Watchers Of The Sky Part 9

V

NEWTON

I

If I saw farther, 'twas because I stood On giant shoulders," wrote the king of thought, Too proud of his great line to slight the toils Of his forebears. He turned to their dim past, Their fading victories and their fond defeats, And knelt as at an altar, drawing all Their strengths into his own; and so went forth With all their glory s.h.i.+ning in his face, To win new victories for the age to come.

So, where Copernicus had destroyed the dream We called our world; where Galileo watched Those ancient firmaments melt, a thin blue smoke Into a vaster night; where Kepler heard Only stray fragments, isolated chords Of that tremendous music which should bind All things anew in one, Newton arose And carried on their fire.

Around him reeled Through lingering fumes of hate and clouds of doubt, Lit by the afterglow of the Civil War, The dissolute throngs of that Walpurgis night Where all the cynical spirits that deny Danced with the vicious l.u.s.ts that drown the soul In flesh too gross for Circe or her swine.

But, in his heart, he heard one instant voice.

_"On with the torch once more, make all things new, Build the new heaven and earth, and save the world."_

Ah, but the infinite patience, the long months Lavished on tasks that, to the common eye, Were insignificant, never to be crowned With great results, or even with earth's rewards.

Could Rembrandt but have painted him, in those hours Making his first a.n.a.lysis of light Alone, there, in his darkened Cambridge room At Trinity! Could he have painted, too, The secret glow, the mystery, and the power, The sense of all the thoughts and unseen spires That soared to heaven around him!

He stood there, Obscure, unknown, the shadow of a man In darkness, like a grey dishevelled ghost, --Bare-throated, down at heel, his last night's supper Littering his desk, untouched; his glimmering face, Under his tangled hair, intent and still,-- Preparing our new universe.

He caught The sunbeam striking through that bullet-hole In his closed shutter--a round white spot of light Upon a small dark screen.

He interposed A prism of gla.s.s. He saw the sunbeam break And spread upon the screen its rainbow band Of disentangled colours, all in scale Like notes in music; first, the violet ray, Then indigo, trembling softly into blue; Then green and yellow, quivering side by side; Then orange, mellowing richly into red.

Then, in the screen, he made a small, round hole Like to the first; and through it pa.s.sed once more Each separate coloured ray. He let it strike Another prism of gla.s.s, and saw each hue Bent at a different angle from its path, The red the least, the violet ray the most; But all in scale and order, all precise As notes in music. Last, he took a lens, And, pa.s.sing through it all those coloured rays, Drew them together again, remerging all On that dark screen, in one white spot of light.

So, watching, testing, proving, he resolved The seeming random glories of our day Into a constant harmony, and found How in the whiteness of the sunlight sleep Compounded, all the colours of the world.

He saw how raindrops in the clouds of heaven Breaking the light, revealed that sevenfold arch Of colours, ranged as on his own dark screen, Though now they spanned the mountains and wild seas.

Then, where that old-world order had gone down Beneath a darker deluge, he beheld Gleams of the great new order and recalled --Fraught with new meaning and a deeper hope-- That covenant which G.o.d made with all mankind Throughout all generations: _I will set My bow in the cloud, that henceforth ye may know How deeper than the wreckage of your dreams Abides My law, in beauty and in power. _

II

Yet for that exquisite balance of the mind, He, too, must pay the price. He stood alone Bewildered, at the sudden a.s.sault of fools On this, his first discovery.

"I have lost The most substantial blessing of my quiet To follow a vain shadow.

I would fain Attempt no more. So few can understand, Or read one thought. So many are ready at once To swoop and sting. Indeed I would withdraw For ever from philosophy." So he wrote In grief, the mightiest mind of that new age.

Let those who'd stone the Roman Curia For all the griefs that Galileo knew Remember the dark hours that well-nigh quenched The splendour of that spirit. He could not sleep.

Yet, with that patience of the G.o.d in man That still must seek the Splendour whence it came, Through midnight hours of mockery and defeat, In loneliness and hopelessness and tears, He laboured on. He had no power to see How, after many years, when he was dead, Out of this new discovery men should make An instrument to explore the farthest stars And, delicately dividing their white rays, Divine what metals in their beauty burned, Extort red secrets from the heart of Mars, Or measure the molten iron in the sun.

He bent himself to nearer, lowlier, tasks; And seeing, first, that those deflected rays, Though it were only by the faintest bloom Of colour, imperceptible to our eyes, Must dim the vision of Galileo's gla.s.s, He made his own new weapon of the sky,-- That first reflecting telescope which should hold In its deep mirror, as in a breathless pool The undistorted image of a star.

III

In that deep night where Galileo groped Like a blind giant in dreams to find what power Held moons and planets to their constant road Through vastness, ordered like a moving fleet; What law so married them that they could not clash Or sunder, but still kept their rhythmic pace As if those ancient tales indeed were true And some great angel helmed each gliding sphere; Many had sought an answer. Many had caught Gleams of the truth; and yet, as when a torch Is waved above a mult.i.tude at night, And shows wild streams of faces, all confused, But not the single law that knits them all Into an ordered nation, so our skies For all those fragmentary glimpses, whirled In chaos, till one eagle-spirit soared, Found the one law that bound them all in one, And through that awful unity upraised The soul to That which made and guides them all.

Did Newton, dreaming in his orchard there Beside the dreaming Witham, see the moon Burn like a huge gold apple in the boughs And wonder why should moons not fall like fruit?

Or did he see as those old tales declare (Those fairy-tales that gather form and fire Till, in one jewel, they pack the whole bright world) A ripe fruit fall from some immortal tree Of knowledge, while he wondered at what height Would this earth-magnet lose its darkling power?

Would not the fruit fall earthward, though it grew High o'er the hills as yonder brightening cloud?

Would not the selfsame power that plucked the fruit Draw the white moon, then, sailing in the blue?

Then, in one flash, as light and song are born, And the soul wakes, he saw it--this dark earth Holding the moon that else would fly through s.p.a.ce To her sure orbit, as a stone is held In a whirled sling; and, by the selfsame power, Her sister planets guiding all their moons; While, exquisitely balanced and controlled In one vast system, moons and planets wheeled Around one sovran majesty, the sun.

IV

Light and more light! The spark from heaven was there, The flash of that reintegrating fire Flung from heaven's altars, where all light is born, To feed the imagination of mankind With vision, and reveal all worlds in one.

But let no dreamer dream that his great work Sprang, armed, like Pallas from the Thunderer's brain.

With infinite patience he must test and prove His vision now, in those clear courts of Truth Whose absolute laws (bemocked by shallower minds As less than dreams, less than the faithless faith That fears the Truth, lest Truth should slay the dream) Are man's one guide to his transcendent heaven; For there's no wandering splendour in the soul, But in the highest heaven of all is one With absolute reality. None can climb Back to that Fount of Beauty but through pain.

Long, long he toiled, comparing first the curves Traced by the cannon-ball as it soared and fell With that great curving road across the sky Traced by the sailing moon.

Was earth a loadstone Holding them to their paths by that dark force Whose mystery men have cloaked beneath a name?

Yet, when he came to test and prove, he found That all the great deflections of the moon, Her s.h.i.+ning cadences from the path direct, Were utterly inharmonious with the law Of that dark force, at such a distance acting, Measured from earth's own centre....

For three long years, Newton withheld his hope Until that day when light was brought from France, New light, new hope, in one small glistening fact, Clear-cut as any diamond; and to him Loaded with all significance, like the point Of light that shows where constellations burn.

Picard in France--all glory to her name Who is herself a light among all lands-- Had measured earth's diameter once more With exquisite precision.

To the throng, Those few corrected ciphers, his results, Were less than nothing; yet they changed the world.

For Newton seized them and, with trembling hands, Began to work his problem out anew.

Then, then, as on the page those figures turned To hieroglyphs of heaven, and he beheld The moving moon, with awful cadences Falling into the path his law ordained, Even to the foot and second, his hand shook And dropped the pencil.

"Work it out for me,"

He cried to those around him; for the weight Of that celestial music overwhelmed him; And, on his page, those burning hieroglyphs Were Thrones and Princ.i.p.alities and Powers...

For far beyond, immeasurably far Beyond our sun, he saw that river of suns We call the Milky Way, that glittering host Powdering the night, each grain of solar blaze Divided from its neighbour by a gulf Too wide for thought to measure; each a sun Huger than ours, with its own fleet of worlds, Visible and invisible. Those bright throngs That seemed dispersed like a defeated host Through blindly wandering skies, now, at the word Of one great dreamer, height o'er height revealed Hints of a vaster order, and moved on In boundless intricacies of harmony Around one centre, deeper than all suns, The burning throne of G.o.d.

V

He could not sleep. That intellect, whose wings Dared the cold ultimate heights of s.p.a.ce and Time Sank, like a wounded eagle, with dazed eyes Back, headlong through the clouds to throb on earth.

What shaft had pierced him? That which also pierced His great forebears--the hate of little men.

They flocked around him, and they flung their dust Into the sensitive eyes and laughed to see How dust could blind them.

If one p.r.i.c.kling grain Could so put out his vision and so torment That delicate brain, what weakness! How the mind That seemed to dwarf us, dwindles! Is he mad?

So buzzed the fools, whose ponderous mental wheels Nor dust, nor grit, nor stones, nor rocks could irk Even for an instant.

Newton could not sleep, But all that careful malice could design Was blindly fostered by well-meaning folly, And great sane folk like Mr. Samuel Pepys Canva.s.sed his weakness and slept sound all night.

For little Samuel with his rosy face Came chirping into a coffee-house one day Like a plump robin, "Sir, the unhappy state Of Mr. Isaac Newton grieves me much.

Last week I had a letter from him, filled With strange complainings, very curious hints, Such as, I grieve to say, are common signs --I have observed it often--of worse to come.

He said that he could neither eat nor sleep Because of all the embroilments he was in, Hinting at nameless enemies. Then he begged My pardon, very strangely. I believe Physicians would confirm me in my fears.

'Tis very sad.... Only last night, I found Among my papers certain lines composed By--whom d'you think?--My lord of Halifax (Or so dear Mrs. Porterhouse a.s.sured me) Expressing, sir, the uttermost satisfaction In Mr. Newton's talent. Sir, he wrote Answering the charge that science would put out The light of beauty, these very handsome lines:

'When Newton walked by Witham stream There fell no chilling shade To blight the drifting naiad's dream Or make her garland fade.

The mist of sun was not less bright That crowned Urania's hair.

He robbed it of its colder light, But left the rainbow there.'