Blackwell Reference Online

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In December 1919, the popular science writer and literary journalist J. W. N. Sullivan surveyed the contemporary cultural scene. It was a moment of transition, which he likened to a Victorian form of slide show, a “dissolving view,” where one slide had not disappeared but the next had not come into focus. Though the situation in politics and religion was disorienting, in art it was worse. There was no unifying pattern to contemporary work. Science too was going through a period of transition, and Sullivan argued that art needed to rediscover the universe just as the physical sciences had done:If art is to survive it must show itself worthy to rank with science; it must be as adequate, in its own way, as is science. To do that, it must become, to an unprecedented degree, profound and comprehensive, for it is living in a world which is unprecedentedly wide and deep.(Sullivan 1919a: 1362)The immediate context for Sullivan's survey was the announcement of the experimental proof of Einstein's general principle of relativity. Einstein's special theory, advanced in a paper in 1905, had attracted little attention beyond the scientific community, but the general theory, which provided an entirely new approach to gravitation, proved more sensational. The announcement, made by A. S. Eddington at the Royal Society on November 6, 1919, created newspaper headlines, and came to be seen as the ... log in or subscribe to read full text