To be overwhelmed and mastered by the material and the mechanical, even to the extent of being blind to the existence of every other aspect, is common and human enough. But to recognize to the full the reign of law in Nature, the sequence of cause and effect, the strength of the chain-armour of necessity which men of science weave, and yet to discern in it the living garment of God—that is poetic and divine.
TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE[72]
By Sir Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.
When Tennyson passed from life, not only did England lose one of her noblest sons, but the world a poet who, beyond all others who have ever lived, combined the gift of expression with an unceasing interest in the causes of things and in the working out of Nature’s laws.
When from this point of view we compare him with his forerunners, Dante is the only one it is needful to name; but although Dante’s knowledge was well abreast of his time, he lacked the fullness of Tennyson, for the reason that in his day science was restricted within narrow limits. In Dante’s time, indeed—he was born some 300 years before Galileo and Tycho Brahe—science apart from cosmogony had chiefly to do with the various constellations and measurements of the passing of time and the daily and yearly motions of the sun, for the observation of which long before his epoch our ancient monuments were erected; the physical and biological sciences were still unborn. Dante’s great work is full of references to the science of his day; his science and song went hand in hand as Tennyson’s did in later, fuller times. This in strong contrast with such writers as Goethe who, although both poet and student of science, rarely commingled the two strands of thought.
It is right and fitting that the highest poetry should be associated with the highest knowledge. Tennyson’s great achievement has been to show us that in the study of science we have one of the bases of the fullest poetry, a poetry which appeals at the same time to the deepest emotions and the highest and broadest intellects of mankind. Tennyson, in short, has shown that science and poetry, so far from being antagonistic, must for ever advance side by side.
So far as my memory serves me I was introduced to the late Lord Tennyson by Woolner about the year 1864. I was then living in Fairfax Road, West Hampstead, and I had erected my 6-inch Cooke Equatorial in the garden. I soon found that he was an enthusiastic astronomer, and that few points in the descriptive part of the subject had escaped him. He was therefore often in the observatory. Some of his remarks still linger fresh in my memory. One night when the moon’s terminator swept across the broken ground round Tycho he said, “What a splendid Hell that would make.” Again, after showing him the clusters in Hercules and Perseus he remarked musingly, “I cannot think much of the county families after that.” In 1866 my wife was translating Guillemin’s Le Ciel and I was editing and considerably expanding it; he read many of the proof sheets and indeed suggested the title of the English edition, The Heavens.
In the ’seventies, less so in the ’eighties, he rarely came to London without discussing some points with me, and in these discussions he showed himself to be full of knowledge of the discoveries then being made.