The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by
the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters
nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their
language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory
in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they
believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough
facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do
this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and
Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure,
vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite
content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry
"memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to
become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with
such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of
general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English
as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we
have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct
and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very
few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that _Tom Jones_
is a work of art, and the _Decline and Fall_ is a work of art.
It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and
social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest
imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric
and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean
of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley
conceived his _Prometheus_, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of
the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of
invention. Since the _School for Scandal_ (1777) no English drama has
been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For
more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate
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