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THE VOICE OF SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
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THE VOICE OF SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Representative Prose and Verse
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE
The nucleus of this collection was a privately printed volume for the use
of the students in the sophomore course in English and History at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The volume was edited by Professor
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George Washington University, Washington, D.C. The present volume, which
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CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
MATTHEW ARNOLD
_The Function of Criticism_ 1
SIR MICHAEL FOSTER
_The Growth of Science in the Nineteenth Century_ 22
THOMAS HUXLEY
_Three Hypotheses Respecting the History of Nature_ 52
_On the Physical Basis of Life_ 69
JOHN TYNDALL
_Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism_ 93
JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN
_Christianity and Physical Science_ 104
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
_Pulvis et Umbra_ 108
JOHN RUSKIN
_The Mystery of Life and its Arts_ 116
MATTHEW ARNOLD
_Marcus Aurelius_ 146
_Dover Beach_ 170
_Morality_ 171
_Self-Dependence_ 172
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
_All is Well_ 174
_To Spend Uncounted Years of Pain_ 174
_Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth_ 175
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
_The Garden of Proserpine_ 176
EDWARD FITZGERALD
_Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ 180
ROBERT BROWNING
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_ 197
_An Epistle_ 204
_Caliban upon Setebos_ 214
_A Grammarian's Funeral_ 224
_Why I am a Liberal_ 228
_Fears and Scruples_ 229
_Epilogue to "Asolando"_ 231
_Prospice_ 232
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
_Wages_ 233
_The Higher Pantheism_ 233
_Flower in the Crannied Wall_ 234
_In Memoriam_ 235
_Crossing the Bar_ 239
GEORGE MEREDITH
_Lucifer in Starlight_ 240
WILLIAM E. HENLEY
_Invictus_ 241
THOMAS HARDY
_New Year's Eve_ 242
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
_Civilization_ 244
_Illusions_ 255
_Fate_ 268
WALT WHITMAN
_Song of the Open Road_ 300
_Crossing Brooklyn Ferry_ 313
_A Song of Joys_ 320
INTRODUCTION
BY HENRY GREENLEAF PEARSON
"The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature" is a volume of
selections put together for use in the third term of a course in English
and History offered to the second-year students at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. The plan of the year's work provides for a study
of the record made in English literature by the great movements of thought
that distinguished the nineteenth century. First John Stuart Mill's essays
on "Liberty" and "Representative Government" furnish an interpretation of
the political currents of thought in the first half of the century.
Carlyle's "Past and Present," which is read in the second third of the
year, is an analysis of economic and social problems in the same period;
in the third term the profound effect of science on the thought of the age
receives illustration in the writings here brought together.
Broadly stated, the central theme of the book is man's place in the
universe, considered in the light of the new knowledge and speculation as
to his origin and destiny which the study of science in the nineteenth
century has invoked. Some of the selections are more closely related to
this theme than are others. Between some of the selections the connection
or contrast is obvious ("Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam"); in others it is less immediately evident. In some cases the
background is the group of ideas roughly classed under the word
_evolution_; in others it is some characteristic phase of religious
feeling or ethical or theological thought. The contrast in outlook
between the American writers, Emerson and Whitman, and their English
contemporaries is one of which particularly valuable use may be made. The
discovery of these interrelations is what gives zest to the reading for
both parties in the classroom; for neither teacher nor students should the
work take the form of checking off selections on a minutely correlated
syllabus. The course should be pursued on the assumption that the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts: the total impression, the height gained
at the end, the inspiration of the view there disclosed--these are the
goals to be sought for. And the discerning teacher will not be surprised
that the pupil presses him so closely up the ascent.
In reading pursued on this plan what should be emphasized on the side of
history is not the marshaling of fact, of things done, but the war of
thought in one field or another. Without being embroiled in the
controversy for this or that belief, the student examines the battleground
to learn how the battle was fought. He discovers what befell truths,
half-truths, and falsehoods, and under what circumstances of glory or
shame. He sees the period with the unity that genius always gives to a
subject; at the same time he learns how to make the correction that a
piece of contemporary interpretation inevitably requires. On the side of
literature, the student's approach is no less special and with its
appropriate reward. He sees the man of genius primarily in the setting of
his age. The personal adventures and idiosyncracies that often form so
large and so unedifying a portion of the treatment afforded in the
traditional "historical survey course" here fill a modest space in the
background; the attention is concentrated on what this leader did for the
men of his own day. These writers lived intensely in the life of their own
generation; conscious of a clearer perception of the truth and possessing
a voice that men could hear, they sought to lead their companions out of
the wilderness. It is the man of genius speaking with authority to those
of his own time who is here presented. In such a setting his voice has
still its ancient power.
THE VOICE OF SCIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
MATTHEW ARNOLD
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM[1]
The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in
assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind.
It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free
creative activity, is the true function of man; it is proved to be so by
man's finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that
men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other
ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not
so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of
all men; they may have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning,
they may have it even in criticizing. This is one thing to be kept in
mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in the
production of great works of literature or art, however high this exercise
of it may rank, is not, at all epochs, and under all conditions, possible;
and that, therefore, labor may be vainly spent in attempting it, and may
with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible.
This creative power works with elements, with materials; what if it has
not those materials, those elements, ready for its use? In that case it
must surely wait till they are ready. Now, in literature,--I will limit
myself to literature, for it is about literature that the question
arises,--the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the
best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time;
at any rate, we may lay it down as certain that in modern literature no
manifestation of the creative power not working with these can be very
important or fruitful. And I say _current_ at the time, not merely
accessible at the time; for creative literary genius does not principally
show itself in discovering new ideas--that is rather the business of the
philosopher; the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and
exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of
being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,
by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing
divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and
attractive combinations, making beautiful works with them, in short. But
it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of
ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command.
This is why great creative epochs in literature are so rare; this is why
there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of
real genius; because, for the creation of a master-work of literature, two
powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and
the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its
happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own
control.
Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the
business of the critical power, as I said in the words already quoted, "in
all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to
see the object as in itself it really is." Thus it tends, at last, to make
an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail
itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true,
yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best
ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth
is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of
this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature.
Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general
march of genius and of society,--considerations which are apt to become
too abstract and impalpable,--everyone can see that a poet, for instance,
ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and
life and the world being, in modern times, very complex things, the
creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical
effort behind it; else it would be a comparatively poor, barren, and
short-lived affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance in
it, and Goethe's so much; both had a great productive power, but Goethe's
was nourished by a great critical effort providing the true materials for
it, and Byron's was not; Goethe knew life and the world, the poet's
necessary subjects, much more comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron.
He knew a great deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they
really are.
It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in
fact, something premature; and that from this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and
do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions
of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to
work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this
century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know
enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth, even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
variety. Wordsworth cared little for books, and disparaged Goethe. I
admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much that I cannot wish him different; and
it is vain, no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he is, to
suppose that he could have been different; but surely the one thing
wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is,--his thought
richer, and his influence of wider application,--was that he should have
read more books--among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he
disparaged without reading him.
But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding
here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at
this epoch; Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading.
Pindar and Sophocles--as we all say so glibly, and often with so little
discernment of the real import of what we are saying--had not many books;
Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and
Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of
ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative
power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought,
intelligent and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the
creative power's exercise; in this it finds its data, its materials, truly
ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only
valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually
exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance
of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he
may live and work. This is by no means an equivalent to the artist for the
nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or
Shakespeare; but, besides that, it may be a means of preparation for such
epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and
sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided
learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany
formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of
life and thought there, as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
Elizabeth. That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of
equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a
large body of Germans. That was his strength. In the England of the first
quarter of this century there was neither a national glow of life and
thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a
force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany.
Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest
sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was
necessarily denied to it.
At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French
Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius
equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of
Greece, or out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode, the
Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took
a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as
these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual
movements; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction
in itself and in the increased play of its own activity; the French
Revolution took a political, practical character. This Revolution--the
object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred--found, indeed, its
motive-power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense.
This is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the
First's time; this is what makes it a more spiritual event than our
Revolution, an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though
practically less successful--it appeals to an order of ideas which are
universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642
asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according
to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated,
within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within
its own sphere, has been prodigious.
But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here
to-day is not law even here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is
binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's; the old woman
who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in the Tron
Church at Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race
may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are
absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; _to count by tens is the
easiest way of counting_--that is a proposition of which everyone, from
here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least, I should say so if we
did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we
may find a letter in the "Times" declaring that a decimal coinage is an
absurdity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an
enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its
prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how
little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into
the motives which alone, in general, _impel_ great masses of men. In spite
of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the
crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives
from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its
law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for
these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is--it will probably long
remain--the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no
sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in
many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite
barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit, the natural and
legitimate fruit, though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she
is the country in Europe where _the people_ is most alive.
But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application
to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in
his element: on this theme we can all go for hours. And all we are in the
habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot
be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with;
but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice,
violently to revolutionize this world to their bidding--that is quite
another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of
practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the
other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons
said to me the other day: "That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no
objection to it whatever." I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing
is an anomaly _is_ an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of
ideas; it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at
such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and
practice. Joubert has said beautifully: "C'est la force et le droit qui
reglent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit."
Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is
ready. _Force till right is ready_; and till right is ready, force, the
existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But
right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of
the will; we are not ready for right,--_right_, so far as we are
concerned, _is not ready_,--until we have attained this sense of seeing it
and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and transform force,
the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate
ruler of the world, will depend on the way in which, when our time comes,
we see it and will it. Therefore, for other people enamored of their own
newly discerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and
violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act of tyranny,
and to be resisted. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim,
_force till right is ready_. This was the grand error of the French
Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere
and rushing furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed, a prodigious
and memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the
movement of ideas of the Renaissance, and created, in opposition to
itself, what I may call an _epoch of concentration_.
The great force of that epoch of concentration was England; and the great
voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke. It is the fashion to treat
Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered
by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and
prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence
and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was
bounded, and his observation therefore at fault; but on the whole, and for
those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these
writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth; they
contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the
heavy atmosphere which its own nature is apt to engender round it, and
make its resistance rational instead of mechanical.
But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought
to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his
accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration,
not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by
ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could
float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them.
It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were displeased with
him; it does not hurt him, even, that George the Third and the Tories were
enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which
neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter--the world
of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it from
being really true of him that he "to party gave up what was meant for
mankind," that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French
Revolution, after all his invectives against its false pretensions,
hollowness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of its
mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combating
it,--some of the last pages he ever wrote: the _Thoughts on French
Affairs_, in December, 1791,--with these striking words:--
"The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where
power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good
intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I
believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two
years. _If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men
will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that
way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in
opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men.
They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate._"
That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the
finest things in English literature, or indeed, in any literature. That is
what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your
earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all
round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a
steam-engine and can imagine no other--still to be able to think, still to
be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the
opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak
anything _but what the Lord has put in your mouth_. I know nothing more
striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English.
For the Englishman in general is like my friend the Member of Parliament,
and believes, point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly is absolutely
no objection to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's day,
who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of "certain
miscreants, assuming the name of philosophers, who have presumed
themselves capable of establishing a new system of society." The
Englishman has been called a political animal, and he values what is
political and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of
dislike in his eyes, and thinkers "miscreants," because ideas and thinkers
have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very
well if the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas transported
out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with practice; but they are
inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life of
intelligence; practice is everything, a free play of the mind is nothing.
The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a
pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider
of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may
have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into
an Englishman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word _curiosity_,
which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and
fine quality of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play
of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake--it is noticeable, I say,
that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a
rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is
essentially the exercise of this very quality; it obeys an instinct
prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the
world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind;
and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the
intrusion of any other considerations whatever. This is an instinct for
which there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical English
nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long, benumbing period of
check and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed the
French Revolution.
But epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of
expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of
expansion seems to be open here in England. In the first place, all danger
of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long
disappeared; like the traveler in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear
our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of
Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in
infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then,
too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing
influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me
indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in
the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has
made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do
with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the
mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly the
privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our
business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere,
faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our traveling, and our
unbounded liberty to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the
practice to which our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an
inclination to deal a little more freely with these notions themselves, to
canvass them a little, to penetrate a little into their real nature.
Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word, appear amongst
us, and it is in these that criticism must look to find its account.
Criticism first; a time of true creative activity, perhaps,--which, as I
have said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of
criticism,--hereafter, when criticism has done its work.
It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern
what rules for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now
opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The
rules may be given in one word; by being _disinterested_. And how is it to
be disinterested? By keeping aloof from practice; by resolutely following
the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all
subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of
those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas, which
plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often
to be attached to them, which in this country, at any rate, are certain to
be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really
nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the
best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making
this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is
to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is
to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences
and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence
given to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own
nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in
this country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what
is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical
considerations cling to it and stifle it; it subserves interests not its
own; our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having
practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first
thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is
compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is
wanted.
* * * * *
It must needs be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of
these sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ
subserve the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that
there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not
their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them. No other
criticism will ever attain any real authority or make any real way toward
its end--the creating a current of true and fresh ideas.
It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual
sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly
polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in England,
its best spiritual work; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction
which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him toward perfection, by
making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute
beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical criticism makes men
blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them
willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it
against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. If
they were reassured on the practical side, speculative considerations of
ideal perfection they might be brought to entertain, and their spiritual
horizon would thus gradually widen....
It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am
thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the
Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life,
it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be,
but it is the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind will
never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate
ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and
must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying
that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one
of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely
doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The
rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting
effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its
vortex; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful
as it is in England. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing
to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic
can do the practical man any service; and it is only by the greatest
sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by at last convincing even the
practical man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which
perpetually threaten him.
For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these
distinctions truth and the highest culture greatly find their account. But
it is not easy to lead a practical man--unless you reassure him as to your
practical intentions, you have no chance of leading him--to see that a
thing which he has always been used to look at from one side only, which
he greatly values, and which, looked at from that side, more than
deserves, perhaps, all the prizing and admiring which he bestows upon
it--that this thing, looked at from another side, may appear much less
beneficent and beautiful, and yet retain all its claims to our practical
allegiance. Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we
make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to
say to the political Englishman that the British constitution itself,
which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent organ of
progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side,--with its
compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied
avoidance of clear thoughts,--that, seen from this side, our august
constitution sometimes looks--forgive me, shade of Lord Somers!--a
colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? How is Cobbett to say
this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a
lifelong conflict in the field of political practice? How is Mr. Carlyle
to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field
with his "Latter-day Pamphlets"? How is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious
political economy? I say, the critic must keep out of the region of
immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he
wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of
things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this
sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner.
Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain exposed to frequent
misunderstandings, and nowhere so much as here in England. For here people
are particularly indisposed even to comprehend that, without this free,
disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest culture are out
of the question. So immersed are they in practical life, so accustomed to
take all their notions from this life and its processes, that they are apt
to think that truth and culture themselves can be reached by the processes
of this life, and that it is an impertinent singularity to think of
reaching them in any other way. "We are all _terrae filii_," cries their
eloquent advocate; "all Philistines together. Away with the notion of
proceeding by any other way than the way dear to the Philistines; let us
have a social movement, let us organize and combine a party to pursue
truth and new thought, let us call it _the liberal party_, and let us all
stick to each other, and back each other up. Let us have no nonsense about
independent criticism, and intellectual delicacy, and the few and the
many. Don't let us trouble ourselves about foreign thought; we shall
invent the whole thing for ourselves as we go along. If one of us speaks
well, applaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we are all in
the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth."
In this way the pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical,
pleasurable affair, almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and
advertisements; with the excitement of a little resistance, an occasional
scandal, to give the happy sense of difficulty overcome; but, in general,
plenty of bustle and very little thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe
says; to think is so hard! It is true that the critic has many
temptations to go with the stream, to make one of the party movement, one
of these _terrae filii_; it seems ungracious to refuse to be a _terrae
filius_, when so many excellent people are; but the critic's duty is to
refuse, or, if resistance is vain, at least to cry with Obermann:
_Perissons en resistant_.
* * * * *
What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the practical point of
view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works ... for their
general utility's sake? By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied
with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect
ideal.
In criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be popular,
and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets
with immense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting
them again and again. Criticism must maintain its independence of the
practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the
practical spirit, it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the
ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to the
goal because of its practical importance. It must be patient, and know how
to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to
withdraw from them. It must be apt to study and praise elements that for
the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to
a power that in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to
discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the
practical sphere may be beneficent. And this without any notion of
favoring or injuring, in the practical sphere, one power or the other;
without any notion of playing off, in this sphere, one power against the
other. When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court,--an
institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the
ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution which neither makes divorce
impossible nor makes it decent; which allows a man to get rid of his wife,
or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the
public edification, through a mire of unutterable infamy,--when one looks
at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded trials, its
newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this institution in which
the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an image of
himself, one may be permitted to find the marriage theory of Catholicism
refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed
rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too
magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, in
this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was a
moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther's theory of grace no
more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of
history reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability of
the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason
than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism will not on that account
forget the achievements of Protestantism in the practical and moral
sphere; nor that, even in the intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though
in a blind and stumbling manner, carried forward the Renaissance, while
Catholicism threw itself violently across its path.
I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor
and movement which he now found amongst young men in England with what he
remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. "What reformers we were
then!" he exclaimed; "what a zeal we had! how we canvassed every
institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all on
first principles!" He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the
lull that he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which
the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being accomplished.
Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in
inseparable connection with politics and practical life. We have pretty
well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection; we have
got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try a more disinterested
mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the serener life of
the mind and spirit. This life, too, may have its excesses and dangers;
but they are not for us at present. Let us think of quietly enlarging our
stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half
an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it
rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world all the better for
maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty years' time it will in the English
House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly,
and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his grave. But let
us in the meanwhile rather endeavor that in twenty years' time it may, in
English literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd.
That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost fails to grasp
it. _Ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo._
If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where
politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning
matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. In general, its
course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being: the
idea of a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is
known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh
and true ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the
world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be
of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is
just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is
streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we
shall not be ignorant of its existence; the English critic, therefore,
must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part
of it which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason
specially likely to escape him. Judging is often spoken of as the critic's
one business, and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost
insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh
knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh
knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself; and it is by
communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along
with it,--but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a
sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver,--that he will
generally do most good to his readers.
Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in
literature and his relation to a central standard,--and if this is not
done, how are we to get at our _best in the world_?--criticism may have to
deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the
question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed
application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let one's
self become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively
consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this
fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all
circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in
itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics,
it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the
sense of creative activity. To have this sense is, as I said at the
beginning, the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it
is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere,
simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have,
in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense
which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive
from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs
no other creation is possible.
Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to
genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true
man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a
gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living
ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely
to underrate it. The epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their
preeminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of
literature; there is the promised land, toward which criticism can only
beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die
in the wilderness; but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it
from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries;
it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.
SIR MICHAEL FOSTER
THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[2]