Chapter IX: 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.”