, "Darwinism challenged older ways of thinking; the transformed physical environment challenged older ways of living and doing." He continues:
The conflict mirrored a larger struggle of orientation to the facts of urban-industrial change. In retrospect, both reflected the perennial clash between an old and a new order, but while the physical revolutions jarred attitudes and institutions, Darwinism attacked the whole American Weltanschauung" (Loewenberg, 1941, p. 339).
The popularization of Darwinism, Loewenberg notes, saw a culture in which the "ascent of man was substituted for the fall, and the duty to improve mankind was regarded as an injunction of natural law certified by evolution" (Loewenberg, 1941, p. 352). It is but a step from this observation to the injunction of social reform as a scientific imperative.
The literary culture of England and America took account of the new scientism and sought to explain it in various ways. Some viewed the encounter between science and art as a tension-filled collision. Matthew Arnold's Literature and Science was a critique of the rigidly scientific universe that hailed poetry as a critique of modern (and all other) life. By 1931 Max Eastman in America was openly hostile to the metaphysical view of the human condition as sufficient to the literary task, saying that "it is the function of science to comprehend and criticize life; poetry is our living of it vividly and together. Only after that extreme statement is made can we correctly apprehend, as qualifications of it, the various intellectual possibilities that lie open to poetry and to poetic literature in an age of science" (Eastman, 1931, pp. 241-2). In other words, science could be a literary facilitator and interpreter of a new, modern vision of the world.
But good science and bad writing will not guarantee good fiction, which means that the authentic critique of the parallels between science and literary form is c...