Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/374

362 there are feelings in the heart. Rossini has already been criticised with severity for the innovations he introduced into musical composition, and for his departure from the simple themes and solos of the olden time. A similar reproach was laid against Wagner, and is doubtless held in reserve for the next musical genius that shall arise.

Extinction has also been predicted for the poetic art, but with no better reason than for the other arts. Great poets still exist, and are still produced. They may not excel in the same way as their predecessors, but they excel as well, and reflect with equal power and equal grace the feelings of their age.

From the external conditions of art we pass to the mental and moral conditions; they are the most important ones. The question before us is, if the scientific spirit, which is gradually penetrating humanity and fashioning its brain from generation to generation, will not, in the long run, destroy the three essential faculties of the artist—imagination, the creative instinct, and sentiment.

According to some philosophers, the development of the scientific spirit is destined to arrest that of the poetic imagination. The reign of science, succeeding to the dynasty of legends and religions, will engender a reign of "platitude"; without mystery, say others—without superstition, Goethe added, there can be no true poetry. The poetic imagination does, in fact, need a kind of superstition, in the ancient sense of the word, which will not permit it always to explain events by their cold reasons, and a sort of ignorance, a demi-obscurity, under the cover of which it may play at will around things. Nothing is less poetic, we might say, than a broad, bare road devoid of nooks and turnings, with the sun shining directly upon it; but thickets, shrubberies, shady corners, or anything we can not look into at the first glance, whatever appears to hide from and evade us, these constitute rural poetry. The fault of bare plains is that they conceal nothing from us, and we do not like a straight line because we can see all there is to the end of it. The indefinable charm of evening consists in its showing us everything half veiled; and of moonlight that it gives a softness to objects whose outlines we can only dimly make out, and causes them to appear as through a thin, transparent obscurity. If the skies were cleared of what about them is mysterious, what would distinguish them from the earth we tread under our feet? The "aching for the infinite" that troubles some minds, also gives them some of their most precious joys; and such minds would probably be reluctant to exchange it for universal knowledge.

To us the incompatibility which these writers endeavor to establish between poetry and science is superficial. Poetry will always find a justification in science. Matthew Arnold remarks, in his essay on Maurice de Guérin, that poetry as well as science is an interpretation of the world. The interpretations of science will never give us that intimate sense of things that the interpretations of poetry give