358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Is the poetry of things really destroyed by a scientific acquaintance 

 with them ? Does all poetry in a sense resemble that many-colored, 

 light-embroidered band which the ancients deified, and whose wholly 

 geometrical and earthly texture Newton laid bare ? Pascal said there 

 was no difference between the poet's trade and the embroiderer's ; 

 Montesquieu said the poet's business was "to overload reason and 

 nature with fine fancies, as we used to bury women under their dress- 

 trimmings." Voltaire regarded such expressions as only jests, though 

 malicious ones ; but they appear to a considerable number of the 

 scientific men and thinkers of the present day to embody the exact 

 expression of a truth. Poetry, which, in the seventeenth and eight- 

 eenth centuries, had the majority of the good people on its side, has 

 now, they tell us, only the minority. Science is the great obsession 

 of our age ; we all render to it, often unconsciously, a sort of worship, 

 and can not help feeling a kind of scorn for poetry. Mr. Spencer 

 compares Science to the humjble Cinderella, who was hidden so long in 

 the chimney-corner, while her proud sisters displayed their tinsels in 

 everybody's eyes. Now Cinderella is taking her turn ; " and some 

 day Science, declared the best and the fairest, will reign as sovereign." 

 M. Renan predicts a time " when the great artists will be an antiquated 

 affair, nearly useless, while the value of the scientific man will be 

 more and more appreciated." M. Renan has also expressed regret 

 that he did not himself become a scientific man instead of being a 

 dilettante in erudition. Who can say that Goethe, if he had been 

 bom in the present age, would not have preferred to devote himself 

 entirely to the natural sciences ; or that Voltaire would not have ap- 

 plied himself more to mathematics, in which he showed some force ; 

 or that Shakespeare would not have engaged in a more weighty occu- 

 pation of his psychological powers than the construction of his dramas 

 of human paltriness? Darwin's grandfather devoted a part of his 

 talent to writing poor poems ; the grandson, if he had been born a 

 hundred years earlier, might have done the same ; but Charles Dar- 

 win, in the spirit of the age in which he lived, instead of a poem of 

 gardens, gave us the scientific epic of natural selection. Poems die 

 with their languages, and poets can hope for their works " only an 

 evening of life in the hearts of lovers " ; the canvases of painters 

 wear out, and, in a few hundred years, Raphael will be nothing but a 

 name ; statues and monuments fall into dust ; only thought seems to 

 live, and he who adds a thought to the stores of the human mind may 

 live by its means as long as mankind itself. Must we believe that 

 imagination and feeling are not as vital as thought, and that art must 

 finally give way to science ? The question is worthy of considera- 

 tion, for it concerns the destiny of human genius and the shapes it is 

 to assume in the future. 



The writers who predict that poetry and the arts will gradually 

 disappear rest upon a number of facts, some of which are borrowed 



