Where Art Begins

by Hume Nisbet

Science blunders on, one generation of savants giving us theories and blinding themselves to prove them correct, which another generation of as wise men flatly contradict, and set up fresh theories to be again knocked down. I pay thirty shillings for a valuable work on astronomy to-day that next year I find not worth a sixpence. They coolly inform us that at length the distance to some star is certainly discovered—at least, with the slight margin of some tens of thousands of millions of miles, to be afterwards determined as they think best, and that is our knowledge of the stars. This is science. A man makes himself a mole, scratching up a mound of earth, boring and thinking and wasting his eyes and his brains for fifty or sixty or seventy years to try to find out what he never can while his body consumes bread, and what the most ignorant clown will discover with a single flap of the wing of Death, if our belief in a future state is fact.

The poet is the wisest astronomer. He gazes an hour on the stars, with his eye rapt and his mind fallow, and the spirits or the spirit of inspiration ploughs it up and fills him with the knowledge unconsciously, and if the withered old astronomer with his lines and earth laws is so far astray in his conclusions, seeing the poet cannot wander much farther, why may he not be the only one correct, in that he writes what he knows nothing about? We, reading it, call it deep, mystical, splendid, because we cannot understand it; while the poet, poor fellow! reading our criticism, and thinking that we understand it from our subtle explanation, rests perfectly content, feels it is all right, and that he is a very clever fellow.

To us these stars are serene, as all action is when viewed from distance. The carnage of the battle-field is but an ant-covered spot of the landscape to the spectator ten miles away; a little puff of blue smoke here and there, blotting out the insignificant black and red dots, is the whole picture of the fierce drunkenness and savage lust of blood which transform men into devils; those desolate hearths where the curse of the widow and the wail of the orphan are the most enduring, trophies of victory.

Myriads of miles away, and all the thunders and rapidity become silver pin points: yet they joined in that warfare, or watched it as we do them, saw it cooling down until it died from their range, until the white glare that it once gave out became a crimson glow, to be swallowed in the oceans of steam that rolled about it.

And so we are told that the slow stages went on—the fire, the steam, the waters, the sediment and slime that bred the life, the life that was rank and low, the preparation for other life, the light which was forcing its passage through the mists, that came and made the life robust; the convulsions that overthrew the whole, and the work that began once more, ever growing higher, as death purified and blotted out the errors, until the first perfection stood up from the other animals, and, as man, continued the work of creation.

Sciences so blend together that it is impossible to take up one without finding tendons of another passing through it. Astronomy teaches the student that this earth is only one of a cluster; that our sun is not the sole candle of the universe, nor our moon the only Luna who touches the brains of men and poisons the flesh of fish; that on each of those countless needle and pin points, love, war, and work may be going on while our tiny star is out of the range of their glasses, and speculation sets to work filling up all the blanks, and tinkering up the broken links, while imagination gilds the repairs until we can behold worlds like our own, but larger and fairer; for man ever takes himself for his model of an angel, and his world for the image of the hereafter. Fairer, because imagination hangs up a gauze veil to soften the general effect and the blemishes.

We look at the sky; mellow grey at the horizon, going through gentle gradations towards the deepest ultramarine overhead, and science tells us that this is formed by miles of atmosphere, and behind the ether belt spreads the black vacuum. Sometimes we think we can almost trace the airwaves, one behind the other, until the last thin layer is reached, and the glance is lured on as through a crystal, and we are soaring lark-like through the azure fields, the world beneath us lost, as when the swimmer in mid-ocean turns his face from the ship that represents land, and floats away on a blue sea under a blue sky, a solemn silence over all, the heart filled with the trembling delight and awesome majesty of boundless space.

But to the poet they are angels; to the prisoned wisher they are fairy barks to wing him away from this earth, which is too small for his immortal cravings and desires.

We like the science of the child, the lover, and the savage the best, for we think it as near truth as any other, and ten myriad times more satisfactory to the feelings. Claud Melnotte is our best guide to astronomy.

‘To sit at nights beneath those arching heavens, and guess what star shall be our home when love becomes immortal.’