Читать книгу The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions онлайн

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A great light of the Scientific Age has been heard to say that when he first visited the Vatican he “sat down before Raphael’s Transfiguration and filled three pages of his note-book with its faults.” It was the most natural thing in the world for him to do! How should a Physicist approve of three figures suspended in the air in defiance of the laws of gravitation? Or what could a Zoölogist say to an angel outrageously combining in his person the wings exclusively belonging to the Order Aves with the arms and legs of Bimana? Worst of all, what must be the feelings of a Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a Centaur with two stomachs, or of a Cherub with none?

Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to see what Science can do for it, let us take a typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,—say Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” for example. We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly unscientific statements; e.g., that the lily of the valley grows pale with passion, that the hyacinth rings peals of music from its bells, and that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe how the garden has been thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and sewage. After this the flowers may be mentioned under their proper classes, as monandria and polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such would be the result of bringing the Scientific Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artistic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute realism of “A Mummer’s Wife” and “La Joie de Vivre.” The distance between Walter Scott and Zola measures that between Art and Science in Fiction.