A near contemporary of Horace whose name doesn’t unfortunately survive, but who wrote the well-known philosophical treatise ‘On the Sublime’ (1) says much the same thing about unity, only more soberly: “a display of feeling,” he writes, “is more effective when it seems not to be premeditated on the part of the speaker, but to have arisen from the occasion.” But then he continues,  “ . . . art is only perfect when it looks like nature, and again, nature hits the mark only when she conceals the art that is within her.”

So here we have another twist on the definition of ‘organic’ meaning. Not only does it reflect wholeness; once you’ve re-assembled your chicken, you shouldn’t be able to see how it’s been done.  Writing may be the product of blood, sweat and tears, but it must nevertheless resemble the swan, serenely gliding across the surface of the text as if it’s the product of direct inspiration -  while in fact paddling like fury beneath.

This isn’t an unreasonable demand; unless you’re an unreconstructed postmodernist (and we’ll meet a few later) what makes things work should be kept on the inside, not promoted to the exterior in full view of everybody. So our classical writers are in fact making two points: successful art does not parade its artifice, and nor does it benefit from too much planning by its creator. It’s all part of what has now developed into the familiar philosophical distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘saying’. ‘Saying’ something essentially leads its readers by the nose, encouraging passivity. The writer is constantly telling us, ‘look, here is what I’m doing’. In  Chapter 16 of the ‘Poetics’, Aristotle complains that in Euripides’s tragedy ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’, “Orestes is made to say what the poet here requires instead of its being done through the plot”. And this is a grave fault, violating the principle of ‘discovery’ that governs the best tragic writing.

A more artistically satisfying route is to give the reader sufficient pointers for him to ‘discover’ what’s going on for himself.

Not only are you trusting the reader to do some of the job for you, you’re actively involving him in the creation of meaning, which usually contributes to a more satisfying imaginative experience. It took Ludwig Wittgenstein (2) to philosophically formulate what fans of horror stories and films have always known - that to suggest grisly events is creepier than graphically describing or displaying them.

So what the writer previously known as Longinus is saying is that it’s possible to know too much about your “art”. If you do, “nature” is compromised. So there may be something to be said for those Muses after all, in that they supply the necessary freshness that stops writing degenerating into a technical exercise (3).

So, to sum up; writing is a difficult balancing act. Too conscious and it’s artificial; too unconscious and it loses its grounding in reality. That puts it pretty much in the middle of the Meaning Line, along with all the other prescriptive aesthetic compromises we’ll be looking at in what follows. So these are the thoughts and recommendations inherited by the Renaissance Humanists of the 16th century AD, when the study of classical models really got going again after the lengthy interlude known as the Dark Ages (4).

Now, imagine 1400 years have gone past, and we’re at the court of Elizabeth I, having a yack with Sir Philip Sidney. Sir Philip, born in 1554, is a prominent aristocrat in (and sometimes out) of the Queen’s entourage, and these lapses in her favour have afforded him the leisure to compose such works as the ‘Arcadia’, ‘Astrophil & Stella’, and, most importantly for our discussion, ‘A Defence of Poesie’, a prose work of ground-breaking erudition.  He, being a true Renaissance man, has boned up on his classical writers, and pretty much agrees with everything they recommend, including the need to effect a compromise between conscious and unconscious meaning, art and nature.

Only the writer suddenly takes centre stage in the formulation of meaning - and it’s now a double act between Nature and Human Creativity. And here’s how this seismic shift in perspective occurred.

In Renaissance thought, what happens on Planet Earth is a bit less removed from what occurs on high than it had been in Classical antiquity; in fact, the Victorian poet, critic and philosopher Matthew Arnold characterized the period from the mid-15th century onwards as "that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are."

So the Gods aren’t off doing what they do somewhere off in the heavens or atop mountains; the idea of immanence is much more prevalent, not simply by courtesy of the arrival of a single Christian deity, but because Humanism tended to bring matters divine within easier reach of us mortals (5). Writers will get their inspiration not from the Gods up there, but from the divine spirit as it’s manifested in Nature down here. This proximity makes a compromise a lot easier to effect, because the writer doesn’t have to give things meaning; they already have meaning in them if only he can see it. God has already made sure of that. So you don’t have to hang around waiting for the Muse to strike to help you identify that meaning, and you don’t have to consciously will that meaning into existence -  you’ve just got to look around you. All the writer has to do is to accurately reproduce that immanent deity, and he will create great art. So art and nature are resolved. It’s a wonderfully clever twist on the classical theme, but based on the classical tradition that much of nature has spirits within it.   And, unlike in Platonic theory, this doesn’t all happen two stages back from reality. It is reality, even though most Renaissance writers continued to respect Plato for the ground-breaking genius he was.

So now the writer’s much more in the driver’s seat - he’s both a reporter and a creator. Meaning is a joint venture between the divine and the human all the time. If you want to get all philosophical about it, what we’re witnessing is Platonism being supplanted by what’s called  “natural Humanism”. (6)

You can find the seeds of this philosophy in the classical writers we’ve already looked at, particularly that bloke we thought was Longinus (TBWTWL): the terms ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’ seem to be used with much the same sense as in Plato, but TBWTWL unites them in what he calls ‘the image’, which is the product of a talent “implanted in man at his birth” and “originally born and bred in us”. Our minds are inspired by the power and appropriateness of the image, and our gaze will then turn upwards in praise of the Gods who created the vehicle for that image. And this is the true “sublime”.

So meaning travels upwards from us to reach the sublime and not downwards from the Muses (7). And of all the classical writers, TBWTWL is more forgiving of a writer who occasionally strays from the path of reason in his pursuit of this sublimity. He’d much prefer reading a risk-taking writer warts and all, over someone who writes perfectly rationally but who is dull and safe with it. In his book, nature will always triumph over art, the imperfectly-crafted over the studiously rehearsed.

And so it is with Sidney. In his “Defence of Poesie”, written in 1580/81,  he reverses the Platonic idea that because it can be subjected to rational scrutiny, philosophy will always be superior to poetry. The philosopher deals in precepts but does not map them onto the world in any meaningful way; he lives in a realm of pure theory and supposition that have no practical applications. He’s always dealing in conditionals like “should”, “would” and “could”. But the poet, by finding solid, objective forms for ideas, manages to map "should" onto "is”:

. . .  the peerlesse Poet performes [the work of the philosopher], for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pearce, nor possesse, the sight of the soule so much, as that other doth.

So you see what’s happened. The poet, who was up in the air with the muses, has returned to ground level by successfully embodying his vision; and the philosopher, who was hugging the Earth with his reasoned arguments, is now drifting in the air by having no compelling earthly form for his meaning. It’s conviction versus conjecture, and conviction wins. A neat reversal, Sir Philip. But you’d expect nothing else from someone who was so well versed in the art of rhetoric.

1. For many years, the author of this work was assumed to be the Greek rhetorician Cassius Longinus, who lived in the third century BC. But the experts now reckon this was a false attribution.

2. In his ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, published in 1922

3. A big danger among writers who’ve also set themselves up as critics

4.  ‘The Dark Ages' refers to a decline in literacy stemming from political chaos and social disorder. So there wasn’t much writing going on, and not much meaning to study. The literate Romans were followed by illiterate barbarians, and although the Christian church still had many literate clerics, there are only inconsistent and somewhat fuzzy records from this period, as well as a few acknowledged classics (Bede, for example).

5. Humanism is such a broad movement, it’s impossible to sum up in a general definition. You might say it puts mankind more at the centre of his own universe and in so doing promotes the concept of “vera virtus" ("true excellence") the self-taught development of human faculties and powers to a civilized status. Inasmuch as you can say a movement as big as this ‘began’, it’s generally thought to have originated in Italy in at some point in the 13th century, and quickly spread Europe-wide as printing developed in the late 14th century.

6. And, if you want to get even more philosophical, read the works of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. Spinoza's rejection of the "Cartesian dualism of mind and matter in favour of a God who is identified with the ultimate substance of the world" (thanks for the translation, Magnus Magnusson) places God firmly in Nature and not in some vague realm beyond the universe. In fact, God’s what holds the universe together. And this, roughly speaking, is the root of the Pantheistic philosophy.

7. Of course, you’d have arrived at this position already if you believed that the Muses or the Gods were only metaphors for human creativity. But most of these guys actually believed the Gods existed, so all we’ve looked at in sections 4 & 5 is being argued from a literal standpoint, as if it were true. So this is not all hairsplitting and angels on the head of a pin stuff. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.