Related to Material relating to the emergence of physiological aesthetics (c.1850-1910)
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'We live in an age when not to be scientific is to be nothing; the man untrained in science, though he should speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though he should know all that man may know of the history of men and their works in time past, though he should have nourished on the study of their noblest examples in art and literature whatever he may have of natural intelligence, is but a pitiable and worthless pretender in the sight of professors to whom natural science is not a mean but an end; not an instrument of priceless worth for the mental workman, but a result in itself satisfying and final, a substitute in place of an auxiliary, a sovereign in lieu of an ally, a goal instead of a chariot. It is not enough in their eyes to admit that all study of details is precious or necessary to help us to a larger and surer knowledge of the whole; that without the invaluable support and illumination of practical research and physical science, the human intellect must still as of old go limping and blinking on its way nowhither, lame of one foot at best and blind of one eye; the knowledge of bones and stones is good not merely as a part of that general knowledge of nature inward as well as outward, human as well as other, towards which the mind would fain make its way yet a little and again a little further through all obstruction of error and suffusion of mystery; it is in the bones and stones themselves, not in man at all or the works of man, that we are to find the ultimate satisfaction and the crowning interest of our studies... It is vain to reply, while admitting that truth cannot be reached by men who take no due account of facts, that each fact is not all the truth, each limb is not all the body, each thought is not all the mind; and that even men (if such there be) ignorant of everything but what other men have written may possibly not be ignorant of everything worth knowledge, destitute of every capacity worth exercise. One study alone, and one form of study, is worthy the time and the respect of men who would escape the contempt of their kind. Impressed by this consideration—impelled by late regret and tardy ambition to atone if possible for lost time and thought misspent—I have determined to devote at least a spare hour to the science of comparative entomology; and propose here to set down in a few loose notes the modest outcome of my morning’s researches.
     Every beginner must be content to start from the lowest point—to begin at the bottom if he ever hopes to reach the top, or indeed to gain any trustworthy foothold at all. Our studies should therefore in this case also be founded on a preliminary examination of things belonging to the class of the infinitely little; and of these we shall do well to take up first such samples for inspection as may happen to lie nearest at hand. As the traveller who may desire to put to profit in the interest of this science his enforced night’s lodging “in the worst inn’s worst room” must take for his subjects of study the special or generic properties of such parasites as may leap or creep about his place of rest or unrest; so the lodger in the house of art or literature who for once may wish in like manner to utilize his waste moments must not scorn to pay some passing attention to the varieties of the critical tribe.' (1-3)

 

'There is one large and interesting class of the critical race which unfortunately has hitherto in great measure defied the researches of science. Any collector who by any fair means has secured a sample of this species may naturally be prone to exhibit it with pride among the choicer spoils of his museum; not indeed for its beauty, and certainly not for its rarity; it may be seen in every hedge and every morass, but the difficulty is to determine and distinguish any single specimen by its proper and recognizable name. This species is composed of the critics known only as anonyms. Being anonymous, how can its members be classified by any scientific system of nomenclature? A mere dabbler in the science like myself must not expect at his first start to secure a prize of this kind; such trophies are not for the hand of a beginner. The sciolist who thinks to affix its label and assign its place to any one specimen of the tribe will be liable to grave error. In the grand pantomime of anonymous criticism the actors shift their parts and change their faces so suddenly that no one whose life has not been spent behind the scenes can hope to verify his guess at the wearer of such or such a mask.' (5-6)

 

'The self-imposed task is simple and severe; we would merely submit to the analysis of scientific examination the examiners of other men; bring under our microscope, as it were, the telescopic apparatus which they on their side bring to investigate from below things otherwise invisible to them, as they would be imperceptible from above but for the microscopic lens which science enables us in turn to apply to themselves and their appliances. As to answer, if any workman who has done any work of his own should be asked why he does not come forward to take up any challenge flung down to him, or sweep out of his way any litter of lies and insults that may chance to encumber it for a moment, his reply for his fellows and himself to those who suggest that they should engage in such a warfare might perhaps run somewhat thus: Are we cranes or mice, that we should give battle to the frogs or the pigmies? Examine them we may at our leisure, in the pursuit of natural history, if our studies should chance to have taken that turn; but as we cannot, when they speak out of the darkness, tell frog from frog by his croak, or pigmy from pigmy by his features, and are thus liable at every moment to the most unscientific errors in definition, it seems best to seek no further for quaint or notable examples of a kind which we cannot profitably attempt to classify. Not without regret, therefore, we resign to more adventurous explorers the whole range of the anonymous wilderness, and confine our own modest researches to the limits within which we may trust ourselves to make no grave mistakes of kind. But within these limits, too, there is a race which defies even scientific handling, and for a reason yet graver and more final. Among writers who publish and sign such things as they have to say about or against their contemporaries, there is still, as of old, a class which is protected against response or remark, as (to use an apt example of Macaulay’s) “the skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach.” To this class belong the creatures known to naturalists by the generic term of coprophagi; a generation which derives its sustenance from the unclean matter which produced it, and lives on the very stuff of which it was born

“They are no vipers, yet they feed

On mother-dung which did them breed:”

and under this head we find ranked, for example, the workers and dealers in false and foul ware for minor magazines and newspapers, to whom now that they know their ears to be safe from the pillory and their shoulders from the scourge there is no restraint and no reply applicable but the restraint and the reply of the law which imposes on their kind the brand of a shameful penalty' (13-15)

 

'Of such creatures, then, even though they be nothing if not critical, we do not propose to treat; but only of such examples of the critical kind as may be shown in public without apology by the collector, not retained (if retained at all) for necessary purposes of science on the most private shelves of his cabinet. Among these more presentable classes there is considerable diversity of kind to be traced by the discerning eye, though many signs and symptoms be in almost all cases identical.' (16-17)

 

'In a word, whatever is fit to live is safe to live, and whatever is not fit to live is sure to die, though all men should swear and struggle to the contrary; and it is hard to say which of these is the more consoling certainty. I shall not, therefore, select any book for refutation of its principle, but merely for examination of its argument; my only aim being to test by this simplest of means what may be its purport and its weight.' (20)

 

'I am not aware—but it is possible that this too maybe an instance of a man’s blindness to his own defects—of having by any overt or covert demonstration of so vile a spirit exposed my name to be classed with the names, whether forged or genuine, of the rancorous and reptile crew of poeticules who decompose into criticasters' (34-35)

 

'It is not my purpose in this little scientific excursion to remark further than may be necessary on the symptoms of a poetical sort which the skilful eye may discern in the immediate objects of examination. To play the critic of their idyllic or satirical verse is not an office to which my ambition can aspire. Nevertheless, in the process of research, it may be useful to take note of the casual secretions observable in a fine live specimen of the breed in which we are interested, as well as of its general properties; for thus we may be the better able to determine, if we find that worth while, its special and differential attributes. I have therefore given a first and last glance to the poetic excretions of the present subject. Even from such things as these there might be something to learn, if men would bring to a task so unpromising and uninviting the patient eye and humble spirit of investigation by experiment. Such investigation would secure them against the common critical fallacy of assuming that a poem must be good because written on a subject, and it may be written with an aim, not unworthy of a better man than the writer; that a bad poem, for instance, on the life of our own day and the sorrows of our own people can only be condemned by those who would equally condemn a good poem on the same subject; who would admit nothing as fit matter for artistic handling, which was not of a more remote and ideal kind than this: a theory invaluable to all worthless and ambitious journeymen of verse, who, were it once admitted as a law, would have only the trouble left them of selecting the subject whereon to emit their superfluity of metrical matter.' (71-72)

 

'If we could imagine about 1820 some parasitic poeticule of the order of Kirke White classifying together Coleridge and Keats, Byron and Shelley, as members of “the sub-Wordsworthian school,” we might hope to find an intellectual ancestor for Mr. Robert Buchanan; but that hope is denied us; we are reduced to believe that Mr. Buchanan must be autochthonous, or sprung perhaps from a cairngorm pebble cast behind him by the hand of some Scotch Deucalion.' (n. on p. 77)

 

'At this point, and even after this incomparable windfall in the way of entomology, I begin to doubt whether after all I shall ever make any way as a scientific student. The savours, the forms, the sounds, the contortions, of the singular living things which this science commands us to submit to examination, need a stouter stomach to cope with them than mine. No doubt they have their reasons for being; they were probably meant for some momentary action and passion of their own, harmful or harmless; and how can the naturalist suppose that merely by accurate analysis of their phenomena he has gauged the secret of their mysterious existence? It is so hard to see the reason why they should be, that we are compelled to think the reason must be very grave.
     And if once we cease to regard such things scientifically, there is assuredly no reason why we should regard them at all. Historically considered, they have no interest whatever; the historian discerns no perceptible variation in their tribe for centuries on centuries. It is only because this age is not unlike other ages that the children of Zoilus whet their teeth against your epic, the children of Rymer against your play; the children—no, not the children; let us at least be accurate—the successors of Fréron and Desfontaines lift up their throats against your worship of women:

“Monsieur Veuillot t’appelle avec esprit citrouille;”

Mr. Buchanan indicates to all Hebridean eyes the flaws and affectations in your style, as in that of an amatory foreigner; Mr. Lowell assures his market that the best coin you have to offer is brass, and more than hints that it is stolen brass—whether from his own or another forehead, he scorns to specify; and the Montrouge Jesuit, the Grub-street poet, the Mayflower Puritan, finds each his perfect echo in his natural child; in the first voice you catch the twang of Garasse and Nonotte, in the second of Flecknoe and Dennis, in the third of Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. Perhaps then after all their use is to show that the age is not a bastard, but the legitimate heir and representative of other centuries; degenerate, if so it please you to say—all ages have been degenerate in their turn—as to its poets and workers, but surely not degenerate as to these. Poor then as it may be in other things, the very lapse of years which has left it weak may help it more surely to determine than stronger ages could the nature of the critical animal.' (83-85)