Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  In the one place where he did describe the changes he had noticed in his personality, his children afterwards went to considerable lengths to discount the self-evaluation. Darwin stated that his aesthetic sense had gradually deadened over the years. He did not thrill to beautiful scenery or to a piece of music as he used to.

  Formerly, pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But for many years now I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive.47

  His honesty about this bothered the rest of the family. It was as if Darwin was denying his sensitivity to nature, almost turning his back on his special gifts. One by one, after his death, members of the next generation pointed out counter-examples, where Darwin had enjoyed a scenic view or an evening of music. “As regards his imagination,” said Leonard Darwin defensively, “I think that scenery, the beauty of flowers, and music and novels were sufficient to satisfy it. I remember he once said to me with a smile that he believed he could write a poem on Drosera, on which he was then working.”48 There was no real need for the family so diligently to readjust the record because the cultural norms of that time were easily able to accommodate a lack of artistic taste in the great and the good. There has always been a place among the English upper classes for philistinism, even among the intelligentsia. More was at stake. Francis evidently felt that Darwin’s disregard for aesthetics was unworthy of the flame of intellect and said so when he came to write his father’s Life and Letters. Unanimously, the children rejected their father’s own view of himself as a deadened, anaesthetic man.49

  Despite this occasional bleakness, Darwin’s writing was characteristic. He dwelled sentimentally on his Cambridge days. “My time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned.… we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards.” He told his Beagle story with an appreciative understanding of the way it transformed his life. An unpleasant edge crept into his account of FitzRoy. He praised Henslow too much, probably guilty about not having thanked him adequately in life. He took a valedictory swipe at Richard Owen and explained, to his own satisfaction at least, his decision never to engage in controversy. He was silent about his charitable work in the village, remarking only that he wished he had done more. He refrained from describing his income—and made sure to disparage his youthful extravagance.

  In particular, he emphasised throughout his own personal effort, presenting himself as a man committed to the ethos of self-help, a part of his identity that evidently drew on the ideals of self-determination, “character,” and enterprise more generally encountered in Samuel Smiles’s books. As he had told Galton, he valued this quality highly. He believed everything he had attained was the result of his own industry. Looking back, he reckoned he learned nothing at school; nothing from his father, who considered him “a very ordinary boy”; nothing from two universities except that which was performed under his own steam. Everything accomplished on the voyage was through his own hard work. He claimed that he had listened to Dr. Robert Grant’s eloquent advocacy of Lamarck “without any effect on my mind.” His grandfather’s views produced “no effect on me.” There was a decidedly self-congratulatory element to this. He could not even believe that the subject of evolution had been “in the air.” The black-and-scarlet beetle he had seen on holiday at Plas Edwards, in Wales, aged ten, was recalled more clearly than his dying mother. All this conveyed—whether intentionally or not—his belief in personal creativity and autonomy. Like all memorialists, he pieced together his own view of himself, remembering only those things that endorsed his particular inner picture, and he moulded his memories to the hidden conventions and assumptions that shape any individual’s manner of thinking about his or her life.50 Rather astutely, he painted himself as developing from a good-hearted numbskull, forever “surprised” and “astonished,” into an unlikely prince.51 This was the unquestioning individuality of the age of laissez-faire, a kind of capitalist autobiography where by skill and personal effort the author’s losses were turned into gains. It was full of masculine assumptions about the world of work and positive intellectual activity.52 His moments of uncertainty and the paths left untaken were discarded.

  Furthermore, Darwin smoothed out the turbulent path of his early evolutionary speculations and turned them into a steady march from facts to theory. To omit, or to forget, the intellectual electricity of his London years, his pride and excitement in his theory, his despair on reading Wallace’s letter, and the steady support given to him by others was to rewrite his past. The old Darwin forgot how the young Darwin had returned from the Beagle voyage hard-headed and full of drive. He did not tell his sons about scientific courage or competitiveness, or the ecstasy of ideas.53 He avoided talking about sparks that explode into insights. Even his account of the moment of creative inspiration that had made him into what he was sounded flat and full of future hard work.

  Fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well-prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence … it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.54

  His affable nature, his wish to be kind, his feeling that he had a gilded life, his love for his family: all these obscured the very real shocks he had encountered. As others have remarked about the genre of autobiography, the author depends not so much on the art of recollecting as on the art of forgetting.55 He nowhere acknowledged that competitive steely element that drove him on. Huxley afterwards believed Darwin’s greatest attributes were a “clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination,” which were subordinated to “his love of truth.”56 Darwin was incapable of seeing himself as others saw him. In an oddly engaging manner, he remained a stranger to himself.

  This blurring of the past softened his account of the Origin of Species and the unrelenting dedication with which he had ensured its world-wide consideration. Throwing all memory to the winds, he offered a pleasant encomium on his reviewers.

  I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice. My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has generally been done, as I believe, in good faith.57

  VII

  In this autobiography Darwin expressed startlingly harsh views on Christianity. Like many Victorian thinkers finally coming to terms with their loss of faith, he blamed his increasing doubts on the absence of any rational proof for God’s existence. No “sane man” would believe in miracles, he said; the Gospels were demonstrably not literal accounts of the past; comparative studies of the Hindu, Mohammedan, and Buddhist faiths, along with scholarly descriptions of primitive animism and spirit worship, showed that Christianity could not be regarded as a divine, monotheistic revelation. Formerly, he said, he had believed in a personal deity. He remembered standing in the Brazilian forest and his “conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” Disbelief had only slowly “crept” over him. In fact, his account is distinctive in the annals of autobiographical writing for its lack of any pivotal moment of loss. Darwin had no epiphany. When he composed the Origin of Species he retained some religious views. But now, as he wrote, he said not even the grandest scenes would cause such feelings to swell.

  To him, the God of the Christians was cruel.

  I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and
this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.58

  Perhaps it was for self-protection that he did not dwell on the moral or ethical dilemmas that had beset his notebooks. He did not mention his conscience. There was little here to guide his sons on the right way to live a moral life in the newly secularised world that he had helped to create, no sense of personal transformation or rebellion either, where one set of views was finally jettisoned in favour of another. He did not struggle to find meaning in his loss of faith, seemingly accepting it as an inevitable feature of the life of a scientist. No other experiences, he implied, not even the loss of faith, could match those he had encountered in science.59

  As for the evidence presented by a deep internal conviction that God must exist, he admitted that he could not trust his own mind to reason properly on the issue, knowing that his faculties were “developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal.” A dog might as well reason on the mind of Newton, he had once said. More forcefully, he put the same words into his father’s mouth, recounting Dr. Darwin’s story of an elderly female patient who had remonstrated with him. The old woman believed in God without ever asking herself why she believed. “Doctor, I know that sugar is sweet in my mouth, and I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

  All these were opinions that Darwin repeated here and there in letters during the 1870s, sometimes using the same turn of phrase. They were evidently strongly felt. “Science has nothing to do with Christ,” he told Nicolai von Mengden, a Russian biologist, in a letter written in 1879, “except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe there has ever been any Revelation.”60 As it turned out, Emma Darwin had once suggested to him that his scientific approach might make him question the validity of religion. Darwin seems to have concurred in the truth of this opinion. His niece Julia Wedgwood recollected that when he was writing The Descent of Man he told her that “the habit of looking for one kind of meaning I suppose deadens the perception of another.” Julia admired Darwin’s reticence.

  If he had ever said a word that was either on the side of, or on the side against, what we mean by religion, he could not have taken the place he has done. His books would have been in either case more interesting to a good many people, but no one could have felt, as everyone must feel now, that they are a manifestation of science in its absolute purity. This gives them a coolness & repose, unlike any other written in the last thirty years.61

  Living out for himself the archetypal Victorian crisis of faith, Darwin perhaps recognised that he had lost the last vestiges of faith when he discovered that biology provided him with the answers he most desired. In the end, in his autobiography, he asserted that religious belief was little more than inherited instinct, akin to a monkey’s fear of a snake.

  Emma Darwin’s position in relation to these views was complex. Her husband probably wrote these words with her in mind, concerned not to offend or disturb, sensitive to her fear that his lack of belief would separate them in the hereafter, while trying to be true to his commitments. Yet he may have been almost too sensitive. Emma’s faith was gradually ebbing as she grew older. “She kept a sorrowful wish to believe more, and I know it was an abiding sadness to her that her faith was less vivid than it had been in her youth,” said Henrietta.62 She had developed a broadminded tolerance for her husband’s opinions. Nevertheless when the family was considering publishing parts of this autobiography after his death, she asked for the sentence about the monkey’s dread of a snake to be omitted, telling Francis that “your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me.” This particular remark, she felt, ran a real risk of offending believers, especially those believers who knew and loved Darwin as a man. “I should wish if possible to avoid giving pain to your father’s religious friends who are deeply attached to him, and I picture to myself the way that sentence would strike them, even those so liberal as Ellen Tollett and Laura [Forster, one of Henrietta’s friends], much more Admiral Sullivan, Aunt Caroline, &c, and even the old servants.” The family politics that accompanied her request, and her wish to omit one or two other religious comments that she felt were “not worthy of his mind,” became a significant episode in sanitising Darwin’s religious beliefs in the years immediately after his death.63 In the event, the whole section was diplomatically omitted from the first printing of Darwin’s autobiography.64

  Darwin closed the religious part of his autobiography with a statement of honest ignorance. “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”65

  As the summer blazed away and the garden wilted, Darwin tended to write during the early afternoon and spent the remains of the day lying on the grass under the lime trees, lazily drifting in and out of his memories. When it was done, Emma said, “F. has finished his Autobiography and I find it very interesting, but another person who did not know beforehand so many of the things would find it more so.”66

  VIII

  All along, he worked quietly to promote his sons’ careers. Each of the boys, in one way or another, displayed particular aspects of Darwin’s own character and abilities. William took after his father’s secret talent for finance, as well as helping Darwin with some of his botanical research. His abiding virtue was reliability. George and Francis opted for science, one theoretical, the other experimental. Leonard travelled the world as a military engineer before standing (unsuccessfully) for Parliament as a Liberal and ultimately becoming president of the Eugenics Society, while Horace eventually satisfied his lifelong fascination with machinery by founding what would become the leading scientific instrument company in Britain, whose fortunes rose with the Cambridge school of physics emerging in the Cavendish Laboratory.67 Horace graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1874.

  Francis was indispensable to Darwin at home, both as a secretary and as an experimental botanist. A literate, accomplished man, he felt himself wholly unsuited to the profession of medicine in which he had qualified. He was the son that the others thought most understood his father’s feelings for nature—although Henrietta considered George most like Darwin in his power of work and the “warmth and width of his affections.”

  Darwin was proud of Francis’s achievements. He was a second pair of hands and eyes to him. At Down House, Darwin identified interesting botanical problems for Francis to solve, monitored his experiments, recommended his researches to editors of scientific journals, eased him into his web of eminent correspondents, and relayed his results to Hooker and other leading botanists. As soon as was decently possible, in 1875, Darwin nominated Francis and George Romanes to become fellows of the Linnean Society, and he encouraged his son to produce his first botanical papers on unresolved questions emerging from his own work on insectivorous plants. He longed to see Francis an established naturalist and did everything he could to help him on his way.

  He was consequently outraged when the Royal Society rejected an early paper of Francis’s on the absorptive filaments of the teasel, almost as if the Royal had rejected one of his own investigations. “The wicked R.S. has declined printing Fr’s teazle paper,” Emma reported, “which has vexed F. 10 times more than Fr.”68 Truculently Darwin sent Francis’s paper to a lesser journal for publication, wrote a laudatory notice about it for Nature, and told Ferdinand Cohn, “I have reason to know that some of our leading men of Science disbelieve in my son’s statements & this has mortified me not a little.”69 With an observant sigh, Emma said that Darwin deliberately sent the letter to Nature in order “to spite the Royal Soc.” Guiltily, Darwin began to wonder if his reputation would make it harder for Francis to establish his credentials. Would his old adversaries attack his son, a much more vulnerable target than himself?

  Much of the same dedicated paternal push came
in his dealings with George. George Darwin’s early work touched on the social sciences, for he advocated marriage reform, and in an important article in 1875 he examined the purported ill effects of cousin marriages. As in Francis’s case, these studies grew out of his father’s theory of evolution, even an unintentionally amusing piece on clothes for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1872 in which he discussed “survivals” in dress, such as hatbands and tailcoats, from the standpoint of continuous adaptation and selection, spiced with a dash of Tylor’s anthropology.

  George began his study of cousin marriages and congenital disorders with Darwin’s Descent of Man very much in mind. A text by Alfred Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin, published in 1875, could well have been the stimulating factor, for Huth examined marriage and incest from an anthropological point of view, calling on Charles Darwin’s book for support and advocating the idea of putting a question about cousin marriages on the population census form. Like many of his generation, George felt disturbed over the apparent weakening, or degeneration, of the human race, a common enough response to his father’s application of the idea of natural selection to mankind, that also reflected longlived trends in social and economic thought. George decided to examine the question of cousin marriages by using statistics. He gathered these statistics from Burke’s Landed Gentry and the announcement columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, and from the records of lunatic asylums, making contact with two of Darwin’s medical correspondents, the psychiatrists James Crichton-Browne and Henry Maudsley. Taking a tip from his father, and Francis Galton before him, he also circulated questionnaires, but discovered too late that people were reluctant to divulge to a stranger their children’s mental problems.

  George concluded there was some statistical evidence for slightly lowered vitality among the offspring of first cousins, but no evidence for an excessively high death rate in infancy. How he regarded this information in the knowledge that his own parents were first cousins, and that two other sets of uncles and aunts were first cousins, is unknown. It seems likely that he was here peering into his own heredity, searching for his place in the scheme of nature, and was perhaps relieved to find that his results suggested only a few minor incapacities for himself and his siblings. His Darwinian bad stomach was not going to be the death of him, for example. The dangers of inbreeding could be outweighed, he said in his article, by differing features of upbringing between related parents.