Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose—­the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research.  What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads!  What interminable gritty collops of learning have we to munch!  Through what tangles of uninteresting phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the higher Philosophy!  Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.

There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.  Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor.  Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history.  It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being “readable,” and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.

The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by the barbarous term of “scientists” seem to think that it matters nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their language.  They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs.  And they do this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary.  Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style.  Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry “memoirs.”  Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets.  And all this with such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation.  We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct and intelligent prose.  And yet out of a million books, we find so very few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that Tom Jones is a work of art, and the Decline and Fall is a work of art.