1883 .] Science and Savants, in Modern Literature . 
639 
III. SCIENCE AND SAVANTS IN MODERN 
LITERATURE. 
« CIENCE is at last winning recognition, if not due ap- 
preciation, in a new quarter. Her results, her 
supposed objects, her methods, and even the person- 
ality of her followers are no longer ignored in works of 
fiction, though whether they are faithfully and fairly depicted 
is certainly open to question. This change has been of a 
very gradual charadter. In the last century there were, as 
we know, amateur astronomers and dilettante experimental- 
ists in physics not a few. Society was deeply interested in 
the marvels of fridtional eledtricity. Gentlemen of fashion 
turned back their ruffles in order to apply their hands as 
rubbers to the revolving glass globe or cylinder ; and ladies, 
in all the glory of patches and hair-powder, discussed, or at 
any rate gossiped over, the results produced. Yet none of 
this interest was refledted in the literature of that day. 
Scientific discoveries and scientific theories are not even 
glanced at by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, or their con- 
temporaries. Coming down even to recent times, we may 
make the same remark concerning the writings of Charles 
Dickens. Dodtors, lawyers, divines, men of erudition are 
introduced ; but for him the investigator of Nature was too 
unimportant even for ridicule. 
In Bulwer Lytton the case is different. Here, in “ Zanoni ” 
and in “ A Strange Story,” we find the search after truth 
put forward as a pursuit capable of absorbing human atten- 
tion. But the Science of Lytton is more nearly allied to 
what is now becoming known as “ Occultism ” than to the 
open discipline of Western Europe. Zanoni is a physicist, 
a chemist, a biologist also, but the extent and the nature of 
his attainments are veiled over with an impenetrable cloud. 
He is, at at any rate, neither a pidture nor a caricature of 
any savant of Lytton’s own time. Nor is the knowledge 
which he is represented as possessing part and parcel of that 
which figures in our scientific journals, or in the Trans- 
actions of the great learned societies. Be it a reality or a 
delusion — and this is no place for discussing such a question 
— it is something essentially sui generis. Nor does it appear 
as a factor capable of influencing the ideas, the beliefs, and 
the characters of men and women of the world, 
