Literature and the Lively Sciences

I

IF we are told any oftener that ours is a scientific age, we shall soon believe it. There is a feeling that, since we are enjoying the material benefits conferred by science, we should gratefully accept the reflections on life in general, or on art and other excrescences of life, which scientists are good enough to formulate for us in their spare moments. Our way of justifying a thing is to show that it is scientific, or at least capable of scientific treatment. The arts, long under suspicion, seem to have been put upon probation. If there was a quarrel between art and science in the past, it is over; art has been surrounded and outnumbered. To-day, more than the downright hostility of science, the artist should beware the scientist bearing gifts, promising quarter, willing to make liberal concessions, anxious to end all differences.

Those who saw the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly will have no difficulty in remembering Dr. Hans Zinsser’s vivid article, ‘The Deadly Arts.’ Dr. Zinsser adroitly intercepted the criticism of ‘the professionally literary’ by calling their attention to ‘a prejudice in America that specialists should not trespass beyond their own paddocks, however interestedly they may look over the rails.’ He then proceeded to vault nimbly over the barbedwire fence that separates science from literature, to make himself perfectly at home within the restricted areas of the neighboring enclosure, and finally to depart in utter dissatisfaction, inveighing loudly against its present occupants and scattering the litter of his picnic lunch.

It will be gathered from this unduly prolonged metaphor that Dr. Zinsser recognizes no qualitative distinction between the arts and the sciences. This, from a scientist, can only be construed as a gracious compliment to the arts. Instead of the old dichotomy, he would marshal them both, with all their departments, in a linear formation, graduating from ’an infra-emotional to an ultra-reason range.’ The ensuing spectrum, into which the scientists drop neatly side by side, does not appear to be extensive enough for all the artists, and, indeed, a number of modern writers get shoved ‘off the deep end.’ To be explicit, science has trained a spectroscope on certain of our contemporaries and discovered that they are invisible.

The phenomenon is even more curious when we learn that the same spectroscopic analysis has seen Shelley plain, without the faintest aura of haze, and found a place in the sun for Baudelaire, for Hart Crane, and, presumably, for Dr. Zinsser’s potboiling friend. One would like to examine the collimator of this remarkable instrument. At this distance one fears that the spectroscopist might now and then find it convenient to be color-blind, even as Pantaloon in the comedy is subject to spells of temporary deafness at the mention of uncongenial topics. Until the limits of visibility can be fixed for one and all, the analogy seems more ornamental than useful.

Are Miss Stein, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Joyce, Professor Whitehead, and Alice Gray from the McLean Hospital — is this exclusive assemblage too scientific or not scientific enough for Dr. Zinsser? Shall we, adopting his well-tried categories, condemn them for their excessive intellectuality or for their excessive emotionality? By all means, let us condemn them. If they are guilty on both counts, we can cavil at the excess, although it has always been the privilege of the man of genius, so Keats claimed, to ‘surprise by a fine excess.’ If we are unable to make up our minds whether they are too intellectual or too emotional, we may find ourselves in an embarrassing position — ‘like Voltaire [1694-1778] between Madame de Staël [1766-1817] and Madame Récamier [1777-1849].’ The parentheses are mine.

There would be no disagreement as to which side of the scale we should relegate Alice Gray of the McLean Hospital and Gertrude Stein, now at large in this country. They, my lords, are on the side of the apes, and it cannot be denied that Miss Stein’s advocacy has done much to jeopardize a number of causes in modern literature and art. Yet occasionally, within human memory, Miss Stein has been known to deviate into sense; not quite everything she touched has turned to dross. The Matisses and Picassos still glitter in the atelier of the Rue de Fleurus, thanks to the solicitude of the American public, which habitually comes to scoff and remains to pay.

To quote from a poet who himself has quoted as much and as often as T. S. Eliot is only poetic justice, but Eliot depends so uniquely on his contexts that it is hardly just to isolate the fragments he has shored against his ruins. If it suits his purposes, Dr. Zinsser has a perfect right to point out one or two of the least interesting of these fragments, but not to misquote them. Until we all believe — as Dr. Zinsser already does — that Eliot has no reason for employing any one expression rather than any other, we should insist that no critic is at liberty to garble the phrasing or spelling of a quotation.

It would be quite as uncritical to defend the cause of these oddly assorted contemporaries with exaggerated enthusiasm as to serve them with a blanket indictment. To have great poets, Whitman announced, we must have great audiences; to have comprehensible writers, one might add, we must have a widely accepted set of clear-cut conventions. Caged monkeys — to which Dr. Zinsser strikingly compares our writers — are reduced to their state of frustrated self-expression because society has denied them intercourse with their fellow creatures. Thus the lack of a determining tradition in English literature to-day has led James Joyce to annex the entire corpus of classical and Christian culture in a Promethean effort to give his work a synthetic backbone.

One wonders, incidentally, if Dr. Zinsser is accusing Joyce of being unintellectual and unscientific. In the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ passages of Ulysses and in the continuous stream of unconsciousness that constitutes his Work in Progress, Joyce abandons the ‘naïve realism’ of ordinary literary technique and, by refusing to accept those clear and distinct ideas which are also rash and inaccurate ones and by focusing his interest on the connections between things rather than on the things themselves, he approximates the attitude of Whitehead. And Dr. Zinsser is not, we assume, accusing Dr. Whitehead of being unintellectual and unscientific.

Many will sympathize with Dr. Zinsser’s contempt for ‘popular science.’ The prime source of his irritation is not, one gathers, that this class of books has found so many readers, although it is significant, in a democracy, that the word ‘popular’ should almost invariably be used in a pejorative sense. Possibly he distrusts, as do many scientists whose reputations are untainted with the breath of popularity, the unholy alliance between science and philosophy sponsored by such writers as Eddington and Jeans. Is it not true, however, that the average scientist, in so far as he has any philosophical notions at all, derives them implicitly from the ‘popular science’ of a few generations ago — from Spencer and Comte, not to mention more archaic brands of mechanism and positivism?

Dr. Zinsser is very likely, in the phrase of Rabelais, ung abysme de science; to examine his scientific opinions would be sheer presumption. But if he expects the literary opinions he has voiced to prove caviar to the general, perhaps he may be disappointed. Since the days of Aristophanes and Euripides, anyone with a whim to gird at newfangled and highfalutin tendencies in the literature of his own time has been able to count upon the applause of hordes of gentle readers, ever willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. One can only regret that Dr. Zinsser has not applied his acumen and his impressive repertory of interests in assisting us to a sympathetic understanding of the minds of our contemporaries, rather than in deliberately trying to épater l’intellectuel. From the glimpse at his first chapter which the Atlantic Monthly has offered its readers, one may confidently venture to predict that Dr. Zinsser’s forthcoming scientific work, Rats, Lice, and History, will be popular.

II

‘What’s the essential difference between art and science anyway?’ Not all scientists would be willing to entertain such a question; the more advanced might even dismiss it as meaningless. In a sense, it begs the question by assuming that there is a metaphysical plane on which art and science preëxist in some intrinsic relationship, and that speculation will ultimately reveal some handy and epigrammatic formula for it. Necessarily, as phases of human activity, art and science can be related, but an exact statement of that relationship may turn out to be too general and far-fetched to be of much use. The common ground between two specialized and highly disciplined pursuits is often that of platitude.

This much seems fairly clear — that both must be comprised within some broader frame of reference. Nothing to-day is more depressing than professional attempts to develop a whole way of life out of some particular method for dealing, under selective circumstances, with a portion of the materials of life. We can no longer trust certain critics of the nineteenth century when they expound the doctrine that cultivation of a literary taste by the individual will supply all the deficiencies of modern ethics, politics, and religion. On the other hand, even in the twentieth century, there are those who cannot look forward with any degree of enthusiasm to the time when science will usurp the functions of Church and State.

It would be simpler to limit the problem and to argue, as Arnold and Huxley did, the respective benefits of literary and scientific culture. Dr. Zinsser has certainly demonstrated that the two are not mutually exclusive. If we embark upon a discussion of the proper study of mankind, however, we are bound to lose sight of literature as one of the arts and to be taken up with incidental values. Perhaps it is safest to consider literature and science as conventions, as two techniques of description differing in their respective means and ends. One dare not go farther and assert that the scientific convention is the more precise, for Dr. Zinsser, in his plea for parity, has advanced the disturbing argument that the man of science is every whit as inaccurate as the man of letters.

If the man of science is really any more precise, it is because he finds himself at liberty to frame his own concepts and to coin his own terminology. The man of letters takes his concepts and language as they come, ready-made and often well worn. He must accept uncritically the common sense of daily life. He may admire, but not dissect, the flower in the crannied wall. His not to reason why. Hypotheses non fingit. Science, having deliberately fabricated its conventions, is equipped with a unique set of standards and can well afford to be objective. Literature, having inherited its conventions a priori, is forced to borrow its criteria from life itself and to rely on experience as its only measuring rod.

Scientific method, as Newman pointed out, does not appeal to experience; it only accounts, and that by hypothesis, for the absence of experience. It has perfected a technique of collective experience, so that it is more than half true to say that one scientist can start where another has left off. No writer can get very far beyond the individual experience of the reader, through which his work is both communicated and verified. As an imitator of life, his effects hinge upon our recognition of similarities in our own experience. He is conceded no hypothesis to enable him to penetrate farther. The assertion, all too frequent in the cant of indolent reviewers, that such-and-such a book ‘enlarges our experience’ is a contradiction in terms. Your writer may recombine continually the more and less familiar aspects of experience, but, ‘maker’ though he be, he cannot create ex nihilo.

Here there is a temptation to ask which point of view — the literary or the scientific — comes nearer the absolute truth. One does not propose such a question unless, like jesting Pilate, he can count on a quick getaway. We are too readily disposed to take it for granted that the man of science lives in peculiar intimacy with fact itself, with ultimate actuality, while the man of letters, blinded by the burthen of the mystery, occupies himself with the childish task of keeping up his illusions and ours. Most of us, in superstitiously swallowing the conclusions of science without ever having been initiated into its premises, are hardly less benighted than the savage whose Weltanschauung follows the caprice of a witch doctor. It is no more real and true for us to assume that space is curved than to believe that the moon is made of green cheese. The kind of reality which literature represents is, at least, a matter of universal observation, whereas the world has not appeared to very many in the shape of ‘some colorless movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.’

This stringent view is doubtless a source of intense intellectual satisfaction to the few who are duly qualified to hold it, but it has no bearing upon the lower, more pragmatic levels of life, and hence no significance for literature. It is difficult to dramatize the eternal silence of infinite spaces. Scientific thought, to be sure, is constantly filtering down to literary levels. One recalls Chaucer’s habit of beginning a story by stating the circumstances in the most exact scientific terminology of his day. Ben Jonson’s doctrinaire method of characterization was infected by the sixteenth-century behaviorism of Huarte. The Cartesian theory of the passions is responsible for many of the extravagances of Restoration tragedy. Ptolemaic cosmology, taken out of storage, furnished an admirable mise en scène for Paradise Lost. Nay, the problem of knowledge was broached in the very Garden of Eden, for when Dryden converted Milton’s epic into an opera the first words that he put into Adam’s mouth were: —

It would be easy, if not amusing, to multiply examples, to chronicle the degrees of kinship between Lucretius and Epicurus, Molière and Gassendi, Coleridge and Hartley, or Mr. Eugene O’Neill and Dr. Sigmund Freud. These names are far-flung enough to suggest that literature to-day is not essentially more scientific than it has been in the past, except — and this may be a monstrous exception — to the extent that our general preoccupations are more scientific. But, to the extent that our general preoccupations are so, the less scientific science. The student of our pseudo-culture should turn to the surprising adventures of Buck Rogers on the comic page, or behold at the cinema those awe-inspiring laboratories where flames leap impetuously from one apparatus to another and the canonical hour for important experiments is midnight, preferably during a thunderstorm. Our empirics, heroes of fiction and oracles of fact, are well revenged for the gibes of Jonson and Molière.

Science has been blamed for the experimental tendency of much modern literature, but this derivation is misleading, for literary experiment has precedents of its own. It cannot be an accident that the books of writers who seem most thoroughly indoctrinated with scientific principles — Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, or, in a vein more tolerable to the present generation, Mr. Aldous Huxley—should be flattest and least interesting technically. If we were to examine a work more worthy of representing the modern mind, Ā la recherche du temps perdu, we should find it, despite a tincture of M. Bergson’s ideas, overwhelmingly traditional. Proust’s style is full of symboliste echoes; he has adapted to his needs the naturalistic novel of Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert; his subject matter allies him to Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the noble line of French memorialists, while the range and depth of his obiter dicta belong in the introspective tradition of Montaigne, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld. It is this accumulation of literary tradition, rather than any superficially scientific trait, that characterizes the more distinguished writing of our time.

Experimental science has wielded its influence on literature indirectly, by first affecting our general beliefs. It is not as comfortably reconciled to a literary outlook as the closed systems of an earlier, more anthropocentric science. Sensationalism, although it exploded those assumptions, left a foothold for romantic poetry (pace Dr. Zinsser) in its emphasis on perception. Darwinism, by wrenching away the last barriers between the individual and his environment, abandoned the Victorian poets to a state of bewilderment and trembling before a concept of ‘nature red in tooth and claw.’ The spectacle of Thomas Hardy, brooding over the lack of coöperation between man and nature, may well illustrate the revulsion which was bound to come after. Whether literature itself can survive when the unit of literary experience, the individual life, has been dethroned, degraded, and stripped of dignity by our habit of thinking in totalitarian and materialistic terms — that is the question.

In order to resolve the question we should have to know more than is yet known about those Grenzwissenschaften which call themselves, perhaps wishfully, ‘the social sciences.’ Already our popular literature is branching off in that direction; witness the current output of romans expérimentaux, ‘social documents,’psychological novels, family histories, county surveys, and notebooks of unassimilated observation from ex-convicts and telegraph linemen. When free will, the sine qua non of tragedy, has been replaced by an anatomy of the cerebral cortex, when sociology and economics have, between them, efficiently wound up the problem of evil, when the bourgeois idealism, on which so much art apparently depended, has been purged away, it is hard to see, from this coign of vantage, what need or excuse for literature will be left. With more than curiosity one awaits the great instauration.

III

In the meanwhile, a more immediate and technical problem intrudes itself — the influence of scientific method on literary studies. One need not go so far as to reproach science for the disintegration of litterae humaniores during the past fifty years. One need only observe how the teacher of the liberal arts has taken on the protective coloring of his colleagues in the laboratory, how he has come to look upon his narrowing task as an arcane mystery, and how he begins to speak with blatant assurance of facts and methods and the search for the truth. Doggedly determined to go through the motions of scientific research, he will not pause to adjust his borrowed instruments to his unique material or to ask himself whither, if anywhere, his investigations are tending.

As an instance of the confusion which results when criticism draws upon science for its phrases and ideas, consider the genetic fallacy. This is the assumption, indispensable to literary historians, that the culture of a people may be treated organically. They are thus enabled to speak of periods of growth, efflorescence, and decline, and, from their limited acquaintance with the literatures of the past, to construct a curve which our own literature is expected to follow. Postulating, as it does, that the mind of each generation inherits the characteristics acquired by the last, the theory is open to all the objections which beset Lamarck. If we take their metaphor seriously, we must reconcile ourselves to the prospect of decadence, but what we know of language and of politics allows us to hope that — if there is any literature at all in the predicable future — it will be in some dialect of English.

What is the literary scholar’s vaunted contribution to knowledge? It would never do to subject his findings to the crass criterion of utility. Nor does his work reach any conclusions; rather, it starts from the conclusions of the critic, supplementing and substantiating them. Here is indeed the purest of pure knowledge, admittedly of no use to anyone and incapable of generalization. Less resourceful than the genuine scientist in his observation and description, the scholar has been forced to adopt the categories of history, instead of fashioning his own. He knows no approach but the chronological and thinks entirely in terms of dates, periods, sources, and influences. The Rolls Series and the Calendar of State Papers have befuddled him until he no longer realizes that not every fact out of the past is relevant or significant.

A great deal of recent research in English literature is based on the axiom that writers have always helped themselves freely and literally to the events and people of their day. Scholars have combed the fragmentary documents of various periods to find resemblances between an author’s characters and his contemporaries. If a similar name presents itself on some legal record or census roll, and there are no serious discrepancies, it is seized upon and identified with its literary namesake. The scholar then steps back and marvels at the skill with which his author has caught the likeness of the original. In such a contingency, the evidence is obviously incomplete, the probabilities are stacked against the scholar, and little room is left for the author’s imagination. A splendid specimen of this form of the petitio principii is Professor J. M. Manly’s Some New Light on Chaucer.

New light! Sudden illumination is not an uncommon experience for the readers of learned publications. The scientist isolates another element, develops a needed serum, or splits an atom with novel and startling effects. The scholar discovers, through his researches, that Spenser had a second wife, Wordsworth an illegitimate daughter, or that a certain anonymous alliterative poem of the fourteenth century may plausibly be attributed to Huchown of the Awle Ryale. Let no one say that scholarship has not its trouvailles. It is the ambition of every right-minded apprentice to discredit a portion of the work of his predecessors. Each graduate student in English bums, with fine enthusiasm and intense objectivity, to encounter sonic hitherto unobserved detail and to strain it as far as it will go, to set foot upon some peak in Darien and then to rush headlong into print. Readers of the Atlantic Monthly possess, in their files, a characteristic article by one of our most incessant criers of ‘Eureka,’ Mr. Leslie Hotson, entitled, in all humility, ‘A Great Shakespeare Discovery.’

But this is not the time or place to settle Hotson’s business. Nor would it be pertinent to discuss, except as it typifies the best that can be done under the present, régime, Professor Lowes’s study of the origins of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. The Road to Xanadu belongs on a very special shelf, with The Anatomy of Melancholy on one side and The Golden Bough on the other. It is not a book that can be safely imitated. Men who do not know so much and who do not write so well as Professor Lowes have been ensnared by his methods ere now. What used to be known as ‘source hunting’ has become ‘delving into the ways of the creative imagination.’ Those who were heretofore content to be the hero of a footnote or to have an emendation ratified are setting themselves up for associationist psychologists.

The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-1916), by virtue of its bulk alone, will serve as a landmark, commemorating the fact that the outlines of literary history have been established and the principal texts made available. Subsequent scholarship, pursued in an increasingly rarefied atmosphere, devotes itself to filling in the outlines, exhuming the more mildewed texts, and, in general, supplying a few slips of errata. All this time, the index of production continues to mount and doctoral dissertations pile up in college libraries, waiting to be sorted and digested and used — by those who are planning to write dissertations on kindred subjects. The candidates share our national reverence for statistics of any kind, regardless of their bearing. A tabulation of — let us say — the number of lines to the page in the first editions of Thackeray’s novels would involve much painstaking investigation; it could be accurate and thorough; there is no reason why it should not earn a doctor’s degree for somebody.

A favorite ruse is the application of metrical and stylistic tests to determine the authorship of a work. The scholar assumes that certain features of an author’s vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm are regularly recurrent. He proceeds to take a statistical average of them, and this becomes the canon for all works of questionable authenticity. He is also able, on the biological hypothesis that his author’s style progresses from the simple to the complex, to date a work by internal evidence. The emphasis on problems of authentication and attribution in the scholar’s trade journals reminds us that literary study is still obsessed by the biographical. Still, in spite of its devious methods of inference and its morbid interest in causation, it centres around the stock figures and standard judgments of criticism. To be consistent, it would disregard merely æsthetic distinctions and treat all literature as a uniform mass of anthropological data.

One cavils not because literary studies have gone too far, but because they have not gone far enough. A discipline of philology, bibliography, and antiquarianism is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for productive scholarship. At its most successful, it is only the handmaid of intellectual history. Our professors pride themselves upon accomplishments that would be required as a matter of course from any bookseller’s assistant in England. They stake out their ‘fields’ and squat on them, and woe to him who trespasses! By means of a far-reaching network of academic cartels, such as the notorious Chaucer trust, they have industrialized the training of their successors and organized sweatshops where their research is done for them by graduate students. A hope for the teaching of English literature in America, which Samuel Daniel expressed three hundred years ago, echoes ironically today: —

English culture has never had a central authority. English education, by concentrating on the classics to the exclusion of all else, abandoned its own literature to the humors of curio dealers and country curates who write in to Notes and Queries. An Englishman can still get through public school and university unscathed by any contact, however perfunctory, with the masterpieces of his native language. Literary scholarship in England stems, not from Oxford or Cambridge, but from the University of London, whither it was imported from Germany by Frederick James Furnivall at a time when Francis James Child and Gaston Paris were introducing the product to their respective countries. Now that German scholarship has reduced itself to absurdity, now that Kulturgeschichte has granted its favors to whatever political movement happens to be uppermost, it seems a proper time to scrutinize again the principles which our educators were then embracing with such eagerness.

It is by no means inevitable that literary studies should smell of the stacks. There is room for a really positive— one hesitates to say ‘scientific’ — method. The critic, in spite of his verbalism and subjectivity, is still an empiricist. Because he works with tractable materials which the mind itself has shaped, he faces none of the epistemological difficulties which occasionally sidetrack the scientist. His definitions are operational — that is to say, a book to him is not an independent abstraction, but a series of effects upon a reader’s consciousness. Some day he may realize the power of generalization he has at his command; he may be able to utilize his subject matter for a more precise description of the patterns and processes of human thought. Even now, newer and more fruitful approaches are being adumbrated in the fields of linguistic theory, semantics, the relation of grammar to logic, the definition of meaning, the analysis of metaphor and imagery, folklore, and the study of traditions and conventions.

One may be pardoned a final doubt, for of scholarship and science there is no end. As libraries and periodicals accumulate, the gap between this collective wisdom and the mind of the individual, between theory and practice, continues to widen. For whom has so much infinite and neatly articulated detail been amassed? For what magniloquent purpose was so much diligence and intelligence expended? Have the results of these investigations an ontological status of their own, or do they exist only as ideas in the mind of God?

Within the Platonic realm which modern learning has created for itself, there may be some semblance of order, but without, in the minds of the individuals who are striving to comprehend, there is disorder, and a divergence of backgrounds that makes communication ever more difficult. We have no reason to look too complacently upon the supreme achievement of thought and scholarship since the Renaissance — the divorce of knowledge and virtue.