_POETRY AND SCIENCE._
In spite of the occasional croak of prophets of evil, poetry is not in
danger of being crowded out of the hearts of men by the materialism
of science. It is true that just now there are no poets of surpassing
genius with whom the reading public is popularly acquainted. It is
true that the development of our material civilization through the
surprisingly rapid advance of scientific discovery is a thing which
engages attention to a very great degree. It is true that the necessity
of dealing continually with practical, matter-of-fact details, whether
of the office, or the factory, or the laboratory, is not in itself
distinctly poetical. It is true that planning practical uses for the
Röntgen rays or liquid air is not essentially stimulating to a love for
poetry, but this is only one aspect of the case.
A great deal of the appeal of poetry comes through what it suggests
of the unknown and mysterious, suggestions, not of the strange and
the fanciful, but of the beautiful, hints of a something beyond the
beauty to which our eyes have yet come, a beauty to which, perhaps, for
all our longing, they may never come. A man for whom the problems of
existence have ceased to be problems, a man whose theology is a settled
thing, who believes certain things definitely and rests with assured
ease in his belief, a man for whom the vague anticipations of a world
of doubt as yet beyond his ken “make no purple in the distance,” such a
man can neither have appreciation for a wide range of poetry, nor will
he write verse that can take any serious place as poetry for modern
readers. The poetry of a primitive people, dealing with primitive
emotions, finds in more elementary things, like the boy in Wordsworth’s
“Intimations of Immortality,” hints and suggestions of a “something
that is gone,” “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” These emotions
become our emotions sympathetically, and not because they are quite the
normal feelings for the mature reader of poetry to-day. The things that
were a wonder to the Greek of Homer’s time have ceased to be a wonder
to us, and if a poet would excite the same feelings in us he must
employ other means. Science, in giving us absolute knowledge in regard
to many things which not so long ago were full of strangeness for us,
has taken out of them the olden poetry and the trees have nymphs that
direct their growth no longer, the streams that were once dæmon-haunted
are now merely water courses, and the other spirits of the earth and
air have gone far away into the world’s forgetfulness. But while we
have been pushing out into the unknown and annexing portions of it to
the region of the known, we have been merely enlarging the boundary,
not obliterating it. More than this man never can do. Always beyond
the farthest vision of his telescope and microscope will lie the
unknowable, growing smaller, perhaps, but seeming larger as it gives
up some of its secret places for the inhabiting of the dwellers in the
known. And this is the significant thing, that, as our knowledge grows,
our sense of what lies beyond that knowledge finds an increasing number
of things that may excite wonder. Every new scientific discovery, at
least in certain departments of science, simply acts as an index finger
pointing the way to related phenomena not yet understood. And so it
will be ever. The most learned man that the schools, and the fields
and the sky aided by the finest instruments human skill can devise,
can produce, will only find himself awed by the vast darkness of the
unknown into which his eyes cannot pierce.
There is another phase of the question that must not pass unnoticed. As
the region of the unknown widens it offers more objects of interest and
may thereby more fully absorb attention. When reality is sufficiently
rich in experience we do not care to indulge in dreams. When the
present satisfies us and answers all our needs we are less inclined to
look forward to the future, whether that glows before us with the hues
of promise or darkens with the threat of coming storm. But the fullest
life may weary at times and wish, for the mere rest of change, to go
outside of itself and find in the strangeness of something new and not
yet known a relaxation and recreation for the tired hand and brain.
And so the strenuousness of modern life with its ceaseless outreaching
for new pleasures and new truths will be ready always for the soothing
restfulness of a poetry that gives the form of beauty to things just
beyond the wonderland of the known.
But how to make poetry of these things is the perplexing problem.
Truth, whether of the world of fact or of the world of imagination
reaching out into the spiritual realm, is not poetry until in some
fashion it is made beautiful in its appeal to our sensibilities. A
hundred years ago the things that were fitting subjects for poetic
treatment were much more elementary and as emotional stimulus they
reached consciousness in a much more immediate and direct fashion
than the themes that are fitted for poetry now. The poet who would
achieve distinct success in the higher walks of poetry to-day must
be master of an art surpassing that of all but a few of his brethren
of the craft who have gone before him. The world of the known is so
large, comparatively, now, and the individual is so far removed from
the boundaries of the unknown, save, perhaps, at one point, that more
art is required to induce him to travel the longer distance out of the
world of cold fact into the borderland of strangeness where suggestions
of new truth and new beauty may come to quicken aspirations.
It is true that there are themes that were new a thousand years ago
and will be new a thousand years hence, but a poet to achieve distinct
success must strike a note not only individual, but one closely attuned
to the thought and feeling of his time. Milton we know rather as a
voice of Puritan England than as a poetic genius. We call Wordsworth
a great poet and are conscious as we do so, that he deserves the
distinction rather because he interpreted to men a new phase of thought
and feeling, than because he knew how to make his verse wholly pure
poetry rather than bald prose. Even poets of such spiritual elevation
as Shelley and Coleridge caught the feeling and the tone of their time,
and the revolutionary spirit and the love of nature that was molding
Wordsworth finds a distinct voice in them as well. Even Burns, isolated
as he was, is not altogether an anomaly, and no one need be told that
Byron was in an extreme degree the voice of the reactionary spirit of
post-revolutionary Europe. William Morris, retelling old legends of
Greek and Saxon, none the less informed his verse with the humanitarian
and æsthetic spirit of modern life, and applied his sense of the
beautiful to the problems of nineteenth century existence. Swinburne,
too, is democratic and in his vision the world moves on to new glories
even though the old be not wholly faded from the earth.
Robert Browning is first and fundamentally a painter of character, a
student of the more subtle moods that dominate the individual, and
toward this the reader of English fiction would hardly fail to see
that the development of literature has steadily been advancing for
two centuries. Even Mrs. Browning through the somewhat morbid and
mawkish sentimentality and the overstrained art of “Aurora Leigh,” in
the vague and uncertain way of a woman whose contact with reality
was necessarily slight, catches at the problems of nineteenth century
feeling. Tennyson, as all men know, gave us poetry that was inwrought
of the latest word of science, the last aspiration of religious hope,
the newest sure conclusion in the field of social endeavor for the
betterment of man.
And Tennyson in “In Memoriam,” as Browning in “Paracelsus” and Lowell
in “The Cathedral,” has taught us that abstract truth may be made
into poetry and that of the loftiest and most vitalizing kind. And to
such poetry the world is ready to give a willing ear, though it will
not be satisfied with the mere tricking out in rhyme and meter of
scientific truth. The difficulty for the poet to-day is not merely that
of new knowledge, but that of a science advancing so rapidly that the
poet, whose art is meditative, can hardly avail himself of its latest
revelations before their significance has vanished in the light of some
new and revolutionary discovery announced from some investigator’s
laboratory. This is so new a thing that literary conditions have not
yet been adjusted to it, as we may fairly hope that they will be some
time in the not distant future.
A thing, almost if not quite, as distinctive of our time as the
progress of scientific discovery is the growth of the democratic
spirit. This latter has been a thing of common observation for over
a century, and about that long ago Wordsworth and Shelley, Burns and
Byron voiced with glowing enthusiasm the new revolutionary gospel.
Since then it has been the theme of other pens and has become a matter
of commonplace, and yet, though it has not lost interest because of
the fulfilment of the hopes of man, it is not now a vital force in
literature of the better class. The reason for this is, perhaps, not
far to seek. In the domain of politics the advance in thought and
feeling from a hundred years ago is a matter of no great moment. The
poet who would voice for the world a message of brotherhood, thrilled
with the spirit of a new humanity, inevitably finds himself harking
back; he is compelled to repeat the sentiments of Mrs. Browning’s
perfervid Italian poems, or Whittier’s simple songs, or Shelley’s vague
theorizing: he ceases to be individual. Under present conditions,
strenuously vocal as the world is with the voices of those trying to be
heard, failure to be distinctly and positively individual is failure to
gain attention.
And it is significant that we are approaching the solution of social
problems in the scientific way. The development of a better state of
society is to come about, as we now realize, through the operation of
natural laws, and not by the sensational process of awakening in the
hearts of men a flashing enthusiasm for new forms of government.
Benjamin Kidd’s ‘Social Evolution’ indicates quite clearly the new
point of view from which all problems of society are to be considered,
and perhaps, not less remarkable for a like significance is Henry
Drummond’s ‘Ascent of Man.’ As the laboratory gives up its secrets, as
the mysteries of biology and processes of growth in the organic world
become less mysterious, we are approaching nearer and nearer to a
knowledge of the laws that are concerned in all growth, whether of the
star fish or of the modern state. Assuming that man is the most vitally
concerned in the organization of society here in this present world,
and with the problem of another world, whether real or imaginary,
whether a perfect state, or state of growth as that of earth, one
cannot escape the reflection that both these problems have become in
a measure problems of science, rather than problems of intuition or
authority or emotional susceptibility.
And when science has come so close to all the inmost convictions and
aspirations of man, there must follow a poetry of science, fuller,
richer, more vitalizing and more enduring than any that has gone before
it. It will appeal to a nobler and loftier sense of beauty, a finer
and more perfect conception of truth. It will clothe its utterances in
an imagery as much more varied as the knowledge of to-day is fuller
than that of yesterday. It will be artistic beyond the dreams of other
days, and its art will be something more than that of mere intuition.
It will glow with color, but no crudeness of taste will guide the
artist’s brush, and the intelligent, æsthetic sense of a broadly
cultured people will find inspiration in it, as once heroes did in the
songs of the bards of old.
L. W. SMITH.
_Tabor, Iowa._
_ANTIQUITY OF THE CHEWING GUM HABIT._
In the letter of Columbus on the discovery of America, facsimile
edition, 1892, of the four Latin editions belonging to the Lenox
Library, the following occurs in the translation (page 11): “Finally,
that I may compress in few words the brief account of our departure
and quick return, and the gain, I promise this, that if I am supported
by our most invincible sovereigns with a little of their help, as much
gold can be supplied as they will need, indeed, as much of spices, of
cotton, of chewing gum (which is only found in Chios), also as much of
aloeswood, and as many slaves for the navy as their majesties will wish
to demand.”
The date of this letter is March 14, 1493,--over four hundred years
ago. It will be seen by the above that the chewing gum habit is by no
means a modern or recent one, and doubtless antedates Columbus’ letter
by many years.
The reference to Chios, an island in the Grecian Archipelago, is
presumably for the purpose of indicating the character of the ‘gum.’
The Chios ‘gum’ of the ancients has been described as an earth of a
compact character, probably argillaceous, and had the reputation of
possessing medicinal qualities. Its consistency and appearance may have
been such as to have led to its being popularly called ‘gum.’
That the chewing of gum, or some other article or waxy substance
suitable for chewing, was in vogue at the time, there can be no doubt,
and that the discovery of such a substance would be regarded as an
important acquisition is implied by its being specially mentioned and
promised by Columbus.
Years ago, more than half a century, shoemakers’ wax, so-called,
Burgundy pitch and crude spruce-gum were chewed to a considerable
extent, as the writer clearly remembers.
Betel chewing, the leaves and the nut mixed in certain proportions
_with lime_, as practiced in Asiatic countries, naturally occurs to the
mind in connection with the foregoing, as well as occasional instances
of chewing slate pencils and lime mortar, an interesting case of the
latter having been brought to my notice several years since by a
well-known physician of Newark, N. J. But these are rather exceptional
and individual cases, therefore not to be regarded as general or
popular habits. From the _chewing_ of earthy substances to the _eating_
of the same, would appear to be but a natural step. The latter
habit, so far as facts are available, is of comparatively infrequent
occurrence and restricted to a much smaller number of persons. Beds of
white infusorial earth, resembling magnesia in appearance, known as
_Bergmehl_, occur in Lapland and Finland. This is, or has been used in
seasons of scarcity, mixed with flour made of some kind of grain or
ground birch-bark, and _clay-eating_ probably, to a greater or less
extent, still continues to be a habit in North Carolina as in the past.
The effect of this habit, as any intelligent person would suppose,
is decidedly injurious to the individual that pursues it. In several
cases that have come under my observation the results are exhibited in
sallowness of complexion, lack-lustre eyes, distension of the abdomen
caused by engorgement or clogging of the liver, and other intestinal
derangement, listlessness and general debility.
ROB’T E. C. STEARNS.
_Los Angeles, Cal._