by A. N. Wilson
Darwin in fact incorporated some of Mivart’s more devastating corrections into the sixth edition of The Origin of Species, but he was not a good loser. Unable to refute Mivart, and lacking the courage to engage in public controversy himself, Darwin unleashed a pamphlet war which even his admiring biographer Janet Browne admits was ‘nasty’.71 An American admirer of Darwin – though it would be truer to call him a worshipper, since on a visit to Down House the young mathematician-philosopher described meeting the great man as an almost religious experience – was Chauncey Wright, then in his early twenties. Appalled by Mivart’s temerity in daring to question the Master, Chauncey Wright had written a lengthy critique of Mivart’s Genesis of Species, and Darwin paid for this to be reprinted in Britain as a pamphlet. Meanwhile, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, Huxley, was trundled into the lists to attack Mivart. Darwin had considered Mivart’s article denouncing The Descent of Man in the Quarterly Review as ‘most cutting’. Huxley obliged with some cuts in riposte, though he returned neat rapier thrusts with blows from a blunt hatchet.
Mivart’s review had been devastating but polite. Apart from itemizing specific errors in Darwin’s book, he committed (in the eyes of Darwin-worshippers) two cardinal sins. One was he attributed the theory of natural selection to Wallace, as well as to Darwin, knowing of course that while Wallace accepted the theory as an account of how plants and animals have evolved, he did not see it as an adequate theory to explain the existence of human consciousness, the moral sense, the aesthetic sense and so on. Secondly, Mivart drew attention to Darwin’s use of phrases such as ‘we have every reason to believe’, ‘no doubt’, ‘unless we wilfully close our eyes’ to introduce propositions which by no means command assent.
Already, among the Darwin-worshippers, it had become bad form to attribute too much of the glory to Wallace for his simultaneous proposal of the natural selection theory. Wallace, in their version, was analogous to Trotsky in the story of the Russian Revolution as seen through Leninist eyes – someone whom it would eventually be possible to airbrush out of the story. Huxley was in St Andrews on holiday when he read Mivart’s detailed review, and decided to pen a reply. In the course of a detailed scientific critique of Darwin, Mivart made one very small mistake which covers nine lines of his entire essay. He attributed to a Spanish Jesuit called Suárez the view that St Augustine had been right: that nature had evolved, that the divine creation of humanity had been a matter of breathing life into what Huxley called ‘the manlike animal’s nostrils’. In fact Suárez had rejected this view and believed in something more like a modern-day creationist – namely that humanity was created entire, body and soul, as it were in one creative act.72
Mivart had blundered in attributing a view to a Renaissance-era Jesuit which he had not in fact held. That was all. It was not wrong, however, to say that a belief in God and a belief in evolution were quite compatible. Thousands of his contemporaries, including Charles Kingsley, Wallace himself, the mathematician Baden Powell (father of the Scouts’ founder)73 – even the diehard Dr Pusey in Oxford – were evidence of this. Yet for Huxley’s son Leonard this was ‘one of the most deadly [sentences] in the history of controversy’.74 Mivart mildly stated, ‘It was not without surprise that I learned that my one unpardonable sin – the one great offence disqualifying me for being “a loyal solider of science” – was my attempt to show that there is no real antagonism between the Christian revelation and evolution.’ For this, as has been stated, he was excommunicated from his Church. Darwin and his friends also vindictively blackballed him from membership of the Athenaeum Club. Hooker read Huxley’s malicious attack on Mivart and wrote to Darwin, ‘What a wonderful Essayist he is, and incomparable critic and defender of the faithful.’ Darwin himself was beside himself with malicious glee. ‘I laughed over Mivart’s soul till my stomach contracted into a ball, but that is a horrid sensation which you will not know . . . It quite delights me that you are going to some extent to . . . attack Mivart.’75
The Descent of Man and Huxley’s assaults on Mivart were demonstrations that Darwinism had now ceased to be a merely scientific theory and was the new religion. Huxley was, as Hooker described him, ‘the defender of the faithful’. Moreover, when the Darwinians spoke about eliminating the opposition, they were not dealing just in metaphor. The Descent had ended with a nod towards Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), the coiner of the term ‘eugenics’, whose book Hereditary Genius had been published in 1869. Seeds of the eugenic idea are planted at the end of The Descent. Just as man rose from the lower animals, so the class to which the Darwinians belonged had risen from a lower class, and they were determined to kick away the ladder from beneath them. By ‘selection’ man can ‘do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind . . .’76
As has been justly said, the majority of Darwin’s human contemporaries in Britain were not engaged in a competition for life, but in a competition for early death through alcohol.77 Before they achieved that end, however, those ‘inferior in body or mind’ tended to breed in greater numbers than the class to which Darwin himself belonged. Had Darwin’s application of the theory of natural selection to sociology been true, it would have been his own class – strong in intellect, talent and enterprise – which eventually came to outnumber the feckless, the weak and the stupid. Paradoxically, it was the very fact that the Darwinian theory of humanity was untrue which would eventually cause Darwinians to embrace eugenics. Precisely because the ‘unfit’ were outbreeding the ‘fit’, it was thought necessary to help ‘natural’ selection a little by artificially eliminating the ‘unfit’. Darwin, in the second edition of The Descent of Man, would spell out the need for this.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt this must be highly injurious to the race of man . . . excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.78
In 1871, the first of Darwin’s children was married. Etty was their only daughter to take this step, Bessy remaining a spinster. Richard Litchfield, ten years older than his wife, was a lawyer who worked for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Janet Browne makes the unavoidable, and surely just, supposition that ‘he may have seemed like another version of her father’79 – though Litchfield, unlike the recluse of Down, was much given to good works at the Working Men’s College in London. Etty met him in June, had become engaged in July and was married in August. Litchfield’s friend Arthur Munby, whose taste was for working-class women, and who was secretly married to a maid of all work called Hannah Cullwick, was dismayed by Litchfield’s wedding which, he said, ‘takes away the last but one of my unmarried friends’. Of the twenty-seven-year-old bride, Munby told his diary, ‘I have yet dwelt all day on his words, after speaking of her intellect and power – “She does not believe in a personal God”. How wide we have to stretch our sympathies now a days!’ Munby noted that Etty was ‘subdued and self-possessed’, finding something in her features which was ‘not unlike the photographs of her father’.80 There is a clue here, incidentally, to the very modern nature of Darwin’s fame. In that, the first age of widespread photography, it was possible to be a very famous hermit, and your face to be quite familiar to millions.
Etty and Litchfield, like Francis Galton, and like her brother Leonard, the
most fervent eugenicist of the Darwin siblings, would be childless.
Tiny and cantankerous, Etty would lead a life which, by the standards of women of a later age, was eventless almost beyond imagining. In the twentieth century, she once told her niece that, when her maid Janet was away for a few days, ‘I am very busy answering my own bell.’81 She never posted a letter for herself, never sewed on a button and never travelled anywhere without a maid. Litchfield, exuberantly bearded, usually clad in black coat, striped trousers and egg-shaped waistcoat, was a little taller than she, but not much. It was the survival of the unfittest. Both of them enjoyed ill health, though Etty, a true Darwin, easily beat her husband at the hypochondriacal game. After her ‘low fever’ aged thirteen, she had been encouraged by the doctor to take breakfast in bed. She never got up for breakfast again for the rest of her life. Her long-suffering maids were asked to place a silk handkerchief over her left foot as she lay in bed, because this, of the two feet, was the one which got colder. If anyone else in the house was suffering from a cold, Etty would wear a sort of gas mask of her own invention, a wire kitchen-strainer stuffed with antiseptic cotton-wool and tied on like a snout with elastic round her ears.
The Litchfields resided in Kensington Square, near the houses of Sir Hubert Parry, John Stuart Mill and Lady Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter). The house was decorated with Morris wallpapers and curtains, blue china, peacock feathers and Arundel prints.82
Etty’s siblings had lives slightly more crowded with incident, but not dramatically fruitful when viewed from a genetic viewpoint. William, the eldest, who became a banker, married but was childless. Leonard, who succeeded to the presidency of the Eugenic Education Society after the demise of his cousin Francis Galton in 1911, married but also had no children. Francis, who became a botany don at Cambridge after his father’s death released him from secretarial and lavatorial-assistant duties at Down House, married and had one daughter, the poet Frances Cornford. George, the Cambridge maths don, had four children, one of whom was Gwen Raverat; and Horace, founder of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, and Mayor of Cambridge in 1896–7, had two daughters, and one son killed in action in 1915.
Of Darwin’s nine children, therefore, only three had issue. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Victorian upper-middle class died out was that it did not breed with anything like the fecund abandon of the aristocracy or the lower orders. Samuel Butler’s exposition of the sheer hellishness of family life in The Way of All Flesh found an echo in many young readers’ bosoms. Rose Macaulay and Ivy Compton-Burnett were not unusual in their generation, in being born into enormous upper-middle-class families not one of which bred. Macaulay (1881–1958) was one of seven. Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was the seventh of twelve children, two of whom died in a suicide pact, one of whom was killed on the Somme. Although Darwinism, if true, should have ensured, by a process of natural selection, the triumph of Darwin’s social class and the natural extermination of the hordes of Pooters crowding the new-built suburbs, the vast army of improvident toilers, who filled their slum-dwellings with offspring they could scarcely afford to feed, this did not happen. There were not enough intelligent rich people in proportion to the others whose rowdy lives must be a source of distress to those upper-middle-class people who were kind enough to observe them. Clearly, the more public-spirited members of Darwin’s class did their best to extend education to the masses, but it would obviously be better if such troubling individuals did not exist. Although George Darwin’s academic expertise lay in the fields of geodesy and of mathematics (he became Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge in 1883), he shared his cousin Francis Galton’s enthusiasm for what would eventually be termed eugenics. In the years after he coined this term (1883) Galton would campaign politically for tax breaks to encourage intelligent people to have large families and to sterilize the ‘unfit’.83 Long before this campaign got under way George Darwin, developing the ideas of his father’s Descent of Man, had written a proposal ‘on beneficial restrictions to liberty of marriage’ in 1873.84 The article appeared in the Contemporary Review and was a classic exposition of the ‘eugenic’ idea, viz. that those deemed by the Darwins to be defective should be forbidden to breed. In July 1874, an anonymous essay appeared in the Quarterly Review discussing works on primitive man by John Lubbock and Edward Burnett Tylor. It included an attack on George Darwin’s paper as ‘speaking in an approving strain . . . of the encouragement of vice in order to check population’. The anonymous author was St George Mivart. Today, ‘liberal’ opinion in the West deplores eugenics, not least because of the enthusiasm with which it was adopted in Germany in the period 1933–45. It would only be among conservative Christians, however, that you would be likely to find those who believed contraception or medically advised abortion to be immoral. Mivart was, it is true, a Roman Catholic, albeit a convert who had been excommunicated for his belief in evolution. In 1873–4, however, he would probably have been in the huge majority of Victorians in believing contraception to be morally questionable and abortion positively criminal. George Darwin had not even ventured into the notion, which was a commonplace in the entourage of Bertrand Russell (heterosexual), Lytton Strachey (gay) and the Bloomsbury Set in the 1920s, that homosexuality was another good way of limiting the population explosion. (The Stracheys were a typical example of the upper-middle-class tendency to abandon breeding on the Victorian scale – Lytton was the eighth child of ten, few of whom bred.)
When Charles Darwin read the attack upon his son in the Quarterly, he was enraged, and advised him ‘that it wd be a good plan to lay the case before an eminent Counsel, not necessarily for Prosecution of the author, but that he shd compare the Review with your Article’.85 George had pointed out (correctly) that in the laws of the German Commune ‘Prostitution was not merely tolerated but was secretly promoted as a check to overpopulation, as in Japan at the present day.’ (Charles Darwin had darkly alluded to this supposed vice in Japanese society in The Descent.) They did not commence legal proceedings, either against Mivart or against the Quarterly, which, as Charles Darwin reminded his son, was published by his own publisher, Murray. They considered sacking Murray, but George worried that it would be ‘a great annoyance to go to a new publisher’.86 The spat, however, had awoken uncomfortable feelings. Ever since, in his first notebooks M and N, Darwin had begun to meditate upon the mystery of human descent, he had been aware that by embracing Malthusianism he was overturning conventional Christian morality. Human beings, rather than seen as made in God’s image and likeness, were reduced to mere ‘surplus population’. It has been rightly said that ‘Darwin did not first formulate natural selection and then apply it to human beings: he drew the theory directly from contemporary (and ideologically loaded) assessments of human behaviour and afterwards concealed its implications for over three decades, until The Descent of Man.’87 Eugenics was the natural consequence of Darwin’s Malthusianism. Sterilization programmes, state-encouraged prostitution, contraception and abortion were the logical rational measures by which to fulfil his idea of society. He was, of course, unable fully to admit this to himself, still less to ‘come out’, when an old man, as an advocate of such policies. Safer to consult a lawyer and see if Mivart could not be bullied into silence.
Darwin, in the conclusion to The Descent of Man, had endorsed Galton’s views that, if the prudent avoid marriage while the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society.88 It was not long before this translated itself in Britain into a fear of ‘race suicide’. Sidney Webb, for instance, one of the leading leftist social engineers of his generation, founding father of the New Statesman and Nation and of the London School of Economics and one of those who drafted the constitution of the Labour Party, feared that Britain was ‘gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews’, owing to their high rate of reproduction. Webb, in common with H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, shared the view that middle-class women would be ‘shirking in th
eir duty’ if they did not have families which outnumbered those of the feckless poor. Opponents of eugenics are able to see that, not only were their views morally repellent, they were based upon false science, mistakes which derived directly from Darwinism.89 Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who became the first Professor of Eugenics at the London School of Economics in 1904, decried Mendelian genetics, advocating Galton’s theory of inheritance through continuous blending and variation, ‘a view’, as Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall accurately remark, ‘which became increasingly untenable with the rise of genetics in the interwar years’.90 It was not long before Professor Pearson was advising two Royal Commissions, one on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded (1904–8) and another on Venereal Diseases (1913–16).91 It is not difficult to see a direct correlation between these noxious ideas and the social programmes of the Third Reich, culminating in the Holocaust. Michel Foucault remarks on the ‘mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race’.92 Less than thirty years would elapse between boring little Sidney Webb’s expressing the fear that his country would fall to the Irish and the Jews and another European country, Germany, enacting the Reich Citizenship Law, the Blood Protection Law, the Marital Health Law and the Nuremberg Laws for racial segregation, all based on bogus Victorian science, much of which had started life in the gentle setting of Darwin’s study at Down House.
Darwin, almost from the first, was wildly popular in Germany. One of his most enthusiastic adepts was Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who was quick, having embraced the doctrines of the Master, to postulate an evolutionary tree beginning with ‘ape men’, splitting to a ‘primitive’ branch, which included ‘Negroes’, ‘Kaffirs’, ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Papuas’; then to the ‘higher’ branch – Finns, Magyars, Japanese and Chinese; and, highest of all, the Indo-Germanic races, the Aryans. Darwin treasured the support and penfriendship of Haeckel, who had received his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1857 before becoming a lecturer in comparative anatomy at the University of Jena in 1861 and Professor of Zoology, and Director at the German Zoological Institute. In September 1874 Darwin exclaimed to Haeckel, ‘What grand success your books have had, & I am delighted to see your name continually quoted in all parts of the world with high approbation.’93 From Jena, Haeckel could write back with pride and enthusiasm, ‘In Deutschland hat der Darwinismus im letzen Jahre sehr grosse Fortschritte gemacht, besonders unter den Philosophen’94 (‘Darwinism has made great progress in Germany in the last year, especially among philosophers.’)