or tale-teller, I have no doubt whatever. But this leaves untouched the attraction of his miscellaneous work, and its suitableness for the purpose of recreation. For that purpose I think it to be among the very best work in all literature. Its unfailing life and vigour, its vast variety, the healthy and inspiriting character of the subjects with which in the main it deals, are the characteristics which make its volumes easy-chair books of the best order. Its beauty no doubt is irregular, faulty, engaging rather than exquisite, attractive rather than artistically or scientifically perfect. I do not know that there is even any reason to join in the general lament over Wilson as being a gigan

tic failure, a monument of wasted energies and half-developed faculty. I do not at all think that there was anything in him much better than he actually did, or that he ever could have polished and sand-papered the faults out of his work. It would pretty certainly have lost freshness and vigour; it would quite certainly have been less in bulk, and bulk is a very important point in literature that is to serve as recreation. It is to me not much less certain that it never would have attained the first rank in symmetry and order. I am quite content with it as it is, and I only wish that still more of it were easily accessible.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

THE old feud, or pretended feud, between science and religion has lately spread to a neighbouring province, and science and literature are now more or less at loggerheads. Professor Huxley taunts the poets with "sensual caterwauling," and the poets taunt the professor and his ilk with gross materialism.

The world is too much with us," said Wordsworth; and he intimated that our science and our civilisation

half put us out of tune" with nature. To the scientific mind such language is simply nonsense, as are those other lines of Wordsworth in which he makes his poet

"Contented if he might enjoy

The things which others understand." Science is said to be democratic, its aims and methods in keeping with the great modern movement; while literature is alleged to be aristocratic in its spirit and tendencies. Literature is for the few; science is for the many. Hence their opposition in this respect.

Science is founding schools and colleges from which the study of literature, as such, is to be excluded; and it is becoming clamorous for the positions occupied by the classics in the curriculum of the older institutions. As a reaction against the extreme partiality for classical studies, the study of names instead of things, which has so long been shown in our educational system, this new cry is wholesome and good; but so far as it implies that science is capable of taking the place of the great literatures as an instrument of high culture, it is mischievous and misleading.

About the intrinsic value of science, its value as a factor in any civilisation, there can be but one opinion; but about its value to the scholar, the thinker, the man of letters, there is

room for very divergent views. It is certainly true that the great ages of the world have not been ages of exact science, nor have the great literatures, in which so much of the power and vitality of the race have been stored, sprung from minds which held correct views of the physical universe. Indeed, if the growth and maturity of man's moral and intellectual stature was a question of material appliances or conveniences, or of accumulated stores of exact knowledge, the world of to-day ought to be able to show more eminent achievements in all fields of human activity than ever before. But this it cannot do. Shakespeare wrote his plays for people who believed in witches, and probably believed in them himself; Dante's immortal poem could never have been produced in a scientific age. Is it likely that the Hebrew scriptures would have been any more precious to the race, or their influence any deeper, had they been inspired by correct views of physical science?

It is not my purpose to write a diatribe against the physical sciences. I would as soon think of abusing the dictionary. But as the dictionary can hardly be said to be an end in itself, so I would indicate that the final value of physical science is its capability to foster in us noble ideals, and to lead us to new and larger views of moral and spiritual truths. The extent to which it is able to do this measures its value to the spiritmeasures its value to the educator.

That the great sciences can do this, that they are capable of becoming instruments of pure culture, instruments to refine and spiritualise the whole moral and intellectual nature, is no doubt true; but that they can ever usurp the place of the humanities or general literature in this respect, is

one of those mistaken notions which seem to be gaining ground so fast in our time.

Can there be any doubt that contact with a great character, a great soul, through literature, immensely surpasses in educational value, in moral and spiritual stimulus, contact with any of the forms or laws of physical nature, through science? Is there not something in the study of the great literatures of the world that opens the mind, inspires it with noble sentiments and ideals, cultivates and develops the intuitions, and reaches and stamps the character, to an extent that is hopelessly beyond the reach of science? They add something to the mind that is like leaf mould to the soil, like the contribution from animal and vegetable life and from the rains and the dews. Until science is mixed with emotion, and appeals to the heart and imagination, it is like dead inorganic matter; and when it becomes so mixed and so transformed it is literature.

The college of the future will doubtless banish the study of the ancient languages; but the time thus gained will not be devoted to the study of the minutiae of physical science, as contemplated by Mr. Herbert Spencer, but to the study of man himself, his deeds and his thoughts as illustrated in history and embodied in the great literatures.

separated from human and living currents and forces-in fact, becomes more and more mechanical, and rests in a mechanical conception of the universe. And the universe, considered as a machine, however scientific it may be, has neither value to the spirit nor charm to the imagination.

The man of to-day is fortunate if he can attain as fresh and lively a conception of things as did Plutarch and Virgil. Virgil. How alive the ancient observers made the world! They conceived of everything as living, beingthe primordial atoms, space, form, the earth, the sky. The stars and planets they thought of as requiring nutriment, and as breathing or exhaling. To them fire did not consume things, but fed or preyed upon them, like an animal. It was not so much false science, as a livelier kind of science, which made them regard the peculiar quality of anything as a spirit. Thus there was a spirit in snow; when the snow melted the spirit escaped. This spirit, says Plutarch, "is nothing but the sharp point and finest scale of the congealed substance, endued with a virtue of cutting and dividing not only the flesh, but also silver and brazen vessels." "Therefore this piercing spirit, like a flame" (how much, in fact, frost is like flame !)" seizing upon those that travel in the snow, seems to burn their outsides, and like fire to enter and penetrate the flesh." There is a spirit of salt too, and of heat, and of trees. The sharp, acrimonious quality of the fig-tree bespeaks of a fierce and strong spirit which it darts out into objects. "A bull, after he is tied to a fig-tree, though never so mad before, grows presently tame, and will suffer you to touch him, and on a sudden all his rage and fury cool or die." "Game hung upon a fig-tree soon becomes tender. Therefore the fig-tree sends forth a hot and sharp spirit which cuts and boils the flesh of the bird."

rays, that went to co-operate with the rays from outward objects. Hence the power of the eye, and its potency in love matters. "The mutual looks of nature's beauties, or that which comes from the eye, whether light or a stream of spirits, melt and dissolve the lovers with a pleasing pain, which they call the bitter-sweet of love." "There is such a communication, such a flame raised by one glance, that those must be altogether unacquainted with love that wonder at the Median naphtha that takes fire at a distance from the flame." "Water from the heavens," says Plutarch, "is light and aerial, and, being mixed with spirit, is the quicker passed and elevated into the plants by reason of its tenuity." Rain-water, he further says, "is bred in the air and wind, and falls pure and sincere." Science could hardly give an explanation as pleasing to the fancy as that. And it is true enough, too. Mixed with spirit, or the gases of the air, and falling pure and sincere, is undoubtedly the main secret of the matter. He said the ancients hesitated to put out a fire because of the relation it had to the sacred and eternal flame. Nothing," he says, "bears such a resemblance to an animal as fire. It is moved and nourished by itself, and, by its brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes everything apparent; but in its quenching it principally shows some power that seems to proceed from our vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists like an animal dying, or violently slaughtered.

The ancients had that kind of knowledge which the heart gathers; we have in superabundance that kind of knowledge which the head gathers. If much of theirs was made up of mere childish delusions, how much of ours is hard, barren, and unprofitable-a mere desert of sand where no green thing grows, or can grow. How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know; how much of modern

physical science is a mere rattling of dead bones, a mere threshing of empty straw. Probably we shall come round to as lively a conception of things by and by. Darwin has brought us a long way toward it. At any rate, the ignorance of the old writers is often more captivating than our exact, but more barren, knowledge.

The old books are full of this dewscented knowledge-knowledge gathered at first hand in the morning of the world. In our more exact scientific knowledge this pristine quality is generally missing; and hence it is that the results of science are far less available for literature than the results of experience.

Science is probably unfavourable to the growth of literature because it does not throw man back upon himself and concentrate him as the old belief did; it takes him away from himself, away from human relations and emotions, and leads him on and on. We wonder and marvel more, but we fear, dread, love, sympathise less. Unless, indeed, we finally come to see, as we probably shall, that after science has done its best the mystery is as great as ever, and the imaginations and the emotions have just as free a field as before.

Science and literature in their aims and methods have but little in common. Demonstrable fact is the province of the one; sentiment is the province of the other. "The more a book brings sentiment into light," says M. Taine, "the more it is a work of literature;" and, we may add, the more it brings the facts and laws of natural things to light, the more it is a work of science. Or, as Emerson says in one of his early essays, "literature affords a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a life, a purchase by which we may move it." In like manner science affords a platform whence we may view our physical existence, purchase by which we may move the material world. The value of the one is in its ideality, that of the

other in its exact demonstrations. The knowledge which literature most loves and treasures is knowledge of life; while science is intent upon a knowledge of things, not as they are in their relation to the mind and heart of man, but as they are in and of themselves, in their relations to each other and to the human body. Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and re-invested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be re-invested, as it is a crop to be ever new grown.

It cannot be said that literature has kept pace with civilisation, though science has; in fact, it may be said without exaggeration that science is civilisation-the application of the powers of nature to the arts of life. The reason why literature has not kept pace is because so much more than mere knowledge, well-demonstrated facts, goes to the making of it; while little else goes to the making of pure science. Indeed, the kingdom of heaven in literature, as in religion, "cometh not with observation." This felicity is within you as much in the one case as in the other. It is the fruit of the spirit, and not of the diligence of the hands.

Because this is so, because modern achievements in letters are not on a par with our material and scientific triumphs, there are those who predict for literature a permanent decay, and think the field it now occupies is to be entirely usurped by science. But this can never be. Literature will have its period of decadence and of partial eclipse; but the chief interest of mankind in nature or in the universe can never be for any length of time a merely scientific interest-an interest

measured by our exact knowledge of these things; though it must undoubtedly be an interest consistent with the scientific view. Think of having one's interest in a flower, a bird, the landscape, the starry skies, dependent upon the stimulus afforded by the text books, or dependent upon our knowledge of the structure, habits, functions, relations of these objects!

This other and larger interest in natural objects, to which I refer, is an interest as old as the race itself, and which all men, learned and unlearned alike, feel in some degree; an interest born of our relations to these things, of our associations with them It is the human sentiments they awaken and foster in us, the emotion of love, or admiration, or awe, or fear, they call up; and is, in fact, the interest of literature as distinguished from that of science. The admiration one feels for a flower, for a person, for a fine view, for a noble deed, the pleasure one takes in a spring morning, in a stroll upon the beach, is the admiration and the pleasure literature feels, and art feels; only in them the feeling is freely opened and expanded, which in most minds is usually vague and germinal. Science has its own pleasure in these things; but it is not, as a rule, a pleasure in which the mass of mankind can share, because it is not directly related to the human affections and emotions. In fact, the scientific treatment of nature can no more do away with or supersede the literary treatment of it-the view of it as seen through our sympathies and emotions, and touched by the ideal, such as the poet gives us-than the compound of the laboratory can take the place of the organic compounds found in our food, drink, and air.

If Audubon had not felt other than a scientific interest in the birds, namely, a human interest, an interest born of sentiment, would he have ever written their biographies as he did?

It is too true that the ornithologists of our day for the most part look upon the birds only as so much legiti