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, 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. 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. 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. 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,— Great Jove is made the treasurer of wars; and this other also,— When a God means a noble house to raze, He frames one rather than he’ll want a cause: 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; 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; and, Then to the ghosts the mournful soul did fly, Sore grieved in midst of youth and strength to die; 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. 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.