and this other also,—
When a God means a noble house to raze,
He frames one rather than he’ll want a cause:[19]
these passages, I say, express the judgment and belief of poets
who thereby discover and suggest to us the ignorant or mistaken
apprehensions they had of the Deities. Moreover, almost every one
knows nowadays, that the portentous fancies and contrivances of
stories concerning the state of the dead are accommodated to popular
apprehensions,—that the spectres and phantasms of burning rivers and
horrid regions and terrible tortures expressed by frightful names are
all mixed with fable and fiction, as poison with food; and that neither
Homer nor Pindar nor Sophocles ever believed themselves when they wrote
at this rate:—
There endless floods of shady darkness stream
From the vast caves, where mother Night doth teem;
and,
There ghosts o’er the vast ocean’s waves did glide,
By the Leucadian promontory’s side;[20]
and,
There from th’ unfathomed gulf th’ infernal lake
Through narrow straits recurring tides doth make.
And yet, as many of them as deplore death as a lamentable thing, or the
want of burial after death as a calamitous condition, are wont to break
out into expressions of this nature:—
O pass not by, my friend; nor leave me here
Without a grave, and on that grave a tear;[21]
and,
Then to the ghosts the mournful soul did fly,
Sore grieved in midst of youth and strength to die;[22]
and again,
’Tis sweet to see the light. O spare me then,
Till I arrive at th’ usual age of men:
Nor force my unfledged soul from hence, to know
The doleful state of dismal shades below.[23]
These, I say, are the speeches of men persuaded of these things, as
being possessed by erroneous opinions; and therefore they touch us the
more nearly and torment us inwardly, because we ourselves are full of
the same impotent passion from which they were uttered. To fortify
us therefore against expressions of this nature, let this principle
continually ring in our ears, that poetry is not at all solicitous to
keep to the strict measure of truth. And indeed, as to what that truth
in these matters is, even those men themselves who make it their only
study to learn and search it out confess that they can hardly discover
any certain footsteps to guide them in that enquiry. Let us therefore
have these verses of Empedocles, in this case, at hand:—
No sight of man’s so clear, no ear so quick,
No mind so piercing, that’s not here to seek;
as also those of Xenophanes:—
The truth about the Gods and world, no man
E’er was or shall be that determine can;
and lastly, that passage concerning Socrates, in Plato, where he by the
solemnity of an oath disclaims all knowledge of those things. For those
who perceive that the searching into such matters makes the heads of
philosophers themselves giddy cannot but be the less inclined to regard
what poets say concerning them.
3. And we shall fix our young man yet the more if, when we enter him
in the poets, we first describe poetry to him, and tell him that it
is an imitating art and doth in many respects correspond to painting;
not only acquainting him with that common saying, that poetry is vocal
painting and painting silent poetry, but teaching him, moreover,
that when we see a lizard or an ape or the face of a Thersites in a
picture, we are surprised with pleasure and wonder at it, not because
of any beauty in the things, but for the likeness of the draught. For
it is repugnant to the nature of that which is itself foul to be at
the same time fair; and therefore it is the imitation—be the thing
imitated beautiful or ugly—that, in case it do express it to the life,
is commended; and on the contrary, if the imitation make a foul thing
to appear fair, it is dispraised because it observes not decency and
likeness. Now some painters there are that paint uncomely actions; as
Timotheus drew Medea killing her children; Theon, Orestes murdering
his mother; and Parrhasius, Ulysses counterfeiting madness; yea,
Chaerephanes expressed in picture the unchaste converse of women with
men. Now in such cases a young man is to be familiarly acquainted with
this notion, that, when men praise such pictures, they praise not the
actions represented but only the painter’s art, which doth so lively
express what was designed in them. Wherefore, in like manner, seeing
poetry many times describes by imitation foul actions and unseemly
passions and manners, the young student must not in such descriptions
(although performed never so artificially and commendably) believe
all that is said as true or embrace it as good, but give its due
commendation so far only as it suits the subject treated of. For as,
when we hear the grunting of hogs and the shrieking of pulleys and the
rustling of wind and the roaring of seas, we are, it may be, disturbed
and displeased, and yet when we hear any one imitating these or the
like noises handsomely (as Parmenio did that of an hog, and Theodorus
that of a pulley), we are well pleased; and as we avoid (as an
unpleasing spectacle) the sight of sick persons and of a lazar full of
ulcers, and yet are delighted to be spectators of the Philoctetes of
Aristophon and the Jocasta of Silanion, wherein such wasting and dying
persons are well acted; so must the young scholar, when he reads in a
poem of Thersites the buffoon or Sisyphus the whoremaster or Batrachus
the bawd speaking or doing any thing, so praise the artificial managery
of the poet, adapting the expressions to the persons, as withal to look
on the discourses and actions so expressed as odious and abominable.
For the goodness of things themselves differs much from the goodness
of the imitation of them; the goodness of the latter consisting only
in propriety and aptness to represent the former. Whence to foul
actions foul expressions are most suitable and proper. As the shoes
of Demonides the cripple (which, when he had lost them, he wished
might suit the feet of him that stole them) were but unhandsome shoes,
but yet fit for the man they were made for; so we may say of such
expressions as these:—
’Tis worth the while an unjust act to own,
When it sets him that does it on a throne;[24]
Get the repute of Just for a disguise,
And in it do all things whence gain may rise,
A talent dowry! Could I close my eyes
In sleep, or live, if thee I should despise?
And should I not in hell tormented be,
Could I be guilty of profaning thee?[25]
These, it is true, are wicked as well as false speeches, but yet are
decent enough in the mouth of an Eteocles, an Ixion, and an old griping
usurer. If therefore we mind our children that the poets write not
such things as praising and approving them, but do really account
them base and vicious and therefore accommodate such speeches to
base and vicious persons, they will never be damnified by them from
the esteem they have of the poets in whom they meet with them. But,
on the contrary, the suspicions insinuated into them of the persons
will render the words and actions ascribed to them suspected for evil,
because proceeding from such evil men. And of this nature is Homer’s
representation of Paris, when he describes him running out of the
battle into Helen’s bed. For in that he attributes no such indecent act
to any other, but only to that incontinent and adulterous person, he
evidently declares that he intends that relation to import a disgrace
and reproach to such intemperance.
4. In such passages therefore we are carefully to observe whether or
not the poet himself do anywhere give any intimation that he dislikes
the things he makes such persons say; which, in the prologue to his
Thais Menander does, in these words:—
Therefore, my Muse, describe me now a whore,
Fair, bold, and furnished with a nimble tongue;
One that ne’er scruples to do lovers wrong;
That always craves, and denied shuts her door;
That truly loves no man, yet, for her ends,
Affection true to every man pretends.
But Homer of all the poets does it best. For he doth beforehand, as it
were, bespeak dislike of the evil things and approbation of the good
things he utters. Of the latter take these instances:—
He readily did the occasion take,
And sweet and comfortable words he spake;[26]
By him he stood, and with soft speeches quelled
The wrath which in his heated bosom swelled.[27]
And for the former, he so performs it as in a manner solemnly to forbid
us to use or heed such speeches as those he mentions, as being foolish
and wicked. For example, being to tell us how uncivilly Agamemnon
treated the priest, he premises these words of his own,—
Not so Atrides: he with kingly pride
Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied;[28]
intimating the insolency and unbecomingness of his answer. And when he
attributes this passionate speech to Achilles,—
O monster, mix’d of insolence and fear,
Thou dog in forehead, and in heart a deer![29]
he accompanies it with this censure,—
Nor yet the rage his boiling breast forsook,
Which thus redoubling on Atrides broke;[30]
for it was unlikely that speaking in such anger he should observe any
rules of decency.
And he passeth like censures on actions. As on Achilles’s foul usage of
Hector’s carcass,—
Gloomy he said, and (horrible to view)
Before the bier the bleeding Hector threw.[31]
And in like manner he doth very decently shut up relations of things
said or done, by adding some sentence wherein he declares his judgment
of them. As when he personates some of the Gods saying, on the occasion
of the adultery of Mars and Venus discovered by Vulcan’s artifice,—
See the swift God o’ertaken by the lame!
Thus ill acts prosper not, but end in shame.[32]