tween science and religion. He replied that there certainly was not, but that modern science was so comprehensive as to satisfy men's minds, and make them independent of "metaphysical aid." The splendid edition of Bacon's Works for which James Spedding was chiefly responsible contains a Preface by a young man of singular gifts, Leslie Ellis, who was soon afterwards removed by death. He concluded his essay with these striking and beautiful sentences:

"The tone in which Bacon spoke of the future destiny of mankind fitted him to be a leader of the age in which he lived. It was an age of change and of hope. Men went forth to seek in new-found worlds for the land of gold and for the fountain of youth; they were told that yet greater wonders lay within their reach. They had burst the bonds of old authority; they were told to go forth from the land where they had dwelt so long, and look on the light of heaven. It was also for the most part an age of faith; and the new philosophy upset no creed and pulled down no altar. It did not put the notion of human perfectibility in the place of religion, nor deprive mankind of hopes beyond the grave. On the contrary, it told its followers that the instauration of the sciences was the free gift of the God in whom their fathers had trusted, that it was only another proof of the mercy of Him whose mercy is over all His works."

It

not be answered by science cannot be answered at all. Hence Agnosticism, the creed of Huxley, not of Bacon. My subject, however, is not religion, but literature and its decline. Mill, as we read in his Autobiography, was haunted at an early age by a strange dread, which he quaintly compares with the conviction of sin, that musical combinations might be exhausted. Music is Science, and therefore, I suppose, inexhaustible. Literature is not, whatever history may be. The scientific spirit seems now to dominate everything. The world is in future to be governed from the laboratory. used to be said by those of old time that science had a definite province, within which no doubt all unscientific ideas were intrusions, beyond which was the realm of literature, conduct, imagination, faith. Modern science seeks to remove the boundaries, to claim all knowledge for its province, and to say that what it does not know is not knowledge. Jura negat sibi nata, nihil non arrogat armis. Demands like these, perhaps not consciously put forward, would still, if formulated, be set aside by the bulk of the human race. But then do the bulk of the human race count? Or is the future with the select band who are competent to arrive at scientific truth, and care for nothing else? Do the highest minds gravitate by slow and sure degrees from the shadows and fancies of art to the facts and conclusions which alone are sure? When Tyndall lectured on the scientific use of the imagination, he was wittily told that he meant the imaginative use of science. The criticism, so far as it was not merely verbal, admitted that the former things had passed away, that the ancient distinction had broken down. Darwin rejected literature, it

had been starved. A man of science would explain the phenomenon in pre

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cisely the opposite way. Here, he would tell us, is the deepest thinker of his age, the man who by his patient researches has transformed our conceptions of the universe. sume that such a man has no imagination is ridiculous. Yes, his imagination is the true one, because it was set going by experiment, because it arrives at certainty, because it rests upon fact. Literature may be an elegant amusement, but, after all, it is only permutations and combinations of words. Have we not had enough of it? What is the need for it, except to make the conclusions of science intelligible to the masses? Is it possible to carry the art of expression further than Plato carried it more than two thousand years ago? Are we likely to see a greater poet than Shakespeare? There is no progress in literature. There is nothing else in science, for there is no limit to discovery. If these arguments are sound, they may suggest a reason why literary genius is not unquenchable, or is even being quenched.

at least I will tell you nothing that I cannot prove. If my paths are not always paths of pleasantness, they are never paths of illusion. If I cannot teach you to deceive others, I can at least teach you not to deceive yourself. This is not a new message. There is nothing new under the sun. When Lucretius glorified Epicurus in verses which have survived for centuries the scientific theories they embalm, he celebrated the triumph of science over mythology. Sublime poet as he was, he valued his art, if indeed he was conscious of it, simply as an instrument for making more Epicureans. It is true that his expectations have been reversed, that Lucretius is read now for his poetry, not for his science. Why? Because, the physicist will say, there is development in science, and not in literature. The ideas of Epicurus are as remote as a cuneiform inscription. Lucretius could write poetry better than anybody can write it now. The art of expression is a mere trial of ingenuity, and how can any one ever be more ingenious than Pope? Let the dead bury their dead. Science is alive. Of course people want new books. They always will want them. They read to amuse themselves, to pass the time. Books must be written, as chairs and tables must be made. The world must go on. Average minds have no need to trouble themselves about such things. There will always be plenty for them to do. But if literature is to be in the future what it has been in the past, it must retain its attraction for men of genius. Will the highest intellects concern themselves with insoluble problems, with windows that exclude the light and passages that lead to nothing? Or will they be drawn, are they being drawn even now, into the more fruitful methods of experiment and exactitude? A definite answer to such a question would be most presumptuous.

The query is only offered as a tentative solution of apparent facts. It is easy to reply that science and literature are not necessarily or naturally opposed; that Darwin wrote a good style, and Huxley a better; that Tennyson was fascinated by scientific progress; that things can only be explained by words. Original minds, minds of the highest order, will not always be content with a secondary place. When, if ever, science is finally enthroned as the goddess of reason, the one source of real truth here below, the arbitress of human destiny, the dictatress of the world, literature must gradually subside into a tale of little meaning, a relic of the past. The legendary mathematician's comment on "Paradise Lost," "A very fine poem, but I don't quite see what it all goes to prove," may have shown him to be in advance of his age. For though "Paradise Lost" probably numbers more readers than the "Principia," it has not extended the boundaries of human knowledge.

Nature, and nature's laws, lay hid in night;

God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.

Does that neat couplet illustrate the true connection between science and literature? Is poetry destined to be a memoria technica? Men of letters have exhausted their eloquence on the inestimable value of literature as a luxurious form of mental entertainment. They have added nothing in modern times to what Cicero said in the "De Archia" before the foundation of the Roman Empire. Cicero can be read with as much pleasure by us as by his own contemporaries, and that is immortality in the eyes of a mortal. Long and nobly has literature struggled for its rightful place in human history. Is the struggle coming to an end? Is science acquiring an absolute dominion over the minds of men?

On such a subject one can only be hypothetical. Supposing that such a process were going on, its effects would be first seen on the highest plane. If there is ample scope in science, and in science alone, for the fullest and deepest operations of the mind, literature would no longer enlist the best minds in its service. By science I mean physical science, the investigations of natural phenomena. When professors say that history is a science, they mean something totally different, and that controversy would be out of place here. Perhaps history will henceforth be a collection of tabulated and analyzed facts.

Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry passing hence! In the common deluge drowning old political common sense.

History and poetry do not receive a very high compliment by being classed with heraldry. Nor is the common deluge very clearly defined. The flood of science may overwhelm us all. Or it may be a more accurate metaphor to picture ourselves as worms unable to escape the roller. The Positive, or Positivist, philosophy was once defined as Catholicism without Christianity. Is not the scientific school becoming quite as dogmatic as the Church of Rome? Extra scientiam nulla salus. The charm of dealing with certainties has often been described. Walter Bagehot in one of his essays represents the voice of the Church to which he did not belong welcoming the tired traveller to many fields of human speculation, and inviting him to the haven where all such matters were

settled long ago. An excellent refuge for those who believe the Church. Science you cannot disbelieve. You cannot get outside your own reason, the only faculty with which you can judge of revelation itself. Butler had to fall back upon probability as the

guide of life. The man of science despises probabilities. With him as with the Church of Rome it is all or nothing. Scientific Agnosticism does not merely say, "I am not sure." It says also, "You can't be sure." "The rest may reason and welcome," Abt. Vogler exclaims; "'tis we musicians know." But then there is, I am told, a subtle connection between music and the higher mathematics, which accounts for the confidence of Abt. Vogler. Herbert Spencer, at the close of his life, was haunted with a kind of philosophic nightmare. Man did not understand the universe. What if there existed no comprehension of it anywhere? There was a time, not very distant, when men of science would not have assumed to know more about it than other people. Even now they have not accounted for creation, or explained it away. But less and less every year are they disposed to compass their knowledge with bounds, to lay down any time or limit at which they must stop. That is the supreme attraction of science. Its possibilities are infinite. In literature, in metaphysics, the best that can be has been done. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy, ancient or modern. the student of natural phenomena any discovery is possible, even the principle of life, the ultimate origin of things. Scientific enthusiasm to-day is not what it was in Bacon's time. It is no vast and vague idea of co-ordinating knowledge. It is a belief in the unlimited power of patient research, combined with a Newtonian or Darwinian imagination. Argon, and radium, and wireless telegraphy may be trifles compared with what the future has in store. I am not arguing, I am not able to argue, that this unbounded confidence in scientific progress is justified by facts, or even that it will last. It may be a temporary phase. My point

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is that it will serve to explain the apparent failure of literary genius. Men are not born literary or scientific. In most cases the bent of their minds is shaped by accident. The highest minds have the loftiest aspirations, which poetry and other forms of literature have satisfied hitherto. If science can be proved to hold the key of the universe, complete satisfaction cannot be sought elsewhere. As for everything which does not enlarge the bounds of knowledge, what is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns? If all science, except natural science, be science falsely so called, the human intellect must inevitably be drawn away from what cannot yield tangible results. History cannot yield them. Let bygones be bygones. Why seek ye the living among the dead? There is enough poetry in the world already. It must be waste of time to make more. Science is to literature as life to death. To become really scientfic is a resurrection. If these views are widely held, more widely every day, the question at the head of this article must be answered in the affirmative. It may be a euthanasia, a gradual and easy decay. But it is as certain as it is gradual. The very fact that the name of science is often misapplied, that men claim the epithet scientific for things which it will not suit, is itself a proof of the despotism to which the unscientific world submits. Literature may be more tempting than most forms of illusion. Other verse besides Sir David Lindsay's may still "have charms." Science alone is real. The prevalence of that creed, or of that superstition, does not seem to produce scientific genius, though it has doubtless raised the level of the scientific intelligence. Its negative effect upon literature is more obvious, and the effect is not, of course, confined to the literature of any single country.

Just as motor cars are superseding horses, SO is science superseding humanism. At least, SO it would seem. Even science may disappoint expectation, and the door which no man living has yet entered may remain inexorably closed. Among other discovThe Contemporary Review.

eries it may be discovered that there are bounds to the discoveries of science. At present the trend of opinion is the other way. The pursuit of what Bacon called secondary causes is the most dangerous rival that literature has ever encountered.

Herbert Paul.

1

In the month of February of this year an interesting article was contributed by Mr Frank R. Benson to this Review, entitled "An Attempt to Revive the Dramatic Habit." In this article he speaks of a "marked increase of activity in the sphere of folk drama," more especially in country districts, and describes it with equal truth and assurance as a promising means "of relieving much of the dulness of our rural life." And if folk drama, historical pageants, and the presentment of Shakespeare's plays may serve to relieve the monotony of existence and to stimulate the imaginations of country people, surely not less useful as an educating force may be the exercise of the dramatic habit for those whose lives are passed in the turmoil of a large city such as London. I do not in this connection refer to the West End nor to the West End theatres, but rather to those poor and densely populated quarters where the desirability of being able to escape occasionally, if only in fancy, from the squalid surroundings and the daily struggle for bread, is yet more urgent in the interests of the national character. Such a thought was in my mind, when an invitation reached me last January to be one of a few privileged spectators from the West at the performance of an East-end pantomime which was to be entirely the product of local talent and 1 The Living Age, March 16.

to be acted in a parish schoolroom by the children of the neighborhood. This was certainly to be no "folk-drama," properly so-called, still less an historical pageant. Even child-life in the East of London is too strenuous, too concerned with the present, to be keenly appreciative of any appeal from the remote past. Yet none the less it has seemed to me that in this local play full of local interests there might surely be found yet another instance of that revival of the dramatic habit which Mr. Benson so warmly advocates. The pantomime of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was, as we have said, to be a home grown product, woven out of material real and fantastic, topical and historical, in so far as the past five or six years may be said to represent history, by the fertile brain of the vicar of the parish, and to be acted under his tuition by some of the better looking and more gifted members of his little flock. And who better, on the face of it, should understand the minds of his people, young and old, how to appeal to their imagination, quicken their patriotic interest in passing events, and vitalize their sense of humor, than this very real pastor whose active brain and heart and hands are alike given in hourly and untiring service to his immense family? This vicar's parish may be covered by a walk of five minutes in one direction and of four minutes in an