Abstract
A serious, pious view of literature (that is the general concept of verbal human art) as eternally the same obsessed and inhibited many writers of the 18th century. The authoritarian example of the “ancients” was indeed one of the “ghosts” of innate verities that Lockean analysis could not dismiss. Darwin himself could not help but pay devote homage to the general ideas about the mimetic power of literature to hold the mirror up to truth and nature. But Darwin had much more ability and inclination to speculate than, like Pope, to polish epigrammatic condensations of inherited traditions. Thus, even though the nervous tone of his writing seems in part forced out under the burden of the past, what is interesting about his literary theory is its daring speculation about the physiological explanation of literary art.
Hence the reverberations in the words
Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
Of his aesthetic, his philosophy.
Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C”
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References
See in particular: I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956), but also a new biography of Einsteinmakes the same point about theory in science. See Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: World, 1970). “[Einstein] retained a touch of clowning humour as well as a resigned and understanding amusement at the follies of the human race,” p. 3.
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, A Poem, in Two Parts, The Second American Edition, (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1807), xxii. and Zoonomia; or The Laws of Organic Life, First American Edition (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1796), pp. 1–2.
Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine, A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1960), pp. 76–77.
Hesketh Pearson, Doctor Darwin (New York: Walker and Company, 1963), pp. 138–144.
Irwin Primer, “Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and Eleusinian Mysteries,” in JHI, 25 (Jan.-March, 1964), 58–76.
Vartanian, p. 22.
La Mettrie, Man a Machine in Lester G. Crocker, ed., The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 103.
James V. Logan, The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1936), p. 21. Logan, who has done the most scholarly work on Darwin, is a little sketchy on the psychology, but very good on the aesthetics.
Jean H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 8.
Darwin, Zoonomia, p. 3.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., pp. 81–82. The italics are Darwin’s.
Ibid. p. 10. The italics are Darwin’s.
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Ralph Cohen, ed., Essential Works of David Hume (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. 451.
See his section on “Sentiment of Beauty” in Additional Note XIII, “Analysis of Taste,” in The Temple of Nature; a Poem (New York: T. & J. Sword, 1804). I am using these later American editions of Darwin’s works because I have them conveniently at home.
Ibid., p. 219.
Darwin, Temple of Nature, p. 216.
Ibid., p. 224.
G. S. Rousseau, “Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3, (Fall, 1969), 127.
See Vartanian, pp. 28 ff.
See Darwin, Zoonomia, pp. 139–142.
Ibid., p. 133. The italics are Darwin’s.
Ibid., p. 145.
Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 101.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part Two, p. 43. Miss Schneider mentions Lord Kames and concludes that Darwin does a better job of explaining the phenomenon.
Darwin, Zoonomia, p. 96.
To Mr. West, April, 1741. Thomas Gray, Gray’s Poems Letters and Essays, John Drinkwater and Lewis Gibbs, eds. (New York: Dutton, Everyman, 1912), pp. 136–37.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part Two, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 97. Darwin did have a contract to invent a speaking machine, but he could not make one work very well. See Desmond King-Hele, ed., The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), p. 125 and p. 129.
Darwin, from “Advertisement” to The Botanic Garden.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Hassler, D.M. (1973). Darwin’s Literary Theory. 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_2
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