The English Novel and the Principle of its Development. Sidney Lanier
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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,