CHAPTER III.POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER.
But same one may ask, Is not imagination generally at war with reason and truth? Is not the quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy as old as the days of Plato? Did not he feel this so keenly that he banished poets as false teachers from his well-ordered State?
Luckily we have not to answer this question in all its breadth and complexity; we are not now called to defend the truth of Poetry in its delineations of human character and emotions. Our subject confines us to that simpler aspect of the question which concerns the action of imagination on the external world. When the eye rests on the ranging landscape, and the heart responds to the beauty of it, the emotion which is evoked is as true and as rational as is the action of any law of Nature. This kindling of heart in the presence of Nature may be said to be “another aspect of reason.” It is not confined to any one order of men or stage of civilisation, but belongs alike to the child, the peasant, and the philosopher, if only the heart be natural and unspoiled. No doubt the imaginative frameof mind differs in each according to difference of mental habits, but in all alike it is essentially one. It is a spontaneous and unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty of the Universe—a proof to those who think about it that the Universe was made for the soul of man, and the soul for the Universe, that there is between them a wonderful harmony, the one answering to the other as the harp-strings to the hand of the musician.
Take instances of this feeling, not from past times, but as it may exist in our own day. The Yarrow shepherd, as he goes forth at dawn and sees morning spread on the hills of the Forest, feels a momentary elevation of heart for which he has no words, and of which he may be but half-conscious; but in this feeling he has within him the first stirrings of that which, when the poet fashions it into fitting words, becomes an immortal song. His grandfather, a hundred years ago or less, when he saw the first streaks of dawn strike some lonely peak, or the early pencilings of light falling down into some hidden dell, embodied his feelings of that beauty in the imagination of Fairies retiring from their moonlight dances into the green knolls where they made their homes. The Ettrick Shepherd, in his childhood, was perhaps among the last who had a genuine feeling and belief of these symbols. They passed with him, but though the symbols have vanished the same appearances remain,and awaken the old feeling, and the feeling still needs a language.
So too was it with that Westmoreland dalesman who, as he walked with the poet Wordsworth by the side of a brook, suddenly said to him, with great spirit and a lively smile, “I like to walk where I can hear the sound of a beck.” Beck is the Westmoreland word for what in England is called a brook, in Scotland a burn. “I cannot but think,” adds the poet, “that this man, without being conscious of it, has had many devout feelings connected with the appearances which presented themselves to him in his employment as a shepherd, and that the pleasure of his heart was an acceptable offering to the Divine Being.” This is Wordsworth’s reflection. I shall but add that his liking to hear the sound of a beck was a proof that the outward sound had ceased to be a mere commonplace to him, and passing inward, had awakened an imaginative echo which is the birth of poetry.
Or take another instance—that youth, a shepherd lad, but more poet and philosopher than shepherd, whom Wordsworth describes watching the sunrise on the Highland mountains:—
“For the growing youth,What soul was his, when from the naked topOf some bold headland, he beheld the sunRise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him layIn gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,And in their silent faces did he readUnutterable love. Sound needed none,Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drankThe spectacle: sensation, soul, and formAll melted into him; they swallowed upHis animal being; in them did he live,And by them did he live; they were his life.In such access of mind, in such high hourOf visitation from the living God,Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;Rapt into still communion which transcendsThe imperfect offices of prayer and praise,His mind was a thanksgiving to the powerThat made him; it was blessedness and love.”
“For the growing youth,What soul was his, when from the naked topOf some bold headland, he beheld the sunRise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him layIn gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,And in their silent faces did he readUnutterable love. Sound needed none,Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drankThe spectacle: sensation, soul, and formAll melted into him; they swallowed upHis animal being; in them did he live,And by them did he live; they were his life.In such access of mind, in such high hourOf visitation from the living God,Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;Rapt into still communion which transcendsThe imperfect offices of prayer and praise,His mind was a thanksgiving to the powerThat made him; it was blessedness and love.”
“For the growing youth,What soul was his, when from the naked topOf some bold headland, he beheld the sunRise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him layIn gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,And in their silent faces did he readUnutterable love. Sound needed none,Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drankThe spectacle: sensation, soul, and formAll melted into him; they swallowed upHis animal being; in them did he live,And by them did he live; they were his life.In such access of mind, in such high hourOf visitation from the living God,Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;Rapt into still communion which transcendsThe imperfect offices of prayer and praise,His mind was a thanksgiving to the powerThat made him; it was blessedness and love.”
“For the growing youth,
What soul was his, when from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked—
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion which transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love.”
As we read such a passage, the thought involuntarily arises, What if the said youth, instead of being a nursling of nature among the hills of Atholl, had been college-bred, and crammed with all the’ologieswhich Physical Science now teaches, would he still have had the same elevated joy in presence of that spectacle? It is the old question which Plato asked, and which many since have asked down to our own time. In 1842 Haydon wrote to Wordsworth, recalling a dinner-party which took place many years before at the painter’s house: “Don’t you remember Keats proposing ‘Confusion to the memory of Newton,’ and upon your insisting on an explanation before you drank it, his saying, Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism?” Suppose the Atholl shepherd lad had been an optician, and understood all the laws of light by which the effulgent hues of sunrise wereelicited; suppose, further, that he had been an astronomer, and as he saw the sunrise had begun to reflect, It is not the sun that I see rising, but it is the earth that is rotating on her own axis, and now turning her side toward the sun, that causes all that I now see; and that axis is not vertical, but slants obliquely to the plane of its orbit,—supposing these, and a hundred other truths, which Physical Astronomy teaches, had come into his mind, would he still have had that sublime joy?
Or suppose, again, he had been a geologist, and, as he gazed over the mountain ridges, had begun to think of them as a record of commotions that took place in far-back geological eras, and to reflect how the stratified layers of which these mountains are composed had been formed by the slime deposited at the bottom of a long since vanished sea; how they had been upheaved by the action of subterranean forces; how some of the great depressions which we call valleys, or those rents in the mountains, now filled by sea-lochs, had been caused by the cracking of the earth’s crust, while it was still a heated mass, glowing from the primeval fires; how other lesser glens and corries had been sculptured out of the solid earth by Nature’s graving tools, ice-wedges, glaciers, rain, and rivers,—in the presence of such scientific thoughts as these, what would become of the boy’s imaginative and devout ecstasy?
In answer, it may be said that whether thescientific man shall feel this spontaneous glow in the presence of the great spectacles of Nature or not, depends not on his scientific knowledge, but on his natural temperament, on the amount of soul there is in him, underlying his attainments. If he be so entirely the man of science, if the intellect has so entirely absorbed his being that he never gets beyond analyzing, comparing, and reasoning on the appearances he sees, then he will look without emotion on the grandest ongoings of Nature; he will see in them only a subject for investigation—nothing more. But if, as has often been the case, the physicist be a man not only of wide and accurate knowledge, but of large soul,—if his knowledge has become a part of him, has melted into his being, then his heart will be free to kindle and rejoice at the great things of Nature which he sees, as genuinely as the unreflecting child, the thoughtful peasant, or the most spontaneous poet.
As genuinely, but with a difference: the eye of the imaginative man of science will take in all that these others do, and more. His admiration will be fuller, larger, more instructed. The knowledge that has been gradually lodged in his mind, and become a part of it, will pass into his eye, and enable him to see, on whatever side of the Universe he looks, more complicated marvels, more wonderful correspondences.
“In Wonder,” says Coleridge, “all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends: and Admiration fillsup the interspace.” The last clause I should change thus,—and Investigation fills up the interspace. In the first Wonder and in the last the Philosopher and the Poet are akin to each other. Both wonder, both admire what they see, but this incipient wonder tends to different results. The unscientific poet, just like the child and the thoughtful peasant, wonders at the beauty that is in the face of Nature, and at its mystery, seeks no physical explanations of it, but reads its moral and spiritual meaning, and tries to utter it. The man of science equally begins with wonder at what he sees, but his wonder leads him on to seek for an explanation, to search for the laws which regulate the appearances, if haply he may find them.
Then comes the long interspace of toilsome labor, of painful analysis, of rigorous induction. Experiment, analysis, deductive and inductive reasoning, by which chiefly Science works, are intellectual acts quite distinct from imaginative intuition and emotion, and, in some degree, opposed to them. It cannot be that these distinct processes can be combined in one intellectual act. They can hardly go on in one mind at the same time. While a man is immersed in these scientific processes, they preclude the poetic vision for the time. For many men they scare away poetry from the world forever.
Not so with the largest, most sovereign minds of Science. Lesser men of dry or narrow mindsmay be so entangled in the meshes of their own understanding as never to escape from them, or may find more delight in the cleverness of their own explanations than in the wonderful things which they explain. But the larger minds, when they have done their work, emerge in time from the study and the laboratory, and look abroad with expanded vision and profounder reverence on that Universe, some small part only of which it has been given them to understand. Kepler, after he had discovered so far the laws of planetary motion, said that all that he had been able to do was to read a few of the thoughts of God. A short time before his death, Newton is reported to have said, and I give the oft-told story in the authentic words, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”[6]A lesson surely to all future investigators, and, as his latest biographer has said, “to those especially who have never even found the smoother pebble or the prettier shell.” These great men, so feeling, are in the attitude of philosophic wonder—wonder both at part of the ways of God which it has been given them to see, and at that vaster part which they feel to lie beyondtheir vision. These laws which they have discovered, what are they? whence come they? They know that they themselves did not make them, only attained to catch sight of them. They know too that the laws did not make themselves. They are beautiful in themselves and in their benign operation; they are wonderful in their origin and continuance. This is what those great discoverers felt. And when they stood on the utmost verge of their scientific knowledge, and looked from what they had been allowed to see out upon the great beyond, they were rapt into that mood of wonder, akin to awe, which is the very essence of Poetry. Had they, in addition to their great scientific insight, been endowed with the gift of poetic utterance to express the wonder which they felt, they might have left to the world a poem of scientific truth transfigured by the imagination, such as has never yet been uttered.
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 thaneither 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. StopfordBrooke. “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.”