Читать книгу Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere - John Willis Clark - Страница 6

‘Over the broad-spread sea the thoughtful son of Ulysses

Steered his well-built bark. Full long had he sought for his father,

Till hope, lingering, fled; for the face of the water is trackless.

Then rose strong in his mind the thought of his home and his island;

And he desired to return; to behold his Ithacan people,

Listen their just complaints, restrain the fierce and the lawless.’

Mrs. Stair Douglas has acted wisely in reprinting the elegiacs written after the death of Mrs. Whewell. We cannot believe that the metre will ever be popular; but in the case of this particular poem eccentricities of style will be forgiven for the sake of the dignified beauty of the thoughts. With the exception of In Memoriam, we know of no finer expression of Christian sorrow and Christian hope. We will quote a few lines from the first division of the poem, in which the bereaved husband describes the happiness which his wife had brought to him:

‘Blessed beyond all blessings that life can embrace in its circle,

Blessed the gift was when Providence gave thee to me:

Gave thee, gentle and kindly and wise, calm, clear-seeing, thoughtful,

Thee to me as I was, vehement, passionate, blind:

Gave me to see in thee, and wonder I never had seen it,

Wisdom that shines in the heart dearer than Intellect’s light;

Gave me to find in thee, when oppressed by loneliness’ burden,

Solace for each dull pain, calm from the strife of the storm.

For O, vainly till then had I sought for peace and contentment,

Ever pursued by desires, yearnings that could not be still’d;

Ever pursued by desires of a heart’s companionship, ever

Yearning for guidance and love such as I found them in thee.’

It is painful to be obliged to record that Whewell’s executors found that the copyright of his works had no mercantile value. He perhaps formed a true estimate of his own powers when he said that all that he could do was to ‘systematize portions of knowledge which the consent of opinions has brought into readiness for such a process^[14].’ His name will not be associated with any great discovery, or any original theory, if we except his memoir on Crystallography, which is the basis of the system since adopted; and his researches on the Tides, which have afforded a clear and satisfactory view of those of the Atlantic, while it is hardly his fault if those of the Pacific were not elucidated with equal clearness^[15]. It too often happens that those who originally suggest theories are forgotten in the credit due to those who develop them; and we are afraid that this has been the fate of Whewell. Even as a mathematician he is not considered really great by those competent to form a judgment. He was too much wedded to the geometrical fashions of his younger days, and ‘had no taste for the more refined methods of modern analysis^[16].’ In science, as in other matters, his strong conservative bias stood in his way. He was constitutionally unable to accept a thorough-going innovation. For instance, he withstood to the last Lyell’s uniformity, and Darwin’s evolution^[17]. Much, therefore, of what he wrote will of necessity be soon forgotten; but we hope that some readers may be found for his Elements of Morality, and that his great work on the Inductive Sciences may hold its own. It is highly valued in Germany; and in England Mr. John Stuart Mill, one of the most cold and severe of critics, who differed widely from Whewell in his scientific views, has declared that ‘without the aid derived from the facts and ideas contained in the History of the Inductive Sciences, the corresponding portion of his own System of Logic would probably not have been written.’

We have felt it our duty to point out these shortcomings; but it is a far more agreeable one to turn from them, and conclude our essay by indicating the lofty tone of religious enthusiasm which runs through all his works. As Dr. Lightfoot pointed out in his funeral sermon, ‘the world of matter without, the world of thought within, alike spoke to him of the Eternal Creator the Beneficent Father; and even his opponent, Sir David Brewster, who more strongly than all his other critics had denounced what he termed the paradox advanced in The Plurality of Worlds, that our earth may be ‘the oasis in the desert of the solar system,’ was generous enough to admit that posterity would forgive the author ‘on account of the noble sentiments, the lofty aspirations, and the suggestions, almost divine, which mark his closing chapter on the future of the universe.’