Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily foresworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired of all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
It is true that we have bad manners; yet among the crowds at the
Centennial Exposition it was universally remarked that in no country
in the world could such vast multitudes of people have assembled day
after day with so few arrests by the police, with so little disorder,
and with such an apparent universal and effective sentiment of respect
for the law.
Now if we carry the result of this inquiry over into art; if we are
presented with a poetry which professes to be democratic because
it--the poetry--is measurelessly vicious, purposely eructant, striving
after ruggedness, despising grace, like the democracy described by
Whitman; then we reply that as matter of fact there never was any such
American democracy and that the poetry which represents it has no
constituency. And herein seems a most abundant solution of the fact
just now brought to your notice, that the actually existing democracy
have never accepted Whitman. But here we are met with the cry of
strength and manfulness. Everywhere throughout Whitman's poetry the
"rude muscle," the brawn, the physical bigness of the American
prairie, the sinew of the Western backwoodsman, are apotheosized, and
all these, as Whitman asserts, are fitly chanted in his "savage song."
Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, all brawn and
rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal of strength. Let us examine
this strength a little. For one, I declare that I do not find it
impressive. Yonder, in a counting-room--alas, in how many
counting-rooms!--a young man with weak eyes bends over a ledger, and
painfully casts up the figures day by day, on pitiful wages, to
support his mother, or to send his younger brother to school, or some
such matter. If we watch the young man when he takes down his hat,
lays off his ink-splotched office-coat, and starts home for dinner, we
perceive that he is in every respect the opposite of the stalwart
Whitman ideal; his chest is not huge, his legs are inclined to be
pipe-stems, and his dress is like that of any other book-keeper. Yet
the weak-eyed pipe-stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a
man, more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's roughs;
to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in this man's daily
endurance of petty care and small weariness for love; more of the sort
of stuff which makes a real democracy and a sound republic, than in an
army of Whitman's unshaven loafers.
I know--and count it among the privileges of my life that I do--a
woman who has spent her whole life in bed for twenty years past,
confined by a curious form of spinal disease which prevents locomotion
and which in spite of constant pain and disturbance leaves the system
long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the mercy of all those
tyrannical small needs which become so large under such circumstances;
every meal must be brought to her, a drink of water must be handed;
and she is not rich, to command service. Withal her nature is of the
brightest and most energetic sort. Yet, surrounded by these
unspeakable pettinesses, enclosed in this cage of contradictions, the
woman has made herself the centre of an adoring circle of the
brightest people; her room is called "Sunnyside;" when brawny men are
tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest physical
health are sick of life they go to her for the curative virtue of her
smiles. Now this woman has not so much rude muscle in her whole body
as Whitman's man has in his little finger: she is so fragile that long
ago some one called her "White Flower," and by this name she is much
known; it costs her as much labor to press a friend's hand as it costs
Whitman's rough to fell a tree; regarded from the point of view of
brawn and sinew, she is simply absurd; yet to the eye of my spirit
there is more manfulness in one moment of her loving and
self-sacrificing existence than in an aeon of muscle-growth and
sinew-breeding; and hers is the manfulness which is the only solution
of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness of which only can a
republic be built. A republic is the government of the spirit; a
republic depends upon the self-control of each member: you cannot make
a republic out of muscles and prairies and Rocky mountains; republics
are made of the spirit.
Nay, when we think of it, how little is it a matter of the future, how
entirely is it a matter of the past, when people come running at us
with rude muscle and great mountain, and such matters of purely
physical bigness to shake our souls? How long ago is it that they
began to put great bearskin caps on soldiers with a view to make them
look grisly and formidable when advancing on the enemy? It is so long
ago that the practice has survived mainly as ceremonial, and the
little boys on the streets now laugh at this ferociousness when the
sappers and miners come by who affect this costume.
Yet, here in the nineteenth century we behold artists purposely
setting bearskin caps upon their poetry to make it effective. This
sort of thing never yet succeeded as against Anglo-Saxon people. I
cannot help thinking here of old Lord Berners' account translated from
Froissart, of how the Genoese cross-bowmen attempted to frighten the
English warriors at the battle of Crecy. "Whan the Genowayes were
assembled togayder, and beganne to aproche, they made a great leape
and crye, to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode styll, and styredde
not for all that; thane the Genowayes agayne the seconde tyme made
another leape, and a fell crye, and stepped forward a lytell, and
thenglysshmen remeved not one fote; thirdly, agayne they leapt and
cryed, and went forthe tyll they come within shotte; thane shot
feersley with their crosbowes; than thenglysshe archers stept forthe
one pase, and lette fly their arowes so hotly, and so thycke, that it
semed snowe; when the Genowayes felt the arowes persynge through
heedes, armes, and brestes, many of them cast downe their crosbowes,
and dyde cutte their strynges, and retourned dysconfited."
And so the Poetry of the Future has advanced upon us with a great leap
and a fell cry, relying upon its loud, ill-pitched voice, but the
democracy has stirred not for all that. Perhaps we may fairly say,
gentlemen, it is five hundred years too late to attempt to capture
Englishmen with a yell.
I think it interesting to compare Whitman's often expressed contempt
for poetic beauty--he taunts the young magazine writers of the present
time with having the beauty disease--with some utterances of one who
praised the true function of ruggedness in works the world will not
soon forget. I mean Thomas Carlyle, who has so recently passed into
the Place where the strong and the virtuous and the beautiful souls
assemble themselves. In one of Carlyle's essays he speaks as follows
of Poetic Beauty. These words scarcely sound as if they came from the
lover of Danton and Mirabeau:
"It dwells and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man, united to all love
of Virtue, to all true belief in God; or rather, it is one with this
love and this belief, another phase of the same highest principle in
the mysterious infinitude of the human Soul. To apprehend this beauty
of poetry, in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but
difficult; thousands on thousands eagerly read poems, and attain not
the smallest taste of it; yet to all uncorrupted hearts, some
effulgences of this heavenly glory are here and there revealed; and to
apprehend it clearly and wholly, to require and maintain a sense of
heart that sees and worships it, is the last perfection of all humane
culture."
In the name of all really manful democracy, in the name of the true
strength that only can make our republic reputable among the nations,
let us repudiate the strength that is no stronger than a human biceps;
let us repudiate the manfulness that averages no more than six feet
high. My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure; the
democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have
a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle
hell, he shall play ball with the earth, and albeit his stature may be
no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods
of California; his height shall be the height of great resolution, and
love and faith and beauty and knowledge and subtle meditation; his
head shall be forever among the stars.
But here we are met with the cry of freedom. This poetry is free, it
is asserted, because it is independent of form. But this claim is also
too late. It should have been made at least before the French
Revolution. We all know what that freedom means in politics which is
independent of form, of law. It means myriad-fold slavery to a mob. As
in politics, so in art. Once for all, in art, to be free is not to be
independent of any form, it is to be master of many forms. Does the
young versifier of the Whitman school fancy that he is free because
under the fond belief that he is yielding himself to nature, stopping
not the words lest he may fail to make what Whitman proudly calls "a
savage song," he allows himself to be blown about by every wind of
passion? Is a ship free because, without rudder or sail, it is turned
loose to the winds, and has no master but nature? Nature is the tyrant
of tyrants. Now, just as that freedom of the ship on the sea means
shipwreck, so independence of form in art means death. Here one recurs
with pleasure to the aphorism cited in the last lecture; in art, as
elsewhere, "he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the
rocks." I find all the great artists of time striving after this same
freedom; but it is not by destroying, it is by extending the forms of
art, that all sane and sober souls hope to attain. In a letter of
Beethoven's to the Arch-duke Rudolph, written in 1819, I find him
declaring "But freedom and progress are our true aim in the world of
art, just as in the great creation at large."
We have seen how in the creation at large progress is effected by the
continual multiplication of new forms. It was this advance which
Beethoven wished: to become master of new and more beautiful forms,
not to abolish form. In a letter of his to Matthisson, as early as
1800 accompanying a copy of _Adelaide_, we may instructively gather
what he thought of this matter: "Indeed even now I send you _Adelaide_
with a feeling of timidity. You know yourself what changes the lapse
of some years brings forth in an artist who continues to make
progress; the greater the advances we make in art the less we are
satisfied with our works of an early date." This unstudied declaration
becomes full of significance when we remember that this same
_Adelaide_ is still held, by the common consent of all musicians, to
be the most perfect song-form in music; and it is given to young
composers as a type and model from which all other forms are to be
developed. We may sum up the whole matter by applying to these persons
who desire formlessness, words which were written of those who have
been said to desire death:
Whatever crazy Sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.
In art, form and chaos are so nearly what life and death are in
nature, that we do not greatly change this stanza if we read:
'Tis form whereof our art is scant,
O form, not chaos, for which we pant,
More form, and fuller, that I want.
I find some deliverances in Epictetus which speak so closely to more
than one of the points just discussed that I must quote a sentence or
two. "What then", he says--in the chapter "About Freedom" "is that
which makes a man free from hindrance and makes him his own master?
For wealth does not do it, nor consulship, nor provincial government,
nor royal power; but something else must be discovered. What then is
that which when we write makes us free from hindrance and unimpeded.
The knowledge of the art of writing. What then is it (which gives
freedom) in playing the lute? The science of playing the lute." If
Whitman's doctrine is true, the proper method of acquiring freedom on
the lute is to bring lute-music to that point where the loud jangling
chord produced by a big hand sweeping at random across the strings is
to take the place of the finical tunes and harmonies now held in
esteem. "Therefore" continues Epictetus, "in life, also, it is the
science of life.... When you wish the body to be sound, is it in your
power or not?--It is not. When you wish it to be healthy? Neither is
this in my power." (I complain of Whitman's democracy that it has no
provision for sick, or small, or puny, or plain-featured, or
hump-backed, or any deformed people, and that his democracy is really
the worst kind of aristocracy, being an aristocracy of nature's
favorites in the matter of muscle.) And so of estate, house, horses,
life and death, Epictetus continues; these are not in our power, they
cannot make us free. So that, in another chapter, he cries: This is
the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against such
appearances. Stay, wretch, do not be carried away. Great is the
combat, divine is the work: it is for kingship, for freedom, for
happiness.
And lastly, the Poetry of the Future holds that all modern poetry,
Tennyson particularly, is dainty and over-perfumed, and Whitman speaks
of it with that contempt which he everywhere affects for the dandy.
But what age of time ever yielded such a dandy as the founder of this
school, Whitman himself? The simpering beau who is the product of the
tailor's art is certainly absurd enough; but what difference is there
between that and the other dandy-upside-down who from equal motives of
affectation throws away coat and vest, dons a slouch hat, opens his
shirt so as to expose his breast, and industriously circulates his
portrait, thus taken, in his own books. And this dandyism--the
dandyism of the roustabout--I find in Whitman's poetry from beginning
to end. Everywhere it is conscious of itself, everywhere it is
analysing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot assume a
naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is screwing up its eyes,
not into an eyeglass like the conventional dandy, but into an
expression supposed to be fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful
to the terror-stricken reader; and it is almost safe to say that one
half of Whitman's poetic work has consisted of a detailed description
of the song he is going to sing. It is the extreme of sophistication
in writing.
But if we must have dandyism in our art, surely the softer sort, which
at least leans toward decorum and gentility, is preferable; for that
at worst becomes only laughable, while the rude dandyism, when it does
acquire a factitious interest by being a blasphemy against real
manhood, is simply tiresome.
I have thus dwelt upon these claims of the Whitman school, not so much
because of any intrinsic weight they possess, as because they are
advanced in such taking and sacred names,--of democracy, of manhood,
of freedom, of progress. Upon the most earnest examination, I can find
it nothing but wholly undemocratic; not manful, but dandy; not free,
because the slave of nature; not progressive, because its whole
momentum is derived from the physically-large which ceased to astonish
the world ages ago, in comparison with spiritual greatness.
Indeed, this matter has been pushed so far, with the apparent, but
wholly unreal sanction of so many influential names, that in speaking
to those who may be poets of the future, I cannot close these hasty
words upon the Whitman school without a fervent protest, in the name
of all art and all artists, against a poetry which has painted a great
scrawling picture of the human body, and has written under it: "_This
is the soul_;" which shouts a profession of religion in every line,
but of a religion that, when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric,
save that a man must be natural, must abandon himself to every
passion; and which constantly roars its belief in God, but with a
camerado air as if it were patting the Deity on the back, and bidding
Him, _Cheer up_, and hope for further encouragement.
We are here arrived at a very fitting point to pass on and consider
that third misconception of the relation between science and art,
which has been recently formulated by M. Emile Zola in his work called
_Le Roman Experimental_. Zola's name has been so widely associated
with a certain class of novels, that I am fortunately under no
necessity to describe them, and I need only say that the work in
question is a formal reply to a great number of objections which have
come from many quarters as to the characters and events which Zola's
novels have brought before the public.
His book, though a considerable volume, may be said to consist of two
sentences which the author has varied with great adroitness into many
forms. These two sentences I may sum up, as follows: (1) every novel
must hereafter be the entirely unimaginative record of an experiment
in human passion; and (2) every writer of the romantic school in
France, particularly Victor Hugo, is an ass.
You are not to suppose that in this last sentiment I have strengthened
Zola's expressions. A single quotation will show sufficient authority.
As, for example, where M. Zola cries out to those who are criticizing
him: "Every one says: 'Ah yes, the naturalists! they are those men
with dirty hands who want all novels to be written in slang, and
choose the most disgusting subjects.' Not at all! you lie!... Do not
say that I am idiot enough to wish to paint nothing but the gutter."
But with this quarrel we are not here concerned; I simply wish to
examine in the briefest way Zola's proposition to convert the novel
into a work of science. His entire doctrine may be fairly, indeed
amply gathered in the following quotations:
"We continue by our observations and experiments the work of the
physiologist, who has himself employed that of the physicist and
the chemist. We after a fashion pursue scientific psychology in
order to complete scientific physiology; and in order to complete
the evolution, we need only carry to the study of nature and man
the invaluable tool of the experimental method. In a word, we
should work upon characters, passions, human and social facts, as
the physicist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the
physiologist works with living organisms. Determinism controls
everything.
"This, then, is what constitutes the experimental novel,--to
understand the mechanism of human phenomena, to show the
machinery of intellectual and emotional manifestations as
physiology shall explain them to us under the influence of
heredity and surrounding circumstances; then to show man living
in the social _milieu_ which he has himself produced, and which
he modifies every day, while at the same time experiencing in his
turn a continual transformation. So we rest on physiology; we
take man isolated from the hands of the physiologist to continue
the solution of the problem and to solve scientifically the
question, How men live as members of society.--We are, in a word,
experimental philosophers, showing by experiment how a passion
exhibits itself in certain social surroundings. The day when we
shall understand the mechanism of this passion, it may be
treated, reduced, made as inoffensive as possible."
These propositions need not detain us long. In the first place, let us
leave the vagueness of abstract assertions and, coming down to the
concrete, let us ask who is to make the experiment recorded in the
novel? Zola says, "We (the novelists) are experimental philosophers,
showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain social
surroundings." Very well; in one of Zola's most popular novels, the
heroine Nana, after a remarkable career, dies of small-pox; and a
great naturalistic ado is made over this death. A correspondent of the
_Herald_, writing from Paris, says: "In a very few days we are to be
treated to the stage version of _Nana_, at the Ambigu. Nana, it will
be remembered, dies at the end of the story of small-pox. We are to be
given every incident of the agony, every mark of the small-pox. Pretty
Mlle. Massin (who is to play this death-scene) is to be the crowning
attraction of this new play.... We shall be shown a real death of
small-pox, or the nearest possible approach to it. Mlle. Massin, who
is to sustain the pleasing part of the "heroine," will make her pretty
face hideous for the occasion. At half past 11 every evening she will
issue from behind the drapery of a bed, clad only in the most
indispensable of nightly raiment--and that "in most admired
disorder"--her neck, cheeks and forehead disfigured, changed and
unrecognizable for simulated pustules. At twenty minutes to 12 the
pustules will be too much for her, and she will expire. At a quarter
to 12 the deafening applause of the public will call her to life
again, and she will bow her acknowledgments."
Applying Zola's theory, sociology is to find here a very instructive
record of how a woman such as Nana would comport herself when dying of
small-pox; and furthermore, his description of it must be an exact
record of an experiment in death from small-pox conducted by M. Zola
in person. But now recurring to our question, let us ask, how could M.
Zola conduct this experiment? It would certainly be inconvenient for
him to catch the small-pox and die, with a view to recording his
sensations; and yet it is perfectly apparent that the conditions of
scientific experiment could not be satisfied in any other way. M. Zola
would probably reply with effusion, that he had taken pains to go to a
small-pox hospital and to study with great care the behavior of a
patient dying with that disease. But, we immediately rejoin, this is
very far from what his theory bound him to show us; his theory bound
him to show us not some person, any person, dying of small-pox, but
Nana with all her individuality derived from heredity and from her own
spontaneous variation--it was Nana dying of small-pox that he must set
before us; one person dies one way and another person dies another
way, even of the same disease; Smith, a very tragic person, would make
a death-scene full of tragic message and gesture; Brown might close
his eyes and pass without a word; Nana, particularly, with her
peculiar career and striking individuality, would naturally make a
peculiar and striking death. Now since Nana is purely a creation of
Zola, (unless indeed the novel is a biography, which is not pretended)
Zola is the only person in the world who understands Nana's feelings
in death or on any occasion; and this being so, it is simply
impossible that Zola could make a scientific experiment of Nana's
death from small-pox without dying himself. This seems so absurd that
one goes back to _Le Roman Experimental_ to see if Zola's idea of a
scientific experiment has not something peculiar about it; and one
quickly finds that it has. It is in fact interesting to observe that
though Zola has this word experiment continually on his lips, yet he
never means that the novelist is to conduct a real, gross, downright,
actual brute of an experiment; and the word with him is wholly
Pickwickian, signifying no more than that the novelist, availing
himself of such realistic helps as he can find in hospitals and the
like, is to evolve therefrom something which he believes to be the
natural course of things. Examine the book wherever you may, the
boasted experiment, the pivot of the whole system, fades into this.
The experiment of Zola is as if a professor of chemistry, knowing
something of the properties of given substances desiring to see how a
certain molecule would behave itself in the presence of a certain
other molecule, hitherto untried in this connection, instead of going
into his laboratory and bringing the molecules together and observing
what they actually did, should quietly sit before his desk and write
off a comfortable account of how he thought these molecules would
behave, judging from his previous knowledge of their properties. It is
still more interesting to find that Zola is apparently unconscious of
the difference between these two modes of experiment. About this
unconsciousness I have my own theory. I think it entirely probable
that if these two kinds of experiment were described to Zola he would
maintain with perfect good faith that they were exactly the same.
There is a phase of error--perhaps we may call it hallucination--in
which certain sorts of minds come to believe that two things which
have been habitually associated are always the same. For instance, a
friend of mine has told me that a certain estimable teacher of the
French language, who, after carrying on his vocation for many years,
during which English and French became equally instinctive tongues to
him, was accustomed to maintain that English and French were
absolutely one and the same language. "When you say _water_," he was
accustomed to argue to my friend, "you mean water; when I say _l'eau_
I mean water; _water--l'eau_, _l'eau--water_; do you not see? We mean
the same thing; it is the same language."
However this may be, nothing is clearer than that Zola's conception of
an experiment is what I have described it--namely, an evolving from
the inner consciousness of what the author _thinks_ the experimental
subjects would do under given circumstances. Here are some of Zola's
own words: and surely nothing more naive was ever uttered: "The
writer" (of the novel) "employs both observation and experiment. The
observer gives the facts as he has observed them ... and establishes
the solid ground on which his characters shall march, and the
phenomena shall develop themselves. _Then the experimenter appears and
conducts the experiment; that is to say_" (I am quoting from M. Zola)
"_he moves the characters in a particular story to show that the
sequence of facts will be such as is determined in the study of
phenomena_." That is to say, to carry Zola's "experiment" into
chemistry: knowing something of chlorine and something of hydrogen
separately, a chemist who wishes to know their behavior under each
other's influence may "experiment" upon that behavior by giving his
opinion as to what chlorine and hydrogen would likely do under given
circumstances.
It seems incredible, but it is logically beyond question, that by this
short process we have got to the bottom of this whole elaborate system
of the Experimental Novel, and have found that it is nothing but a
repetition of the old, old trick of the hand of Jacob and the voice of
Esau. Think how much self-sacrifice and labor, of how many noble and
brave spirits, from Horrox and Hooke in the seventeenth century down
to the hundreds of scientific men who at this moment are living
obscure and laborious lives in the search of truth,--think, I say, how
much fervent and pious labor has gone to invest the mere name of
scientific experiment with that sacredness under which the Zola school
is now claiming the rights and privileges of science, for what we have
seen is _not_ science, and what, we might easily see if it were worth
showing, _is_ mere corruption. The hand is the hand of science; but
the voice is the voice of a beast.
To many this animal voice has seemed a portentous sound. But if we
think what kind of beast it is, we cease to fear. George Eliot,
somewhere in _Adam Bede_, has a _mot_: when a donkey sets out to sing,
everybody knows beforehand what the tune will be. This voice has been
heard many times before. Long before Zola came on the stage, I find
Schiller crying in his sweet silver tones to some who were likewise
misusing both art and science: "Unhappy mortal, that, with science and
art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest nothing
more than the day-drudge with the meanest; that in the domain of
perfect Freedom bearest about in thee the spirit of a slave."
In these words, Schiller has at once prophesied and punished The
Experimental Romance.
But there is another view of Zola's claims which leads us into some
thoughts particularly instructive at the present time, and which will
carry us very directly to the more special studies which will engage
our attention.
After the views of form which have been presented to you, it will not
be necessary for me to argue that even if Zola's Experimental Novel
were a physical possibility, it would be an artistic absurdity. If you
_could_ make a scientific record of actual experiment in human
passion, very well: but why should we call that record a novel, if we
do not call Professor Huxley's late work on the crayfish a novel, or
if we do not call any physician's report of some specially interesting
clinical experience to the _Medical and Surgical Journal_ a novel?
Here we are put upon securing for ourselves perfectly clear
conceptions as to certain relations between that so-called _poetic_
activity and _scientific_ activity of the human mind which find
themselves in a singularly interesting contact in the true and worthy
novel which we are going to study. Merely reminding you of the
distinction with which every one is more or less familiar
theoretically, that that activity which we variously call "poetic,"
"imaginative," or "creative," _is_ essentially synthetic, is a process
of putting together, while the scientific process seems distinctively
analytic, or a tearing apart; let us pass from this idea to those
applications of the poetic faculty which are made whenever a
scientific searcher goes further than the mere collection of facts, to
classify them and to effect generalizations. This is an activity of
what is well called the scientific imagination. Now what is the
difference between a work of the scientific imagination and a work of
the poetic imagination? Without going into subtleties, I think the
shortest way to gain a perfectly clear working idea of this difference
is to confine our attention to the differing results of these
activities: the scientific imagination results in a formula, whose
paramount purpose is to be as _short_ and as comprehensive as
possible; the poetic imagination results in a created form of forms,
whose paramount purpose is to be as _beautiful_ and as comprehensive
as possible. For example, the well-known formula of evolution: that
evolution is a process from the uniform and indefinite to the
multiform and definite; that is a result of long efforts of the
scientific imagination; while on the other hand Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_, in which we have deep matters discussed in the most
beautiful words and the most musical forms of verse, is a poetic work.
And now if we pass one step farther and consider what would happen if
the true scientific activity and the true poetic activity should
engage themselves upon one and the same set of facts, we arrive at the
novel.
The great modern novelist is at once scientific and poetic: and here,
it seems to me, in the novel, we have the meeting, the reconciliation,
the kiss, of science and poetry. For example: George Eliot, having
with those keen eyes of hers collected and analyzed and sorted many
facts of British life, binds them together into a true poetic
synthesis, in, for instance, _Daniel Deronda_, when instead of giving
us the ultimate relations of all her facts in the shape of a formula,
like that of evolution, she gives them to us in the beautiful creation
of Gwendolen Harleth and all the other striking forms which move
through the book as embodiments in flesh and blood of the scientific
relations between all her facts.
Perhaps we will find it convenient here, too, to base perfectly clear
ideas of the three existing schools of novel-writing upon these
foregoing principles. It has been common for some time to hear of the
Romantic and the Realistic school, and lately a third term has been
brought into use by the Zola section who call themselves the
Naturalistic school. It is easy to see that these terms have arisen
from the greater or less prominence given now to the poetic activity,
now to the scientific activity, in novel writing; those who most rely
on the poetic being the Romantic, those on a combination of the poetic
and scientific the Realistic, and those who entirely reject the
imagination (as Zola professes to do) the Naturalistic school. At all
events, then, not troubling ourselves with the Naturalists who, as we
have seen, call that an experiment which is only an imaginative
product; we are prepared to study the Novel as a work in which science
is carried over into the region of art. We are not to regard the novel
therefore as ought else but a work of art, and the novelist as an
artist.
One rejoices to find Emerson discussing the novel in this light
purely, in his very suggestive essay on "Books":--
"Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the
imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The
novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything
else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli,
Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray and Reade.
"The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has
a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets;
and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they
never quite subside to their old stony state."
Nay, we have such beautiful novels in the world, novels far from the
experimental romances by which we are not _perfected_ but _infected_
(_non perficitur_, _inficitur_), as old Burton quotes in the
_Anatomy_; novels in which scientific harmony has passed into its
heavenly after-life of wisdom, novels in which the pure sense of
poetic beauty is so tenderly drawn out, that I love to think of them
in the terms which our most beauty-loving of modern poets has applied
to beauty, in the opening of _Endymion_:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing;
Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.