by A. N. Wilson
A few speakers had their say, and Owen then rose to describe some of the facts which he considered useful to those members of the public who wanted to come to terms with Darwin’s theory. He proceeded to repeat his views on the vast differences between the human brain and that of the gorilla. This ‘sentiment’ was more than enough to inflame the ‘intellect’ of Huxley – or perhaps the other way around. Huxley bounced to his feet to tell the audience that there was no time to explain to them the many similarities between the brains of apes and people; but he wished to say that Owen’s position was based on fear that humanity might lose its privileged place among the earth’s species. It is difficult for us, at this distance of time, not to see that this was true, and that this was what underlay the second and much more explosive public airing of the Darwinian question during that Oxford meeting. This was the Saturday session of Section D – that is, the section of science which contained zoology, botany and physiology.
Huxley was, at this stage of the meeting, so bored by the proceedings that he had decided not to attend the Saturday meeting, intending to leave Oxford for Reading, where his wife’s brother-in-law had a house. He was persuaded to stay by, of all people, Robert Chambers. It really did seem, as the audience gathered for Saturday’s session, as if all the living figures who had played an important role in Darwin’s intellectual journey had gathered at the newly built Natural History Museum in South Parks Road.
The building itself was a parable. The Honour School of Natural Science had started in Oxford only in 1849. The Natural History Museum was seen as the home of Oxford science, and of Oxford’s approach to science. The architects, Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, made something which was midway between a North German Rathaus and the aisle of a Gothic cathedral temporarily set aside for the exhibition, in glass cases, of skeletons, fossils and other natural history specimens. According to John Ruskin’s friend Henry Acland, University Reader in Anatomy, Gothic was the appropriate style for science – by contrast with the fairly recent Cambridge Museum, which was classical. Richard Cresswell, one of the founder members of the Ashmolean Society, saw natural science as ‘a kind of religious contemplation’. Cresswell, a clergyman like so many dons, saw the collection as a celebration of the wonders of God’s creation.6
It was in this cathedral of contemplative science that the great debate was to take place. It had been finished only months earlier. Each day, the architects would turn up with plants borrowed from the Botanic Gardens so that stone-carvers could copy their likeness in the capitals of the columns. The wrought-iron roof was similarly decorated with motifs from nature, finished by the firm of Skidmore, of Coventry. In the spandrels could be seen interwoven branches, with fruits of lime, chestnut, walnut, sycamore, palm and other exotic trees such as Darwin and Huxley might have seen on their voyages. And there, beneath these reminders of exotic tropical botany, was none other than Admiral FitzRoy himself. Here was Darwin’s old friend and mentor Henslow, who had only a year to live. Here was Owen again. Lyell and Hooker were present. The word had somehow got about that this was to be a momentous meeting. Although Oxford was already deep in the Long Vacation – so the young were not present in any great numbers – here were the local clergy, en masse, with their wives; here was ‘town’ as well as ‘gown’. Long before the meeting was due to start, 700 people were in attendance. The lecture hall was soon filled to capacity, and it was necessary to move the audience to the (as yet unfinished) library.
The meeting began with a talk by John Draper, who had been Professor of Chemistry at the University of the City of New York since 1838. The room became hot. The American was slow-spoken and prolix. Hooker, who was present, felt that he was merely echoing things which had been written, and printed, by the likes of Herbert Spencer and Henry Thomas Buckle. Draper’s theme was ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe, Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr Darwin and Others, that the Progression of Organisms is Determined by Law’.
Draper was a determinist, and a progressivist, like Herbert Spencer. He argued that the progress of civilizations was determined, as was the history of organisms. One of the only sentences recalled by one of the witnesses (Isabel Sidgwick) was, in Draper’s American voice, ‘Air we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?’ Taking the audience through five phases of ancient Greek history, Draper suggested that all civilizations, including that of the Victorians, inexorably followed these patterns, just as plants and birds and mammals are determined, in their development, by the processes of natural selection, as described by Mr Darwin. It is fascinating to note that, on this its very first public airing, Darwinism, which began as a kind of metaphor (nature imitating Malthus), was interpreted as a social metaphor by Draper. Those who gathered in the library in South Parks Road were not discussing who was right, Darwin or Wilberforce, in the matter of whether animals, artificially bred in domestication, can change species. They were not discussing who was right, Darwin or Owen, in the assertion that there was, or wasn’t, proof for the transmutation of one species into another. Instead, they were immediately confronted, in Draper’s elongated, ponderous words, with the question of what Darwinism said about humanity.
When Draper had finished, it was Richard Cresswell who was first on his feet, vehemently denying that you could force an analogy between the history of nations and that of organisms. How could there be any parallel drawn between the intellectual progress of man and the physical development of the lower animals? Then Sir Benjamin Brodie arose – a royal surgeon who had attended upon William IV and the present Queen – simply to deny Darwin. That was what they were there for. Why not take the gloves off and start the fight? Several anti-Darwinians spoke, and Henslow, who was in the chair, asked Huxley if he would respond in Darwin’s defence. Huxley – for the moment – declined. Then Samuel Wilberforce rose. He was a good-looking man, and an experienced public speaker. This was what the crowds had come to hear. Wilberforce gave the audience a rather dry précis of his review of The Origin of Species. He repeated his argument that a comparison between the breeding of hybrids under domestication and of animals in the wild actually disproved, rather than proved, natural selection. The fossil evidence had ‘gaps’ because there was none.
Had the Bishop of Oxford left his argument there, he might well have been deemed the victor in the debate that morning. But having scrutinized Darwin’s inductive methodology for about half an hour, the Bishop could not resist disobeying Henslow’s injunction that speakers should keep the discussion on a scientific footing. Christianity, he stated, offered a nobler view of life than Darwinism. The Bishop shuddered to think of a world where Darwinian evolution would be adopted as a creed. He rejoiced that the ‘greatest names in science’ had already rejected Darwin’s theory, which, he believed, was ‘opposed to the interests of science and of humanity’.
Even now Soapy Sam, in spite of having spoken for too long, could have sat down covered with honour. He had the audience on his side, however, and their excitement went to the Bishop’s head. He could not resist a little quip. He turned to Huxley who was, he patronizingly said, ‘about to demolish me’ and inquired, ‘Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he traced his descent from an ape?’
Huxley, who was sitting beside Sir Benjamin Brodie, murmured, ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.’ Brodie ‘stared at me as if I had lost my senses’. Soapy Sam’s quip was a frivolous response to a serious scientific question. As such, it antagonized some of the audience. It was also – and here it especially cut Huxley to the quick – a snob remark. While the Bishop was merely rebutting the thought that humanity had actually descended from apes, Huxley felt the wounds of social humiliation. Standing among the Oxford professors, he became once more the son of the impoverished school usher, who had only enjoyed minimal formal education until enlisting as a surgeon’s assistant. Not for Huxley the luxury of a college education or a university degree. While Brodie, and Wilberforce, and Acland, and these other learned men looked on
, with their condescending expressions, Huxley was the raw man of the suburbs. The new science was not the metaphorical expression of new politics, exactly speaking; but for those, like Huxley, who had no time for the formularies of theology, the Established Church, with its incomprehensible doctrines and its Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and its hold on the universities, was an embodiment of everything to which a free spirit must instinctively feel itself opposed.
With great restraint, Huxley replied to the Bishop that he was ‘unable to discover either a new fact or a new argument’ in his speech, ‘except indeed the question raised as to my personal predilections in the matter of ancestry’. Only two days before, baiting Owen, Huxley had raised the matter of human kinship with the apes, but on this occasion, for rhetorical effect, he expressed surprise that the Bishop should have brought up such a topic in a serious discussion. ‘If, then, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’7
Henry Fawcett, later Professor of Economics at Cambridge, would say that no one present could ever forget the impression made by Huxley’s riposte. (Fawcett, after the debate, was heard saying in a loud voice that he did not believe the Bishop had even read Darwin. Wilberforce, who was near by, was about to pitch in to defend himself when he saw that Fawcett was blind.)8 The audience, who had roared with amusement at Soapy Sam’s joke, now clapped Huxley. Lady Brewster – wife of Sir David Brewster, the astronomer, and keen ally of Owen – actually fainted, perhaps at Huxley’s impudence, perhaps from sheer excitement.
This was not the end of the drama by any means. No sooner had Huxley resumed his seat and the applause died out than another figure arose. Huxley, by now the self-appointed ‘Bulldog’ of Darwin and Darwinism, was the newest friend of the reclusive sage of Down. But here stood one who had once been his friend and was no more. Hook-nosed, beetle-browed, still with a fine head of wavy brown hair, here at the age of fifty-five stood the tall figure of Rear Admiral (as he was by now) Robert FitzRoy, clutching in his strong capable hand the book which he considered to be imperilled by the Darwinian thesis: the Holy Bible. FitzRoy wanted to put it on record that he regretted ever giving Darwin the chance to sail around the world, thereby beginning the train of thought which undermined the word of God. FitzRoy was a clever man, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and now, in his retirement from the Royal Navy, chief of the meteorological department of the Board of Trade. He was a pioneer of storm warnings for the help of those at sea, and a skilled meteorologist. His speech against Darwin, however, was not a clever speech, either rhetorically or intellectually. It left the impression that the theory of natural selection was an uncomfortable truth which he regretted Darwin having unearthed. What seemed to distress him was not the possibility of Darwin’s being wrong, but the possibility of Darwin’s being right. Henslow, in the chair, and a friend to Darwin, though by no means convinced by the theory, now turned to Hooker and asked him if he had anything to say.
For many who attended the meeting, it was Hooker’s speech, rather than Huxley’s, which really carried the day for Darwin. Hooker spoke calmly and reasonably. He told the audience that he had been privy to Darwin’s hypothesis for the previous fifteen years, and that he had applied Darwin’s views ‘to botanical investigations of all kinds in the most distant parts of the globe, as well as to the study of some of the largest and most different Floras at home’. He explained that he had originally believed that species were ‘original creations’, but that he could no longer subscribe to this belief, since it did not explain the evidence at hand. He rebutted Wilberforce’s description of Darwin’s views as a ‘creed’, and said, rather, that the theory ‘offers the most probable explanation of all the phenomena presented by classification, distribution, structure, and development of plants in a state of nature and under civilization’. Hooker said that he was ready to abandon a belief in evolution by natural selection but only if and when a better hypothesis appeared. Until then, Darwinian evolution offered ‘the best weapon for future research’.
Here was an expanded version of something which, a little earlier in the debate, had been advanced by Darwin’s friend and neighbour John Lubbock. The debate had at last been anchored (as Henslow had implored from the beginning that it should be) in science. When he heard about the debate, Darwin felt heartily glad not to have been there. ‘I would as soon have died as tried to answer the Bishop in such an assembly.’9
When it passed into myth, the Oxford debate became the occasion when – to quote one of the most vociferous atheists of recent decades, Christopher Hitchens – Huxley ‘in front of a large audience cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that’.10 At the time, however, views were more nuanced, and more balanced. The Athenaeum definitely regarded Hooker’s as the most impressive speech. The Press considered the debate not as a battle in the grand war between God and science, but, by contrast, as evidence of ‘wide and wise toleration’, showing a spirit of cooperation between the ‘Christian’ and the ‘scientific’.11 Undoubtedly, there was a dimension in the debate – introduced by Wilberforce and painted in lurid colours by FitzRoy – of religious paranoia, the fear that by adopting a theory as to how nature operates they would somehow have discarded God Himself. But a much bigger factor than the theological element to the debate was that of an academic orthodoxy under threat. The great majority of scientists, especially in Britain since the Napoleonic Wars, had rejected evolutionary theory as continental claptrap. They clung to ‘original creations’ because it suited them to do so. Most science, particularly in the setting of university faculties, finds it easiest to operate within a status quo.
There is a paradox here, of course, because scientific progress depends, not on the reaffirmation of old ideas, but on the testing of new ones; and some of those new ideas will, inevitably, overthrow orthodoxy. James Secord called the debate ‘a minor incident later raised to mythical dimensions by the need to make the Darwinian debate look more heated than it actually was’.12 And Ian Hesketh rightly adds the question, ‘Isn’t that precisely what makes the debate significant?’13
Soapy Sam, pace Hitchens, was not eaten for lunch or used as a floor-mop. In terms of victory or defeat, the debate was in fact a dead heat. Despite the best endeavours of Henslow and Hooker, however, it was not possible to limit this discussion to a simple question of science.
The Darwin family recalled the period when The Origin of Species was published as a time of ‘frozen misery’, as we have seen. When the book had actually appeared, the whole family had left the icily uncomfortable lodgings at Ilkley to return to Down House. Darwin felt himself to be in the dock as the reviews appeared. In the intervening months, the children watched the reaction of Charles and Emma Darwin to the stream of letters and reviews. Emma read most of the reviews to the children, but she concealed, even from Etty, the denunciation by Adam Sedgwick.14 Although we know, from the written evidence left behind, that Emma was deeply troubled by the religious implications of Darwin’s theories, she gave little indication, if any, of such worries to her children. One biographer has likened the terseness of Emma’s letters to her children to the laconic military dispatches of the Duke of Wellington.15
My dear Lenny. You cannot write as small as this I know. It is done with your crow-quill. Your last letter was not interesting, but very well spelt, which I care more about. We have a new horse on trial, very spirited and nice-looking, but I am afraid too cheap. Papa is much better than when Frank was here. We have some stamps for you: one Horace says is new Am, 5 cent. Yours, my dear old man, E.D.16
That was written in November 1863 to her thirteen-year-old. ‘We are cool fish, we Darwins,’ Lenny said many years later.17 Illness, as Darwin himself demonstrated to them on an almost perpetu
al basis, was one way of thawing the cool and attracting affection and cherishing. Etty, who in her mid- to late teens seemed worryingly prone to unspecified illness, noted that ‘Both parents were unwearied in their efforts to soothe and amuse us whichever of us was ill; my father played backgammon with me regularly every day and [Emma] would read out to me.’18
Indeed, it was Etty’s illness, even more than Darwin’s own, or the Oxford debate about The Origin of Species, which dominated the late summer and early autumn of 1860. They took her to Eastbourne, from whence he reported, in a letter to Henslow about botany, that ‘I am glad to say she has benefited decidedly from sea-air.’19 In October, she had ‘such a week as I did not know man could suffer. My daughter grew worse and worse, with pitiable suffering, so that all the Doctors thought we should lose her.’20 In fact, she rallied, and would live until 1927 – reaching the age of eighty-four. It was not the Darwin family, but the Huxleys who would lose a child that autumn. On 20 September, Huxley wrote in his journal:
our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking.21