Inquiries and Opinions | Page 3

with human character. It will inhibit that pitiful
tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which asserts the
reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before the final fall
of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the feeble and summary
psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of weakness or of
wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden effort of will.
And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of life, subtler
than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell unduly on
the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich portrayal
of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of the
mechanism of their impulses. More than one novelist of the twentieth
century has already yielded to this tendency. No doubt, this is only the

negative defect accompanying a positive quality,--yet it indicates an
imperfect appreciation of the artist's duty. "In every art," so Taine
reminded us, "it is necessary to linger long over the true in order to
attain the beautiful. The eye, fixing itself on an object, begins by noting
details with an excess of precision and fulness; it is only later, when the
inventory is complete, that the mind, master of its wealth, rises higher,
in order to take or to neglect what suits it."
The attitude of the literary critic will be modified by the constant use of
the scientific method, quite as much as the attitude of the literary
creator. He will seek to relate a work of art, whether it is an epic or a
tragedy, a novel or a play, to its environment, weighing all the
circumstances of its creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is, of
course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species made by
a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep himself free
from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself derelict to
his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every masterpiece of
the past, however transcendent its merits, there must needs be much
that is temporary admixt with more that is permanent,--many things
which pleased its author's countrymen in his own time and which do
not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what is eternal and
universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much that the
author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All the works of
Shakspere and of Molière are not of equal value,--and even the finest of
them is not impeccable; and a literary critic who has a scientific
sincerity will not gloss over the minor defects, whatever his desire to
concentrate attention on the nobler qualities by which Shakspere and
Molière achieved their mighty fame. Indeed, the scientific spirit will
make it plain that an unwavering admiration for all the works of a great
writer, unequal as these must be of necessity, is proof in itself of an
obvious inability to perceive wherein lies his real greatness.
Whatever the service the scientific spirit is likely to render in the future,
we need to be on our guard against the obsession of science itself.
There is danger that an exclusive devotion to science may starve out all
interest in the arts, to the impoverishment of the soul. Already there are
examples of men who hold science to be all-sufficient and who insist

that it has superseded art. Already is it necessary to recall Lowell's
setting off of "art, whose concern is with the ideal and the potential,
from science which is limited by the actual and the positive." Science
bids us go so far and no farther, despite the fact that man longs to peer
beyond the confines. Vistas closed to science are opened for us by art;
and science fails us if we ask too much; for it can provide no
satisfactory explanation of the enigmas of existence. Above all, it
tempts us to a hard and fast acceptance of its own formulas, an
acceptance as deadening to progress as it is false to the scientific spirit
itself. "History warns us," so Huxley declared, "that it is the customary
fate of new truths to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions."
II
The growth of the scientific spirit is not more evident in the nineteenth
century than the spread of the democratic movement. Democracy in its
inner essence means not only the slow broadening down of government
until it rests upon the assured foundation of the people as a whole, it
signifies also the final disappearance of the feudal organization, of the
system of caste, of the privileges which are not founded on justice, of
the belief in any superiority conferred by the