An illuminating volume which explores, as one of its themes, the relation of literature and the sciences is A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, to which reference has already been made. Yet this volume, so masterly in its attempt to explain simply the complex advances of modern science, is disappointing when it approaches literature. Whitehead does not seem to have examined the texts, or to have consulted those who have examined them; it is as if he did not consider the arts worthy of the methods which he applied in such a masterly way in exploring the sciences. 'In English literature', he wrote with reference to the romantics, 'the deepest thinkers of this school were Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley. Keats is an example of literature untouched by Science. We may neglect Coleridge's attempt at an explicit philosophical formulation. It was influential in his own generation, but in these lectures it is my object only to mention those elements of the thought of the past which stand for all time. Even with this limitation, only a selection is possible. For our purposes Coleridge is only important by his influence on Wordsworth. Thus Wordsworth and Shelley remain.
'Wordsworth was passionately absorbed in nature. It has been said of Spinoza that he was drunk with God. It is equally true that Wordsworth was drunk with nature. But he was a thoughtful, well-read man, with philosophical interests and sane even to the point of prosiness. In addition, he was a genius. He weakens his evidence by his dislike of science. We all remember his scorn of the poor man whom he somewhat hastily accuses of peeping and botanising on his mother's grave. Passage after passage could be quoted from him, expressing this repulsion. In this respect, his characteristic thought can be summed up in his phrase "we murder to dissect". '
In these two paragraphs, the only statement which could not be challenged is that Shelley was a thinker and interested in science. All the rest could be challenged, and, having been challenged, would be found wanting. I have already discussed Keats, and I have shown that the suggestion that he is 'untouched' by science is not supported by the evidence. The patronising reference to Coleridge is typical of the period at which Whitehead is writing, though it would not now be accepted as valid. One cannot avoid the suspicion that Whitehead was depending on the critics, and not on the text of Coleridge, for his alert mind would have seen further than this if he had examined the texts for himself. Coleridge was the friend of scientists, and knew the language of science, and more than any other creative writer of his time sought some reconciliation between science and literature.
There remains Wordsworth. Wordsworth is important in the whole argument. I must admit that Professor Douglas Bush, himself a distinguished historian of the romantic period, writing in his admirable Science and English Poetry, uses language very similar to Whitehead's. 'Wordsworth's thought or feeling', Professor Bush writes, 'is altogether non-scientific, and is not concerned with evidences of design or indeed with much except his own response to the idea of unity of Being.' For Professor Bush's work I have the profoundest respect, but here, on Wordsworth, I feel that his approach is devoid somewhat of that sense of justice which is normally such a feature of his criticism. Indeed, despite the fact that the best biography of Wordsworth was composed by Professor Harper of Princeton, I would venture the suggestion that no American, unless he has long lived in England, can do justice to Wordsworth, for Wordsworth's thought and the experience on which that thought is based, is intensely English in its origin.
It is surprising, though, to find Professor Bush describing A Poet's Epitaph as an anti-intellectual and anti-scientific outburst. The whole point of the poem, as I understand it, is that the poet was interested in individuals, and in experiences, and being Wordsworth, particularly in experiences derived from nature. He was not being in any precise sense of the term anti-scientific, but he was attacking all those who regarded humanity as a collective phenomenon from whom data may be derived:
Art thou a Statist in the vanOf public conflicts trained and bred?—First learn to love one living man;Then may'st thou think upon the dead.A Lawyer art thou?—draw not nigh!Go, carry to some fitter placeThe keenness of the practised eye,The hardness of that sallow face!
Incidentally Wordsworth used the word 'Statist' in its older sense of 'politician' or one skilled in affairs of State. The only stanza which has any direct relation to science is:
Physician art thou?—one, all eyes,Philosopher!—a fingering slave,One that would peep and botanizeUpon his mother's grave?
This is the very stanza to which Whitehead was referring in his extraordinary passage that Wordsworth, 'weakens his evidence by his dislike of science. We all remember his scorn of the poor man whom he somewhat hastily accuses of peeping and botanising on his mother's grave.' But this, as I understand it, is not the meaning of the passage. Wordsworth in this and the other stanzas was asserting, as I have suggested above, that the individual life and the validity of human experience and the sentiments that arise from them are important, whatever may be the call to abstract investigation by statesman, or lawyer, or doctor. He was claiming that the poet who regards each man as a separate person has a more valuable point of view than experts who categorize humanity on one mechanical basis or another. Science as such has but little place in the argument.
Wordsworth, it is true, was conscious of experiences, derived directly from nature which seemed to him to have a mystical quality and so penetrate more deeply into the burden of the mystery of the world than was in any other way possible. In some of the early poems he spoke boldly, recklessly if you will, in support and confirmation of these experiences. But the artist will follow the single experience or intuition and see where it leads him, particularly if his creative power permits him to give it a separate existence in a poetic design. So it was in The Tables Turned, the poem from which Whitehead quoted the phrase 'We murder to dissect'. The mood is clear if the poem is read as a whole, along with the companion poem 'Expostulation and Reply'.
One impulse from a vernal woodMay teach you more of man,Of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can.Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;Our meddling intellectMis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—We murder to dissect.
This is a mood, a poem of 'sentiment and reflection': it does not represent Wordsworth's normal, and certainly not his total attitude to learning.
Whitehead speaks of 'Wordsworth's greatest poem' by far as 'the first book of The Prelude'. Yet it is the whole of The Prelude that is Wordsworth's greatest poem, and it is there, among numerous other places, that he expressed his admiration for science, and particularly for Newton. Wordsworth was an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge. His bedroom window looked out on to the Chapel of Trinity. Newton's association with Trinity made a profound impression upon Wordsworth. The early version of The Prelude has a comment on Newton's statue in Trinity College:
And from my Bedroom, I in moonlight nightsCould see, right opposite, a few yards off,The Antechapel, where the Statue stoodOf Newton with his Prism and silent Face.
Later, on revision, Wordsworth expanded this passage until it read:
. . . . where the statue stoodOf Newton with his prism and silent face,The marble index of a mind for everVoyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.1
