Per Contra
“‘THE evil that men do lives after them” {239a} is happily not so true as
that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones,
and to no one does this correction of Shakespeare’s unwonted spleen apply
more fully than to Mr. Darwin. Indeed it was somewhat thus that we
treated his books even while he was alive; the good, descent, remained
with us, while the ill, the deification of luck, was forgotten as soon as
we put down his work. Let me now, therefore, as far as possible, quit
the ungrateful task of dwelling on the defects of Mr. Darwin’s work and
character, for the more pleasant one of insisting upon their better side,
and of explaining how he came to be betrayed into publishing the “Origin
of Species” without reference to the works of his predecessors.
In the outset I would urge that it is not by any single book that Mr.
Darwin should be judged. I do not believe that any one of the three
principal works on which his reputation is founded will maintain with the
next generation the place it has acquired with ourselves; nevertheless,
if asked to say who was the man of our own times whose work had produced
the most important, and, on the whole, beneficial effect, I should
perhaps wrongly, but still both instinctively and on reflection, name him
to whom I have, unfortunately, found myself in more bitter opposition
than to any other in the whole course of my life. I refer, of course, to
Mr. Darwin.
His claim upon us lies not so much in what is actually found within the
four corners of any one of his books, as in the fact of his having
written them at all—in the fact of his having brought out one after
another, with descent always for its keynote, until the lesson was
learned too thoroughly to make it at all likely that it will be
forgotten. Mr. Darwin wanted to move his generation, and had the
penetration to see that this is not done by saying a thing once for all
and leaving it. It almost seems as though it matters less what a man
says than the number of times he repeats it, in a more or less varied
form. It was here the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” made his most
serious mistake. He relied on new editions, and no one pays much
attention to new editions—the mark a book makes is almost always made by
its first edition. If, instead of bringing out a series of amended
editions during the fifteen years’ law which Mr. Darwin gave him, Mr.
Chambers had followed up the “Vestiges” with new book upon new book, he
would have learned much more, and, by consequence, not have been snuffed
out so easily once for all as he was in 1859 when the “Origin of Species”
appeared.
The tenacity of purpose which appears to have been one of Mr. Darwin’s
most remarkable characteristics was visible even in his outward
appearance. He always reminded me of Raffaelle’s portrait of Pope Julius
the Second, which, indeed, would almost do for a portrait of Mr. Darwin
himself. I imagine that these two men, widely as the sphere of their
action differed, must have been like each other in more respects than
looks alone. Each, certainly, had a hand of iron; whether Pope Julius
wore a velvet glove or no, I do not know; I rather think not, for, if I
remember rightly, he boxed Michael Angelo’s ears for giving him a saucy
answer. We cannot fancy Mr. Darwin boxing any one’s ears; indeed there
can be no doubt he wore a very thick velvet glove, but the hand
underneath it was none the less of iron. It was to his tenacity of
purpose, doubtless, that his success was mainly due; but for this he must
inevitably have fallen before the many inducements to desist from the
pursuit of his main object, which beset him in the shape of ill health,
advancing years, ample private means, large demands upon his time, and a
reputation already great enough to satisfy the ambition of any ordinary
man.
I do not gather from those who remember Mr. Darwin as a boy, and as a
young man, that he gave early signs of being likely to achieve greatness;
nor, as it seems to me, is there any sign of unusual intellectual power
to be detected in his earliest book. Opening this “almost” at random I
read—“Earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any
country. If, for instance, beneath England the now inert subterraneous
forces should exert those powers which most assuredly in former
geological ages they have exerted, how completely would the entire
condition of the country be changed! What would become of the lofty
houses, thickly-packed cities, great manufacturies (_sic_), the beautiful
public and private edifices? If the new period of disturbance were to
commence by some great earthquake in the dead of night, how terrific
would be the carnage! England would be at once bankrupt; all papers,
records, and accounts would from that moment be lost. Government being
unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the
hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled. In every large town
famine would be proclaimed, pestilence and death following in its train.”
{240a} Great allowance should be made for a first work, and I admit that
much interesting matter is found in Mr. Darwin’s journal; still, it was
hardly to be expected that the writer who at the age of thirty-three
could publish the foregoing passage should twenty years later achieve the
reputation of being the profoundest philosopher of his time.
I have not sufficient technical knowledge to enable me to speak
certainly, but I question his having been the great observer and master
of experiment which he is generally believed to have been. His accuracy
was, I imagine, generally to be relied upon as long as accuracy did not
come into conflict with his interests as a leader in the scientific
world; when these were at stake he was not to be trusted for a moment.
Unfortunately they were directly or indirectly at stake more often than
one could wish. His book on the action of worms, however, was shown by
Professor Paley and other writers {242a} to contain many serious errors
and omissions, though it involved no personal question; but I imagine him
to have been more or less _hébété_ when he wrote this book. On the whole
I should doubt his having been a better observer of nature than nine
country gentlemen out of ten who have a taste for natural history.
Presumptuous as I am aware it must appear to say so, I am unable to see
more than average intellectual power even in Mr. Darwin’s later books.
His great contribution to science is supposed to have been the theory of
natural selection, but enough has been said to show that this, if
understood as he ought to have meant it to be understood, cannot be rated
highly as an intellectual achievement. His other most important
contribution was his provisional theory of pan-genesis, which is admitted
on all hands to have been a failure. Though, however, it is not likely
that posterity will consider him as a man of transcendent intellectual
power, he must be admitted to have been richly endowed with a much more
valuable quality than either originality or literary power—I mean with
_savoir faire_. The cards he held—and, on the whole, his hand was a good
one—he played with judgment; and though not one of those who would have
achieved greatness under any circumstances, he nevertheless did achieve
greatness of no mean order. Greatness, indeed, of the highest kind—that
of one who is without fear and without reproach—will not ultimately be
allowed him, but greatness of a rare kind can only be denied him by those
whose judgment is perverted by temper or personal ill-will. He found the
world believing in fixity of species, and left it believing—in spite of
his own doctrine—in descent with modification.
I have said on an earlier page that Mr. Darwin was heir to a discredited
truth, and left behind him an accredited fallacy. This is true as
regards men of science and cultured classes who understood his
distinctive feature, or thought they did, and so long as Mr. Darwin lived
accepted it with very rare exceptions; but it is not true as regards the
unreading, unreflecting public, who seized the salient point of descent
with modification only, and troubled themselves little about the
distinctive feature. It would almost seem as if Mr. Darwin had reversed
the usual practice of philosophers and given his esoteric doctrine to the
world, while reserving the exoteric for his most intimate and faithful
adherents. This, however, is a detail; the main fact is, that Mr. Darwin
brought us all round to evolution. True, it was Mr. Darwin backed by the
_Times_ and the other most influential organs of science and culture, but
it was one of Mr. Darwin’s great merits to have developed and organised
this backing, as part of the work which he knew was essential if so great
a revolution was to be effected.
This is an exceedingly difficult and delicate thing to do. If people
think they need only write striking and well-considered books, and that
then the _Times_ will immediately set to work to call attention to them,
I should advise them not to be too hasty in basing action upon this
hypothesis. I should advise them to be even less hasty in basing it upon
the assumption that to secure a powerful literary backing is a matter
within the compass of any one who chooses to undertake it. No one who
has not a strong social position should ever advance a new theory, unless
a life of hard fighting is part of what he lays himself out for. It was
one of Mr. Darwin’s great merits that he had a strong social position,
and had the good sense to know how to profit by it. The magnificent feat
which he eventually achieved was unhappily tarnished by much that
detracts from the splendour that ought to have attended it, but a
magnificent feat it must remain.
Whose work in this imperfect world is not tarred and tarnished by
something that detracts from its ideal character? It is enough that a
man should be the right man in the right place, and this Mr. Darwin
pre-eminently was. If he had been more like the ideal character which
Mr. Allen endeavours to represent him, it is not likely that he would
have been able to do as much, or nearly as much, as he actually did; he
would have been too wide a cross with his generation to produce much
effect upon it. Original thought is much more common than is generally
believed. Most people, if they only knew it, could write a good book or
play, paint a good picture, compose a fine oratorio; but it takes an
unusually able person to get the book well reviewed, persuade a manager
to bring the play out, sell the picture, or compass the performance of
the oratorio; indeed, the more vigorous and original any one of these
things may be, the more difficult will it prove to even bring it before
the notice of the public. The error of most original people is in being
just a trifle too original. It was in his business qualities—and these,
after all, are the most essential to success, that Mr. Darwin showed
himself so superlative. These are not only the most essential to
success, but it is only by blaspheming the world in a way which no good
citizen of the world will do, that we can deny them to be the ones which
should most command our admiration. We are in the world; surely so long
as we are in it we should be of it, and not give ourselves airs as though
we were too good for our generation, and would lay ourselves out to
please any other by preference. Mr. Darwin played for his own
generation, and he got in the very amplest measure the recognition which
he endeavoured, as we all do, to obtain.
His success was, no doubt, in great measure due to the fact that he knew
our little ways, and humoured them; but if he had not had little ways of
his own, he never could have been so much _au fait_ with ours. He knew,
for example, we should be pleased to hear that he had taken his boots off
so as not to disturb his worms when watching them by night, so he told us
of this, and we were delighted. He knew we should like his using the
word “sag,” so he used it, {245a} and we said it was beautiful. True, he
used it wrongly, for he was writing about tesselated pavement, and
builders assure me that “sag” is a word which applies to timber only, but
this is not to the point; the point was, that Mr. Darwin should have used
a word that we did not understand; this showed that he had a vast fund of
knowledge at his command about all sorts of practical details with which
he might have well been unacquainted. We do not deal the same measure to
man and to the lower animals in the matter of intelligence; the less we
understand these last, the less, we say, not we, but they can understand;
whereas the less we can understand a man, the more intelligent we are apt
to think him. No one should neglect by-play of this description; if I
live to be strong enough to carry it through, I mean to play “cambre,”
and I shall spell it “camber.” I wonder Mr. Darwin never abused this
word. Laugh at him, however, as we may for having said “sag,” if he had
not been the kind of man to know the value of these little hits, neither
would he have been the kind of man to persuade us into first tolerating,
and then cordially accepting, descent with modification. There is a
correlation of mental as well as of physical growth, and we could not
probably have had one set of Mr. Darwin’s qualities without the other.
If he had been more faultless, he might have written better books, but we
should have listened worse. A book’s prosperity is like a jest’s—in the
ear of him that hears it.
Mr. Spencer would not—at least one cannot think he would—have been able
to effect the revolution which will henceforth doubtless be connected
with Mr. Darwin’s name. He had been insisting on evolution for some
years before the “Origin of Species” came out, but he might as well have
preached to the winds, for all the visible effect that had been produced.
On the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s book the effect was instantaneous; it
was like the change in the condition of a patient when the right medicine
has been hit on after all sorts of things have been tried and failed.
Granted that it was comparatively easy for Mr. Darwin, as having been
born into the household of one of the prophets of evolution, to arrive at
conclusions about the fixity of species which, if not so born, he might
never have reached at all; this does not make it any easier for him to
have got others to agree with him. Any one, again, may have money left
him, or run up against it, or have it run up against him, as it does
against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not
lose it. Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an
end of everything. Did the world give much heed to or believe in
evolution before Mr. Darwin’s time? Certainly not. Did we begin to
attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write? Certainly
yes. Did we ere long go over _en masse_? Assuredly. If, as I said in
“Life and Habit,” any one asks who taught the world to believe in
evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin.
And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous does its
success become. It seems as if some organisms can do anything with
anything. Beethoven picked his teeth with the snuffers, and seems to
have picked them sufficiently to his satisfaction. So Mr. Darwin with
one of the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, tersest
writer could have done. Strange, that such a master of cunning (in the
sense of my title) should have been the apostle of luck, and one so
terribly unlucky as Lamarck, of cunning, but such is the irony of nature.
Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin
who said, “That fruit is ripe,” and shook it into his lap.
With this Mr. Darwin’s best friends ought to be content; his admirers are
not well advised in representing him as endowed with all sorts of
qualities which he was very far from possessing. Thus it is pretended
that he was one of those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas,
ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our
knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most
cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can
be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at
once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was “ever ready,” &c. So the
Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people’s feet on some one of the
festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this
yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in the
habit of washing poor people’s feet. I can understand Mr. Darwin’s not
having taken any public notice, for example, of “Life and Habit,” for
though I did not attack him in force in that book, it was abundantly
clear that an attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be pardoned
for not doing anything to advertise the works of his opponents; but there
is no excuse for his never having referred to Professor Hering’s work
either in “Nature,” when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention
to it (July 13, 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books. If his
attitude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been
the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come
forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering’s theory, but still
as helping it to obtain a hearing.
His not having done so is of a piece with his silence about Buffon,
Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck in the early editions of the “Origin of
Species,” and with the meagre reference to them which is alone found in
the later ones. It is of a piece also with the silence which Mr. Darwin
invariably maintained when he saw his position irretrievably damaged, as,
for example, by Mr. Spencer’s objection already referred to, and by the
late Professor Fleeming Jenkin in the _North British Review_ (June 1867).
Science, after all, should form a kingdom which is more or less not of
this world. The ideal scientist should know neither self nor friend nor
foe—he should be able to hob-nob with those whom he most vehemently
attacks, and to fly at the scientific throat of those to whom he is
personally most attached; he should be neither grateful for a favourable
review nor displeased at a hostile one; his literary and scientific life
should be something as far apart as possible from his social; it is thus,
at least, alone that any one will be able to keep his eye single for
facts, and their legitimate inferences. We have seen Professor Mivart
lately taken to task by Mr. Romanes for having said {248a} that Mr.
Darwin was singularly sensitive to criticism, and made it impossible for
Professor Mivart to continue friendly personal relations with him after
he had ventured to maintain his own opinion. I see no reason to question
Professor Mivart’s accuracy, and find what he has said to agree alike
with my own personal experience of Mr. Darwin, and with all the light
that his works throw upon his character.
The most substantial apology that can be made for his attempt to claim
the theory of descent with modification is to be found in the practice of
Lamarck, Mr. Patrick Matthew, the author of the “Vestiges of Creation,”
and Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, again, in the total absence of complaint
which this practice met with. If Lamarck might write the “Philosophie
Zoologique” without, so far as I remember, one word of reference to
Buffon, and without being complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write
the “Origin of Species” without more than a passing allusion to Lamarck?
Mr. Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a _résumé_
of the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck,
Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon. I have not the original edition of the
“Vestiges of Creation” before me, but feel sure I am justified in saying
that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that sprang full
armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself. This at least is how it
was received by the public; and, however violent the opposition it met
with, I cannot find that its author was blamed for not having made
adequate mention of Lamarck. When Mr. Spencer wrote his first essay on
evolution in the _Leader_ (March 20, 1852) he did indeed begin his
argument, “Those who cavalierly reject the doctrine of Lamarck,” &c., so
that his essay purports to be written in support of Lamarck; but when he
republished his article in 1858, the reference to Lamarck was cut out.
I make no doubt that it was the bad example set him by the writers named
in the preceding paragraph which betrayed Mr. Darwin into doing as they
did, but being more conscientious than they, he could not bring himself
to do it without having satisfied himself that he had got hold of a more
or less distinctive feature, and this, of course, made matters worse.
The distinctive feature was not due to any deep-laid plan for
pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as part of a scheme of
materialistic philosophy, though it has since been made to play an
important part in the attempt to further this; Mr. Darwin was perfectly
innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably,
care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct with mind or
no—what he did care about was carrying off the palm in the matter of
descent with modification, and the distinctive feature was an adjunct
with which his nervous, sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him
to dispense.
And why, it may be asked, should not the palm be given to Mr. Darwin if
he wanted it, and was at so much pains to get it? Why, if science is a
kingdom not of this world, make so much fuss about settling who is
entitled to what? At best such questions are of a sorry personal nature,
that can have little bearing upon facts, and it is these that alone
should concern us. The answer is, that if the question is so merely
personal and unimportant, Mr. Darwin may as well yield as Buffon, Erasmus
Darwin, and Lamarck; Mr. Darwin’s admirers find no difficulty in
appreciating the importance of a personal element as far as he is
concerned; let them not wonder, then, if others, while anxious to give
him the laurels to which he is entitled, are somewhat indignant at the
attempt to crown him with leaves that have been filched from the brows of
the great dead who went before him. _Palmam qui meruit ferat_. The
instinct which tells us that no man in the scientific or literary world
should claim more than his due is an old and, I imagine, a wholesome one,
and if a scientific self-denying ordinance is demanded, we may reply with
justice, _Que messieurs les Charles-Darwinies commencent_. Mr. Darwin
will have a crown sufficient for any ordinary brow remaining in the
achievement of having done more than any other writer, living or dead, to
popularise evolution. This much may be ungrudgingly conceded to him, but
more than this those who have his scientific position most at heart will
be well advised if they cease henceforth to demand.