[This paper was read on September 24th, 1904, in the section of
Belles-lettres of the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences,
held at St. Louis.]
There is no disguising the difficulty of any attempt to survey the whole
field of literature as it is disclosed before us now at the opening of a
new century; and there is no denying the danger of any effort to declare
the outlook in the actual present and the prospect in the immediate
future. How is it possible to project our vision, to foresee whither the
current is bearing us, to anticipate the rocks ahead and the shallows
whereon our bark may be beached?
But one reflection is as obvious as it is helpful. The problems of
literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature
is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the
moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an
intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life.
If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the
world, we may discover forces at work in society which are exerting also
a potent influence upon the future of literature.
Now that the century in which we were born and bred is receding swiftly
into the past, we can perceive in the perspective more clearly than ever
before its larger movements and its main endeavor. We are at last
beginning to be able to estimate the heritage it has left us, and to see
for ourselves what our portion is, what our possessions are, and what
our obligations. While it is for us to make the twentieth century, no
doubt, we need to remember that it was the nineteenth century which made
us; and we do not know ourselves if we fail to understand the years in
which we were molded to the work that lies before us. It is for us to
single out the salient characteristics of the nineteenth century. It is
for us to seize the significance of the striking advance in scientific
method, for example, and of the wide-spread acceptance of the scientific
attitude. It is for us, again, to recognize the meaning of that
extension of the democratic movement, which is the most obvious
characteristic of the past sixscore years. It is for us, once more, to
weigh the importance of the intensifying of national spirit and of the
sharpening of racial pride. And, finally, it is for us to take account
also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that
breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the
others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.
Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth:--first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of
democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that
stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no
more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism."
I
"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently
in an essay on Carlyle,--who was devoid of it and detested it,--"the
scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification,
between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is
inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and
edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical of
seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid,
tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of letters, who
had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.
By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man
of science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth
and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity,
absolute honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And
then Dr. Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the
constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress
upon him who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching
would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings
of the highest type of religion."
This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science
falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere
utilization by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this
may be. The painter has been aided by science to perceive more precisely
the effect of the vibrations of light and to analize more sharply the
successive stages of animal movement; and the poet also has found his
profit in the wider knowledge brought to us by later investigations.
Longfellow, for example, drew upon astronomy for the figure with which
he once made plain his moral:
Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So, when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
Wordsworth, a hundred years ago, warmly welcomed "the remotest
discoveries of the chemist, the botanist and mineralogist," as "proper
objects of the poet's art," declaring that "if the time should ever come
when what is now called 'science,' thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the
being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of
man."
Again, the "use of the scientific method" is not equivalent to the
application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the
man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his
purpose. Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of
the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not "see life steadily
and see it whole," he has been enabled to invest his somber 'Ghosts'
with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel to be so
appalling in the master work of Sophocles. Criticism, no less than
creation, has been stimulated by scientific hypothesis; and for one
thing, the conception of literary history has been wholly transformed
since the theory of evolution was declared. To M. Brunetière we owe the
application of this doctrine to the development of the drama in his own
language. He has shown us most convincingly how the several literary
forms,--the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its illegitimate
descendant, the modern novel in prose,--may cross-fertilize each other
from time to time, and also how the casual hybrids that result are ever
struggling to revert each to its own species.
Science is thus seen to be stimulating to art; but the "use of the
scientific method" would seem to be more than stimulation only. It leads
the practitioners of the several arts to set up an ideal of
disinterestedness, inspired by a lofty curiosity, which shall scorn
nothing as insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge
ascertained for its own sake. As it abhors the abnormal and the
freakish, the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative
artist to strive for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it
guides the critic toward passionless proportion and moderation. Altho it
tends toward intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the
reign of law. It establishes the strength of the social bond, and
thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever
young and ever true, what is known as "neo-romanticism," with its
reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore
probably immoral.
The "use of the scientific method" will surely strengthen the conscience
of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a
sterner veracity in dealing with human character. It will inhibit that
pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which
asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before
the final fall of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the
feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of
weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden
effort of will. And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of
life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell
unduly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich
portrayal of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of
the mechanism of their impulses. More than one novelist of the twentieth
century has already yielded to this tendency. No doubt, this is only the
negative defect accompanying a positive quality,--yet it indicates an
imperfect appreciation of the artist's duty. "In every art," so Taine
reminded us, "it is necessary to linger long over the true in order to
attain the beautiful. The eye, fixing itself on an object, begins by
noting details with an excess of precision and fulness; it is only
later, when the inventory is complete, that the mind, master of its
wealth, rises higher, in order to take or to neglect what suits it."
The attitude of the literary critic will be modified by the constant use
of the scientific method, quite as much as the attitude of the literary
creator. He will seek to relate a work of art, whether it is an epic or
a tragedy, a novel or a play, to its environment, weighing all the
circumstances of its creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is,
of course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species
made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep
himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself
derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every
masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must
needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is
permanent,--many things which pleased its author's countrymen in his own
time and which do not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what
is eternal and universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much
that the author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All the
works of Shakspere and of Molière are not of equal value,--and even the
finest of them is not impeccable; and a literary critic who has a
scientific sincerity will not gloss over the minor defects, whatever his
desire to concentrate attention on the nobler qualities by which
Shakspere and Molière achieved their mighty fame. Indeed, the scientific
spirit will make it plain that an unwavering admiration for all the
works of a great writer, unequal as these must be of necessity, is proof
in itself of an obvious inability to perceive wherein lies his real
greatness.
Whatever the service the scientific spirit is likely to render in the
future, we need to be on our guard against the obsession of science
itself. There is danger that an exclusive devotion to science may starve
out all interest in the arts, to the impoverishment of the soul. Already
there are examples of men who hold science to be all-sufficient and who
insist that it has superseded art. Already is it necessary to recall
Lowell's setting off of "art, whose concern is with the ideal and the
potential, from science which is limited by the actual and the
positive." Science bids us go so far and no farther, despite the fact
that man longs to peer beyond the confines. Vistas closed to science are
opened for us by art; and science fails us if we ask too much; for it
can provide no satisfactory explanation of the enigmas of existence.
Above all, it tempts us to a hard and fast acceptance of its own
formulas, an acceptance as deadening to progress as it is false to the
scientific spirit itself. "History warns us," so Huxley declared, "that
it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies, and to end
as superstitions."