PARRINGTON AND REALITY
35
mately his notions of Henry James's prudery, and wants to know
what is wrong with-the act itself, isn't sex a Good Thing, and, if it
is, what is wrong with just simply representing it all bare of a
snobbish cloak of meanings? Things are what they are and nothing
else: of so much Mr. Smith is certain. That things are what they
mean, that things are what they make us do or what we do with
them, Mr. Smith does not want to believe and does not want us to
believe, and such a view is, indeed, what he calls mystical as
against realistic: he seems to think, what is not at all the case, that
it makes every man's ideas at once eccentric and as good as the
next man's.
A critic with such a view is at a very great advantage, for all
he need do is to examine Fig. 1, cast an eye on Fig. la and tell us
whether or not they are congruent.
If
they are not, he can pass his
judgment on the artist, Fig. 2. The critic knows what reality is and
he can check the work of art by comparing it with reality. But how
does this critic know what reality is? Mr. Smith has already given
us the answer: by the methods of science applied to literature.
To be sure, everybody speaks-though less now than for–
merly-of the scientific method in literature. But, really, how
much validity has the notion? I certainly have not the
courag~
to
debate the meaning of science with Mr. Smith or anyone else, but
I
do remember that science is usually said to have these charac–
teristic activities: to gather data, to formulate statements about
these data, to predict on the basis of these formulations and, some–
times, on the same basis, to control. The conjunction of science and
literature was perhaps first made by German philology; here,
where classifications can be made and definite connections traced,
a kind of science does seem to be at work. But when we come to,
the use of the same method in such endeavors as literary history,
even though the ideal of checked data as complete as possible is
the essential equipment of the literary scholar, the "science" in–
volved has already a certain metaphorical flavor. After all, there
are only certain things in literature that are indisputable and very
few things indeed that are measurable. A spelling, an edition, a
date, a form, the length of a line-we can be definite about these,
even when incorrect. But a meaning is not indisputable, nor a qual–
ity
either, and we find ourselves in a realm in which science can–
not apply.
