THE POETRY OF SCIENCE
“_Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man
keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science
is an index of self-knowledge. Since everything in Nature answers to
a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because
the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active._”
Emerson’s idea of the scientific intelligence keeping step with the
moral and spiritual faculties is an illuminating one. It suggests to
us what happened in the nineteenth century, and gave rise to so much
confusion.
The orderly progress of the human mind was broken up by the sudden
and unprecedented advance of the physical sciences. In a single
generation knowledge advanced with great leaps, which carried it into
regions which had never before been entered. There was a penetrating
power in the scientific method which amazed those who used it. The
geologist, the chemist, the biologist, were daily enlarging the sphere
of knowledge. Political economists were claiming the whole sphere of
morals as their own.
But all this progress was one-sided. Was the advance of scientific
knowledge only another name for disenchantment? Was the bloom of the
world to be brushed off, never more to return? The poets and the
artists and idealistic moralists were panic-stricken. Those who picture
the mood of the so-called Victorian Age as one of smug complacency
forget the predominant feeling of its men of literary and artistic
genius. Ruskin, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold agree in lamenting the fact
that “knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.” A glory had departed from
the world. We are in danger, they thought, of knowing too much.
Matthew Arnold voiced this despondent mood in his poem, “The Future.”
Man was born in a boat that floats upon the River of Time. At the
beginning it was a clear flowing mountain stream, and looking out upon
the romantic mountains the voyager’s heart was full of joy.
“As is the world on the banks
So is the mind of the man.”
Our fathers lived in a world of poetry. Life to them was simple but
full of mystery. It was easy to believe and wonder and enjoy. But the
tract which the River of Time now flows through is the level plain,
bordered by cities, crowded with traffic. Our world is prosaic, and
we must adapt ourselves to it as best we may. All that remains is a
melancholy resignation.
It was against this mood of depression that Emerson always protested.
The man of science, he says, does not divest the world of mystery.
He does not “explain away” anything. His explanations are but the
translating one mystery into another. His knowledge is never final. It
reveals deep behind deep.
The trouble is with ourselves. We allow our imagination to grow torpid.
In the processes of nature are the materials not only for scientific
investigation, but for poetry also. An evolving universe is a theme
that can never be exhausted.
Emerson had not the equipment of the man of science, but he had the
imagination which sympathized with the tendencies of scientific
investigation. It seemed to him that they were confirmations of the
intuition of the poets. That matter is not dead but thrilling with
energy; that space is not empty but is the medium through which
forces operate; that all things are related; that lower forms of life
are always reaching out toward that which is higher; that there is
a tendency for the organism to grow more complex and therefore more
wonderful,--these were discoveries that ought to kindle the poetic
imagination.
Emerson did not flatter himself that he had the ability to express the
new view of the universe. The new poetry he believed would be realistic
without losing its charm.
“For it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that
makes things ugly. The poet who reattaches things to nature and the
whole--reattaching even artificial things and violations of nature
to nature by a deeper insight--disposes very easily of the most
disagreeable facts.”
That to the true poet all things are poetical was a teaching that
he repeats continually. It was this belief that made him greet Walt
Whitman with such effusion. When in 1855 the “Leaves of Grass”
appeared, the literary world was affronted. Whittier, it is said, threw
his presentation copy into the fire. Emerson, almost alone in his
recognition of the new note, wrote,
“I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in
it. I find incomparable things, said incomparably well, as they must
be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which
large perception only can give. I greet you at the beginning of a
great career.”
But when Walt, in the exuberance of joy over the appreciation,
published a new edition with Emerson’s commendation printed on the
cover, the Concord poet was displeased. There were later interviews,
but each man became conscious of the limitations of the other. “I was
simmering, simmering, simmering,” said Whitman, “and Emerson brought
me to boil.” Emerson approved the ideas which were simmering in the
younger poet’s mind, but when they actually boiled over he was inclined
to get out of the way. This was not mere fastidiousness. It indicated a
different conclusion drawn from what lawyers call “agreed facts.” Walt
Whitman expresses the creed of Emerson in his “Song of the Universal:”
“Come, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.
“In this broad earth of ours
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart
Nestles the seed perfection.
“By every life a share or more or less,
None born but it is born concealed or
Unconcealed the seed is waiting.
“Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow,
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
High in the purer happier air.
“From imperfection’s murkiest cloud
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
One flash of heaven’s glory.
“To fashion’s, custom’s discords,
To the mad Babel din, the deafening orgies,
Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard,
From some far shore the final chorus sounding.
“O the blest eyes, the happy hearts,
That see, that know the guiding thread so fine
Along the mighty labyrinth.”
That spiritual realities are wrapped up in the material world, and that
the seed of perfection may be found amid the apparent grossness of the
earth, was a creed, which both poets fervently believed. But what had
it to do with the poet’s art?
Whitman, in his robust faith that goodness was universal, felt relieved
from the responsibility of choice. Nature had invited him to a feast of
good things. He would take pot luck, and enjoy the rude plenty. This
he conceived to be the very essence of democracy. He would take good
things in the bulk.
Emerson also chanted the praise of the universal, but with a somewhat
different emphasis. He was interested in the grossness and the slag
only for the sake of the seed perfection that lay hidden in it. It
is the uncaught bird that flies above the mountain, it is the ray of
perfect light that now and then flashes through the murky clouds, that
must be the theme of poetry. The poet must follow the guiding thread
or he is lost in the labyrinth. There must be discrimination. Nature
has something more than fecundity. There is an austere rejection of
the lower forms of life in favor of the higher. There is a continual
refinement going on. To interpret this side of nature is the function
of art. In this discrimination he was in harmony with the scientific
attitude.
The man of science does not yield to an idle curiosity. He selects the
objects of his study and the method to be used. The laboratory is not
cluttered up with all the objects which a naturalist might encounter
in his walks. Only such objects as are fitted for the purpose are
selected. Should not the poet exercise the same kind of discrimination?
Whitman tells us how on Beacon Street in Boston he walked with Emerson
for two hours, discussing their agreements and differences.
“During these two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was
an argument,--statement, reconnoitering, review, attack and pressing
home against all that could be said against my poems,--Children of
Adam. Emerson’s statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever
more complete or convincing. I could never hear the points better
put,--and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable
conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.”
As between Emerson and Whitman as poets, it is not necessary for us to
decide. Both stood in the presence of nature. Whitman delighted in its
obvious aspects, its sheer bulk, its prodigality, its endless variety.
Emerson was more interested in the laws which it illustrated and the
unseen forces which move it. He was listening to the “chorus of the
ancient causes.” This is what made his words so precious to the men
of science who in the nineteenth century were waging a battle against
ancient formulas which obscured the meaning of their researches.
Professor Tyndall, in his famous address to the British Association
in 1870, took his text from Emerson, to whom in many other places he
acknowledged his indebtedness. His theme was “The Scientific Use of the
Imagination,” and he began by repeating Emerson’s lines which I have
already quoted, beginning:
“If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.”
Here, he said, is the poetic expression of the spirit of modern science.
In another essay, Professor Tyndall denies the common notion that
advances in science are made simply by the patient pushing out of
boundaries of knowledge according to a prosaic system. Beyond the
region of actual light where facts are clearly seen, there is a
penumbral region. Here is a field where intuition goes in advance of
knowledge. “Here the investigator proceeds by combining intuition
and verification. He ponders the knowledge he possesses and tries
to push it further; he guesses and checks his guess, he conjectures
and confirms or rejects his conjecture.... Thus the vocation of the
true experimentalist may be defined as the continued use of spiritual
insight, and its incessant correction and realization. His experiments
constitute a body of which his purified intuitions are as it were the
soul.”
Those “purified intuitions,” which Tyndall declares constituted the
very soul of science, were to Emerson the essence of poetry. What the
scientist discovered to be true, the poet saw to be beautiful. Both
recognized the fact that nature was not fixed but fluid. We see the
successive phases of an endless genesis.
“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still
truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth
becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild
delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature
says,--he is my creature, and maugre all his imperfect griefs, he
shall be glad with me. Not the sun of the summer alone, but every
hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and
change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind,
from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that
fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the
air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in
snow-puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods,
too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual
youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign,
a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should
tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and
faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace,
no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.
Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and
uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become
a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to
be brothers, to be acquaintances,--master or servant is then a trifle
and a disturbance. I am a lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”