John Campbell Shairp

“ Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the minds that were still young when this century opened, and added each a fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision into the life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they had never done before, and to love her with a new passion. ”

“ Were the scientific view of the Universe to become the popular one, were all men to regard the sight of the heavens and the earth, not with natural spontaneous eyes, but as the chemist, the astronomer, and the geologist teach us to regard them,—were scientific truth, in short, to supersede surface appearance,—would it be any longer possible to feel, as we look on the face of things, that free and intuitive delight out of which Poetry has hitherto been born? In a word, to express the fear which many hearts have felt, must not the march of Science trample out Poetry? ”

“ I have said that the range of Poetry is boundless as the universe. Whenever the soul comes into living contact with fact and truth, whenever it realizes these with more than common vividness, there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of emotion. And the expression of that thrill, that glow, is Poetry. The range of poetic emotion may thus be as wide as the range of human thought, as existence. It does not follow from this that all objects are alike fit to awaken poetry. The nobler the objects the nobler will be the poetry they awaken, when they fall on the heart of a true poet. ”

“ For are not the visible earth and skies the storehouse from which imagination furnishes herself with her earliest forms, and draws her broadest as well as most delicate resemblances? Are these not the substance round which the affections twine many of their first and finest tendrils? Next to the household faces, is not the visible world the earliest existence that we know, the last we lose sight of in our earthly sojourn? All his life long man is encompassed with it, and never gets beyond its reach. He lies an infant in the lap of Nature before he has awakened to any consciousness. ”

“ Neither morality nor religion will he get out of beauty taken by itself. If out of the splendid vision spread before him—the sight of earth, sea, and sky, of the clouds, the gleams, the shadows—man could arrive directly at the knowledge of Him who is behind them, how is it that in early ages whole nations, with these sights continually before them, never reached any moral conception of God? how is it that even in recent times many of the most gifted spirits, who have been most penetrated by that vision, and have given it most magnificent expression, have been in revolt against religious faith? ”

“ In the poet’s mind, at least, it must have passed out of the region of mere head-notions into the warmer atmosphere of imaginative intuition, and, vitalized there, must have bodied itself into beautiful form and flushed into glowing color. For, to repeat once again what has been said at the outset, Poetry originates in the vivid contact of the soul—not of the understanding merely, but of the whole soul—with reality of any kind; and it is the utterance of the joy that arises, of the glow that is felt, from such soul-contact with the reality of things. ”

“ This earth which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms, will one day burst forth into a new world of light and glory. Who would think, except from his experience of former Springs all through his life, who could conceive two or three months before that it was possible that the face of Nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so splendid and varied? How different is a prospect when leaves are on it, and off it! How unlikely it would seem before the event that the dry and naked branches should suddenly be clothed with what is so bright and so refreshing! ”

“ However we may for a moment regard Nature by herself, we must not forget that in reality we can never contemplate it apart from the other two entities on which it depends; that Nature as mere isolated appearance, without a mind to contemplate and a power to support it, is meaningless; that all the three objects of knowledge coexist at every moment, interpenetrate and modify each other at every turn of thought; and that it is to the light reflected on Nature from the other two that she owes large part of her meaning, her tenderness, her suggestiveness, her sublimity. ”

“ And here we see how finely Science and Poetry may interact and minister each to the other. If it be the duty of Science beneath seeming confusion to search for order, and its happiness to find it everywhere,—an order more vast, more various, more deeply penetrating, more intimate and minute than uninstructed men ever dreamed of,—wherever it reveals the presence of this, does it not open new fields for the imagination to appropriate? For what is order but the presence of thought, the ground of all beauty, the witness to the actual nearness of an upholding and moving Spirit? ”

“ As the clear windless lake, spread out on a still autumn day, takes into its steady bosom every feature of the surrounding mountains, every hue of the overhanging sky, so is his soul spread out to receive into itself the whole imagery of Nature. When this wise passiveness has been undergone, what images, sentiments, thoughts the poet will give back depends on the capaciousness, the depth, the clearness of soul within him. The highest poetry of Nature is that which receives most inspiration from the spectacle, which extracts out of it the largest number of great and true thoughts. ”

“ There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful, fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. ”

“ And our wisdom is to receive her native impulses without imposing on her our caprices. Hence it is that Nature is to man a supporting, calming, cooling, and invigorating power. So it was that at this time he felt both emotion and calmness come to him from Nature, from the one energy to seek the truth, from the other that happy stillness which fits the mind to receive truth when it comes unsought. With clearer conviction than ever, he now saw in Nature a power, which is the shape and image of right reason—reason, in its highest sense, embodied and made visible. ”

“ It is because they sought in Nature alone, that which alone she was never intended to give. It is because the spectacle of the outward world, however splendid, if we begin with it, and insist on extracting our main [84] light from it, is powerless to satisfy our human need, to speak any word which fits in to man’s moral yearning. Nay, Nature taken alone will often appear no benign mother at all, no dwelling-place of a kindly spirit, but an inexorable and cruel Sphinx, who rears children and makes them glad a little while, only that she may the more relentlessly destroy them. ”

“ Would it not be well if we could win back the truth, of which a dull mechanical or merely logical way of thinking has long robbed us, that the outward world, with all its movements, is not a mere dead machine, going by ropes and pulleys and cog-wheels, but an organism full of a mysterious life, which defies our most subtle analysis, and escapes us when placed in the crucible? This feeling, that things are alive and not dead, rests at the bottom of all mythology, the one root of truth underlying the huge mass of fable. ”

“ He had felt, and after reflection had made the feelings a rooted and habitual conviction, that the world without him, the thing we call Nature, is not a dead machine, but something all pervaded by a life—sometimes he calls it a soul; that this living Nature was a unity; that there was that in it which awoke in him feelings of calmness, awe, and tenderness; that this infinite life in Nature was not something which he attributed to Nature, but that it existed external to him, independent of his thoughts and feelings, and was in no way the creation of his own mind ”

“ The poet gathers images from every element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though unconscious love. ”