Raw, Ripe, Rot: Nineteenth-Century Pathologies of the American Aesthetic

Abstract

The primary pitch of this article centers on the heated debate taking place throughout the nineteenth century between American art lovers, who were struggling to formulate an updated aesthetic grounded in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty worthy to express the ideals of the newly formed nation, and their often hostile opponents in the fields of physical sciences, whose fierce commitment to the rules of rigorous scientific inquiry disdained intellectually trivial pursuits such as the creation and evaluation of the plastic arts. I like what Charles Darwin had to say at the conclusion of Chapter 14 in The Origin of the Species: is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us (Darwin 174; emphasis added). As we know, the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin caused both fret and excitement. It threatened established philosophical positions, whereby science was defined by its ability to confirm a universe governed in its physical and spiritual sense by a priori absolutes; it wrenched open scientific inquiry to methods that stressed the randomness of process and nullified the monolithic certainties of progress. Nonetheless, the Crayon, the first art journal published in America and a major proponent of German Idealism, had nothing but praise for the quotation descriptive of that entangled bank: There is a grandeur in this view of life... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved (May 1860, 150).' However much Darwin's notions might shake previous notions of how one responds to the science of God's natural