Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  Linking the point to the cruelty and other “imperfections” of some animal instincts, Charles suggested that those traits were best understood not as “specially given by the Creator,” but as “very small parts of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings. Multiply, vary, let the strongest forms by their strength live and the weakest forms die.” Here some might have heard echoes of Tennyson’s evil dream of Nature in his poem In Memoriam, which had appeared in 1850. “I care for nothing, all shall go.”

  Writing in this way, Charles was facing up again to the cruelty in natural life. He was thinking of Annie, but also of every other victim. His view was not an exceptional insight at the time; it was shared by Matthew Arnold and others who could at last see through the shallow complacency of natural theology. John Stuart Mill commented on Nature’s utter amorality. “Next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness . . . Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature’s everyday performances.” She never turns “one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction”; such are “her dealings with life.”

  What was special in Charles’s view was his unique understanding of the extraordinary outcome of the process of natural selection, the paradox of how all the diversity and beauty of living things was the outcome of the endless suffering and death in the “war of nature,” and how each new form might itself be destroyed as others took its place.

  Charles decided that he would open his argument for the idea of evolution by natural selection with a reminder of some generally known facts about fancy pigeons. There was wide interest in “the fancy” at the time, and people of all ranks were fascinated by the extraordinary variety of shapes and plumage that the fanciers had managed to produce by careful choice in breeding—fantails like peacocks, pouters with their enormous inflated crops, barbs with bright red eye-wattles, and so-called swallows with fanned feathers on their legs and feet. Charles saw that the range of breeds offered a perfect illustration of the variation that could be achieved by selection for reproduction. He built a pigeon house in the garden at Down for a collection to experiment with. Etty, who was now twelve, joined him in looking after them. He was grateful for her help, and found quickly that the pigeons were “a decided amusement to me, and a delight to Etty.” At first, things did not all go well and he complained that “all nature is perverse and will not do as I wish it.” But he and Etty soon mastered the tricks of breeding, and he came to love the pigeons so much that he could not bear “to kill and skeletonise them.” Etty got to know their characters and judged some sharply, just as she commented on Miss Thorley. A pouter pigeon, she recalled later, was “good-natured but not clever” and one hen Jacobin she considered “rather feeble-minded.”

  Charles was now working hard on his “big species book,” and he was preparing in his mind for the controversy that would follow when it was published. He was also dandling his last son, Charles Waring Darwin, whom Emma had borne in 1856. After the birth of Horace five years before, even though Emma was then forty-three, Charles had wanted another child. Emma carried on noting her periods in her diary. Charles wrote to his cousin Fox in October 1852: “Emma has been very neglectful of late and we have not had a child for more than one whole year.” She missed a period some months later and numbered the following weeks in her diary for the “reckoning,” but appears to have miscarried. She had another miscarriage in the following year, but eventually conceived again and, after weary months of discomfort, gave birth to Charles Waring when she was forty-eight.

  Charles played with his tenth child just as he had done with each of the others, and watched him with the same devoted absorption. “He was small for his age and backward in walking and talking, but intelligent and observant. When crawling naked on the floor, he looked very elegant. He had never been ill, and cried less than any of our babies. He was of a remarkably sweet, placid and joyful disposition, but had not high spirits, and did not laugh much. He often made strange grimaces and shivered, when excited; but did so, also, for a joke and his little eyes used to glisten after pouting out or stretching widely his little lips. He used sometimes to move his mouth as if talking loudly, but making no noise, and this he did when very happy. He was particularly fond of standing on one of my hands, and being tossed in the air; and then he always smiled, and made a little pleased noise. I had just taught him to kiss me with open mouth when I told him. He would lie for a long time placidly on my lap looking with a steady and pleased expression at my face; sometimes trying to poke his poor little fingers into my mouth, or making nice little bubbling noises as I moved his chin.”

  During Willy’s summer holiday in 1857, Charles gave him a set of photographic apparatus and the seventeen-year-old became a keen amateur photographer, walking in and out of the house with his hands blackened by the chemicals he used to prepare his plates. One of his first photographs was a picture of his mother watching over Charles Waring as he lay in her lap. She mounted the picture on a card and kept it until she died. I showed it recently to a consultant paediatrician, and gave him Charles’s comments on his child. The paediatrician said that the infant’s appearance in the photograph, his placid temperament and Emma’s age when he was conceived were all consistent with the condition we now call Down’s syndrome.

  Charles and Emma had noticed Charles Waring’s slow development, but probably did not recognise the signs in his appearance as there was no general awareness of the condition at the time. Few sufferers were ever seen in ordinary life, and the appearance was first identified tentatively with the disability in 1866 by Dr. John Langdon Down, the superintendent of a mental asylum, who corresponded with Charles in later years about facial features. Dr. Down had a positive approach to caring for the “feeble in mind,” and looked attentively for any patterns among his patients’ symptoms in the hope that suitable treatments could be found for any groups he could identify. From his experience with children with the distinctive “Mongolian” appearance, he suggested that they often responded better to treatment than many others with otherwise similar disabilities. The first step for all, though, was “to rescue the feeble one from the solitary life, to give him the companionship of his peers, to place him in a condition where all the machinery shall move for his benefit and where he shall be surrounded by influences both of art and nature, calculated to make his life joyous, to arouse his observation, and to quicken his power of thought.”

  In June 1858, Charles received the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist in Malaya, in which he revealed that he had come quite independently to the idea of natural selection and sought Charles’s views. Charles suddenly faced the possibility of losing credit for the theory which it had become his life’s work to build. He wrote in desperation to Lyell and Hooker (now assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) and waited for their advice on how to reply. As the days passed, a wave of scarlet fever was spreading from household to household through the village. Charles Waring caught the infection and died five days later in extreme distress. When Hooker’s letter came, Charles was thinking only about his son. The day after the infant died, Charles wrote to Hooker that he hoped to God he had not suffered “as much as he appeared.” “Thank God he will never suffer more in this world.” The last thirty-six hours had been “miserable beyond expression.” But “In the sleep of Death he resumed his placid looks.” Charles added about Wallace’s letter and the species theory: “I cannot think now on [the] subject but soon will.”

  In the event Hooker and Lyell presented a joint paper by Charles and Wallace to the Linnean Society in London. The historic announcement of their joint theory of evolution by natural selection was made at a meeting on the first day of July; Hooker and Lyell were both present, but Charles was not. That day he had followed Charles Waring’s small coffin to the village churchyard and watched as it w
as laid in the family tomb next to Mary.

  After the announcement to the Linnean Society, Charles accepted that he must publish his full argument without further delay, and set to work on a shortened version of the “big species book.” It appeared a year later as The Origin of Species. His thoughts about Annie and Charles Waring coloured two pictures of the “face of Nature” at the heart of his argument about natural selection in the struggle for life. In his early accounts of his ideas he had written how difficult it was when seeing “the contented face of Nature,” “to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods and smiling fields.” In his draft for the “big species book,” he had given a full chapter to the “Struggle for existence.” “All Nature . . . is at war. When one views the contented face of a bright landscape or a tropical forest glowing with life, one may well doubt this . . . Nevertheless the doctrine that all nature is at war is most true. The struggle very often falls on the egg and seed, or on the seedling, larva and young; but fall it must sometime in the life of each individual.”

  In the final text of The Origin of Species, Charles sharpened the wording in ways that echoed his memories of Annie as a child and the unexpected pain of her loss. He had written in his memorial of her that “from whatever point” he looked back on her, he saw the joyousness which “radiated from her whole countenance . . . Her dear face now rises before me . . . her eyes sparkled brightly.” And he had ended: “Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.” He now wrote: “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness . . . we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds or beasts of prey.” Charles had found that when loved children were healthy and lively, pain and death were easily forgotten. In Annie’s last days, he had watched as her face was changed beyond recognition by the emaciation of her fatal illness. You could understand the true conditions of life only if you held on to a sense of the ruthlessness of the natural forces that could waste the bright surface, of how Tennyson’s “brute force of Nature” might prevail.

  The second picture of the face of Nature had also changed as Charles developed his ideas. In 1838, he had written: “There is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying to force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps of the economy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.” He chose wedges for his simile to convey a critical point about the mechanism of natural selection, because when you drove a wedge in, it displaced whatever was on either side. The image gave a sense of the struggle for survival, and how alongside every survivor there was a victim. Now, in The Origin of Species, he suddenly linked the two images of the glad face and the ten thousand wedges in an extraordinary and violent way. He wrote that each creature “lives by a struggle at some period of its life” and “heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old.” The face of Nature, which he had just described as a human face “bright with gladness,” might be compared to “a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.” The cruelty of the image was too painful, though, and he cut the sentence from all editions after the first.

  In The Origin of Species, Charles ended his account of the struggle for existence with a last attempt at reassurance. He insisted again that we must “keep steadily in mind, that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio; 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.” But now, “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.” He had reflected on the struggle. Consolation was needed. He had a consolation to offer, but it was hollow for him after the deaths of his two sick children. “The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive,” but we continue to care for the others.

  Charles held to his wonder at the richness of natural life; it remained the inspiration of his theory, evident in page after page of The Origin of Species, and when he came to the conclusion, he returned to the idea of evolution as an endless unfolding which he had first sketched in his notebook and then developed in each reworking of the theory. He now gave it its final form in an imagined corner of the countryside he walked through every day on his own or with his children—the Sand walk copse perhaps, or Orchis Bank.

  “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us . . . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  The words became famous. In them, Charles offered his riddle to the world, how the “endless forms most beautiful” evolved “from the war of nature, from famine and death.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  GOING THE WHOLE ORANG

  Apes and humans—Lyell and Queen Victoria—The Water Babies—

  Sympathy—Workings of the mind

  ETTY SUGGESTED AFTER HER father’s death that “the habit of looking at man as an animal had become so present to him, that even when discussing spiritual life, the higher life kept slipping away.” Emma had lived with his “habit of looking at man as an animal” since she joked with him before their marriage that he would watch her as a specimen of the ape “genus.” Etty was right to suggest that this habit undermined his thinking about “the higher life”; he was developing his own ideas about human nature at the same time, deep rather than high, to put in place of the claims of Christianity. His eventual view of human origins was a humble one, but after comparing his children with Jenny the orang, he did not see our link with animals as demeaning. Others, when they wanted to emphasise animals’ utter inferiority to mankind, called them “brutes” or the “brute creation”; Charles seldom used the word, and never with that contemptuous sense.

  When Charles had first developed his species theory in 1838, mankind was at the centre of his thinking. When, twenty years later, before the publication of The Origin of Species, Alfred Russel Wallace asked him if he would discuss human origins, he acknowledged that it was the “highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist.” But “I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices.”

  Few apes had been seen in England after the second Jenny died in 1844, but Wombwell’s Menagerie had a male orang in the 1850s which they took in their cavalcade from town to town in England and Scotland. They claimed in their handbills that it was “beyond doubt or dispute the SECOND LINK in the chain of the Animal Creation.” The citizens of Aberdeen were told that the orang exhibited “sagacity little inferior to
that of a human being,” and so close were its links to our species that “we are literally lost in wonderment, and almost doubt the class to which it immediately belongs.” The Darwins and their friends went often to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which had a stuffed chimpanzee in a tableau of African life. The official guide commented that the living ape “exhibits an intelligence that presses with rather uncomfortable nearness upon the pride of the sole rational animal.”

  Zoologists were also learning about the gorilla from skulls and other bones brought from West Africa by travellers. Professor Owen was now widely recognised as a leading authority on the comparative anatomy of mammals. In 1853, he obtained the first complete gorilla skeleton for the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum, and in 1858, another was displayed in the Mammalian Gallery of the British Museum alongside a human skeleton. The juxtaposition was so striking that the British Museum had a photograph made of the two together, and it may have been among the pictures that were sold at the photographer’s stall in the entrance hall of the museum.

  The year before, Professor Owen had tried to break the evident close links between man and ape by taxonomic sleight of hand. He proposed making Homo sapiens the sole member of a subclass of mammals, quite separate from all other primates. He argued that the structure of the brain should be the key to the main distinctions in the class of mammals; that the human brain was unique, and that one of its special features, a small swelling at its base known as the hippocampus minor, warranted the separation of humans from all other mammals. When Charles read Professor Owen’s paper, he told Hooker that he had enjoyed Owen’s argument but could not swallow the placing of man in a position as far removed from a chimpanzee as a horse was from a platypus. With his old impulsive empathy he put himself in the ape’s position looking at man, and wrote: “I wonder what a chimpanzee would say to this.”