The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

in the intellectual nature, is manifested in action by passing into the elementary nature by means of the inner labour of the poet who invests it with a sentient form according to his talent; you perceive finally, how, following this simple theory, I explain the words of Plato, and how I conceive that the inspired poet transmits to men the ideas of the gods.

I have no need I think of telling you that I make an enormous difference between this divine inspiration which exalts the soul and fills it with a real enthusiasm, and that sort of inner movement or disorder which the vulgar also call inspiration, which in its greatest perfection is only passion excited by the love of glory, united with a habit of verse making, which constitutes the talent, and in its imperfection is only a disordered passion called by Boileau, an ardour for rhyming.

These two kinds of inspiration in no wise resemble each other; their effects are as different as their causes, their productions as different as their sources. The one, issuing from the intellectual nature, has its immutabiUty: it is the same in all time, among all peoples, and in the heart of all men who receive it ; it alone produces genius : its first manifestation is very rare, but its second manifestation is less so, as I will show later on.

The other inspiration, inherent in sentient nature, bom of passion, varies with the whim of men and things, and takes on the hue of the customs and the times; it can bring forth talent or at least modify it, and when it is seconded by a great facility, can go to the extent of feigning genius but never farther: its real domain is the mind. Its possession is not very rare even in its perfection.

One can sometimes find it united with the true inspiration, first as in Homer, or second as in Vergil; and then the form which it unceasingly works over, joining its sentient beauties to the intellectual beauties of genius, creates the monuments of science.

It may be that the development which I have just given of my ideas on the essence of poetry will appear new, although I must acknowledge that in reality they are not.

The Essence and Form of Poetry 13

I am addressing men who are too enlightened to ignore what the ancients have said in this respect. Heraclides, whom I have already cited, is not the only one who has given this impression. Strabo assures positively that ancient poetry was only the language of allegory, ' and he refutes Eratosthenes who pretended that the aim of Homer was only to amuse and please. In this he is in accord with Denys of Halicamassus who avows that the mysteries of nature and the most sublime conceptions of morals have been covered with the veil of allegory. ^ Phumutus goes farther : he declares that the allegories used by Hesiod and by Homer do not differ from those which other foreign poets have used before them.^ Damascius said as much of the poems of Orpheus,* and Plutarch confirms it in a passage which has been preserved to us by Eusebius. ^

In the first ages of Greece, poetry ,~ consecrated to the service of the altars, left the enclosures of the temples only for the instruction of the people : it was as a sacred language in which the priests, entrusted with presiding at the mysteries of religion, interpreted the will of the gods. The oracles, dogmas, moral precepts, religious and civil laws, teachings of all sorts concerning the labours of the body, the operations of the mind, in fact all that which was regarded as an emanation, an order, or a favour from the Divinity, all was written in verse. To this sacred language was given the name Poetry, that is to say, the Language of the Gods: a symbolic name which accords with it perfectly, since it expressed at the same time its origin and its usage. * It was said to have come from Thrace, ^ and the one who had invented it and caused its first accents to be heard was

' Geogr., 1. i. " Anlig^. rom., 1. ii.

3 In his book entitled Hepl t^s tui' Seflc ipiaeat, ch. 17. * In his book entitled IlepJ Bewv Kal Kbaiiav, ch. 3. Court de G6belin cites these works. (GSnie allSg.)

sPrcBp. Evang., 1. iii., c. I. " Court de Gobelin, Ginie alUg., p. 149.

' Strabo positively assures it. See Bannier, Mythol., ii., p. 252.

14 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras