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Divine Patterns: Louis Agassiz and American Men of Letters. Some Preliminary Explorations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
To arrive at Pound's Canto XXIII from Poe's ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Lurie's excellent biography, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.
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References
1 There is an extensive bibliography of these technical accounts in Marcou, Jules, Life, Letters and Works of Louis Agassiz (2 vols., New York, 1896)Google Scholar (cited hereafter as ‘Marcou’).
2 Brooks, Van Wyck, The Flowering of New England 1815–1865 (1936), p. 507Google Scholar. Brooks notes: ‘At Harvard, everything was “comparative” now: the studies overlapped one another … Agassiz had brought full summer with him’ (p. 447).
3 The literature on the subject is too voluminous to list here. Lurie, Edward's ‘Essay on Sources’, Louis Agassiz. A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), pp. 429–30Google Scholar, cites the most important contributions on the debate. Personally, I have found the following most useful: Mayer, Ernest, ‘Agassiz, Darwin and Evolution’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 13 (Spring, 1959), 165–94Google Scholar, and Dupree, A. H., Asa Gray: 1810–1888 (Cambridge, Mass. 1959), passimGoogle Scholar.
4 ‘Professor Agassiz on the Origin of the Species’, American Journal of Science and the Arts, 2nd series, 30 (07 1860), 147Google Scholar.
5 See Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary, Louis Agassiz. His Life and Correspondence (2 vols., Boston, 1885), vol. 11, p. 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar (cited hereafter as Life and Correspondence).
6 See Methods of Study in Natural History (Boston, 1863), pp. 19–21Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., pp. iii, 74–75, 317–318.
8 Cf. Correspondence between Spencer Fullerton Baird and Louis Agassiz, ed. Herber, E. C. (Smithsonian Institute, Washington, 1963), p. 167Google Scholar.
9 Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow, ed. Wagenknecht, Edward (1956), p. 125Google Scholar.
10 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Works (Riverside ed., 13 vols., 1892), vol. xiii, pp. 96–98Google Scholar.
11 Life and Correspondence, vol. 11, pp. 544–5. Marcou, vol. 11, pp. 68–9. Cook, Joseph, Boston Monday Lectures (1878), 1891, p. 97Google Scholar.
12 Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Norton, Charles Eliot (2 vols., Boston, 1894), vol. 11, p. 156Google Scholar.
13 The Writings of James Russell Lowell (Riverside ed., 1894), vol. vi, Literary and Political Addresses, p. 9Google Scholar. The letters and biographies of many contemporary intellectuals provide us with frequent documentation of this kind; Francis Parkman, for example, who often visited the Agassiz household during the 1850s and 1860s as a friend of Agassiz's daughter, Ida, wrote in a letter of April, 1850: ‘Agassiz has written an article in which he aims at proving that both men and animals originate from difference acts of creative power at different parts of the earth's surface. The Orthodox are at him in consequence, raising a great outcry about impiety, and attacking him with texts of Scripture. If they could, they would serve him as the Church served Galileo.’ (Letters, ed. Jacobs, Wilbur R. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2 vols. 1960), vol. 1, p. 69)Google Scholar. The majority of scientific papers published in The Atlantic Monthly during the 1860s were dominated by Agassiz's influence.
14 I am grateful to Professor D. S. R. Welland for drawing my attention to Conway.
15 See Burtis, Mary Elizabeth, Moncure Conway 1832–1907 (New Brunswick, 1952), p. 14Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
17 Of all the New England littérateurs that Agassiz associated with, Emerson was one of the most closely interested in contemporary science. He made a famous testament to Agassiz, 's manner of lecturing in ‘Aristocracy’ (Complete Works (Riverside ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1883), vol. x, pp. 55–6)Google Scholar and he tangentially evinces Agassiz's intellectual influence on himself in ‘Poetry and Imagination’ (Complete Works, vol. viii, pp. 13–15).
18 One of the more whimsical illustrations of Agassiz's continuing presence is seen in Conway's Foreword to the first issue (January 1860) of the short-lived journal that he edited in Cincinnati, The Dial: ‘It [the journal] is in our minds, symbolized not so much by the sun-clock in the yard, as by the floral dial of Linneaus, which recorded the advancing day by the opening of some flowers and the closing of others: it would report the Day of God as recorded in the unfolding of higher life and thought, and the closing up of old superstitions and evils; it would be a Dial measuring time by growth.’ (Quoted Burtis, op. cit., p. 69.) The symbol is ‘deistic’ in the sense that Conway ascribed to Agassiz, and ‘growth’ reminds us of Agassiz's persistent substitution of the word for ‘development’.
19 The Letters of William James, ed. James, Henry (2 vols., 1920), vol. 1, p. 42Google Scholar.
20 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 1928, p. 217Google Scholar. James announced in his Preface that ‘a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas’ (p. v.). And Pound's ‘phalanx of particulars’ is in the not-too-distant future.
21 See, for example, James's enthusiastic response to Matière et Mémoire in 1902 (Letters, vol. 11, p. 179) and to L'Evolution Créatrice in 1907 (Letters, vol. 11, pp. 290 ff). Within a wider spectrum Paul Elmer More informs us in 1910: ‘We are beginning to hear a great deal these days about the French metaphysician, M. Henri Bergson, of whom Prof. William James has avowed himself a willing disciple, and whose disquisitions on Matière et Mémoire and L'Evolulion Créatrice are more talked of than any other recent books of philosophy’ (Shelburne Essays (Phaeton, ed., New York, 1967), vol. vii, p. 240Google Scholar). Both James and Bergson subscribed to the thinking of Ernst Mach, a physicist who, more than natural historians, did much to counter the ‘mechanist’ reputation of the exact sciences by postulating scientific method as ‘description’ rather than ‘explanation’. Mach's theorizing was popularized by his disciple, Pearson, Karl, whose Grammar of Science (1892)Google Scholar was one of the most widely read books of its kind.
22 James, William, Memories and Studies (1911), p. 14Google Scholar. James insists on the same point five years later in the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh (The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 1928, p. 512).
23 See e.g., ‘Frederick Myers' Services to Psychology’ (1901), Memories and Studies, pp. 145–70Google Scholar.
24 Adams's biographer offers a lucid case for the importance of Agassiz's influence at this time – Samuels, Ernest, The Young Henry Adams (1948), pp. 17–22Google Scholar.
25 Quoted Samuels, op. cit., p. 166.
26 A later commentator acutely notes at this exact point in Adams' ‘education’ that ‘Henry's mind was already admitting to himself that what attracted it was not evolution, but change’. Louis Zukofsky, ‘Henry Adams/A Criticism in Autobiography’ (Dated 1924), ‘a few brief additions 1928/9’, Prepositions (1967), p. 87Google Scholar.
27 The best, and most widely read of these accounts are: Lyman, Theodore, ‘Recollections of Agassiz’, Atlantic Monthly, 33 (02 1874), 221–9Google Scholar. Scudder, Samuel Hubbard, ‘In the Laboratory with Agassiz’,Every Saturday, 16 (4 04 1874), 369–70Google Scholar. Scudder's essay recounts the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish, the most famous of all the reminiscences about Agassiz, and the source of Pound's reference in the ABC of Reading. It was reprinted in the two standard contemporary biographies by Jules Marcou (op. cit., vol. 11, pp. 94–7) and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (op. cit., vol. 11, p. 567), and it was published separately as a leaflet for the Agassiz fund on behalf of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge by James Barnard, again a former student of Agassiz (see Marcou, op. cit., vol. II, p. 97). One of the rare attempts of modern scholarship to assess Agassiz's importance as a teacher is Teller, James David, Louis Agassiz, Scientist and Teacher (Columbus, Ohio State U.P., 1947)Google Scholar.
28 Armytage, W. H. G., Sir Richard Gregory: His Life and Work (1957), p. 69Google Scholar.
29 It assumes the principles informing Coleridge's familiar distinction between the ‘fancy’ and the ‘imagination’. Bergson picks up the distinction and straddles the gap between science and aesthetics by making the same point, noting that ‘invention’ proceeds ‘by a new arrangement of elements already known’ (Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Mitchell, Arthur (1911), p. 48Google Scholar).
30 It would, however, given the rarity of the text and of any discussion of the text, be useful to catalogue the nature and the sources of Cooper's selection. My list is organized by Cooper's chapter headings: (1) ‘Agassiz at Neuchatel’: Life and Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 206 ffGoogle Scholar. (2) ‘A Sketch of the Life and Work of Agassiz’: An article by Warren, Helen Ann which first appeared in The Scientific Monthly (10 1928), pp. 355–66Google Scholar, and in a revised form in The American Scholar (Autumn 1934), pp. 381–95. Cooper's selection of this article for the 1945 edition was his major revision of the original volume. (3) ‘Agassiz at Harvard’: Life and Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 564 ffGoogle Scholar. (4) ‘How Agassiz taught Professor Shaler’: The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Boston 1907), pp. 93–100Google Scholar. (5) ‘How Agassiz taught Professor Wilder’: Wilder, Burt G., ‘Louis Agassiz, Teacher’ The Harvard Graduates Magazine (06 1907)Google Scholar. Wilder's other major contribution to the literature on Agassiz was his Address to the ‘Centenary of Louis Agassiz’ at Cornell University, 28 May 1907. It was published as ‘What We Owe to Agassiz’ in The Popular Scientific Monthly, 71 (07 1907)Google Scholar, and contains useful anecdotal and bibliographical material. (6) ‘How Agassiz taught Professor Verril’: a private letter to Cooper from Addison Emery Verril. (7) ‘How Agassiz taught Professor Scudder’: Scudder, Samuel Hubbard, ‘In the Laboratory with Agassiz’, Every Saturday, 16 (4 04 1874), pp. 369–70Google Scholar. (8) ‘A List of the Pupils of Agassiz’: extracted from Helen Ann Warren, loc. cit. She notes, ‘Virtually every distinguished biologic [sic] American of the fifties, sixties and seventies was a friend or student of Agassiz's. The roster is bright with accomplishment, even today [i.e. 1928]’. (9) ‘The Death of Agassiz – His Personality’: a sketch by Cooper himself, drawing mainly on material from the biographies by Marcou and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. (10) ‘Obiter Dicta by Agassiz’: a list of representative quotations from Agassiz himself, selected from three sources: (a) David Starr Jordan's reminiscence of Agassiz's talk to teachers at the Penikese summer camp shortly before his death in 1873. (b) Burt G. Wilder, ‘Louis Agassiz Teacher’, loc. cit. (c) Agassiz, Louis, ‘Evolution and the Permanence of Type’, Atlantic Monthly, 33 (01 1874)Google Scholar; Agassiz's final piece of written work, and published posthumously. (11) ‘Passages for Comparison with the Method of Agassiz’: a series of extracts from August Boeckh, Encyklopadie und Methodologie der Phihlogischen Wissenschaften, and from Jowett's translation of The Symposium. This catalogue is intended to be descriptive, although we may note that the two final sections clearly anticipate the organization of Pound's own critical thinking, particularly in those works of retrospection and summary, the ABC of Reading and the Guide to Kulchur.
31 This is an adage supported by all the reminiscences that Cooper selects: his extract from Elizabeth Cary Agassiz's biography, for example: ‘Observation and comparison being in his opinion the intellectual tools most indispensable to the naturalist, his first lesson was one in looking. He gave no assistance; he simply left his student with the specimen, telling him to use his eyes diligently, and report upon what he saw’ (p. 32).
32 We could perhaps, add John Heydon to the List – ‘Omniformis/Omnis intellectus est’, ‘Three Cantos – III’ Poetry, 10 (08 1917), 249Google Scholar; cf. the opening of Canto XXIII.
33 There still remains a regrettable paucity of attention to Agassiz by commentators on Pound. Guy Davenport has provided an excellent introduction to the subject in The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Boston, 1963)Google Scholar, a selection of ‘luminous details’ from Agassiz's major published works, but Davenport remains very much on his own: Agassiz invariably becomes relegated to footnotes and parentheses. Noel Stock points us in the right direction in the ‘Confucius and Nineteenth Century Science’ chapter of his Poet in Exile (Manchester, 1964)Google Scholar, and Agassiz inhabits a ghostly background to Emery, Clark, Ideas Into Action (Miami, 1958)Google Scholar.
34 Pearson wrote: ‘Louis Agassiz becomes a landmark. It was he in his laboratory at Harvard who trained Edward S. Morse, the Salem natural scientist who taught at the Imperial University of Tokyo and became the influential collector and curator of Oriental art…, not forgetting to carry over the lessons of Agassiz into the new field. And it was Morse who in turn persuaded Ernest Fenollosa, also from Salem and fresh from Harvard, to go out as instructor in rhetoric to the Imperial University, where Fenollosa's interest like that of Morse expanded to include the stimulation of Oriental culture.’ (Quoted Davie, Donald, Ezra Pound. Poet as Sculptor (1965), p. 189nGoogle Scholar.) Morse wrote two reminiscences of Agassiz: ‘Jean Louis Rudolphe Agassiz’, The Popular Science Monthly, 71 (12 1907)Google Scholar, and ‘Agassiz and the School at Penikese’, Science, NS., 58 (12 10 1923)Google Scholar. Extensive documentation concerning his relationship with both Agassiz and Fenollosa, ‘my most intimate friend’, is to be found in Wayman, Dorothy G., Edward Sylvester Morse. A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1942)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which, despite its uncritical, anecdotal tone, is useful for the large amount of material drawn from Morse's own journal.
35 We may usefully compare Henry James's use of the principle of ‘recognition’ in his Preface to The Golden Bowl. Illuminatingly, it emerges out of James's discussion of his collaboration with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn over the frontispieces for the New York edition of the novels.
36 Gordon, David, ‘Meeting E.P. and then …’, Paideuma, 3 (Winter 1974), pp. 358–9Google Scholar.
37 That this is only part of the heritage is indicated by one of Pound's reading-lists, drawn up in 1952, which included ‘L. Agassiz/naturalist/tradition straight from Mencius’. (Palandri, Angela, ‘Homage to a Confucian Poet’, Paideuma, 3 (Winter 1974), 306Google Scholar).
38 Pound is perhaps also thinking of Van Wyck Brooks's description of Agassiz: ‘Agassiz, the “romantic” man of science, when he fought against the stars in their courses, opposing the theories of Darwin’. (New England: Indian Summer(1940), p. 28. One of the most revealing contexts for Pound's lines is in Hunecker, James's essay, ‘Remy de Gourmont’ Unicorns (1917)Google Scholar. Hunecker places De Gourmont within the tradition of Lamarck and De Vries, and claims: ‘… to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars …’ (p. 27. cf. the famous moment in Canto LXXXIII where sanity is salvaged through a naturalist's observation: ‘When the mind swings by a grass-blade/an ant's forefoot shall save you’). Again, this is a ‘lesson in looking’: ‘… the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces with crystaline clearness the veil of the visible world’ (p. 204).