Preface

Evolutionary Science and Aestheticism: a Survey and a Suggestion

“…Within the burgeoning field of Victorian science and literature, a smaller but growing subset of research focuses specifically on evolutionary science and British aestheticism – the “art for art's sake” movement that came to prominence in the 1860s with the controversial publication of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and Walter Pater's collection of critical essays Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It is the gradual expansion of this particular area of interest that concerns me here.…”

“…Stevenson likewise situates the work of Matthew Arnold and George Meredith in relation to the “materialistic assumptions” of evolutionary theory (49–53). Gerald Monsman's definitive 1977 biography of Pater attributes the critic's “empirical‐scientific spirit” to his reading of Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer and W. K. Clifford (28). From the 1960s onward, David J.…”

“…From the 1960s onward, David J. DeLaura, Billie Andrew Inman, Charles S. Blinderman and others linked Pater's rhetoric of flux – the “perpetual motion” he envisions in the famous “Conclusion” of Studies (186) – to contemporary trends in biology and psychology.…”

“…In their view, the aesthetic feelings consisted in nervous reactions to external stimuli, and it was more accurate to regard “beauty” and “ugliness” as feelings generated by objects, rather than qualities inherent in objects. This scientific reformulation, Small explains, shaped the very philosophical foundations of Pater's movement, which consequently focused on the only aspect of aesthetic experience that one could empirically verify – the personal and idiosyncratic “ relationship which exists between the spectator or the reader and the artefact or art‐object” (9). Hence, Pater's many meditations on the ideal critical “temperament” with which one should receive sense impressions (“Preface” xxi).…”

“…Around the 1870s, Gagnier continues, physiologists and psychologists developed and proliferated models of aesthetic experience that hinged on the “pleasured body” of the observer (136). This scientific paradigm, coupled with long‐term shifts toward a consumer economy, eclipsed Ruskinian aesthetics and ushered in the subjective, hedonic aesthetics of Pater, Wilde and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), among others. As Small and Gagnier both demonstrate, Darwinian evolution was deeply implicated in Pater's pivotal turn toward the pleasurable “impression” that constituted, for the Victorian aesthetes, the sole object of aesthetic criticism and the highest aim of life (“Conclusion” 189).…”