Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  Darwin, in his Autobiography, tells us that

  in October 1838, that is, 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 which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, 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.

  Reading, like seeing, is selective, and in Malthus he found not a model but a mechanism. What drew Darwin to Malthus was not an encompassing vision of a planet of competition but the specific point that organisms make more children than their environment can support, and that the ones that survive must survive for a reason—might be ones that have some feature that gives them an advantage. A baby bug that could see farther than its brothers might get to the crucial crumb of bread first. (Malthus's argument eventually foundered on an error: population increases geometrically while food stocks can increase only arithmetically, he insisted. Fortunately, at least so far, that hasn't been true.)

  There are ongoing arguments about just how much of Malthus there is in Darwin, and how much of Darwin is anticipated in Malthus. Malthus can have an unpleasantly sanctimonious tone, unknown to his student, and the moralizing is quite overt. (A shaming but perhaps not unique confession: until becoming preoccupied with Darwin, I had always thought that Malthus was a grim seventeenth- century figure, like Hobbes.)

  Yet we are also undergoing a bit of a Malthus renaissance now, as ecology- minded “realists” insist that the central insights of Malthus about populations and resources are, like them or not, “neutral” and that the time of plenty through which we have just passed will prove to be a bubble on a Malthusian sea of pain. Darwin understood early on that where people were concerned,Malthusian argument was really not about nature but about culture, where purposes count—about how we are prepared to share resources. We share not against nature but because, as social animals, it is in our interest to help one another. Scrooge's moral education is to learn that Malthus is right only if we let him be. (Darwin would later come to reject the Malthusian idea that poverty could be cured only by famine.) Darwin learned from Malthus, as Marx learned from Darwin, but he wasn't a Malthusian. The theory Darwin got worked only where no conscious intentions were working at the same time.

  Yet Darwin did understand clearly, and began to brood at length on, what he eventually called the “wedge” of death, the reality that his new theory implied that death and suffering and pain were, from some point of view, creative but not justified. It wasn't that suffering was for your own good, or for the good of the species; suffering just was. It might in the long run produce innovation, but that wasn't its point. Its point was—well, its point was a dagger pointed at the heart of “natural theology,” which insisted that nature, though cruel seeming in individual cases, was purposefully benevolent seen whole. The infliction of suffering in that view implied not a long- term direction but a perfected balance, a plan; we suffer for a purpose. This kind of Panglossian hopefulness Darwin dismissed. “Pain & disease in world, & yet talk of perfection,” he wrote in his notes. Even if civilized people could temper the Malthusian horror for man, nothing could alter it in the long course of nature. Death was the thing that weeded out life. The process might have a history, but it didn't seem to have a moral or, really, a point.

  Perhaps in spite of this new preoccupation—or, perhaps, in order to spite it—he began to think about getting married. He made a series of reflections on the advantage of marriage that is irresistibly comic, charming, because it attempts to use the same kind of close- order analytic reasoning on the question of whether to make love to a woman as led to his revelations on coral reefs. In a famous series of notes, he made a “pro” and “con” list of the advantages and drawbacks of getting married, like Robinson Crusoe on his island pointing out the positives and negatives of being shipwrecked. (Did he have a particular bride in mind? It isn't entirely clear.)

  Against, he listed: “Freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it.—Conversation of clever men at clubs— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.—to have the expense & anxiety of children.… I never should know French,—or see the Continent—or go to America,” or even “go up in a Balloon.” For the idea, he noted:“Children … —Constant companion, (& friend in old age)” and, memorably, “better than a dog anyhow.” In the end, he chose marriage, on the strong grounds of “a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps.”“Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,”he concluded.

  There is so much inadvertent poetry on this page that as it brings a smile to one's lips, it is perhaps easy to miss the slightly tongue- in- cheek quality it must have originally had for its author. Common sense tells you that Darwin was not a kid, nor a naïf, and he had seen enough of the world in five years’ circumnavigating it to know something of sex and men and women. He is having fun, as he always does in his notebooks, fooling around with an idea in a deliberately po- faced manner that was part of his humor. It is fair to guess, given the intensity of his obsessive interests already, that the idea that marriage would keep him from going up in a balloon was not actually a real concern. (On the other hand, the notion of America might have been; he would toy with the idea of emigration even after he was settled and housebound.) The combination of earnest naïveté in the attempt to project the future and a gauche and winning boyishness—only a newcomer to it would have counted the conversation of clever men in clubs enough to swear him to a celibate life. (It is also very much like Darwin that he did not put the expected exclamation point at the end of the that triple “Marry.”)

  The woman he was to propose to, his cousin Emma Wedgwood, had a bit more Jane Austen in her than might first seem apparent. Pretty in that sleepy early- Victorian manner, she had a sharper tongue, on paper at least, than her reputation as a pious, retiring mama might suggest. Just that year she had written in a letter about her disappointment with a life of Bishop Wilberforce that she was reading: “His dull sons have put in such a quantity of repetition that one is quite weary of the same religious sentiment repeated 50 times over in nearly the same words. And they have been very spiteful about poor old Clarkson, who is blind and 80 years old, which I think might have made them careful not to hurt him, and one feels very sure their father never would. Wilberforce's letters, I think, are not very agreeable or clever, but very sweet (in a good sense).” She bantered with the best, writing to Darwin, after they were engaged, “You will be [after our marriage] forming theories about me & if I am cross or out of temper you will only consider ‘What does that prove’. Which will be a very grand & philosophical way of considering it.”

  But that she was passionately religious, a woman of faith, there's no doubt. They exchanged letters on the great questions. It seems clear that Charles confided in her his hopes: his belief that he had stumbled on a fundamental discovery about life's history, and that he was on the way to solving the “mystery of mysteries.” In stating his hopes, he could not help but confess his doubts. It was, as he would say elsewhere, like confessing a murder. And she seems to have said to him unequivocally that it would pain her beyond measure if indeed he believed these things and went ahead and said them publicly. Her reasons were sympathetic and even romantic: they would not be able to stay together through eternity. “My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.”

  Whether Charles promised to stay away from his speculations, or promised himself to, or, most likely, decided to throw himself into more conventional kinds of naturalism while saving the bigger thoughts for another day, he certainly drew back from his revelation in the very moment that he had come close to the truth. He turned instead to the detailed study of the kinds
and habits of—-barnacles. He had good reasons to delay: he wanted the argument to be impregnable; he wanted to be an unimpeachably big deal naturalist when he published. “Darwin? Well, you know, his stuff on barnacles is very sound.” “No one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many,” he wrote to his friend J. D. Hooker in 1845, and one hears Darwin trying to convince himself that the drudge work must precede the real work. (This intuition was sound, though, at the tactical level; he eventually got that Royal Medal “All along of the Barnacles!!!” as Hooker wrote to him delightedly.) He needed much more time to get the details right and the problems solved. But there was also, undeniably, an element of fear and hypersensi-tivity in his delay—fear of the critics, of course, but also fear of hurting the one person he loved most by saying things that would pain her.

  But he knew he was right, and he knew it already. He was torn. He did eventually write a précis of the theory, complete, in 1844, and wrote a letter to Emma enjoining her to publish it if he died suddenly. In it, he pointed out what remained the central challenge to his theory—the argument from the design of the human eye, which seems too perfectly wrought to have emerged by small natural steps rather than one big creative act. He sketched his idea of what we now know to be the right solution: that the eye is neither perfectly designed nor all that hard to make by slight increments, since half an eye is much better than no eye at all. But Emma wrote in the margin, referring to the idea that a mere light- sensitive nerve could become a perfect seeing machine, “a great assumption, E.D.”

  He respected his wife enough to listen to her opinion and knew, as well, that her opinion was likely to be the opinion of the world, whose reflexive attitudes, on this subject at least, she knew by heart, and by soul, too. Whether he promised her to go no further, for a while anyway, or promised himself to publish nothing until he was certain, he knew that he was right and that he couldn't say what he knew, not yet. He was in something like the position of an addict who promises to leave the needle or bottle alone but, deep inside, knows he can't. The notebooks from the late 1830s were always there, somewhere on a high shelf in his mind. A deep ambivalence was set in Darwin's character beginning in 1838. He was working hard, accumulating evidence, refining his theory— but he was also getting deeper into barnacles, finding ways of avoiding the point, finding excuses for not finishing or publishing.

  Sex and family and earthworms and barnacles more than made up for it. Despite Peter Gay's long urging us to accept the existence of intense erotic life between married people in the Victorian era, we still tend to have an oddly prim view of the sex lives of our great- great- grandfathers. Emma and Charles had ten children in seventeen years—but we nonetheless act as though these constant pregnancies and “confinements” are not the sign of a lovemaking so urgent and regular that it could defy chance to produce so many full- term pregnancies. A woman is not always pregnant if a man is not always asking. What Darwin did have was a puzzling opacity about the reasons his wife was always pregnant, as Dickens, his contemporary, had about his wife's pregnancies. More than any other feature, this is strange—not “prudery” about sex but the need for it and the participation in it, along with a reluctance on the part of the man to take responsibility for its consequences. One can only believe that the Darwins enjoyed a good sex life, and that the dependency they show on each other, which shines through their letters and memoirs, was a function of it. Marriages are made of lust, laughter, and loyalty, and though the degree of the compound alters over time, none can survive without a bit of each one. We can usually infer the presence of all three from the presence of one; people are loyal to each other because of remembered pleasures, and they remember social pleasures because they recall sexual ones. All good marriages are different, but they are all alike in having the three elements in some kind of functioning, self- regulating balance.

  That the Darwins felt lust is evident in their children; that they shared it is evident in their laughter. And that they laughed a good deal is obvious from their letters. They joke fondly—single-mindedly—about their children, because that's what parents do. But they had made this life together. It is always hard to resist projecting backward to an earlier time the values of our own time, particularly when those values are dear to us. We want the Darwins (like the Lincolns) to be loving and indulgent and attentive parents because then they will be like us. We should resist too facile a likeness. Charles Dickens, though family celebrating (he called his journal Household Words until his separation from his wife, when it became All the Year Round) and capable of writing fondly about his children (who called him Old Wenables), was obviously a remote and overbearing patriarch who scared his children, particularly the boys, half to death.

  But with the Darwins the evidence is overwhelming and disarming that they were pioneers of engaged parenting. Charles, in fact, was so enraptured by the experience of having children that he made among the first stabs on record at true developmental psychology, the scientific study of children—what he called, beautifully, the “Natural History of Babies,” a subject that no one would return to with such objective passion until our own time. (I know a famous developmental psychologist, a fanatic evangelist for the mental powers of the small, who insists that Darwin made a wrong turn by not pushing forward with his work on child psychology, rather than taking the more obvious turn toward what are, after all, mere footnotes in antiquarian biology. Kids’ minds are primary; old bones are secondary.)

  He made extensive notes on it. His love for his children, and his engagement with them, is genuinely startling for any time, and almost incredible in his own. “However hard my father was at work,” his son George remembered years later, “we certainly never restrained ourselves in our romps about the house, & I sh certainly have thought that the howls and screams must have been a great annoyance; but we were never stopped.” Charles studied his sons as though each were a barnacle, or a South American beetle: “W. Erasmus. Darwin born. Dec. 27th. 1839.—During first week, yawned, stretched himself just like old person—chiefly upper extremities … Surface of warm hand placed to face, seemed immediately to give wish of sucking, either instinctive or associated knowledge of warm smooth surface of bosom.” Either instinctive or associated knowledge—the question of what's inborn and what's learned begins right after birth. He did not mechanize his children; he recognized that they were creatures of mind: he saw them unfolding jealousy, self- recognition, then recognizing that other people had minds like their own. He saw the moment when Willy learned that a mirror image was only an image and became “aware that the image of person behind, was not real, & … turned round to look at the person behind.” Unsure whether the pleasure baby Willy showed in music was real or a figment of his parents’ observation, he noted that Willy “cried, when Emma left off playing the pianoforte.” The baby showed such “decided pleasure” as soon as she turned around to go back to the piano that Charles was certain the love for music was actual.

  Of course, at one level, all of these things were things that mothers had known for millennia. (Emma didn't have the time to make notes at that length. Those of hers that survive are just as good.) You didn't have to tell mothers that babies love music any more than you had to tell milkmaids that cowpox ward off smallpox, or small boys dozing in a classroom that the continents fit together too neatly, jigsaw- puzzle- style, to not have once been one, or, as we'll see, than you had to tell pigeon fanciers that they could turn a pigeon into any kind of pigeon they liked. A large part of every scientific discovery Darwin's included, involves paying attention to the long ignored.

  What was new was that a father, a patriarch, was there to set them down. We insist, sometimes pugnaciously, that fathers have been remote in all times but our own, but this is a belief only of the Grumpy Old Guy school of family history, and may have been a singularity of American parenting circa 1938, perhaps because of the Depression. It was certainly not Darwin's view, or experience. The notes on the na
tural history of babies, more than anything else, show that he was there, in the nursery, and then with the children almost all the time: “I was playing with Baby,” he writes to Emma in 1845, when she is briefly away from Down House, the country house they had made their home, “in the window of the drawing- room this morning and she was blowing a feeble fly and blew it on its back, when it kicked so hard that to my great amusement Baby grew red in the face, looked frightened, and pushed away from the window. The children are growing so quite out of all rule in the drawing- room, jumping on everything and butting like young bulls at every chair and sofa.”

  Probably the release into a tribe of children, butting like bulls, whom he could kiss and fondle and tease, was a huge liberation for a man brought up in a competitive and loving but far from fond family. And probably, too, we underestimate the amount of sheer joie de vivre that was possible in those locked- up houses. Samuel Butler, with his tight- lipped and closed- hearted Victorians in The Way of All Flesh, should not be our only guide; the wonderful Molly Hughes, writing of a slightly later date and a much poorer family, gives witness to the same kind of domestic pleasure but with absolute wild commitment to play. Sex and play were available to Victorian people as much as they are to us; the Victorians just talked about them less.

  That both Darwin and Lincoln held their public life in ten-

  sion with this obsessive inward- turning domesticity is hardly surprising—it is one of the key passions of their time. Victoria and Albert are the prime examples of the phenomenon, surrendering the louche, worldly manners of the aristocracy to which they belonged for the prim domesticity of the bourgeois family. But what is easy to miss is how much of it was rooted in awakened sexual love—as was certainly the case with Victoria's infatuation with her handsome Albert—and how much of it was happy. Lytton Strachey saw a great deal about the Victorians. He saw their hypocrisies, and we have recently been reinstructed in their virtues; what is most appealing about them, as the Darwins remind us, are their pleasures. Darwin's daughter Henrietta (whom everyone called Etty) writes—and there is no reason to think that memory cast more than the appropriate amount of gold varnish on her image—that high summer at the Darwin home meant “the rattle of the fly- wheel of the well, drawing water for the garden; the lawn burnt brown, the garden a blaze of colour, the six oblong beds in front of the drawing- room windows, … the row of lime- trees humming with bees, my father lying on the grass under them; the children playing about, with probably a kitten and a dog, and my mother dressed in lilac muslin, wondering why the blackcaps did not here sing the same song as they did at Maer.”