February 2, 191 1] 



NATURE 



447 



tory is concerned with the accumulation and con- 

 sideration of facts with the view of arriving at correct 

 conclusions from them ; and in this respect it must be 

 studied by the methods of science, though the human 

 factor makes the problems more difficult than when 

 material things only are involved. There is, how- 

 ever, no intrinsic reason why Gibbon's majesty of 

 historic conceptions, and the symmetric grandeur of 

 his design, should not be combined with such great 

 learning as was displayed by Lord Acton. Accurate 

 knowledge must surely not be considered as antithetic 

 to perfection of style. 



The instance of Darwia's loss of interest in poetr)' 

 and music proves little. A wide search through the 

 biographies of distinguished men of science will only 

 reveal two or three cases in which devotion to studies 

 of Nature has resulted in the atrophy of aesthetic 

 faculties. Close concentration upon any particular 

 subject often leads to indifference to the aims and 

 work of others ; but this is as true of art, or poetr)-, or 

 music, as it is of science. There is less reason for 

 believing that the man of science has usually no taste 

 for literature, music, or other forms of refined and 

 imaginative expression, than there is for concluding 

 that artists, musicians, and poets have no interest in 

 the attentive study of natural objects and phenomena. 

 If science and documentary evidence are responsible 

 for an age of prose, it is because the poets have been 

 spinning cobwebs from their brains when they ought 

 to have been learning something of the spirit and 

 achievements of science. These are they who, having 

 never entered upon scientific pursuits, are, to use 

 Herbert Spencer's words, "blind to most of the poetry 

 \>\ which they are surrounded." 



Subjoined are some extracts from Lord Moriey's 

 address — 



Let me offer a few words on the effects of the relations 

 of letters and science. We may obviously date a new 

 time from 1859 when Darwin's " Origin of Species " 

 appeared, and along with two or three other imposing 

 works of that date launched into common currency a new 

 vocabulary. We now apply in every sphere, high and 

 low, trivial or momentous, talk about evolution, natural 

 selection, environment, heredity, survival of the fittest, 

 and all the rest. The most resolute and trenchant of 

 Darwinians has warned us that new truth<» begin as rank 

 heresies and end as superstitions ; and if he were alive 

 to see to-day all the effects of his victory on daily speech, 

 perhaps he would not withdraw his words. That great 

 controversy has died down, or at least takes new shape, 

 leaving, after all is said, one of the master contributions 

 to knowledge of nature and its laws and to man's view 

 of life and the working of his destinies. 



Scientific interest has now shifted into new areas of 

 discovery, invention, and speculation. Still the spirit of 

 I lie time remains the spirit of science, and fact and 

 *)rdered knowledge. What has been the effect of know- 

 ledge upon form, on language, on literary art? It adds 

 boundless gifts to human conveniences. E)oes it make an 

 inspiring public for the master of either prose or verse? 

 Darwin himself made no pretentions in authorship. He 

 once said to Sir Charles Lyell that a naturalist's life 

 would be a hap^y one if he had only to observe and never 

 to write. Yet he is a writer of excellent form for simple 

 and direct description, patient accumulation of persuasive 

 arguments, and a noble and transparent candour in stating 

 what makes against him, which, if not what is called 

 style, is better for the reader than the finest style can be. 

 One eminent literary critic of my acquaintance finds his 

 little volume on earthworms a most fascinating book even 

 as literature. Then, although the controversial exigencies 

 of his day affected him with a relish for laying too lustily 

 about him with his powerful flail, I know no more lucid, 

 effective, and manful English than you will find in 

 Huxley. What more delightful book of travel than the 

 " Himalaya Journals " of the great naturalist Hooker, 



NO. 2153, VOL. 85] 



who carried on his botanical explorations some sixty years 

 ago, and happily is still among us? 



Buffon, as man of science, is now, I assume, little 

 more than a shadow of a name, and probably even the 

 most highly educated of us know little more about him 

 than his famous pregnant saying that the style is the 

 man — a saying, by the way, which really meant no more 

 than that, while nature gave the material for narrative, it 

 is man who gives the style. Yet the French to this day 

 count him among the greatest of their writers for order, 

 unity, precision, method, clearness in scientific exposition 

 of animated nature, along with majestic gifts of natural 

 eloquence. Then comes the greatest of all. Whatever the 

 decision may be as to the value of Goethe's scientific con- 

 tribution, this, at least, is certain, that his is the most 

 wondrous, the unique case of a man who united high 

 original scientific power of mind with transcendent gifts 

 in flight, force, and beauty of poetic imagination. 



As for science and the poets, only the other day an 

 attractive little book published by Sir Norman Lockyer 

 shows how Tennyson, the composer of verse unsurpassed 

 for exquisite music in our English tongue, yet . followed 

 with unflagging interest the problems of evolution and all 

 that hangs upon them. Whether astronomy or geology — 

 terrible muses, as he well might call them — inspired the 

 better elements of his beautiful work, we may doubt. 

 An English critic has had the courage to say that there 

 is an insoluble element of prose in Dante, and Tennyson 

 has hardly shown that the scientific ideas of an age are 

 soluble in musical words. Browning, his companion poet, 

 nearly universal in his range, was too essentially dramatic, 

 too independent of the scientific influences of his day, too 

 careless of expression, to be a case much in point. Tenny- 

 son said of him, he had power of intellect enough for all 

 of them, "but he has not the glory of words." Whether 

 he had or not, science was not responsible. 



I should like to name in passing the English poet who, 

 in Lowell's words, has written less and pleased more 

 than any other. Gray was an incessant and a serious 

 student in learned tongues ; and his annotations on the 

 " Systems of Nature," by Linnaeus, his contemjjorary, 

 bear witness to his industry and minute observation as 

 naturalist. 



In prose fiction was one writer of commanding mind, 

 saturated with the spirit of science. Who does not feel 

 how George Eliot's creative and literary art was impaired, 

 and at last worse than impaired, by her daily associations 

 with science? Or would it be truer to say — I often 

 thought it would — that the decline was due to her own 

 ever-deepening sense of the pain of the world and the 

 tragedy of sentient being? 



Let us look at the invasion of another province by the 

 spirit of the time. The eager curiosity of all these years 

 about the facts of biology, chemistry, physics, and their 

 laws has inevitably quickened the spread both of the same 

 curiosit}' and the same respect, quickened by German 

 example, for ascertained facts into the province of history. 

 Is the pure scientific impulse — to tell the exact truth with 

 all the necessary reservations — easy to combine with re- 

 gard for artistic pleasure? 



The English writer of our own Immediate time, with 

 the fullest knowledge and deepest understanding of the fact 

 and spirit of history, would, I think, be pronounced by 

 most critics with a right to judge to be the late Lord 

 Acton. Acton's was a leading case where knowledge and 

 profundity was not matched by form. His page is over- 

 loaded, he is often over-subtle, he has the fault — or shall 

 I call it the literary crime? — of allusiveness and indirect 

 reference — he is apt to put to his reader a riddle or a 

 poser, and then to leave him in the lurch. Here is 

 Acton's own account of the historian's direct debt to the 

 methods of science : — " If men of science owe anvthing 

 to us," he says, " we may learn much from them that is 

 essential. For they can show how to test proof, how to 

 secure fulness and soundness in induction, how to restrain 

 and employ with safety hypothesis and analogy. It is 

 they who hold the secret of the mysterious property of 

 the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth 

 irrecoverably prevails." 



Where the themes and issues are those of scientific 

 truth, that prose should be unemotional is natural. Everv- 



