"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

doggedly. "You ought to have the autoscanner read you some books on the aesthetic laws of language.
It's all there."

The artist blinked in great innocence. "What's all there?"

"Scientific rules for analyzing poetry. Take the mood of a poem. You can very easily learn whether it's
gay or somber just by comparing the proportion of low-pitched vowelsтАФu and o, that isтАФto the
high-pitched vowelsтАФa, e and i."

"Well, what do you know about that!" He turned a wondering face to Anna. "And she's right! Come to
think of it, in Milton's L'Allegro, most of the vowels are high-pitched, while in his Il Penseroso, they're
mostly low-pitched. Folks, I believe we've finally found a yardstick for genuine poetry. No longer must
we flounder in poetastical soup. Now let's see." He rubbed his chin in blank-faced thoughtfulness. "Do
you know, for years I've considered Swinburne's lines mourning Charles Baudelaire to be the distillate of
sadness. But that, of course, was before I had heard of Martha's scientific approach, and had to rely
solely on my unsophisticated, untrained, uninformed feelings. How stupid I was! For the thing is crammed
with high-pitched vowels, and long e dominates: 'thee", 'sea', 'weave', 'eve', 'heat', 'sweet', 'feet'..." He
struck his brow as if in sudden comprehension. "Why, it's gay! I must set it to a snappy polka!"

"Drivel," sniffed Martha Jacques. "ScienceтАФ"

"тАФis simply a parasitical, adjectival, and useless occupation devoted to the quantitative restatement of
Art," finished the smiling Jacques. "Science is functionally sterile; it creates nothing; it says nothing new.
The scientist can never be more than a humble camp-follower of the artist. There exists no scientific
truism that hasn't been anticipated by creative art. The examples are endless. Uccello worked out
mathematically the laws of perspective in the fifteenth century; but Kallicrates applied the same laws two
thousand years before in designing the columns of the Parthenon. The Curies thought they invented the
idea of 'half-life'тАФof a thing vanishing in proportion to its residue. The Egyptians tuned their lyre-strings
to dampen according to the same formula. Napier thought he invented logarithmsтАФentirely overlooking
the fact that the Roman brass workers flared their trumpets to follow a logarithmic curve."

"You're deliberately selecting isolated examples," retorted Martha Jacques.

"Then suppose you name a few so-called scientific discoveries," replied the man. "I'll prove they were
scooped by an artist, every time."

"I certainly shall. How about Boyle's gas law? I suppose you'll say Praxiteles knew all along that gas
pressure runs inversely proportional to its volume at a given temperature?"

"I expected something more sophisticated. That one's too easy. Boyle's gas law, Hooke's law of springs,
Galileo's law of pendulums, and a host of similar hogwash simply state that compression, kinetic energy,
or whatever name you give it, is inversely proportional to its reduced dimensions, and is proportional to
the amount of its displacement in the total system. Or, as the artist says, impact results from, and is
proportional to, displacement of an object within its milieu. Could the final couplet of a Shakespearean
sonnet enthrall us if our minds hadn't been conditioned, held in check, and compressed in suspense by the
preceding fourteen lines? Note how cleverly Donne's famous poem builds up to its crash line, 'It tolls for
thee!' By blood, sweat, and genius, the Elizabethans lowered the entropy of their creations in precisely
the same manner, and with precisely the same result, as when Boyle compressed his gases. And the
method was long old when they were young. It was old when the Ming artists were painting the barest
suggestions of landscapes on the disproportionate backgrounds of their vases. The Shah Jahan was