Browning as a scientific poet / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
[1885]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Browning as a scientific poet / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    scientist he would have made, just as readers of Professor Tyndall are always exclaiming, Here is the poet of science! Hear what he himself says of the experimental philosopher : He lives a life of the senses, using his hands, eyes, and ears in his experiments, but is constantly being carried beyond the margin of the senses. His mind must realise the subsensible world, and possess a pictorial power; if the picture so formed be correct, the phenomena he is investigating are accounted for. Imagination with him does not sever itself from the woi'ld of fact; this is the storehouse from which all its pictures are drawn, and the magic of its art consists not in creating things anew, but in so changing the magnitude, position, and other relations of sensible things as to fit them for the requirements of the intellect in the subsensible world. Poets have been allowed to exercise a riotous power in dealing capriciously with facts. But if a well-ordered and disciplined scientific method restrain this riot and caprice, I don't think the result is any the less true poetry. Perhaps the fact that Browning is restrained by his science from playing havoc with phe- nomena may account for the unrestrained riot and caprice of his words. On Tyndall's theory this may really be Bi'owning's safety- valve. Christopher North and the Ettrick shepherd in the twenty-second of the Nodes AvibrosianoB so exactly and admirably place the ques- tion in its proper light, that I may be pardoned if I quote a few sentences. The shepherd asks, What think ye, sir, o' the dogmas that high imagination is incompatible wi' high intellect, and that as science flourishes poetry decays'! North replies, The dogmata of dunces beyond the reach of re- demption. A man may have a high intellect with little or no imagination; but he cannot have a high imagination with little or no intellect. The intellect of Homer, Dante, Milton, or Shakespeare, was higher than that of Aristotle, Newton, and Bacon. When ele- vated by feeling into imagination, their intellect becomes transcendent, and thus were they poets, the noblest name by far and away that belongs to any of the children of men. What is science 1 True knowledge of mind and matter, as far as it is permitted to us to know anything truly of the world without and the world within us, congenial in their co existence. What is poetiy 1 The true exhibi- tion in musical and metrical speech of the thoughts of humanity when coloured by its feelings throughout the whole range of the physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual regions of its being. Poetry and science are identical—or rather, that as imagination is the highest