by Adam Gopnik
Retreating into his garden, widely known to be ill, publishing as often about earthworms and orchids as about men and apes— the notion persists to this day that Darwin was a diffident and circumspect observer of animals, not a confident theorist of life. Darwin was humble and modest in exactly the way that Lieutenant Columbo is humble and modest. He knows from the beginning who the guilty party is, and what the truth is, and would rather let the bad guys hang themselves from arrogance and overconfidence while he walks around in his raincoat, scratching his head and saying, “Oh, yeah—-just one more thing about that six- thousand- year- old earth, Reverend Snodgrass …” Darwin was a civil and courteous man, but he was also what is now polemically called a Darwinian fundamentalist. He knew that he was right, and that his being right meant that much else people wanted to believe was wrong. Design was just chance plus time, greed not a sin from the devil but an inheritance from the monkeys. “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!!” he had written in his notebook back in that magical year of 1838. “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!” Under the beard and beneath the sage wrinkles, he never lost the inner confidence reflected in those words, nor the urge to provocation, and found ways of getting them both expressed in his books.
The discrepancy between the public and the private Darwin, the wide- eyed naturalist and the canny private politician, can make him sound like a bit of a phony, or at least like a shrewder operator than we want our saints to be: Janet Browne shows how carefully the Darwin- Huxley alliance took over the key positions in the London scientific societies of their day. Yet Darwin's rhetoric, coupled with Huxley's tactics, explains one of the most easily missed things about his revolution. Given that his was the most fundamental and successful challenge to dogma that had ever been launched—in a single generation, it caused intelligent people to accept claims about history and man's place in it that had been heretical for thousands of years—its reception was, as we've seen, remarkably peaceable. Of course, it inspired enormous controversy, but that controversy was far less battering than Darwin himself must have imagined. Victoria read him, Disraeli mocked him, the debates were held, and Darwin, the man who told the world that their forebears had been monkeys in trees with pointed ears, was almost offered a knighthood and buried in Westminster Abbey, as grand a figure as Tennyson or Browning.
But the real meat and juice of the post- Origin Darwin lies in the books he wrote after 1860, which, almost as much as that masterpiece, are wonders of observation, argument, and mischief. He found new ways again and again not just to describe nature but also to dramatize nature. He oscillated between books on very finely drawn subjects—orchids and earthworms—and larger pop books on big subjects. In them all, he shows an immense and artful skill at distributing detail and delaying detonations, playing out the string and then pulling up the drawbridge.
Reading The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), for instance, you feel an urge to draw analogies between his study of the way that birds’ plumage and song affect their reproductive success and the way men dress up and show off in order to attract women—an urge so overwhelming that you practically have to bite your tongue to avoid it. Darwin bit his. (Generations have not so bitten, with predictable results.) Page after page goes by, in which the analogies to courtship, love, and flirtation are soberly avoided; when he quotes a French naturalist who uses just such larksome language, Darwin dutifully keeps it in the original French, as Gibbon kept the sexual escapades of the looser Romans in the original Latin.
But this turns out to be buildup, not letdown. After fourteen chapters of copious detail on the preening of the bronze- winged pigeon of Australia (which, “whilst standing before the female, lowers his head almost to the ground, spreads out and raises perpendicularly his tail, and half expands his wings”) and the song of the European male bustard (which utters during breeding season “a peculiar sound resembling ‘ock’ ”), the argument once again gets paid out:
What then are we to conclude from these facts and considerations? Does the male parade his charms with so much pomp and rivalry for no purpose? Are we not justified in believing that the female exerts a choice, and that she receives the addresses of the male who pleases her most? It is not probable that she consciously deliberates; but she is most excited or attracted by the most beautiful, or melodious, or gallant males. Nor need it be supposed that the female studies each stripe or spot of colour; that the peahen for instance, admires each detail in the gorgeous train of the peacock…. Nevertheless after hearing how carefully the male Argus pheasant displays his elegant primary wing feathers and erects his ocellated plumes in the right position for their full effect; or again how the male goldfinch alternately displays his gold- bespangled wings, we ought not to feel too sure that the female does not attend to each detail of beauty. We can judge, as already remarked, of choice being exerted, only from the analogy of our own minds, and the mental powers of birds, if reason be excluded, do not fundamentally differ from ours.
Having studiously avoided comparisons for hundreds of pages packed with ornithological detail, the entire book springs to, so to speak, wild life. Beauty and melody and gallantry, elegance and display, female choice—all are asserted to be as much a part of nature as egg laying. And so, at last, is a firm insistence: we are on a mental continuum with pheasants and peacocks. Analogy is avoided, and then the most unsettling analogy of all is grandly asserted, and without apology: they're us; we're them. This is Darwin's method: an apparently modest allegiance to mere fact gathering abruptly crystallizes in a whole worldview
Darwin's ability to look pious while demolishing every piety can be seen at its best in what may be the single most explosive sentence in English, which appears in the last chapter of The Descent of Man: “We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” Darwin does quietly lay the ground for the fireworks early in his book. His first chapter, on “rudiments,” discusses in detail the many resemblances between human and animal anatomy. “It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals,” he writes, and then expands on the point, detailing the resemblances at length, and then arriving at last at the observation, which he credits to “the celebrated sculptor, Mr. Woolner,” that there is a “little blunt point” in the human ear, “projecting from the inwardly folded margin, or helix.” By a sequence of oblique deductions about the ears of monkeys observed in the zoo, Darwin concludes that there are “vestiges of the tips of formerly erect and pointed ears” which occasionally reappear in man.
But though the fuse is quietly lit, the explosion still surprises. We can be startled by its boldness today; we know what its effect was in 1871. Yet how beautifully it is situated within the book, as, after that first chapter, we lose the plot in hundreds of detailed pages on sexual selection, on peacocks’ tails and mammals’ tusks, by which point it is presented not as a thesis to be demonstrated (although that was exactly what it was) but as a conclusion forced inexorably on the unwilling author. And then the sly choice of words—the “hairy quadruped” (unnecessary for the point but necessary to make the image maximally disturbing) and the dynamite of that tail and those “pointed ears,” with their specific invocation of the diabolical, and the use of the domestic “furnished.” There are a thousand ways the sentence could have been written in order to minimize its damage to belief; for example, “Those primates closest in organization and structure to man may have had their early origins among arboreal quadrupeds native to the Old World.” But, a decade after The Origin, he writes instead the mortar sentence, the one that makes the minimal noise coming in and does the maximum damage on arrival. There's your grandfather: in a tree on all fours, his ears sticking straight up and his tail swinging through the branches.
• • •
The aftershocks of his early work continued, inflected by the triumph of his b
ig idea. With the onset of evolutionary theory the argument over Darwin's early theory about coral reefs at first sank away into the background—until Alexander Agassiz revived it. Alexander's father, Louis, was the Swiss- born maker of American natural history, and he became Darwin's first great creationist opponent. Dogmatic, difficult, and determined, he dominated American natural history until the spread of Darwin's ideas left him high and dry and even, eventually, a figure of ridicule. His son, a smart and decent man, recognized that his father had been both arrogant and wrong—he greatly admired Darwin, at first— and that evolutionary theory was probably sound. But he became increasingly impatient with the coral- reef theory, and hurt, too, by the Darwinian overkill aimed at his father.
Darwin, while pretending to treat his father with deferential respect, wrote letters to friends that mocked the old man's pretensions, urged on his opponents, and delighted at his eventual downfall. In one letter, Darwin thanked Charles Lyell for sending him a pamphlet on Amazonian geology by Louis Agassiz; “I was very glad to read it, though chiefly as a psychological curiosity,” he wrote. “What a splendid imagination Agassiz has.… It is wonderful that he should have written such wild nonsense.” (When Darwin's memoir was published after his death, the younger Agassiz was dismayed by its contents. “I was surprised… to see the element of… [Darwin] wishing his cause … brought out so prominently,” Alexander wrote to a marine- biologist friend. “The one thing always claimed by Darwin's friends … had been his absolute impartiality to his own case.”)
Alexander Agassiz spent his final decades trying to demonstrate the truth of his father's own theory of coral- reef formation: that coral reefs are formed when the millions of minuscule coelen -terate skeletons pile up in vast mountains of shells; those, not Darwin's sunken mountains, were what provided coral with its shallow- water platform. He traveled endlessly, and spent millions of dollars, in an effort to prove this inductively until, to his own satisfaction, he thought he had.
In the end, Darwin turned out to be right about that, too. After World War II, almost a century after he had come up with the subsidence theory, engineers finally had drills hard enough to bore past layers of coral and find out what lay beneath. It was rock, not organic matter; those volcanoes really had sunk, another account of life on earth changing and producing gloriously complicated and beautiful things through contingency and chance.
Yet for all his triumphs, and his deep-in- the-bone English sureness and even arrogance, he never appeared in public playing in a prideful key. Everywhere in Darwin's late work, the radicalism of his points is half concealed by the calming expansiveness of his syntax. He is gentle but unyielding on the religious question. “I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence,” he writes toward the end of The Descent. “But this is a rash argument…. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long- continued culture.” In short, belief in the divine is man- made, not God given. As Lyanda Haupt points out, Darwin called his book The Descent of Man, not The Ascent, denying his readers the solace of an upward arc. Believers search for a crumb of comfort or teleology in Darwin, but what looks promising always turns out to be poisoned.
He and Emma, agnostic and believer, man and wife, stayed together till the end, and showed no signs of strain or unhappiness. However much she had feared his publishing his heresies, when the day came, she found that her love was stronger than her faith— or, rather, that her love was her faith. They continued on in their life at Down House, retreating, as long- married people will, particularly after most of the children were out of the house, into a kind of willed mutual dependency that had some of the aspects of an Eliotian marriage of equals, some of a Beckettian folie à deux. The beautiful and touching thing is that once he had at last taken the decision to publish that he had delayed so long in part on her behalf, she seems never to have blamed him, or reproached him, or felt burdened by his now- public aid to “disbelief.” Small signs of difference, tempered by courtesy, persisted between them. He wrote to Karl Marx's son- in- law, upon being asked to have a radically antireligious book dedicated to him, that
I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.
Emma, in turn, gently bowdlerized his autobiography for publication, removing the most aggressively agnostic bits.
But at some point in his last years, he came upon that letter that she had written so long ago, when he had first decided to “Marry—Marry—Marry,” telling him how pained she would be by his defection to disbelief, and that she “would be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.” He scribbled at the bottom: “When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.” When he was dying at last, in 1882, he whispered to her on his deathbed, with no plan for an afterlife, “My love, my precious love.”
In 1881, the year before his death, he published one last improbable “commercial” volume with John Murray: On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms. It must have seemed like a perverse gesture to the publisher—the kind of thing greeted around the office with a sigh and a memory of old days and greater sales. But it's quite a book. Darwin begins by devoting to worms the same meticulous, worrying attentiveness that he before had given to man and monkeys, with a record of one of the more winning experiments ever attempted by a great scientist:
Worms do not posses any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet. When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both retreated into their burrows. After a time they emerged, and when G above the line in the treble clef was struck, they again retreated.
It is said that the Darwin family participated in this earthworm quartet, including Darwin's new grandson, who played the whistle. Darwin goes on to consider the earthworm's mind:
Mental Qualities—There is little to be said on this head. We have seen that worms are timid. It may be doubted whether they suffer as much pain when injured as they seem to express by their contortions. Judging by their eagerness for certain kinds of food, they must enjoy the pleasure of eating. Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light. They perhaps have a trace of social feeling, for they are not disturbed by crawling over each other's bodies, and they sometimes lie in contact…. Although worms are so remarkably deficient in the several sense- organs, this does not necessarily preclude intelligence, as we know from such cases as those of Laura Bridgman; and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind….
… Some degree of intelligence appears… to be exhibited in this work—a result that has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms.
(Laura Bridgman, by the way, was blind and deaf- mute yet mastered language, a proto–Helen Keller.) As usual with Darwin, the slow crawl of fact is building toward a big blade of point. “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than mos
t persons would at first suppose,” he writes, and then explains:
When we behold a wide, turf- covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth- worms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.
He then clinches, and ends, with a crucial and suggestive point: “Some other animals, however, still more lowly organised, namely corals, have done far more conspicuous work in having constructed innumerable reefs and islands in the great oceans; but these are almost confined to the tropical zones.” Small makes big; earthworms look like dinosaurs compared with coral- reef creatures, and look what they do!
Darwin's expansive consciousness—his empathy with the earthworm, no big deal but crucial to the history of the world— always narrows to a repeated rapier point: slow and steady wins the race and makes the races; we are allowed only a tiny glimpse, in our hummingbird lives, of what duration and endurance and repetition can actually achieve. We have a moral and scientific duty to seek out those places—coral reefs and earthworm- plowed fields as well as fossil pits and mussel- moved mountains—where we can get at least a sense of how an earthworm can do a farmer's work, if you give him time.
All of Darwin's virtues as a writer are in place in this improbable best seller (which it became, shocking the publisher as it pleased the readers). The Origin and The Descent of Man are more obviously great books, masterpieces of the human spirit. But if I had to pick one book to sum up what was great and rich in Charles Darwin, and in Victorian science and the Victorian mind more generally—a book to place alongside Middlemarch and Phineas Finn and Through the Looking Glass and Great Expectations—it might well be On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms. Limitless patience for measurement (the same virtue we see at similarly comic length in Ruskin's Stones of Venice), an ingenuous interest in the world in all its aspects, a desire to order many things in one picture, a faith that the small will reveal the large. And a gift for storytelling: Darwin makes the first person address never feel odd or strange in this scientific text, because we understand that the author is in a personal relation with his subject, probing, testing, sympathizing, playing the bassoon while the earthworms listen and striking the piano while they cower, and trying in every way to see who they are and where they came from and what they're like—not where they stand in the great chain of being beneath us, but where they belong in the great web of being that surrounds us, and includes us.