Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  During this highly charged time, Charles Kingsley emerged as Huxley’s saviour, sending him letters that in the end brought him back from the edge of the abyss. But Kingsley could not rekindle in Huxley any glimmer of traditional religious belief. That was gone forever, evaporated with the last breath of his boy. All through this anguish, however, Huxley wrote like a madman, spewing out venom against Owen and the injustices of the world in the most violent scientific paper he ever composed. Single-handedly (that was the way he liked it), he smashed into the old-fashioned museum regime that Owen represented. He claimed that the laboratory-based, investigative study of living beings that he championed was the only appropriate vehicle for the changing times.

  In this paper Huxley fulfilled the threat he made at Oxford that he could prove Owen’s statements about brain anatomy wrong. Not just wrong, Huxley asserted—dishonest. The man was a liar, he said, and produced a list of previously published anatomical observations by other scholars that contradicted every one of Owen’s assertions about the structure of the human brain. Huxley aimed particularly at Owen’s description of the hippocampus minor as a feature unique to mankind. On the contrary, declared Huxley, the hippocampus minor was present in all the higher quadrumana: “anyone who chooses to take the trouble to dissect a monkey’s brain, or even to examine a vertically bisected skull of the true Simiae, may convince himself.” Professional expertise and reputations were at stake here, and both Huxley’s and Owen’s passions ran deep. Although looking like little more than a trivial argument over factual observations, it actually represented a clash of fundamentally opposing systems of thought. Empirical data could not—and would not—resolve the issue about the hippocampus because the disputants did not agree about their relevance.32

  Huxley published his article in January 1861 in the first number of his own journal, the relaunched Natural History Review, which he and a group of progressive scientific thinkers had agreed to purchase as a commercial proposition, ostensibly with a view to making money but mostly to provide an uninterrupted outlet for their radical, mainly evolutionary ideas. The co-owners included Lubbock, the botanist Daniel Oliver, and anatomists George Rolleston, George Busk, and William Carpenter, a conspicuously pro-Darwin team. Huxley made a few extravagant, token gestures as editor at the outset, claiming that the Review would be completely impartial, and then immediately turned it into a powerful mouthpiece for his form of biology; and even though the journal died after little more than four years, it was, in its short lifetime, a pungent instrument for naturalism in science. “The tone of the Review will be mildly episcopophagous,” Huxley told Hooker, “and you and Darwin and Lyell will have a fine opportunity if you wish of slaying your adversaries.”33 In its first years, the Natural History Review published all the most important brain and ape articles of the period, as well as essays and reviews promoting Darwinism in general. Darwin contributed a review or two himself and followed the journal’s fortunes.34 “What a complete & awful smasher (& done like a ‘buttered angel’),” he said encouragingly after reading Huxley’s opening shot against Owen. “By Jove how Owen is shown up.… What a canting humbug he is.”35

  Egged on by Darwin, Huxley made brains and toes the subject of his lectures to various audiences during the spring of 1861. Cheekily, he told his patrons at the Royal Institution that they were indisputably related to apes, for their big toes were nothing other than poor copies of prehensile apish thumbs. He continued the line in lectures to working men delivered not far away on the other side of Piccadilly. This second batch of lectures was part of a regular series delivered by several old hands at the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, where Huxley taught natural history and purveyed cheap public instruction at sixpence a time. The lectures were notable in content and as a phenomenon. It was striking to see a large number of London working men voluntarily giving up their scant leisure time, after a working day of twelve hours or more, to attend an academic class in the School of Mines, and paying a sixpenny entrance fee out of a weekly wage of some thirty shillings. Huxley’s series ran from February to May 1861 under the title “The Relation of Man to the Rest of the Animal Kingdom.” The lectures were lively and informative, attracting a large clientele. Lyell, who visited in March, was astonished at the magnitude and attentiveness of the crowd.

  “My working men stick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night,” Huxley said to his wife. “By next Friday evening they will all be convinced they are monkeys.”36

  IV

  But the man at the hub of this enthusiastic support felt oddly restless. Darwin could not settle at all during the post-publication period. He tried starting the next book, the long disquisition on variation he had promised Murray, but his heart was not in it. He felt chained to the Origin of Species even though it was physically gone from his desk. His days rose and fell with the afterswell, while he dealt with a huge correspondence and the increasing number of reviews that his book evoked. At the same time, he kept up his letters to Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and all. Were they converts or “perverts” as Lyell engagingly put it? Privately he was beginning to feel what every author experiences after a long project is completed. He was drained.

  Four substantial reviews of the Origin of Species appeared in March 1860, eight in April, five in May, and three in June, each with important reservations, criticisms, or misunderstandings to deal with. These writings uncovered minor gaps or flaws which he wished he had spotted earlier. Shocked disapproval began making itself felt; and a raft of scientific objections was floated, sometimes only a disguise for more fundamental religious or metaphysical opposition, at other times exposing genuinely puzzling phenomena that natural selection did not appear to answer. Darwin, after all, was asking a great deal of his audience. He was inviting them to believe in what was then thought to be unbelievable.

  Military metaphors peppered his thoughts. He talked of “buckling on my armour” and the long, uphill fight. Sedgwick, he complained, “has been firing broadsides”; Gray was “fighting splendidly”; Lyell “keeps as firm as a tower.” Attacks were “heavy & incessant of late.” “I am getting wearied at the storm of hostile reviews; & hardly any useful.”37

  There was good news from Wallace, however. Darwin received a letter from him in May 1860 that eased his mind. The letter itself has been lost, but Darwin, in his reply, expressed his pleasure at Wallace’s “too high approbation of my book.”

  Your letter has pleased me very much, & I most completely agree with you on the parts which are strongest & which are weakest.… I think geologists are more converted than simple naturalists because more accustomed to reasoning. Before telling you about progress of opinion on subject, you must let me say how I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my book: most persons would in your position have felt some envy or jealousy. How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind.—But you speak far too modestly of yourself;—you would, if you had had my leisure, [have] done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it.38

  Wallace’s feelings about the Origin can be gleaned more directly from other letters written to Bates and his old school friend George Silk. He told Silk, “I have read it through five or six times, each time with increasing admiration. It will live as long as the ‘Principia’ of Newton.… Mr. Darwin has given the world a new science, and his name should in my opinion, stand above that of every philosopher of ancient and modern times. The force of admiration can no further go!!!”

  To Bates he explained, “I know not how, or to whom, to express fully my admiration of Darwin’s book. To him it would seem flattery, to others self-praise; but I do honestly believe that with however much patience I had worked and experimented on the subject, I could never have approached the completeness of his book, its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the world.”39 Politely, generously, and with an undeniable w
hiff of relief, the two co-authors took up the positions that they were to hold relative to each other for the rest of their lives.

  Still, perhaps Darwin was relieved to have got Wallace off his conscience. Almost immediately he turned to organising translations of the Origin of Species. He very much wanted European naturalists to consider his arguments properly. France and Germany were first in his mind. Six months beforehand, he had distributed presentation copies in both countries with the hope that some eager young naturalist in Berlin or Paris might request permission to translate his volume.

  At that time, the initiative for foreign publication usually rested with the translator, who was expected to get permission directly from the author and negotiate a contract with a local publisher. So Darwin welcomed the news that Heinrich Bronn, a distinguished philosophical naturalist, would undertake a German edition. Bronn was a geologist of note who knew Darwin’s geological work of old. He also held a good reputation in the scientific world for his inquiries into the elemental laws of matter, in which he drew parallels between organic and inorganic phenomena and thought about branching trees of fossil development. Though elderly, he was sprightly, and he reviewed the Origin of Species relatively favourably when it came out. “I have had this morning a letter from old Bronn (who to my astonishment seems slightly staggered by Nat. Selection) & he says a publisher in Stuttgart is willing to publish a translation & that he Bronn will to a certain extent superintend,” Darwin informed Huxley.

  Nevertheless Bronn had intellectual preoccupations of his own that he hoped to explore through his translation of Darwin’s book. He was fascinated by the controversy emerging in Paris between Louis Pasteur and Felix Pouchet over the possible creation of life in a laboratory test-tube. Could living globules emerge out of disconnected organic materials, as Pouchet’s Heterogenie of 1858 claimed? Or did every living being—even the smallest germ—need to be produced by another living being, as Pasteur tried to demonstrate? The controversy hinged on what kind of experimental evidence would satisfy inquiry on the question. Pouchet’s and Pasteur’s rival experiments pointed in several directions at the same time, and the interwoven religious and political situations in Catholic France were no less complex.40 Pouchet’s close association with philosophical materialism and his disregard for traditional forms of religious belief made his claim for the chemical origin of living beings highly suspect in the eyes of at least some of the general public.

  Bronn vividly saw the point at issue. For him, evolution must go hand in hand with spontaneous generation, although he was not inclined to believe in either. But a word-for-word translation of the Origin was not what he had in mind. Instead, he diligently put back into the book the controversial themes that Darwin deliberately left out. Bronn’s translation included many philosophical asides and disquisitions on the first origin of life. Furthermore, he added a final chapter of his own, in which he drew attention to the religious difficulties in fully accepting Darwin’s views. Until Darwin could take purely inorganic matter and make a living creature, Bronn said, readers must consider descent with modification an unproven suggestion.

  When it was published in 1860, by the firm of Schweizerbart in Stuttgart, this free-ranging translation consequently alerted German-speaking readers to the most provocative aspects of the book—either to the satisfaction of philosophical radicals or the deep misgivings of more conservatively minded thinkers. The German scientific public, already relatively familiar with notions of metamorphosis and transmutationary ideas, from Goethe’s work through to Vestiges, encountered Darwin’s ideas in a form that diverged considerably from the author’s intention.

  Darwin had scarcely expected a translator, however eminent, to adjust the Origin’s argument to suit himself. Armed with some heavy German dictionaries, he struggled through Bronn’s pages to see what had been done. Even the title indicated some of the difficulties inherent in moving ideas and metaphors from one cultural context to another. Darwin’s “favoured races” was translated by Bronn as “perfected races”; his “struggle for existence” was “struggle for survival.”41 Bronn’s final chapter was particularly densely written, and in desperation Darwin finally asked Camilla Ludwig, the new German governess at Down, to turn it into English (“very difficult” Darwin said to Lyell and offered to lend him Miss Ludwig’s version). Gradually, Darwin became aware that Bronn simply left out those sentences of which he did not approve—for example, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” He fretted about Bronn’s literal translation of the term “natural selection.” Earlier he had written to Bronn, “I cannot help doubting whether ‘Wahl der Lebensweise’ expresses my notion—it leaves the impression on my mind of the Lamarckian doctrine (which I reject) of habits of life being all important.” As Darwin understood it, Wahl der Lebensweise more or less meant “choice of lifestyle.” Bronn took the hint. Darwin was glad to see that he settled on naturliche Zuchtung, meaning natural breeding or cultivation, which caught his intention well enough.

  Uneasy about this turn of events, he cast about for another German translator. Within a few months he located Julius Victor Carus, a younger, altogether more compliant naturalist who said he believed in natural selection. In 1862, after Bronn’s death, Carus produced an amended version of Bronn’s translation, working closely with Darwin by correspondence.

  France also looked promising at the start with Madame Belloc (grandmother of Hilaire Belloc) offering to translate the Origin of Species soon after publication. Madame Belloc probably contacted Darwin through Mary Butler, his water-cure friend.42 But she retreated when she noticed the weight of the subject matter: “on reading it, she finds it too scientific,” reported Darwin. He then thought he might have found a substitute in Pierre Talandier, an explosive Frenchman whiling away his time as a political exile from the Second Empire by teaching languages at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Yet Talandier could not get a publisher in France to touch him, a situation probably caused at least as much by his political stance as any perceived dangers in Darwin’s book. “I have had endless bother about French translation, between two stools, which makes me gladder to close with any one for German translation,” Darwin murmured to Huxley.43

  In the end, Darwin’s book was put into French by Clemence Royer, a Frenchwoman living in Geneva, and published in 1862.44 It is not entirely clear when Darwin realised that she intended to translate his book, since translators were every bit as opportunist and unregulated as publishers and it seems that she notified him of her forthcoming volume only shortly before publication. His pleasure was short-lived. Royer went much further than Bronn in changing the substance of what Darwin said. When the book came out in 1862, Darwin complained that she turned the Origin of Species into a travesty of his views. Royer, naturally enough, felt she had enhanced what was already there and knew her intellectual ground. She was well acquainted with the work of European political economists, possessed good English, and mixed with many of the naturalists and anthropologists in Geneva who corresponded with Darwin and reviewed the Origin, including Jules Pictet, Édouard Claparède, and Carl Vogt, himself the translator into German of Chambers’s Vestiges. Several members of this circle had left France after the upheavals of 1848. The new conservatism of nineteenth-century Paris made it an uncomfortable place for liberal, politically active, left-wing thinkers like these to live, and Vogt and Royer were among those who moved to Geneva and created a high-minded intellectual coterie in exile. At this time in her life Royer advocated social progression, women’s rights, and advanced views on scientific philosophy, very daring and confrontational in all areas. This included her private life, which involved living openly with a married man, a mirror image of George Eliot’s circumstances in England. Royer was impressed with the Origin’s implications for human society. “One could say that this is the universal synthesis of economic laws, the social science par excellence, the code of living beings for all races and all times.”45

  Her translation was arr
esting. First of all, she added a long anti-clerical preface attacking Catholic and Protestant alike. If she offended Swiss sensibilities, she wrote, an “Oxford bishop has provided me with the example.” She explored eugenics and the perils of nineteenth-century marriage, emphasising the need for choice and good breeding, and making her point by using the emotionally loaded phrase election naturelle for “natural selection.” She added footnotes that over-ruled Darwin’s cautious apologies. She considered Darwin was wrong to speak of a universal war in nature, and referred throughout to concurrance de vie instead of the struggle for existence. She added a quantity of Lamarckian ideas about inbuilt progress and organisms striving to adapt to circumstances. Her title included the non-Darwinian phrase “laws of progress.”

  It was the most unusual reconstruction of his work Darwin ever faced. She must be “one of the cleverest and oddest women in Europe,” he exclaimed crossly. “Almost everywhere in the Origin when I express great doubts she appends a note explaining the difficulty or saying there is none whatever!” He could not laugh off these distortions. In 1865 he was still struggling to come to terms with her adjustments. Emma told their daughter Henrietta that he “is at work today on the verdammte Mlle Royer whose blunders are endless.”

  Perhaps his predicament was made easier by the fact that Royer was a woman. Darwin’s men friends rallied round, eager to dismiss her as a mere eccentric whose views were too absurd to heed. Édouard Claparède wrote to say that he had tried to prevent Royer from “disfiguring your work more completely.”46 “Mlle. Royer is a singular individual whose attractions are not those of her sex,” he mysteriously explained. The same air of baffled incredulity underpinned Ernest Renan’s aphorism that Royer was “almost a man of genius.” It seems clear that Royer was defying convention. Women in those academic circles were expected mostly to facilitate the unimpeded flow of their menfolk’s scientific ideas by translating, editing, proof-reading, and suchlike. The anticipated norm was a demure willingness to let the male author speak for himself, as Sarah Austin exemplified in her best-selling translations into English of Humboldt’s writings, or as Emma Darwin and Frances Hooker displayed. To rewrite and to politicise was unacceptable—unacceptable whatever the sex of the translator. Nevertheless, any book might quickly turn into a spectacle if a female translator stepped out of place. To be sure, Royer was inaccurate, misinformed, and following a cause. Yet Darwin and his friends may have found it a relatively simple matter to link these faults with her gender and dismiss her evolutionary outbursts as a feminine curiosity.