Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/370

358 Is the poetry of things really destroyed by a scientific acquaintance with them? Does all poetry in a sense resemble that many-colored, light-embroidered band which the ancients deified, and whose wholly geometrical and earthly texture Newton laid bare? Pascal said there was no difference between the poet's trade and the embroiderer's; Montesquieu said the poet's business was "to overload reason and nature with fine fancies, as we used to bury women under their dress-trimmings." Voltaire regarded such expressions as only jests, though malicious ones; but they appear to a considerable number of the scientific men and thinkers of the present day to embody the exact expression of a truth. Poetry, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had the majority of the good people on its side, has now, they tell us, only the minority. Science is the great obsession of our age; we all render to it, often unconsciously, a sort of worship, and can not help feeling a kind of scorn for poetry. Mr. Spencer compares Science to the humble Cinderella, who was hidden so long in the chimney-corner, while her proud sisters displayed their tinsels in everybody's eyes. Now Cinderella is taking her turn; "and some day Science, declared the best and the fairest, will reign as sovereign." M. Renan predicts a time "when the great artists will be an antiquated affair, nearly useless, while the value of the scientific man will be more and more appreciated." M. Renan has also expressed regret that he did not himself become a scientific man instead of being a dilettante in erudition. Who can say that Goethe, if he had been born in the present age, would not have preferred to devote himself entirely to the natural sciences; or that Voltaire would not have applied himself more to mathematics, in which he showed some force; or that Shakespeare would not have engaged in a more weighty occupation of his psychological powers than the construction of his dramas of human paltriness? Darwin's grandfather devoted a part of his talent to writing poor poems; the grandson, if he had been born a hundred years earlier, might have done the same; but Charles Darwin, in the spirit of the age in which he lived, instead of a poem of gardens, gave us the scientific epic of natural selection. Poems die with their languages, and poets can hope for their works "only an evening of life in the hearts of lovers"; the canvases of painters wear out, and, in a few hundred years, Raphael will be nothing but a name; statues and monuments fall into dust; only thought seems to live, and he who adds a thought to the stores of the human mind may live by its means as long as mankind itself. Must we believe that imagination and feeling are not as vital as thought, and that art must finally give way to science? The question is worthy of consideration, for it concerns the destiny of human genius and the shapes it is to assume in the future.

The writers who predict that poetry and the arts will gradually disappear rest upon a number of facts, some of which are borrowed