Myths and Maths
The Music of the Spheres : A Nature Lover's Astronomy. By Florence A. Grondal. (Macmillan. 21s.)
WE are all children when we look at the stars. The wisest of us can listen open-mouthed to the tales of wonder which the astronomer has to tell, for • he is the last of the magicians ; the only one left who can conjure fabulous monsters, and waken us again to that Golden Age of incredulous credulity.
The author of a popular book about the heavens is therefore bound to have a general appeal, though nowadays the number of these books is increasing so rapidly that there. is a danger of the miraculous becoming wearisome. We do not suggest, however, that this book is one of these belated messengers who conic crying a stale story.
It is welcome because it serves a special purpose. It sets about mapping the heavens in much the same way as the geographers of the Renaissance times mapped out the rapidly expanding known world. It collects the pictorial mythology of the stars and collates it to that much more elaborate and modern mythology of number which the astrophysicists arc building up like a gossamer coral-reef.
Myth, and the efficacy of myth as a bearer of truth, are daily becoming a more conscious influence in our scientific technique. The young sciences of anthropology and psychology are only just beginning to play their part in the household of know- ledge. They are taking us by the hand, and whispering surprising things into our sophisticated ears ; surprising and at the same time very humiliating things. They tell us that our complacent actualism sprung of post-Darwinian dogmas, is really not knowledge at all, but merely a process of indexing, a preparation of data which may be useful when some deeper impulse of constructive wisdom comes flooding in along the nerves of humanity.
There are signs that such an impulse is flowing now ; and it is fed, like all its predecessors, from the aesthetic source. I say the aesthetic source, for that is the most permanent spring in human nature ; the desire for form, coherence, architecture, location. That is why " art is long," for art is the unceasing effort after that difficult goal, the attainment of unity, the linking of first and last. That is why, in the Greek phrase, " beauty is difficult." Sooner or later our " certainties," our purely mechanistic interpretations of life, break down, and 'we return again - with renewed TesPect to the personal, the relative Position.. Old wives' tales are examined afresh, 'and found to be true, and the Book of Genesis again becomei'the true story' of the origin of the speeies. But oh, what wiloilds away is that truth the " truth " of the Fundainentalists !
Perhaps_ the scientist who has been least unfaithful to this glorious. Continuity of human. wisdom is the pure mathe- matician. For even the philologist has often lost his way in the deierts of Rationalism. Number, however, has neyer quite east 'off its priestly robes, and Babylon, the pyramids, Syra $ cuie and the Aristotelean sands of -Arabia all come "cowling, into our Cube. roots and_,COculi, whispering Mystery ! MYstery 1" I have been at some length to try th explain how this
author has approached her subject. That cry from the past reason for covering ground which now begins to be rather
over-trodden. Her work serves a gait 1, '....t."'"t‘ste! for_ it not only provides a guide to the stars in their courses, but by doing so in this pictorial and legendary way, it adds the dignity of time to the wonder of space. We feel—and there is no experience more healthy for the human soul—the large sense of historical continuity of idea. We go out into the night, and lift up our eyes with reverence to the maze of mathematical fires. But as we look, immortal shades creep up out of the crusted Earth, stand by our side, and gaze equally with us. And we exchange baffled whispers, they speakin: in legend of Bear, Hunter, Rapine and Fidelity ; we in sine, cosine, and parallax. We are gazing at two infinities—for such is possible nowadays—the infinity of cosmical sameness and perpetuity and the infinity of human simplicity, the undying child.
" Oh that the ancient rage of Kings Could fill my sober heart to-night "
as I gaze, heartbroken with awe, at the same constellations that magnetized the minds of Aristyllus and Timocharis, three hundred years before Christ, and inspired them to construct the first catalogue of the Cosmos.
Emerson once said that " he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the planets, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man." We may add that he who knows how his ancestors have come at these enchantments, and sees thereby their everlastingness, is in that additional knowledge the richer and the more regal.
This book, then, is very consciously planned to that purpose. It is inspired by a more than ordinary historical sense ; and if in detail it is a little clumsy and naive—we find, for instance, a passage from Keats attributed to Longfellow—the author may be pardoned because she succeeds in spite of her faults. She does indeed awaken us to the music of the spheres—the harmony of the stars in their courses, which sometimes—so the mystics say—actually puts on itself the garment of sound, and can be heard by mortal ears, as clear in melodic rhythm and harmonic mass as any physical orchestration of human
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