Organic Life, the produce of long labour and much consideration. What
profit a physician may derive from this book I am unable to determine;
but I fear that the general reader will too often discover in it a
hazardous ingenuity, to which good sense and reason have been
sacrificed. When the writer of these pages, who was then his patient,
ventured to intimate the sensuality of one part of it to its author, he
himself immediately referred to the passage which was likely to have
raised the objection; and, on another occasion, as if to counteract this
prejudice in the mind of one whose confidence he might be desirous of
obtaining, he recommended to him the study of Paley's Moral Philosophy.
In 1781, he married his second wife, the widow of Colonel Pole, of
Radburne, near Derby, with whom he appears to have lived as happily as
he had done with his first. By her persuasion, he was induced to pass
the latter part of his days at Derby. Here his medical practice was not
at all lessened; and he had a second family to provide for out of the
emolument which it brought him. His other publications were a Tract on
Female Education, a slight performance, written for the purpose of
recommending a school kept by some ladies, in whose welfare his relation
to them gave him a warm interest; and a long book in 1800, on the
Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening, which he entitled Phytologia.
On Lady Day, 1802, he took possession of an old house, called the
Priory, which had belonged to his son Erasmus, and was situated at a
short distance from Derby; and on the 17th of the next month, while he
was writing to his friend, Mr. Edgeworth, the following letter, he was
arrested by the sudden approach of death.
* * * * *
Priory, near Derby, April 17, 1802.
Dear Edgeworth,--I am glad to find that you still amuse yourself with
mechanism, in spite of the troubles of Ireland.
The use of turning aside, or downwards, the claw of a table, I don't
see, as it must be reared against a wall, for it will not stand alone.
If the use be for carriage, the feet may shut up, like the usual brass
feet of a reflecting telescope.
We have all been now removed from Derby about a fortnight, to the
Priory, and all of us like our change of situation. We have a pleasant
home, a good garden, ponds full of fish, and a pleasing valley
somewhat like Shenstone's--deep, umbrageous, and with a talkative
stream running down it. Our home is near the top of the valley, well
screened by hills from the east and north, and open to the south,
where at four miles' distance we see Derby Tower.
Four or more strong springs rise near the house, and have formed the
valley, which, like that of Petrarch, may be called Valchiusa, as it
begins, or is shut at the situation of the house. I hope you like the
description, and hope farther, that yourself or any part of your
family will sometime do me the pleasure of a visit.
Pray tell the authoress that the water-nymphs of our valley will be
happy to assist her next novel.
My bookseller, Mr. Johnson, will not begin to print the Temple of
Nature till the price of paper is fixed by Parliament. I suppose the
present duty is paid
* * * * *
To this imperfect sentence was added on the opposite side by another
hand;
Sir,--This family is in the greatest affliction. I am truly grieved to
inform you of the death of the invaluable Dr. Darwin. Dr. Darwin got
up apparently in good health; about eight o'clock, he rang the library
bell. The servant who went, said he appeared fainting. He revived
again. Mrs. Darwin was immediately called. The Doctor spoke often, but
soon appeared fainting; and died about one o'clock.
Our dear Mrs. Darwin and family are inconsolable: their affliction is
great indeed, there being few such husbands or fathers. He will be
most deservedly lamented by all who had the honour of being known to
him.
I remain, Sir,
Your obedient humble servant,
S.M.
P.S. This letter was begun this morning by Dr. Darwin himself.
The complaint which thus suddenly terminated his life, in his
seventy-first year, was the Angina Pectoris.
The Temple of Nature was printed in the year after his death; but the
public had either read enough of his writings or were occupied with
other things, for little attention was paid to this poetical bequest.
That ingenious burlesque of his manner, the Loves of the Triangles,
probably contributed to loosen the spell by which he had for a while
taken the general ear.
His person is well described by his biographer, Miss Seward, as being
above the middle size, his form athletic, and his limbs too heavy for
exact proportion; his countenance marked by the traces of a severe
small-pox, and, when not animated by social pleasure, rather saturnine
than sprightly. In youth his exterior was rendered agreeable by florid
health, and a smile that indicated good-humour. His portrait, by Wright
of Derby, gives a very exact, but inanimate, representation of his form
and features. In justice to the painter, it must be told, that I believe
the likeness to have been taken after death.
In his medical practice he was by some accused of empiricism. From this
charge, both Miss Seward and Mr. Edgeworth have, I think, justly
vindicated him. The former has recorded a project which he suggested, on
the supposed authority of some old practitioners, but which he did not
execute, for curing one of his consumptive patients by the transfusing
of blood from the veins of a person in health. I have been told, that
when a mother, who seemed to be in the paroxysm of a delirium, expressed
an earnest wish to take her infant into her arms, and her attendants
were fearful of indulging her lest she should do some violence to the
object of her affection, he desired them to commit it to her without
apprehension, and that the result was an immediate abatement of her
disorder. This was an instance rather of strong sagacity than of
extraordinary boldness; for nothing less than a well-founded confidence
in the safety of the experiment could have induced him to hazard it.
I know not whether it be worth relating, that when sent for to a
nobleman, at Buxton, who conceived his health to have suffered by the
use of tea, to which he was immoderately addicted, Darwin rang the bell,
and ordered a pot of strong green tea to be brought up, and, filling
both his patient's cup and his own, encouraged him to frequent and
lavish draughts. I have heard that he was impatient of inquiries which
related to diet; thinking, I suppose, that after the age of childhood,
in ordinary cases, each person might regulate it best for himself. But
from an almost entire abstinence from fermented liquors, he was, both by
precept and example, a strenuous adviser. "He believed," says Miss
Edgeworth, in her Memoirs of her Father, "that almost all the distempers
of the higher classes of people arise from drinking, in some form or
other, too much vinous spirit. To this he attributed the aristocratic
disease of gout, the jaundice, and all bilious or liver complaints; in
short all the family of pain. This opinion he supported in his writings
with the force of his eloquence and reason; and still more in
conversation, by all those powers of wit, satire, and peculiar humour,
which never appeared fully to the public in his works, but which gained
him strong ascendancy in private society. During his lifetime, he almost
banished wine from the tables of the rich of his acquaintance; and
persuaded most of the gentry in his own and the neighbouring counties to
become water-drinkers." Here, I doubt, Miss Edgeworth has a little
over-rated the extent of his influence. "Partly in jest, and partly in
earnest, he expressed his suspicions, and carried his inferences on this
subject, to a preposterous excess. When he heard that my father was
bilious, he suspected that this must be the consequence of his having,
since his residence in Ireland, and in compliance with the fashion of
the country, indulged too freely in drinking. His letter, I remember,
concluded with--Farewell, my dear friend. God keep you from whiskey--if
he can."
His opinion respecting the safety of inoculating for the small-pox at a
proper age, as it was expressed in the following letter to the writer of
these pages, will be satisfactory to such parents as are yet unconvinced
of the efficacy of vaccination; and his opinion is the more valuable,
because it was given at a time when there was neither prejudice nor
prepossession on the subject.
_Derby, Oct_. 9, 1797.
Dear Sir,--On the best inquiry I have been able to make to-day, I
cannot hear that the small-pox is in Derby. I can only add, that all
those who have died by inoculation, whom I have heard of these last
twenty years, have been children at the breast; on which account it
may be safer to defer inoculation till four or five years old, if
there be otherwise no hazard of taking the disease naturally.
I am, &c.
E. DARWIN.
On the accounts which his patients gave him of their own maladies, he
placed so little dependence, that he thought it necessary to wring the
truth from them as a lawyer would do from an unwilling witness. His
general distrust of others, in all that related to themselves, is well
exemplified by a casual remark that has been lately repeated to me by a
respectable dignitary of the church, to whom when he was apologizing for
his want of skill in the game of chess, at which they were going to
play, Darwin answered, that he made it a rule, not to believe either the
good or the harm that men spoke of themselves.
This want of reliance in the sincerity of those with whom he conversed
has been attributed, with some colour of reason, to his habitual
scepticism on matters of higher moment. Mr. Fellowes has observed of
him, that he dwelt so much and so exclusively on second causes, that he
seems to have forgotten that there is a first. There is no solution of
natural effects to which he was not ready to listen, provided it would
assist him in getting rid of what he considered an unnecessary
intervention of the Supreme Being. A fibre capable of irritability was
with him enough to account, not only for the origin of animal life, but
for its progress through all its stages. He had thus involved himself in
the grossest materialism; but, being endued with an active fancy, he
engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be
regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our
pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which
they originate. What more prodigious transformation shall we read of in
Ovid, than that which he supposes the organs of his strange ens to have
undergone during the change of our globe from moist to dry?
As in dry air the sea-born stranger roves,
Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves;
Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs,
And sounds aerial flow from slimy tongues.
_Temple of Nature,_ c. 1.
The peculiarities of the shapes of animals, which distinguished them
from each other, he supposes to have been gradually formed by these same
irritable fibres, and to have been varied by reproduction. As to the
faculties of sensation, volition, and association, they come in
afterwards as matters of course, and in a manner so easy and natural,
that the only wonder is, what had kept them waiting so long. He
mentions, with something like approbation, the hypothesis of Buffon and
Helvetius, who, as he tells us, seem to imagine, that mankind arose from
one family of monkeys, on the banks of the Mediterranean, who
accidentally had learned to use the adductor pollicis, or that strong
muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb and draws the point of it
to meet the points of the fingers, which common monkeys do not; and that
this muscle gradually increased in size, strength and activity, in
successive generations; and that, by this improved use of the sense of
the touch, monkeys acquired clear ideas, and gradually became men.
To this he gravely adds, that perhaps all the productions of nature are
in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern
discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the
solid parts of this terraqueous globe, and consonant of the dignity of
the Creator.
His description of the way in which clear ideas were acquired is not
much improved when he puts it into verse.
Nerved with fine touch above the bestial throngs,
The hand, first gift of Heaven! to man belongs:
Untipt with claws, the circling fingers close,
With rival points the bending thumbs oppose,
Trace the nice lines of form with sense refined,
And clear ideas charm the thinking mind.
_Temple of Nature_, c. 3.
He tells us of a naturalist who had found out a shorter cut to the
production of animal life, who thought it not impossible that the first
insects were the anthers and stigmas of flowers, which had by some means
loosened themselves, from their parent plant, and that other insects in
process of time had been formed from these; some acquiring wings, others
fins, and others claws, from their ceaseless efforts to procure food, or
to secure themselves from injury. What hindered but these insects might
have acquired hands, and by those means clear ideas also, is not
explained to us.
As great improvements, however, have certainly been made in some way or
other, he sees reason to hope that not less important ameliorations may
in time succeed. If our improved chemistry (says he,) should ever
discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter, without
the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as
plentiful as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying
on each other, as thick as blades of grass, without restraint to their
numbers but the want of local room: no very comfortable prospect, it
must be owned, especially to those who are aware of the alarming ratio
in which, according to later discoveries, population is found to
multiply itself; a consummation that would scarcely produce that at
which he thought it the chief duty of a philosopher to aim: namely, the
greatest possible quantity of human happiness. On being made acquainted
with reveries such as these, through the means of the press, we are
inclined to doubt the justice of his encomium on the art of printing,
since which discovery, he tells us, superstition has been much lessened
by the reformation of religion; and necromancy, astrology, chiromancy,
witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society;
though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to
believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism, and of metallic tractors.
What then is to be said of the prodigies of spontaneous vitality? To a
system which removes the Author of all so far from our contemplation, we
might well prefer the faith of
--the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.
The father of English poetry, who well knew what qualities and habits
might with most probability be assigned to men of different professions,
has made it a trait in the character of his Doctour of Phisike, that
His study was but little in the Bible.
Though there are illustrious examples of the contrary, yet it may
sometimes be with the physician as Shakspeare said of himself, when
complaining of the influence which the business of a player had on his
mind, that
--his nature is subdued
To that it works in.
A propensity to materialism had not, however, so subdued the mind of
Darwin, as to prevent him from acknowledging the existence of what he
terms the Great Cause of Causes, Parent of Parents, Ens Entium. Nay, he
went the length of maintaining, that his doctrine of spontaneous
vitality was not inconsistent with Scripture.
But whatever may be thought of his creed, it must be recorded of him
that he discharged some of the best duties of religion in a manner that
would have become its most zealous professors. He was bountiful to the
poor, and hospitable to his equals. To the inferior clergy, when he
resided at Lichfield, he gave his advice unfeed, and he attended
diligently to the health of those who were unable to requite him.
Johnson is said, when he visited his native city, to have shunned the
society of Darwin: Cowper, who certainly was as firm a believer as
Johnson, thought it no disparagement to his orthodoxy, to address some
complimentary verses to him on the publication of his Botanic Garden.
This poem ought not to be considered more than as a capriccio, or sport
of the fancy, on which he has expended much labour to little purpose. It
does not pretend to anything like correctness of design, or continuity
of action. It is like a picture of Breughel's, where every thing is
highly coloured, and every thing out of order. In the first part, called
the Economy of Vegetation, the Goddess of Botany appears with her
attendants, the Powers of the Four Elements, for no other purpose than
to describe to them their several functions in carrying on the
operations of nature. In the second, which has no necessary connection
with the first, the Botanic Muse describes the Loves of the Plants. Here
the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger
of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a
dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is
done throughout. The second part has been charged with an immoral
tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a
burlesque upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at
its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader,
not in the pages of the poet. For these amours, he might have found a
better motto than that which he has prefixed from Claudian, in the
following stanza of Marini.
Ne' fior ne' fiori istessi Amor ha loco,
Ama il giglio il ligustro e l'amaranto,
E Narciso e Giacinto, Ajace e Croco,
E con la bella Clitia il vago Acanto;
Arde la Rosa di vermiglio foco,
L'odor sospiro e la rugiada e pianto:
Ride la Calta, e pallida e essangue
Vinta d'amor la violetta langue.
_Adone_, Canto 6.
He was apt to confound the odd with the grotesque, and to mistake the
absurd for the fanciful. By an excellent landscape-painter now living, I
was told that Darwin proposed as a subject for his pencil, a shower, in
which there should be represented a red-breast holding up an expanded
umbrella in its claws.
An Italian critic, following a division made by Plotinus, has
distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical,
the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who
are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second,
such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward
appearances of real or fanciful objects; and in the third, those who
penetrate to the qualities of things, draw out their hidden beauties,
and separate what is really and truly fair from that which has only its
exterior semblance. Among the second of these, Darwin might claim for
himself no mean station. It was, indeed, a notion he had taken up, that
as the ideas derived from visible objects (to use his own words) are
more distinct than those derived from any other source, the words
expressive of those ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part
of poetic language. So entirely was he engrossed by this persuasion, as,
too frequently, to forget that the admirers of poetry have not only eyes
but ears and hearts also; and that therefore harmony and pathos are
required of the poet, no less than a faithful delineation of visible
objects.
Yet there is something in his versification also that may be considered
as his own. His numbers have less resemblance to Pope's, than Pope's to
those of Dryden. Whether the novelty be such as to reflect much credit
on the inventor, is another question. His secret, was, I think, to take
those lines in Pope which seemed to him the most diligently elaborated,
and to model his own upon them. But with those forms of verse which he
borrowed more particularly from Pope, in which one part is equally
balanced by the other, and of which each is complete in itself without
reference to those which precede or follow it, he has mingled one or two
others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely
rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of
Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that
the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the
beginning of a trochee in the third foot.
And showers | th[)e] st[=i]ll | sn[=o]w fr[)o]m | his hoary urns.
_Darwin, Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. 2, 28.
Or dart | th[)e] r[=e]d | fl[=a]sh thr[)o]ugh | the circling band.
_Ibid_. 361.
Or rests | h[)e]r fa[=i]r | ch[=e]ek [)o]n | his curled brows.
_Ibid_. c. 2, 252.
Deserve | [)a] sw[=e]et | l[=o]ok fr[)o]m | Demetrius' eye.
_Shakspeare, Mid. N. D._
Infect | th[)e] so[=u]nd | p[=i]ne [)a]nd | divert his grain.
_Shakespeare, Tempest._
Which on | thy s[=o]ft | ch[=e]ek f[)o]r | complexion dwells.
_Shakspeare, Sonnet_ 99.
To lay | th[)e]ir j[=u]st | h[=a]nds [)o]n | the golden key.
_Milton, Comus_.
Or where they make the end of an iambic in the first, and the beginning
of a spondee in the second foot, as
Th[)e] w[=a]n | st[=a]rs gl[=i]m|mering through its silver train.
_Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. I, 135.
Th[)e] br[=i]ght | dr[=o]ps r[=o]l|ling from her lifted arms.
_Ibid_. c. 2, 59.
Th[)e] p[=a]le | l[=a]mp gl[=i]m|mering through the sculptur'd ice.
_Ibid_. 134.
H[)e]r fa[=i]r | ch[=e]ek pr[=e]ss'd | upon her lily hand.
_Temple of Nature_, c. I, 436.
Th[)e] fo[=u]l | b[=o]ar's c[=o]n|quest on her fair delight.
_Shakspeare, Venus and Adonis_, 1030.
Th[)e] r[=e]d | bl[=o]od r[=o]ck'd | to show the painter's strife.
_Ibid._ _Rape of Lucrece_, 1377.
There is so little complexity in the construction of his sentences,
that they may generally be reduced to a few of the first and simplest
rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the
verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following
verses from the Temple of Nature:
On rapid feet o'er hills, and plains, and rocks,
Speed the sacred leveret and rapacious fox;
On rapid pinions cleave the fields above,
The hawk descending, and escaping dove;
With nicer nostril track the tainted ground,
The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound;
Converge reflected light with nicer eye,
The midnight owl, and microscopic fly;
With finer ear pursue their nightly course,
The listening lion, and the alarmed horse.
C. 3, 93.
Sometimes he alternates the forms; as
In Eden's groves, the cradle of the world,
Bloom'd a fair tree with mystic flowers unfurl'd;
On bending branches, as aloft it sprung,
Forbid to taste, the fruit of knowledge hung;
Flow'd with sweet innocence the tranquil hours,
And love and beauty warm'd the blissful bowers.
_Ibid._ 449.
The last line or the middle of the last line in almost every sentence
throughout his poems, begins with a conjunction affirmative or negative,
_and_, or _nor_; and this last line is often so weak, that it breaks
down under the rest. Thus in this very pretty impression, as it may
almost be called, of an ancient gem;
So playful Love on Ida's flowery sides
With ribbon-rein the indignant lion guides;
Pleased on his brindled back the lyre he rings,
And shakes delirious rapture from the strings;
Slow as the pausing monarch stalks along,
Sheathes his retractile claws, and drinks the song.
Soft nymphs on timid step the triumph view,
And listening fauns with beating hoofs pursue;
With pointed ears the alarmed forest starts,
And love and music soften savage hearts.
_Botanic Garden_, c. 4. 252.
And in an exceedingly happy description of what is termed the
picturesque:
The rush-thatch'd cottage on the purple moor,
Where ruddy children frolic round the door,
The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak,
The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke,
The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare
Through the long tissue of his hoary hair,
As with quick foot he climbs some ruin'd wall,
And crops the ivy which prevents its fall,
With rural charms the tranquil mind delight,
And form a picture to the admiring sight.
_Temple of Nature_, c. 3, 248.
And in his lines on the Eagle, from another gem: