102 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This proposition I can not accept. Literature, for example, is an 

 indispensable element in an education, but it does not give all 

 kinds of knowledge and mental training. Those students who 

 look upon literature as in itself an education will find or others 

 will find it out if they do not that they have accepted it in some 

 measure instead of an education. One can not omit the other 

 great subjects from his training, and then make up for their loss 

 by reading his Browning, his Chaucer, or even his Shakespeare, 

 more often and more strenuously. The mathematics and the 

 more exact physical sciences help, as no other branches of study 

 can, to give to the mind habits of accuracy and a sense of propor- 

 tion. In a class in literature many questions do not admit of 

 exact answers ; the personal element must come in ; the answers 

 of the most careful instructor are only an approximation to the 

 truth; the answers of the most superficial scholar will not be 

 entirely wrong. Indeed, since a literary masterpiece makes its 

 appeal primarily to the emotions and the imagination, the whole 

 conception of definite, exact answers to specific questions has but 

 a limited application to the work of the class in literature. In 

 mathematics and the more exact physical sciences each problem 

 is specific, and has one answer that is exactly right ; all other pos- 

 sible answers are exactly and entirely wrong. Every man needs 

 the discipline of such study. 



Let the man interested in literature study mechanics. When 

 he learns that many forces differing in quantity and direction 

 can all combine in a single resultant motion, he will not be quite 

 so ready in studying literary movements to fix the attention upon 

 one force or circumstance and neglect all the others. Let him 

 study chemistry ; let him determine all the elements in a given 

 compound, and how much of each is present ; then he will not be 

 quite so apt, when analyzing a piece of literature, to fix the atten- 

 tion upon one quality and ignore everything else. 



Even professional literary critics are often decidedly lacking 

 in proportion, poise, and sharpness of outline. Let me illustrate. 

 Mr. Swinburne speaks thus of Collins : " He could put more spirit 

 of color into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single 

 note, than could all the rest of his generation into all the labors 

 of their lives." * The same critic comments as follows upon some 

 of the poems of Keats : " The Ode to a Nightingale, one of the 

 final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages, is 

 immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the 

 most vulgar and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and 

 effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood." f 



* Ward's English Poets, iii, p. 282. 



f Encyclopaedia Britannica, article upon Keats. 



