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.