Magic and wonder in literature (cont.)

Part 4 of John Erskine's essay by the same name from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*

Perhaps the contrast has been indicated sufficiently between the universe of law which we are supposed to believe in, and the world of magic which we like to read about. What does this inconsistency mean? Perhaps it is rash to venture on so large a question in so short a space, but in this balancing of magic against wonder a conviction steals on one that the love of magic, though it may be stupid, indicates something far higher than stupidity. The connotations of the words themselves convince us. Magic suggests power, however obtained, whereas wonder suggests no power at all. Is there such merit in enlightenment if one is to be, after all, only an enlightened bystander? The magician at least wanted control of experience — and so do we! Magic sought to engage the help of alien forces, foreign gods, in the problems of this world; we, believing that no gods are alien to our universe, ought logically to make the remotest force effective in our daily aspirations; we cannot stop with a passive wonder. Or if we do, our sympathies, and the sympathy of our fellows, will return to magic, which with all its defects dreamt of power.

When we consider how many noble intellects have tried in vain to take from the race its love of magic, and to teach it instead the habit of wonder, the long failure can be explained, I think, by the fact that the ideal of wonder has rarely included the ideal of control, without which we refuse to be fascinated. This is true of the philosophers, who though they have sought to correct all haphazard and irresponsible impressions of the universe, yet have so far failed, in that they have not greatly disturbed man's love of magical stories. Some of them, Francis Bacon, for example, have opened up visions of scientific control more magical than magic itself; we shall owe it to them eventually that our magic and our wonder have become identical. But most philosophers have been content to attack the ignorance of magic without satisfying its aspiration; and the wonder which they would substitute, though nobly imaginative, has stopped short of that power men yearn for. Lucretius serves for example, whose poem on the Nature of Things sought to take away our fear of death by removing our faith in immortality—or, as he would say, our superstition. This intended service has not roused the gratitude of mankind. What stirs us in the poem is the vision of an ordered world, and an impassioned rebuke that the vision has not stirred us before. To feed our sense of wonder we have had recourse to fairy tales; but, says the poet, "Look up at the bright and unsullied hue of heaven, and the stars which it holds within it, wandering about, and the moon and the sun's light of dazzling brilliancy; if all these things were now for the first time suddenly presented to mortals, what could have been named that would be more marvelous?" Here is an escape from ignorance, if you please, a sense of wonder in the presence of the actual universe; but when we have felt this wonder, what next? Having got rid of our superstitions, shall we then be ready to die?

The same criticism can be made of Milton, the one English poet comparable with Lucretius in loftiness and fervor. His sense of reality, as we saw, kept him from believing in magic; his special gift, it seems, was for wonder on an infinite scale. But he stops with wonder; he would not have mankind seek knowledge for the magic purpose of control. When Adam voices his suspicion that the sun, the moon, and the stars, are not circling the earth, as they appear to be doing, for the sole uneconomic purpose of furnishing light for one man and his wife, Raphael replies with a superb summary of both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories, but he advises Adam not to bother his head with either hypothesis, nor to prosecute any scientific inquiry. The great Architect, he says,

"Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought
Rather admire. . . .
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid.
Leave them to God above. Him serve and fear."

That Milton, himself preeminently a thinker and a student, should have represented the powers of good as opposed to enquiry, has greatly puzzled his admirers. We should like to find an argument on the other side in Adam's reply to the angel,

"To know
That which before us lies in daily life
Is the prime wisdom."

We should like to translate this speech into a praise of practical science, of enquiry which has for object the control of one's destiny. But there is nothing in the context to aid this interpretation.

If the philosophers have not lured us to a reasonable view of life, the satirists have not driven us to it. Wherever satire has dealt with man's ignorance, it has attacked magic in some form. Even magic-lovers themselves, as to some extent Fielding and Thackeray were, have appealed to the inexorable order when they wrote satirically, as in Jonathan Wild and Barry Lyndon. The stock in trade of George Bernard Shaw today is our persisting trust in magic formulas. The substance of his art is but to prick that bubble. In Androcles and the Lion, for example, he gives a reading of Christian martyrdom in what professes to be the unchanging law of character; his audience wonder why he should have demonstrated the obvious, and they remark as they go home that he is losing his old sparkle. But they have applauded with spontaneous and unembarrassed delight that moment in the play where the lion refuses to eat Androcles—which proves, I suppose, that they have fallen into Shaw's trap. Yet with all this clever exposing of our inconsistencies, the satirist gives us no vision of what life would be like, were we to make intelligent use of the laws we profess to believe in.

Here and there, however, poets have given us glimpses of the vision. Such a poet is Shelley. We do not usually praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few men have tried so honestly to give their enthusiasms to the proper objects, or have contemplated with such genuine rapture the control over experience which a knowledge of nature's order should give. His education in science was amateurish and fragmentary, but no specialist conceives more clearly or more rapturously the magic possibilities of exact knowledge. For Shelley, science was to be the key to nature's secrets, and those secrets, once known, were to subject nature to man. The fullest expression of this faith is in Prometheus Unbound, the last act of which, in praise of what may be called scientific living, might be read as a commentary on The Newcomes.

"Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul.
Whose nature is its own divine control.
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labor, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!

All things confess man's strength—
Through the cold mass
Of marble and of color his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song.
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare.
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.

Such a poet, to name a second, is Emerson. He, also, is not famous for any grasp on reality. His fame, however, does him injustice. He was indeed a mystic, and much of his teaching seems to belittle the facts of life, the terms on which we move in this present world. But he did not belittle facts, nor undervalue whatever is actual. There is no real power, he taught, which is not based on nature, and the beginning of power is the belief that things go not by luck, but by law. Even when the mystic in him was uppermost, he often meant in a nobly practical way what we have taken as an extravagance of idealism. " Hitch your wagon to a star." We translate "aim high"—but that was not his meaning. He meant that we should be scientific, if you choose—that having learned to wonder at the laws and forces of the universe, we should then turn the laws to our advantage and should ourselves control the forces. These are his words: "I admire the skill which, on the seashore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron. Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star."

Here is an invitation to a greater power than magic, and here, I think, is a foretaste of what poetry may be. Lucretius stood in awe before the universe, but he stood aloof; Shelley and Emerson, modern of the moderns, beheld man entering into control of a vaster universe than the Roman poet merely contemplated. When literature expresses the miracle of that control, our common life will be transfigured in wonder, our dreams will lie, not in the impossible, but in the path of our happy destiny, and the gods will walk with us.

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