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to form modern style". There is a contagious enthusiasm in much that they wrote, from the earlier men like Wilkins, through Evelyn, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. But there was no literary genius among the virtuosi directly inspired of the new science; their work had a permanent effect on English thought, but not on English literature. Even Newton, with his "brooding mind, took no thought for literary expression". Then, once again, the new science was "exposed" by satire, in those exceedingly clever attacks in prose. Eachard, the schoolmaster, King, Brown, Swift, the Scriblerus Club, conjointly, Arbuthnot, The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, Defoe, and The London Spy, all launched satiric darts at the new philosophy. It was another exploitation of a humor, with more discrimination, to be sure, than comedy and verse possessed. The tone throughout is little varied; the raillery is good-natured, except in Swift; the fairness and candid good-sense of The Tatler and The Spectator are remarkable. In the last mentioned periodicals the absurdities of the new interest are fairly characterized, and the great men and their splendid achievements find some appreciation. Addison, in particular, had caught the vision of "the heavens of the new astronomy". There is no re-action in this period to counterbalance the satire. Locke and Berkeley only touch upon the new science in the midst of a hundred other interests; the deistic controversy, which found its culmination in Butler's Analogy, drew from the new experiments the new conception of the physical universe; Shaftesbury, alone, among the human philosophers and theologians, gave an appreciative expression to the new philosophy in his idealization of the virtuoso. Further than this, the new science received a direct exposition in a non-literary style of its own, and separating itself from history, theology, human philosophy, and classical learning, took its honorable place among the other branches of human thought.

Here the investigation stops, though the literary phenomenon is not complete. With the passing away of Pope, however, there ended a satiric, inappreciative attitude; at that time, too, natural science ceased to be on the defensive, and the movement toward the literary use of the results of experiments and observations had begun. The new intellectual impulse had entered the minds of

Elton, Oliver, The Augustan Ages, p. 420.

men with its transforming and quickening power, and was developing its subtle relationship with realism. Poets had begun to learn that "observation and experience are the ballast needed to give imagination steadiness". The effects of the scientific ideas were longer in making themselves felt than those of the classical renaissance, because "national characteristics are never so strongly marked in science and philosophy as in other branches of literature". The "painful discord" was not yet wholly harmonized; as, indeed, it can never be. There is always a discord that is temperamental and irradicable. Lowell said, with Yankee shrewdness and wit, that "the more she (Science) makes one lobe of our brain Aristotelian, so much the more will the other intrigue for an invitation to the banquet of Plato". Edgar Allan Poe is an illustration of the point, in whom imagination, desiring to be free, picks a half-whimsical quarrel with the demand of science for matters of fact.

"Science! true daughter of old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me,

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?""

Audience may be given to voices of three men of literary genius from the nineteenth century, on the relationship between literature and science. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1815, Wordsworth wrote:-"The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to

Neilson, W. A. The Essentials of Poetry, p. 137.

Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV, p. 308.
Latest Literary Essays, p. 183.

Sonnet, To Science.

us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and inalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor, he cherishes it and loves it in solitude; the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge-it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of the Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or the Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."'10

Tennyson, writing out of a period strikingly similar in some respects to the Restoration in that new scientific discoveries were revolutionizing human thought, asked of himself and of all poets,"Is this.

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A time to sicken and swoon,

When Science reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon?" 9911

10 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1815; cf. also The Prelude. Tennyson, In Memoriam.

And, finally, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when natural science had come more fully into her own and “humane letters" were on the defensive, Matthew Arnold said in reply to Huxley,-"But how, finally, are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it, but that they can and will exercise it, I am sure.

912

It seems reasonable to believe that human thought will continue to progress by this same process of discovery, opposition, and reconciliation. If the literary mind cherishes the old idols, clings to the ancient faith after they are disowned by the philosophers, it will certainly at last "lend its divine spirit to aid in the transfiguration and will welcome the new truths into the household of man".

12 Discourses in America, Lit. and Science.

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