The Holy Earth

by L. H. Bailey

Great literature may be relatively independent of time and place, and this is beyond discussion here; but if the standards of interpretative literature are lowering it must be because the standards of life are lowering, for the attainment and the outlook of a people are bound to be displayed in its letters.

Perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods and standards rather than in essential qualities. We constantly acquire new material for literary use. The riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever before. It would be strange indeed if the new experience of the planet did not express itself in new literary form.

We are led astray by the fatal habit of making comparisons, contrasting one epoch with another. There may be inflexible souls among the investigators who see little or nothing beyond the set of facts in a little field, but surely the greater number of scientific men are persons of keen imagination and of broad interest in all conquests. Indeed, a lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the best attainments in science; it is necessary only that the imagination be regulated and trained. Never has it been so true that fact is stranger than fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been so evenly matched by the flights of science. All great engineers, chemists, physiologists, physicists work in the realm of imagination, of imagination that projects the unknown from the known. Almost do we think that the Roentgen ray, the wireless telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the stars, the serum control of disease are the product of what we might call pure fancy. The very utilities and conquests of modern society are the results of better imagination than the world has yet known. If it is true that the desire to measure and to analyze is now an established trait, equally is it true that it directs the mind into far and untried reaches; and if we have not yet found this range of inspiration in what is called artistic literature, it must be because literary criticism has not accepted the imagery of the modern world and is still looking for its art to the models of the past.

The models of the past are properly the standards for the performances of their time, but this does not constitute them the standards of all time or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of language for the sake of writing it is losing its hold; but a new, clear, and forceful literature appears. This new literature has its own criteria. It would be violence to judge it only by standards of criticism founded on Elizabethan writings. We do not descend into crude materialism because we describe the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate imagination because we desire that it shall have meaning; we do not strip literature of artistic quality because it is true to the facts and the outlook of our own time.

It may be admitted that present literature is inadequate, and that we are still obliged to go to the former compositions for our highest artistic expressions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never cease to want these older literatures. Let us hope that we shall never be severed from our past. But perhaps the good judge in a coming generation, when the slow process of elimination has perfected its criticism, will discover something very noble and even very artistic in the abundant writing of our day. Certainly he will note the recovery from the first excess of reaction against the older orders, and he will be aware that at this epoch man began anew to express his social sense in a large way, as a result of all his painstaking studies in science. Even if he should not discover the highest forms of literary expression, he might find that here was the large promise of a new order. Possibly he would discover major compositions of the excellence of which we ourselves are not aware.

It is less than forty years since Darwin and less than fifty years since Agassiz. It is only twenty years since Pasteur. It is only a century and a quarter since Franklin, fifty years since Faraday, less than twenty-five since Tyndall. It is sixty years since Humboldt glorified the earth with the range of his imagination. It is not so very far even if we go back to Newton and to Kepler. Within the span of a century we count name after name of prophets who have set us on a new course. So complete has been the revolution that we lost our old bearings before we had found the new. We have not yet worked out the new relationships, nor put into practice their moral obligations, nor have we grasped the fulness of our privileges. We have not yet made the new knowledge consciously into a philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into working attitudes of social equity. Therefore, not even now are we ripe for the new literature.

We have gone far enough, however, to know that science is not unsympathetic and that it is not contemptuous of the unknown. By lens and prism and balance and line we measure minutely whatever we can sense; then with bared heads we look out to the great unknown and we cast our lines beyond the stars. There are no realms beyond which the prophecy of science would not go. It resolves the atom and it weighs the planets.

Among the science men I have found as many poetic souls as among the literary men, although they may not know so much poetry, and they are not equally trained in literary expression; being free of the restraint of conventional criticism, they are likely to have a peculiarly keen and sympathetic projection. Close dissection long continued may not lead to free artistic literary expression; this is as true of literary anatomy as of biological anatomy: but this does not destroy the freedom of other souls, and it may afford good material for the artist.

Two kinds of popular writing are confused in the public mind, for there are two classes that express the findings of scientific inquiry. The prevailing product is that which issues from establishments and institutions. This is supervised, edited, and made to conform; it is the product of our perfected organizations and has all the hardness of its origin. The other literature is of a different breed. It is the expression of personality. The one is a useful and necessary public literature of record and advice; the other is a literature of outlook and inspiration. The latter is not to be expected from the institutions, for it is naturally the literature of freedom.