On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

Again: “Details alone, and unreferred to a final purpose, are the sign of a tyro’s work.... Details perfect in unity and contributing to a final purpose are the sign of the production of a consummate master. It is not details sought for their own sake ... which constitute great art,—they are the lowest, most contemptible art; but it is detail referred to a great end, sought for the sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest and least of God’s works, and treated in a manly, broad, and impressive manner. There may be as much greatness of mind, as much nobility of manner, in a master’s treatment of the smallest features, as in his management of the more vast; and this greatness of manner chiefly consists in seizing the specific character of the object, together with all the great qualities of beauty which it has in common with the higher orders of existence.”

Once more: “This is the difference between the mere botanist’s knowledge of plants and the great poet’s or painter’s knowledge of them. The one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium, the other that he may render them vehicles of expression and emotion. The one counts the stamens, affixes a name, and is content; the other observes every character of the plant’s color and form; considering each of its attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its lines of grace or energy, rigidity or repose, notes the feebleness or the vigor, the serenity or tremulousness of its hues; observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the features of the situations it inhabits and the ministering agencies necessary to its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living creature, with histories written on its leaves and passions breathing in its motion. Its occurrence in his picture is no mere point of color, no meaningless spark of light. It is a voice rising from the earth, a new chord of the mind’s music, a necessary note in the harmony of his picture, contributing alike to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less to its loveliness and its truth.”

If in the observation of Nature the ends which the poet has in view and the effects which he brings out are different from those aimed at by the man of science, not less distinct are the mental powers which each brings into play. The man of science investigates that he may reach rigid accuracy of fact, and this he does by the exercise of the dry understanding, and by the use of the analytic method. The poet contemplates the single objects or the vast spectacle of Nature, in order that he may discern the beauty that pervades both the parts and the whole, and that he may apprehend the intimations—the great thoughts, I might call them—which come to him through that beauty, and which make their appeal to the power of imaginative sympathy within him. Nature, whether in detail or as a whole, he regards in the relation it bears, whether of likeness or of contrast, to the soul, the emotions, and the destiny of man. But this relation he must seize, not by neglecting or setting aside facts, but by noting them with all the fidelity consistent with his main purpose.

But it may be well to mark more definitely some of the ways in which the extension of natural science in modern times has reacted on the work of the poet.

1st. It had fallen in with, though it has not originated, that remarkable change in the mental attitude in which modern times stand toward Nature, a change of which more will have to be said presently, but which it is enough here to allude to. For that ardent, sensitive, reverent regard which the modern time turns on Nature, recent research may be said to have furnished a rational basis, a sufficient justification. Not that Science created this mental attitude, this new-born sentiment; it is due to other, more subtle and hidden causes. Indeed, it may be that the two great contemporaneous influences, the increased activity of physical discovery working by scientific analysis, and the enlarged and heightened admiration of Nature as seen through the imagination, are but opposite sides of the one great current of modern thought. Shelley speaks of the “intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England,” and this, though by no means a product of physical science, is in keeping with its revelations, though it goes beyond and supplements them.

2d. Again: the greatest of the early poets, as we have seen, were instinctive lovers of Nature, and faithful delineators of its forms. But in presence of the unresting scrutiny and careful exactness of Science, modern poets are stimulated to still closer, more minute observation. Indeed, there may be danger lest this tendency in Poetry go too far, and make it too microscopic and forgetful of that higher function which, while seeing truly, ever spiritualizes what it sees. However this may be, it is clear that Science by its contagion has stimulated the observing powers of the modern poet, and made him more than ever a heedful

“Watcher of those still reports

Which Nature utters from her rural shrine.”

3d. Again: since the progress of modern Science has let in on the mental vision whole worlds of new facts and new forces,—a height and a depth, a vastness and minuteness in Nature, as she works all around us, alike in the smallest pebble on the shore, and “in the loftiest star of unascended heaven,”—it cannot be but that all this now familiar knowledge should enter into the sympathetic soul of the poet, and color his eye as he looks abroad on Nature. When the eye, for instance, from the southern beach of the Moray Firth passes over to its northern shore, and rests on the succession of high plateaux and precipiced promontories which form the opposite coast, and observes how the whole landscape has been shaped, moulded, and rounded into its present uniformity of feature by the glaciers that untold ages since descended from Ben Wyvis and his neighboring altitudes, and wore and ground the masses of old red sandstone into the outlines of the bluffs he now sees,—who can look on such a spectacle without having new thoughts awakened within him, of Nature working with her primeval wedges of frost, ice, and flood, to carve the solid rock into the lineaments before him, and of the still higher power behind Nature that directs and controls all these her movements to ulterior and sublimer ends! When, in addition to these thoughts, the gazer calls to mind that these are the native headlands which first arrested the meditative eye of the great northern mason, more than any other, geologist and poet in one, and fed the fire of his young enthusiasm, does not the geologic charactery that is scrawled upon these rocks receive a strange enhancement of human interest?

Again: the huge gray bowlders strewn here and there on the top of those promontories, and all about the dusky moors, when we learn that they have been floated to their present stations from leagues away by long vanished glaciers, no doubt their gaunt shapes become wonderfully suggestive. And yet, perhaps, nothing that geology can teach regarding them will ever invest them with a more imaginative aspect than that which they wore to the poet’s eye, when, caring little enough for scientific theories, it shaped them into this human phantasy—