My head is running about the tropics: in the morning I go and gaze at Palm trees in the hot-house and come home and read Humboldt; my enthusiasm is so great that I can hardly sit still on my chair.
Darwin’s first view of the richness of tropical life led him to rhapsody, for the real objects even exceeded Humboldt’s descriptions. In Brazil, Darwin wrote in his diary for February 28, 1832:
Humboldt’s glorious descriptions are and will for ever be unparalleled; but even he with his dark blue skies and the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flights of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.
And, more succinctly, in a letter to his mentor Henslow a few months later, on May 18: “I never experienced such intense delight. I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him.”
Darwin did not read Humboldt only for visceral wonder; he evidently studied Humboldt’s aesthetic theories with some care as well, as several entries in the Beagle diary testify. Consider this comment from Rio de Janeiro in 1832:
During the day I was particularly struck with a remark of Humboldt’s who often alludes to “the thin vapor which without changing the transparency of the air, renders its tints more harmonious, softens its effects,” etc. This is an appearance which I have never observed in the temperate zones. The atmosphere, seen through a short space of half or three-quarters of a mile, was perfectly lucid, but at a greater distance all colors were blended into a most beautiful haze.
Or this passage, from his summary comments upon returning in 1836:
I am strongly induced to believe that, as in Music, the person who understands every note, will, if he also has true taste, more thoroughly enjoy the whole; so he who examines each part of a fine view, may also thoroughly comprehend the full and combined effect. Hence a traveler should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment. Group masses of naked rocks, even in the wildest forms. For a time they may afford a sublime spectacle, but they will soon grow monotonous; paint them with bright and varied colors, they will become fantastick [sic]; clothe them with vegetation, and they must form at least a decent, if not a most beautiful picture.
Humboldt himself could not have written a better passage on the value of diversity and his favorite theme of aesthetic appreciation enhanced by detailed knowledge of individual parts—the union of artistic pleasure and scientific understanding.
So we reach the pivotal year of our drama, 1859. Humboldt lies dying in Berlin, while two powerful and influential men, half a world apart in geography and profession, reach an apex of fame founded on Humboldt’s inspiration: Frederic Edwin Church displays The Heart of the Andes, and Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.
And we encounter a precious irony, an almost painfully poignant outcome. Humboldt himself, in the preface to volume one of Kosmos, had noted the paradox that great works of science condemn themselves to oblivion as they open floodgates to reforming knowledge, while classics of literature can never lose relevance:
It has frequently been regarded as a subject of discouraging consideration, that while purely literary products of intellectual activity are rooted in the depths of feeling, and interwoven with the creative force of imagination, all works treating of empirical knowledge, and of the connection of natural phenomena and physical laws, are subject to the most marked modifications of form in the lapse of short periods of time. . . . Those scientific works which have, to use a common expression, become antiquated by the acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus continually being consigned to oblivion as unreadable.
By Darwin’s hand, Humboldt’s vision suffered this fate of superannuation in 1859. The exterminating angel cannot be equated with the fact of evolution itself, for some versions of evolution as necessarily progressive and internally driven fit quite well with Humboldt’s notion of pervasive harmony. Rather, Darwin’s particular theory, natural selection, and the radical philosophical context of its presentation, drove Humboldt’s pleasant image to oblivion. Frederic Edwin Church, alas, felt even more committed than Humboldt to the philosophical comfort of their shared vision, for Church, unlike Humboldt, had rooted a good portion of his Christian faith—for him a most important source of inspiration and equanimity—in a view of nature as essential harmony in unity.
Consider just three aspects of the new Darwinian worldview, all confuting central aspects of Humboldt’s vision.
1. Nature must be reconfigured as a scene of competition and struggle, not higher and ineffable harmony. Order and good design arise by natural selection, and only as a side consequence of struggle. Hobbes’s “war of all against all” denotes the causal reality of most daily interactions in nature. The struggle should be viewed as metaphorical and need not involve bloody battle (a plant, Darwin tells us, may be said to struggle against an inclement environment at the edge of a desert). But, more often than not, competition proceeds by the sword, and some die that others may live. The struggle, moreover, operates for the reproductive success of individual organisms, not directly in the service of any higher harmony. Darwin, in one of his most trenchant metaphors, seems to tear right through Humboldt’s faith and Church’s canvases in depicting apparent harmony as dangerously misleading:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.
2. Evolutionary lineages follow no intrinsic direction toward higher states or greater unification. Natural selection only yields local adaptation, as organisms alter in response to modifications in their environment. The geological and climatological causes of environmental change impose no inherent direction either. Evolution is opportunistic.
3. Evolutionary changes do not arise by an internal and harmonious force. Evolution expresses a balance between the internal characteristics of organisms and the external vector of environmental change. These internal and external forces both include strong random components, further obviating any notion of impulse toward union and harmony. The internal force of genetic mutation, the ultimate source of evolutionary variation, works randomly with respect to the direction of natural selection. The external force of environmental change alters capriciously with respect to the progress and complexity of organisms.
Many other humanists joined Frederic Edwin Church in feeling crushed by this new and apparently heartless view of nature. Few themes, in fact, reverberate more strongly through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature than the distress and sadness provoked by losing the comfort of a world lovingly constructed with intrinsic harmony among all its constituent parts. Thomas Hardy, in a striking poem titled “Nature’s Questioning,” lets the natural objects and organisms of Darwin’s new world express their despair through stunned silence:
When I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree,
All seem to gaze at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.
Upon them stirs in lippings mere
(As if once clear in call,
But now scarce breathed at all)—
“We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!”
I am no devotee of psychobiography or psychohistory, and I will not indulge in speculative details about the impact
of Darwin’s revolution on Church’s painting. But we cannot ignore the coincidences of 1859, and their impact upon the last thirty years of Church’s life. When I began this project,7 I was shocked to learn that Church had lived until 1900. His work and its meaning had been so firmly fixed, in my eyes, into the world just before Darwin’s watershed, that I had trouble imagining his corporeal self peering into the twentieth century. (Church reminds me of Rossini, living into Wagner’s era, but with all his work done thirty years before in a different age of bel canto; or of Kerensky, deposed by Lenin, but then living for more than fifty years as an aging exile in New York.)
My impression of surprise arose in part from the facts of Church’s output. He continued to produce some canvases into the 1890s, but he painted no more great landscapes after the 1860s. I know that several non-ideological reasons help to explain Church’s withdrawal. For one, he became very wealthy from his painting (contrary to the stereotype of struggling artists) and spent much of his later life designing and furnishing his remarkable home, Olana, on the Hudson River in upstate New York. For another factor (and one could hardly state a better reason), he experienced severe health problems with inflammatory rheumatism and eventually lost the use of his painting arm. Still, I wonder if the collapse of his vision of nature, wrought by Darwin’s revolution, also played a major role in destroying both his enthusiasm for painting such landscapes ever again. If an uplifting harmony turns into a scene of bloody battle, does not the joke become too bitter to bear?
Several scholars have claimed that the large number of books about science in Church’s library at Olana prove his continuing concern for keeping up with the latest ideas in natural history. But this argument cannot be sustained, and the list, in my judgment as a historian of the sciences of natural history, actually implies an opposite conclusion. Yes, Church owned many books about science, but as Sherlock Holmes once recognized the absence of a bark as the crucial evidence for the nonexistence of a dog, the key to Church’s collection lies in the books he did not own. Church maintained a good collection of Humboldt; he bought Wallace’s books on the geographic distribution of animals and on tropical biology, Darwin on the Beagle voyage and the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). He purchased the major works by Christian evolutionists who continued to espouse the idea of necessary progress mediated by internal forces of vital matter—H. F. Osborn and N. S. Shaler, for example. But Church did not own either of Darwin’s evolutionary treatises, The Origin of Species (1859) or The Descent of Man (1871). More important, he apparently collected not a single work of a mechanistic or materialist bent—not a word of E. H. Haeckel and only a text on religion by T. H. Huxley, though sales of their books far exceeded all others among late-nineteenth-century popularizations of evolution. I think that Frederic Edwin Church probably did undergo a crisis of confidence akin to the pain and bewilderment suffered by the organisms of Hardy’s poem—and that he could not bear to face the consequences of Darwin’s world.
I do not wish to end this article on a somber note—not only because I try to maintain a general cheerfulness of temperament, but also because such a termination would not provide a factually correct or aesthetically honorable end for my story. I want to finish by affirming an aspect of Humboldt’s vision that I regard as more important than his falsified view of natural harmony and, therefore, as upholding the continuing power and beauty of Church’s great paintings. I also want to suggest that Hardy’s sadness and Church’s silence may not represent the most fruitful or appropriate responses of humanists to Darwin’s new world—an initial reaction of shock and dismay, perhaps, but not the considered conclusion of more reflection and understanding from both sides.
First of all, Humboldt correctly argued, as quoted earlier, that great works of science supersede themselves by sowing seeds for further advances. This, Humboldt adds, marks an aspect of science’s joy, not its distress:
However discouraging such a prospect must be, no one who is animated by a genuine love of nature, and by a sense of the dignity attached to its study, can view with regret anything which promises future additions and a greater degree of perfection to general knowledge.
Second, and of far more importance for this essay, Humboldt rightly emphasized the interaction of art and science in any deep appreciation of nature. Therefore Church advanced a grand vision, as right and as relevant today as in his own time, in his fidelity to the principle and actuality of natural observation combined with the shaping genius of imagination. Indeed, I would go further and argue that this vision may now be even more important and relevant today than in the era of Humboldt and Church. For never before have we been surrounded with such confusion, such a drive to narrow specialization, and such indifference to the striving for connection and integration that defines the best in the humanist tradition. Artists dare not hold science in contempt, and scientists will work in a moral and aesthetic desert—a most dangerous place in our age of potentially instant destruction—without art. Yet integration becomes more difficult to achieve than ever before, as jargons divide us and anti-intellectual movements sap our strength. Can we not still find inspiration in the integrative visions of Humboldt and Church?
I will not deny that such integration becomes more difficult in Darwin’s world—a bleaker place, no doubt, than Humboldt’s. But in another sense, the very bleakness of Darwin’s world points to the right solution, a viewpoint perceived with crystal clarity by Darwin himself. Nature simply is what she is; nature does not exist for our delectation, our moral instruction, or our pleasure. Therefore, nature will not always (or even preferentially) match our hopes. Humboldt asked too much of nature, and pinned too much of his philosophy on a particular outcome. He therefore chose a dubious, even a dangerous, tactic—for indifferent nature may not supply the answers that our souls seek.
Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not “discovered” in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us—questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain—her answers unframed in human terms—then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and impossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature’s independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms. I therefore give the last word to Darwin (diary entry of January 16, 1832), who could not deny the apparent truth of natural selection as a mechanism of change, but who never lost his sense of beauty or his childlike wonder. Darwin stood in the heart of the Andes as he wrote:
It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes, he is overwhelmed by what he sees and cannot justly comprehend it. Such are my feelings, and such may they remain.
III
Darwinian Prequels and Fallout
6
The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving Evolution’s Oddest Coupling
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE DEEMED INCONGRUOUS ON A shelf of Victorian bric-a-brac, the ultimate anglophonic symbol for miscellany? What, to illustrate the same principle on a larger scale, could possibly seem out of place in London’s Highgate Cemetery—the world’s most fantastic funerary park of overgrown vegetation and overblown statuary, described as a “Victorian Valhalla . . . a maze of rising terraces, winding paths, tombs and catacombs . . . a monument to the Victorian age and to the Victorian attitude to death . . . containing some of the most celebrated—and often most eccentric—funerary architecture to be found anywhere” (from Highgate Cemetery by F. Barker and J. Gay, published in 1984 by John Murray in London, the same firm that printed
all Darwin’s major books—score one for British continuity!).
E. Ray Lankester. Why did such a conservative gent attend the funeral of Karl Marx?
Highgate holds a maximal variety of mortal remains from Victoria’s era—from eminent scientists like Michael Faraday, to literary figures like George Eliot, to premier pundits like Herbert Spencer, to idols of popular culture like Tom Sayers (one of the last champions of bare-knuckle boxing), to the poignancy of early death for ordinary folks—the young Hampstead girl “who was burned to death when her dress caught fire,” or “Little Jack,” described as “the boy missionary,” who died at age seven on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1899.
But one monument in Highgate Cemetery might seem conspicuously out of place, to people who have forgotten an odd fact from their high-school course in European history. The grave of Karl Marx stands almost adjacent to the tomb of his rival and arch opponent of all state intervention (even for street lighting and sewage systems), Herbert Spencer. The apparent anomaly only becomes exacerbated by the maximal height of Marx’s monument, capped by an outsized bust. (Marx had originally been buried in an inconspicuous spot adorned by a humble marker, but visitors complained that they could not find the site, so in 1954, with funds raised by the British Communist Party, Marx’s gravesite reached higher and more conspicuous ground. To highlight the anomaly of his presence, this monument, until the past few years at least, attracted a constant stream of the most dour, identically suited groups of Russian or Chinese pilgrims, all snapping their cameras, or laying their “fraternal” wreaths.)
I Have Landed Page 13
