more pleasing. And indeed,
neither the measures nor the tropes nor the grandeur of words nor the
aptness of metaphors nor the harmony of the composition gives such
a degree of elegance and gracefulness to a poem as a well-ordered
and artificial fiction doth. But as in pictures the colors are more
delightful to the eye than the lines, because those give them a nearer
resemblance to the persons they were made for, and render them the
more apt to deceive the beholder; so in poems we are more apt to be
smitten and fall in love with a probable fiction than with the greatest
accuracy that can be observed in measures and phrases, where there is
nothing fabulous or fictitious joined with it. Wherefore Socrates,
being induced by some dreams to attempt something in poetry, and
finding himself unapt, by reason that he had all his lifetime been
the champion of severe truth, to hammer out of his own invention a
likely fiction, made choice of Esop’s fables to turn into verse; as
judging nothing to be true poetry that had in it nothing of falsehood.
For though we have known some sacrifices performed without pipes and
dances, yet we own no poetry which is utterly destitute of fable and
fiction. Whence the verses of Empedocles and Parmenides, the Theriaca
of Nicander, and the sentences of Theognis, are rather to be accounted
speeches than poems, which, that they might not walk contemptibly on
foot, have borrowed from poetry the chariot of verse, to convey them
the more creditably through the world. Whensoever therefore any thing
is spoken in poems by any noted and eminently famous man, concerning
Gods or Daemons or virtue, that is absurd or harsh, he that takes such
sayings for truths is thereby misled in his apprehension and corrupted
with an erroneous opinion. But he that constantly keeps in his mind and
maintains as his principle that the witchcraft of poetry consists in
fiction, he that can at all turns accost it in this language,—
Riddle of art! like which no sphinx beguiles;
Whose face on one side frowns while th’ other smiles!
Why cheat’st thou, with pretence to make us wise,
And bid’st sage precepts in a fool’s disguise?—
such a one, I say, will take no harm by it, nor admit from it any
absurd thing into his belief. But when he meets in poetry with
expressions of Neptune’s rending the earth to pieces and discovering
the infernal regions,[14] he will be able to check his fears of the
reality of any such accident; and he will rebuke himself for his anger
against Apollo for the chief commander of the Greeks,—
Whom at a banquet, whiles he sings his praise
And speaks him fair, yet treacherously he slays.[15]
Yea, he will repress his tears for Achilles and Agamemnon, while
they are represented as mourning after their death, and stretching
forth their limber and feeble hands to express their desire to live
again. And if at any time the charms of poetry transport him into any
disquieting passions, he will quickly say to himself, as Homer very
elegantly (considering the propension of women to listen after fables)
says in his Necyia, or relation of the state of the dead,—
But from the dark dominions speed thy way,
And climb the steep ascent to upper day;
To thy chaste bride the wondrous story tell,
The woes, the horrors, and the laws of hell.[16]
Such things as I have touched upon are those which the poets willingly
feign. But more there are which they do not feign, but believing them
themselves as their own proper judgments, they put fictitious colors
upon them to ingratiate them to us. As when Homer says of Jupiter,—
Jove lifts the golden balances, that show
The fates of mortal men, and things below.
Here each contending hero’s lot he tries,
And weighs with equal hand their destinies.
Low sinks the scale surcharged with Hector’s fate;
Heavy with death it sinks, and hell receives the weight.[17]
To this fable Aeschylus hath accommodated a whole tragedy which he
calls Psychostasia, wherein he introduceth Thetis and Aurora standing
by Jupiter’s balances, and deprecating each of them the death of her
son engaged in a duel. Now there is no man but sees that this fable
is a creature of the poet’s fancy, designed to delight or scare the
reader. But this other passage,—