Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860

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Until recently, no attention has been paid, even in Europe, to
historical sequence and special motives in the arrangement of
galleries. As in the Pitti Gallery, pictures were generally hung so
as to conform to the symmetry of the rooms,--various styles, schools,
and epochs being intermixed. As the progress of ideas is of more
importance to note than the variations of styles or the degree of
technical merit, the chief attention in selection and position should
be given to lucidly exhibiting the varied phases of artistic thought
among the diverse races and widely separated eras and inspirations
which gave them being. The mechanism of art is, however, go
intimately interwoven with the idea, that by giving precedence to the
latter we most readily arrive at the best arrangement of the former.
Each cycle of civilization should have its special department,
Paganism and Christianity being kept apart, and not, as in the
Florentine Gallery, intermixed,--presenting a strange jumble of
classical statuary and modern paintings in anachronistic disorder, to
the loss of the finest properties of each to the eye, and the
destruction of that unity of motive and harmonious association so
essential to the proper exhibition of art. For it is essential that
every variety of artistic development should be associated solely
with those objects or conditions most in keeping with its
inspirations. In this way we quickest come to an understanding of its
originating idea, and sympathize with its feeling, tracing its
progress from infancy to maturity and decay, and comparing it as a
whole with corresponding or rival varieties of artistic development.
This systematized variety of one great unity is of the highest
importance in placing the spectator in affinity with art as a whole
and with its diversities of character, and in giving him sound
stand-points of comparison and criticism. In this way, as in the Louvre,
feeling and thought are readily transported from one epoch of
civilization to another, grasping the motives and execution of each
with pleasurable accuracy. We perceive that no conventional standard
of criticism, founded upon the opinions or fashions of one age, is
applicable to all. To rightly comprehend each, we must broadly survey
the entire ground of art, and make ourselves for the time members, as
it were, of the political and social conditions of life that give
origin to the objects of our investigations. This philosophical mode
of viewing art does not exclude an aesthetic point of view, but rather
heightens that and makes it more intelligible. Paganism would be
subdivided into the various national forms that illustrated its rise
and fall. Egypt, India, China, Assyria, Greece, Etruria, and Rome,
would stand each by itself as a component part of a great whole: so
with Christianity, in such shapes as have already taken foothold in
history, the Latin, Byzantine, Lombard, Mediaeval, Renaissant, and
Protestant art, subdivided into its diversified schools or leading
ideas, all graphically arranged so as to demonstrate, amid the
infinite varieties of humanity, a divine unity of origin and design,
linking together mankind in one common family.

Beside statuary and paintings, an institution of this nature should
contain specimens of every kind of industry in which art is the
primary inspiration, to illustrate the qualities and degrees of
social refinement in nations and eras. This would include every
variety of ornamental art in which invention and skill are
conspicuous, as well as those works more directly inspired by higher
motives and intended as a joy forever. Architecture and objects not
transportable could be represented by casts or photographs. Models,
drawings, and engravings also come within its scope; and there should
be attached to the parent gallery a library of reference and a
lecture- and reading-room.

Connected with it there might be schools of design for improvement in
ornamental manufacture, the development of architecture, and whatever
aids to refine and give beauty to social life, including a simple
academic system for the elementary branches of drawing and coloring,
upon a scientific basis of accumulated knowledge and experience,
providing models and other advantages not readily accessible to
private resources, but leaving individual genius free to follow its
own promptings upon a well-laid technical foundation. As soon as the
young artist has acquired the grammar of his profession, he should be
sent forth to study directly from Nature and to mature his invention
unfettered by authoritative academic system, which more frequently
fosters conventionalism and imposes trammels upon talent than endows
it with strength and freedom.

Such is a brief sketch of institutions feasible amongst us from
humble beginnings by individual enterprise. Once founded and their
value demonstrated, the countenance of the state may be hopefully
invoked. Their very existence would become an incentive to munificent
gifts. Individuals owning fine works of art would grow ambitious to
have their memories associated with patriotic enterprise. Art invokes
liberality and evokes fraternity. The sentiment, that there is a
common property in the productions of genius, making possession a
trust for the public welfare, will increase among those by whose
taste and wealth they have been accumulated. Masterpieces will cease
to be regarded as the selfish acquisitions of covetous amateurs, but,
like spoken truth, will become the inalienable birthright of the
people,--finding their way freely and generously, through the
magnetic influences of public spirit and pertinent examples, to those
depositories where they can most efficaciously perform their mission
of truth and beauty to the world. Then the people themselves will
begin to take pride in their artistic wealth, to honor artists as
they now do soldiers and statesmen, and to value the more highly
those virtues which are interwoven with all noble effort.

In 1823, when the National Gallery of England was founded, the
English were nearly as dead to art as we are now. A few amateurs
alone cultivated it, but there was no general sympathy with nor
knowledge of it. Yet by 1837, in donations alone, the gallery had
received one hundred and thirty-seven pictures. Since that period
gifts have increased tenfold in value and numbers. Connected with it,
and a part of that noble, comprehensive, and munificent system of
art-education which the British government has inculcated, are the
British and Kensington Museums. Schools of design, with every
appliance for the growth of art, have rapidly sprung into existence.
Private enterprise and research have correspondingly increased.
British agents, with unstinted means, are everywhere ransacking the
earth in quest of everything that can add to the value and utility of
their national and private collections. A keen regard for all that
concerns art, a desire for its national development, an enlightened
standard of criticism, and with it the most eloquent art-literature
of any tongue, have all recently sprung into existence in our
motherland. All honor to those generous spirits that have produced
this,--and honor to the nation that so wisely expends its wealth! A
noble example for America! England also throws open to the
competition of the world plans for her public buildings and
monuments. Mistakes and defects there have been, but an honest desire
for amendment and to promote the intellectual growth of the nation
now characterizes her pioneers in this cause. And what progress!
Between 1823 and 1850, in the Museum alone, there have been expended
$10,000,000. Within twelve years, $450,000 have been expended on the
National Gallery for pictures, and yet its largest accession of
treasures is by gifts and bequests. Lately, beside the Pisani
Veronese bought for $70,000, eight other paintings have been
purchased at a cost of $50,000. In 1858, $36,000 were given for the
choice of twenty, of the early Italian schools, from the Lombardi
Gallery at Florence,--not masterpieces, but simply characteristic
specimens, more or less restored. The average cost of late
acquisitions has been about $6,000 each. In 1858, there were 823,000
visitors to both branches of the National Gallery. Who can estimate
not alone the pleasure and instruction afforded by such an
institution to its million of annual visitors, but the ideas and
inspiration thence born, destined to grow and fructify to the glory
and good of the nation? At present there are seventy-seven schools of
art in England, attended by 68,000 students. In 1859, they and
kindred institutions received a public grant of nearly $450,000. The
appropriation for the British Museum alone, for 1860, is L77,452.

To the Louvre Louis XVIII. added one hundred and eleven pictures, at
a cost of about $132,000; Charles X., twenty-four, at $12,000; Louis
Philippe, fifty-three, at $14,500; and Napoleon III., thus far,
thirty paintings, costing $200,000, one of which, the Murillo, cost
$125,000. Russia is following in the same path. Italy, Greece, and
Egypt, by stringent regulations, are making it yearly more difficult
for any precious work to leave their shores. If, therefore, America
is ever to follow in the same path, she must soon bestir herself, or
she will have nothing but barren fields to glean from.

DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

Novelties are enticing to most people: to us they are simply
annoying. We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an
old suit of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches, ("The
Atlantic" still affects the older type of nether garment,) is sure to
have hard-fitting places; or even when no particular fault can be
found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general
discomfort. New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well
used to them, which is only by slow degrees.

Wherefore, in Galileo's time, we might have helped to proscribe, or
to burn--had he been stubborn enough to warrant cremation--even the
great pioneer of inductive research; although, when we had fairly
recovered our composure, and had leisurely excogitated the matter, we
might have come to conclude that the new doctrine was better than the
old one, after all, at least for those who had nothing to unlearn.

Such being our habitual state of mind, it may well be believed that
the perusal of the new book "On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection" left an uncomfortable impression, in spite of its
plausible and winning ways. We were not wholly unprepared for it, as
many of our contemporaries seem to have been. The scientific reading
in which we indulge as a relaxation from severer studies had raised
dim forebodings. Investigations about the succession of species in
time, and their actual geographical distribution over the earth's
surface, were leading up from all sides and in various ways to the
question of their origin. Now and then we encountered a sentence,
like Professor Owen's "axiom of the continuous operation of the
ordained becoming of living things," which haunted us like an
apparition. For, dim as our conception must needs be as to what such
oracular and grandiloquent phrases might really mean, we felt
confident that they presaged no good to old beliefs. Foreseeing, yet
deprecating, the coming time of trouble, we still hoped, that, with
some repairs and make-shifts, the old views might last out our days.
_Apres nous le deluge_. Still, not to lag behind the rest of the
world, we read the book in which the new theory is promulgated. We
took it up, like our neighbors, and, as was natural, in a somewhat
captious frame of mind.

Well, we found no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. Here the
author takes us directly to the barn-yard and the kitchen-garden.
Like an honorable rural member of our General Court, who sat silent
until, near the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine
at large to wear pokes was introduced, when he claimed the privilege
of addressing the house, on the proper ground that he had been
"brought up among the pigs, and knew all about them,"--so we were
brought up among cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the
cackling of hens, and the cooing of pigeons were sounds native and
pleasant to our ears. So "Variation under Domestication" dealt with
familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced "Variation
under Nature," which seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for
Existence,"--a principle which we experimentally know to be true and
cogent,--bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon
Leviathan Hobbes's theory of society, is no worse than the rest of
creation, since all Nature is at war, one species with another, and
the nearer kindred the more internecine,--bringing in thousand-fold
confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine, that
population tends far to outrun means of subsistence throughout the
animal and vegetable world, and has to be kept down by sharp
preventive checks; so that not more than one of a hundred or a
thousand of the individuals whose existence is so wonderfully and so
sedulously provided for ever comes to anything, under ordinary
circumstances; so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the
weaker and ill-favored must perish;--and then follows, as naturally
as one sheep follows another, the chapter on "Natural Selection,"
Darwin's _cheval de bataille_, which is very much the Napoleonic
doctrine, that Providence favors the strongest battalions,--that,
since many more individuals are born than can possibly survive, those
individuals and those variations which possess any advantage, however
slight, over the rest, are in the long run sure to survive, to
propagate, and to occupy the limited field, to the exclusion or
destruction of the weaker brethren. All this we pondered, and could
not much object to. In fact, we began to contract a liking for a
system which at the outset illustrates the advantages of good
breeding, and which makes the most "of every creature's best."

Could we "let by-gones be by-gones," and, beginning now, go
on improving and diversifying for the future by natural
selection,--could we even take up the theory at the introduction of the
actually existing species, we should be well content, and so perhaps would
most naturalists be. It is by no means difficult to believe that
varieties are incipient or possible species, when we see what trouble
naturalists, especially botanists, have to distinguish between
them,--one regarding as a true species what another regards as a
variety; when the progress of knowledge increases, rather than
diminishes, the number of doubtful instances; and when there is less
agreement than ever among naturalists as to what the basis is in
Nature upon which our idea of species reposes, or how the word is
practically to be defined. Indeed, when we consider the endless
disputes of naturalists and ethnologists over the human races, as to
whether they belong to one species or to more, and if to more,
whether to three, or five, or fifty, we can hardly help fancying that
both may be right,--or rather, that the uni-humanitarians would have
been right several thousand years ago, and the multi-humanitarians
will be a few thousand years later; while at present the safe thing
to say is, that, probably, there is some truth on both sides.
"Natural selection," Darwin remarks, "leads to divergence of
character; for more living brings can be supported on the same area
the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution," (a
principle which, by the way, is paralleled and illustrated by the
diversification of human labor,) and also leads to much extinction of
intermediate or unimproved forms. Now, though this divergence may
"steadily tend to increase," yet this is evidently a slow process in
Nature, and liable to much counteraction wherever man does not
interpose, and so not likely to work much harm for the future. And if
natural selection, with artificial to help it, will produce better
animals and better men than the present, and fit them better to "the
conditions of existence," why, let it work, say we, to the top of its
bent. There is still room enough for improvement. Only let us hope
that it always works for good: if not, the divergent lines on
Darwin's diagram of transmutation made easy ominously show what small
deviations from the straight path may come to in the end.

The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and
encouraging. It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long
vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming. Here the lines
converge as they recede into the geological ages, and point to
conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but by no means
welcome. The very first step backwards makes the Negro and the
Hottentot our blood-relations;--not that reason or Scripture objects
to that, though pride may. The next suggests a closer association of
our ancestors of the olden time with "our poor relations" of the
quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge. Fortunately,
however,--even if we must account for him scientifically,--man with
his two feet stands upon a foundation of his own. Intermediate links
between the _Bimana_ and the _Quadrumana_ are lacking altogether; so
that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what footing you will, the
four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners;--at least, not
until some monkey, live or fossil, is producible with great toes,
instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky
geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France
or England, who was so busy "napping the chuckie-stanes" and chipping
out flint knives and arrow-heads in the time of the drift, very many
ages ago,--before the British Channel existed, says Lyell[1],--and
until these men of the olden time are shown to have worn their
great-toes in a divergent and thumb-like fashion. That would be evidence
indeed: but until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must
needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however it
may have been with the lower animals and with plants.

No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis
strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower
animal races out of some simple primordial animal,--that all are
equally "lineal descendants of sense few beings which lived long
before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as
the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and
accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or
forms of being which included potentially all that have since existed
and are yet to be, he is thereby not warranted to extend his
inferences beyond the evidence or the fair probability. There seems
as great likelihood that one special origination should be followed
by another upon fitting occasion, (such as the introduction of man,)
as that one form should be transmuted into another upon fitting
occasion, as, for instance, in the succession of species which differ
from each other only in some details. To compare small things with
great in a homely illustration: man alters from time to time his
instruments or machines, as new circumstances or conditions may
require and his wit suggest. Minor alterations and improvements he
adds to the machine he possesses: he adapts a new rig or a new rudder
to an old boat: this answers to _variation_. If boats could engender,
the variations would doubtless be propagated, like those of domestic
cattle. In course of time the old ones would be worn out or wrecked;
the best sorts would be chosen for each particular use, and further
improved upon, and so the primordial boat be developed into the scow,
the skiff, the sloop, and other species of water-craft,--the very
diversification, as well as the successive improvements, entailing
the disappearance of many intermediate forms, less adapted to any one
particular purpose; wherefore these go slowly out of use, and become
extinct species: this is _natural selection_. Now let a great and
important advance be made, like that of steam-navigation: here,
though the engine might be added to the old vessel, yet the wiser and
therefore the actual way is to make a new vessel on a modified plan:
this may answer to _specific creation_. Anyhow, the one does not
necessarily exclude the other. Variation and natural selection may
play their part, and so may specific creation also. Why not?

[Footnote 1: Vide _Proceedings of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science_, 1859, and London _Athenaeum_, passim. It
appears to be conceded that these "celts" or stone knives are
artificial productions, and of the age of the mammoth, the fossil
rhinoceros, etc.]

This leads us to ask for the reasons which call for this new theory
of transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in
obscurity, beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of
conjecture or of analogical inference. Why not hold fast to the
customary view, that all species were directly, instead of
indirectly, created after their respective kinds, as we now behold
them,--and that in a manner which, passing our comprehension, we
intuitively refer to the supernatural? Why this continual striving
after "the unattained and dim,"--these anxious endeavors, especially
of late years, by naturalists and philosophers of various schools and
different tendencies, to penetrate what one of them calls "the
mystery of mysteries," the origin of species? To this, in general,
sufficient answer may be found in the activity of the human
intellect, "the delirious yet divine desire to know," stimulated as
it has been by its own success in unveiling the laws and processes of
inorganic Nature,--in the fact that the principal triumphs of our age
in physical science have consisted in tracing connections where none
were known before, in reducing heterogeneous phenomena to a common
cause or origin, in a manner quite analogous to that of the reduction
of supposed independently originated species to a common ultimate
origin,--thus, and in various other ways, largely and legitimately
extending the domain of secondary causes. Surely the scientific mind
of an age which contemplates the solar system as evolved from a
common, revolving, fluid mass,--which, through experimental research,
has come to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical
affinity, and mechanical power as varieties or derivative
and convertible forms of one force, instead of independent
species,--which has brought the so-called elementary kinds of matter, such
as the metals, into kindred groups, and raised the question, whether the
members of each group may not be mere varieties of one species,--and
which speculates steadily in the direction of the ultimate unity of
matter, of a sort of prototype or simple element which may be to the
ordinary species of matter what the _protozoa_ or component cells of
an organism are to the higher sorts of animals and plants,--the mind
of such an age cannot be expected to let the old belief about species
pass unquestioned.

It will raise the question, how the diverse sorts of plants and
animals came to be as they are and where they are, and will allow
that the whole inquiry transcends its powers only when all endeavors
have failed. Granting the origin to be supernatural, or miraculous
even, will not arrest the inquiry. All real origination, the
philosophers will say, is supernatural; their very question is,
whether we have yet gone back to the origin, and can affirm that the
present forms of plants and animals are the primordial, the
miraculously created ones. And even if they admit that, they will
still inquire into the order of the phenomena, into the form of the
miracle. You might as well expect the child to grow up content with
what it is told about the advent of its infant brother. Indeed, to
learn that the new-comer is the gift of God, far from lulling
inquiry, only stimulates speculation as to how the precious gift was
bestowed. That questioning child is father to the man,--is
philosopher in short-clothes.

Since, then, questions about the origin of species will be raised,
and have been raised,--and since the theorizings, however different
in particulars, all proceed upon the notion that one species of plant
or animal is somehow derived from another, that the different sorts
which now flourish are lineal (or unlineal) descendants of other and
earlier sorts,--it now concerns us to ask, What are the grounds in
Nature, the admitted facts, which suggest hypotheses of derivation,
in some shape or other? Reasons there must be, and plausible ones,
for the persistent recurrence of theories upon this genetic basis. A
study of Darwin's book, and a general glance at the present state of
the natural sciences, enable us to gather the following as perhaps
the most suggestive and influential. We can only enumerate them here,
without much indication of their particular bearing. There is,--

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