SCIENCE IN ITS RELATION TO LITERATURE. i 77 



Owing to the endless tautologies of literature, it requires little dis- 

 cernment to see that it must be approaching a crisis in, if not a com- 

 pletion of, its destiny. Traveling in the same old circle, and treating 

 us perpetually to the same round of entertainment without change or 

 variety, it must gradually cease to interest, and eventually die a natu- 

 ral death. With no new oil to fill its lamps, steeped in a kind of 

 Stygian darkness of its own creation, one may well exclaim with 

 Othello : 



I know not where is that Promethean heat 



That can its light relume. 



And that this would have been a natural result if modern science 

 had not come to the rescue at the right moment, and furnished its 

 proper share of this " Promethean heat," admits of scarcely a doubt, 

 especially in view of the fact that the most successful cultivators of 

 letters in modern times are found resorting, for their choicest inspira- 

 tion, to the new fountains thus opened to use. Notably among poets 

 such men as Tennyson, among historians such men as Buckle, and 

 among critics such men as Taine, have availed themselves of these 

 helps to their genius ; while by differentiating the condition of man, 

 in some of the most important particulars, science has so wrought 

 upon his character and destiny as to render it possible for such splen- 

 did intellects as Goethe, Dickens, and Victor Hugo to say something 

 original of him. For, if you strip their pages of what may be called 

 their scientific coloring, if you take away what directly or indirectly 

 may be traced to the magic web which science has woven all through 

 the affairs of modern life, you strip them of much of their witchery 

 and of most of their originality. 



Now, without going into particulars, we may say generally that 

 the way in which science has wrought this great reform and revolution 

 in literature has been by widening our survey of both man and na- 

 ture. From a being of comparative insignificance, ruled by the rod 

 of a tyrant, or made the sport of demons, and whose views of things 

 were bounded by the narrowest horizon, she has transformed man into 

 a being of the highest order of which we have any knowledge, having 

 risen to it by the operation of laws that have been shaping his destiny 

 for ages. Step by step his powers have been unfolding and the range 

 of his vision enlarging, until he has been able to find some clew to his 

 origin, and some interpretation of natural laws that before were a 

 mystery to him. By the aid of what may be considered a sort of 

 " second sight," namely, instruments of his own invention, he has been 

 enabled to explore the remotest bounds of creation, and thus literally 

 open to himself a new heaven and a new earth. With the telescope 

 he has reached the most distant of planets, with the spectroscope he 

 has discovered many of their constituent elements, and with the mi- 

 croscope he has penetrated into the secrets of the minutest forms of 

 insect life. Through molecular physics and the grand modern tri- 



VOL. XV. 12 



