POETRY AND SCIENCE 47 



lect or building up the moral character, then very certainly the effort 

 would have ended in failure; poetry must be taken for its own sake, 

 or it may as well not be taken at all. I incline to the opinion that 

 the readings, while they would undoubtedly have increased the store 

 of possible quotation, would still have left Darwin with the regrets 

 that the " Autobiography " expresses. 



The argument of the present note may now be summarized as fol- 

 lows. I do not think that Darwin ever had a profound interest in 

 poetry; the scientific temperament was too strong in him. The his- 

 torical plays in which as a schoolboy he took " intense delight " prob- 

 ably interested him in the main as stories. The poets whom he read 

 during his plastic period probably attracted him, in large measure, by 

 their felicity of language; the cult of words and phrases is character- 

 istic of adolescence, and is curiously different from a real appreciation 

 of style — into which it may or may not develop, according to the 

 temperam.ent of the reader. On the other side, I think that Darwin's 

 poetic leanings were much more pronounced and much more persistent 

 than those of the average man of science. By his own unconscious 

 confession, and by the evidence of his written works, his mind was 

 leavened with poetic feeling; all through his mature life he is ready 

 with quotation when the occasion calls; and the veiy poignancy of his 

 regret for the loss of poetry witnesses to his poetic endowment. If 

 and in so far as he did lose his poetic interests, the loss was due, not 

 specifically to his occupation with science, but generally to the combi- 

 nation of a stupendous life-work with continued ill-health. " For 

 nearly forty years he never knew one day of the health of ordinary 

 men," and in those forty years he revolutionized biology. Small won- 

 der, then, that he had neither time nor energy for that critical cultiva- 

 tion of poetry which, however gifted the temperament, is the sine qua 

 non of a true poetic insight. It was not that addiction to science 

 brought with it an atrophy of the higher esthetic tastes. It was rather 

 the fact that an esthetic power, distinctly above the average, though 

 not of the first rank, was left, by the demands of an absorbing pursuit 

 upon a frail constitution, to work itself out unguided, and to show 

 itself as best it might. The cry that Shakespeare is intolerable is the 

 cry of a man to whom Shakespeare is familiar from cover to cover, 

 tragedy and history and comedy, and for whom Shakespeare might, 

 under other circumstances, have been a source of never-ending delight. 



I have spoken only of poetry. The considerations which I have here 

 urged apply, however, with the necessary modifications, to Darwin's 

 loss of pleasure in pictures and music. 



