They may have reckoned without the fugitive nature of mystery, which has now been chased to the very boundaries of the conceivable universe and, in the work of some physicists, has turned to face us in the name of God.But Heath-Stubbs’s argument may give a clue to the durable illusion that the artistic enterprise is fundamentally antithetical to the scientific one, that they aren’t just different expressions of the same metaphorical instinct. It’s true that for most of its history the scientific act of picturing has had to correspond to our perceptions (even if we often learn to alter our perceptions to fit new pictures) while the artistic one can readily be at odds with them. He points out, for instance, that Homeric poetry contains evidence about the prevailing cosmology at the time of its composition, not in its content alone but in its poetics. In this sense Keats and Blake’s hostility is understandable as a terrible suppressed recognition that Newton’s ideas would have consequences for their own imaginations, that the universe had changed irretrievably. It was a physicist, not a poet, who wrote recently that we might come to look upon the face of God.The poet John Heath-Stubbs has argued, in the preface to Poems of Science, that science’s success in the world of observable reality drove art inward, to subjective experience.
This has a tempting neatness to it, but the idea that apprehension of the world is a zero-sum game, that when scientists win ground artists have to retreat and find other territory, is surely too simple. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend has suggested, in contrast, that science and art share a common ground, that they rest on a single underlying world view. Even those who were happy to see gnomes evicted from the mines must have quailed before the scope of Newton’s ideas. Wordsworth captures the sense of awe when he writes of the bust of Newton in Trinity, Cambridge: “The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” But science in our own century is very different in its ambitions and metaphors – indeed it sometimes seems intent on restocking the mine with gnomes, weaving new rainbows – with phantom particles, alternative worlds, inherent uncertainty. Poets’ relationships with the new science were complex: subversive, fascinated, satirical, experimental even But they weren’t simply hostile.
Keats and Blake were the exception, not the rule.And if their metaphors for science were prejudicial in their own time, how much more so now? It’s easy to understand how Newtonian cosmology, a science of strict cause and effect, might assail the transcendental mind – the massy planets reduced to billiard balls, the mysteries of nature to a clanking set of cogs and levers. Donald Davie has usefully shown, in an essay on “The Language of Science and the Language of Literature” that, well before Keats and Blake, poets had responded to scientific discoveries with far greater confidence than the old story would suggest, that they saw the language of science as a rich new source of language (the words acrimony, volatile, and insipid, to give one small example, all start their life as narrow technical terms). They have taken their place on the plinth.And while Keats and Blake speak to real terror, their strictures are far from being universal in their own age or enduring in ours. The myth of the mad scientist is actually a variation on a far more ancient theme – that of hubris, a fatal over-reaching. It is a variation, moreover, that implicitly recognises that science has recently made most of the running in terms of human ambition. Priests, politicians and generals used to be those who suffered from hubris, when religion, politics and military violence were the prevailing modes of asserting control over the world.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that scientists should present a ready target now. It’s true that there is no shortage of examples of technological dread, from Daedalus to Jurassic Park But I wonder whether there isn’t a category confusion here. Fay Weldon described the old battle-lines only this weekend, asking why it was that film-makers and writers so often depicted scientists as “irresponsible and destructive”. / Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -/ Unweave a rainbow.”William Blake’s mind recoiled from the new mechanics too:”I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe / And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire / Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth / In heavy wreathes folds over every nation”.This Luddite splinter group among poets has often been taken to represent a far wider constituency than it actually does, giving rise to the conventional picture of artists irreconcilably at odds with scientists, as if the two groups were grappling for a monopoly franchise to explain the world. He answered his question balefully:
“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven.
