THE POET AND THE PALÆONTO-THEOLOGIST.
'Puis nous fut dit que chose estrange ne leur sembloit estre deux
contradictoires Vrayes en mode, en figure, et en temps.'
Pantagruel, v. xxii.
Moved by an uncontrollable impulse, they all three rushed out into the
garden; and far beyond them, in the sunlight, they did indeed catch one
parting gleam of gauzy wings, as the fairy vanished. When the professor
led the way into the room again, and, rather crestfallen, looked at the
tall empty bottle and the stopper, which in his hurry he had thrown
down upon the floor.
'She is gone!' sobbed the child. 'My beautiful Dala. I shall never see
her again.'
He was right; the professor and the theologian, between them, had
scared Queen Mab away pretty successfully. She would certainly never
revisit that part of the city if she could help it. The divine looked
uncomfortable. In spite of himself he had recognised something strange
and unusual in the appearance of this last capture of his friend's
butterfly-net, and almost unconsciously he began to ponder on the old
theory that the Evil One might occasionally disguise himself as an
angel of light. The poet, meanwhile, was more voluble.
'Your soul is sordid!' he said indignantly to the professor. 'You have
no eyes for the Immaterial, the intangibly Ideal, that lies behind the
shadowy and deceptive veil that we call Matter.'
'My soul,' said the professor with equal indignation, 'that is, if I
have got one, is as good as yours.'
'No, it isn't,' said the poet; 'I am all soul, or nearly all. You are
nothing but a mass of Higher Protoplasm.'
'No one need wish to be anything better. I should like to know,' cried
the professor angrily, 'where we should all be without Protoplasm.'
'My friends,' said the theologian, still rather confused, 'this heat is
both irreverent and irrational. Protoplasm is invaluable, but is it not
also transient? The flight of that butterfly may well remind us—'
'Stop!' interrupted the philosopher. '_Was_ it a butterfly? Now I come
to think of it, I hardly know whether to refer it to the lepidoptera or
not. At all events, it is a striking example of the manner in which
natural and sexual selection, continued through a series of epochs, can
evolve the most brilliant and graceful combinations of tint and
plumage, by simple survival of the favourable variations.'
'It is indeed,' suggested the theologian, 'a remarkable proof of the
intelligent construction of the universe, and of the argument from
design, that this insect should have been framed with such exquisite
perfection of form and colour to delight the eyes of the theologian.'
'Not at all,' said the professor irritably. 'It was to delight the eyes
of butterflies of the opposite sex. It is no more an argument from
design than I am!'
'Do stop that!' said the poet. 'How can a fellow write a sonnet with
you two for ever sparring away at your musty scholasticisms? Haven't we
heard enough about Paley and Darwin? You have frightened away the fairy
between you, and that is plenty of mischief for one day.
'Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed
For one brief hour to languish and repine.
Entombed? That will do, but I'm afraid there are not many more rhymes
to "doomed." "Loomed," "boomed," "exhumed," "well-groomed." My thoughts
won't flow, hang it all!'
'You _are_ an argument for design,' said the theologian, taking no
notice of the poet, 'though you won't admit it. Why won't you take up
with my scientific religion?—a religion, you know, that can be
expressed with equal facility by emotional or by mathematical terms. It
is as easy, when you once understand it, as the first proposition in
Euclid. You have two points, Faith and Reason, and you draw a straight
line between them. Then you must describe an equilateral triangle—I
mean a scientific religion, on the straight line, F R—between Faith and
Reason.'
'Oh!' said the professor. 'How do you do it?'
'First,' said the theologian hopefully, 'taking F as your centre, F R
as your radius, describe the circle of Theology. Then, taking R as your
centre, F R as your radius, describe the circle of Logic. These two
circles will intersect at Science, indicated in the proposition by the
point S. Join together S F, and then join S R, and you will have the
equilateral triangle of a scientific religion on the line F R S.'
'Prove it,' said the professor grimly.
'Science and Faith,' replied the theologian readily, 'equal Faith and
Reason, because they are both radii of the same circle, Man being the
Radius of the Infinite. Theology—'
'Stop!' ejaculated the professor in the utmost indignation. 'What do
you mean by it? I never in my life listened to such unmitigated
nonsense. Who gave you leave to talk of a scientific religion as an
equilateral triangle? If it is a triangle at all, which there is not
the remotest reason to suppose—but I cannot argue with you? You might
as well call it a dodecahedron, or the cube root of minus nothing.'
'Oh, very well,' said the theologian with exasperating coolness. 'I
thought it possible that even your blind prejudice might not refuse to
listen to a simple mathematical demonstration of the possibility of a
true scientific religion, but I find that I was mistaken. I am not
annoyed—not at all. I prefer to look with lenity upon this outburst of
passion, which might, I admit, have roused the anger of a theologian of
the old school. But, believe me, I personally feel towards you no
enmity—only the profoundest compassion.'
Inarticulate sound from the professor.
'I find in you,' continued the theologian with benevolence, 'much to
tolerate, much even to admire. I regret that, formerly, some of my
predecessors may have been led, by your aggressive and turbulent
spirit, to form unnecessarily harsh judgments of your character, and
put unnecessarily tight thumbscrews on your thumbs; but as for me, I
desire to win you by sympathy and affection and physico-theological
afternoon parties, not to coerce you by vituperation. Your eye of
Reason, as I have often observed, is already sufficiently developed;
supplement it with the eye of Faith, and you will be quite complete. It
will then only remain for you to learn which objects it is necessary to
view with which eye, and carefully to close the other. This takes a
little practice (which must not be attempted in Society), but I am sure
that a person of your attainments will easily master the difficulty. We
will then joyfully receive you into our ranks. No sacrifice on your
part will be required; you will retain the old distinction of F.R.S.,
of which you have always been justly proud; but we shall take the
liberty of conferring upon you the additional privilege of the honorary
title of D.D.'
The professor uttered a brief but trenchant observation, on which the
theologian was about to launch down a reply, less brief but equally
trenchant. But the poet, as his fate would have it, struck in, in the
capacity of a lightning conductor, and succeeded in turning the wrath
of both combatants upon his own devoted head.
'If you must quarrel,' he cried, 'pray don't quarrel here. You would
fight on the very peaks of Parnassus. I can't think of a word that will
rhyme except "design." Stop, now I have it:
'Bright messenger of the Celestial Nine,
Now in translucent ambience entombed.'
Celestial Nine is commonplace, but what can a man do in this region of
trivial souls? Soar, my mind! What does "ambience" mean, by the way?
Never mind, if the Sublime is unfettered by literal meaning, all the
better for the Sublime!'
At this the divine and the philosopher turned upon him together, as
they were wont to do every now and then.
'This laxity of terms,' said the professor, 'is unscientific and
unpractical.'
'I am a poet,' said the poet, 'I bow to no narrow machinery of
definitions. Words have a gemlike beauty and colour of their own. They
are _not_ merely the signs of ideas—of thoughts.'
'I wish they were!' groaned the professor. 'They are with us.'
'The idea,' continued the poet, 'must conform to the word, when the
word honours the idea by making use of it. What care I for the
conventional, the threadbare significance? My heart recognises, through
the outer vestment of apparent insanity, the inner adaptability. Soar,
my mind!'
'And in this way,' said the professor sternly, 'ignoring the great
principles of classification and generalisation, you let a chaos of
disordered ideas abroad upon the universe, destroying all method and
definite arrangement and retarding the great progress of Evolution!'
'A jewel-like word, a transfigured phrase,' replied the poet, 'is worth
all your scientific dictionaries and logic threshing-machines put
together. Ruskin was in error. He tells us that Milton always meant
what he said, and said exactly what he meant.
'This had been an ignoble exactitude. How can a man whose words are
unbounded confine himself within the limits of an intellectual bound?
How can he, that is to say, know exactly what he means, in words, or
mean exactly what, to souls less gloriously chaotic, his words appear
to express? I have always felt this an insuperable difficulty.'
'I have no doubt of it,' said the professor ironically. 'Now,' he went
on, turning to the theologian, 'you see what comes of having too much
soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ
should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have
a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.'
'Not a bit of it,' said the theologian indignantly. 'It comes of not
having soul enough, or of allowing the sway the soul should exercise to
fall upon the feeble sceptre of imagination. If our misguided young
friend had been thoroughly grounded in Paley's Evidences and scientific
primers—for these should never be separated—do you think we should have
heard anything about his chaotic soul? Not a bit of it. It would all
have been as clear as an opera-glass, or as Mr. Joseph Cook's theory of
Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical
Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid,"
on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the
"Tales from the Norse?" It was very remiss of them.'
'On the contrary,' said the professor, 'I should have recommended the
entire elimination of doctrinal matter from his studies. I should have
guided him to a thorough investigation of the principle of all the
Natural Sciences, with especial devotion to one single branch, as
Botany or Conchology, and an entire mastery of its terminology I should
have urged our gifted but destitute of all scientific method friend to
the observation and definition of objective phenomena, rather than to
subjective analysis, and turned his reflections—'
'Flow, my words!' said the poet dreamily. 'Soar, my mind!'
He had flung himself into the solitary armchair in a graceful and
distraught pose, and with half-closed eyes had fallen into a reverie.
The divine and the professor stood and gazed at him despondently.
'Such,' said the divine, 'are the consequences of the lack of sound
ethical and eclectic principles in our day and generation!'
'Such,' said the professor, 'are the pernicious results of a classical
training, the absence of a spirit of scientific research and a broad
and philosophical mental culture.'
Those readers who have not yet perused the poet's sonnet may recognise
it, of course, by the first line:
'Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed.'
It attracted a good deal of attention at the time. The public were
informed, in the 'Athæenum,' that the poet was engaged on a sonnet, and
the literary world was excited, but, not having the key, could not make
out what on earth it meant. Meanwhile the professor's paper in
'Nature,' which appeared in the course of the same week, being written
from a wholly different standpoint, did not tend to elucidate the
mystery. The latter merely described the locality in which the fairy,
or butterfly, as the professor called it, was found, and the
circumstances of its capture and escape, with such an account of its
manifold peculiarities, and the reasons to suppose it an entirely new
genus, that Epping Forest was as much haunted for the next two or three
months by naturalists on the watch, as by 'Arries making holiday. Our
professor himself visited the fairy's pond several times, in the
company of the poet, with whom he soon patched up a reconciliation. But
Queen Mab, in the meantime, had taken her departure.
The professor also sent to the 'Spectator' an account of the Origin of
Religion, as developed by his little boy, under his very eyes. But the
editor thought, not unnaturally, that it was only the professor's fun,
and declined to publish it, preferring an essay on the Political Rights
of the Domesticated Cat.