Man Proposes. God Disposes.

We live in an age of wonder. This month, if all goes as planned, German cargo ships will be the first ones to make the trip from Asia to Europe through the Arctic waters north of Russia known as the Northeast Passage. This route cuts over 4000 miles off the trip ships currently have to take through the Suez Canal. “It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” said Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the Beluga Group shipping company, according to the New York Times. And that’s not global warming’s only breakthrough trade route. Some scientists now predict that navigation of the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic could also become commercially feasible within 20 or 30 years. The Northwest Passage has long been a dream for international traders, and the object of expeditions to prove its viability. In another age of wonder, the Victorian Era in England, one such attempt provided the basis for Sir Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes, part of the Royal Holloway Collection of Victorian paintings now on exhibit at BYU’s Museum of Art. The painting offers us an ambivalent view of social progress in Victorian England and invites to reexamine the advancements of our own era.

In 1845, England sent John Franklin to lead a crew whose aim was to map the Northwest Passage. The flowering of international commerce had already enriched Britain immensely, and the straits offered tantalizing financial gains to any country that could control them, if they proved navigable. Industrialization was also rapidly advancing the technology available for exploration. The expedition was outfitted with the newest inventions of maritime science, including steam engines from the London and Greenwich Railway and an iron rudder and propeller that could be retracted into iron wells to protect them from damage. The expedition set off . . . and was never seen again. Years later, searchers discovered that they had been trapped in the ice for years, gradually killed off by weather and disease and starvation. Marks on crew members’ bones indicated some had resorted to cannibalism. (1)

In Landseer’s deft hands, the scene becomes a perfect encapsulation of the Victorian era’s pathos. A forbidding but majestic icescape frames two polar bears ferociously tearing through the remains of the shipwreck, with a broken telescope lying discarded and useless in one corner and an exposed ribcage visible above the ice in the other. In many ways, Victorian England was a place of heady optimism, reflected in the rags-to-riches story of Thomas Holloway himself. But his collection of art, purchased a few years before his death, highlights the tensions associated with society’s progress. Many pieces are gritty scenes of the human suffering that accompanied urbanization: debtors’ prisons, rising crime, crowded homeless shelters. However, almost all the rest of the paintings exhibit a striking polarity: they are idealized scenes of rural bliss, natural beauty, and exotic locales. Escapism. The rich people who drove the demand for art—those who had benefited from the radical social and technological changes sweeping over England—wanted to forget about the price progress had exacted on their country.

Man Proposes, God Disposes is unique in the collection for synthesizing elements of these two groups of paintings. Nature’s awesome serenity serves as a backdrop to the woes humanity invented for itself: the obsessive, feverish worship of technology and commerce leads to calamity. That calamity was evident in the ills present in newly-industrialized Victorian England, and Landseer seems to say that such rapid and unconsidered change threatens to twist people’s very humanity from their grasp—can’t we see those ravenous polar bears as stand-ins for the crew members? And on some level, can’t a society be called cannibalistic that launches some to fabulous wealth at the expense of others who languish in poverty?

Landseer’s painting might be particularly relevant for us as a 21st-century audience. Our society exhibits many parallels to the Victorian Era: boundless opportunity, increasing reliance on technology, ubiquitous commerce. Bu with a daily backdrop of headlines populated with slums, hunger, and extremism, it seems unnecessary to ask what calamities could be riding the coattails of our progress. And the Victorians would probably be taken aback at the social cannibalism of Ponzi schemes and sub-prime mortgage loans. Landseer’s title is a warning; hubris has been the bane of mortals since Icarus. Our achievements must be tempered by an acknowledgment and minimization of their negative effects. So while the world produces and invents and communicates as never before, new passages are going to continue to open up to us. But every action has consequences. Or as the New York Times put it, global warming can help the Arctic open up for shipping, fishing, and oil exploration . . . but it “could be a particularly harsh jolt to polar bears.”