1920] on Science and Poetry 207 



1812 to 1815'. And still less have its distinguished audiences con- 

 sisted only of the acolytes of science, for Tennyson and Browning 

 attended lectures here ; and so I think has every man of eminence, at 

 some time or other. And I will say this, as a first approximation to 

 my subject of Science and Poetry, that it is not only the right but 

 the duty of the spirit to explore every direction, if only to learn the 

 limits of things. In intellectual affairs, the cobbler shall not always 

 stick to his own last, lest he become only a mere journeyman. 



It is true that much specialization is needed in order to reach 

 technical perfection, both in art and in science ; but technical per- 

 fection should be only the flower of a tree the roots and branches of 

 which spread on every side in the air and soil of experience. There 

 is a limit to the merits of specialization ; nor should we agree with 

 the dictum, which I have seen stated, that every great poet must 

 be a professional poet, that is, a literary man, and that every man of 

 science should concern himself only with test-tubes and microscopes. 

 Still more do I abhor the superstition that every branch of every 

 art and science should be further sub-divided. This is not the teach- 

 ing of history, so far as we possess the histories of the greatest men. 

 As everyone knows, Michael Angelo was sculptor, painter, archi- 

 tect, and poet. Leonardo da Vinci was painter, mathematician, 

 mechanician, military engineer, and father of many inventions. 

 Descartes created not only analytical geometry. When Peter Paul 

 Rubens was ambassador in England, an English courtier called on 

 him and found him seated at his easel. " So His Excellency the 

 ambassador plays at being a painter," exclaimed the courtier. "No," 

 replied Rubens, " His Excellency the painter plays at being an 

 ambassador." In the days of Voltaire, philosophy contained all the 

 sciences and discussed all the arts. Goethe commenced, not only a 

 literature, but the theory of evolution. I wonder in what witch's- 

 cauldron of folly the absurdity was brewed that poetry and science 

 are enemies. Shelley tasted several sciences, and, when he was in 

 Italy, proposed to make a careful study of mathematics. The poems 

 of Coleridge were indeed flowers that peeped out from among the 

 rocks of his philosophy. Keats was a medical student, and I am 

 convinced would have shown, had he lived, how poetry may descend 

 from the shrine of science ; and he has already nearly summed up my 

 theme of to-day in his apothegm, " Beauty is truth, truth beauty." 

 Hugo, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and especially Arnold, all 

 followed science more or less closely. Indeed, it is never among the 

 greater poets that we notice any antipathy to science, in its broadest 

 or its narrowest sense. Perhaps sometimes poets may be somewhat 

 chilled by the cold pure water of science, but that is only when they 

 were (as poets are apt to be) tempted by the foaming but less whole- 

 some drinks of, let us say, nescience. It is the lower type of what 

 may be called literary poetry which, like much of our purely literary 

 philosophy, endeavours to attack science. 



