ON POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.*

"I DOleT see anything in that," said one who watched Turner as he painted. "Don't you," growled the artist in reply, " don't you wish you could though ?" And this, perhaps, after all, is the only answer painter and poet can make to the complaint of the unperceiving. The gulf between them is one philosophy will not bridge and argument will never plumb. In this, as in so much else, " "ris the taught already who profit by teaching." And the man or the woman who would understand Professor Shairp's book must bring to it a mind already in keen sympathy with his subject. For such he has provided a true intellectual feast. Young students, to whom he specially addresses himself, will find themselves here in communion with a mind which places its rich resources at their disposal. The problem before Mr. Shairp is the place of poetry in the interpretation of nature, and the further consideration of the mode in which, from generation to generation, poets, the true high priests and servants of Nature, have repre- sented or interpreted her voice to mankind. Bacon long ago, giving expression to a thought which too often holds the key of the imaginative faculty of those whose attention is absorbed by scientific pursuits, has said of poetry "that it is a kind of learning belonging to the imagination, which being unrestrained by laws, may make what unnatural mixtures and separations it pleases." Nothing can be further from the truth. The first principle of harmony is order, and order, to be order, must be based on truth, though it may be truth deep down out of sight, and with roots that the pickaxe of science has not yet uncovered. "Beauty," says Mr. Shairp, "is no merely mental or subjective thing, born of association and dependent on individual caprice, but when the two elements necessary to the perception of it have met/ it is a reality as inevitable and as verit- able as the laws of gravitation, er any law which science registers ; and when, either through our own perception or through the teaching of the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us, through eye and ear, imagination and emotion—we have learnt something more about the world in which we dwell than physics have taught us,—a new truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination, not through the scientific or logical faculty." Perhaps a more perfect expression of that which is the essence of all true poetry has * on Poetic ininpktation of Nature. By J. 0. lhaIrp, LL.D. Edinburgh : Davi& Douglas. 1877.

seldom been found than in the words in which Mr. Shairp tells us, "Whenever the soul comes into living contact with fact and truth, whenever it realises these with more than common vivid- ness, there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of emotion,—and the expression of that thrill, that glow, is poetry."

And this brings us into direct consideration of the position of poetry with regard to science. Are the two antagonistic, as a large portion of the world has always been only too ready to admit? Or is it when the soul of man touches with vivifying power the material facts of the universe, the raw material of science, that we get the emanation, "the golden exhalation "we call poetry? Only before imagination can take up and mould the results of science, as Mr. Shairp observes, " these must have ceased to be difficult, laborious, abstruse." While the attention is occupied with experiment and analysis, with difficult labour and stern reasoning, the imaginative faculties must be, for a time, at least, in abeyance. In some minds—those, for instance, more occupied with explanations than with the thing explained—they will remain dormant altogether ; not so with the greatest. Mr. Shairp instances Kepler, Newton, and Faraday. Unquestionably the thought which kept time and tune in the head and heart of the last-named may most adequately be expressed in Wordsworth's lines :—

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky, So was it when I was a child, So is it now I am a man ; So let it be when I grow old, Or let me die."

Emotion at white heat becomes rhythmical, but before it attains that point it has been struck by a hard fact somewhere. The finest poetry in the world has been the result of the close observation of nature, ,of the near communion which comes of unconscious insight, and the man of science and the poet may oftener than would at first sight seem likely, clasp hands on the border-land of discovery. Chaucer knew little of the theory of wave-motion as applied to sound, when be wrote his famous lines on,— " Selene is not but ogre ybroken," (to.; but the results of science must be clear enough to be simple, must have rid themselves of the complexities of investigation, before they can be consciously made use of by the poet. It is easy to illustrate this. Tennyson occupied with one of the deepest problems that can engage the attention of a human soul, gives utterance to the rhythmical cry :— " Are God and Nature, then, at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams ? So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life, That I, considering everywhere Her secret moaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to boar,—

I falter," lko.

Science takes up the answer, and between the lines of the statis- tics she gives us we read the parable of the coal-field. We who are alive to day see every day what we call wasted pain, wasted plea- sure, lives certainly wasted, in nature. To what end are myriads of birds singing with no ear to listen, myriads of human cries going up with no apparent reply, myriads of beautiful things blossoming only to decay? But had we stood in the old prinmval forest, and seen millions upon millions of spore-cases strew the ground, certainly to our eyes not fulfilling the end of their exist- ence, reasonably we might have asked,—To what purpose is this waste ?—reasonably, we think, have concluded that these myriads of beautiful seeds were destined only to rot ? Nature was care- less of the single life, yet the most prosaic of modern investigators has been at considerable pains to prove that not only was not one seed destroyed, but each was destined to be an element of richest light and blessing to mankind. The wasted spore-case of un- counted ages ago forms the much coveted gold line of the fuel of to-day. A true poet seized the simple facts patent now to every child, and Kingsley supplied the revelation that lay hidden beneath the statistics of Huxley. Mr. Shairp suggests that young students should occupy themselves in searching out the mode in which Shakespeare, Milton, &c., have dealt with Nature. Doubtless such study would be richly rewarded, only the student must bring to the work the key to unlock the treasure-house. Words could scarcely more finely describe the hush in Nature which pre- sages a storm than those of Chapman, in the passage where he speaks of,—

" The calme Before a tempest, when the silent uire Laies her soft earo close to the earth to hearken

For that she foams steals on to ravish her." Yet even to appreciate this, a man must himself have listened till he has many times caught Nature's undertones. Macaulay never

appreciated Wordsworth. Professor Shairp quotes his remarks on the "Prelude," where he speaks of "the old raptures about mountains and cataracts ; the old flimsy philosophy about the effects of scenery on the mind ; the old crazy metaphysics," &c., and remarks, "Truly we see but as we feel." And Macaulay, who knew so much, knew Nature, as she reveals herself to the true poet, not at all. Sunbeams cannot be weighed in hay-scales, but they have weight, for all that, as science will bear witness.

The ideal and the spiritual world are as actual, Mr. Shairp re- marks, as the mechanical, and "imagination and poetry do their best work when they body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us through the outer shell of nature's mechanism ;" but the greater part of his little book is occupied with what the author is pleased to call "the humbler task of find- ing out how imagination has actually worked with the plastic stuff supplied by nature," and he begins by tracing the process in pre- historic, pre-literary ages, and finds its record in "two fossil crea- tions, language and mythology." Not the least interesting of these pages is given to these points, and then he turns to Homer, who writes when the myth-creating instinct is past its prime, but from whom "you may catch the primitive physical meaning of the myth, shining through the anthropomorphic covering which it afterwards assumed." He quotes from Cordery's translation of the Iliad, the passage where Poseidon, the earth-encompassing, drives full upon the Trojan strand :— " He entered in, And there beneath his chariot drew to yoke Fast-flying horses, maned with flowing gold, Hooved with bright brass ; and girt himself in gold, Took golden goad, and sprang upon the oar ; So forth upon the billows, round whose path Huge monsters gambolled, gathering from the depth Afar, anear, and joyous know their lord ; Ocean for gladness stood in sunder cloven, Whilst lightly flew the steeds, nor 'neath the car The burnished axle moistened with the brine :— Thus tow'rd the fleet his coursers bore the god."

And here, Mr. Shairp remarks, we have, half-physical, half-mytho- logical, like Milton's half-created lion, the fore-part perfect, the hinder part still clay, a well-known natural appearance. After the storm-winds are laid, but while the sea still feels their power, it is thus that the high-crested breakers may be seen racing shore- wards, with their white manes backward streaming, and glorified with rainbow hues from a bright dawn or a splendid sunset, poured upon them from the land." Max Willer has made many of us see how truly "language is fossilpoetry " and any one, says Mr. Shairp, who will set himself to spell out those fossils and the meanings they contain, will find a wonderful record of the way in which the mind of man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into layers of thought as varied as any the geologist deciphers, filled with more subtle and marvellous formations than any animal or vegetable fossils. But the pleasure the poet brings will not bear labelling. We have followed Mr. Shairp with much interest through his little volume, and heartily commend it to our readers, but we have not really criticised it, only given a few of the thoughts it has suggested, leaving it to those who are inclined to follow in our steps to see what further he has to say of Homer and of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Milton, and notably of Wordsworth. We can promise a fresh pleasure in almost every page, while underlying the whole is the thought Tennyson has so well rendered :—

" God is Law, say the wise, 0 soul! and lot us rejoice,

For if He thunders by law, the thunder is yet His voice."