Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/174

170 novels are now but little read by reason of their coarseness, while such a simple story as the "Vicar of Wakefield" is as popular as ever. While, therefore, the general progress of events did much to humanize men, the movement was very slow, with many and long periods of stagnation, between about 400 B.C. and A.D. 1800. Persons of insight had learned to be humane before science had taught them the wisdom of humaneness. Science had made considerable progress before the latter date. But it was aristocratic. The common people concerned themselves little about it because it taught them almost nothing which it was to their interest to know. It dealt chiefly with large problems, not with the minute affairs of daily life. The fundamental difference between science and poetry is that the former seeks to know and to set forth the truth no matter what the consequences; the latter seeks to give pleasure. Coleridge says:

Hence the poetic justice that plays so important a part on the modern novel is not the justice that prevails among men. Science brings before us the stern facts of the world in which we live, painful though they may be. On the other hand, imaginative literature either ignores those facts that pain the reader or weakens their effect by contrasting them with man's nobler traits or with human nature in "her calmer moods." Often a disagreeable subject is placed at a distance from us in either time or space. The Homeric poems are full of strife and slaughter and bloodshed and treachery; but they also portray conjugal and parental affection, valor, friendships that are not broken by death, piety toward the dead, fortitude and heroism. A novel in which all the characters are bad would be read by nobody. The popularity of Scott and Dickens is due mainly to the humanitarian spirit which their works display. They portray villains of the blackest type, but they always meet with the reward which we feel to be their due. Such novels are, therefore, not true to nature. Many knaves live to enjoy the fruits of their villainy to the end of a long life and die in peace. To the scientist nature is "red in tooth and claw"; to the poet she is a benignant mother, a provider of pleasure and a beneficent friend. A truth is often clad in a poetic garb. It then becomes a winged word, and impresses itself more firmly on the mind. It is poetry as well as truth. When Burns wrote: "wad some power the giftie gie us," he put on a homely truth a poetic garment. On the other hand, the commonplace and unadorned dictum: "Honesty is the best policy," together with a thousand similar proverbs lacks every element of poetry. It is the embodiment of human experience, a sort of summing up of what men have learned in their