Part 6

The experiment of Zola is as if a professor of chemistry, knowing something of the properties of given substances desiring to see how a certain molecule would behave itself in the presence of a certain other molecule, hitherto untried in this connection, instead of going into his laboratory and bringing the molecules together and observing what they actually did, should quietly sit before his desk and write off a comfortable account of how he thought these molecules would behave, judging from his previous knowledge of their properties. It is still more interesting to find that Zola is apparently unconscious of the difference between these two modes of experiment. About this unconsciousness I have my own theory. I think it entirely probable that if these two kinds of experiment were described to Zola he would maintain with perfect good faith that they were exactly the same. There is a phase of error--perhaps we may call it hallucination--in which certain sorts of minds come to believe that two things which have been habitually associated are always the same. For instance, a friend of mine has told me that a certain estimable teacher of the French language, who, after carrying on his vocation for many years, during which English and French became equally instinctive tongues to him, was accustomed to maintain that English and French were absolutely one and the same language. "When you say _water_," he was accustomed to argue to my friend, "you mean water; when I say _l'eau_ I mean water; _water--l'eau_, _l'eau--water_; do you not see? We mean the same thing; it is the same language."

However this may be, nothing is clearer than that Zola's conception of an experiment is what I have described it--namely, an evolving from the inner consciousness of what the author _thinks_ the experimental subjects would do under given circumstances. Here are some of Zola's own words: and surely nothing more naive was ever uttered: "The writer" (of the novel) "employs both observation and experiment. The observer gives the facts as he has observed them ... and establishes the solid ground on which his characters shall march, and the phenomena shall develop themselves. _Then the experimenter appears and conducts the experiment; that is to say_" (I am quoting from M. Zola) "_he moves the characters in a particular story to show that the sequence of facts will be such as is determined in the study of phenomena_." That is to say, to carry Zola's "experiment" into chemistry: knowing something of chlorine and something of hydrogen separately, a chemist who wishes to know their behavior under each other's influence may "experiment" upon that behavior by giving his opinion as to what chlorine and hydrogen would likely do under given circumstances.

It seems incredible, but it is logically beyond question, that by this short process we have got to the bottom of this whole elaborate system of the Experimental Novel, and have found that it is nothing but a repetition of the old, old trick of the hand of Jacob and the voice of Esau. Think how much self-sacrifice and labor, of how many noble and brave spirits, from Horrox and Hooke in the seventeenth century down to the hundreds of scientific men who at this moment are living obscure and laborious lives in the search of truth,--think, I say, how much fervent and pious labor has gone to invest the mere name of scientific experiment with that sacredness under which the Zola school is now claiming the rights and privileges of science, for what we have seen is _not_ science, and what, we might easily see if it were worth showing, _is_ mere corruption. The hand is the hand of science; but the voice is the voice of a beast.

To many this animal voice has seemed a portentous sound. But if we think what kind of beast it is, we cease to fear. George Eliot, somewhere in _Adam Bede_, has a _mot_: when a donkey sets out to sing, everybody knows beforehand what the tune will be. This voice has been heard many times before. Long before Zola came on the stage, I find Schiller crying in his sweet silver tones to some who were likewise misusing both art and science: "Unhappy mortal, that, with science and art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest; that in the domain of perfect Freedom bearest about in thee the spirit of a slave."

In these words, Schiller has at once prophesied and punished The Experimental Romance.

But there is another view of Zola's claims which leads us into some thoughts particularly instructive at the present time, and which will carry us very directly to the more special studies which will engage our attention.

After the views of form which have been presented to you, it will not be necessary for me to argue that even if Zola's Experimental Novel were a physical possibility, it would be an artistic absurdity. If you _could_ make a scientific record of actual experiment in human passion, very well: but why should we call that record a novel, if we do not call Professor Huxley's late work on the crayfish a novel, or if we do not call any physician's report of some specially interesting clinical experience to the _Medical and Surgical Journal_ a novel?

Here we are put upon securing for ourselves perfectly clear conceptions as to certain relations between that so-called _poetic_ activity and _scientific_ activity of the human mind which find themselves in a singularly interesting contact in the true and worthy novel which we are going to study. Merely reminding you of the distinction with which every one is more or less familiar theoretically, that that activity which we variously call "poetic," "imaginative," or "creative," _is_ essentially synthetic, is a process of putting together, while the scientific process seems distinctively analytic, or a tearing apart; let us pass from this idea to those applications of the poetic faculty which are made whenever a scientific searcher goes further than the mere collection of facts, to classify them and to effect generalizations. This is an activity of what is well called the scientific imagination. Now what is the difference between a work of the scientific imagination and a work of the poetic imagination? Without going into subtleties, I think the shortest way to gain a perfectly clear working idea of this difference is to confine our attention to the differing results of these activities: the scientific imagination results in a formula, whose paramount purpose is to be as _short_ and as comprehensive as possible; the poetic imagination results in a created form of forms, whose paramount purpose is to be as _beautiful_ and as comprehensive as possible. For example, the well-known formula of evolution: that evolution is a process from the uniform and indefinite to the multiform and definite; that is a result of long efforts of the scientific imagination; while on the other hand Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, in which we have deep matters discussed in the most beautiful words and the most musical forms of verse, is a poetic work.

And now if we pass one step farther and consider what would happen if the true scientific activity and the true poetic activity should engage themselves upon one and the same set of facts, we arrive at the novel.

The great modern novelist is at once scientific and poetic: and here, it seems to me, in the novel, we have the meeting, the reconciliation, the kiss, of science and poetry. For example: George Eliot, having with those keen eyes of hers collected and analyzed and sorted many facts of British life, binds them together into a true poetic synthesis, in, for instance, _Daniel Deronda_, when instead of giving us the ultimate relations of all her facts in the shape of a formula, like that of evolution, she gives them to us in the beautiful creation of Gwendolen Harleth and all the other striking forms which move through the book as embodiments in flesh and blood of the scientific relations between all her facts.

Perhaps we will find it convenient here, too, to base perfectly clear ideas of the three existing schools of novel-writing upon these foregoing principles. It has been common for some time to hear of the Romantic and the Realistic school, and lately a third term has been brought into use by the Zola section who call themselves the Naturalistic school. It is easy to see that these terms have arisen from the greater or less prominence given now to the poetic activity, now to the scientific activity, in novel writing; those who most rely on the poetic being the Romantic, those on a combination of the poetic and scientific the Realistic, and those who entirely reject the imagination (as Zola professes to do) the Naturalistic school. At all events, then, not troubling ourselves with the Naturalists who, as we have seen, call that an experiment which is only an imaginative product; we are prepared to study the Novel as a work in which science is carried over into the region of art. We are not to regard the novel therefore as ought else but a work of art, and the novelist as an artist.

One rejoices to find Emerson discussing the novel in this light purely, in his very suggestive essay on "Books":--

"Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray and Reade.

"The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets; and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state."

Nay, we have such beautiful novels in the world, novels far from the experimental romances by which we are not _perfected_ but _infected_ (_non perficitur_, _inficitur_), as old Burton quotes in the _Anatomy_; novels in which scientific harmony has passed into its heavenly after-life of wisdom, novels in which the pure sense of poetic beauty is so tenderly drawn out, that I love to think of them in the terms which our most beauty-loving of modern poets has applied to beauty, in the opening of _Endymion_:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing; Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; All lovely tales that we have heard or read: An endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

IV.

The points discussed at our last meeting were mainly of such a nature that I need not occupy your time with the detailed review which has seemed advisable heretofore.

You will remember, in a general way, that we finished examining the claims of the poetry of the future, as presented by Whitman, and found reason to believe, from several trains of argument, that its alleged democratic spirit was based on a political misconception; that its religious spirit was no more than that general feeling of good fellowship and _cameraderie_ which every man of the world knows to be the commonest of virtues among certain classes; its strength rested upon purely physical qualifications which have long ago practically ceased to be strength; its contempt for dandyism was itself only a cruder dandyism, and its proposed substitution of power for beauty not only an artistic blindness but a historical error as to the general progress of this world, which has been _from_ strength _to_ beauty ever since the ponderous old gods Oceanus and Gaea--representatives of rude strength--gave way to the more orderly (that is, more beautiful) reign of Saturn, and he in turn to the still more orderly and beauty-representing Jupiter, whom Chaucer has called the "fadyr of delicacye."

Passing thus from the Whitman school, we attacked that third misconception of literary form which had taken the shape of the so-called naturalistic school, as led by Zola in his novels and defended by him in his recent work, _The Experimental Romance_. Here we quickly discovered that if the term "experiment" were used by this school in its ordinary and scientific sense, it would, in a large number of cases, involve conditions which would exterminate the authors of the projected experimental romances often at an early stage of the plot; but that secondly, this inconvenience was avoided through the very peculiar meaning which was attached to the word by this school, and which reveals that they make no more use of experiment, in point of fact, than any one of the numerous novelists who have for years been in the habit of studying real life and nature as the basis of their work.

In short, it appeared that to support the propriety of circulating such books by calling them experimental romances, was as if a man should sell profitable poison under the name of scientific milk, and claim therefor both the gratitude of society and the privileges of science. Finally, supplying ourselves with clear ideas as to the difference between what has become so well known in modern times as the scientific imagination and the poetic imagination, we determined to regard the novel as a true work of art, and the novelist as an artist, by reason of the _created forms_ in the novel which were shown to be the distinctive outcome of the poetical imagination as opposed to _the formula_ which is the distinctive outcome of the scientific imagination. Nevertheless, in view of the circumstance that the facts embodied in these forms are facts which must have been collected by a genuine exercise of the true scientific faculty of observing and classifying, we were compelled to regard the novel as a joint product of science and art, ranking as art by virtue of its final purely artistic outcome in the shape of beautiful created forms.

It is with a sense of relief that one turns away from what I fear has seemed the personal and truculent tone of the last lecture--an appearance almost inseparable from the fact that certain schools of writing have become represented by the names of their living founders, and which would, indeed, have prevented your present lecturer from engaging in the discussion had not his reluctance been overwhelmed by the sacred duty of protesting against all this forcible occupation of the temple of art by those who have come certainly not for worship; it is with a sense of relief that one turns from this to pursue the more gracious and general studies which will now occupy us.

According to the plan already sketched: having now acquired some clear fundamental conceptions of the correlations among form, science, art, and the like notions often so vaguely used, we are next to inquire, as our first main line of research: Is it really true that what was explained as the growth in human personality is the continuing single principle of human progress; is it really true that the difference between the time of Aeschylus and the time of (say) George Eliot is the difference in the strength with which the average man feels the scope and sovereignty of his age? For upon this fundamental point necessarily depends our final proposition that the modern novel is itself the expression of this intensified personality and an expression which could only be made by greatly extending the form of the Greek drama. Pursuing our custom of leaving the abstract and plunging into the concrete as soon as possible, let us determine this question by endeavoring to find some special notable works of antique and of modern times in which substantially the same subject matter has been treated; let us then compare the difference in treatment, let us summarize the picture of things evidently existing in the old, as contrasted with the modern author's and reader's minds; and finally let us see whether the differences thus emerging will not force themselves upon us as differences growing out of personality. For the purposes of this comparison I have thought that the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus, the _Prometheus Unbound_ of Shelley, and the _Prince Deukalion_ of Bayard Taylor offered inviting resources as works which treat substantially the same story, although the first was written some two thousand three hundred years before the last two. Permit me then, in beginning this comparison, to set before you these three works in the broadest possible sketch by reading from each, here and there a line such as may bring the action freshly before you and at the same time elucidate specially the differences in treatment we are in search of. As I now run rapidly through the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, I ask you to bear along in mind the precise nature of this spontaneous variation between man and man which I was at some pains to define in my first lecture; and perhaps I may extend profitably the partial idea there given by adopting a pretty fancy which I find in No. 44 of Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and carrying it to a larger sphere than there intended. The poet is here expressing the conception that perhaps the main use of this present life of ours is for each one to learn _himself_,--possibly as preparatory to learning other things hereafter. He says:

The baby new to earth and sky What time his tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that 'this is I:'

But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,' And finds, 'I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.'

So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of Death.

Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single child passing through a single life to the collective process of growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself--"that I am I"--so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new forms to clothe them in.

One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of the _ego_ feeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in the poem _De Profundis_, partially read to you, was poetically called "the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world, whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and free will,--between the Infinite Personality, which should seem boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to bound it,--let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain appears in the _Prometheus Bound_, for alas it was an old grief when Aeschylus was a baby. Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the gigantic figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy) stark, prostrate, proud, unmoving throughout the whole action. Two ministers of Jove, Might and Force, have him in charge and Hephaestus--the god more commonly known as Vulcan--stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might acquaints us at once with what is toward.

At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached, This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste. Hephaestus, now Jove's high behests demand Thy care; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind down With close-linked chains of during adamant This daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire, Mother of arts.... Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here

.....

Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme; And love men well but love them not too much.

Hephaestus proceeds to chain him, but with many protests, not only because Prometheus' act seems over-punished, but because he is Prometheus' kinsman.

Would that some other hand

(He cries)

"Had drawn the lot To do this deed!"

To which Might replies

All things may be, but this: To dictate to the gods. There's one that's free, One only--Jove.

And Hephaestus sullenly acquiesces, as he beats away at his task,

"I know it, and am dumb."

--Amid similar talk--of protest from Vulcan and pitiless menace from Might--the great blacksmith proceeds to force an adamantine bolt through the breast of Prometheus, then to nail his feet to the rock, and so at last cries, in relief,

Let us away, He's fettered, limb and thew.

But Might must have his last pitiless speech.

"There lie,

he exults,--

And feed thy pride on this bare rock, Filching god's gifts for mortal men. What man Shall free thee from these woes? Thou hast been called In vain the Provident:

(_pro-vident_, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, who provides, the provident.)

had thy soul possessed The virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseen These cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them.

Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the Titan has maintained a proud silence. He now breaks into that large invocation which seems still to assault our physical ears across the twenty odd centuries.

O divine Aether, and swift-winged Winds, And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinous Laughter of ocean, and thou Earth, Born mother of us all, and thou bright round Of the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke! Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs I suffer from the gods, myself a god!

(This, by the way, is one of those passages which our elder poets seem to have regarded as somehow lying outside the pale of moral law--like umbrellas--and which they have therefore appropriated without a thought of blushing. Byron, in _Manfred_, and Shelley, in his _Prometheus Unbound_, have quite fairly translated parts of it.)

Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue throughout the play to perform the functions of exciting sympathy for the Protagonist, and of calling upon him for information when it becomes necessary that the audience should know this and that fact essential to the intelligibility of the action.

For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from their wind-borne car, and have condoled with the sufferer, Aeschylus makes them the medium of drawing from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus of freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the minds of his audience.

Speak now,

say the chorus,

"And let us know the whole offence Jove charges thee withal."

And Prometheus relates