NATURE 



[May 20, 1922 



the coast of America and to the western islands of 

 the Arctic archipelago. They also point to great 

 possibihties in the way of more detailed oceano- 

 graphical work by sledge journeys in the future. 



Hugh Robert Mill. 



An Epic of Science. 



The Torch-hearers. By Alfred Noyes. Pp. lx + 281. 

 (Edinburgh and London : W. Blackwood and Sons.) 

 75. dd. net. 



EPIC is perhaps too large a word to apply to 

 this beautiful book^ though Mr. Noyes himself 

 suggests it in his preface. There is, as he says, " an 

 epic unity — a unity of purpose and endeavour" — in 

 the story of scientific discovery, and " the great 

 moments of science have an intense human interest 

 and belong essentially to the creative imagination of 

 poetry." The world of science and of poetry, therefore, 

 both owe Mr. Noyes a great debt of gratitude for his 

 attempt — the first of the kind — to bring them together ; 

 and, apart altogether from the high scope which he 

 announces, every reader who submits himself fairly 

 to the influence of his verse will be carried away by 

 the charm of the language, the human, sometimes 

 humorous, touches of character, and the triumphs, 

 mixed with pathos, of the story. 



We are told in the preface that this volume is the 

 first of a trilogy, though the subjects of the two which 

 are to follow are not revealed. This one deals with 

 the pioneers of astronomy, and the other two might 

 well be given, one to the discoverers of physics and 

 chemistry, ending in the marvels of the electrons, and 

 the other to the story of evolution, linking the record 

 of geology with the gradual establishment of the 

 continuity of organic structure. These we shall await 

 with intense interest, and with full confidence that Mr. 

 Noyes will do justice to the broad outlines of the 

 theme and its human bearings, without too much 

 concern as to the absolute accuracy of his account 

 in details. Of course there are mistakes here and 

 there ; Kepler's laws are not quite accurately given. 

 But what a tour deforce to present them at all, approxi- 

 mately and attractively, in poetic form ! Of course, 

 too, there are plenty of prose-like lines, about which 

 some of the critics in the press have made merry. 

 But at the most they are a very small proportion of 

 the whole, far smaller than in any of the long narrative 

 poems of Wordsworth. 



Speaking of Wordsworth, it is a little strange that 

 Mr. Noyes does not invoke his great authority in 

 favour of his enterprise in this trilogy. He invokes 

 NO. 2742, VOL. 109] 



Matthew Arnold, who prophesied forty years ago that 

 poetry would carry on the purer fire of human thought 

 and express in new terms the eternal ideas of faith and 

 hope which must be the constant stay of the human 

 race. But Wordsworth, in the Preface to the second 

 edition of the " Lyrical Ballads," came nearer still to 

 Mr. Noyes's idea. He showed how the Poet, being in 

 that respect the Man, par excellence, looked always 

 " before and after " and held our human ideals together. 

 He carried everywhere relationship and love, and wove 

 into the fabric of his vision all that mankind has ever 

 done or known or dreamt. Thus the material of science 

 is just as fit an object of the poet's art as any upon 

 which it is more usually employed. " If the time 

 should ever come when what is now called science, 

 thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, 

 as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will 

 lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and 

 will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and 

 genuine inmate of the household of man." 



More than a hundred years have passed since Words- 

 worth made that prophecy. The volume of the poetry 

 written, either in this country or abroad, with that 

 inspiration is but slight, Tennyson gave us some 

 thoughts suggested by the doctrine of evolution, 

 Matthew Arnold some others. On the whole. Sully 

 Prudhomme has come nearest to Wordsworth's ideal 

 of the poet inspired by science, but it takes with him 

 the guise of a stern, sad doctrine of resignation and 

 fortitude under inexorable laws. It remained for 

 Mr. Noyes to strike a new note, of triumph in the 

 growth of the human spirit, of patient search for 

 truth, of romantic beauty in the linking up of relation- 

 ships between the heavenly bodies, which have inspired 

 the worship and wonder of man since he first looked 

 upwards. 



The figures Mr. Noyes has chosen for the protagonists 

 of his drama have all some points of personal interest, 

 as well as permanent importance in the building up 

 of science. These personal aspects he rightly stresses. 

 Copernicus is described upon his death-bed, waiting 

 for the issue of his long-delayed work. Kepler is the 

 fantastic poet, visited by Sir Henry Wotton, who 

 quotes verse for verse. The trial of Galileo^dramatic- 

 ally the most effective thing in the poem — is given 

 in the form of letters from his daughter Celeste and 

 from others, friends and foes, somewhat in the manner 

 of Browning. 



It is tempting to quote some of the most telling lines 

 in the poem ; one reviewer, at any rate, has read 

 some of them several times already. Two extracts 

 only shall be given, not by any means as among the most 

 beautiful, but as conveying the dominating spirit of 

 the whole. The Prologue raises the question, is there 



