THE GREAT DIVORCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 12

THE GREAT DIVORCE

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, by B. litor, Evans; Allen and Unwin, English price 8/6.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

N this small book the Provost of University College, London -whose special flair for the lucid compression of a wide range of material is already familiaropens up a fascinating and highlytelevant field of study. Dr. Ifor Evans has two main aims: first. to trace "the historical development of the effect of sciénce on literature"; second, "to explore the position of the artist, and hete more particularly the writer in our modern scientific society."’ With the first he is brilliantly successful; the second and more difficult task is tentatively but suggestively treated. On the attitude of English writers to science from Bacon and Donne to Hardy and Aldous Huxley, this study is always lively and often illuminating. Attitudes. to Newton provide the first major touchstone: the earlier 18th Century approved, the later (with Blake at its extreme of protest) did not. But the great Romantic writers, contrary to common assumption, did not reject science as even so powerful an intellect as Swift seems to have done.

Dr. Ifor Evans is particularly good on Wordsworth: here he can break a lance with A. N. Whitehead and Douglas Bush, and others who have seen in Wordsworth’s reliance on in- -- —

dividual experience a negation of scientific method. He has no difficulty in proving that Wordsworth, in his earlier years at least, had a deep and passionate interest in science, and that he wrote -in The Prelude — what is perhaps our greatest scientific poem. Coleridge, Shelley, and even Keats were aware of the implications of scientific discovery: it was the later 19th Century, above all the Pre-Raphaelites and Pater, that widened the gulf between science and the artist, instead of following the path that Wordsworth and Coleridge so nobly opened to them. For our own time, Dr. Ifor Evans fully recognises the dangers of that divorce between science and the arts which all true educationists deplore. He pleads for a new humanism to bridge the gap. If here his argument (as he himself recognises) is less surely developed, it is timely enough: and his book will have well served its purpose, if it sets more students thinking about the solution of one of the major intellectual and human problems of our age.