Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in propounding the idea that the whole common speech of early man may have been rhythmical through the operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practically verse of a very complex rhythm, was naturally a later development; in propounding this idea, I say, I do not mean to declare that the prehistoric man, after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his stone-quarry would dance back to his dwelling in the most beautiful rhythmic figures, would lay down his palÆolithic axe to a slow song, and, striking an operatic attitude, would call out to his wife to leave off fishing in the stream and bring him a stone mug of water, all in a most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What I do mean to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables were uniform, and his breath periodic, then the rhythmical results described would follow. Here let me at once illustrate this, and advance a step towards my final point in this connection, by reminding you how easily the most commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly when couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into quite respectable verse rhythms. I might illustrate this, but Dr. Samuel Johnson has already done it for me:—"I put my hat upon my head and walked into the Strand, and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." We have only to arrange this in proper form in order to see that it is a stanza of verse quite perfect as to all technical requirement:—

Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write "hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here "hanging," so as to make it read:

Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's,

Text with Diacritics

—by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not destroyed the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon my head," unchanged; but we have merely added brief rhythms, namely that of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or logaoedic dactyl hasitly; that is to say, instead now of leaving our first line all iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a spondee—rushed forth—varies the rhythm by this spondaic intervention, but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So, of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its own rhythm—for an English tongue always gives these words with definite time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms, we have added to them. We have not made it formless, we have made it contain more forms.

Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the formal: it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms. It is this relation which makes prose a freer form than verse.

When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say) then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we must use one form, in prose we may use many forms; and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, not because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a sequence of verse.

Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard much of "forms"—of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art, and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science—which we may call the knowledge of forms—to art, and most especially of these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions have flowered out into widely different shapes.

In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic sÉance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out.

Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature, which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and generally riot in a complete independence of form.

And finally—to mention no more than a third phase—we may consider the original misconception to have reached a climax which is at once absurd and infernal, in a professedly philosophical work called Le Roman ExpÉrimentale, recently published by M. Emile Zola, gravely defending his peculiar novels as the records of scientific experiments, and declaring that the whole field of imaginative effort must follow his lead.

Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our time here in studying the novel—at least any other novels except M. Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated—to wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science will simply destroy the old imaginative products and build up a new formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that science will absorb into itself all imaginative effort, so that every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little space for perplexity as to these diverse claims.

Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated—after the various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man appear—it is only then that life and use and art and relation and religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of form to a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it had no form.

On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science bring us practically to the same view. Science would seem fairly to have reduced all this host of phenomena which we call the world into a congeries of motions in many forms. What we know by our senses is simply such forms of these motions as our senses have a correlated capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving in orbits too narrow for human vision, impress my sense with a certain property which I call hardness or resistance, this "hardness" being simply our name for one form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the human sense. So color, shape, &c.; these are our names representing a correlation between certain other forms of motion and our senses. Regarding the whole universe thus as a great congeries of forms of motion, we may now go farther and make for ourselves a scientific and useful generalization, reducing a great number of facts to a convenient common denominator, by considering that Science is the knowledge of these forms; that Art is the creation of beautiful forms; that Religion is the faith in the infinite Form-giver and in that infinity of forms which many things lead us to believe as existing, but existing beyond any present correlative capacities of our senses; and finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the satisfaction of our human needs.

And now advancing a step: when we remember how all accounts, the scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of things is from chaos or formlessness to form, and, as we saw in the case of verse and prose, afterwards from the one-formed to the many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, however stentorian, of a progress that professes to be winning freedom by substituting formlessness for form; we know that the ages are rolling the other way,—who shall stop those wheels? We know that what they really do who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one. Do not dream of getting rid of form; your most cutting stroke at it but gives us two forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional reverence to the original meaning of those words, we may devoutly say that in form we live and move and have our being. How strange, then, the furtive apprehension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find prevailing so greatly in our own country.

But, advancing a further step from the particular consideration of science as the knowledge of forms, let us come to the fact that as all art is a congeries of forms, each art must have its own peculiar science; and always we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and the science of that art. For example, correlative to the art of music, we have the general science of music, which indeed consists of several quite separate sciences. If a man desire to become a musical composer, he is absolutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, (2) the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of Orchestration or Instrumentation.

The science of musical form, concerns this sort of matter, for instance. A symphony has generally four great divisions, called movements, separated usually from each other by a considerable pause. Each of these movements has a law of formation: it consists of two main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The sequence of these subjects, the method of varying them by causing now one and now another of the instruments to come forward and play the subject in hand while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the interplay of the two subjects in the modulation-part,—all this is the subject-matter of a science which every composer must laboriously learn.

But again: he must learn the great science of harmony, and of that wonderful tonality which has caused our music to be practically a different art from what preceding ages called music; this science of harmony having its own body of classifications and formulated laws just as the science of Geology has, and a voluminous literature of its own. Again, he must painfully learn the range and capacities of each orchestral instrument, lest he write passages for the violin which no violin can play, &c., and further, the particular ideas which seem to associate themselves with the tone-color of each instrument, as the idea of women's voices with the clarionet, the idea of tenderness and childlikeness with the oboe, &c. This is not all; the musical composer may indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences of music well in hand; but a fourth science of music, namely, the physics of music, or musical acoustics, has now grown to such an extent that every composer will find himself lame without a knowledge of it.

And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting, involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative science—the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its science of prose. Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will supply the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with the conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man to the extent of a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better artist than Strephon who cannot mould the handle of a goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until Beethoven has become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of Harmony?

But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth of Shakspeare's genius unless he were a scientific man to the extent of knowing the science of English verse, or what would be George Eliot's genius unless she knew the science of English prose or the science of novel-writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem as if a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference between the relation of the literary arts to their correlative sciences and the relation of other arts to their correlative sciences influenced the general mind.

I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting a mere man of straw who has been arranged with a view to the convenience of knocking him down, and I find such mournful evidences of the complete misconception of form, of literary science in our literature, that, with a reluctance which every one will understand, I am going to draw upon a personal experience, to show the extent of that misconception.

Some of you may remember that a part of the course of lectures which your present lecturer delivered here last year were afterwards published in book-form, under the title of The Science of English Verse. Happening in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I was asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and criticisms of the book, whereof the publishers had collected a great bundle. Most curious to see if some previous ideas I had formed as to the general relation between literary art and science would be confirmed, I read these notices with great interest. Not only were my suspicions confirmed: but it is perfectly fair to say that nine out of ten, even of those which most generously treated the book in hand, treated it upon the general theory that a work on the science of verse must necessarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now, not one of these writers would have treated a work on the science of geology as a collection of rules for making rocks; or a work on the science of anatomy as a collection of rules for making bones or for procuring cadavers. In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might very well be written; but then it would be a hand-book of the art of verse, and would take the whole science of verse for granted,—like an instruction-book for the piano, or the like.

If we should find the whole critical body of a continent treating (say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as really a cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas upon the best methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, we should certainly suspect something wrong; but this is precisely parallel with the mistake already mentioned.

But even when the functions of form, of science, in literary art have been comprehended, one is amazed to find among literary artists themselves a certain apprehension of danger in knowing too much of the forms of art. A valued friend who has won a considerable place in contemporary authorship in writing me not long ago said, after much abstract and impersonal admission of a possible science of verse—in the way that one admits there may be griffins, but feels no great concern about it—"as for me I would rather continue to write verse from pure instinct."

This fallacy—of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we learned to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching—seems a curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For—to go no farther—the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn the science of language—the practical relation of noun and verb and connective—before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every word it uses,—with an amount of diligence and of study which is really stupendous when we think of it—what wild absurdity to forget these years passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of the science of verse can be learned—what wild absurdity to fancy that one is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a science.

Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it, remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor.

The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity.

No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example, is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master of his art and not be mastered by his art.

Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have her inspiration, she must be in a true raptus, but the raptus must be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once sublime and practical, of every act.

There is an old aphorism—it is twelve hundred years old—which covers all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet—and a rare one he must have been—an old Armorican named HervÉ, of whom all manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of Scribner's Magazine, you can realize that one who lived in that old Armorica—the modern Brittany from which Millet comes—knew full well what it meant to answer to the rocks.

Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels. I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary artist our language has ever produced.

We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an Elizabethan eulogy:

(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),

No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.

With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations of Science—or the knowledge of all forms—to Art, or the creation of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned, (1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art; (2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in ordinary for the information of current sociology.

Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true—as I am told is much believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the way of timorous apprehension in our own country—that science is to abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature. It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing; while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the Ode to St. Cecilia, the Essay on Man, Manfred, A man's a man for a' that, the Ode on Immortality, In Memoriam, the Ode to a Nightingale, The Psalm of Life, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.

Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me that we find—as to the substance of poetry—a steadily increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the form of the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words, this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No. 60 of In Memoriam:

Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call his In Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.

Returning to Tennyson: has science cooled his yearning for human friendship? We are answered in No. 90 of In Memoriam. Where was ever such an invocation to a dead friend to return!

Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes from the depths of a sick despondency, from all the darkness of a bad quarter of an hour.

Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of others? We are wonderfully answered in No. 33.

Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty? Here in No. 84 we have a poem which, for what I can only call absolute beauty, is simply perfect.

And finally we are able to see from his own words that he is not ignorantly resisting the influences of science, but that he knows science, reveres it and understands its precise place and function. What he terms in the following poem (113 of In Memoriam) Knowledge and Wisdom are what we have been speaking of as Science and Poetry.

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If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative victim of Science, we find him still preaching the poet's gospel of beauty, as comprehending the evangel of faith, hope and charity, only preaching it in those newer and finer forms with which science itself has endowed him; if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten and disciplined with the stern questions which scientific speculation has put—questions which you will find presented in their most sombre terribleness in Tennyson's Two Voices; if finally we find him steadily regarding science as knowledge which only the true poet can vivify into wisdom:—then I say, life is too short to waste any of it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, still prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry.

Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all this argument upon a priori grounds: this argument is, in brief, that wonder and mystery are the imagination's material, and that science is to explain away all mystery. But what a crude view is this of explanation! The moment you examine the process, you find that at bottom explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest example: here is a mass of conglomerate: science explains that it is composed of a great number of pebbles which have become fastened together by a natural cement. But after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a mountain of conglomerate? though we are familiar with the pebble, and unfamiliar with the other. Now to the wise man, the poet, familiarity with a mystery brings no contempt; to explanation of science, supremely fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, but adds to old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher into nature always finds, as a poet has declared, that

And so, away with this folly. Science, instead of being the enemy of poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary—it forever purveys for poetry, and just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with nature, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the poetry of the future and more abundant in its forms.

And here we may advance to our second class, who believe that the poetry of the future is to be democratic and formless.

I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sentences here and there in a recent paper of Whitman's, in order to present a perfectly fair view of his whole doctrine. When, for instance, he declares that Tennyson's poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although it is "the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure and almost always perfumed like the tuberose to an extreme of sweetness," yet it has "never one democratic page," and is "never free, naÏve poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated;" when we find him bragging of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic" (the United States of course) "with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind), wherewith nature, history and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past;" and when finally we hear him tenderly declaring that "meanwhile democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight—but 'tis the twilight of dawn;"—we are in sufficient possession of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his doctrine.

In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written for the people, who have professed most distinctively to represent and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing A man's a man for a' that, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's Lambs and Peter Grays.

And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated.

The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society.

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