WAYS OF NATURE 
one is just as shy of over-coloring or falsifying his 
facts as the other, only he gives more than facts, — 
he gives impressions and analogies, and, as far as 
possible, shows you the live bird on the bough. 
The literary and the scientific treatment of the 
dog, for instance, will differ widely, not to say radi- 
cally, but they will not differ in one being true and 
the other false. Each will be true in its own way. 
One will be suggestive and the other exact; one 
will be strictly objective, but literature is always 
more or less subjective. Literature aims to invest its 
subject.with a human interest, and to this end stirs 
our sympathies and emotions. Pure science aims 
to convince the reason and the understanding alone. 
Note Maeterlinck’s treatment of the dog in a late 
magazine article, probably the best thing on our 
four-footed comrade that English literature has to 
show. It gives one pleasure, not because it is all true 
as science is true, but because it is so tender, human, 
and sympathetic, without being false to the essen- 
tial dog nature; it does not make the dog do impos- 
sible things. It is not natural history, it is literature; 
it is not a record of observations upon the manners 
and habits of the dog, but reflections upon him and 
his relations to man, and upon the many problems, 
from the human point of view, that the dog must 
master in a brief time: the distinctions he must 
figure out, the mistakes he must avoid, the riddles of 
life he must read in his dumb dog way. Of course, as 
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