Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  Charles warmly welcomed Wallace’s argument, with its suggestion that our moral sense might have developed naturally from our social instincts by evolution and reflection. Wallace’s emphasis on the human power of sympathy also struck a chord. Charles had not taken his own ideas further since his private notes in 1839, but the novelist George Eliot had made sympathy the key to the “religion of humanity” which she wrote about in her essays and stories from the early 1850s, believing that “Our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.” She had taken up Wordsworth’s idea of the Romantic imagination which Charles had read about in 1838, and made it the focus of her artistic purpose, writing that “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.” She developed the theme in her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, which appeared in 1859 a few months before the publication of The Origin of Species. She embodied the idea most clearly in the figure of Dinah Morris, the young Methodist lay preacher, and her “passionate pity” for Hetty Sorrel waiting in her prison cell to be hanged for the murder of her illegitimate child. At a point of great strain in preparing The Origin for publication, Charles had to take a week’s rest to “drive” the species theory “out of my head.” He read Adam Bede with Emma and it did him “a world of good.” It remained their favourite of George Eliot’s novels, and he referred to a passage from it in one of his last works, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as an example for a scientific point about infants’ feelings.

  Charles was still working on his plant experiments when he read Wallace’s paper in 1864. He hoped Wallace would take the lead in further work on human nature and wrote to him: “I have collected a few notes on man, but I do not suppose I shall ever use them. Do you intend to follow out your views? and if so, would you like at some future time to have my few references and notes? I am sure I hardly know whether they are of any value, and they are at present in a state of chaos. There is much more that I should like to write, but I have not strength.”

  Wallace did not take up Charles’s offer, and wrote nothing more at the time. He returned to the theme five years later, but by then he had changed his view, to Charles’s intense disappointment. Wallace had attended a séance in 1865 and was intrigued as a man of science by the possibilities of spiritualism. He experimented with paid mediums, and was soon convinced of the reality of spiritual forces. In 1869, he set out his changed thinking about human origins in a review of a new edition of Lyell’s Principles of Geology. He argued that savages had mental powers beyond their needs for survival. Primitive man could not, therefore, have evolved by the workings of natural selection alone, and we must “admit the possibility that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends.” He was now arguing for just the kind of “miraculous addition” to explain human evolution that Charles had declared to Lyell he would never accept. Charles felt betrayed and wrote unhappily to him about their theory. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.” He said later: “I differ greatly from you, and I feel very sorry for it.”

  Meanwhile, Charles’s acquaintance Professor W. B. Carpenter of University College London was developing an organic view of the workings of the mind in his Principles of Human Physiology. Following previous writers, he suggested that memory, on which our feeling of personal identity depended, was rooted in the structure of the brain, and was “essentially an automatic form of mental activity.” Recollection was the “volitional exercise” of that power, and had special importance for mankind since reflection and reasoning by conscious will were held to be the unique powers which set us apart from animals. Carpenter emphasised how much mental and emotional activity took place below the threshold of awareness, and his approach soon influenced other writers. In 1865, Charles read William Lecky’s History of Rationalism which had a long footnote about the power of deep-rooted prejudices. Following Carpenter, Lecky suggested that the mind was “perpetually acting, pursuing trains of thought automatically, of which we have no consciousness.” “Opinions, modes of thought and emotions belonging to a former stage of our intellectual history” often reappeared through “the automatic action of the mind when volition is altogether suspended.” As a result, “the origin of most of those opinions we attribute to pure reasoning is more composite than we suppose.”

  Another person working in the area whom Charles knew was the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who argued and worked for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. He was then an ambitious young physician who believed strongly in an organic rather than spiritual approach to the human mind. Knowing all he did from his medical practice about the patterns of breakdown in disturbed and demented patients, he could not see human awareness and reason as a God-given faculty independent of organic life. In his Physiology and Pathology of Mind, published in 1867, Maudsley aimed to bring scientific method and biology to bear on mental activity, and to explore what light disease might throw on the workings of the brain. He was impatient with philosophers’ reliance on introspective examination of their own minds. They gave no account of the workings of the minds of children, uneducated adults or the insane; nor did they cover the influence of the body on the mind, or the large field of unconscious mental action. The mind was not, as so many assumed, “a wondrous entity, the independent source of power and the self-sufficient cause of causes.” It was, instead, “the most dependent of natural forces,” highly developed, but still strongly influenced by all the natural factors in its makeup. Man was “a sort of compendium of animal nature,” carrying his history with him, and only by looking at the evolution of human nature through time could we see the underlying relations.

  Charles read The Physiology and Pathology of Mind carefully, and noted some passages about expressions and other involuntary actions linked with sharp and deep feelings. “The beatings of the heart, the movements of respiration, the expressions of the countenance, the pallor of fear or the flush of anger, and the effects upon all the secretions and upon intuition—all these evince with certainty that the organic life participates essentially in the manifestation of emotion.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GOD’S SHARP KNIFE

  Providence, design and suffering—Return to Malvern—

  Emma’s faith—Spiritualism

  THROUGHOUT THE 1860S, Charles thought again and again about the puzzle of suffering and the sense of order in the natural world, and the mystery only deepened. He first explained his growing doubts to Asa Gray, an American naturalist and friend. Commenting on the “theological view” of his theory, he said: “This is always painful to me. I am bewildered.” He held firmly to his long-standing belief that God took no special interest in the fate of individuals. “The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws.” Did Gray believe “that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do . . . I can’t and don’t.” Instead, he was inclined to look at everything as resulting from the operation of God’s “designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.” He wrote later that it was “more satisfactory to attribute pain and suffering to the natural sequence of events.” He was prepared to allow that when God set the laws, he foresaw every eventuality. But he found that notion so all-embracing that it was valueless. “It may be said that when you kick a stone, or when a leaf falls from a tree, that it was ordained before the foundations of the world were laid exactly where that stone or leaf should lie. In this sense the subject has no interest for me.”

  Charles had always shared the common wish to see “evidence of design and beneficence” in the natural world. He had rejected the claim of natural theology that every species had been separately contrived by an all-powerful Creator, but commented to Gray and Hooker that he could not “view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of
man” “as the result of blind chance” or “brute force.” Yet still, he could not see the evidence of design and beneficence “as plainly as others do.” “There seems to me too much misery in the world.” He gave examples from nature like the huge numbers of ichneumons, wasp-like insects which feed on the living bodies of caterpillars, but his word “misery” clearly applied to human suffering and grief.

  Annie’s cousin Snow Wedgwood had grown into a serious young woman with a strong interest in the harmonies and discords between her uncle’s theory and her own deeply felt Christian morality. She set out the problem in an essay which was published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1861. When Charles was shown a copy, he found that she gave a correct account of his argument, and that, he told her gratefully, was a “rare event” with his critics. She was concerned that in his account of natural selection, “the work of creation” was carried out by natural forces which had elements of “what in man would constitute sin.” His theory seemed to carry us back to the point when “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good,” but the theory then revealed a “scene of strife, of bloodshed, of suffering.” “Surely it was not on this that the Creator pronounced a blessing! Surely the command ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ did not mean ‘Let every creature engage in an unremitting warfare with its fellows for the means of subsistence’!” Looking throughout nature, she felt it was difficult to avoid the feeling that “something is amiss; something is the work of an evil power.” And we must ask ourselves what it would mean for human nature if we accepted that “man is the result of the predominance among his ancestors of those tendencies which in him are sinful.”

  Snow suggested that man and nature both bore the “impress of imperfection,” and that the task of reconciling that with our belief in Divine omnipotence lay beyond human reason. Trying to make sense of how God had placed mankind in this imperfect world, she suggested that nature bore a lesson at every turn, “that failure, suffering, and strife, and even death, are but the steps by which [man] has been raised to the height at which he finds himself . . . What a depth of meaning do we find in such a view of creation as this, of such mighty changes accomplished through such faint and dim gradations, such innumerable failures for one success, such a slow and such an unpausing movement in the stream of creation, widening towards the mighty ocean!”

  Charles wrote to Snow that her conclusions had “several times vaguely crossed” his mind. But when he tried to think the points through, “the result has been with me a maze.” He could not imagine that the universe had not been designed; yet the closer he looked where one would most expect to find design, “in the structure of a sentient being,” the less proof he could see. As he thought about the problem, his sense of order in nature fluctuated, and he found he could not reconcile it with his understanding of the extent of animal and human pain. He could not see how a truly beneficent and omniscient God could have created the order out of that boundless weight of suffering. “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

  Around the same time, Charles told Herschel he was “in a complete jumble on the point,” and commented to Gray: “I am in thick mud . . . yet I cannot keep out of the question.” Some years later, he suggested to Hooker that thinking about the riddle was a waste of time, but he still could not stop. “How difficult it is not to speculate.”

  Charles’s memories of Annie softened and changed as the years passed, but he still felt for her as he always had since her childhood. The lasting sense of her loss and the fresh pain of Charles Waring’s death deepened his fear of the hurt he would suffer if any of his other children were to die.

  Infectious diseases continued to kill many children of both rich and poor throughout the 1850s and 1860s. William Farr’s “ledgers of death” showed that for years after its peak in the 1840s, child mortality remained almost as high. In 1857, a new disease, diphtheria, spread from northern France to southeast England, and caused public alarm. Etty suffered an attack with dreadful inflammation of her throat, and as soon as the worst of the crisis was over, Charles wrote to Hooker that she had been “very seriously ill with Dipterithes (or some such name).” In 1862, Leonard almost died of scarlet fever caught at his boarding school in Clapham. For Charles and Emma the “misery of having illness among one’s children” grew worse. When Etty was ill, she could sometimes hardly bear it when her father came to see her, because his concern and emotion were “too agitating.”

  Charles revealed his fears and stress most clearly in 1863 when he and Emma returned at last to Malvern and saw Annie’s grave. His sickness had recurred through the years after the publication of The Origin of Species. He talked often with Emma about returning to Malvern for treatment by Dr. Gully, but was torn between the hope of relief from his illness and the fear of reviving his memories of Annie’s last days. In the first months of 1863, Horace developed a chronic stomach complaint; Charles was vomiting frequently, and in June he told Hooker he was “languid and bedevilled.”

  Charles found it difficult to work, but watched a wild cucumber plant growing in a pot in his study. A neighbour’s gardener, for whom he had great respect as an observer, believed the tendrils could see, because wherever he placed the plant, its tendrils found any stick quickly. Charles had long had a special interest in plant shoots. In the Brazilian forests in 1832 he had seen them growing, and had watched entranced. One day he wrote in his pocket notebook: “Twiners entwining twiners—tresses like hair—beautiful Lepidoptera—silence.” Now looking at the plant in his study from hour to hour, Charles spotted the circular sweeping of the tendrils, now clockwise and now anticlockwise, as they searched for an object to attach themselves to. He suggested to Hooker that the tendrils had “some sense, for they do not grasp each other when young.”

  Emma urged Charles to take the family to Malvern for a month or two to see if Dr. Gully’s treatment could relieve his symptoms, and after a fortnight of sickness in August, he agreed. Emma travelled ahead, and took a house for their stay. She went at once to the churchyard to find Annie’s grave, but looked from headstone to headstone in vain. The sexton told her that the churchyard had been altered a few years before and the stone might have been stolen. When Charles arrived, he wrote at once to Fox to ask if he could remember from his visit in 1856 where the grave was. “We want, of course, to put another stone.” Fox replied immediately that it was “among several tombs which have shrubs and trees thickly planted round them . . . It was a good strong upright stone, and I remember well ‘To a good and dear child’.” Charles and Emma then sought out Eliza Partington, who was still at Montreal House, and with Fox’s information and her help, they found the headstone. It was shaded by trees and looked so green and old that Emma had not thought it could be the one. She wrote to Fox: “This has been a great relief.”

  Finding the stone and reading the words he had chosen for Annie, now patched by lichen after twelve years, seems to have helped Charles in coming to terms with his memories of her death, but only to a point. As the weeks passed at Malvern, the water treatment had an effect and he made some progress, but he was not at ease with himself. He had a day of “languor,” and suffered bouts of “sinking,” “swimming,” giddiness and distress in the night.

  Then, in the chill of early autumn, Hooker wrote to him from Kew in an agony of pain. “My darling little second girl died here an hour ago, and I think of you more in my grief than of any other friend.” Maria was six. Charles wrote back at once, but the following day he suffered “much swimming in head.” Hooker’s next letter opened: “Dear old Darwin, I have just buried my darling little girl and read your kind note.” Hooker wrote about his devotion to his daughter, “the companion of my walks, the first of my children who has shown any love for music and flowers, and the sweetest tempered affectionate little thing that ever I knew. It will be long before I cease to hear her voice in my ears or feel her little hand stealing into
mine by the fireside and in the garden. Wherever I go she is there.”

  Charles replied with a restrained effort at consolation, as he had tried long before with Fox. “I understand well your words ‘Wherever I go, she is there.’ I am so deeply glad that she did not suffer so much, as I feared was inevitable. This was to us with poor Annie the one great comfort. Trust to me that time will do wonders, and without causing forgetfulness of your darling.” These two comforts were the consolations that he and Emma had relied on, but behind his calm words, he was deeply shaken by the sense of what his friend was going through, and was overcome by another wave of feeling. “I am very weak and can write little . . . My head swims badly, so no more.”

  Charles and Emma stayed on at Malvern for another two weeks, but his head kept swimming; he grew very weak, and eventually he “could not walk a step but from one room into another.” Watching him with concern, Dr. Gully decided that he was too ill for the water treatment, and the family returned to Down. It was a relief to be back at home and Charles tried hard to recover, walking a little further every day. In the last week of October, he “accomplished twice round the Sand walk,” but he was unable to work or write letters to anyone. Hooker, not aware of his state of mind, wrote frankly to him again about his grief for Maria. “I am very well, but it will be long before I get over this craving for my child, or the bitterness of that last night. To nurse grief I hold is a deadly sin, but I shall never cease to wish my child back in my arms as long as I live.” In a postscript he added that he had just learnt that his son William had scarlet fever but was recovering.