emembrance and reading,
whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is
scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science
and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so
diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart
from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science
may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows
some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with
decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the
example--perhaps the only example--of pure science, of what all science
would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as
far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of
mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all
personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add
that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in
precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture,
that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature
consists.

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more
especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be
strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself
from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great,
is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable
and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older
scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary
side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the
universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in
a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its
even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now
find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not
merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of
linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value
of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps
not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly
has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote
applications, that it stands thereto much as geology