by Janet Browne
Similarly, the web of geographical patterns that plants and animals traced over the globe could be explained on the grounds that species spread and changed. At every point, the notion of ancestry connected previously disparate facts and opened up new perspectives. The practical naturalist in him emerged and spoke plainly—the barnacle scholar, the pigeon-lover, the plant experimenter, and Beagle collector, the traveller at last approaching his goal. His theory’s value, he was arguing, lay in the way it explained and united so many different features of the natural world.
Ruminatively, he here and there acknowledged the problems that his anthropomorphic language would generate. Often he veered too close to personifying natural selection. While this was perhaps unavoidable in the general sense, he frequently gave the impression that he regarded natural selection as an active agent, an all-seeing farmer in the sky, as it were, who deliberately chose the variants that were to succeed. Only a few months afterwards Darwin admitted to Lyell that this was not his intention and that he ought to have used a more neutral expression like “natural preservation.” He and Wallace were to discuss this difficulty at length. The same entanglement occurred with the word “adaptation,” which in Darwin’s hands hinted at some form of purposeful strategy in animals and plants, the exact opposite of what he meant. Later, he used “contrivance” as a partial solution. Over and over, Darwin struggled with words. The language he knew best was the language of Milton and Shakespeare, steeped in teleology and purpose, not the objective, value-free terminology sought (although rarely found) by science.46
He was not even able to speak of “evolution,” as such, because at this time the term was mostly used to describe the embryological process of a gradual unfolding of hidden structures; it was the ensuing debate around his published work that gave the word its modern meaning.47 In the Origin of Species Darwin referred to “descent with modification.” Equally, he did not use what ultimately became the most famous phrase of all, “survival of the fittest.” This was coined a few years afterwards, by Herbert Spencer in 1864, at which point Wallace suggested Darwin should use it.48 All these verbal ambiguities would lead readers in directions that Darwin did not fully intend.
Unusually for a scientific book, Darwin also provided a frank discussion of the many stumbling blocks that he thought would occur to readers. “Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered,” he admitted. “I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.”49
This confession was his most adroit step so far. He expected a barrage of challenges and intended to provide the answers straight away. In fact, he found the difficulties easy to list, in much the same way as he had once confidently jotted down the inconveniences of getting married. Disadvantages always made themselves obvious to him. These were fresh in his mind. If organisms are constantly changing, where are all the intermediate forms? Have transitional species ever been found in the fossil record? How can complicated organs ever come into existence by stages? “Is it possible to believe that the eye with its admirable correction for spherical & chromatic aberration, & with its power of adapting the focus to the distance, could have been formed from the simplest conceivable eye, by natural selection?”50 How do the specialised hierarchies of castes emerge in an ants’ nest or a beehive? Were instincts created individually for each species by God? It was very difficult to explain how sterility between incipient species might arise when they were originally members of the same interbreeding population. And—as Agassiz pointed out—what might happen to biological classification schemes if species and varieties are forever in flux? One by one, he proposed answers.
With profound deliberation, however, he did not include the two difficulties that would have occurred to everybody. He avoided talking about the origin of human beings and he avoided God. He remembered the bitter furore over Vestiges. He remembered the years he had spent worrying about divine intervention. No matter how seriously and cautiously he might treat evolutionary questions himself, he knew that anything he said was bound to ignite furious controversy, and anticipating just such a response, he had long ago drained his manuscripts of any reference to a Creator or human ancestry. He had no intention of reintroducing them now.51 In this book, he was completely silent on the subject of human origins, although he did refer in several places to mankind as an example of biological details.52 The only words he allowed himself—and these out of a sense of duty that he must somewhere refer to human beings—were gnomic in their brevity. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,” he declared in the conclusion. When he needed to, he spoke cautiously of the Creator, aware that his book might otherwise be labelled atheistic. But he was careful not to allow the Creator any active role in biological proceedings.
He purposefully avoided the first origin of life, too. For a book that would claim in its title to address the origin of species, Darwin’s text refused to propose any theory of absolute origins. He had no systematic history of beginnings to offer, no primeval soup or creative spark, and only at the end of his book did he mention the likelihood of all ancestral organisms originating in one primordial form. Such ancient origins, he privately believed, were lost in the mists of time and were essentially unreclaimable. His story was not about the start of life but about the processes that governed organisms during their life spans.
By the end, he had set out one of the most densely impressive proposals of the century. Although he did not compare his work directly with that of those who had gone before, his theory was nonetheless distinctive. He differed from Lamarck, or even from his evolutionary grandfather Dr. Erasmus Darwin, in that he eschewed any “doctrine of necessary progression” and inner striving towards perfection. While Darwin certainly allowed some place in his scheme for the direct effect of the environment on organisms—the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was popularly assumed to be the main feature of Lamarck’s system—he always regarded the chief difference between them to be that he, Darwin, did not allow his organisms any future goal, any teleology pulling them forwards, or any internal force that might drive the adaptive changes in specific directions. On the contrary, Darwin’s scheme of evolutionary adaptation was based entirely on contingency. Organisms shifted randomly. Darwin could never understand why Lyell, or any number of commentators over the next few decades, failed to see the contrast as plainly as he did.
He differed from Robert Chambers’s Vestiges in the solidity of his factual information and tightly organised mechanism for change. Darwin’s theory was more strictly limited in scope than Vestiges’ all-embracing system of development, and perhaps regarded by his friends as more scholarly for that reason. Certainly Darwin considered it a great advantage that he avoided discussing the beginnings of the earth, or the start of life, or the future of humanity—omissions that undoubtedly made his text dull by comparison with Vestiges but, in return, gave him a superior rank in conventional scientific circles. They also differed in detail. Where Chambers had seen the links in the fossil record as if each species passed through stages representing life forms below it in the scale, Darwin presented the history of life on earth as if it were a metaphorical tree, growing and branching from some ancestral base, and explained how this might happen according to his principle of divergence.53 “My views are very different from those of that clever but shallow book, the Vestiges,” he assured James Dwight Dana.54
And he managed to differentiate himself from Wallace, at least in two respects. Wallace had suggested that domesticated organisms were raised in circumstances that rendered any comparisons between them and wild organisms invalid. Darwin, on the other hand, put this comparison at the foundation of his argument for the origin of species. In addition, Wallace had spoken mostly about the replacement of species by other species, groups by groups, rather than the individual changes that preoccupied Darwin. Neither of these difference
s was regarded as important by anyone other than Wallace and Darwin themselves.
Taking the distinctions and comparisons together in Victorian context, Darwin’s writing was ultimately both unique and part of a larger corpus of pre-existing evolutionary thought. There could be no mistaking the weight of thought that lay behind every word, the judicious strategies, the powerful, transformative metaphors, his notion of a “great tree of life,” the interlocking double-punch of detail and breadth of vision. Although he subsequently complained that he had been rushed into the Origin of Species, that it was nothing but an abstract, that his evidence was truncated and his footnotes and sources were omitted, it was undeniably his masterpiece.
“When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history,” he declared fervently in the closing pages. “I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!55
All his hopes came to a crescendo. Simultaneously domestic and universal in tone, Darwin had achieved something extraordinary. One particular country lane that he visited on walks around Downe filled his mind.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.… There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.56
He hardly anticipated how austere, tragic, and supremely beautiful his work would appear to others.
VI
Long before the end of May, Darwin needed to stop. He had been buoyed up by mental activity alone, and the perpetual effort ate away at his health. He began vomiting again.
His usual resource was to cut adrift from his work and take a few days’ holiday or retire to the water-cure for a while. But with the Origin of Species in hand he resented doing this. Every day was needed, he said. Impatiently, he experimented with nostrums for dyspepsia advertised in the pages of newspapers. “I am taking Pepsine,” he informed Fox. “I think it does me good & at first was charmed with it.”
In the end, however, the best treatment was getting away from it all. He recognised that his visits to the water-cure were becoming more and more essential, having increased the length of his stays from a few days in the spring of 1858, to a week in October, then a full two weeks in February 1859. He no longer travelled all the way to Malvern. In 1857 he had located a new establishment, Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, much closer to home and without any of the sad memories associated with his daughter Annie’s death. He and Emma had not yet been back to Malvern to visit their daughter’s grave. “Old thoughts would revive so vividly that it would not have answered,” he confided to Fox, “but I have often wished to see the grave.… The thought of that time is yet most painful to me. Poor dear happy little thing.”57 But he retained all his old confidence in water treatment and “no faith whatever in ordinary doctoring.”
Moor Park was run by a young couple, Dr. Edward Lane and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Lane’s widowed mother, Lady Drysdale. The spa was a handsome building, the former home of Sir William Temple and full of interesting associations with Jonathan Swift and eighteenth-century literary life.58 The spacious grounds, lakes, and Dutch parterres laid out by Temple were a major part of the attractions; and Darwin considered the drive from Downe to Farnham very scenic, passing along the foot of the North Downs and skirting the Devil’s Punchbowl, with a convenient stopping-off point for lunch at his sister Caroline’s house at Leith Hill (Caroline had married Emma’s brother Jos Wedgwood). Inside the building, much of the Lanes’ success lay in making medical therapy akin to an exclusive house-party. Lady Drysdale maintained polite society habits during treatment, and her lively personality dominated the household arrangements. She was “a great reader, a great whist-player, and the active capable housekeeper of the great establishment.”59 Eventually Lane would concede that he could not afford to carry on in such expensive surroundings and would sell up to run a more economical property in Epsom.
Darwin liked the Lanes and their gracious treatment. Dr. Lane was “too young,” he laughed, but that was his only fault, for otherwise he was a “gentleman & very well read.”60 Lane did not believe in all the fringe therapies that Dr. Gully pressed on water-cure patients at Malvern either—no clairvoyance, mesmerism, or homeopathy, and no demand that Darwin must give up snuff, although Lane did point out the dangers of addiction. Instead, Lane attributed most disorders to imperfect digestion, an attitude that seemed entirely sensible to Darwin, and prescribed a wholesome diet, sitz baths, daily showers, and the diversions of pleasant scenery and company.61 What with the walks, baths, music, agreeable conversation, and a nightly game of billiards, Darwin’s time at Moor Park was dedicated to the relaxation he could not achieve at home. “It is really quite astonishing & utterly unaccountable the good this one week has done me,” he exclaimed after his first visit in 1857.62
As time went by, he became a complete convert to Lane’s relaxed therapies. Full of enthusiasm, he sent his daughter Henrietta for treatment in the summer of 1857 to see if it would revive her spirits in the same way that it had helped him, and he furthered his own therapy by getting himself a billiard table for Down House just like the one at Moor Park.
Henrietta felt no better when she returned. Darwin, on the other hand, had given himself a wonderful time poring over billiard advertisements in gentlemen’s magazines, consulting clubbable friends, and weighing up various impractical alternatives, in the end opting for a full-sized slate-bedded table from the London firm of Hopkins and Stephens and paying for it by selling his father’s gold watch and some bas-reliefs of Greek figures (probably by Flaxman) inherited from the Wedgwood side of the family. The table cost much less than the sum realised on these family heirlooms, and his highhanded disposal of such valuable decorative objects caused some resentful mutterings. “I suppose it was partly his fondness for money that made him do things that we his children thought had better not be done when we grew up and found out about them,” observed his son Francis Darwin later on. “For instance he sold a gold watch given to his father by Lord Powis. The beautiful Flaxman things & the Barberini vase [a china reproduction of the original Portland vase, a renowned Wedgwood triumph] were all sold at a nominal sum, part of the money (or all?) being spent on a billiard table.” Francis complained that the Flaxman reliefs meant nothing to his father, and were usually covered in dust and placed far too high to see properly. His father’s philistinism obviously pained him. “It is certainly curious that so affectionate & sympathetic a man should have had so little love of heirlooms.”63
When the billiard table arrived in packing cases on a cart from London, its new owner threw himself enthusiastically into the construction process, right down to the last turn on the complicated screw-levelling apparatus that ensured English gentlemen could play on a
flat surface despite the irregularities of country house floorboards. One diagram that Darwin sent to his son George at school was so detailed he must have spent the best part of the morning on his hands and knees inspecting the work underneath as it proceeded. Darwin’s passion for his new toy knew no bounds. Eagerly, he bought himself an illustrated book (“stunning”) full of coloured diagrams of various cue strokes. He learned the different moves, practised diligently, and boasted of well-executed “caroms” to Fox, pleased that his eye had not deteriorated too far from the sporting days of his youth. Soon, he and Parslow were taking a game or two every evening. There was always a ready excuse. “I find it does me a deal of good, & drives the horrid species out of my head,” he said cheerfully to Huxley. Thereafter regular rounds at the table drew father, sons, visiting scientists, and butler together in an amiable web of sporting recreation.
At Moor Park he most of all enjoyed being on his own. During one visit early in 1858, a few months before Wallace’s letter entered his life, he had loitered for hours in the furthest reaches of the park, which was “very wild and lonely, so just suits me.” Inevitably, something tiny would catch his attention: the ants under the Scotch firs were perhaps of a sort not seen at Downe; or the wild clover was visited by different insects; or a woodpecker gave away its hiding-place with telltale chips of bark on the ground. He scribbled notes on any available bit of paper. “It has been stated that woodpeckers remove fragments. In 2 cases I can say this false for such fragments guided me to discovery of nest,” he jotted on a crumpled slip that was evidently found at the bottom of a pocket. He was “all eyes,” said Edward Lane after one of these visits, always in tune with the tiniest minutiae of life.64