THE ASCENDING EFFORT—­1910

Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry.  Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have gone on singing in a sweet strain.  How they dare do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation.  Not yet.  We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan.  As somebody—­perhaps a publisher—­said lately:  “Poetry is of no account now-a-days.”

But it is not totally neglected.  Those persons with gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind.  Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants and a scoffer The Loves of the Triangles, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science.  What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity?  All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons’ line about arc lamps:  “Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit.”

Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of science.  Poetry does not play its part.  Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon’s knife; but when he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table.  Here I am reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose.  Mr. H. G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was inspired a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife.  Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words:  “There shall be no more pain!” I advise you to look up that story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are.  His poetic imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say.  But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet—­were he born without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper.

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