This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a
trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of
scientific discovery has its own epic unity--a unity of purpose and
endeavour--the single torch passing from hand to hand through the
centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour,
the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant
order--sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole
world of thought--have an intense human interest, and belong
essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these
moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible
attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after
the Lucretian model, out of modern science.
The theme has been in my mind for a good many years; and the first
volume, dealing with the "Watchers of the Sky," began to take definite
shape during what was to me an unforgettable experience--the night I
was privileged to spend on a summit of the Sierra Madre Mountains,
when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope. The
prologue to this volume attempts to give a picture of that night, and
to elucidate my own purpose.
The first tale in this volume plunges into the middle of things, with
the revolution brought about by Copernicus; but, within the tale,
partly by means of an incidental lyric, there is an attempt to give a
bird's-eye view of what had gone before. The torch then passes to
Tycho Brahe, who, driven into exile with his tables of the stars, at
the very point of death hands them over to a young man named Kepler.
Kepler, with their help, arrives at his own great laws, and
corresponds with Galileo--the intensely human drama of whose life I
have endeavoured to depict with more historical accuracy than can be
attributed to much of the poetic literature that has gathered around
his name. Too many writers have succumbed to the temptation of the
cry, "e pur si muove!" It is, of course, rejected by every reliable
historian, and was first attributed to Galileo a hundred years after
his death. M. Ponsard, in his play on the subject, succumbed to the
extent of making his final scene end with Galileo "frappant du pied la
terre," and crying, "pourtant elle tourne." Galileo's recantation was
a far more subtle and tragically complicated affair than that. Even
Landor succumbed to the easy method of making him display his entirely
legendary scars to Milton. If these familiar pictures are not to be
found in my poem, it may be well for me to assure the hasty reader
that it is because I have endeavoured to present a more just picture.
I have tried to suggest the complications of motive in this section by
a series of letters passing between the characters chiefly concerned.
There was, of course, a certain poetic significance in the legend of
"e pur si muove"; and this significance I have endeavoured to retain
without violating historical truth.
In the year of Galileo's death Newton was born, and the subsequent
sections carry the story on to the modern observatory again. The form
I have adopted is a development from that of an earlier book,
"_Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_" where certain poets and
discoverers of another kind were brought together round a central
idea, and their stories told in a combination of narrative and lyrical
verse. "The Torch-Bearers" flowed all the more naturally into a
similar form in view of the fact that Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and many
other pioneers of science wrote a considerable number of poems.
Those imbedded in the works of Kepler--whose blazing and fantastic
genius was, indeed, primarily poetic--are of extraordinary interest. I
was helped, too, in the general scheme by those constant meetings
between science and poetry, of which the most famous and beautiful are
the visit of Sir Henry Wotton to Kepler, and the visit of Milton to
Galileo in prison.
Even if science and poetry were as deadly opposites as the shallow
often affirm, the method and scheme indicated above would at least
make it possible to convey something of the splendour of the long
battle for the light in its most human aspect. Poetry has its own
precision of expression and, in modern times, it has been seeking more
and more for truth, sometimes even at the expense of beauty. It may be
possible to carry that quest a stage farther, to the point where, in
the great rhythmical laws of the universe revealed by science, truth
and beauty are reunited. If poetry can do this, it will not be without
some value to science itself, and it will be playing its part in the
reconstruction of a shattered world. The passing of the old order of
dogmatic religion has left the modern world in a strange chaos,
craving for something in which it can unfeignedly believe, and often
following will-o'-the-wisps. Forty years ago, Matthew Arnold
prophesied that it would be for poetry, "where it is worthy of its
high destinies," to help to carry on the purer fire, and to express in
new terms those eternal ideas which must ever be the only sure stay of
the human race. It is not within the province of science to attempt a
post-Copernican justification of the ways of God to man; but, in the
laws of nature revealed by science, and in "that grand sequence of
events which"--as Darwin affirmed--"the mind refuses to accept as the
result of blind chance," poetry may discover its own new grounds for
the attempt. It is easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow.
It is even easier to practise a really shallow and devitalising
pessimism. The modern annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch
beneath the skin of man is neither new nor profound. Neither science
nor poetry can rest there; and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to
show that spiritual values are not diminished or overwhelmed by the
"fifteen hundred universes" that passed in review before the telescope
of Herschel, it is only after the opposite argument--so common and so
easy to-day--has been faced; and only after poetry has at least
endeavoured to follow the torch of science to its own deep-set
boundary-mark in that immense darkness of Space and Time.