THE ROADS TO TRUTH 79 are satisfied with conventional verisimilitude.* Science, in its pursuit of truth, rejects every piece of evidence which cannot be definitely proved, and which is not directly pertinent to the purpose of the inquiry. Art, in its pursuit of truth, starts from a different point of view. The science of weather, for instance, is the subject of meteorological speculation; the artistic view of weather discovers quite another kind of truth. The beauty of the sun and rain are as essential to their complete comprehension as the scientific explanation of these phenomena. The painter or poet who succeeds in revealing that beauty is likewise increasing knowledge; he is interpreting nature to man, and, no less than the meteorologist, he contributes to our knowledge of the truth. "Let us build altars," cried Emerson, "to the Beautiful Necessity." The "Beautiful Necessity" is God, under whatever name He may be designated. Science, seeking sensational truth, reaches God by the road of observation, reaches a point in its * As a matter of opinion, it may be suggested that we are satisfied with considerably less. When Lord Rosebery, for instance, made a speech at Chesterfield in December 1901, no two newspapers agreed as to the value of his utterance. Yet they must have possessed a true worth in politics as well as a multitude of relative and conventional values. Similarly, every new book has its true place in literature as well as the number of false places to which the critics assign it. inquiry somewhere high up among the hills, where the beaten pathway ceases, but the rocky prospect extends, and the philosopher admits that he has entered the region of the Unknowable. Art, pursuing emotional truth, reaches God by the road of interpretation, and, while science calls His work necessary, art discovers it to be beautiful. But the necessary and the beautiful are one good, thus vindicating—in a critical sense transcending the "higher criticism"-the verse of Genesis which states that "God saw everything that he had made, and lo! exceeding good." For Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." * § 29. Scientific and Poetical Truth: The Sun.— To make this distinction clearer, we may select a few examples. Take, first, the following paragraphs from the article on Astronomy in the Encyclopædia Britannica : "The sun is constantly shifting his position among the stars. If we observe the altitude of any star, or group of stars, above the Eastern horizon at sunset, we shall find, on making the same observation a few days afterwards, that its elevation is considerably increased, and that it has approached nearer to the meridian. At the end of three months it will appear at sunset on Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn. * THE ASTRONOMERS' SUN 81 the meridian, and from that time continue to advance nearer and nearer to the sun, till it is at last concealed by the splendour of his rays. After remaining for some time invisible, it will again make its appearance in the morning to the westward of the sun, and its distance from him will continue to increase daily, till, at the end of a year, it has made a complete circuit of the sky, and regained the position it occupied at the time of the first observation. . . . The result of constant experience shows that the declination reaches its maximum on the south side of the equator about the 22nd of December. . . . From this time it gradually diminishes till about the 21st of March, when the sun reaches the plane of the equator. . . . His declination or meridianal altitude continues to increase till about the 22nd of June, when he becomes stationary, and then again. shapes his course towards the equator." Now, here are matters of fact, the accumulated evidence of science, laboriously observed, and gathered, and sifted by generations of patient truth-seekers, watching the stars by night, and bringing to bear on their facts of observation minds trained to reason and infer through months, and years, and centuries of investigation. contrast with this point of view, or, rather, with the mode of presentation selected by this learned F But writer, four lines from a poem by Catullus written nineteen hundred years ago: "Sed ubi oris aurei Sol radiantibus oculis Perhaps you do not understand the Latin, though the sweeping splendour of its language must effect you even as you read it, and I add, therefore, an inadequate attempt at translation, in order to convey the wonderful imagery: But when Sun, the golden-visaged, with his radiant-beaming eyes, Shone across the white air-spaces, lonely wastes, and savage sea, Drave the shades of night before him-hark! the hooves of mettled steeds Then did Sleep, as Attis wakened, sudden turn and swiftly flee. Add to these two modes of presentation an account of sunset, taken this time from a Christian poet of the middle of the last century. It is from an ode "composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty" by that prince of interpreters, William Wordsworth: "No sound is uttered,—but a deep And solemn harmony pervades THE POETS' SUN Of beamy radiance, that imbues Herds range along the mountain side; Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread 883 It is, of course, open to us to say that Catullus and Wordsworth are scientifically inaccurate. Every epithet in their wonderful descriptive lines might be disputed as a matter of fact, and the man of science might refer the poets to his article in the Encyclopædia in order to dismiss the fanciful accounts of the sun's mettlesome steeds, and the mixture of Heaven's pomp with the clay of an English pasture. And, equally, the poet might complain that the learned account of the sun's meridianal altitude omits altogether the true significance of that luminary to us who live by its light. It is not for the sake of its obliquity, nor for love of the angle of its declination, that humanity once worshipped the sun, and still, familiar though it is by its daily rising and setting, treats it as a kind of god, imploring its presence |