The lecture Olaf Stapledon gave on science and literature — first to the John o' London Circle on 20 October 1937, and again to the WEA Literary Society and the Liverpool University Literary Club in 1938 — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.
Occasion. The manuscript dates itself, and more than once. Sheet 1's right margin stacks three occasions in Stapledon's own hand — John o' London Circle, 20.10.37; WEA Lit. Soc., .11.38; L'pool Univ. Lit. Club, 14.12.38 — so one set of notes served three deliveries between October 1937 and December 1938. That is the speaker's own record on his own papers, the strongest evidence class this archive affords; it does not fix the November 1938 day, and no external notice of any of the three occasions has been acquired. The project's lecture concordance quotes the three inscriptions and dates the set by them.
The manuscript. Seven sheets (Liverpool University Library OS/F8/4; folder F8). It is a disciplined recto outline — display headings, then examples set out point by point; sheet 5 is a single short qualifying aside. The transcription is diplomatic: cancelled matter is shown struck and never voiced, and one disputed negated line on sheet 7 is left unvoiced rather than resolved.
The argument in brief. Three questions: what effect science has had on literature, what effect it ought to have, and what literature's function is within a scientific culture. Stapledon defines science (an attitude and method, tending to determinism; a body of facts, tending to materialism) and literature (of escape, of current needs, of creative imagination), then runs a long survey of examples from Dante to the "scientifiction" magazines. The "upshot" sorts the kinds of influence, qualifies that the amount of such literature is small, and asks how science ought to benefit literature — through escape, creative work, fantasy and myth — and what literature owes the culture in return: suggestive speculation, criticism of the "specialist's fallacy," and a stress on "the higher human capacities." It closes that science cannot describe the mind, and that literature should prophesy modestly, and in hope.
Position in the corpus. Dated 1937–1938, this falls in the years the concordance reads as a "platform bifurcation" — the public, largely secular Stapledon — yet it is the corpus's fullest statement on literature and the arts, and it anticipates the poetics of Science and Fiction a decade later: the "myth" that must "open windows," the symbol of "man-in-the-cosmos." The wider recurrence of that position across the published shelf is treated in the deep analysis (§3.9).
What is not known. The day in November 1938; whether the text changed between the three deliveries; whether the seven sheets are complete; any external corroboration of the three occasions; and the disputed sheet-7 line, left unvoiced.
Three questions
I want to ask three questions this evening. They may look remote from our immediate troubles, though I do not think they really are. First, what effect has science in fact had upon literature, for good and for bad? Secondly — and this is perhaps the weightier question — what effect ought science to have? And thirdly, granting that our culture is becoming, or trying to become, a scientific one, what is the proper function of literature within it?
Let me say what I mean by the two words. By science I mean chiefly modern natural science, which is two things at once. On the one hand it is an attitude and a method — observation, induction, abstraction — and, because it seeks recurrent order, it tends toward determinism in some sense. On the other hand it is an immense accumulation of facts and detailed theories, and it tends to encourage materialism in some sense. I say "in some sense" deliberately, for both words are treacherous; and there is, besides, the awkward case of psychology.
By literature I mean the expression of thoughts and feelings in words. Setting aside good and bad craftsmanship altogether, I distinguish three broad kinds. There is the literature of escape, which is legitimate but dangerous: it distracts attention from unpleasant reality and affords wish-fulfilment, as the fairy story does. There is the literature of current needs — propaganda and comment, conducted in terms of accepted values. And there is the literature of creative imagination, which welcomes reality and explores it, epitomizes it in symbols and so reveals its essential patterns, and, in enhancing our sensibility and understanding, reveals new aspects of reality and thereby actually creates new human capacity.
What science did to literature: the older writers
I shall offer examples rather than a history, and my comments must be somewhat random. Among the early cases Dante is the obvious one: deeply influenced by the science of his age, he draws from pre-Copernican astronomy not only the architecture of his universe but its verisimilitude. Bacon is the trumpeter of a new age, the prophet of knowledge as power, imagining in the New Atlantis what is virtually a republic of science; while in Milton the new science and the inherited mythology are already in conflict.
Rabelais and Swift show a different tendency, though without any direct influence of science. In Gargantua the people lost in the giant's mouth are worked out with a kind of realism; and Swift takes a novel idea and pursues its consequences — Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the rational horses, the immortals — with detail exact enough to put man firmly in his place. In Shelley there is a medley of science and Greece, with Prometheus become in part the spirit of science and the promise of a new world. Wordsworth, alarmed, flies back to nature as directly perceived, and protests against the man who would go "botanizing on his mother's tomb": what he fears is abstraction, dissection, materialism. Samuel Butler's Erewhon applies a scientific analysis and a characteristic shuffling of categories — sickness treated as crime, crime as sickness — and lets the machines threaten to take power, so that the book becomes a warning; Butler is a prophet of evolution too, though for him evolution is bound up with purpose in life. Meredith reflects evolution again, his nature more objective than Wordsworth's, catching in an image like the "Warrior Horse" the small effect our human effort makes. Hardy, in Two on a Tower, uses astronomy for the fear and fascination of immensity — the moon's disc, the vast scale in which Europe itself dwindles, set against the little heath bells. Jules Verne must at least be named; and Rosny, in Un Autre Monde and Les Xipéhuz, imagines worlds superimposed upon our own, while Flatland works out the consequences of two-dimensional life, and gives that geometrical abstraction, by imaginative filling, the quality of a world.
The moderns
Shaw is an evolutionist, though often hostile to science as an institution, and especially to the pretensions of scientific medicine — which brings us conveniently to the contemporaries. Wells is, of course, the master. He gives us scientific melodrama in The War of the Worlds, The Star and The Time Machine; elsewhere a levitating drug, and forms of accelerated or "quick" living. But the best of him is not melodrama at all but sheer mind-stretching, as in The Country of the Blind; and throughout his work he is the prophet of a scientific Utopia. J. B. S. Haldane, in Possible Worlds, plays with the fall of the moon and the future of Venus, and can imagine even the abolition of pain and its reinstatement; J. D. Bernal, in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, imagines living worlds. Aldous Huxley warns us in Brave New World, working out the consequences of mechanization — mass production hardening into regimentation, mass suggestion pursuing us even through the pillow-phone, industry grown aimless in technocracy and robots.
David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus gives us a rotating universe, strange scenery, such details as the yellow water, and human beings themselves transformed and glorified. Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England shows the influence of psychology more directly: its mechanism may be implausible — the subterranean light, the fungus, the dependence on food from the upper earth — but its hypnotized people are a clear symbol of Fascism. Murray Constantine's Proud Man turns to psychology again: a perfected visitor comes among us and finds human beings busy at self-torture — and here I will unfrock myself. Hilton's Lost Horizon combines the psychological, the mystical and the scientific; J. C. Powys's Morwyn, by contrast, hates science and couples scientists with sadists, though its mechanism — the meteor fall, the use of gravity at the centre — is faulty. Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, with its underground race, belongs in the background here; and M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud imagines a gas cloud destroying all life, and draws its force from the description of a dead world. Then there is what has been called "scientifiction" — Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories and the like — with its subterranean races, its intelligent reptiles, its voyages in time, its life on the subatomic scale: the ingenuity is often considerable, the human factor commonly crude. Régis Messac, writing on Micromégas, is fascinated by the very big and the very little — giants whose heads are inconveniently high, forms of life governed by subatomic laws — and his Quinzinzinzili and La Cité des Asphyxiés may stand as further examples.
The upshot
What, then, is the upshot? Several distinct kinds of influence appear. There is the prophecy of wisdom and power — mechanical power, but also man's greatness and potentiality. There is the opposite: revulsion against science and the prophecy of disaster, a dwelling on man's littleness and inconsequence, the ruin of individuality, the menace of determinism, the deplored effects of industrialism and of materialism, and an obsession with mere size and number. There is a kind of natural piety toward the universe, a reverence for its aloofness and for its immense potentiality. There is a danger of atrophy in what used to be called "man's proper study," man himself, as interest drifts to galaxies and mechanisms and remote futures; and with it the cult of the marvellous, a new "realism," a deliberate objectivity. And science has touched literary style itself, encouraging prose that is unemotional and unrhetorical, dry, concise, abstract.
A qualification is needed at once. We name Jules Verne and Wells, and point to the amazing stories; but the amount of literature really transformed by science is still very small — and whether Wells and the amazing stories are properly scientific literature is itself a question.
What science ought to give — and what literature owes in return
How, then, ought science to benefit literature? Escape literature is not necessarily bad, only minor; science can lend it new satisfactions — wonder, power, aloofness — provided it stays plausible within its own assumptions. The same demand for plausibility holds of creative literature, on pain of farce: in manner, science should keep it in touch with the actual; in matter, it should afford new themes and a fuller understanding both of man and of the world. Beyond this lies the scientific fantasy, whose business is to perform particular mind-stretchings, and which to do so honestly must keep abreast of exploration. And beyond fantasy lies myth — a symbol of the pattern of a whole culture, comparable in that to the epic poem, which must "open windows"; the myth of a scientific culture cannot but assimilate science, and yet must beware of its passing fashions.
What, finally, is literature's own function within such a culture? First, it may offer suggestive speculation in terms of the culture itself. Secondly, and more importantly, it must criticize the culture — and in particular correct the specialist's fallacy, that standing temptation to mistake an abstraction for the whole of reality: materialism for a philosophy, determinism for a complete account of conduct, magnitude for importance, myopic detail for understanding. Literature must therefore keep stressing the higher human capacities, the very capacities the sciences cannot yet tackle and which, for that reason, the specialist may fail even to notice.
Style, danger, and a hope
The appropriate style, I should say, will be unconventional but restrained, learning not only from natural science but from social science, history and philosophy. One may fairly ask whether the study of nature can itself become an escape; certainly anthropology and astronomy can be used to flee the immediate human world, as one feels at moments in Meredith and in Hardy. For science cannot describe the mind. We may say that man is electrons and atoms — but where, in that account, is mind, and where is what we vaguely call the spiritual? The correlates are needed, necessity and requirement — but necessity and requirement of what? The question stays open.
Some writers behave as though God whispered directly in their ears. My advice to them would be plain: do not under-prophesy; do not overstep the mark; and do not be overawed by any scientist, however subtle — for some of the ideas, after all, are right. We can escape from reality and remain sane; there may even be a kind of emotional purgation of science by the writing of it. Science lacks the bitterness of mere religion; and yet science is itself dangerous, for the good it does — some people's good — may go awry, which is why we oscillate between pessimism and optimism. Scientific notions can be recruited to prop up racial superiority; and there is the myth of Communism, of one that is coming. The facts of science are so contradictory in appearance, and so numerous, that they have not yet been synthesized: we have isolated discussions — Maugham on sadism, Shakespeare on the whole of human nature, Priestley's Midnight on the Desert — but the specialists remain specialists. A thousand years ago the learned world had far fewer facts, and a more manageable synthesis; we have enormously more truth in detail and very little agreement about the whole.
So we come back to where we began. We must first define what we mean by science, and learn to recognize what is unscientific literature; and then we may ask whether a genuinely scientific drama is possible — whether, if the scientist himself could speak as an artist, he would give us merely another Jules Verne, or something more. Literature must indeed prophesy; but it should prophesy modestly, and, in the end, prophesy in hope.