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 frame of 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 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 _’ologies_ which
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 were elicited; 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 the scientific 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 fills up 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 minds may 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 beyond their
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 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.”