DARWIN: THE LOSER
I
At different times Darwin commented on the gradually increasing
absorption of his life by scientific pursuits and on the consequent
atrophy of other intellectual and spiritual interests, which in
earlier days had meant a good deal to him. In other words he was
illustrating the favorite text of Sainte-Beuve, ‘All longings fail
except that to understand.’ Sometimes he expresses this loss with
terse vigor: ‘It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed
in any subject as I am in mine.’[309] Or again: ‘It is a horrid bore
to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every
subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though
God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which
makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.’[310]
And elsewhere he analyzes it with more elaborate regretful curiosity:
‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general
laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have
caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the
higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more
highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I
suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I
would have made a rule to read some poetry or listen to some music
at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now
atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.’[311]
[Illustration: THE STUDY AT DOWN]
Having recently had occasion to make a somewhat extended study of
Darwin’s remarkable contemporary the evangelist D. L. Moody, I have
been struck by this similarity of lack of general interest in both of
them. Darwin was of course a far better educated man fundamentally
than Moody. But in both, their very bigness and power made the one
engrossing passion—about as different in the two cases as can be
imagined—dwarf and drive out the varied distractions and desires
which relieve and stimulate the curiosity or the indolence of more
ordinary men. So far as Darwin is concerned, with the exaggeration
natural to reminiscence, he perhaps somewhat overestimated both
the original aptitude and the later atrophy. But it is exceedingly
instructive to trace his relation to the various occupations and
experiences of life outside of the scientific.
Take first the external human interests, other than purely social.
In the larger movements of history Darwin seems not to have been
particularly well versed or to have concerned himself very much with
them. Of course, in relying upon his volumes of published letters as
evidence, we must remember that those volumes were naturally edited
with a view in the main to scientific pursuits, and therefore it is
to be expected that other interests should figure less conspicuously.
Still the testimony, both positive and negative, to the unimportance
of those interests is very decided. As to this matter of history,
Darwin himself tells us that he read the historians in his youth.
He even insists that when he had lost æsthetic pleasures, ‘books on
history, biographies, and travels ... and essays on all sorts of
subjects interest me as much as ever they did.’[312] Of his earlier
life he records that ‘I used to sit for hours reading the historical
plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls
of the school.’[313] Perhaps on this Shakespearean basis, he retains,
with many other English conventions, that of reverence for rank,
though no more natural democrat ever lived, and he makes gentle fun
of himself for his snobbishness: ‘I have the true English reverence
for rank, and therefore liked to hear about the Princess Royal.’[314]
Nevertheless, in his letters and in his books, you get the sense that
the great currents of development in Europe and in the world were
not familiar to his thought. With the unfailing candor, he admits
this: ‘I believe your criticism is quite just about my deficient
historic spirit, for I am aware of my ignorance in this line.’[315]
And an acute and sympathetic analyst of his work, points out that it
suffered to some extent from the deficiency. The tendency to extend
evolutionary analogies from the individual to society was partly
Darwin’s fault, says this critic, because of his ‘embarking upon the
discussion of social and moral matters, in “The Descent of Man”;
matters concerning which he was little better informed than any other
non-specialist.’[316]
In contemporary politics it was not to be expected that Darwin should
have much immediate concern. One can hardly imagine a man less likely
to choose an active political career, or on the whole less adapted
to it, though the tact which enabled him to deal successfully with
his fellow-scientists would no doubt have been helpful in more
practical spheres. There are occasional glimpses of his taking some
part in local interests, and for a time at any rate he attended to
the judicial duties which we so generally associate with the English
country squire: ‘I attended the Bench on Monday, and was detained in
adjudicating some troublesome cases one and one half hours longer
than usual, and came home utterly knocked up, and cannot rally.’[317]
Darwin would not have been an Englishman, if he had not entertained
political opinions of some sort. He could not pretend to escape
the tradition so strongly planted in the blood of the race. He
does indeed resent the suggestion that politics are more important
than science: ‘Did you see a sneer some time ago in the _Times_
about how incomparably more interesting politics were compared with
science even to scientific men?... Jeffrey, in one of his letters,
I remember, says that making an effective speech in Parliament is a
far grander thing than writing the grandest history. All this seems
to me a poor short-sighted view.’[318] But he has been brought up
a Whig, a Liberal, and Whig prejudices are inherent in his system.
This was true in the early days of the Beagle voyage: ‘The Captain
does everything in his power to assist me, and we get on very
well, but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade
to Whig principles.’[319] And it remained true to old age. When
answering a questionnaire in 1873, he described himself as ‘Liberal
or Radical,’[320] but the radicalism was of a very conservative and
English order.
The Whig partisanship even shows itself in quite normal fashion
in hatred of the Tories, and on this head the tolerant and kindly
scientist expresses himself with a rather amusing bitterness: ‘Thank
God, the cold-hearted Tories, who, as J. Mackintosh used to say,
have no enthusiasm, except against enthusiasm, have for the present
run their race.’[321] But these outbursts are not to be taken very
seriously.
There are occasional glimpses of interest in current public men and
current public affairs. Lord Bryce gives a striking account of a
visit which Gladstone paid to the great thinker. Darwin’s comment
was, ‘he seemed to be quite unaware that he was a great man, and
talked to us as if he had been an ordinary person like ourselves.’ On
which Bryce remarks: ‘The friend who was with me and I could not but
look at each other and exchange covert smiles. We were feeling toward
Darwin just as he had felt toward Gladstone.’[322] During the early
portion of the Franco-German War Darwin’s sympathy, like that of many
Englishmen, was with Germany: ‘I have not yet met a soul in England
who does not rejoice in the splendid triumph of Germany over France:
it is a most just retribution against that vainglorious, war-liking
nation.’[323] But the struggles of party politics, as they went on
about him, aroused little attention and little ardor.
There was, however, one political event of his time that called
forth Darwin’s keen sympathy and extended comment, and that was
the American Civil War. As is well known, English opinion was much
divided on this question, and the prejudices of the upper class, at
any rate among the more conservative, were in favor of the South.
Although Darwin was by no means confident that the North would win,
he was strongly on that side from the start, and his numerous letters
to Asa Gray show how decided his feeling was.
The feeling was not based on the abstract political and
constitutional considerations that appealed to Americans, but on
Darwin’s rooted, bitter antipathy to the system of slavery in any
form. When he was in South America with the Beagle, he had plenty of
opportunity to watch the working of human servitude, and it disgusted
and repelled him beyond measure. ‘To this day, if I hear a distant
scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing
a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could
not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew
that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.... Near Rio
de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush
the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a
young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and
persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.’[324]
As a result of these experiences and many others, Darwin imbibed a
detestation of slavery and slave-holders which lasted through life,
and which led him to oppose them where he could, whether in England
or America.
The hostility to slavery was based even more deeply on an intense
hatred of cruelty, barbarity, and the infliction of physical
suffering of any sort. The dislike of such suffering was so keen that
from the start it incapacitated Darwin for the medical profession,
which his father would have been glad to see him follow. He could not
bear the sight of blood, and fled from an operation with disgust.
Ill-treatment of animals was especially tormenting to him, and he
interfered to prevent it, when he could: ‘He returned one day from
his walk pale and faint having seen a horse ill-used, and from the
agitation of violently remonstrating with the man.’[325]
With such a general sensibility, Darwin’s attitude towards
vivisection is extremely curious. Knowing as he did the importance of
animal experiment, he could not possibly range himself on the side
of the anti-vivisectionists. But he supported every effort to have
humanity legally emphasized and rigidly insisted upon. The nature
of his feeling in the matter appears clearly in a passage of ‘The
Descent of Man’: ‘Every one has heard of the dog suffering under
vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless
the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or
unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last
hour of his life.’[326]
In sociological questions of a broader bearing, which made no such
immediate appeal to his susceptibilities, Darwin took much less
interest. Now and then some special point arouses him. He was excited
about any attempt to interfere with the marriage of cousins, because
he had married his cousin and had in consequence largely investigated
the subject.[327] He was decidedly opposed to the English tradition
of primogeniture, and felt its unfairness. On the land-question
he writes to Wallace: ‘I see you are going to write on the most
difficult political question, the land. Something ought to be done;
but what, is the rub.’[328] In the same spirit of remoteness and
uncertainty, he writes also to Wallace in regard to Henry George’s
‘Progress and Poverty’: ‘I will certainly order “Progress and
Poverty,” for the subject is a most interesting one. But I read
many years ago some books on political economy, and they produced
a disastrous effect on my mind, viz., utterly to distrust my own
judgment on the subject, and to doubt much every one else’s judgment.
So =I feel= sure that Mr. George’s book will only make my mind worse
confounded than it is at present.’[329] But it is clear that the
remoteness did not imply contempt or cynical disregard, merely a
feeling of complete inability and diffidence in regard to economic
problems, and one is slow to condemn this state of mind, when one
thinks that such problems are usually dealt with and solved, if it
can be called so, by those in whose equipment freedom from diffidence
is the most aggressive and impressive instrument.
II
With artistic and general æsthetic matters, Darwin, at any rate in
later years, was even more indifferent than with political. It
is true that his scientific investigations sometimes involved the
abstract analysis of æsthetics: ‘I agree with what you say about
beauty. I formerly thought a good deal on the subject, and was led
quite to repudiate the doctrine of beauty being created for beauty’s
sake.’[330] The theory of sexual selection, as presented in ‘The
Descent of Man,’ necessitated a good deal of discussion of the
susceptibility to color and form and to music. But such æsthetic
discussion has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic enjoyment.
One thing may be said in regard to Darwin; with art as with
everything else, he was absolutely free from pretense. He says of one
writer, ‘The pretentiousness of her style is extremely disagreeable,
not to say nauseous to many persons.’[331] Anything artificial,
anything affected, was peculiarly repugnant to him, and never under
any circumstances would he have pretended to admire or to appreciate
a work of art that really left him cold. Indeed it was partly his
intense wish not to appear to feel what he did not feel that made him
inclined to underestimate his artistic pleasure as compared with the
raptures of those who exclaimed conventionally over what they neither
understood nor enjoyed.
Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that art in its varied forms
hardly afforded Darwin the delight and solace that it brings to
many persons. The theater he cared little for at any period of his
life. The effort, fatigue, and constraint outweighed the charm.
Mrs. Darwin, who was a lover of average plays, though she found
Shakespeare tedious and said so with something of her husband’s
candor, is quite anxious on the subject: ‘The real crook in my lot
I have withheld from you, but I must own it to you sooner or later.
It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am
afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head.’[332]
Later she takes him to see Macready in ‘Richelieu’ and hopes that
he is getting converted, but there are no signs that the hopes were
finally realized.
With the plastic arts the case is somewhat better. There is little
reference to architecture. One passage in a letter seems to suggest
the feeling of cathedral grandeur, but the æsthetic quickly turns
into the scientific bearing: ‘Possibly the sense of sublimity
excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the
vague feelings of terror and superstition in our savage ancestors,
when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest.’[333] As regards
pictures, his son thinks that he did keep up his love of them to a
certain extent.[334] His biographer remarks: ‘His love of pictures as
a young man is almost a proof that he must have had an appreciation
of a portrait as a work of art, not as a likeness.’[335] And the
biographer adds, with entire justice: ‘This way of looking at
himself as an ignoramus in all matters of art, was strengthened by
the absence of pretence, which was part of his character.’[336] The
immediate recognition of a Salvator Rosa scene in one of the Beagle
experiences shows an acquaintance with painting in its different
forms and periods.[337] Yet pictures make a different showing in
Darwin’s letters from what they have in Edward FitzGerald’s, for
instance.
The form of art which meant most to Darwin and into which he seemed
to enter with the nearest approach to ecstasy was music. Here again,
there is a good deal of theoretical discussion, which at times
appears of a nature to dampen emotional enjoyment. But there can be
no question that with Darwin as a young man the emotional enjoyment
was there, and sincere, and profound, even at times overmastering. He
does indeed confess that his musical ear was not fine or perfect: ‘I
am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord,
or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I
could possibly have derived pleasure from music.’[338] But it is
manifest that he did derive such pleasure, and went out of his way
to seek it: ‘I also got into a musical set.... From associating with
these men, and hearing them play I acquired a strong taste for music,
and used very often to time my walks so as to hear on week days the
anthem in King’s College Chapel.’[339]
The love was for good music, too, not by any means for what was
trashy or cheap. He liked Beethoven and Händel, had the natural
instinct for the high and fine, in this as in other matters. Mrs.
Darwin took him to classical concerts and he responded much more
heartily than to the theater. He liked to have his wife and his
sisters play to him, and when he was absent with the Beagle, he
wrote: ‘I hope your musical tastes continue in due force. I shall be
ravenous for the pianoforte.’[340]
And the enjoyment was not merely perfunctory, but went deep, and
took hold of the nerves. ‘At the end of one of the parts, which was
exceedingly impressive, he turned round to me and said, with a deep
sigh, “How’s your backbone?” He often spoke of coldness or shivering
in his back on hearing beautiful music.’[341] The references to
this thrill, this tension of nervous musical excitement, occur
occasionally even in Darwin’s more scientific works.
And then there is the recurring doubt, the mistrust of one’s
sincerity, the desperate dread of sentimental convention in these
artistic matters: ‘This gave me intense pleasure, so that my backbone
would sometimes shiver. I am sure that there was no affectation or
mere imitation in this taste, for I used generally to go by myself to
King’s College, and I sometimes hired the chorister boys to sing in
my rooms.’[342]
But, affectation or not, the musical enthusiasm vanished, and the
encroaching, all-absorbing growth of the scientific preoccupation
crowded it out. Indeed, any one who is susceptible to musical
delight, appreciates how elusive it is, how much it depends upon
favorable conditions and surroundings, and how peculiarly its
delicate and subtle quality is subject to erasure by distractions
of a different order. And Darwin’s comment on the disappearance of
his pleasure in music is: ‘I have said that formerly pictures gave
me considerable, and music very great delight.... I have also almost
lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking
too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving
me pleasure.’[343]
With the enjoyment of beauty in literary forms, Darwin’s sense
of loss was quite as keen as with music. Of the higher and finer
elements of style and imagination there is little evidence that he
was conscious. Such consciousness would not seem very compatible with
his remark about Buckle: ‘To my taste he is the very best writer
of the English language that ever lived, let the other be who he
may.’[344]
In this connection it is interesting to consider Darwin’s own style,
as it appears in the vast mass of his production, running probably,
letters and all, to over two million words. In this mass there are
occasional passages of appealing beauty or startling effectiveness,
for example, the charming sentence, written in age, ‘I should very
much like to see you again, but you would find a visit here very
dull, for we feel very old and have no amusement, and lead a solitary
life,’[345] or the much earlier passage: ‘This letter is a most
untidy one, but my mind is untidy with joy.’[346]
But Darwin, in writing, would have bestowed no thought or care on
such qualities as these. He had a great discovery to give to the
world. His one desire was to give it accurately, lucidly, and in a
form that would convince, and it was his despair that he thought
nature had not endowed him with the gifts for doing this. He envies
the admirable literary skill of Huxley and Spencer and deplores his
own inability to get his thoughts and ideas into a shape that would
force mankind to read and understand them: ‘I do not believe any man
in England naturally writes so vile a style as I do.’[347]
Which is a gross exaggeration and belongs to the humility so
manifest in other and more important matters. It is true that there
are curious lapses from mere formal correctness, as in the rather
attractive misuse of ‘like,’ which occasionally occurs: ‘Few have
observed like you have done.’[348] It is true, also, that Darwin
had not the swift and eloquent vigor of Huxley, which has sometimes
virile energy enough to make force of statement appear like truth
of fact. But no one, I think, can read Darwin at all widely without
getting to feel a singular charm in the absolute simplicity of his
manner of expressing himself. To be sure, Huxley suggests that
the very simplicity is sometimes misleading: ‘A somewhat delusive
simplicity of style, which tends to disguise the complexity and
difficulty of the subject.’[275] But when so many writers make simple
subjects difficult, it would surely be ungracious to complain of one
who makes a difficult subject simple. As I have before suggested,
Darwin’s perfect candor, his absolute sincerity, his intense and
obvious effort to have you think with him, seem to take the place of
great literary qualities and to give his prose a revealing directness
which is quite lacking to some who are more highly skilled.
Especially is this the case with the correspondence, where finish
and technical perfection are of less importance than the power of
spontaneous spiritual contact. In maintaining this contact there
are few letter-writers who can surpass Darwin, and his four solid
volumes, technical and scientific as they are, have a singular and
persistent appeal to those who have a taste for that kind of writing.
As to his own personal enjoyment of literature, one form of it
at least continued to attract him to the very last, and that was
fiction. Relief from the strain of his scientific labors was best
found in stories which distracted and absorbed: ‘He was extremely
fond of novels,’ says his son, ‘and I remember well the way in which
he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as
he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both
in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand
how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel
as a feminine vice.’[276] Darwin himself confirms this statement:
‘Novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very
high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to
me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been
read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they
do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.’[277]
He enjoyed Miss Austen, he adored Scott, and cites the Laird of
Redgauntlet’s facial peculiarity in the book on Expression. He did
not like realism, even in the mild form practiced by George Eliot,
and he wished things and people to be agreeable: ‘A novel, according
to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains
some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all
the better.’[197]
But for the higher orders of literature, the loss was indubitable,
and Darwin himself makes it very emphatic. He tells us that in his
youth he enjoyed poetry. Shakespeare was his favorite reading. He
read Thomson and Byron, and he got much pleasure from ‘Paradise
Lost’: ‘Formerly Milton’s “Paradise Lost” had been my chief
favorite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the _Beagle_,
when I could take only a single volume, I always chose Milton.’[198]
The solid evidence of this enjoyment is the frequent reference to
poetical reading in Darwin’s books. Even in connection with strictly
scientific topics he is apt to introduce some citation from the poets
which not only proves his point, but shows his familiarity.
Yet in later years all this poetical interest disappeared, and Darwin
bewails the disappearance deeply. Shakespeare, who had touched and
stirred him, ceases to awaken any emotion, rings merely hollow and
empty: ‘Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry:
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably
dull that it nauseated me.’[199]
A clever writer in the Popular Science Monthly some years ago
endeavored to prove that here, as in other things, Darwin’s humility
much exaggerated his defects, and that his natural poetical sympathy
was greater than he recognized. This writer urges Darwin’s early
enjoyment and his constant, apt, and accurate quotation to establish
the thesis: ‘By his unconscious confession and the evidence of
his written works, his mind was leavened with poetic feeling; all
through his mature life he is ready with quotation when the occasion
calls; and the very poignancy of his regret for the loss of poetry
witnesses to his poetic endowment.’[200] But the contention though
ingenious, is exaggerated. Darwin’s quick intelligence was interested
in the substance of Shakespeare and Milton and other poets and prose
writers. But it seems to me impossible that any one who had really
felt the high stimulus of the splendor of Shakespeare’s imagination
could ever have lost it to any such extent as Darwin deplores with
obvious sincerity. Sainte-Beuve had as wide and varied a scientific
curiosity as Darwin’s. But he said when he was well over fifty, ‘I
rarely write about poetry, precisely because I have loved it so much
and because I still love it more than anything else.’[201] Goethe’s
old age was filled with scientific preoccupations, yet the glory of
poetry was more to him than any possible science.
III
The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic
matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature
and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the
rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have
often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other
field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and
thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more
real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of
æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded
and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as
impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or
overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of
the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world.
To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the
excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and
sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a
butterfly, the
‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate,
too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many
who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high
intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase:
‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a
lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]
The secret of the enjoyment must lie mainly in obscure processes of
association, hints and suggestions of buried joy and sorrow, which go
down deep into the roots of subconscious memory. But at any rate it
is true that such enjoyment is bound up far more with simple scenes
and home surroundings than with the remote or the picturesque or what
Darwin so often refers to as the sublime. The hurrying tourist, who
rushes about the world in search of some higher mountain or rougher
glacier or wilder valley is not the one who feels the secret charm of
nature, but rather he who strolls in lonely, quiet fields or woods
that he has always known and loved. The return of violets in early
spring, the song of thrushes in summer twilights, these are the
things that bring tears, that come full charged with the weight of
all that Cowper means when he writes of
‘Scenes that soothed Or charmed me young, no longer young I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still.’[203]
And it is in this matter of association that the poets most of all
help us. It is they who can disentangle the subtle threads of emotion
and thought that have twined themselves about the simple impressions
of the natural world, and who in turn can interweave a tissue of
still more splendid imaginative glory with all our sight and all our
hearing. It is Shakespeare with his
‘Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of
March with beauty.’
it is Keats, with his
‘Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,’
or his,
‘Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,’
who store our souls with memories that vibrate at the sight of
daffodils and violets and stars.
And the imagination goes further yet, interpenetrates the whole of
nature, transforms it, makes it a living, sentient unity, wholly
unlike the dead multiplicity on which the scientist exercises his
ingenious research. Take Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and compare it with
Darwin’s book on Earthworms. The Darwin has its fascination: it makes
you long to spend your days watching and testing and measuring the
tiny creatures who are forever making over the surface of the globe.
But the Emerson transfuses all this natural world with thought, with
creative human intelligence, dissolves it, moulds it, re-creates
it, tosses and turns it till it seems a ball and a trifle for the
overmastering soul of man to produce or abolish as it will. Or again,
with Wordsworth, there is the sense of animating life in nature, the
dim, impersonal personality, which is for ever passing and repassing
through the endless manifestations that are all the scientist can
count or measure,
‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts.’
And as there is the sense of this profounder life in nature, this
deeper, mysterious unity, back of all the varied shift and change,
so there is the passionate desire to be at one with that unity, to
lose one’s miserable, insignificant, turbulent, tormenting I in that
vast, illimitable, measureless All. There is the thirst of Shelley’s
‘Adonais’:
‘That sustaining love, Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as
each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst.’
There is Byron’s cry:
‘I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that about me, and to
me High mountains are a feeling.’[204]
And with the realization that the longing cannot be satisfied,
that we are forever imprisoned within the insuperable barriers
of this petty I, from which there is no escape, comes a bitter
revolt of despair, or a profound melancholy of questioning. It is
Obermann, with his, ‘There, in the peace of night, I questioned my
uncertain destiny, and this inconceivable universe, which, containing
everything yet does not contain my desires.’[205] Or, as an American
contemporary has expressed the deep suggestion of the earnest stars:
‘O Lyra, I have gazed at you, until I could not tell your brightness
from my own eyes. I have gazed at you till my soul left my body, and
circled with you through the stars; but there is something which I am
and you are not, something which will not let me rest....
‘Infinite Intelligence! Infinite Beauty! Either make me what thou
art, take me to thyself, or free me from this passion which I cannot
gratify and cannot destroy. Make me as other men are, toilers and
forgetters, seeking yesterday in to-day, and to-day in to-morrow, and
illusion always; or fulfill for me the hope which the waters whisper,
which I can feel throbbing forever in the heart of thy world.’
Of all this in Darwin nothing whatever, nothing, nothing. It may
indeed be said that with nature, as with other things, many people
have feelings and experiences that they do not express or try to
express. But persons who cherish such experiences with the natural
world usually have a more constant regard and interest for the
expression of them in others than Darwin had. Any such melancholy
or passionate longing as is suggested above one would of course not
expect in him. There was no natural melancholy in his temperament. He
was depressed and discouraged when things went badly, yet in the main
his disposition was even and serene. But his enjoyment of natural
scenes and objects, which is indisputable and proved by his own
testimony and that of others, would seem to have been generally of a
rather superficial character, and certainly not to have partaken of
the nature of passion. How far, far different is his touch from that
of Lucretius, for example.
Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He
enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s
account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire
the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower
itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem
to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the
same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally,
also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper
feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At
last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds
singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some
woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as
ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or
birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a
scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth.
There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor
bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles,
distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I
was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full
orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking
touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a
decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable,
and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in
the Forest of Fontainebleau.
But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the
different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough
that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the
growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied
that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not
emotional.
IV
As with sociology and with æsthetic experience, so, and even more,
with God and the things of God, Darwin’s limitations are profoundly
interesting, and if the loss was less, because there was less to
lose, it was nevertheless, in all its aspects significant. Here
again, as with æsthetic emotion, it must be remembered that men do
not utter all they feel, and those who feel most sometimes utter
least. But it so happens that circumstances obliged Darwin to be very
explicit about his religious views and experiences, so that we are
justified in assuming that we have access to pretty much all there
was.
It must never be forgotten that Darwin grew up in the thoroughly
conventional atmosphere of the English Church. Neither his father nor
his grandfather was an active believer, but the immense tradition
of staid decorum, from which the English upper middle class rarely
escapes, was all about his boyhood, and left an indelible mark on
it. To appreciate how haunting and oppressive the atmosphere was,
one should read ‘A Century of Family Letters,’ edited by Darwin’s
daughter. The flavor of established religious propriety is so
overwhelming that one wonders how Darwin could ever have shaken
himself intellectually free from it.
Mrs. Darwin was a wise and a charming woman, and she was invaluable
to her husband, but, oh, she was English. She took a proper wifely
interest in Darwin’s scientific adventures, and was sometimes of
assistance to him. She had her anxieties about the animosity of
his critics and also about the drift of his speculations, and her
daughter implies that in later years these speculations effected a
change in the mother’s religious beliefs.[210] But I relish very
much this lovely passage of solicitude for the husband’s eternal
welfare, written in the year of the publication of the ‘Origin’: ‘I
am sure you know I love you well enough to believe that I mind your
sufferings, nearly as much as I should my own, and I find the only
relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, and to try to
believe that all suffering and illness is meant to help us to exalt
our minds and to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see
your patience, deep compassion for others, self-command, and above
all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you, I cannot help
longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven
for the sake of your daily happiness.’[211] Also, Mrs. Darwin was a
careful observer of that augustly hideous institution, the Victorian
Sunday: ‘I remember she persuaded me,’ writes a reminiscent relative,
‘to refuse any invitation from the neighbors that involved using the
carriage on that day, and it was a question in her own mind whether
she might rightly embroider, knit, or play patience.’[212] It strikes
me as peculiarly delightful that the Sabbath should be treated with
such reverence in the house of one who was to do more than any one
else to smash the God of the Sabbath altogether.
So it is evident that Darwin grew up with a strong religious habit.
There was even serious talk of his entering the church, till his
hopeless lack of vocation made it clearly impossible. The net of
religious inheritance and circumstance was woven closely about him
and in the early days he recognized himself as in general orthodox
enough. I like particularly the reply he made to his Catholic friends
in South America, who conjured him to see the light: ‘Why do you not
become a Christian—for our religion is certain?’ ‘I assured them
I was a sort of Christian.’[213] A sort of Christian! Isn’t that
charmingly characteristic? You can imagine millions of fanatics
to-day howling, ‘What sort of Christian?’
One thing at least is certain: Darwin never was cynical or mocking in
his attitude toward religion. Without the least trace of affectation
or cant, he always spoke of the church and the clergy and religious
practice with respect, and with the same gentle tolerance that he
displayed towards those who differed from him in any line. Peculiarly
significant in this regard are his references to the missionaries
with whom he came into contact on his southern voyage. He was at
first disposed to speak of them without enthusiasm, to say the
least, and Admiral Sullivan, who was with him on the Beagle, tells
of his scepticism about missionary work, ‘his conviction that it was
utterly useless to send missionaries to such a set of savages as
the Fuegians.’[214] Many years later Darwin was entirely converted,
and, as usual, did not hesitate to say so: ‘He wrote me that he had
been wrong and I right in our estimates of the native character,
and the possibility of doing them good through missionaries; and he
requested me to forward to the Society an enclosed cheque for £5, as
a testimony of the interest he took in their good work.’[215] Other
passages could be adduced to the same effect.
And the religious training and the constant presence of high-minded
and earnest living and meaning people about him had established in
Darwin a secure habit of morals and a vivid activity of conscience.
He might subject the moral habit in theory to cold analysis, ‘The
moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through
the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just
public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been
rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of
habit, example, instruction, and reflection.’[216] But the analysis
did not in the least affect his own personal instinct of right and
upright living.
It is not only that there is no appearance or record of irregularity
of conduct of any kind. But, much more than this, there is repeated
evidence of the nicest scrupulousness and a tender conscience which
would not be surpassed in the most devout and anxious Christian. It
was perhaps ‘a sort of Christian,’ but assuredly not a bad sort,
who, as I have before mentioned, got up in the middle of the night
to correct a fancied misstatement, not about a scientific fact, but
about an æsthetic experience.[298] And a clerical friend records a
similar incident, equally striking: ‘On one occasion, when a parish
meeting had been held on some disputed point of no great importance,
I was surprised by a visit from Mr. Darwin at night. He came to say
that, thinking over the debate, though what he had said was quite
accurate, he thought I might have drawn an erroneous conclusion, and
he would not sleep till he had explained it.’[299] With the members
of his own family there was the same scrupulous, tender anxiety not
to do or say anything unjust or unkind. After some quite warrantable
and reasonable outburst of indignation over the levity of one of his
sons, ‘The next morning at seven o’clock he came to my bedroom and
said how sorry he was that he had been so angry and that he had not
been able to sleep; and with a few kind words he left me.’[300] This
‘sort of Christian’ is perhaps not even yet so common as might be
wished.
On the other hand, when we come to the more intimate, personal
aspects of the religious life, Darwin’s record appears to be largely
negative, and what earlier traces there are gradually disappear.
Take prayer. Here again, in the study of Expression, we have the
scientific analysis, of prayer as an attitude at any rate: ‘Hence it
is not probable that either the uplifting of the eyes or the joining
of the open hands under the influence of devotional feelings, are
innate or truly expressive actions, and this could hardly have been
expected, for it is very doubtful whether feelings, such as we should
rank as devotional, affected the hearts of men, whilst they remained
during past ages in an uncivilized condition.’[301] Also, there are
other occasional references to the external aspects of religious
petition, as in the Beagle Journal: ‘He prayed as a Christian should
do, with fitting reverence, and without the fear of ridicule or any
ostentation of piety.’[302]
But to prayer as a personal experience I find only one single
allusion. When Darwin was a boy, he was a good runner, often
took part in races, and was often successful. His explanation of
his success at that time is interesting: ‘When in doubt I prayed
earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my
success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how
generally I was aided.’[303] This recalls the youthful experience of
Moody, who was caught under a fence rail and could not move, but put
up earnest prayers to God, and then was able to lift the rail quite
easily.
Prayer played a very different part in Moody’s later life from what
it did in Darwin’s, so far as any tangible evidence goes. It is true
that probably a good many men pray whom one would never suspect of
doing so. I had an old friend, who had been brought up devoutly but
had been a Unitarian for years, rarely going to church, apparently
indifferent to religion, and discussing speculative, ultimate
problems with annihilating freedom. Yet he told me, in an outburst
of confidence, that every night, when he went to bed, he repeated,
in substance, if not in words, the prayers that he had learned at
his mother’s knee. ‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said; ‘I don’t
know whether there is a God, or whether He hears me, or what I want
of Him; but I pray.’ And I, who had not prayed for thirty years,
heard him with amazement. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Darwin
repeated ‘Now I lay me’ to the end, or prayed for triumph with
evolution as he had prayed for triumph in the foot-race.
The question of a future life seems to have had as little actuality
for Darwin as that of prayer, and we have more explicit evidence on
the point, because correspondents were always writing for a statement
of his beliefs. He never committed himself to any complete assertion
of disbelief. On the contrary, he is quite ready to admit some
forcible positive arguments: ‘Believing as I do that man in the
distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is,
it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings
are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow
progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul,
the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.’[304] Yet
the difficulties seem insuperable, and he is hardly able to accept
any definite belief: ‘Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy
about immortality ... by intuition; and I suppose I must differ from
such persons because I do not feel any innate conviction upon such
points.’[305]
The supreme test as to the future is the death of those we love
and the thought of our own death. In 1851 Darwin lost a little
daughter whom he loved tenderly. His intimate letters at that time
have affectionate and pathetic references to her; but there is not
one word in them to indicate the slightest hope of ever meeting her
again. When he himself was close to the end, mentally clear but with
no prospect of recovery, his calm words were: ‘I am not the least
afraid of death.’[306]
As to the question of God, Darwin’s statements are as elaborate as
in regard to immortality, and for the same reason, because eager
inquirers were determined to find out where he stood. In early
life, while he still believed in the theory of special creations,
he accepted the deistic view without hesitation: ‘Many years ago,
when I was collecting facts for the “Origin,” my belief in what is
called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself.’[307]
As the years went on, the working out of his theories involved a
profound change, but still he never at any time admitted an absolute
disbelief or a militant atheism. He goes over and over the old, old
arguments. How could an omnipotent God, who desired the good of all
his creatures, inflict upon the travailing creation such an infinity
of misery? Again, there is the puzzle of design and providential
interference. He is reluctant to believe that this vast and ordered
whole came together by mere chance; yet he debates with Asa Gray the
possible providence in the fall of a sparrow: ‘An innocent and good
man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do
you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God _designedly_
killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and
don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps
up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap
up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that
the man and the gnat are in the same predicament.’[308] Nor does the
Pantheistic solution appeal much more than the anthropomorphic one.
Darwin is constantly personifying Nature, with a capital N; but he is
careful to specify that he does this for convenience, and that Nature
means only the sum of natural laws in their eternal working, not any
mysterious force of Divinity. The Pantheistic solution also creates
as many puzzles as it solves. So the conclusion is, to leave all such
questions as hopeless and insoluble, beyond the intelligence of man
so completely that it does not seem intended that he should grapple
with them. And Darwin at least was satisfied to weigh and measure and
experiment and let God go.
It does not appear that he felt the need and the longing and the
desire that torture some of us. Like some other men, perhaps like
many others, the life of this world, the work of this world, the
pleasure of this world, the interest of this world, were enough
for him, and the other world might simply wait its turn. And as in
beginning this chapter I compared the evangelist Moody with the
scientist Darwin in their extreme limitation of interests, so at the
end I would compare them again to bring out the enormous difference.
To Darwin the mere fact of life in the universe and the endless
curiosity about it were enough. Whether God was there or not was a
matter that could not be settled and need not be discussed. To Moody
both life and the universe were nothing without God.