by Tom Wolfe
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity of gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”36
One faint cryptic hint too many, old chap! On November 19, five days before publication, an anonymous reviewer in the prestigious journal Athenaeum eviscerated the book and fried the entrails. A single sentence in the piece leaped out at Darwin: “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?” A man! says his nameless assailant! At the time virtually all book reviews were unsigned, the theory being that anonymity gave the reviewer the freedom to be frank. But it wasn’t supposed to give him carte blanche to make vicious distortions! This one had gone straight to that short obiter dictum two pages from the end and made it seem like the whole book is about man thrashing and splashing and gibbering away in some primordial muddy puddle somewhere. The message was: Don’t risk your sanity trying to read it! Leave that to the philosophers and divines who enjoy dog-paddling around in such slop.
“If a monkey has become a man!”…and Darwin thought he had so cleverly kept man hidden in the wings…So much for that delusion. Right away this bastard spots man peeking out from behind a curtain. This bastard—Darwin was never one to resort to off-color language, but then no one had ever hurt and humiliated him and dashed his hopes this thoroughly, either. The first review!
On November 21, 1859, Hooker writes Darwin to say that he and Lyell think the asinine anonymous Athenaeum reviewer must be a geologist named Samuel Pickworth Woodward. Forever after, Woodward, hopelessly baffled, flinched whenever he found himself in the same room with Darwin. Darwin cut him dead every time or else gave him an iceberg. One-eighth of an iceberg’s mass sticks up above the frigid surface with a tip of thirty-three-degree civility. The other seven-eighths is hidden under water…a gigantic ice boulder of frozen loathing and resentment, hard as a rock. In fact, the nameless hugger-mugger was another naturalist entirely, an Anglican priest named John Leifchild.
The Athenaeum blast so tenderized Darwin that he failed to understand what was happening when a regular storm of reviews and commentaries erupted during December and the first six months of 1860. Even mildly negative reviews hit him like body blows. The fierce ones cut him clear through to the gizzard. The Edinburgh Review ridiculed not only his theory but also his prose style, his scientific ignorance, his scholarly incompetence, all of it lazily afloat in his shallow brain. One had only to compare Darwin, the piece went on, with someone like, say, Britain’s preeminent naturalist and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Owen.37 Now, there we’re talking about a deep thinker, a real scientist: Richard Owen, Richard Owen, Richard Owen. Owen’s name kept coming up. Darwin went over the review repeatedly. He couldn’t believe what he was looking at: as usual, it was unsigned…but the man’s finicky rhetoric and would-be-cosmopolitan displays of how much French he knew gave the game away. It was his longtime friend-he-had-always-assumed…Richard Owen. He never spoke to Owen again.
By then he was in such a wary, defensive state of mind that even the positive reviews struck him as tepid or tentative—with one exception: an absolute rave in the very voice of the British upper orders, the London Times. The Times ran only one or two book reviews per month. Like the others, this review was published anonymously. But Darwin soon learned it was written by one of his younger adherents, the anatomist Thomas Huxley.38 In a piece of dumb luck, Huxley had happened to run into the writer the Times had assigned to do the review. The man was moaning that he wasn’t even remotely familiar with the subject. Huxley came up with the bright idea of writing the piece for him—anonymously, needless to say. Darwin wound up with an astounding boost in the mighty Times. Huxley became the best public relations wizard any scientist had ever had.
Huxley’s background was similar to Alfred Wallace’s, although their personalities could scarcely have been more different. Huxley’s father was an up-against-it mathematics teacher who couldn’t pay for his son’s education beyond two years of grade school. The boy became a scientific prodigy all the same, a largely self-taught anatomist. At nineteen he discovered an internal component of hair no biologist had ever dreamed existed. By age twenty he had the pleasure of seeing it referred to in scientific journals as “Huxley’s sheath.” It was the first of a series of anatomical discoveries he would make. He was only twenty-five when he was elected a member of the Royal Society.
The boy wonder was such a hot number in scientific circles that Darwin courted him as an acolyte, and the boy came through for him in a big way. He wrote five long, enthusiastic reviews of The Origin of Species in major journals in the space of four months, the two longest conveniently anonymous, and that was the least of it.i In person he was a good-enough-looking man, but with a bulldog’s build, a bulldog’s neck, and a bulldog’s prognathous jaw when he was angry, which was often, since he loved a good fight. He was aware of all that and enjoyed being called “Darwin’s bulldog.” In June of 1860, he starred in a much-written-about British Association for the Advancement of Science debate over Evolution against the Church of England’s most renowned public speaker, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. He went on to create the X Club, a group of nine prominent naturalists, including Hooker, who met every month at some restaurant or a club and set about—very successfully—stacking influential university science faculties with Darwinists. The X Clubbers had a big hand in creating the pro-Darwinist journal Nature (which thrives to this day).39 They attacked every Darwin doubter the moment he dared raise his voice. That mode of intimidation only intensified over time, leading to what is still known today as “the Neo-Darwinist Inquisition.”40
Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—he never did—but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was. No one dared flaunt such a loaded term, of course. Huxley said he was not an atheist but an agnostic. He made up the word. An agnostic, he said, was the opposite of a gnostic.41 Gnostics held an early Christian and even pre-Christian belief that people should separate knowledge of the material world from the only true knowledge: the spiritual. An agnostic like him wasn’t even sure there was a God. This newest Huxleyism entered the language the way “Huxley’s sheath” had.
Huxley’s great PR campaign happened to coincide with two sweeping mid-nineteenth-century developments in western Europe—Britain, especially—creating, as the phrase goes, a perfect storm. One was the sudden proliferation of magazines and newspapers, whipping up a competition not only for hard news but also for stories of every sort of social and intellectual trend…such as the Theory of Evolution. The second was what the German sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” Well-educated, would-be-sophisticated people all over Europe had begun to reject the magical, miraculous, superstitious, logically implausible doctrines of religion, such as the Virgin Birth of Christ, the Creation (of the world in seven days), Christ’s Resurrection, the power of prayer, the omnipotence of God, and a thousand other notions that were irrational by their very nature. Three decades earlier, Coleridge had concluded that the influence of the clergy was fading so rapidly that he revived the by-now-obsolete term “clerisy.” The clerisy, he said, were the secular thinkers who had replaced the clergy here in the nineteenth century…in matters spiritual as well as philosophical.j Near the end of the century, while the Dreyfus case raged in France, the country’s off-and-on president, Clemenceau, would call them (with a nod toward Anatole France and Émile Zola) “the intellectuals,” and that was the name that stuck, in England as well as France.
The Theory of Evolution eliminated all such mystification. At the higher altitudes of society, as well as in academia, people began to judge one another socially according to their belief, or not, in Darwin’s great discovery. Practically all Church of England clergymen were well educated and well connected soc
ially, and by 1859 the demystification of the world had extinguished whatever fire and brimstone they might have had left. The sheerly social lure of the theory, the status urge to be fashionable, was too much for them. Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below. There were plenty of clerical attacks on The Origin of Species, but they were so civil and rhetorically well mannered that the new agnostics didn’t cringe in fear of an angry God, much less a vengeful one. The theory and the atheistic bias that came with it spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even though the great mass of the population kept on mooing and made sure America remained the most religious country on earth outside of the nations of Islam (and it remains so today).
Only in France was Darwin written off as just another little man with a big theory. It took three years for The Origin of Species to find a French publisher. France had gone through its own Evolution debate—the French term was “transformism”—thirty years earlier, mainly thanks to Lamarck’s influence. But the leading French spokesman for transformism, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, made the mistake of taking on Georges Cuvier in debate. Cuvier, a zoologist, paleontologist, anatomist, politician, and aristocrat, was like Huxley in his aggressiveness. But he was classier, so to speak. Baron Cuvier was a fashion plate and a speaker who could switch from soft-voiced, lacerating wit to overpowering thunder in a blink. He found the transformist concept of gradual Evolution ludicrous. The much simpler truth was that species were constantly dying out and new ones were taking their place. French naturalists so feared Cuvier’s brilliant fury that the Theory of Evolution—like the name Charles Darwin and the ism-magnifying term “Darwinism”—seldom saw print in France…and seldom does, to this day.
In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: “God is dead.” Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the “doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal” will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods”—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in “wars such as never have been fought before.” If we take one generation to be thirty years, that would have meant by 1904. In fact, the First World War broke out in 1914. This latter-day barbarism, he went on to say, will in the twenty-first century lead to something worse than the great wars: the total eclipse of all values.42
It was not so much the book The Origin of Species as the talk about it that created such a stir. The book never came close to becoming a bestseller. Darwin was an engaging writer, but the science was too hard to comprehend. The first printing was only 1,250 copies.k Robert Chambers, still anonymous, reissued Vestiges to take advantage of the excitement…and outsold The Origin of Species by four or five to one. But Darwin’s theory came up with dizzying frequency in newspaper and magazine articles and cartoons—the cartoonists delighted in depicting Darwin with an ape’s body—in public debates high (Huxley versus Wilberforce) and low, in doggerel, and, of course, in sermons. No new idea had ever generated so much controversy, gossip, and befuddlement or so many heavy-laden books. By 1863 Darwin’s own collection of clippings contained 347 reviews and 1,571 commentaries plus 336 pieces that were never sorted out by category.43
It turned out that Leifchild, the unknown Athenaeum reviewer who had jumped the gun, was merely the first to assume that Darwin’s real subject was the evolution of man—as, of course, it was. Even Darwin’s closest allies, Huxley and Lyell, stopped pretending otherwise. In February of 1863, Lyell, who had for so long doubted Evolution, cast his lot with Darwin in a book called The Antiquity of Man. The full title was The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. It obliterated the religious distinction between man (made in God’s own image) and animal. A few weeks later Huxley published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. Here was Huxley at his snarling, pugnacious best. He came right out and asserted, in different words, precisely what Nietzsche would be saying eleven years later: there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal. Man descended from animals, and only fools and too-far-gone clergymen could deny it.
It gradually dawned on Darwin that the attacks by Leifchild in the Athenaeum and Owen in the Edinburgh Review had been godsends. As Sigmund Freud would put it thirty-five years later in similar circumstances, “Many enemies, much honor.” Darwin’s critics had turned him into a controversial figure, and a very famous one. For years his friends had been fond of him in a good-old-Charlie fashion. But their demeanor and the very expressions on their faces had changed. Suddenly good old Charlie had become a celebrity. No matter what side of the controversy people came down on, no matter how well they knew him, their involuntary smiles in his presence radiated a certain…mousy awe. And oh, yes, Celebrated Old Charlie picked that up every time. Not even his longtime friendly mentor, elder, protector, and superior when it came to social and intellectual status and public recognition, namely, Lyell—not even Lyell could hold back a certain deference. Without a word, both were aware that their rankings had reversed on every score. Darwin was famous. Life was delightful—
—until his next jolt.
Max Müller had been born and educated (at Leipzig University) in Germany but for years had been a professor of modern languages at Oxford and by now, 1861, was the best-known and most distinguished linguist in Britain. He gave two highly publicized lectures at the Royal Institution that year in which he said, apropos of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, “Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.”44 During the dustup that ensued, he added: “The Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.”45
In The Origin of Species, Darwin had dealt only with the Evolution of animals. But his real dream was of being the genius who showed the world that man was just an animal himself, evolved from other animals—and that his mighty mental abilities had evolved the same way. And now, just two years after its publication, an already certified genius, Max Müller, was saying man possessed a supreme power—language—that no animal had ever possessed or ever would. They might as well have come from different planets—man, with his power of speech…and animals, with nothing even remotely comparable.
And the accurséd Max Müller just wouldn’t let up. He seldom mentioned Darwin by name, but the world knew immediately who the target of his mockery was.l Darwin’s notion that language had somehow evolved from imitation of animal sounds…Müller called that the bow-wow theory. The notion that speech began with instinctive cries such as “Ouch!” for pain and “Oh!” for surprise…Müller called that the pooh-pooh theory. The notion that words…“whisper,” “wind,” “crack,” “hack,” “belch,” and “squash”…came from the sounds things made… Müller called that the ding-dong theory. Many Darwinists, such as the highly regarded Sir Richard Paget and George Romanes, didn’t seem to realize that Müller was merely making fun of their Prophet with all this baby-talk terminology. So they pitched in and amplified Müller’s laugh in their own long faces. Soon there was the mama theory, referring to the coos and other nonverbal cues mothers use with infants, later known as “motherese”…the tata theory, later known as the “gestural theory,” the notion that humans first communicated via hand signals and body language and—somehow—began to substitute the voice for all the motions…plus the yo-he-ho theory…the sing-song theory…the hey, you theory…there was no end to it…and no end to Max Müller’s delight in the Darwinists’ wooden noggins.
Soon the biggest butt of Müller’s jokes, Darwin himself, with his family and household staff in tow, retreated to the spa, this time in Malvern, for a protracted stay. He was fifty-f
our. When he emerged two years later, he was an old man, the old man most commonly portrayed in photographs. His dome had gone bald…his hair had turned gray…and he had cultivated a so-called philosopher’s beard of the sort that had been the philosopher’s status symbol since the days of Roman glory. Darwin was forever pictured sitting slightly slumped in an easy chair…his philosopher’s beard lying on his chest all the way from his jaws to his sternum…like a big old hairy gray bib.
In the meantime, Wallace knew nothing about this entire set-to. He had remained in the Malay Archipelago, flycatching for all he was worth. He didn’t return to England until 1862, when Max Müller’s lectures were published. From the very first, he bowed to make way for Darwin. He referred to It as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. He even went so far as to say it was a good thing the theory hadn’t been attributed to somebody like himself, Alfred Wallace. It might never have been noticed, whereas it couldn’t be ignored once it carried the imprimatur of a Gentleman like Mr. Darwin.m That may have sounded like a queasy form of groveling, but in fact he was absolutely correct.