Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  There was another reason why Romanes was a figure of such importance in Darwin’s story. He was a faithful footsoldier in the laboratory. He was a religious doubter. And he was also better equipped than Darwin himself to express Darwinism’s metaphysical, philosophical significance.

  The very first letter which Romanes had written to Darwin in July 1874 had amounted to a paper on the philosophy of science; and in particular on the phenomenon of causation. ‘I have so poor a metaphysical head that Mr Spencer’s terms of equilibration &c always bother me & make everything less clear,’ Darwin frankly conceded when he received Romanes’s paper.

  Romanes believed, as did Haeckel, that Darwinism had solved, not merely a scientific conundrum – how do species evolve? – but also an epistemological one – can we ever be certain of causation? Can we ever verify that one thing causes another thing? Can we legitimately infer, because matter behaved in a particular way in one set of circumstances, that it will do so again if identical circumstances were repeated? Berkeley and Hume, neither of them having any scientific knowledge worth speaking of, believed they had delivered the ultimate critique of Cartesian science. We think we know that water will boil at a certain temperature, that the sun will come up in the morning, but we can neither prove that these things will happen nor prove that even if we put the kettle on the gas just as we did yesterday, the water inside it will boil. Lyell, more than any other scientist perhaps, took on Hume by demonstrating that geology was a sequence of observable events: that one thing demonstrably led to another. Hume had denied the possibility of an a priori comprehensive system of knowledge. Darwin’s theory of natural selection confirmed – or appeared to confirm – what Lyell’s geology had all but proved. ‘In succeeding where Hume had basically failed, Darwin was giving rise to the most radical revolution in modern thought: the classical tradition starting from Plato and Aristotle and its long-lasting consequences were knocked down and replaced by something new and equably workable.’11 The modern scientific outlook, the belief that science was the most reliable road to the truth, had arrived. Darwin was not being falsely modest when he said that he had ‘a poor metaphysical head’. Although passionate in his commitment to the scientific significance of his theories, it was his disciples, above all Haeckel and Romanes, who were more acutely aware of the wider intellectual ramifications.

  By the time he was seventy years old, there had erupted a painful incident which awoke old spectres from his earliest days in Shrewsbury, and, beyond that time, to the era of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin.

  Samuel Butler’s name is perhaps obscure in the twenty-first century. In Edwardian England (he died in 1902) he was seen as the iconoclast who had, years before the Bloomsbury Set did so, blown the whistle on Victorian humbug, and in particular on the Victorian cult of the family and good breeding. His novel The Way of All Flesh was published posthumously, and it still has the power to shock with its claims, or demonstrations, that family life is based not on mutual love, but on hatred, and in particular on the hatred felt by children for their parents. It is also a book which mercilessly lays bare the need for the solid family structures of upper-middle-class Britain to maintain the many-petalled flower of the Establishment. ‘That a man should have been bred well and breed others well; that his figure, head, hands, feet, voice, manner and clothes should carry conviction upon this point, so that no one can look at him without seeing that he has come of good stock and is likely to throw good stock himself, that is the desiderandum.’12

  As Butler’s most hostile biographer saw, ‘The Way of All Flesh, like The Origin of Species, said what a large number of people wanted said; and the fact that Shaw went out of his way to praise it so highly, and was himself a practising creative evolutionist, gave it just the necessary cachet of respectability.’13

  Darwin and Butler probably saw many of the same truths in the artificial threads of convention which held together the Establishment. The differences between them were that, whereas Butler was a tormented homosexual who hated his family, Darwin was, as far as one can judge these things, seemingly happy with his sexuality (heterosexuality), and – whatever his difficulties with his own father – he was a devoted family man; indeed, his whole emotional life was bound up with his wife, his children, his siblings and his cousins. Dr Alison Pearn was absolutely right to emphasize, in an unpublished lecture in Philadelphia on Darwin’s feuds, that ‘Darwin’s science was situated in a remarkably domestic environment, with loving family and friends as the context within which he thought and wrote: and that career in science was built on co-operation, and a finely honed ability to get on with those whose help and support he needed.’14

  Butler called at Down House on Sunday 19 May 1872, according to Emma’s diary. The occasion would seem to have been that Butler, who had befriended a young artist named Arthur Dampier May, hoped that May’s dog drawings would be of interest to Darwin in his researches into the expression of emotion in animals’ faces. It was to George Darwin, in his capacity as secretary, that Butler had written in the first instance.

  15. Clifford’s Inn

  Fleet Street

  Dear Darwin

  My young friend May has brought me these this morning: he tells me to say that they are entirely at Mr Darwin’s disposal, and that he shall be delighted in case he finds them in any way useful. I don’t think the lower one satisfies him, but I should think that a suggestion would be attended to: he said he found it so far more difficult to get a dog into the fighting attitude than the fawning one, that he had less chance of studying. I send the drawings to you rather than to your father because it is no use troubling him at all unless you think them likely to please him. Would you like to meet the youth? he seems to me to shape uncommonly well.

  Yours very truly

  S. Butler15

  The Butlers and the Darwins went back together through the generations. Dr Robert Darwin had been acquainted with Samuel Butler’s grandfather, the Headmaster of Shrewsbury School – the model for the obnoxiously hypocritical Mr Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh. Darwin was at university with Butler’s father. Samuel Butler was friendly with Darwin’s sons and had stayed at Down House. And now came this offer of help with illustrations for The Expression of Emotion.16

  An early sign that the milk of Butler’s human kindness was not untainted with acid came with the novel he published the same year as that visit to Down with the drawings, 1872. Erewhon is a satirical attack on ‘Victorian Values’, and it had already been completed by the time he was offering Darwin May’s dog drawings. Erewhon (anagram of ‘Nowhere’) is an all-too-recognizable picture of Victorian Britain, with its worship of the idol Ydgrun (Mrs Grundy – that is, fear of what-will-the-neighbours-say as the basis of morality). While mocking both Christianity and the Victorian humbugging allegiance to its doctrines, Butler also mocked Victorian materialism, and indeed the first part of his novel had been published nine years previously, in the Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and entitled ‘Darwin among the Machines’. As well as having the temerity to attack Darwin, Butler also satirized the British universities, and Cambridge in particular. The Colleges of Unreason, in Erewhon, are too clearly the places which gave Darwin his education, and some of Darwin’s sons their employment and their home.

  Darwin himself was not entirely without humour, but he was made uneasy by Butler’s squib. Emma wrote to Horace on 28 January 1873, ‘We are just finishing Butler & find it v. striking & interesting in the latter part; but I am very angry w. him for giving such horrible stories about brutality to the dogs, which one cannot forget. I believe he is a humane man, but he tells it in rather a jocose way.’17 It is clear from these references that, while they could see the cleverness of Erewhon, the Darwins did not like it. Above all, Darwin could sniff out, what he detested more than anything, disloyalty – personal disloyalty from a young friend with many family connections, and, further, disloyalty to the tribe. He could sniff out that Butler was a class traitor.


  Much worse than Erewhon, from the Darwins’ point of view, was to come. The occasion was the Festschrift compiled for Darwin’s birthday by Ernst Krause in Germany for his journal Kosmos. The special issue of the periodical contained an article by Krause himself on Darwin’s grandfather Dr Erasmus. It was entitled ‘A Contribution to the History of the Descent Theory’. Krause here came to the nub of Darwin’s mystery. He did so, not in a deliberately destructive spirit, but with a certain clumsiness. He acknowledged the genius of both the Darwins, Erasmus and Charles, but the very nature of the essay gave the lie to the now popular notion that, to use the words of Engels, ‘[Charles] Darwin discovered the law of evolution.’

  Darwin, therefore, viewed the German tribute with mixed sensations, but he was in retrospective and reflective mode. He had lately completed his short Autobiography, to which so much notice has been given in this book, and he also wished to set the record straight, correcting the memoirs of two of Dr Erasmus’s female contemporaries, Anna Seward of Lichfield and Mrs Schimmelpenninck, both of whom, he felt, did his grandfather an injustice.

  Darwin wrote to his cousin Francis Galton – also a grandson of Dr Erasmus, and the custodian of the family papers. Murray was approached to see if he would publish an English translation of Krause’s article, and a memoir of Dr Erasmus by Charles, based on archival research among these documents. George, among Darwin’s sons, was the most inclined to ancestor-worship, and he was glad to be enlisted to help. Darwin himself revelled in the talk of pedigree. ‘All your astronomical work is a mere insignificant joke compared with your Darwin discoveries,’ said Father Charles to son George approvingly. ‘O good Lord that we should be descended from a Steward of the Peverel; but what in the name of heaven does this mean?’18 One thing it certainly meant – and this was the sort of ‘discovery’ which upper-middle-class students of pedigree were agog for in the nineteenth century – was that they were not mere arrivistes. There was the quiet reassurance that, in the background of their Victorian, frock-coated, carriage-driven lives, there were, as well as the graves of honest yeomen, the occasional frayed escutcheon aloft over a tomb in a country church, a family name found among justices of the peace or officers in the army, the comfort of knowing the predecessors in the family tree to be gentry.

  George, in his enthusiasm, enlisted an American acquaintance, Colonel Chester, a keen genealogist, to draw up a pedigree stretching back 200 years. For a while even the earthworms were neglected as old Darwin drooped over the ancient wills and seventeenth-century titles. Meanwhile, Darwin set to work on his own short biographical sketch of his grandfather, the pioneer of evolutionary theory who, in the just completed Autobiography, Darwin claimed had made no impression on his young mind. He submitted what he wrote to the inspection of other family members. Etty Litchfield read it, and made him excise approving references to his grandfather’s religious scepticism. Sometimes he strayed from his theme to include personal anecdotes – ‘Henrietta, is this too egoistic to include?’ he asked.19

  One of the factors to spur Darwin on was Galton’s essay on the heredity of genius. It placed Darwin in a peculiar position. On the one hand, his name was now synonymous with the notion that, rather than being individual creations, each being owed its characteristics to inheritance. Paradoxically, egotism required him to adapt this claim, by adding the aggressive old idea of the struggle for existence. If, like some still not perfected finch’s beak, he inherited much of his grandfather’s genius, he had also, with brighter plumage and sharper claws than the prototype, defeated the old man, pecked him off the branches. He dismissed Dr Erasmus’s ‘overpowering tendency to theorize and generalize’: ‘I fear that his speculations on this subject cannot be held to have much value.’

  The reader was to be left in no doubt. The newer, younger evolved evolutionist left the older, eighteenth-century one a mere fossil, a curiosity who had nothing to say to the modern generation.

  A strange cluster of coincidences and conjunctions now came together, like the strands of some elaborately plotted work of fiction. In May 1879, Samuel Butler had published an essay entitled Evolution, Old and New, or the Theories of Buffon, Dr Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck as Compared with That of Mr Charles Darwin. This was scarcely an embarrassment to match that of 1858, when Wallace had popped up out of the blue with a theory of natural selection just as Darwin was about to reveal to the world an all but identical theory. Nevertheless, it was embarrassing that Butler’s essay should have resurrected the figure of Dr Erasmus some five months before Darwin’s own Erasmus Darwin which was published by Murray in November 1879.

  Butler was a natural iconoclast. Some of his arch ‘naughtiness’ will seem forced to us. He was, for all that, an original mind who deserves his description in The Dictionary of National Biography of ‘philosophical writer’.20 Though the man who maintained – in ‘The Authoress of the Odyssey’ – that Homer was a woman, or that Shakespeare’s sonnets were about the poet’s love not for the Earl of Southampton but for a lad of the lower class – could be seen as an addict of heterodoxy, he had taken the trouble to read much evolutionary material, and his hits against Darwin were palpable.

  In his expanded Autobiography, suppressed by the family until his granddaughter Nora Barlow published the full version in 1958, Darwin’s account of what happened reads as follows: ‘Owing to my having omitted to mention that Dr Krause had enlarged and corrected his article in German before it was translated, Mr Samuel Butler abused me with almost insane virulence. How I offended him so bitterly, I have never been able to understand.’21

  Darwin omits to make two things clear. One is that he had published a much reduced version of Krause’s article, in translation, without explaining to English readers that he had heavily doctored the German’s original essay. Secondly, he has conveniently changed the chronology of Butler’s ‘attack’. Butler’s essay on Evolution, Old and New appeared – as I have said – five months before Darwin’s account of his grandfather. The previous year, 1878, Butler had published Life and Habit, in which he assessed Darwin Junior’s contribution to evolutionary theory in a highly critical manner. He found Darwin’s theory, of the mechanism of evolution, unconvincing.

  Anyone can make people see a thing if he puts it in the right way, but Mr Darwin made us see evolution, in spite of his having put it, in what seems to not a few, an exceedingly mistaken way. Yet his triumph is complete, for no matter how much any one now moves the foundation, he cannot shake the superstructure, which has become so currently accepted as to be above the need of any support from reason, and to be as difficult to destroy as it was originally difficult of construction. Less than twenty years ago, we never met with, or heard of, any one who accepted evolution . . . Yet, now, who seriously disputes the main principles of evolution?22

  Darwin’s reaction when under attack was now instinctive – unleash the Bulldog. ‘I am astounded at Butler,’ wrote Huxley – ‘who I thought was a gentleman, though his last book appeared to me supremely foolish.’ This had been the approach to Mivart’s closely reasoned critiques of Darwin’s work: the man’s a cad, keep him out of the Athenaeum. ‘Has Mivart bitten him and given him Darwinophobia? It is a horrid disease and I would kill any son of a [here there is a drawing of a, presumably female, dog] I found running loose with it without mercy. But don’t you worry with these things. Recollect what old Goethe said about his Butlers and Mivarts: “Hat doch der Wallfisch seine Laus / Muss ich auch meine haben” [“Still, as the whale has his louse, I must also have mine”].’23

  Butler repeated the story (about Darwin altering Krause’s article) in the book Unconscious Memory, published in 1880, and seven years later, after Darwin was dead, he published his most detailed criticism of Darwinism in Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification, pointing out Darwin’s many inconsistencies and contradictions. ‘There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with modification which does not find support in some one passage or another of the “Origin of Species”.�
�� Here, of course, Butler put his finger on the reason why Darwin, so soon after the publication of The Origin, was regarded widely as the man who had ‘discovered’ evolution. Having flirted with almost all explanations for evolution, ducked and dived when contradicted, and cheerfully reverted to Lamarckianism when it suited him, Darwin could be seen simply as Mr Evolution by the reading public. Butler noted, as we have done in this book, how Darwin shamelessly spoke of ‘my theory’, even when rehearsing the arguments of Lamarck’s original theory, which antedated ‘his’ by fifty years. Butler noted that, in later editions of The Origin, this use of the word ‘my’ when applied to evolutionary theory was dropped, possibly under the influence of Haeckel’s work.

  Butler was not a serious scientist, and his defence of Lamarckianism seems now unconvincing. The paradox is that, in attempting to put forward a version of Lamarckianism with a theory that characteristics can be acquired by ‘unconscious memory’, Butler was proposing something very similar to Darwin’s own theory of pangenesis. Another irony, pointed out by Løvtrup, is that Darwin’s son Francis, the botanist, adopted a theory very similar to Butler’s in his article ‘The Analogies of Plant and Animal Life’, in which he inquires ‘whether among plants anything similar to memory or habit as it exists in animals, may be found’.24