The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

by Sidney Lanier

II.

Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in propounding the idea that the whole common speech of early man may have been rhythmical through the operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practically verse of a very complex rhythm, was naturally a later development; in propounding this idea, I say, I do not mean to declare that the prehistoric man, after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his stone-quarry would dance back to his dwelling in the most beautiful rhythmic figures, would lay down his palæolithic axe to a slow song, and, striking an operatic attitude, would call out to his wife to leave off fishing in the stream and bring him a stone mug of water, all in a most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What I do mean to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables were uniform, and his breath periodic, then the rhythmical results described would follow. Here let me at once illustrate this, and advance a step towards my final point in this connection, by reminding you how easily the most commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly when couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into quite respectable verse rhythms. I might illustrate this, but Dr. Samuel Johnson has already done it for me:—"I put my hat upon my head and walked into the Strand, and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." We have only to arrange this in proper form in order to see that it is a stanza of verse quite perfect as to all technical requirement:—

"I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand."

Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write "hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here "hanging," so as to make it read:

"I hastily put my hat upon my head,
And rushed forth into the Strand,
And there I encountered another man,
Whose hat was hanging in his hand."

Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's,

—by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not destroyed the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon my head," unchanged; but we have merely added brief rhythms, namely that of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or logaœdic dactyl

; that is to say, instead now of leaving our first line all iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a spondee—rūshed fōrth—varies the rhythm by this spondaic intervention, but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So, of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its own rhythm—for an English tongue always gives these words with definite time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms, we have added to them. We have not made it formless, we have made it contain more forms.

Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the formal: it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms. It is this relation which makes prose a freer form than verse.

When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say) then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we must use one form, in prose we may use many forms; and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, not because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a sequence of verse.

Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard much of "forms"—of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art, and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science—which we may call the knowledge of forms—to art, and most especially of these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions have flowered out into widely different shapes.

In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic séance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out.

Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature, which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and generally riot in a complete independence of form.

And finally—to mention no more than a third phase—we may consider the original misconception to have reached a climax which is at once absurd and infernal, in a professedly philosophical work called Le Roman Expérimentale, recently published by M. Emile Zola, gravely defending his peculiar novels as the records of scientific experiments, and declaring that the whole field of imaginative effort must follow his lead.

Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our time here in studying the novel—at least any other novels except M. Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated—to wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science will simply destroy the old imaginative products and build up a new formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that science will absorb into itself all imaginative effort, so that every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little space for perplexity as to these diverse claims.

Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated—after the various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man appear—it is only then that life and use and art and relation and religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of form to a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it had no form.

On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science bring us practically to the same view. Science would seem fairly to have reduced all this host of phenomena which we call the world into a congeries of motions in many forms. What we know by our senses is simply such forms of these motions as our senses have a correlated capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving in orbits too narrow for human vision, impress my sense with a certain property which I call hardness or resistance, this "hardness" being simply our name for one form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the human sense. So color, shape, &c.; these are our names representing a correlation between certain other forms of motion and our senses. Regarding the whole universe thus as a great congeries of forms of motion, we may now go farther and make for ourselves a scientific and useful generalization, reducing a great number of facts to a convenient common denominator, by considering that Science is the knowledge of these forms; that Art is the creation of beautiful forms; that Religion is the faith in the infinite Form-giver and in that infinity of forms which many things lead us to believe as existing, but existing beyond any present correlative capacities of our senses; and finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the satisfaction of our human needs.

And now advancing a step: when we remember how all accounts, the scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of things is from chaos or formlessness to form, and, as we saw in the case of verse and prose, afterwards from the one-formed to the many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, however stentorian, of a progress that professes to be winning freedom by substituting formlessness for form; we know that the ages are rolling the other way,—who shall stop those wheels? We know that what they really do who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one. Do not dream of getting rid of form; your most cutting stroke at it but gives us two forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional reverence to the original meaning of those words, we may devoutly say that in form we live and move and have our being. How strange, then, the furtive apprehension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find prevailing so greatly in our own country.

But, advancing a further step from the particular consideration of science as the knowledge of forms, let us come to the fact that as all art is a congeries of forms, each art must have its own peculiar science; and always we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and the science of that art. For example, correlative to the art of music, we have the general science of music, which indeed consists of several quite separate sciences. If a man desire to become a musical composer, he is absolutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, (2) the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of Orchestration or Instrumentation.

The science of musical form, concerns this sort of matter, for instance. A symphony has generally four great divisions, called movements, separated usually from each other by a considerable pause. Each of these movements has a law of formation: it consists of two main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The sequence of these subjects, the method of varying them by causing now one and now another of the instruments to come forward and play the subject in hand while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the interplay of the two subjects in the modulation-part,—all this is the subject-matter of a science which every composer must laboriously learn.

But again: he must learn the great science of harmony, and of that wonderful tonality which has caused our music to be practically a different art from what preceding ages called music; this science of harmony having its own body of classifications and formulated laws just as the science of Geology has, and a voluminous literature of its own. Again, he must painfully learn the range and capacities of each orchestral instrument, lest he write passages for the violin which no violin can play, &c., and further, the particular ideas which seem to associate themselves with the tone-color of each instrument, as the idea of women's voices with the clarionet, the idea of tenderness and childlikeness with the oboe, &c. This is not all; the musical composer may indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences of music well in hand; but a fourth science of music, namely, the physics of music, or musical acoustics, has now grown to such an extent that every composer will find himself lame without a knowledge of it.

And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting, involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative science—the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its science of prose. Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will supply the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with the conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man to the extent of a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better artist than Strephon who cannot mould the handle of a goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until Beethoven has become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of Harmony?

But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth of Shakspeare's genius unless he were a scientific man to the extent of knowing the science of English verse, or what would be George Eliot's genius unless she knew the science of English prose or the science of novel-writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem as if a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference between the relation of the literary arts to their correlative sciences and the relation of other arts to their correlative sciences influenced the general mind.

I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting a mere man of straw who has been arranged with a view to the convenience of knocking him down, and I find such mournful evidences of the complete misconception of form, of literary science in our literature, that, with a reluctance which every one will understand, I am going to draw upon a personal experience, to show the extent of that misconception.

Some of you may remember that a part of the course of lectures which your present lecturer delivered here last year were afterwards published in book-form, under the title of The Science of English Verse. Happening in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I was asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and criticisms of the book, whereof the publishers had collected a great bundle. Most curious to see if some previous ideas I had formed as to the general relation between literary art and science would be confirmed, I read these notices with great interest. Not only were my suspicions confirmed: but it is perfectly fair to say that nine out of ten, even of those which most generously treated the book in hand, treated it upon the general theory that a work on the science of verse must necessarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now, not one of these writers would have treated a work on the science of geology as a collection of rules for making rocks; or a work on the science of anatomy as a collection of rules for making bones or for procuring cadavers. In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might very well be written; but then it would be a hand-book of the art of verse, and would take the whole science of verse for granted,—like an instruction-book for the piano, or the like.

If we should find the whole critical body of a continent treating (say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as really a cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas upon the best methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, we should certainly suspect something wrong; but this is precisely parallel with the mistake already mentioned.

But even when the functions of form, of science, in literary art have been comprehended, one is amazed to find among literary artists themselves a certain apprehension of danger in knowing too much of the forms of art. A valued friend who has won a considerable place in contemporary authorship in writing me not long ago said, after much abstract and impersonal admission of a possible science of verse—in the way that one admits there may be griffins, but feels no great concern about it—"as for me I would rather continue to write verse from pure instinct."

This fallacy—of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we learned to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching—seems a curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For—to go no farther—the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn the science of language—the practical relation of noun and verb and connective—before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every word it uses,—with an amount of diligence and of study which is really stupendous when we think of it—what wild absurdity to forget these years passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of the science of verse can be learned—what wild absurdity to fancy that one is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a science.

Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it, remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor.

The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity.

No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example, is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master of his art and not be mastered by his art.

Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have her inspiration, she must be in a true raptus, but the raptus must be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once sublime and practical, of every act.

There is an old aphorism—it is twelve hundred years old—which covers all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet—and a rare one he must have been—an old Armorican named Hervé, of whom all manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of Scribner's Magazine, you can realize that one who lived in that old Armorica—the modern Brittany from which Millet comes—knew full well what it meant to answer to the rocks.

Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels. I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary artist our language has ever produced.

We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an Elizabethan eulogy:

Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,

(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),

My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race.
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.

No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.

With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations of Science—or the knowledge of all forms—to Art, or the creation of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned, (1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art; (2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in ordinary for the information of current sociology.

Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true—as I am told is much believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the way of timorous apprehension in our own country—that science is to abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature. It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing; while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the Ode to St. Cecilia, the Essay on Man, Manfred, A man's a man for a' that, the Ode on Immortality, In Memoriam, the Ode to a Nightingale, The Psalm of Life, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.

Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me that we find—as to the substance of poetry—a steadily increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the form of the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words, this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No. 60 of In Memoriam:

If in thy second state sublime,
Thy ransomed reason change replies
With all the circle of the wise,
The perfect flower of human time;

And if thou cast thine eyes below,
How dimly character'd and slight,
How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night,
How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man,
I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.

Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call his In Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time;
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had bought,
To march in ranks of better equipage;
But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."

Returning to Tennyson: has science cooled his yearning for human friendship? We are answered in No. 90 of In Memoriam. Where was ever such an invocation to a dead friend to return!

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish'd years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.

When summer's hourly mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come; not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after-form,
And like a finer light in light.

Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes from the depths of a sick despondency, from all the darkness of a bad quarter of an hour.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pains that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a fury, slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of others? We are wonderfully answered in No. 33.

O thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.

Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor then with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.

Her faith thro' form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good.
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!

See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev'n for want of such a type.

Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty? Here in No. 84 we have a poem which, for what I can only call absolute beauty, is simply perfect.

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows, and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odor streaming far
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'

And finally we are able to see from his own words that he is not ignorantly resisting the influences of science, but that he knows science, reveres it and understands its precise place and function. What he terms in the following poem (113 of In Memoriam) Knowledge and Wisdom are what we have been speaking of as Science and Poetry.

Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

---

Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.

A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:

For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the Soul.
O friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,

I would the great world grew like thee
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.

If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative victim of Science, we find him still preaching the poet's gospel of beauty, as comprehending the evangel of faith, hope and charity, only preaching it in those newer and finer forms with which science itself has endowed him; if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten and disciplined with the stern questions which scientific speculation has put—questions which you will find presented in their most sombre terribleness in Tennyson's Two Voices; if finally we find him steadily regarding science as knowledge which only the true poet can vivify into wisdom:—then I say, life is too short to waste any of it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, still prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry.

Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all this argument upon a priori grounds: this argument is, in brief, that wonder and mystery are the imagination's material, and that science is to explain away all mystery. But what a crude view is this of explanation! The moment you examine the process, you find that at bottom explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest example: here is a mass of conglomerate: science explains that it is composed of a great number of pebbles which have become fastened together by a natural cement. But after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a mountain of conglomerate? though we are familiar with the pebble, and unfamiliar with the other. Now to the wise man, the poet, familiarity with a mystery brings no contempt; to explanation of science, supremely fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, but adds to old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher into nature always finds, as a poet has declared, that

... "In seeking to undo
One riddle, and to find the true
I knit a hundred others new."

And so, away with this folly. Science, instead of being the enemy of poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary—it forever purveys for poetry, and just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with nature, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the poetry of the future and more abundant in its forms.

And here we may advance to our second class, who believe that the poetry of the future is to be democratic and formless.

I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sentences here and there in a recent paper of Whitman's, in order to present a perfectly fair view of his whole doctrine. When, for instance, he declares that Tennyson's poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although it is "the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure and almost always perfumed like the tuberose to an extreme of sweetness," yet it has "never one democratic page," and is "never free, naïve poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated;" when we find him bragging of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic" (the United States of course) "with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind), wherewith nature, history and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past;" and when finally we hear him tenderly declaring that "meanwhile democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight—but 'tis the twilight of dawn;"—we are in sufficient possession of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his doctrine.

In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written for the people, who have professed most distinctively to represent and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing A man's a man for a' that, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's Lambs and Peter Grays.

And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated.

The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society.

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III.

At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail. We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of these misconceptions. The first we examined was that which predicts the total death of imaginative literature—poetry, novels and all—in consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light; so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally, penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson—as a poet most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it—we found from several readings in In Memoriam that whether as to love or friendship, or the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.

And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall still love mystery; but it is not the shallow mystery of those small darks which are enclosed by caves and crumbling dungeons, it is the unfathomable mystery of the sunlight and the sun; it is this inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite which is projected upon the finite; it is this multitudinous flickering of all the other ego's upon the tissue of my ego: these are the lights and shades and vaguenesses of mystery in which the modern imaginative effort delights. And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young man who may entertain the hope of poethood, that at this stage of the world you need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your poetry unless that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of current science. I do not mean that you are to write "Loves of the Plants;" I do not mean that you are to versify Biology; but I mean that you must be so far instinct with the scientific thought of the time that your poetic conceptions will rush as it were from under these pure, cold facts of science like those Alpine torrents which flow out of glaciers. Or,—to change the figure for the better—just as the chemist, in causing chlorine and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid, finds that he must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together, but he must put them together in the presence of light in order to make them combine; so the poet of our time will find that his poetic combinations, his grandest syntheses of wisdom, own this law; and they, too, must be effected in the presence of the awful light of science.

Returning to our outline of the last lecture: After we had discussed this matter, we advanced to the second of the great misconceptions of the function of form in art—that which holds that the imaginative effort of the future will be better than that of the present, and that this improvement will come through a progress towards formlessness. After quoting several sentences from Whitman which seemed to contain the substantial argument—to-wit, that the poetry of the future is to be signalized by independence of form, and is, by virtue of this independence, to gain strength, and become a democratic poetry, as contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic poetry of the present—I called your attention to a notable circumstance which seems to throw a curious light along this inquiry: that circumstance being that the two English poets who have most exclusively laid claim to represent the people in poetry, to express nothing but the people's heart in the people's words, namely Wordsworth and Whitman, are precisely the two whose audience has been most exclusively confined to the other extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing to Hodge, Nokes, and Stiles; instead of being found in penny editions on the collier's shelves; is most cherished by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high-priest of culture. And so with Whitman: we may say with safety that no preacher was ever so decisively rejected by his own: continually crying democracy in the market-place, and crying it in forms or no-forms professing to be nothing but products of the democratic spirit; nevertheless the democracy everywhere have turned a deaf ear, and it is only with a few of the most retired thinkers of our time that Whitman has found even a partial acceptance.

And finally, by way of showing a reason for this state of things in Whitman's case, the last lecture closed with the assertion that Whitman's poetry, in spite of his belief that it is democratic, is really aristocratic to the last degree; and instead of belonging, as he asserts to an early and fresh-thoughted stage of a republic, is really poetry which would be impossible except in a highly civilized state of society.

Here, then, let us take up the thread of that argument. In the quotations which were given from Whitman's paper, we have really the ideal democracy and democrat of this school. It is curious to reflect in the first place that in point of fact no such democracy, no such democrat, has ever existed in this country. For example: when Whitman tells us of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud ill-pitched voice; its fights, errors, eructations, dishonesties, audacities;" et cetera: when he tells us this, with a sort of caressing touch upon all the bad adjectives, rolling the "errors" and the "audacities" and the "viciousness" under his tongue and faithfully believing that the strength which recommends his future poetry is to come out of viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like; let us inquire, to what representative facts in our history does this picture correspond; what great democrat who has helped to "block out" this present republic, sat for this portrait? Is it George Washington, that beautiful, broad tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we Americans have never yet held quite at his true value,—is it Washington who was vicious, dishonest, audacious, combative? But Washington had some hand in blocking out this republic. Or what would our courtly and philosophic Thomas Jefferson look like, if you should put this slouch hat on him, and open his shirt-front at the bosom, and set him to presiding over a ruffianly nomination? Yet he had some hand in blocking out this republic. In one of Whitman's poems I find him crying out to Americans, in this same strain: "O lands! would you be freer than all that has ever been before? If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me." And this is the deliverance:

"Fear grace—fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice;
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of States and men."

And in another line, he rejoices in America because—"Here are the roughs, beards, ... combativeness, and the like".

But where are these roughs, these beards, and this combativeness? Were the Adamses and Benjamin Franklin roughs? was it these who taught us to make ruffianly nominations? But they had some hand in blocking out this republic. In short, leaving each one to extend this list of names for himself, it may be fairly said that nowhere in history can one find less of that ruggedness which Whitman regards as the essential of democracy; nowhere more of that grace which he considers fatal to it, than among the very representative democrats who blocked out this republic. In truth, when Whitman cries "fear the mellow sweet," and "beware the mortal ripening of nature", we have an instructive instance of the extreme folly into which a man may be led by mistaking a metaphor for an argument. The argument here is, you observe, that because an apple in the course of nature rots soon after it mellows, argal a man cannot mellow his spirit with culture without decaying soon afterwards. Of course it is sufficient only to reflect non sequitur; for it is precisely the difference between the man and the apple, that, whereas every apple must rot after ripeness, no man is bound to.

If therefore after an inquiry ranging from Washington and Jefferson down to William Cullen Bryant (that surely unrugged and graceful figure who was so often called the finest American gentleman) and Lowell, and Longfellow, and the rest who are really the men that are blocking out our republic, if we find not a single representative American democrat to whom any of these pet adjectives apply,—not one who is measurelessly vicious, or ruffianly, or audacious, or purposely rugged, or contemptuous towards the graces of life,—then we are obliged to affirm that the whole ideal drawn by Whitman is a fancy picture with no counterpart in nature. It is perfectly true that we have ruffianly nominations; but we have them because the real democrats who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, stay away from nominating conventions and leave them to the ruffians. Surely no one can look with the most cursory eye upon our everyday American life without seeing that the real advance of our society goes on not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call the Government, &c.; that really the most effective legislation in our country is that which is enacted in the breasts of the individual democrats who compose it. And this is true democratic growth, every day; more and more, each man perceives that the shortest and most effectual method of securing his own rights is to respect the rights of others; and so every day do we less and less need outside interference in our individual relations; so that every day we approach nearer and nearer towards that ideal government in which each man is, mainly, his own legislator, his own governor or president, and his own judge, and in which the public government is mainly a concert of measures for the common sanitation and police.

But again: it is true as Whitman says that we have dishonesties; but we punish them, they are not representative, they have no more relation to democracy than the English thief has to English aristocracy.

From what spirit of blindness is it alleged that these things are peculiar to our democracy? Whitman here explicitly declares that the over-dainty Englishman "can not stomach the high-life below stairs of our social status so far;" this high-life consisting of the measureless viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot stomach it, no; who could? But how absurd to come down to this republic, to American society for these things! Alas, I know an Englishman, who, three hundred years ago, found these same things in that aristocracy there; and he too, thank heaven, could not stomach them, for he has condemned them in a sonnet which is the solace of all sober-thoughted ages. I mean Shakspeare, and his sonnet

LXVI.

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 æon 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 Crécy. "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 Expérimental. 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 Expérimental 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 naïve 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.

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