contemporary poets of the 7. A wealthy banking family. 'aesthetic school' such as Oscar Wilde. 8. Evil spirit (usually male) that descends on per
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1 536 / LIGHT VERSE
5 This air severe Is but a mere Veneer!
This cynic smile Is but a wile 10 Of guile!
This costume chaste Is but good taste Misplaced!
Let me confess! 15 A languid love for lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me! I do not care for dirty greens By any means. I do not long for all one sees
20 That's Japanese.2 I am not fond of uttering platitudes
In stained-glass attitudes. In short, my medievalism's affectation, Born of a morbid love of admiration!
25 If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. And everyone will say,
30 As you walk your mystic way, 'If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man
must be!'
Be eloquent in praise of the very dull old days which have long since passed away, And convince 'em, if you can, that the reign of good Oueen Anne was Culture's palmiest3 day. 35 Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new, and declare it's crude and mean, For Art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine.4
2. Admiring Japanese vases and paintings had become a cult practice among aesthetes like the painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Bunthorne's other references are probably to Pre- Raphaelite paintings such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's portraits of languidly gazing women (sometimes in green dresses) in which the subject might be posed in a cramped posture recalling that of a figure in a stained-glass window.
3. Most prosperous. Queen Anne (1665-1714) ruled from 1702 to 1714. 4. Napoleon's wife (1763?1814), empress of France from 1804 to 1811.
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GILBERT: IF YOU'RE ANXIOUS FOR TO SHINE / 1537
And everyone will say, As you walk your mystic way, 'If that's not good enough for him which is good enough for me, 40 Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth this kind of youth must be!'
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion5 must excite your languid spleen,0 melancholy An attachment a la Plato6 for a bashful young potato, or a nottoo- French French bean! Though the Philistines7 may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.8 45 And everyone will say, As you walk your flowery way, 'If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit
me,
Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!'
1881
5. Gilbert here begins to play with the concept of 'vegetable love,' a phrase taken from Andrew Marveil's poem 'To His Coy Mistress' (1681). 6. Platonic love denotes a spiritual relationship, devoid of sexual desire. 7. A term used by Matthew Arnold to describe the respectable middle classes, who predictably disapproved of the aesthetes' flamboyant behavior.
8. Another reference to frequently repeated motifs in Pre-Raphaelite art. Piccadilly: a busy street in central London.
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Victorian Issues
EVOLUTION
One of the most dramatic controversies in the Victorian age concerned theories of evolution. This controversy exploded into prominence in 1859 when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published, but it had been rumbling for many years previously. Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830) and Robert Chambers's popular book Vestiges of Creation (1843^46) had already raised issues that Tennyson aired in his In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). It was Darwin, however, with his monumental marshaling of evidence to establish his theory of natural selection, who finally brought the topic fully into the open, and the public, as well as the experts, took sides.
The opposition aroused by Darwin's treatise came from two different quarters. The first consisted of some of his fellow scientists, who affirmed that his theory was unsound. The second consisted of religious leaders who attacked his theory because it seemed to contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible. Sometimes the two kinds of opposition combined forces, as in 1860 when his scientific opponents selected Bishop Wilberforce to be their spokesman in spearheading their attack on The Origin of Species. In replying to such attacks, Darwin had the good fortune to be supported by two of the ablest popularizers of science in his day, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Moreover, although shy by temperament, Darwin was himself (as Tyndall affirms and the selections printed here will illustrate) an exceptionally effective expositor of his own theories.
Darwin rightly saw himself as a scientist and for the most part restricted his attention to observations about the natural world; the applications of his concept of 'the survival of the fittest' to activities within and between human societies and cultures, which came to be known in the late nineteenth century as 'Social Darwinism,' were primarily conducted by other writers, most notably Herbert Spencer. Nevertheless, the shock that Darwin felt as a young man when he first saw the 'savages' of South America's Tierra del Fuego (described in the extract provided
