‘Lucretius stands alone in the controversial force and energy with
which the genius of negation inspires him, and transforms into sublime
reasons for firm act, so long as living breath is ours, the thought
that the life of a man is no more than the dream of a shadow.’--LORD
MORLEY’S _Recollections_.
I
THERE was a time when the title of this essay would have been received
as a paradox, if not as a contradiction in terms. Lessing, as is well
known, declared roundly that Lucretius was ‘a versifier, not a poet,’
and Lessing is one of the greatest of European critics. It is easy,
indeed, to explain in part his trenchant condemnation. It reflects his
implicit acceptance of Aristotle’s _Poetics_--which he said was for him
as absolutely valid as Euclid, and therefore of Aristotle’s doctrine
that poetry is imitation of human action. Lessing’s insistence on
this doctrine was extraordinarily salutary in his day, and definitely
lowered the status of the dubious kinds known as descriptive,
allegorical, satirical, and didactic poetry, in a century too much
given to them all. That phrase of his about the imitation of human
action marked out a correct, well-defined, and safe channel for the
stream of poetry to pursue, and some of the slender poetic rills of
his generation improved their chance of survival by falling into it
and flowing between its banks. But Lessing did not reckon with the
power of poetic genius to force its own way to the sea through no
matter how tangled and tortuous a river-bed,--nay, to capture from
the very obstructions it overcomes new splendours of foam and rainbow
unknown perhaps to the well-regulated stream. In plain language, he
did not reckon with the fact that a _prima facie_ inferior form, such
as satire or didactic, may not only have its inferiority outweighed by
compensating beauties, but may actually elicit and provoke beauties not
otherwise to be had, and thus become not an obstacle, but an instrument
of poetry. Nor did he foresee that such a recovery of poetic genius,
such an effacement of the old boundaries, such a withdrawal of the
old taboos, was to come with the following century, nay, was actually
impending when he wrote. Goethe, who read the _Laokoon_ entranced, as
a young student at Leipzig, honoured its teaching very much on this
side of idolatry when he came to maturity. As a devoted investigator
of Nature, who divined the inner continuity of the flower and the leaf
with the same penetrating intuition which read the continuity of a
man, or of a historic city, in all the phases of their growth, Goethe
was not likely to confine poetry within the bounds either of humanity
or of the drums and tramplings, the violence, passion, and sudden
death, for which human action in poetic criticism has too commonly
stood. He himself wrote a poem of noble beauty on the _Metamorphosis of
Plants_ (1797)--a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to be
poetically right while merely unfolding the inner truth of things in
perfectly adequate speech.[4] We cannot wonder, then, that Lucretius
and the poem _On the Nature of Things_ excited in the greatest of
German poets the liveliest interest and admiration. On the score of
subject alone he eagerly welcomed the great example of Lucretius. But
he saw that Lucretius had supreme gifts as a poet, which would have
given distinction to whatever he wrote, and which, far from being
balked by the subject of his choice, found in it peculiarly large
scope and play. ‘What sets out Lucretius so high,’ he wrote (1821) to
his friend v. Knebel, author of the first German translation, ‘what
sets him so high and assures him eternal renown, is a lofty faculty
of sensuous intuition, which enables him to describe with power; in
addition, he disposes of a powerful imagination, which enables him to
pursue what he has seen beyond the reach of sense into the invisible
depths of Nature and her most mysterious recesses.’[5] But while Goethe
thus led the way in endorsing without reserve the Lucretian conception
of what the field of poetry might legitimately include, he contributed
to the discussion nothing, so far as I know, so illuminating or so
profound as the great saying of Wordsworth: ‘poetry is the impassioned
expression which is in the countenance of all science.’ For Wordsworth
here sweeps peremptorily away the boundary marks set up, for better or
worse, by ancient criticism--he knows nothing of a poetry purely of man
or purely of action: he finds the _differentia_ of poetry not in any
particular choice of subject out of the field of real things, but in
the _impassioned_ handling of them whencesoever drawn, and therefore
including the impassioned handling of reality as such, or, in the
Lucretian phrase, of _the nature of things_.
What did he mean by _impassioned?_ Something more, certainly, than the
enthusiasm of a writer possessed with his theme, or even of one eager,
as Lucretius was, to effect by its means a glorious purgation in the
clotted soul of a friend. We come nearer when we recall the profound
emotion stirred in Wordsworth by ‘earth’s tears and mirth, her humblest
mirth and tears,’ or the thought, ‘too deep for tears,’ given him by
the lowliest flower of the field. Such passion as this is not easily
analysed, but it implies something that we may call participation on
the one side and response on the other. The poet finds himself in
Nature, finds there something that answers to spiritual needs of his
own. The measure of the poet’s mind will be the measure of the value
of the response he receives. A small poet will people Nature with
fantastic shapes which reflect nothing but his capricious fancy or his
self-centred desires. That is not finding a response in Nature, but
putting one into her mouth; a procedure like that of the bustling
conversationalist who, instead of listening to your explanation, cuts
it short with a ‘You mean to say’--whatever it suits him to suppose.
But the poet of finer genius will neither seek nor be satisfied with
such hollow response as this. If he finds himself in Nature, it will
not be his shallow fancies or passing regrets that he finds, but his
furthest reach, and loftiest appetency of soul. He will not properly
be said to ‘subdue things to the mind,’ as Bacon declared it to be
the characteristic aim of poetry to do, instead of, like philosophy,
subduing the mind to things. But he will feel after analogies to mind
in the universe of things which mind contemplates and interprets.
Such an analogy, for instance, is the sense of _continuity_
underlying the changing show of the material world, corresponding to
the continuity of our own self-consciousness through the perpetual
variations of our soul states. The doctrine of a permanent substance
persisting through the multiplicity of Nature, and giving birth to all
its passing modes, belongs as much to poetry as to philosophy, and owes
as much to impassioned intuition as to a priori thought. Under the
name of the _One and the Many_ the problem of Change and Permanence
perplexed and fascinated every department of Greek thought: it provoked
the opposite extravagances of Heracleitos, who declared change to
be the only form of existence, and of the Eleatics, who denied that
it existed at all; but it also inspired the ordered and symmetrical
beauty of the Parthenon and the Pindaric ode. ‘When we feel the poetic
thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘it is when we find fulness in the concise,
and depth in the clear; and that seems to express with felicitous
precision the genius of Hellenic art.’
A second such analogy is the discovery of _infinity_. Common sense
observes measure and rule, complies with custom, and takes its ease
when its day’s work is done; but we recognize a higher quality in the
love that knows no measure, in the spiritual hunger and thirst which
are never stilled. Therefore, at the height of our humanity, we find
ourselves in the universe in proportion as it sustains and gives scope
for an endlessly ranging and endlessly penetrating thought. The Stoics
looked on the universe as a globe pervaded by what Munro unkindly
calls _a rotund and rotatory god_; at the circumference of which all
existence, including that of space, simply stopped; common sense
revolts, but imagination is even more rudely balked, and we glory in
the defiant description of Epicurus passing beyond the flaming walls
of the world. Yet we are stirred with a far more potent intellectual
sympathy when the idea is suggested, say by Spinoza, that space and
time themselves are but particular modes of a universe which exists
also in an infinite number of other ways; or when, in the final cantos
of Dante’s _Paradiso_, after passing up from Earth, the centre,
through the successive ever-widening spheres that circle round it,
till we reach the Empyrean, the whole perspective and structure of the
universe are suddenly inverted, and we see the real centre, God, as
a single point of dazzling intensity, irradiating existence ‘through
and through.’ Then we realize that the space we have been laboriously
traversing is only the illusive medium of our sense-existence, and
without meaning for the Eternity and Infinity of divine reality.
This example has led us to the verge of another class of poetic ideas,
those in which poetry discovers in the world not merely analogies
of mind, but mind itself. This is the commonest, and in some of its
phases the cheapest and poorest, intellectually, of all poetic ideas.
It touches at one pole the naive personation which peoples earth and
air for primitive man with spirits whom he seeks by ritual and magic
to propitiate or to circumvent. The brilliant and beautiful woof of
myth is, if we will, poetry as well as religion; the primitive and
rudimentary poetry of a primitive and rudimentary religion. Yet it
points, however crudely, to the subtler kinds of response which a
riper poetic insight may discover. If the glorious anthropomorphism of
Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life, everywhere
pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn ‘in man and beast and
earth and air and sea,’ cries to the poet in every moment of his
experience with a voice which will not be put by, and the symbols
from soul-life by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they
often read human personality too definitely into the play of that
elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned
formulas of science, and justify the claim of poetic experience to be
the source of an outlook upon the world, of a vision of life, with
which, no less than with those reached through philosophy and religion,
civilization has to reckon.
The poetic consciousness of soul has thus left a deep impress upon the
medium of ideas through which we currently regard both Nature and Man.
It has imbued with a richer significance and a livelier appeal those
analogies in Nature of which I spoke; turning the sublime but bare
conceptions of continuity and substance into Wordsworth’s _something
more deeply interfused_, or Shelley’s _Love ... through the web of
Being blindly wove;_ turning the abstraction of infinity into limitless
aspiration, or into that ‘infinite passion’ which Browning felt across
‘the pain of finite hearts that yearn.’
On the other hand, in its interpretation of Man, the poetic
soul-consciousness, so extraordinarily intense on the emotional and
imaginative side, has lifted these aspects of soul into prominence;
illuminating and sustaining everywhere the impassioned insight which
carries men outside and beyond themselves, in heroism, in prophecy, in
creation, in love; which makes the past alive for them, and the future
urgent; which lifts them to a vision of good and evil beyond that of
moral codes; to the perception that danger is the true safety, and
death, as Rupert Brooke said, ‘safest of all’; which in a word gives
wing and scope and power to that in man which endures, as the stream
endures though its water is ever gliding on, and makes us ‘feel that we
are greater than we know.’
I have tried to sketch out some of the ways in which a scientific
poetry is possible without disparagement to either element in the
description. Let me now proceed to apply some of these ideas to the
great poet of science who is our immediate subject.