Abstract
Much is lost from literature when it is no longer thought to be divinely inspired nor concerned with permanent, spiritual values; but much remains also of vitality and vividness — the curve of beauty and even a base in sexuality. The physiology of artistic taste and the discovery of the imagination as a material function of the brain opened up literature to something akin to technological development, to progress. Darwin was one of many “engineers” of the imagination in the second half of the 18th century. He experimented with sensation and “imaginative motions,” as he termed them, in order to build an art based on the theory that pleasure comes from the lively recombinations of sense perceptions at the near sub-conscious level of involuntary animal motion. In other words, he believed that pleasure could be engineered out of matter, that it did not spring whole from supernatural virtue. Wordsworth believed the same thing when he described “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us, — the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!”1
the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C”
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References
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1850 edition, Book XI, 11. 142–144.
Elizabeth Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1925), p. 184.
Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque, Studies in a Point of View, With a New Preface by the Author (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967), p. 4. The tendency of Romantics later on is to reject visualism all together as Coleridge does in chapter VI of the 1817 Biographia Liter aria: Under that despotism of the eye... under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful....
Ibid., p. 5.
To William Hayley, 6 Oct. 1787. In Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years of 1784 and 1807, Six Volumes (Edinburgh: Constable, and Co., 1811), I, p. 340.
Martin Price, “The Picturesque Moment,” in Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 262,271.
The quoted line is from The Temple of Nature, canto III, 1. 144.
Erasmus Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants,” part II of The Botanic Garden, Second American Edition (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1807), p. 91.
See in particular John Dixon Hunt, “Emblem and Expressionism in the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 (Spring, 1971), 294–317 and
Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City, Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969).
Hunt, pp. 307–308.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, p. 2.
Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Doctor Darwin (New York: Walker and Co., 1963), pp. 157–58.
Hunt, p. 310.
See Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 422–23.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part II, p. 9.
Albert S. Roe, “The Thunder of Egypt — Blake and Erasmus Darwin,” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., William Blake Essays for S. Foster Damon (Providence: Brown Univ. Press 1969), pp. 159–169.
For further discussion of Blake’s mockery of the univocal world view through his drawings and illustrations see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s The Book of Urizen,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (Fall, 1969), 83–107.
Blake was an ardent defender of Fuseli, which may have made him sympathetic to Darwin since Darwin patronized Fuseli. In any case, Blake wrote, “the truth is, [Fuseli] is a hundred years beyond the present generation.” To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine, 1806. In David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 705. Could this apply to Darwin’s impressionism as well?
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part II, p. 44.
A modern art historian writes, “[Fuseli was] neither a mystic nor a man of religious ideas, but one in whom the Romantic passion for the strange, the violent, the dream-like, the scene of fantasy or horror....” William Gaunt, A Concise History of English Painting (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 144. See also Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 127. Jack links the interest in visual qualities in Keats and Fuseli.
Wordsworth, “Tintera Abbey,” 11. 45–46.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part II, pp. 71–72. “The Loves of the Plants,” canto III, 11.51–78.
Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, p. 103.
Irwin Primer, “Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution and the Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (January-March 1964), 58–76.
Robert N. Ross, “To Charm Thy Curious Eye’: Erasmus Darwin’s poetry at the Vestibule of Knowledge,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (July-Sept., 1971), 379–394.
See my doctoral dissertation The Poems of Erasmus Darwin, Diss. Columbia Univ. 1967.
Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1804), preface.
D. E. L. Haynes, The Portland Vase (London: The British Museum, 1964), p. 7. See also John Bedford, Wedgwood Jasper Ware (New York: Walker and Co., 1964). Bedford writes, “The subject seems to be as obscure as the origin of the vase itself; but the most commonly accepted interpretation of the two scenes shown is that they illustrate the courtship of Peleus, a King of Thessaly, and Thetis, one of the Nereids,” p. 26.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, pp. 197–98.
Ibid., p. 204.
For Fuseli’s interest in Burke’s notion of the “sublime,” see Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, J. T. Boulton, eds. (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. cxiv-cxvi.
Ibid., p. 115. Part Three, section XV.
See James V. Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1936), p. 60.
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or The Laws of Organic Life, First American edition (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1796), pp. 104–105. For a very recent discussion by a psychologist of the art of “beauty” as complexity (much animal motion) that mentions Hogarth’s line of beauty see Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art (Berkeley, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1971), p. 51. For a Renaissance influence on the line of beauty, see Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp. 169–170.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, p. 121.
Darwin, The Temple of Nature, pp. 45–46.
Darwin, p. 46n.
Leo Braudy, “Fanny Hill and Materialism,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 (Fall, 1970), 21–40.
Darwin, Zoonomia, pp. 383. 378.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, pp. 9–10.
To Thomas Barrett, May 14, 1792. In Horace Walpole, The Letters of.... Mrs. Paget Toynbee, ed. (Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1905), XV, 110.
Darwin, The Temple of Nature, pp. 84n-85n.
Ibid., p. 127n.
Ibid., p. 130n.
In the special issue on “Sensibility” of Eighteenth-Century Studies there is a very definite connection made between sea exploration of the time and the mental voyaging of sensibility. See Donald Davie, “John Ledyard: The American Traveler and his Sentimental Journeys,” in ECS, 4 (Fall, 1970), 57–70. Also, Darwin himself apparently wrote much of Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook. See Margaret Ashmun, The Singing Swan (1931; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 76.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part I, p. 46n.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Hassler, D.M. (1973). The Playfulness of the Picturesque the Mirth of the Material. In: The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus Darwin’s Comic Materialism. Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2461-7_3
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