Chapter V: How Far Science May Modify Poetry

It may be worth while to dwell a little longer on the way in which Poetry and Science respectively deal with external Nature, noticing in what respects their methods agree, in what they differ, wherein they seem to modify each other, and how each aims at a separate and distinct end of its own.

The first thing to remark is, that in the presence of Nature the poet and the man of science are alike observers. But in respect of time the poet has the precedence. Long before the botanist had applied his microscope to the flower, or the geologist his hammer to the rock, the poet’s eye had rested upon these objects, and noted the beauty of their lineaments. The poets were the first observers, and the earliest and greatest poets were the most exact and faithful in their observations. In the Psalms of Israel and in the Poems of Homer how many of the most beautiful and affecting images of Nature have been seized and embalmed in language which for exactness can not be surpassed, and for beauty can never grow obsolete! Indeed, fidelity to the truth of Nature, even in its minutest details, may be almost taken as a special note of the higher order of poets. It is not Homer but Dryden who to express the silence of night makes the drowsy mountains nod. It is a vulgar error which supposes that it is the privilege of imagination to absolve the poet from the duty of exact truth, and to set him free to make of Nature what he pleases. True imagination shows itself by nothing more than by that exquisite sensibility to beauty which makes it love and reverence Nature as it is. It feels instinctively that “He hath made everything beautiful in his time;” therefore it would not displace a blade of grass nor neglect the veining of a single leaf. Of course, from the touch of a great poet, the commonest objects acquire something more than exactness and truth of detail; they become forms of beauty, vehicles of human sentiment and emotion. But before they can be so used, fidelity to fact must first be secured. They cannot be made symbols of higher truth unless justice has first been done to the truth of fact concerning them. Hence it is that the works of the great poets of all ages are very repositories in which the features and ever-changing aspects of the outward world are rendered with the most loving fidelity and “vivid exactness.” This is one very delicate service which genuine poets have done to their fellow-men. They have by an instinct of their own noted the appearance of earth and sky, and kept alive the sense of their beauty during long ages when the world was little heedful of these things. How many are there who would own that there are features in the landscape, wild-flowers by the way-side, tender lights in the sky, which they would have passed forever unheeded, had not the remembered words of some poet awakened their eye to look on these things and to discern their beauty! Who ever now sees the “wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,” and notes the peculiar coloring of the petals, without a new feeling of beauty in the flower itself, and of the added beauty it has received since the eye of Burns dwelt so lovingly upon it!

The observation of the world around them in those early poets, clear and transparent, was instinctive, almost unconscious. It proceeded not by rules or method, but was spontaneous, prompted by love. What Mrs. Hemans finely says of Walter Scott among his own woods at Abbotsford, may be said of all the great poets in their converse with Nature—

“Where every tree had music of its own,
To his quick ear of knowledge taught by love.”

Likely enough it will be said, that spontaneous, child-like kind of observation was all well enough in the pre-scientific era. But now, in this day of trained observation and experiment, have not the magnifying-glass of the botanist and the crucible of the chemist quite put out the poet’s vocation as an observer of natural things? Have not these taught us truth about Nature, so much more close, exact, and penetrating, as to have discredited altogether that mere surface observation which is all that is possible to the poet? In the presence of this newer, more sifting investigation, can the imagery of the poets any longer live? Has not the rigorous analysis of modern times, and the knowledge thence accruing, abolished the worth and meaning of that first random information gathered by the eye?

In reply, may it not be said the observations of the poet have real meaning and truth, but it is a different kind of truth which the poet and the man of science extract from the same object? The poet, in as far as he is an observer at all, must be as true and as accurate in the details he gives as the man of science is, but the end which each seeks in his observation is different. In examining a flower, the botanist, when he has noted the number of stamens and petals, the form of the pistil, the corolla, the calyx, and other floral organs,—when he has registered these, and so given the flower its place in his system, his work is done. These things, too, the poet observes, and in his descriptions, if he does not give them a place, he must at least not contravene them; but he observes them as means to a further end. That end is to see and express the loveliness that is in the flower, not only the beauty of color and of form, but the sentiment which, so to speak, looks out from it, and which is meant to awaken in us an answering emotion. For this end he must observe accurately, since the form and hues of the flower discerned by the eye are a large part of what gives it relation and meaning to the soul. The outward facts of the wild-flowers he must not distort, but reverently observe them; but, when observed, he must not rest in them, but see them as they stand related to the earth out of which they grow, to the wood which surrounds them, to the sky above them, which waits on them with its ministries of dew, rain, and sunshine,—indeed, to the whole world, of which they are a part, and to the human heart, to which they tenderly appeal.

On this wide subject, the bearing of scientific on poetic truth, I know not where can be found truer and more suggestive teaching than that contained in Mr. Ruskin’s great work on Modern Painters. Each volume of that work, which has influenced so powerfully the painting of our time, has much to teach to the poet and to the student of Poetry. In the Preface to the Second Edition many of the principles expanded throughout the work are condensed. From that Preface I venture to quote one or two passages which throw much light on the subject of our discussion:—

“The sculptor is not permitted to be wanting either in knowledge or expression of anatomical detail.... That which to the anatomist is the end is to the sculptor the means. The former desires details for their own sake; the latter that by means of them he may kindle his work with life, and stamp it with beauty. And so in landscape: botanical or geological details are not to be given as a matter of curiosity or subject of search, but as the ultimate elements of every species of expression and order of loveliness.”

Again: “Details alone, and unreferred to a final purpose, are the sign of a tyro’s work.... Details perfect in unity and contributing to a final purpose are the sign of the production of a consummate master. It is not details sought for their own sake ... which constitute great art,—they are the lowest, most contemptible art; but it is detail referred to a great end, sought for the sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest and least of God’s works, and treated in a manly, broad, and impressive manner. There may be as much greatness of mind, as much nobility of manner, in a master’s treatment of the smallest features, as in his management of the more vast; and this greatness of manner chiefly consists in seizing the specific character of the object, together with all the great qualities of beauty which it has in common with the higher orders of existence.”

Once more: “This is the difference between the mere botanist’s knowledge of plants and the great poet’s or painter’s knowledge of them. The one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium, the other that he may render them vehicles of expression and emotion. The one counts the stamens, affixes a name, and is content; the other observes every character of the plant’s color and form; considering each of its attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its lines of grace or energy, rigidity or repose, notes the feebleness or the vigor, the serenity or tremulousness of its hues; observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the features of the situations it inhabits and the ministering agencies necessary to its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living creature, with histories written on its leaves and passions breathing in its motion. Its occurrence in his picture is no mere point of color, no meaningless spark of light. It is a voice rising from the earth, a new chord of the mind’s music, a necessary note in the harmony of his picture, contributing alike to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less to its loveliness and its truth.”

If in the observation of Nature the ends which the poet has in view and the effects which he brings out are different from those aimed at by the man of science, not less distinct are the mental powers which each brings into play. The man of science investigates that he may reach rigid accuracy of fact, and this he does by the exercise of the dry understanding, and by the use of the analytic method. The poet contemplates the single objects or the vast spectacle of Nature, in order that he may discern the beauty that pervades both the parts and the whole, and that he may apprehend the intimations—the great thoughts, I might call them—which come to him through that beauty, and which make their appeal to the power of imaginative sympathy within him. Nature, whether in detail or as a whole, he regards in the relation it bears, whether of likeness or of contrast, to the soul, the emotions, and the destiny of man. But this relation he must seize, not by neglecting or setting aside facts, but by noting them with all the fidelity consistent with his main purpose.

But it may be well to mark more definitely some of the ways in which the extension of natural science in modern times has reacted on the work of the poet.

_1st._ It had fallen in with, though it has not originated, that remarkable change in the mental attitude in which modern times stand toward Nature, a change of which more will have to be said presently, but which it is enough here to allude to. For that ardent, sensitive, reverent regard which the modern time turns on Nature, recent research may be said to have furnished a rational basis, a sufficient justification. Not that Science created this mental attitude, this new-born sentiment; it is due to other, more subtle and hidden causes. Indeed, it may be that the two great contemporaneous influences, the increased activity of physical discovery working by scientific analysis, and the enlarged and heightened admiration of Nature as seen through the imagination, are but opposite sides of the one great current of modern thought. Shelley speaks of the “intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England,” and this, though by no means a product of physical science, is in keeping with its revelations, though it goes beyond and supplements them.

_2d._ Again: the greatest of the early poets, as we have seen, were instinctive lovers of Nature, and faithful delineators of its forms. But in presence of the unresting scrutiny and careful exactness of Science, modern poets are stimulated to still closer, more minute observation. Indeed, there may be danger lest this tendency in Poetry go too far, and make it too microscopic and forgetful of that higher function which, while seeing truly, ever spiritualizes what it sees. However this may be, it is clear that Science by its contagion has stimulated the observing powers of the modern poet, and made him more than ever a heedful

“Watcher of those still reports
Which Nature utters from her rural shrine.”

_3d._ Again: since the progress of modern Science has let in on the mental vision whole worlds of new facts and new forces,—a height and a depth, a vastness and minuteness in Nature, as she works all around us, alike in the smallest pebble on the shore, and “in the loftiest star of unascended heaven,”—it cannot be but that all this now familiar knowledge should enter into the sympathetic soul of the poet, and color his eye as he looks abroad on Nature. When the eye, for instance, from the southern beach of the Moray Firth passes over to its northern shore, and rests on the succession of high plateaux and precipiced promontories which form the opposite coast, and observes how the whole landscape has been shaped, moulded, and rounded into its present uniformity of feature by the glaciers that untold ages since descended from Ben Wyvis and his neighboring altitudes, and wore and ground the masses of old red sandstone into the outlines of the bluffs he now sees,—who can look on such a spectacle without having new thoughts awakened within him, of Nature working with her primeval wedges of frost, ice, and flood, to carve the solid rock into the lineaments before him, and of the still higher power behind Nature that directs and controls all these her movements to ulterior and sublimer ends! When, in addition to these thoughts, the gazer calls to mind that these are the native headlands which first arrested the meditative eye of the great northern mason, more than any other, geologist and poet in one, and fed the fire of his young enthusiasm, does not the geologic charactery that is scrawled upon these rocks receive a strange enhancement of human interest?

Again: the huge gray bowlders strewn here and there on the top of those promontories, and all about the dusky moors, when we learn that they have been floated to their present stations from leagues away by long vanished glaciers, no doubt their gaunt shapes become wonderfully suggestive. And yet, perhaps, nothing that geology can teach regarding them will ever invest them with a more imaginative aspect than that which they wore to the poet’s eye, when, caring little enough for scientific theories, it shaped them into this human phantasy—

“As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it hath hither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.”

But no doubt the truths of geology, if known to a poet, will in some measure enter into his description of scenery. For as the geological structure of a country powerfully moulds and determines its features, the knowledge of this, if possessed, must enter into the poet’s eye as it ranges over the landscape. How powerfully geological causes are to modify scenery is well set forth in a passage of the same Preface of Mr. Ruskin’s from which I have already quoted.

The new light which the discovery of these fads throws upon scenery cannot now well be neglected by the poet. And it is impossible to divine how many new facts and farther vistas into the recesses of Nature future discovery may open up, which, when they have passed into the educated mind, poets must in their own way find expression for. But one thing is clear, the poet, however he may avail himself of scientific truth, must not himself merge the Poet in the investigator or analyst. That function he must leave to the physicist, and be content to employ the material with which the physicist furnishes him to enrich and enlarge his vision of beauty. Moreover, the scientific facts he uses must not be those which are still abstruse and difficult, but those with which educated men at least have already become familiar. But, above all, the poet, if he is not to abdicate his function, must retain that freshness of eye, that childlikeness of heart, which looks forth with ever-young delight and wonder and awe on the great spectacle which Nature spreads before him. Most men have lost this gift, their spirits being crushed beneath the dead weight of custom. Our boasted civilization and education have done their best to destroy it; so that now it has come about that to the dull mechanic mind this marvelous earth is but a black ball of mud, painted here and there with some streaks of green and gold. To the drily scientific mind, which fancies itself educated, it is merely a huge piece of mechanism, like some great mill or factory, worked by forces which he proudly tabulates and calls Laws of Nature. But to the true poet the earth and sky have not yet lost all their original brightness. His eye still sees them with the dew upon them, in inspired moments still catches sight of the visionary gleam. His gift it is, his peculiar function, seeing this himself, to make others see and feel it, to make his fellow-men sharers in his perceptions and in the joy they bring. He purges our dulled eyes as with euphrasy and rue, and opens them to partake of the vision which he himself beholds. For after all the sciences have said their say, and propounded their explanations of things, as far as they go, the poet feels that there is in this visible Universe, and the spectacle it presents, something more than all the sciences have as yet grasped or ever will grasp—feels that there is in and through and behind all Nature a mysterious life, which he “cannot compass, cannot utter,” but which he must still bear witness to. This great truth which lay at the bottom of the old mythologies, which gives meaning to many forms of mysticism, but which our dull mechanic philosophies have long discredited, still haunts the soul of the poet, and, feeling it profoundly himself, he longs to express and make others feel it.