The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  If one had to isolate a single all-consuming idea which has taken hold of the human race in the post-political era in which we now live, it is the interrelatedness of natural forms – the fact that we are all on this planet together – human beings, mammals, fish, insects, trees – all dependent upon one another, all very unlikely to have a second chance of life either beyond the grave or through reincarnation, and therefore aware of the responsibilities incumbent upon custodians of the Earth. ‘Let it be borne in mind,’ Darwin writes in The Origin, ‘how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.’11 This surely explains why, in our generation, Darwin has grown in importance and stature, whereas almost all his contemporary thinkers and sages are half-forgotten. Herbert Spencer is all but unread. With the demise of European communism, it seems to many – especially to the majority who have not read much Marx – as if The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are dead. Freud, in many schools of psychology, is discredited; Hegel is of more interest to historians of philosophy than as a living inspiration to many of our contemporary philosophers. Carlyle and Ruskin are unknown to general readers; Mill is read selectively by students, but is no household name. But neo-Darwinians – Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett and the rest – can still write bestsellers.

  ‘Let me lay my cards on the table,’ writes Professor Dennett. ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’12

  The success of The Origin of Species, however, as opposed to the more general question of the philosophical influence of Darwin on the way we think, resides precisely in its quietness, its unhectoring tone. Though Darwin caused Emma such distress by his unbelief, and wept at the distress he caused – on one of her letters on the subject he scribbled, ‘when I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cryed over this’ – he was not an adamant unbeliever, as some of his followers were, and are. His unbelief was quiet and sad. Downe House used to be a parsonage, and in many respects his life resembled that of the naturalist parson, such as Gilbert White, who he could so easily have become after Cambridge. His attention to detail, his patience, his homeliness as well as his punctilious quality of observation are all things we find in Gilbert White. The examples he chose – spaniels, racehorses, pigeons – ensured that hardly an English reader from working-class pigeon-fancier to tweedy female Cocker-breeder to aristocratic racehorse-owner would not recognize Darwin’s world as his or her own. Though earlier readers of Lyell and Chambers were horrified by the pitilessness of nature red in tooth and claw, Darwin manages to make nature appear almost as gentle as himself. In what is almost a quotation from Malthus, he depicts the struggle for existence thus: ‘All we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio [my italics – note the Malthusianism]; that each at some period of its life during some season of the year, during each generation, or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction.’13 But there is consolation offered by gentle Darwin – ‘When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply.’

  The literature on Darwin and his impact is almost limitless. The truth remains that the majority of Victorian scientists went on being Christian, or at least holding on to some form of religious belief.14 Initially at least, the assaults on the authenticity of the Bible were much more damaging to faith than was Darwin. The religious reactions against Darwinism, from Sam Wilberforce, and later from the Catholic Church, can perhaps now be seen as horror at the notion of a natural world which is always changing, never still, never the same, rather than a fully considered philosophical consideration of God’s creative power (or its lack). Marx and Engels saw Darwinism as making an entire Weltanschauung out of laissez-faire capitalism – progress through struggle. It is perhaps for later generations of philosophers and scientists to ask questions about ‘Darwin’s metaphor’. In simple terms, where there is talk of ‘struggle’ and ‘progress’ in Darwin, or in Spencer of ‘the survival of the fittest’, how much of the theory survives examination?

  We shall return to Darwin and Darwinism at the point when he publishes The Descent of Man, but it is worthwhile to ask whether any of the four major scientific objections to The Origin of Species still stand up. In no particular order the objections are as follows. One, that Darwin’s view depended on a miscalculation of the age of the Earth. This was the view of the physicist William Thomson – Lord Kelvin. He was right to think Darwin got the age of the Earth wrong: but as a matter of fact the Earth is older – not, as Kelvin thought, younger – than Darwin’s calculation, so there is plenty of time for evolution to have occurred by Natural Selection.

  Another objection, posed by a Scotch engineer, Fleeming Jenkins, was based on ignorance (shared by Darwin) of genetics. Jenkins could not see, if natural selection produced a favourable variation, how it could be preserved for the next generation rather than being diluted. While he made the objection, Father Mendel in his Czech monastery was proving that genetic factors don’t dilute over time by somehow averaging out, but behave as if they were indivisible (although some are dominant, others recessive). By the 1880s Weisman was advancing his theory that the perishable generations are linked by imperishable genetic material, identified in 1931 as deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA – whose structure was not demonstrated until the 1950s. Here at last was hard and fast evidence that Darwin’s critic, Jenkins, was definitely wrong, and in the imperishability of DNA we see the way in which natural selection could pass on favourable variations without breeding out.

  The Catholic biologist H. St George Mivart objected to Darwin’s theory on an almost metaphysical point. While we might understand the manner in which the process of natural selection might work once it was under way, how does it explain the initial development? How did a ‘useful’ organ like the eye get started in the first place? Some of St George Mivart’s objections seem to be based on a confused metaphor of purpose. The Darwinian does not believe in purpose, so that Darwin’s own metaphor of ‘struggle’ is probably unfortunate. One is not to imagine the giraffe in one generation striving to some imagined state of long-neckedness: merely that the longer the neck, the more leaves the animal can eat, hence an inexorable development of giraffes to browse at tree height.

  These three objections, all brought on scientific, or quasi-scientific grounds, have been answered in time. There is one puzzle, however, which worried Darwin the most and to which he could not supply an answer. As Dr Jonathan Miller has said, ‘the process of evolution is more episodic than Darwin supposed’. The concept of the ‘hopeful monster’, the species which appears to have arrived from nowhere, or to have fast-forwarded through the infinitesimal and slow processes of evolutionary change, cannot be dismissed. How do you leap from having a couple of stumps to having workable wings? Can you or can’t you breathe in air, having been previously aquatic? Most such objections can be answered half-plausibly by Darwinians. Some, however, can’t. Darwin hoped that fossil evidence or something comparable would eventually demonstrate the ‘missing links’ in the chain. But in the case of some structures in the natural world – such as that of the eye for example – modern biochemistry has revealed a complexity which makes Darwin’s explanations seem clumsy. In the view of Michael Behe, ‘Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. Darwin’s metaphorical hops from butte to butte are now revealed in many cases to be huge leaps between carefully tailore
d machines – distances that would require a helicopter to cross in one trip.’15 The use of the word ‘tailored’ here begs huge questions. Many would think that the ‘argument by design’ or the ‘creationist’ viewpoint, however satisfying to those who entertain it, still fails on a scientific or analytic level to explain how, in the evolutionary story, you get from a to c without passing an invisible b. This is the objection to Darwin which, for some people, has never been answered.

  The success of The Origin of Species, however, does not depend in the first instance on any polemical stance, so much as on its picture of the natural world as a teeming, changing and infinitely various abundance of interacting species – plant, insect, fish, bird, mammal only the most visible. This explains its initial impact. In common with the novels of Dickens, the canvases of Frith (his famous overcrowded Derby Day was exhibited in 1858), or the socio-economics of Marx with his vast variety of allusions and examples, Darwin’s most famous book is superabundant. Plenitude is its first, and most overwhelming, quality.

  Natural selection, it need hardly be explained, means not selection by the conscious will of men or of gods, but by successful procreation. The 1858 Matrimonial Causes (or Divorce) Bill became law in England, but not in Ireland, enabling men and women to obtain divorces through a special court, at a cost of around £100. Prime Minister Palmerston, the old roué, told Parliament, ‘we shall return here and sit day by day, and night by night, until this Bill be concluded’.16 His chancellor of the Exchequer – Gladstone – was horrified by the measure, intervening in the debate seventy-three times, and devoting long speeches to the horror of bringing divorce to the doors of all classes. (Hitherto, divorce had only been possible in England by introducing a special Act of Parliament for each marital breakdown. By 1872, with the new law, some 200 decrees were granted annually.)

  The existence of the new divorce law formalized the recognition that Victorian men and women committed adultery – thus, it defined them not merely as property-owning, but as sexual beings. Predictably the law remained biased against women; whereas husbands could sue for divorce on the simple ground of adultery, a wife could do so only if she could prove that her husband was guilty of bestiality, bigamy, incest, rape or cruelty in addition. Though Darwin very consciously and conspicuously omitted a discussion of human behaviour from The Origin of Species, its first readers brought to it, and extracted from it, a new sense of the human place in nature, and this sense in part was inevitably something which found its expression in the many novels and poems which touched on relations between the sexes.

  The art-form, however, which was most blatantly concerned with adultery and sexual feeling was the music drama of Richard Wagner. The year which saw the publication of The Origin of Species in November had also been that in which Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde17 – though the music drama was not performed until June 1865. The extent to which the inspiration for the work was Wagner’s guilty passion for Mathilde, the wife of his benefactor Otto Wesendonk – or indeed how far it anticipates the feelings he would have for Cosima, the wife of his first conductor Hans von Bülow before she married Wagner – this is the stuff of gossip-biographies. Already in the midst of his great Ring dramas, Wagner paused to return to the medieval romance of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. In so doing, he wrote an erotically charged manifesto; the hero’s preparedness to betray his liege-lord King Mark is an act of magnificent anarchy.

  Capitalism, and its creation of a large haute bourgeoisie and a large rentier class with endless leisure, both hugely increased the opportunities for adultery and heightened its dangers. The divorce lawyers whose very existence Gladstone so deplored had come into existence to determine how the iron structures of capitalist society, held together as modern conservative politicians still delight to remind us by the ‘building-blocks’ of family life, could coexist beside the sexual appetites of men and women. The needs for control and hypocrisy and the weapons of financial ruin or public humiliation were obvious when you consider what damage the Tristans and Isoldes of the suburbs could do if they chose. This must be part of what gives the opera its stupendous, almost narcotic power.

  Wagner is a supreme innovator, not merely musically, but imaginatively. Like Marx and Darwin, he draws heavily on the works of predecessors and contemporaries, especially Berlioz. Darwin would be unthinkable without the other evolutionary thinkers – just as Marx owes more than he would ever allow to Proudhon, and to Hegel – but it still makes sense to hail them as world-changing intellects. Wagner’s dreams of the uses to which human beings put their powers – now the slaves and now the masters of greed and passion – are, like Darwin’s, with us still. Tristan und Isolde is perennially ‘modern’. Its Second Act is a sustained musical evocation not merely of erotic feeling but of the sexual act itself. Had such a thing ever been attempted in European art – and has it ever been bettered? And yet it speaks not merely of the ecstatic joys of coition, but also of the impossibility of two human beings ever fully getting beyond sex to union of mind or soul. Its reason is the tragic and realistic one that Western humanity could no longer energetically believe in an afterlife. This great theme of Tristan, its Liebestod, therefore transcends sex just as Dante had done when he wrote the Paradiso. But whereas the great medieval poet could synthesize the personal and the erotic into a grand political and religious vision, culminating in Paradise, Wagner – a genius of comparable power – sees all human aspirations, their hope of political progress, of philosophical enlightenment, of religious comfort or of sexual ecstasy, interwoven with their consciousness of mortality. As he would expound in his extended mythical Ring dramas, the gods themselves cannot escape the extinction which awaits each one of the species being swept down the evolutionary river; whereas the dream of Marx is one of ultimate triumph for the poor, and the fascination of Darwin’s theory for Darwinian optimists was in the concept of progress through struggle, Wagner, with a realism which perhaps only comes to artists, saw the progress of his century – and ultimately of the human race – as one towards destruction.

  In England, the Liebestod is transposed into a minor key when we turn to the home life of Queen Victoria, doomed for most of her reign to be a grief-stricken widow, her emotional life a blend of yearning and morbidity, which if not Wagnerian in tone at least matched Wagner’s dramas in intensity. So aware are we of her last forty years as a half-life, an epilogue to the Morte d’Albert, that we must sometimes suppose there was an inevitability about the Prince’s death, aged forty-two, or that he had already begun to decline into melancholy and inactivity before he was struck down by typhoid fever. This fiction began with Lytton Strachey’s life of Queen Victoria which asserted that Prince Albert ‘believed that he was a failure and he began to despair’. But he wasn’t a failure, he had not begun to despair, and despite a premature baldness and paunchiness (he wore a wig indoors during his latter days because the Queen kept their rooms so cold)18 and despite his very bad teeth, there was no reason to think that, had he escaped the typhoid fever, he would not have continued to lift himself from gloom and lead a full, happy life. In the very closing months of his life he thanked God ‘that he has vouchsafed so much happiness to us’, and this was heartfelt, even if life with his temperamental wife had its tribulations, and life among the unserious and ungrateful English its trials. (When the Queen was finally allowed to dub him Prince Consort in 1857 The Times cattily imagined that this would lead to increased respect for Albert, ‘on the banks of the Spree and the Danube’.)19 In fact, this is one of those feeble jokes which rebound on the teller, for hindsight makes us see what a valuable European dimension Albert brought to the political scene in England, and forces upon us the wistful game of wondering what might have been, had, for example, Albert (whose international, and in particular whose pan-German, stature grew by the year) lived into the era of Bismarck and beyond … No man single-handedly could have prevented the disastrous growth of rival nationalisms which came to catastrophe in 1914, but one can say th
at, had Albert’s policies, rather than those of Lord Palmerston and those of subsequent prime ministers, been pursued, world war would have been less likely.

  We see what he was like from the letters of Edward White Benson who, in his late twenties, was appointed as the headmaster of the newly founded Wellington College. This school, established in memory of the Great Duke, was always of interest to Prince Albert. He helped choose the site, in Berkshire, he gave advice about the architecture, where to plant trees, what the uniform should be like. Benson, whose appointment was owing to Albert, was typical of the sort of man the Prince encouraged – young, by no means well-born, energetic, serious. In one of his letters, he describes going to the Palace of Westminster, before the school was opened, for a meeting of the School Council:

  At the foot of a great staircase which I reached I turned round and saw a moustachioed gentleman drive up in a carriage, but I turned round and ran upstairs and on reaching the top found that the gentleman had run upstairs after me and that it was the Prince himself. He smiled very graciously and sweetly and shook hands with me, and he went on into the room where the Council had met already … The Prince is a prince of princes – thoroughly interested and hearty.20

  This good-heartedness, and energy, came to be applied to all aspects of Albert’s life, to his patronage of the arts, to his chancellorship of Cambridge University, to his punctilious management of Balmoral, Osborne, Windsor, their households and estates, to his large family, to his charitable work, and to his involvement with politics both at home and abroad.