I Have Landed (18 page)

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:

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:

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:

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:

W
HAT
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.