Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: A Poet's Epitaph.]
Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers,
We are they who dream no dreams,
Singers of a rising day,
Who undaunted,
Where the sword of reason gleams,
Follow hard, to hew away
The woods enchanted.
[Footnote: E. Flecker, Donde Estan.]
One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He declares,
Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes,
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek for shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree?
[Footnote: To Science.]
If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed,
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely,
and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." [Footnote: Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying.] If poets complain that all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy, [Footnote: Lamia.]
are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars?
In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things.