ABSTRACT
Many of the best British Isles authors of today now live in Paris, America, or Ireland: the man of letters finds that his chosen field is silently emptying. A hundred years ago Bishop Wilberforce attacked science; and at the hands of T. H. Huxley, a Romanes Lecturer perhaps even more distinguished than the present one, he fared extremely ill. It may be said that Professor Medawar puts science and literature very much on an even footing. The important confusion occurs, though, when Professor Medawar’s story-telling idea is applied to literature. Indeed, as the author suggested earlier on, ‘Science and Literature’ is so good as a lecture that it is itself a piece of literature. The cases of Anna and Vronsky, or Clarissa and Lovelace, or Birkin and Ursula – and so on – are quite certainly not ‘average’ cases; nor, equally certainly, are they ‘probable’ ones.
