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.

    7/26 (page 5)
    sciences flourished together in the Greek intellect, and though per- haps as far as modern times are concerned, till the advent of Ilaller and Goethe, the scientific and the poetic minds had not been blended, we have in Goethe a grand example of the genus, and in Browning, as I think, we have the noble forerunner of a new, strong race of poets of the first order, the interpretei's of the inquiring analytical soul of the age, in which no subject is too sacred to be questioned. No; were the physical sciences, like our factory chimneys, to exhale a breath poisonous to the surrounding flora of the poet's fancy, as some have thought, we should be terrible losers by all our ad- vancement in the productive arts, and Mr. Ruskin's lament over our decadence be more than justified. The spirit of the age has dissolved the legend of William Tell, and taken some of the romance out of the Tell coimtry, but it has given it a magnificent railway, which in a few hours brings the flowers and fruits of Italy to cheerless London slums. The poet of the future will see more romance in that fact than in many time-honoured legends. He will have to sing to us of the modern Spirit of the Alps—-Professor Tyndall, in his chalet questioning the rainbow, the glacier, the avalanche, and the mountain mist, and storm. The dragons are gone, and the knights that slew them live only in legendary tales; but the Epidemiologist, in his laboratory, doing battle with the germs of cholera and typhus, is a not less noble theme for the poet of the nineteenth century, though an artist might not think the subject would look so well on his canvas. It was a poet, Lucretius, who eighteen hundred years ago anticipated the atomic theory. We owe him a debt of gratitude for proving in his own person that poetry is not incompatible with science, and that it is quite possible for a man to investigate the laws of nature without blinding his vision to the loveliness of the ideal world. He sang the reign of law in the universe, that our misery or our happiness was not dependent on the caprice of the gods, but on the nature of things. This man was the true poet, the creator, and it has taken the world eighteen centuries to prove as facts what his prophetic spirit foresaw. We live now in an age of technical accuracy. The time of the poet's licence is past, and poetry, if not now scientifically accurate, is to us of this age foolishness. Some one has said that a poet who was not mad was no poet at all. If Mr. Browning has any madness, it is in his method, never in his matter. His is emphatically the sound mind in the sound body, he is the poet of downright common sense ; his ima- gination never runs away with him, though possibly it is exhausted in bis style. Scientific students of Browning must often think what a