Fifteen Eighty Four

What do you feel when you look at something beautiful? Take this honeysuckle pattern, copied from a Greek vase. As your eyes trace its symmetrical curves, can you feel your “two lungs draw in a long breath”? Do those inhalations give you a “sense of expansion,” or a “vague feeling of harmony”? How about your torso: are you feeling the “slight sensation of the sides of [your] thorax being stretched” right about now?

Illustration
Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson, “Honeysuckle Pattern from Greek Vases,” from Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty & Ugliness and other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: Bodley Head, 1912)c vhubjin

Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson, “Honeysuckle Pattern from Greek Vases,” from Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty & Ugliness and other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: Bodley Head, 1912)c vhubjin

No? According to the Victorian aesthete Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her partner/sometime collaborator Kit Anstruther-Thomson, you might be doing it wrong. In the 1890s, the pair conducted a series of experiments in which Anstruther-Thomson, a painter by training, would stand in the presence of art objects (such as the aforementioned Greek vase) and monitor how her body reacted. Lee, for her part, would ask her probing questions, and later synthesized the data into a sweeping psychological account of beauty that accorded with the evolutionary ideas she had gleaned from years of scientific reading. The women published their findings in an 1897 article entitled “Beauty and Ugliness,” in which they argued that “beauty” isn’t actually an objective quality at all. Instead, they claimed, beauty is a term we apply to objects whose perception stimulates pleasant sensations—the relaxation and contraction of certain muscles, for example, or a smoother breathing rate—and these sensations in turn help our bodies function better. (The phenomenon of ugliness is its opposite: we call things ugly because their appearance makes us feel less balanced, more tense.) For Lee in particular, who sometimes struggled to reconcile her rationalism with her almost religious love for art, this theory explained not only how the sense of beauty worked, but also why it had evolved in the first place. “The aesthetic instinct,” she writes, is “no unaccountable psychological complexity, but the necessary self-established regulation of processes capable of affording disadvantage and advantage to the organism.” As she put it later, in less clinical terms: “Pleasure lead[s] us along livable ways.”

This might sound rather weird today—a Victorian version of pop evo psych, only with a Sapphic spin—but Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s gallery experiments got surprising traction in their own time. By the 1890s, evolutionary science had upended older, theological understandings of beauty as the imprint of God’s design on the universe: according to Charles Darwin, the aesthetic sense was really the result of sexual selection, a process by which individual organisms (typically females) choose mates based on ornamental traits such as coloring and plumage. Moreover, science in this era had yet to be siloed into professional disciplines, meaning that polymaths like Lee could expect to have their scientific ideas taken seriously (it was only in the 1930s, with the benefit of hindsight, that she would dismiss her psychological theories as the fumbling of an “amateur and jack of all trades”). The relative accessibility of science, coupled with new uncertainties about a topic as weighty as the origin and nature of beauty, made the late nineteenth century ripe for aesthetic controversy. Theorizing was in the air; odd, idiosyncratic interpretations abounded.

In my book, Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture, I examine one especially robust interpretation, which I term (as you can probably guess) “evolutionary aestheticism.” Developed and articulated by a loose coalition of late-Victorian science writers, aesthetes, poets, novelists, and critics, evolutionary aestheticism accepted that the sense of beauty was an evolved organic instinct for pleasure. In this view, beauty had no moral or practical function beyond its capacity to set the body and mind at ease. If this sounds like “art for art’s sake,” then you’re spot on: as I argue, evolutionary theories of beauty largely vindicated this most essential of aestheticism’s creeds. More intriguingly for me, these writers also shared an investment in the generative power of aesthetic taste, which sexual selection had established as a major mechanism of evolutionary development. But perhaps the most surprising thing of all—and the reason I got started on this project in the first place—is that this conception of taste motivated an affirmative, even optimistic strain of humanist evolutionary thought. This optimism, though somewhat invisible in popular conceptions of the Darwinian revolution, was just as valid in its time as the crisis of faith memorialized in Alfred Tennyson’s famous lament for “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Compare Tennyson’s despair to the breathless enthusiasm of, say, Oscar Wilde: “Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.” For aesthetes like Wilde, sexual selection lent existential and ethical urgency to aestheticism’s provocative celebrations of excess, deviance, and individual freedom.

Besides Wilde and Lee, Evolutionary Aestheticism examines work by a range of cross-disciplinary figures, including the evolutionists Darwin and Herbert Spencer, science popularizers W. K. Clifford and Grant Allen, the poet Mathilde Blind, and Bloomsbury luminaries Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. Their many disagreements aside, these writers constituted a distinct intellectual tradition that looked to the individual cultivation of taste as a means for collective improvement—one that, crucially, didn’t rely on either utilitarian conceptions of the “greater good” or social Darwinism’s program of unchecked competition. Naturally, the bulk of my focus is on literary and scientific writing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I also make a concluding foray into the more recent past, tracing quintessentially Victorian anxieties about taste and social progress to their irruptions in modern-day debates over critical theory, humanistic education, and whether The Avengers was a good movie (yes, really).

Pulling this all together is the question that kicked off this post. What do you feel when you look at something beautiful? For the evolutionary aesthetes, the answer wasn’t just a twinge in your thorax (though, to be fair, it was also that). The experience of beauty was also the closest thing to religious experience they could imagine in a mechanistic cosmos, and the only way we might shape our species’ future freely, on our own terms—in whatever direction our thoraxes might take us.