nation rather than instruction and practical effects,[1] and appeal to general rather than specialised knowledge. Every element of this definition clearly depends on limited spheres of social and mental evolution—the separation of imagination from experience, of didactic purpose from æsthetic pleasure, and that specialisation of knowledge which is so largely due to the economic development known as "division of labour." In truth, our definition will carry us, and is intended to carry us, a very short way satisfactorily—perhaps no distance at all beyond conditions of art and science under which we live, or similar to these. If the student has expected something better, let him reflect that breadth of definition is only to be purchased by flagrant violations of the facts but just stated. He can, indeed, have no better introduction to the scientific study of literature than a definition which shall bring home one of the great lessons to be learned from this and every other science, the limited truth of human ideas.
We have spoken of our study as a "science;" let us
- ↑ M. Victor de Laprade (La Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modernes," pp. 312–322), while discussing Goethe's efforts to combine science with poetry, raises the question whether didactic poetry is at the present day a legitimate form of poetic art. In doing so he draws a careful distinction between the didactic poetry of Greece or India, and that of days in which "science has left the path of hypothesis and imagination, has become possessed of fixed methods and knows its proper limits." In these latter conditions M. Laprade decides that didactic poetry is "un genre bâtard, dangereux, à peu près impossible;" that it is poetry at all only "in proportion as it withdraws itself from science to enter into the imagination." Goethe's Faust may contain geology, optics, chemistry; his Wilhelm Meister, scientific discussions and demonstrations; but in his Elective Affinities there appears that "fatalistic conception" of scientific law before which human liberty, master-maker of literary art, would seem to disappear. But M. Laprade has scarcely touched the true cause of that dissatisfaction which the metaphysical as well as the didactic poetry of modern times can hardly fail to produce. This cause is to be found in the fact that poetry and literature in general are expected to address the average mind in average, not specialised, language; whereas science pursues its studies and expresses its truths in the technical language it requires.
