that it is directly opposed to the "synthetic, reverential, sympathizing spirit of art"; and she holds up to scorn the physicist who can not enjoy the representation of figures suspended in the air in defiance of the law of gravity, and the zoölogist who fails to admire cherubs without stomachs, and centaurs with a stomach to spare. Well, if we must confess it, our sympathy in each case is with the man of science; and we refuse to believe, on any evidence as yet tendered, that art would be less art if it condescended to recognize the laws of the physical universe. The poet Horace was no mean artist in his day, nor is there any reason to suppose that he was a victim to the scientific spirit; yet he has left on record his distaste for all such composite and unnatural creations as Miss Cobbe takes under her protection. He thought the centaur and the mermaid both very ridiculous figures. "Let a thing be what it may," he said, "but let it be simple, let it preserve its unity."[1] The greatest sculptors the world ever saw, those of ancient Greece, devoted themselves almost wholly to the delineation of the human form in its ideal perfection; their art may have sought to transcend the actual, but not the possible. If they strove to better nature, it was not by flying in the face of natural laws, but by a happier blending of natural elements; just as the gardener of to-day shows us what may be realized by giving to various plants better conditions than can be commanded in the rude competition for existence. Miss Cobbe will have it that the scientific spirit would kill poetry. We do not believe a word of it; but we do believe that the scientific spirit applied to poetry would purge it of many morbid growths and ridiculous conceits. Some not incompetent judges are of the opinion that the very poem cited by Miss Cobbe in illustration, Shelley's "Sensitive-Plant," is overladen with imagery. The late Mr. Arnold did not find Shelley quite "sane" enough to be a poet of the first order; and if representatives of the scientific spirit occasionally find something in his verse that they can not quite reconcile with common sense, they may plead that they are only finding what a great literary critic had already found. In lieu of such delicate fancies as Shelley has woven into his "Sensitive-Plant," the scientific spirit, we are told, would "describe how the garden had been thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and sewage." This is not argument; it is hysteria running a little toward coarseness.
But may it be claimed that science is advancing the interests of truth? No; not the science of our time. We are simply gathering facts and deducing laws, subject to rectification when further facts shall have been gathered. But "in other days truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests
- ↑ "Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum."—Ars Poetica, 23.
