Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points, though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant;—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside thro’ apes & savages at the moral sense of mankind.55

  By now Darwin was reluctant to grapple with any of the great European thinkers unless he was chivvied into it or persuaded that he would find something directly useful for his work, much preferring to hear about leading philosophical systems in colorful synopsis from Huxley. During March and April 1869, for instance, he heard a great deal about the finer points of Comte’s doctrines. Huxley had launched a violent attack on Comte’s positivism in what was to become one of his most famous essays, “On the Physical Basis of Life.” Positivism was nothing more than “Catholicism minus Christianity,” as he derisively called it.56 The smear so annoyed Vernon Lushington, a leading British Comtean and one of Darwin’s London acquaintances, that he sent Darwin an irate letter to pass on to Huxley. Lushington sardonically suggested that Huxley should perhaps “read” Comte before criticising him quite so roundly. Terse letters were exchanged between the three of them until Huxley had the gall to tell Darwin that he disliked these sorts of fights. “I begin to understand your sufferings over the ‘Origin’—a good book is comparable to a piece of meat & fools are like flies who swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing & hatching his own particular maggot of an idea.”57 He followed this high-minded sentiment with a sketch of himself as an angry dog bristling at another. “You must read Huxley v. Comte,” Darwin afterwards exclaimed to Hooker. “He never wrote anything so clever before, & has smashed everybody right & left in grand style. I had a vague wish to read Comte & so had George, but he [Huxley] has entirely cured us of any such vain wish.”58

  Even so, Darwin noted Kant’s views on morality and duty, and tucked the comments away for use in his work on mankind.

  More to Darwin’s liking, he and Frances Power Cobbe discussed the mental powers of dogs, especially their household pets. She was pleased by his affection for the little dog Polly that accompanied the family everywhere, which afterwards struck her as Darwin’s only redeeming feature. And he enjoyed Cobbe’s self-mocking air. “Though I attended on Saturday a most successful Woman’s Rights Meeting,” she was to declare in 1870, “I am of opinion that our ancient privilege of talking nonsense even to those we most deeply honour,—is one not to be parted with on any terms!”

  After this gregarious London visit, Elizabeth Wedgwood moved to Downe in order to be closer to Emma; they were the last two remaining Wedgwood sisters. There, in Tromer Lodge, she lived out her days, nearly blind, until her death in 1880. Henrietta Darwin remembered her regularly tottering into the drawing room at Down House, followed by her dog, demanding, “Where is Emma?” Parslow did not bother to announce her any more, and Emma fitted up a bedroom so that she could stay the night at any time. The Darwin girls spent hours reading to her aloud. Emma’s sisterly devotion sometimes proved a burden to the younger members of the family.

  The socialising continued apace, although in June and July, Darwin’s health deteriorated again. “Unwell … did hardly anything,” he noted. In July 1868 he took the family on holiday to the Isle of Wight, renting a house in Freshwater Bay owned by the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.59

  The holiday turned out one to remember.60 Erasmus went too, eager to experience the bohemian artistic resort that Julia Cameron and Alfred Tennyson had between them created; Joseph Hooker rented a hotel room for a week or two nearby, seeking peace and quiet to write a speech for the next meeting of the British Association; and a mixed handful of nieces and nephews arrived for a day or two every so often. Darwin liked Mrs. Cameron, who was exuberant and droll, a gust of fresh air in his sedate existence. She swept them off hither and thither, plunging them into the social whirl associated with her home in Freshwater.

  It was hardly a secluded rest. During their six weeks’ stay, Darwin visited Tennyson, who lived in Faringford House, not far from the Camerons, talked with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his brother-in-law the poet Thomas Appleton, both of whom were visiting Tennyson, and received courtesy calls from each in return, as well as meeting Julia Cameron and her husband on a daily basis. Darwin enjoyed his discussion with Longfellow, which soon turned to Harvard University, where Longfellow was professor of poetry. Darwin praised Gray and Agassiz. “What a set of men you have in Cambridge!” he said to Longfellow. “Both our universities put together cannot furnish the like. Why there is Agassiz—he counts for three!”61

  Mrs. Cameron took a fancy to Horace Darwin (aged seventeen), often asking him to Dimbola Lodge to help pack and unpack photographs, and on one occasion getting him to pose in one of her allegorical photographs. The Darwin entourage privately smiled at her effusive manner, so different from the self-contained Down House ethos, her flapping silk robes, untidy hair, and capable, dirty hands, stained blue with photographer’s inks. She did all her photographic work herself, rushing from the “glass house” that was her studio to the cellar that acted as a darkroom. The menfolk had never met anyone quite like her before. Erasmus was captivated and willingly sat for a photograph.62 The holiday ended in a transport of mutual affection, with Erasmus calling over the banisters to her, “You have left eight persons deeply in love with you.”63

  It was Julia Cameron who arranged that Darwin should meet Tennyson. She was well aware that an encounter between these flagships of Victorian culture was highly appropriate, each in their own way delving into shadowy realms of thought and transformation, their writings distinguished for the grandeur of their intellects, and each drawing close to the pinnacle of Victorian celebrity. To bring such intellectual lions together, she thought, would be a marvel of social ingenuity. Certainly Mrs. Cameron was convinced that only she could have managed it.64 But like many other strenuously engineered occasions, the fact of the meeting was more significant than the occasion itself.

  Although the two men felt courteously interested in each other, they found it difficult to exchange pleasantries and even harder to engage in real talk. Emily Tennyson made a note in her diary:

  17 Aug. Faringford. Mr. D called and seemed to be very kindly, unworldly, and agreeable. A. said to him, “Your theory of evolution does not make against Christianity,” and D. answered “No, certainly not.”65

  Emma Darwin, on the other hand, was as excited as any teenage girl. To see in person the poet who fired her imagination was a thrill she remembered for a long while. Merely to be in the same room making inconsequential conversation with Emily Tennyson etched itself into her memory. Tennyson gave her a glass of wine and showed her about the house, flirting gently with Julia Cameron. Ever after, Emma’s elderly relatives referred to her “beloved Tennyson.” Aunt Fanny Allen mocked him as a second-rate poet, good enough only to write such things as Locksley Hall.

  This exciting moment had another effect on Emma. She was impressed by her husband. She discovered that she liked to see him being admired for his insights into nature. Even though her loyalty to him had never wavered, this meeting with Tennyson placed her regard for him on a new footing. First the Prince of Wales, and now the Poet Laureate. She felt proud of him. His secularised science, the one thing that might possibly have come between them, was never to be a serious obstacle to their relationship.

  The Irish poet William Allingham was visiting Freshwater Bay at the same time. More cynical than most of the people who met Darwin, he described Darwin as “yellow, sickly, very quiet.” He noted Darwin’s physical frailty and Emma’s attentiveness. Disinclined to bow his knee at the shrine of natural selection, he implied that he considered Darwin selfish and self-indulgent. “He has his meals at his own times, sees people or not as he chooses, has invalid’s privileges in full, a great help to a studious man.… Has been himself called The Missing Link.”66 In his diary he recorded that Emily Tenn
yson “dislikes Darwin’s theory.” He and Tennyson afterwards wandered in the garden talking of Christianity. “What I want,” declared Tennyson impatiently, “is an assurance of immortality.”

  During this stay on the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Cameron fell on Darwin as a photographic subject. She had a sharp eye for a passing celebrity, welcoming the cream of Victorian society on their way to see Tennyson, and persuading the most important visitors to sit for a portrait. No matter who they were, they usually found it impossible to refuse. “She thinks it is a great honour to be done by her,” said one exhausted guest. “Sitting to her was a serious affair, not to [be] entered lightly upon.… she expected much from her sitters.”67 Yet the sessions were an absorbing experience, and many notable figures afterwards said that they were flattered to sit.

  Moreover, the results possessed lasting impact. Not yet at the height of her fame, she depicted the giants of Victorian intellectual life as they had never been seen before, creating an indefinable aura that contributed materially to their widening public stature and added to the general preoccupation with national heroes permeating Victorian culture. She subscribed to the “men of genius” school of thought, and her studies of nineteenth-century thinkers like Tennyson, Robert Browning, and John Herschel showed an intense appreciation of manly intellect. She loved to bring out the power of thought in a celebrated man’s face; and her greatest talent probably rested in these monumental male biographical studies. Her photographic tableaux were quite the opposite. For these she dressed her sitters in costume and posed them for historical or allegorical purpose, such as “Alethea,” or “The gardener’s daughter.” Housemaids, fishermen, and miscellaneous young visitors like Horace Darwin decked themselves in crowns and robes to depict the death of King Arthur, an illustration for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. These sentimental tableaux vivants were ridiculed in Cameron’s own day. Furthermore, she gave full rein to her special trick of fuzziness: “very daring in style,” said the Photographic News, reviewing her first exhibition in 1864; “out of focus,” complained the British Journal of Photography.68 Such images were in marked contrast to her other more rugged pictures of eminent men.

  She took three portrait photographs of Darwin. Two of these show Darwin looking slightly apprehensive, perhaps because Cameron’s photographs required ten or fifteen minutes’ exposure.69 In the third and best-known photograph, Darwin sat three-quarter profile, serene and thoughtful. Mrs. Cameron usually posed her male sitters carefully. She made John Herschel fluff up his white hair for effect and draped Robert Browning in a velvet cloak.70 In her picture of Joseph Hooker, probably taken during this same visit to Freshwater, he leans forward, wrapped in thought. By contrast, Darwin’s costume was evidently his own and mostly betrayed his precautions against the cold, especially on holiday on the British south coast in July.

  On the whole, Darwin’s dress was but a minor part of the composition. Through her use of ceiling light she ensured there was almost nothing in the photograph except Darwin’s massive forehead, top-lit to emphasize the vast dome of his skull, the brow creased in thought, eyes sunk under his enormous eyebrows, and his huge, scholarly beard. As in classical statuary, the effect was of a wise and venerable figure. More than anyone else Mrs. Cameron created the visual image of Darwin as a powerful abstract mind.

  The beard made the difference. Over the preceding years of ill health, Darwin had let it grow unencumbered, for convenience as much as for anything else. Now it reached to his chest, thick, grey, and luxurious, a reassuringly masculine counterpart to his receding hairline, a traditional sign of male maturity and wisdom, symbolic of all the qualities that Victorians were coming to value in their leaders, both patriarchal and patristic. When Darwin distributed an earlier photograph (taken by William) of himself with this beard, Hooker replied immediately, “Glorified friend! Your photograph tells me where Herbert got his Moses for the fresco in the House of Lords—horns & halo & all.… Do pray send me one for Thwaites, who will be enchanted with it. Oliver is calling out too for one.”71 The Darwin boys agreed that their father looked like Moses. Asa Gray echoed the general chorus. “Your photograph with the venerable beard gives the look of your having suffered, and perhaps, from the beard, of having grown older. I hope there is still much work in you—but take it quietly and gently!”72

  It was a philosopher’s beard, as Mrs. Cameron, Hooker, and Gray implied, with strongly religious overtones. Darwin was delighted by this maverick idea: “Do I not look reverent?” he asked his relatives. For himself, he hardly gave the possible symbolism a second thought.73 He liked having a beard, and he intended keeping it. Still, at some level it probably served as a badge of his intellectual vocation and his increasing age and status. A beard like this symbolized his arrival at the summit of Victorian masculine existence. It also indicated that he was no fresh-faced radical, no dangerously well-groomed Frenchman.74 The beard moreover disguised his expression, helping him keep his thoughts private and allowing him, if he wished, to be a sage or a prophet.75 A beard like Darwin’s was a visual symbol of the real seat of Victorian power, and one of the most obvious outward manifestations of what Darwin would soon be describing as factors involved in sexual selection among humans.76 Intuitively, Julia Cameron captured these elements of Darwin’s emerging public persona far more eloquently than any other photographer of the middle years of the century.

  Underneath Cameron’s artistic imperatives, however, lay marked financial necessity. She and her husband were virtually penniless. The couple depended financially on Mrs. Cameron’s entrepeneurial endeavours in photography and on the collection of rental fees from holiday houses, as the Darwin family and others (among them Benjamin Jowett, Jenny Lind, and Anne Thackeray, the writer’s daughter) were aware. Shrewdly using the proximity of Tennyson as a lure, she just about managed to support herself and her husband. Mrs. Cameron charged Darwin a fee for the photographs and asked him to assign the copyright to her. As with her other studies of prominent men, she went on to publish a number of authorised prints as a commercial venture sold through Colnaghi’s, the London fine art firm. Hidden behind impeccable Victorian manners was the inescapable fact that she needed to make money out of Darwin’s face.

  Darwin obliged. He was interested in photography both as a process and as a sign of the times, and he enjoyed Mrs. Cameron’s company. More than this, he liked her photograph better than any other portrait of him, and he wrote her a sentence to that effect. She promptly included the remark as a mechanically reproduced inscription at the bottom of the Colnaghi prints (although some prints exist without it).77 This was evidently a technique she refined in the future. Tennyson would complain about constantly signing photographs for her but did it anyway. She registered the signed picture of Darwin under copyright later in the year.

  At the end, artist and subject were mutually pleased. Darwin paid Julia Cameron £4 7s. for his photograph and other sums later on for various quarter-sized reproductions.78 These he distributed almost like an autograph until the expense became too much and he sat for another, cheaper carte de visite from Elliot and Fry, and other firms after that. Mrs. Cameron moved smoothly into retail action at the next British Association meeting, at which Joseph Hooker was president. “I have between £8 & £9 to hand over to Mrs. Cameron for sale of photographs, chiefly yours,” Hooker told Darwin, “but it is far too big for travellers to carry away—I wrote twice to her from Norwich.”79

  “I have got your photograph over my chimney piece, and like it much,” Darwin told Hooker in return, “but you look down so sharp on me that I shall never be bold enough to wriggle myself out of any contradiction.”80 In this way, the public became more widely familiar with Darwin’s face.

  VI

  Back from holiday, Darwin felt as revitalised as his family. “Charles’s book is done,” said Emma contentedly, “and he is enjoying leisure, tho’ he is a very bad hand at that. I wish he could smoke a pipe or ruminate like a cow.”81 Certainly his health was better, an impro
vement that lasted more or less for another year.

  Emma noted his returning air of anticipation. Striding down the garden path after arriving home from the Isle of Wight, he already planned a riot of fresh experiments. Without delay, he invited Hooker to visit and asked him for plant specimens to restock the hothouse. When lumpy parcels wrapped in coconut matting started appearing on the doorstep, Emma knew that all was right in his world. “You are very good about the lilies,” Darwin wrote conspiratorily to Kew. “We want only a few for pots to be brought into the drawing room when in flower.… we had not the least intention of begging bulbs from you.”82

  He pushed Variation and its poor reviews to the back of his mind.

  The devil take the whole book; & yet now I am at work again, as hard as I am able. It is really a great evil, that from habit I have no pleasure in hardly anything except natural history, for nothing else makes me forget my ever recurrent uncomfortable sensations. But I must not howl anymore, & the critics may say what they like: I did my best & man can do no more. What a splendid pursuit Natural History would be if it was all observing & no writing.83

  If not plants, then mankind. Before he had finished correcting the proofs of Variation, Darwin began turning over in his mind again the links between animals and humans, and evidence for descent from earlier forms of life. For him, the best part of any project always lay in gathering a mass of examples.