by Janet Browne
Ironically, what kept Darwin going through all this worry was his interest in the sex life of orchids. Round about now, with a jolt of recognition, he saw that the sexual arrangements of orchids were similar to those of barnacles. Like barnacles, orchids were basically hermaphroditic organisms. Like barnacles, they went to enormous lengths to prevent any form of self-fertilisation except as a last resort. They piled up adaptation after adaptation to ensure that no solitary sexual activity took place—either the male and the female parts ripened at different times, or each barricaded itself behind a complex series of structural modifications that required different kinds of triggers. The flowers were anatomically hermaphroditic but functionally male and female—exactly the same phenomenon he had discovered in barnacles. Sex, in Darwin’s theories, always required two.
Furthermore, orchids displayed the same kind of evolutionary sequences he had mapped in barnacles. He did not suspect anything of the kind until he got hold of various species of Catasetum from tropical Central America, “the most remarkable of all orchids.” Then he realised that the plant that botanists called Catasetum was functionally male. The female of the species was mistakenly catalogued as a different plant. A third kind contained both sets of sexual organs in full working order and was probably a direct descendant of the original hermaphroditic organism from which the other two had diverged. What botanists had for years described as three separate genera were reunited by Darwin as the male, female, and hermaphroditic forms of a single species.
He demonstrated the point with a renowned oddity kept in spirits in the museum collection at the Linnean Society, a pickled stem of orchid flowers collected in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk. On this stem grew three flowers, each apparently from a different genus. “Such cases shake to the very foundations all our ideas of the stability of genera and species,” John Lindley, the great authority on orchids, had remarked. Darwin recognised that by some curious chance the single stem replicated in miniature the real separation of the sexes in the wild. In April 1862, he went to London to deliver a short paper on Catasetum at a meeting of the Linnean Society. “I by no means thought that I produced a tremendous effect on Linn. Soc.,” he told Hooker afterwards, “but by Jove the Linn. Soc. produced a tremendous effect on me for I vomitted all night & could not get out of bed till late next evening, so that I just crawled home.—I fear I must give up trying to read any paper or speak. It is a horrid bore I can do nothing like other people.”31
Sick as he was, this was an achievement for a man who refused to call himself a botanist. “I am sometimes half tempted to give up species & stick to experiments,” he wrote to Hooker after this virtuoso display. “They are much better fun.”32
VII
Meanwhile his Origin of Species was becoming an object with a life of its own.
First of all, it became clear that Darwin was not the only evolutionist. While his book certainly captured much of the general imagination, and Huxley’s publicity machine pumped up a full head of steam, other developmental proposals pushed back into view. The Origin stimulated a market for all kinds of evolutionary books and theories. Old arguments reappeared to mix with the new; subsidiary controversies sprang up; publishers raced to turn a quick profit with similar products; and readers developed an obvious thirst for more. A revised edition of Vestiges published in 1860 sold extremely well, making it difficult to separate the response to Vestiges from that to Darwin.33 Hard on Vestiges’ reprinted heels came a matching theological counterblast, a reissue of Hugh Miller’s Footprints of the Creator brought out by his widow as an “antidote to some of the ill-grounded notions brought forward in other quarters.”34 Mrs. Miller judged her moment well. Flourishing sales brought her the money that had somehow never materialised when her husband was alive.
At the same time, Robert Grant, Darwin’s old acquaintance from Edinburgh, published a synopsis of his University College zoology lectures with commendatory words addressed to Darwin at the front. In this dull little volume Grant mentioned his friendship with Darwin, and his—Grant’s—longstanding commitment to evolution.35 Under the circumstances, it seems fair to say that Grant must have hoped to increase his book’s sale by capitalising on their former relationship. The two men’s positions were pitifully reversed. These lectures were Grant’s first publication in twenty years, his income was meagre, his zest for research was dead. He had reached rock bottom. To harness himself to Darwin’s ideas must have seemed a last chance for personal renaissance.36
Most notably, Herbert Spencer revealed his extreme originality in his First Principles, produced in parts from 1860 to 1862. In this work he redefined his own version of evolution, first outlined in articles published in the 1850s. To this he added views sharpened by his reading of Darwin. Like Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he seems to have believed that his views were vindicated by Darwin’s writings, although he differed from him on several grounds and experienced mixed emotions over the publicity that the Origin of Species generated. Chambers and Spencer would hardly have been human if they had not sometimes thought that Darwin had an advantage over them in being so highly visible. It was not only what one wrote, they surely thought, but also who one was and where one came from. In his autobiography Spencer said dismissively that he could not remember his first impressions of Darwin’s Origin except for annoyance that parts of his own scheme were “wrong.” He recorded “gratification in seeing the theory of organic evolution justified.”37
Cryptic though Spencer’s title might have seemed, his First Principles addressed the underlying laws of the physical universe and human existence. Every aspect of the world is continuously changing, he stated, and the direction of this change is from simple to complex. Matter always moves from a state of chaos to a state of order, from “indefinite incoherent homogeneity” to “definite coherent heterogeneity.” In other words, simplicity becomes complexity, and uniformity becomes variety. He thought this tendency for change occurred everywhere, in physics and astronomy just as much as in biology and human society. Evolution, so to speak, was the opposite of dissolution. Unerringly, Spencer captured the nation’s sense of progressive advance and diversification. Unerringly, he argued that the world of religious thought should be separated from that of science, postulating the existence of an “Unknowable power” behind all knowable phenomena. Both science and religion, he said, should recognise the impossibility of defining that power. He was himself a declared atheist.
In essence, Spencer presented a general view of the world that was to have a pervasive effect on late-nineteenth-century thinking. Much of what was ultimately attributed to Darwin was the result of philosophical shifts expressed in one form or another by Spencer. At the very least, most of what Spencer proposed about directional development and progress, although basically Lamarckian or environmentalist in thrust, was conflated in people’s minds with the Darwinian impetus. His writings, like Darwin’s, turned people’s thoughts towards the human condition and the great issues of the day.38
Yet Spencer was not blessed with the gift of clarity. He was the “most immeasurable ass in Christendom,” objected Carlyle. Huxley and Hooker more or less understood what Spencer meant, and Wallace, too, who sympathetically acknowledged that Spencer sought to get “to the root of everything.”39 Huxley respected Spencer’s powers of thought. Because of this respect, Darwin tried to approach his writings with an open mind. But however much he tried, he found Spencer’s definitions meaningless: “his style is too hard work for me.” Without ever saying it outright, he may have thought Spencer’s philosophy too extravagant.
Herbert Spencer’s conversation seemed to me very interesting, but I did not like him particularly and did not feel that I could easily have become intimate with him.… After reading any of his books, I generally feel enthusiastic admiration for his transcendent talents, and have often wondered whether in the distant future he would rank with such great men as Descartes, Leibnitz, etc. about whom, however, I know very little. Neverthele
ss I am not conscious of having profited in my own work by Spencer’s writings. His deductive manner of every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me: and over and over again I have said to myself, after reading one of his discussions—“Here would be a fine subject for half-a-dozen years’ work.”40
So he struggled through First Principles and most of Spencer’s subsequent works as they were published, muttering to himself about “unfounded speculation,” unable to suppress a smirk when Huxley quipped that “Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a deduction killed by a fact.”41 Darwin never made any effort to get to know Spencer. On the contrary, apart from borrowing the expression “survival of the fittest” in later years, he went to some trouble to distance himself from Spencer’s writings.
Second, by now some of the most notable nineteenth-century thinkers were contemplating the inner recesses of Darwin’s theory and pulling out of it some of the threads that would lead them towards the modern world. Whereas theologians naturally continued to take issue with the Origin of Species’ signification for the human soul, and connected the book’s purportedly irreligious position with the growing furore over Essays and Reviews and the perils of atheism, several key intellectuals commended Darwin’s method of scientific reasoning, a style depending more on the accumulation of probabilities, and on analogy, than on the classic form of proof by demonstration. Although John Herschel might have complained about the law of “higgledy-piggledy,” younger men such as Henry Fawcett, the blind economist at Cambridge, and John Stuart Mill compared the new form of reasoning favourably against the old. Mill, who read the Origin of Species at Fawcett’s prompting, sanctioned Darwin’s work in the 1862 edition of his System of Logic, and told Fawcett that “though he cannot be said to have proved the truth of his doctrine, he does seem to have proved that it may be true, which I take to be as great a triumph as knowledge & ingenuity could possibly achieve on such a question.”42
That Mill should take an encouraging line so early in the Origin’s history meant a great deal in the republic of letters. Above all, Mill’s approval showed that the natural history sciences (mostly descriptive and nonpredictive) could be brought into an acceptably rigorous philosophical framework.
Mr. Darwin’s remarkable speculation on the origin of species is another unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis.… It is unreasonable to accuse Mr. Darwin (as has been done) of violating the rules of induction. The rules of induction are concerned with the condition of proof. Mr. Darwin has never pretended that his doctrine was proved. He was not bound by the rules of induction but by those of hypothesis. And these last have seldom been more completely fulfilled. He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee.43
Fawcett too was to prove an invaluable support in the University of Cambridge. He had reviewed Darwin favourably in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860 and now began teaching and discussing the wider relevance of the Origin in the mathematical and economic community. “He belonged to that shrewd, hard-headed, North-country type which was so conspicuous at Cambridge,” reminisced Leslie Stephen, who knew him well, “and which, it must be confessed, was apt to be as narrow as it was vigorous intellectually. Fawcett knew Mill’s political economy as a Puritan knew the Bible.”44 Taking Fawcett’s lead, one or two mathematicians, economists, and statisticians also began considering Darwin’s book. In its way, the Origin of Species contributed indirectly to some of the major shifts in ideas about probability and the mathematical rules of chance in the nineteenth century.45 It added weight to an emerging consensus about the value of statistics for tracking random events and indicating hidden trends, shown most noticeably in the growing life assurance market but also supported by the government’s interest in maintaining bills of mortality and stricter financial policies; and generally endorsed the important notion in science that the physical universe is at root fluid, subject to change and contingency. Darwin’s theories contributed to the scientific movements that ultimately led to the taming of chance, replacing the idea of permanence with relativity.
More obviously, social economists seized on parallels between the organic kingdom and political economy. Competition, struggle, adaptation, success, and extinction—all these concepts moved freely between both domains. They were the Malthusian parallels on which Darwin had first drawn when composing his theory.46 While many commentators of the period remained divided on Malthus’s meaning for human society—to those with working-class sympathies Malthus’s principle merely blamed the poor for being poor, a marked contrast to those who applauded it for encouraging responsibility and self-improvement—there could be no denying the concept’s status. In one sense it could be said that Malthus’s images were turning full circle, for Darwin applied political economy to biology, and now these biological ideas were being reintegrated back into political economy, seemingly providing a “natural” account of the way human populations and social economies were thought to work.47 Malthus’s principles were biologised and then reabsorbed into economic thought. In another sense, the social and the biological were scarcely separable. Malthus’s remarks did not so much travel back and forth as exist already embedded in the same cultural context. Either way, Malthus’s doctrines looked like incontrovertible laws of nature to a nation steeped in competitive economic activity, buoyed up with Samuel Smiles’s anthems of self-help, adaptation, struggle, and survival, and as a political body fully engaged in territorial and commercial expansion.
“It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers among beasts and plants the society of England, with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian struggle for existence,” remarked Karl Marx in a letter to Engels in 1862.48 Marx read the Origin of Species soon after publication, noting “the clumsy English style.” He understood the Origin’s threat to traditional Victorian standards more clearly than most. “Although developed in the crude English fashion, this is the book which in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views,” he continued to Engels. He repeated much the same comment to Ferdinand Lassalle. “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”49 Marx laughed at the British fear of apes. “Since Darwin demonstrated that we are all descended from the apes there is scarcely any shock whatever that could shake our ancestral pride.”50
The poets were not far behind. Alfred Tennyson apparently ordered a copy of the Origin of Species in advance so that he might read it as soon as it appeared.51 He had long been interested in transmutation in a general manner, using ideas drawn from Vestiges for some of the most melancholy parts of In Memoriam in which he railed against the heedless forces of nature. And he was well known to have voiced many of the perplexities of the Victorian mind:
There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Tennyson could not find the God he knew in the Origin, the loving being who directed the world towards beneficent ends. For him, the bleakest aspect of Darwin’s work was the widespread cruelty in nature that he described, the “wasteless fecundity” that must end in death.
An omnipotent creator who could make such a painful world is to me sometimes as hard to believe in as to believe in blind matter behind everything. The lavish profusion too in the natural world appals me, from the growths of the tropical forest to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies.52
Soon afterwards, Tennyson changed one of the biblical allusions in In Memoriam. The line “Since Adam left his garden yet,” was adjusted to a more scientifically accurate “Since our first sun arose and set.”53 Never willing to accept the full panoply of Darwinism, and always vaguely dissatisfied with the new view of nature, Tennyson contented himself with the conclusion that evolution, if it was true, indicated that better things would come in the afterlife. In 1863 he remarked to William Allingham, “Darwinism, man from ape, wou
ld that really make any difference? Time is nothing, are we not all part of deity?” Thereafter, in an effort to gain some real insight, Tennyson read pertinent books and questioned the great thinkers of the day. He was to meet Darwin in 1868. And in 1869 he participated in forming the Metaphysical Society (it included Huxley) for the discussion of these and similar topics. He ended up thinking that the Darwinian theory was for the most part true but that mankind probably stood on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder.54
Darwin’s book pushed Robert Browning almost as far. The Origin of Species appeared midway between Browning’s Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, broadly coinciding with the serious spiritual uncertainties he experienced on his wife’s death in 1861. Browning returned to London after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death and by chance formed a friendship with Julia Wedgwood, Darwin’s niece. At one point Julia hoped to marry him, a hope never fulfilled.55 Many of Browning’s realignments of faith during this period came out in his “Caliban upon Setebos,” published in Dramatis Personae, in which God constructed the world merely as a plaything, devoid of any meaning. Browning made little distinction between Darwin, Lamarck, Spencer, and Chambers. Late in life he issued a formal explanation of his view. “In reality all that seems proved in Darwin’s scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organised until man’s appearance.… But I do not consider his case as to the changes in organisation, brought about by desire and will in the creature, proved.”56
Others read the Origin of Species attentively. Ernest Renan, author of Vie de Jésus (1863)—the book that with George Eliot’s translation of Strauss raised troubling doubts in orthodox Victorian minds—had something positive to say. His study of Jesus had deliberately left out the divine, a point noted with interest by Darwin when he and Emma read it. He was as naturalistic in his way as Huxley. “It may be that Darwin’s hypotheses on the subject can be judged to be insufficient or inexact; but undoubtedly they are on the road to the great explication of the world and of true philosophy.”57