by Adam Gopnik
After a long time spent thinking about what had been said, and what it meant, I decided at last to visit the Petersen House, the tiny old boardinghouse in Washington, where Lincoln spent his last hours. I stood in a long line stretching out to the door, surrounded by other tourists, waiting to get to the room at the back where Lincoln died. Now, after months of reading, I was convinced that the first thought that would have crossed Stanton's mind was the angels. Given the man, and the association, what else but angels? Though perhaps they would be not so much the religious angels of an ascension as the Shakespearean angels of fate, the ones who wear us out, the angels whom Claudius prayed to and who sang to Hamlet at his end.
And then, later, someone—perhaps Stanton at the time, or perhaps only Hay long afterward—thought that there was more point and solemn originality in what someone else (Hay from the very moment perhaps?) thought he had heard, and decided to change it. As the line shuffled forward, I made up my mind about what must have happened: Stanton had muttered “angels,” had been heard as saying “ages,” and, if he had been asked which afterward, would have been torn. He might have decided to enable the mishearing in order to place Lincoln in history, not heaven. It seemed possible that both versions were true, one to the intention and the other to the articulation, one to the emotion of the moment and one, in retrospect, to the meaning of the life. Angels or ages? Lincoln belongs to both.
The sentence forms in the mind, and with it the thought that there would be a good place to end: he belongs to both. But as the queue inches forward and I can see, at last, into the room that I have been reading about—I want to laugh. This place isn't small; it's tiny. They brought him here, to this back room, I had learned, because all the other rooms in the house were too messy for a president to die in, and yet—-four people would make it crowded; six would overwhelm it; the forty or so who passed in and out, and the ten or twenty who crowded inside at the end, would have turned it into the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.
In the brief moment given to a visitor to look inside, I wished for a machine that would be able to re- create every breath of air, every vibration that ever took place in a room. And then I knew that we probably would not have understood any better had we been standing there then than we do now. Stanton was weeping, Lincoln had just died, the room was overwhelmed, whatever he said was broken by a sob—the sob, in a sense, is the story. History is not an agreed- on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn't what's heard, and what is heard isn't what gets repeated. Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but the moments we call historic occur when there is a fire in a crowded theater, and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what was said. The indeterminacy is built into the emotion of the moment. The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the pres ent. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
CHAPTER FOUR
DARWIN IN TIME
A HIT BOOK AND A CALM RECEPTION
DARWIN & HUXLEY PLAY GOOD COP AND BAD DARWIN AS NATURAL NOVELIST
HOW EXPLANATION AND NARRATIVE MARRY
BLIND WATCHMAKERS AND INVISIBLE HANDS
DARWIN LEFT, DARWIN RIGHT, OR DARWIN MIDDLE?
SPECIES AND RACES; WHAT DID HE REALLY THINK?
DARWIN'S RADICAL ANTIRACISM
FROM DUFFER TO GRAND OLD MAN
DARWIN AS DETECTIVE
THE FORCE OF DELAY, AND THE EXPLOSIVE SINGLE SENTENCE
RADICAL POINTS, CALMING SYNTAX
CHARLES AND EMMA AT THE CLOSE OF DAY
ENDING WITH EARTHWORMS, WHY DO THEY MATTER?
STRIKING THE GREAT THEME OF TIME IN A MINOR KEY
NOT GOD AND MAN BUT LIFE AND TIME
MAN THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS, AND WHAT IT MIGHT MEAN
SECRETS OF LIFE, PROBLEMS OF LIVING
Darwin's Origin, when it was published at last, in November of 1859, was a hit. The first printing sold out (though whether it actually sold out or the remaining copies merely disappeared among previous orders isn't clear—a difference that every author knows to be significant. It struck with an overwhelming splash). Later, Darwin's obituary in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London would say, “It is doubtful if any single book, except the ‘Principia,’ ever worked so great and so rapid a revolution in science, or made so deep an impression on the general mind. It aroused a tempest of opposition and met with equally vehement support.”
Yet the really striking thing, given how radical his great idea really was, is how mildly that tempest passed. The general response, though obviously accented by firecrackers of indignation, on the whole ranged from welcoming and enthusiastic to skeptically respectful. “Overflowing the narrow bounds of purely scientific circles, the ‘species question’ divides with Italy and the Volunteers the attention of general society,” Huxley wrote a year later. And:
Everybody has read Mr. Darwin's book, or, at least, has given an opinion upon its merits or demerits; pietists, whether lay or ecclesiastic, decry it with the mild railing which sounds so charitable; bigots denounce it with ignorant invective; old ladies of both sexes consider it a decidedly dangerous book, and even savants, who have no better mud to throw, quote antiquated writers to show that its author is no better than an ape himself; while every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism; and all competent naturalists and physiologists, whatever their opinions as to the ultimate fate of the doctrines put forth, acknowledge that the work in which they are embodied is a solid contribution to knowledge and inaugurates a new epoch in natural history.
The railing was mild, and the last clause, certainly true, was the most important. Other naturalists had read it, and got it.
As always in life, good luck played a role. Right away, in December of 1859, Huxley had been able to insert an anonymous review of the book in the London Times. Huxley who was quick and rhetorically gifted in a way that Darwin did not pretend to be (but genuinely modest in his submission to the stronger if milder mind of his friend), praised the book with what is, in retrospect, surprising if strategic caution, admitting that it is possible that Darwin may have “been led to over- estimate the value of his principle of natural selection, as greatly as Lamarck overestimated his vera causa of modification by exercise”—that is, Lamarck's belief that giraffes, by stretching their necks to eat from the top branches of trees, pass on longer necks to their children. But Huxley had got not only the theory but also the nature of the argument, and pressed it on this crucial audience:
But there is, at all events, one advantage possessed by the more recent writer over his predecessor. Mr. Darwin abhors mere speculation as nature abhors a vacuum. He is as greedy of cases and precedents as any constitutional lawyer, and all the principles he lays down are capable of being brought to the test of observation and experiment. … If it be so, it will carry us safely over many a chasm in our knowledge, and lead us to a region free from the snares of those fascinating but barren Virgins, the Final Causes, against whom a high authority has so justly warned us.
Huxley understood that Darwin's argument was an argument against “the final causes.” On the question of species, he an nounced right there in the Times, at the height of a Victorian Christmas season, that you could never again appeal to mysterious authority or ultimate purpose; you could appeal only to rational argument and the specific case.
It is hard, I think, to overestimate the importance of this review in the Times, so soon after the book's publication, for Darwin's state of mind. In the letter he wrote to Huxley right after the appearance of the review, in which he coyly kept up the pretense of not being able to imagine who wrote it, Darwin exults: “Who can the author be? I am intensely curiou
s…. Certainly I should have said that there was only one man in England who could have written this essay, and that you were the man. But I suppose I am wrong…. Well, whoever the man is, he has done great service to the cause…. The admission of such views into the Times, I look at as of the highest importance, quite independently of the mere question of species.”
One feels the palpable level of anxiety drop off for Darwin in this letter; that anxiety, which dominates his letters of the 1850s, never returns, and a new tone of mocking, ironic confidence takes its place and remains. For the rest of his life, Darwin, though often exasperated by his correspondents’ demands and exhausted by his illness, never sounds worried. Even when important doubts were raised about his theory—was the earth old enough to have sustained so much change? wouldn't changes in animal inheritance tend to blend together?—he found a way to fight back, and the words to fight back with. Darwin exults in 1859 because he knows what anyone engaged in a controversial enterprise wants to know—that, whatever the opposition, there will be strong allies and high praise on his side, making the fight tolerable and even fun. His fear, not unreasonable, had been that the whole thing would be blasted out—wrongly, but such things happen— and that he would have to fight uphill all the way. Because of his allies, and because of a bit of luck—the Times in London, the Thunderer, held, as Trollope illustrates in his novels, the kind of power on social issues that the Times in New York still has on Broadway, making and closing shows—the thing was well launched. From that moment on, though he would be attacked and in doubt about details, he would never doubt that the vision he had had in 1838 was fundamentally persuasive to fair- minded men. Educated people in 1859 were already saying that it might be so, though probably not. And when they start saying that it might be so, the point is carried.
Contingency counted, luck helped, the zeitgeist was there to be taken. Far from speaking to readers who would find his work a shocking violation of the norms, Darwin wrote for an audience already in many ways becoming nonreligious; according to the religious census of 1851, less than half the population of Britain was attending church or chapel. The work (or damage) of disbelief had already largely, and long before, been begun by Hume and Gibbon and the “higher criticism” of the Bible. The old bones and the new books had done their business.
But Darwin's own carefully wrought strategy of persuasion was still surely key to the book's reception. He had written a book whose tone of empirical exactitude, fair- minded summary, and above all, sweeping argumentative force—so subtly orchestrated that it acted not as a straitjacket on the argument, pressing it in, but as a tide behind it, driving it forward—was almost impossible to resist, even if one doubted the claim.
Huxley, in fact, himself given to hardier and more conventional polemical outbursts, was a bit exasperated by what he saw as the woolliness and near diffidence of Darwin's argument, complaining in the Westminster Review that “notwithstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly to digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican—a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of an obvious logical bond.” Had Huxley written The Origin, it would have mocked more, shone less. Had the logic been made as obvious and “philosophical” as Huxley wanted—as obvious as Huxley himself tried to make it in his own polemical defenses of Darwin—it would have been less nourishing and sustainable in the long run. Pemmican is good food for long journeys.
For the next quarter century Darwin and Huxley continued to play, knowingly, a kind of good cop–bad cop game in public. Their correspondence shows that each knew his given role— when Darwin at last was put forward for an honorary degree from Oxford by the reactionary Lord Salisbury, it was with the severe corollary that Huxley could not get the same. Huxley and Darwin, sharing the same basic views, enjoyed the joke. When Huxley had his famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce, Darwin kept silent, safe in the country, but wrote to his defender, “How durst you attack a live Bishop in that fashion? I am quite ashamed of you! Have you no reverence for fine lawn sleeves?” And then: “By Jove you seem to have done it well!”
Darwin's gift as a natural novelist is the secret to the book's persuasiveness; his eloquence is marshaled in the guise of a story inhabited by creatures, not a polemic made by one man. It was an argument, but it was also a narrative—not “Here's what I think is the secret of life,” but “Here's how this story must have happened.” Gillian Beer has diagrammed the many and deep resemblances between Darwin's writing and the “evolutionary plots” of contemporary Victorian novelists, particularly those of his friend George Eliot. This parallel need not defer only to the zeitgeist or the immediate friendship for its force. In a famous, much misunderstood passage in his autobiography, Darwin insisted, modestly, that as he grew older, he found himself lacking in aesthetic feeling but then goes on to say, at once, how much he still loved reading novels. One can miss the point entirely if one imagines that Darwin is saying, with a sigh, that he can read only scientific papers; what he's saying is that he finds it harder to go on reading Idylls of the King in preference to Middlemarch and The Prime Minister. He is showing good judgment, not literary indifference. Victorian novels, though now rightly known as one of the high points in the history of writing, and civilization, were a pop form in his time; no special aesthetic credit accrued to one who read them. Darwin's point, modestly put but insightful all the same, was that a scientist could find a satisfaction in the close crawl observation of Victorian prose that he might not find in the higher flights of Victorian poetry.
Like the novelists, Darwin appealed to a cross section of Victorian readers. It is a gross oversimplification, to the point of parody or falseness, to imagine that Darwin appealed especially to one or another part of the Victorian world—to free marketers, who saw the invisible hand of the market extended to nature; to industrialists, who saw the bitter system of factory competition reproduced in every pond; or for that matter to nascent Marxists, who saw in it a model of sweeping historical explanation; or, despite what Huxley says, even to liberals, who saw intimations of freedom in between its paragraphs on chance.
In truth, he appealed about equally to almost everyone who could search and find in his theory a metaphor for his pet project. Radical atheists found radical atheism in it; Marx found his own sense of historical action without conscious intention within it; yet devout Christians could find a more than adequate theological consolation in it as well. One copy of The Origin that Darwin inscribed and signed before publication was for Charles Kingsley the eccentric but devout English clergyman and poet- writer who had been made Queen Victoria's chaplain in 1859. Kingsley, a very odd man—he once wrote Darwin a pre- Freudian letter about how much religious hostility to sex depended on the excretory and reproductive functions of man being placed so closely together—wrote his somewhat Joycean children's classic, The Water- Babies, in the light of both Darwinian theory and the Bible. By “regularizing” nature, by making the history of species as explicable as the path of the stars, Kingsley thought, Darwin had revealed the hand of God in earthly pattern, had joined biology to astronomy and physics and all of the other fields that had already, in the hands of theologically minded men, shown divine order where before there had been only willful impulse. Darwin himself appears in The Water- Babies, a humble and unworldly figure, head in the clouds, pockets filled with fish and fossils—the sort who couldn't harm a fly, or a fair- minded theologian. So the first response to The Origin, primed by Darwin himself, is a form of mystical Christianity.
Of course, Darwin's ideas came out of the light of his day—in what other light could they have been made? But his mind was a prism; the light of his time changed crucially as it passed through, and showed a new and different spectrum. The analogy linking Darwin's ideas on nature with free market ideas on nations, for instance, though still insisted on by his largely brilliant biographers James Moore and Adrian Desmond, is surely forced. There are resemblances betw
een Darwin's theory of what has been called a “blind watchmaker” who governs natural selection and Adam Smith's doctrine of an “invisible hand” that governs markets. The likeness lies in the idea of a system that has order and pattern without agency, that works efficiently and even elegantly without anyone's having designed it: I buy a house; you buy a house; we put up a fire station to keep me from burning down your house, and we hire a policeman to keep you from burgling mine, and next thing you know, wanting nothing but our own selfish good, we have a neighborhood and a city. In the same way in nature, a frog eats a bug; the next frog who happens to have a longer tongue comes along and eats more; the greenest of the bugs being preyed on hide best against the lily pads, and before you know it, we have long- tongued frogs attempting to eat ever- greener insects in an ongoing little lily pad world. Organization emerges without the interference of planning. The natural city isn't “zoned.”