SCIENCE AND ITS ACCUSERS. 375 



tliat it is directly opposed to tlie " synthetic, reverential, sympa- 

 thizing spirit of art " ; and she holds np to scorn the physicist 

 who can not enjoy the representation of figures suspended in the 

 air in defiance of the law of gravity, and the zoologist who fails 

 to admire cherubs without stomachs, and centaurs with a stomach 

 to spare. Well, if we must confess it, our sympathy in each case 

 is with the man of science ; and we refuse to believe, on any evi- 

 dence as yet tendered, that art would be less art if it condescended 

 to recognize the laws of the physical universe. The poet Horace 

 was no mean artist in his day, nor is there any reason to suppose 

 that he was a victim to the scientific spirit ; yet he has left on 

 record his distaste for all such composite and unnatural creations 

 as Miss Cobbe takes under her protection. He thought the 

 centaur and the mermaid both very ridiculous figures. " Let a 

 thing be what it may," he said, " but let it be simple, let it pre- 

 serve its unity." * The greatest sculptors the world ever saw, those 

 of ancient Greece, devoted themselves almost wholly to the de- 

 lineation of the human form in its ideal perfection ; their art may 

 have sought to transcend the actual, but not the ^Dossible. If 

 they strove to better nature, it was not by flying in the face of 

 natural laws, but by a happier blending of natural elements ; just 

 as the gardener of to-day shows us what may be realized by giv- 

 ing to various plants better conditions than can be commanded in 

 the rude competition for existence. Miss Cobbe will have it that 

 the scientific spirit would kill poetry. We do not believe a word 

 of it ; but we do believe that the scientific spirit applied to poetry 

 would purge it of many morbid growths and ridiculous conceits. 

 Some not incomj)etent judges are of the opinion that the very 

 poem cited by Miss Cobbe in illustration, Shelley's " Sensitive- 

 Plant," is overladen with imagery. The late Mr. Arnold did not 

 find Shelley quite " sane " enough to be a poet of the first order ; 

 and if representatives of the scientific spirit occasionally find 

 something in his verse that they can not quite reconcile with com- 

 mon sense, they may plead that they are only finding what a great 

 literary critic had already found. In lieu of such delicate fancies 

 as Shelley has woven into his " Sensitive-Plant," the scientific 

 spirit, we are told, would "describe how the garden had been 

 thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and 

 sewage." This is not argument; it is hysteria running a little 

 toward coarseness. 



But may it be claimed that science is advancing the interests 

 of truth ? No ; not the science of our time. We are simply 

 gathering facts and deducing laws, subject to rectification when 

 further facts shall have been gathered. But " in other days truth 

 was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests 



* " Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum." — Ars Poetica, 23. 



