BOOKS AND WRITERS
THE first great turning-point of known date in the history of human ideas was in the fifth century B.c., when Greek thinkers diverted their attention from the object to the subject ; from their outer to their inner life ; from the study of physics and biology to that of ethics and psychology. After that, if the field of religion be disregarded, there was no comparable revolution of thought in the western world until after the Middle Ages. When Pope defined. the proper study of mankind as Man, he was still saying nothing substantially different from what had been the theory and practice of Socrates, as well as of most philosophers in the intervening centuries. The study of nature in its widest sense, including therewith man as a part of nature, hdd still not emerged from its second infancy in Pope's day, though it was he again who crystallised the vision of the new turning-point:
" Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night ; God said, Let Newton be ! and all was light! "
Within two centuries since then another revolution was completed, as decisive as the first. .
It was not simply a reversion of human thought from the subject to the object, though that is the superficially obvious mark of the scientific age. There was also, as a more significant sequel, the attempt to master the subjective world as well by the application of objective techniques. The scientific approach, created by and for the natural and technical sciences, was widened in the course of the last hundred years to include the exact study of the personal, private, arbitrary world of the individual mind. Psychology, aesthetics, sociology and other formerly suspect fields of specula- tion began to seek the status of rational acadethic disciplines ; and in the field of philosophy the same rigorous trend culminated in the sterile mechanics of logical positivism. It is with one particular aspect of this process, the application of scientific methods to literary criticism, that Professor Dingle is concerned in his new book.* His thesis is that a science of literary criticism is possible, but the possibility has never yet been realised. All that has happened so far is that some critics have tried to be scientific, in the sense of substituting objective criteria and quantitative standards for private speculations and impressions of value ; and some men of scientific training have attempted literary criticism Professor Dingle has some hard and sarcastic knocks for the former class, but he plays fair by offering himself as an example of the latter. After demolishing the pretensions to scientific precision of several notable critics in the last hundred years, from Sainte-Beuve to .Mr. I A. Richards, he devotes the second half of his book to three papers of his own, on Wordsworth, Swinburne and Browning. These are three brilliant performances, full of acute observation and clear thought ; and if they are not entirely free of a subjective element, that is no longer to be expected after Professor Dingle's opening argument. For science itself is no longer to be judged (still less to be condemned) as completely divorced from the subjective, and the subjectivity of the scientist in the criticism of literature is at least an agreeable change from the pontifications of many pro- fessional practitioners. But how much Professor Dingle's personal example contributes to his main thesis is another question.
There are inevitably two separate, strands of argument inter- twined in the thesis. There is first the relation between science and the creative arts, and second the relation between science and the humanities, whiCh are the critical study and appreciation of the creative arts. In these two contexts science really stands as a name for two different things: science qua research is a creative process, strictly comparable to the activity of the artistic imagina- tion ; and science qua academic discipline bears the same sort of relation to the former as humane studies bear to the creative arts. In universities, of course, the word " Arts " is made to bear the same double meaning ; but a -university has never been expected to contribute directly to artistic creation (even if it has sometimes done so) in the same way as it is nowadays expected to contribute
* Science and Literary Criticism. By Herbert Dingle. (Nelson 7s. 6d.)
to the creative progress of science as well as to its academic teach- ing. The distinction is important, 'because the relation between science and the arts has been very different in the two different contexts. There is no essential opposition between the creative processes of science and art, nor have their creative minds ever been at war with each other ; they are separate but parallel activities of imaginative genius. It has often been far otherwise at the lower levels of criticism, study and teaching.
Professor Dingle has some good illustrations of the creative experience in science, and of its proximity to artistic genius. He compares Archimedes' emotion on discovering a hydrostatic principle with that of Keats discovering a nightingale ; he quotes an astonishingly poetic outburst from Kepler, announcing a law of planetary motion, which might be matched from Kekule, and, conversely, might be capped from Dante. Many more examples could be offered of the reciprocity of scientific and artistic imagina- tion, and even a few examples of the two combined in one man ; the universal genius of Leonardo, for instance, and in a slighter degree that of Goethe. Even Ptolemy wrote distinguished poetry, and Omar Khayyam contributed to astronomy ; and the philosophy of science has produced a brilliant succession of creative writers, from Plato to Bertrand Russell. But caution is needed in assessing how much of Professor Dingle's particular thesis is established by the multiplication of such examples. It establishes. certainly, the free inter-accessibility of many departments of the human imagina- tion. Does it establish anything at all about literary criticism 7 For this belongs not to the level of creative imagination but rather to the lower level on which science as an academic discipline stands in contrast, and all too often in opposition, to the so-called " liberal arts " or humanities.
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons that we are re-learning today is that this opposition is unreal ; or at least that it is drawn the wrong way, vertically instead of horizontally. For in this sense science is not a branch of learning but a way of approach to learn- ing ; and the same is true of humanism. There is no reason, except intolerance, why the same branch of learning should not be approached from either direction or both, as it was once by Aristotle and again by the scholars of the Renaissance. At the present time the obstructive intolerance of a generation or two ago between scientists and humanists is breaking down, though it must be admitted that the humanists are slower to demolish the barriers than the scientists: that is why, for instance a book like this comes from Professor Dingle rather than from the other ride of the fence. It is a valuable and stimulating contribution to the demolition of the barrier, both by precept and example, and it is written with a readable freshness which is itself a tribute to scientific education. But it is only a first contribution with no pretence to finality. Two brief quotations will sum up what Professor Dingle might claim to have established :
" The bricks of scientific criticism demand the straw of common data, and this straw does not exist. The qualities that make literature something worth talking about are not qualities whose effects on different people it is possible to compare."
Contrast with this:
" A science of criticism, however, is not necessarily im- possible, and might be created if, through progress in physiology or psychology, the requisite criteria should be found to exist. In the meantime, experience obtained in the prosecution of science might well be placed at the disposal of critics. This would assist in preventing the formation-of false theories of criticism
. . (and) . . would also have constructive value in limited fields of criticism by introducing therein certain scientific methods, such as the use of hypotheses."
It is a modest claim, and its modesty is in keeping with Professor Dingle's scientific temper. It amounts to saying that training in a new discipline can create habits of thought valuable to older disciplines, which is certainly true. Beyond that, criticism is left as a sort of tertium quid between science and literature, and the gap still remains to be closed at both ends. C. M. WOODHOUSE.
Previous page
