On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

Thus we see there is a poetic glow of wonder and emotion before Science begins its work; there is a larger, deeper, more instructed wonder when it ends. And either of these may naturally express itself in poetry, though the earlier wonder has done so far more frequently than the later. That the contemplation of the Universe does awaken this wonder in minds of the highest scientific order appears in the instances of Kepler and Newton. It has been shown in the case of an original discovery nearer our own day than either of these—I mean in that of Faraday. The following account of the imaginative delight which he felt in his scientific investigations I venture to quote from a very suggestive lecture of Mr. Stopford Brooke.

“Nature and her contemplation, says Professor Tyndall, produced in him a kind of spiritual exaltation: his delight in a sunset or a thunderstorm amounted to ecstasy. Our subjects are so glorious, he says himself, that to work at them rejoices and encourages the feeblest, delights and contents the strongest. In this delight and enchantment he was always in the temper of the poet, and, like the poet, he continually reached that point of emotion which produces poetic creation. Once, after long brooding on the subject of force and matter, he saw, and I am sure suddenly, as a poet sees a song from end to end before he writes it down,—he saw, as if lit by a stream of sudden light, the whole of the Universe traversed by lines of force, and these lines in their ceaseless tremors producing light and radiant heat; and dashing forward on the trail of his ideas, and thrilled into creation by the emotion which he felt, declared that these lines were the lines of gravitating force, and that the gravitating force itself constituted matter; that is, he made force identical with matter. It was a speculation which abolished at a stroke the atomic theory and the notion of an ether. Of the possibility of the truth of this I am no judge,” says Mr. Stopford Brooke. “Faraday himself calls it the shadow of a speculation. But who does not see that it proceeded after the manner of poetry; that in it poetry and philosophy went hand in hand? It was one of those inspired, sudden guesses which come to the poet who writes of the soul, coming to the philosopher who writes of the universe. In the midst of unremitting work at details suddenly a vision of the glory of the sum of things flashed upon his sight.”

CHAPTER IV.
WILL SCIENCE PUT OUT POETRY?

Here an interesting question suggests itself: What if the discoveries of Newton and Faraday were to become no longer the exclusive possession of the learned, but were to pass into the daily thoughts of the people? Would Poetry then be any longer possible? Were the scientific view of the Universe to become the popular one, were all men to regard the sight of the heavens and the earth, not with natural spontaneous eyes, but as the chemist, the astronomer, and the geologist teach us to regard them,—were scientific truth, in short, to supersede surface appearance,—would it be any longer possible to feel, as we look on the face of things, that free and intuitive delight out of which Poetry has hitherto been born? In a word, to express the fear which many hearts have felt, must not the march of Science trample out Poetry? Is not Poetry destined to disappear in this modern time, like many other things, once beautiful, but now antiquated?

To this the reply is, There is no fear that it will, as long as human nature remains what it is. If the view already taken of the genesis of Poetry be true, if man is so made that the vivid contact of his soul with reality or existence of any kind must generate that glow of emotion which is poetry, then it cannot be that any enlargement for him of the domain of reality which Science may effect shall be the death of Poetry. For, like Religion, to which it is akin, Poetry is thus seen to be a perennial and necessary growth, having its root, not only in the heart of man, but in the constitution of things, and in the adaptation of these, the one to the other. Science, however, though it can never eradicate the poetic feeling, may modify its nature, or rather may enlarge its range. But let it be clearly understood how it may do this. The processes of Science and of Poetry are radically distinct, and cannot be blended without confusion and injury to both. Experiment, analysis, reasoning inductive and deductive, these are the means by which Science makes its advances, and with these Poetry cannot rightly intermeddle. Imaginatively to contemplate the spectacle of the world is possible before Science has begun, it is possible, also, after it has completed its work. But it is not possible to combine imaginative contemplation and scientific investigation at the same time, and in one mental act. Only after analysis and reasoning have done their work and secured their results is the man of science free to look abroad on Nature with a poetic eye. Analysis and experimentalizing cannot by any possibility be made poetic, but their results may. Every new province of knowledge which Science conquers, Poetry may in time enter into and possess. But this can only be done gradually. Before imagination can take up and mould the results of Science, these must have ceased to be difficult, laborious, abstruse. The knowledge of them must have become to the poet himself, and in some measure to his audience, familiar, habitual, spontaneous. And here we see how finely Science and Poetry may interact and minister each to the other. If it be the duty of Science beneath seeming confusion to search for order, and its happiness to find it everywhere,—an order more vast, more various, more deeply penetrating, more intimate and minute than uninstructed men ever dreamed of,—wherever it reveals the presence of this, does it not open new fields for the imagination to appropriate? For what is order but the presence of thought, the ground of all beauty, the witness to the actual nearness of an upholding and moving Spirit? This is the vast new domain which Science is unveiling and spreading out before the eye of Poetry. And Poetry, receiving this large benefit, may repay the debt by using her own peculiar powers to familiarize men’s thoughts with the new regions which Science has won for them. If there is any office which Imagination can fulfill, it is this. She can help to bring home to the mind things which, though true, are yet strange, distant, perhaps distasteful. She can mediate between the warm, household feelings and the cold and remote acquisitions of new knowledge, and make the heart feel no longer “bewildered and oppressed” among the vast extent and gigantic movements of the Universe, but at home amongst them, soothed and tranquillized. Not, however, out of her own resources alone can Imagination do this. She must bring from the treasure-house of Religion moral and spiritual lights and impulses, and with these interpenetrate the cold, boundless spaces which the telescope has revealed. Some beginning of such a reconciling process we may see here and there in those poems of “In Memoriam” in which the Poet-Laureate has finely inwrought new truths of Science into the texture of yearning affection and spiritual meditation. Even where the views of Science are not only strange, but even at first crude and repulsive, Imagination can soften their asperity and subdue their harsher features. Just as when a railway has been driven through some beautiful and sequestered scene, outraging its quiet and scarring its loveliness, we see Nature in time return, and “busy with a hand of healing,” cover the raw wounds with grass, and strew artificial mounds and cuttings with underwood and flowers. It seems then that while Science gives to Poetry new regions to work upon, Poetry repays the debt by familiarizing and humanizing what Science has discovered. Such is their mutual interaction.

Mr. Stopford Brooke has told us that if on the scientific insight of Faraday could be engrafted the poetic genius of Byron, the result would be a poem of the kind “for which the world waits.” For “to write on the universal ideas of Science,” he says, “through the emotions which they excite, will be part of the work of future poets of Nature.” Likely enough it may be so. For if Poetry were to leave large regions of new thought unappropriated, being thus divorced from the onward march of thought, it would speedily become obsolete and unreal. But let us well understand what are the conditions of such poetry, the conditions on which alone Imagination can wed itself to scientific fact. The poet who shall sing the songs of Science must first be perfectly at home in all the new truths, must move among them with as much ease and freedom as ordinary men now do among the natural appearances of things. And not the poet only, but his audience must move with ease along the pathways which Science has opened. For if the poet has first to instruct his readers in the facts which he wishes imaginatively to render, while he expounds he will become frigid and unpoetic. Just as Lucretius is dull in those parts of his poem in which he has to argue out and to expound the Atomic Theory, and only then soars when, exposition left behind, he can give himself up to contemplate the great elemental movements, the vast life that pervades the sum of things. For in order that any truth or view of things may become fit material for poetry, it must first cease to live exclusively in the study or the laboratory, and come down and make itself palpable in the market-place. The scientific truths must be no longer strange, remote, or technical. If they have not yet passed into popular thought, they must at least have become the habitual possession of the more educated before the poet can successfully deal with them. This is the necessary condition of their poetic treatment. Wordsworth, in one of his Prefaces, has stated so clearly the truth on this subject that I cannot do better than give his words. “If the time should ever come,” he says, “when what is now called Science becomes familiarized to men, then the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed. He will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of Science itself. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.”

Science therefore may in some measure modify Poetry, may enlarge its range, may reveal new phases of it, but can never supersede it. The imaginative view of things which Poetry expresses is not one which can grow obsolete. It is not the child of any one particular stage of knowledge or civilization, which can be put aside when a higher stage has been reached. Any state of knowledge can give scope to it. Any aspect of the world, that seen by the savage as well as that of the sage, can awaken that imaginative glow of mind, that thrill of emotion, which, expressed in fitting words, is called Poetry. Only, as has been said above, before any aspect of nature, or fact of life, or truth of science, may be capable of poetic treatment, it must have become habitual and easy to the mind of the poet, and in some measure to that of his audience. In the poet’s mind, at least, it must have passed out of the region of mere head-notions into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative intuition, and, vitalized there, must have bodied itself into beautiful form and flushed into glowing color. For, to repeat once again what has been said at the outset, Poetry originates in the vivid contact of the soul—not of the understanding merely, but of the whole soul—with reality of any kind; and it is the utterance of the joy that arises, of the glow that is felt, from such soul-contact with the reality of things. When that reality has passed inward, and kindled the soul to “a white heat of emotion,” then it is that genuine Poetry is born.