by Paul Johnson
No one publicly presented Darwin as an enemy of religion. There is a certain amount of mythology on this point. Part of the myth concerns the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, and the confrontation between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The Bishop was not popular in all quarters, being known in the House of Lords as “Soapey Sam” or “the Saponaceous One,” among the advanced Whigs and Liberals. Huxley used the occasion for a fight, and the bishop played into his hands by an unfortunate joke about simian ancestry on the paternal or maternal side. Huxley did not like jokes unless he made them himself, and let fly, later spreading the tale that the bishop had been savaged. The bishop thought he himself had won the debate. Others called it a draw. What is true is that FitzRoy made an ass of himself. Now an admiral, he had come to the meeting to read a paper on storms but took the opportunity to protest against the Origin by holding up an enormous Bible and begging the audience “to believe God rather than man.” He was howled down. A Lady Brewster is said to have fainted—but then, the room was crowded and hot. What is clear is that Wilberforce behaved to all with his customary courtesy, and Huxley with some reluctance conformed. It was a gentlemanly age. Wilberforce reviewed Origin in the Quarterly Review at enormous length—seventeen thousand words. In many ways, he was complimentary, and the review drew forth from Darwin the remark that it was “uncommonly clever.” The bishop met Darwin several times, and his friendly verdict was “He is such a capital fellow.” Of course, those who believe the myth that Wilberforce was a dedicated enemy of evolution and Origin forget that the Wilberforce family was part of the ramifying network of evangelicals and reformers who had played such an important part in getting through Parliament the original statute banning the slave trade in 1807. The bill was effectively carried by Bishop Wilberforce’s father, the MP for Yorkshire, and for people like Emma, the name Wilberforce had a special reverential magic.
The truth is that Origin had a surprisingly good press, thanks in part to Darwin’s careful avoidance of any statements or phrases that might give offense and to his cultivation of potential reviewers. All his fears proved groundless. Indeed, Emma rejoiced in the book’s reception and wrote to their son William at Cambridge: “It is a wonderful thing the whole edition selling off at once & Mudie taking 500 copies.” She seems to have taken as much pleasure as Darwin himself in good reviews—a majority of the forty-four that appeared in the first year—and showed her anger at the unfortunate tone of Owen’s comments. She was a loyal wife, and her support and evident approval of the book as a work of professional scholarship removed a huge burden from Darwin’s shoulders.
As final proof that Origin was accepted and there was to be no campaign against him, word came down that Windsor was not hostile to either evolution or natural selection. Whether Queen Victoria read the book is not clear, but she seems to have believed that Prince Albert would have given the book and the theory a fair hearing. When Lyell stayed at Osborne as her guest in 1863 he reported, “[Victoria] asked me a good deal about the Darwin theory as well as the antiquity of man. She has a clear understanding and thinks quite fearlessly for herself, and yet very modestly.” Her eldest daughter noted, with approval, “Old opinions have received a shake from which they will never recover.” The likelihood is that Queen Victoria would have welcomed an opportunity to meet Darwin as she met Huxley, who left a striking record of his encounter. Charles and Victoria were both fascinated by many aspects of animal life. In 1838 the first orangutan was brought to London and was lodged at the zoo in a special heated giraffe house. Darwin saw this creature, called Jenny, and was particularly fascinated by what he called her “human emotions.” When the keeper refused to give her an apple she had seen, “she threw herself on her back, kicked and cried, precisely like a naughty child.” The keeper told her: “Jenny, if you will stop barking and be a good girl, I will give you the apple.” She understood “every word of this,” stopped whining, and got the apple, “with which she jumped into an armchair and began eating it, with the most contented countenance possible.” Darwin was so fascinated by Jenny that he invented a phrase, “Go the whole orang,” meaning risk offending opponents of evolution by stressing man’s descent from apes.
Jenny’s successor, another Jenny, likewise intrigued Victoria, who watched her drinking a cup of tea “with horrified fascination at her refined gentility.” The queen’s conclusion was that the orang was “disagreeably human.” She was enthralled when Sir James Paxton showed her his special display of extinct animals in 1858. “What beasts they must have been,” she said, “and why did they become extinct?” A year later, Darwin devoted a chapter to this very point and could have expounded on it in person. But the queen may have been put off by Disraeli, who persisted in treating the whole subject of evolution as a subject for mirth. In 1861, attending the Oxford Diocesan Conference, presided over by Wilberforce, Disraeli asked rhetorically, “Is man an ape or an angel? Now, my Lord, I am on the side of the angels.” Disraeli never showed any interest in meeting Darwin. Not so his mortal rival, Gladstone, who paid him a friendly call at Down and gave him a two-hour lecture on Turkish atrocities (it was 1878) before remembering to ask him about the future of evolution. Would the future belong to America? Darwin, who had been stunned into silence by the grand old man’s verbosity, simply answered, “Yes.” When Gladstone left, Darwin said: “What an honour that such a great man should come to visit me.” Gladstone made a note in his diary about Darwin’s “pleasing and remarkable appearance.”
The Origin established itself immediately as an “important” book and has remained such ever since. Darwin saw it through five editions and made many corrections. His pride in his own gentlemanly modesty was stung when people reminded him that others besides himself had got on to natural selection. So he changed “my theory” to “the theory” throughout, a total of fifteen times, but missed one “my.” To his consternation, he found that the “mathematical expert” who had “worked out the number of elephants that would emerge under Malthusian theory at 15 million” had got his sums wrong, and the figure had to be made less frightening. Not for the first time, he cursed the fact that he could not do math himself.
His correspondence increased enormously. Sedgwick wrote to tell him, sadly, that the book had given him “more pain than pleasure,” though “Parts of it I admired greatly, [and] parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore.” (Which parts? One would like to know.) But Sedgwick insisted on putting questions about it in Cambridge exam papers. So, as the publisher, Murray, triumphantly reported, undergraduates had been forced to buy the book. Harriet Martineau exclaimed, “What a book it is. . . . The range & mass of knowledge take away one’s breath.” John Henslow, though critical of the theory, called it “a marvellous assemblage of facts & observations.” Among intellectual potentates who praised it were Henry Buckle, Charles Kingsley, and William Hooker. Among scientists, the vast majority of those under fifty were on Darwin’s side, and almost all the under-forties. For the first time, a progressive lobby began to build up in the scientific community. Darwin compiled a list of fifteen distinguished supporters among the geologists, zoologists, paleontologists, physiologists, and botanists. By May he was writing, “If we all stick to it we shall surely gain the day. And I now see that the battle is worth fighting.” In fact, Darwin never had to fight a public battle. He did not suffer in the smallest degree professionally as a result of Origin. Being sensitive, he was hurt by critical reviews. But that was all. In the not so long run, it was scientists who opposed him who were in danger of victimization. The persecution of Darwin is pure myth. On the contrary, he found himself an eminent Victorian. Darwinism became a term circulating in London society. In Germany, Darwinismus was hailed enthusiastically as the translation circulated. Indeed the Germans treated him as a hero: In no other country did natural selection, or rather the “survival of the fittest,” catch on so fast. Other translations swiftly followed. His ideas were particularly well received in
Japan, then just beginning to enter the modern world and industrialize itself. Soon—by the mid-1860s—there was no corner of the earth where Darwin was not known as “the famous scientist.”
What should he do now? Lyell and he agreed that he ought to “go the whole orang” and write a book showing in detail how man fitted into evolution and natural selection. That was the logical and satisfying thing to do. It was also what he ought to do, now that it was clear Emma was not upset by the way things were going. But so clear and simple a course was not Darwin’s way. He had written Origin under a kind of compulsion, because of Wallace. Now he was under no obligation at all, other than his own wishes and scientific concerns. Darwin had twenty-two years to go when Origin came out, and he was hard at work, either acquiring facts by observation and experiment or setting them down in orderly form on paper, virtually all the time when not ill. But it is difficult to make logical and categorical sense of his progress. He liked to have several projects going at once and switch from one to another as the spirit or the excitement generated by results moved him—from zoology to botany to physiology or anthropology, from insects to plants, the invertebrates, to men, and back to insects again. That was the trouble with being a polymath, though we must never forget that it was also Darwin’s great strength.
The going-the-whole-orang book finally came out in 1871, under the title of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. It is a very awkward volume, much longer than Origin and far more academic, with plenty of footnotes and source citations, and many line illustrations. But it is a confused and confusing book, quite unlike Origin with its single and concentrated argument running throughout. In fact it is two books. The first puts the evolution of man from lower forms into the general context of Origin. Indeed, it should have formed part of Origin and would have done if Darwin had dared, for he says he had been collecting notes on the subject since the 1830s. But he would never have ventured to proclaim in Origin the unqualified assertion that forms the last sentence of Descent:
We must . . . acknowledge . . . that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
However, this argument forms only a part (less than one-third) of the book, and even this is only partly concerned with natural selection on man’s evolution. The first chapter covers the “evidence of the Descent of Man from some Lower Form”; the second the “Manner of Development of this descent.” Then there are two chapters on comparing the mental powers of men and the “lower animals,” followed by three on the evolved man: on his “Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised times,” on his affinities, and on the “Races of Man.” In effect, then, only about sixty pages cover man’s evolution from lower forms.
The remaining two thirds of the book deals with the role of sex in natural selection. Darwin had become uneasily aware that natural selection, though generally true, did not cover man comprehensively and would not stand up as the sole explanation. He decided to bolster it by examining the way in which mating is decided by either the male or the female or both. This really should have been a separate book, and the first third should have been added to a new edition of Origin. But Darwin did not like to do this, as it would carry the implication that he dodged treating man in the first book, though he already possessed the evidence, such as it was. So the two books were lumped awkwardly together.
There are two further faults in construction. Though the title Descent of Man implies that the book is essentially about human beings, of the fourteen chapters dealing with sexual selection, only two concern our species. The last chapter is a general summary and conclusion. Eleven chapters, forming the largest single part of the book, deal with the lower classes of the organic kingdom: insects, butterflies and moths particularly, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, a large section on birds (four chapters), and two chapters on mammals. Here again we have to note Darwin’s weakness in anthropology: He simply had much more accurate and convincing information about other species than man, and that was why they occupied much more room. The title of the book as a whole was thus misleading. Second, he had originally intended to include a chapter on emotional expression, containing a lot of material on humans, which would have a little strengthened the claim of the book to be about them. But in the end, he decided to expand the chapter into a separate book, and this was eventually published at the end of the following year, in November 1872, under the title The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
So Darwin’s work on evolution through natural selection encompasses three books, not one. And it may be felt that it would have been better if he had published only the first, for it is much superior, as a work of science, to the second and third. The fact is, Darwin had done by far his most original and groundbreaking work on the other forms of organic life, as opposed to man, and he continued to do so till the end of his life. On plants and marine life, on insects, birds, and invertebrates, even to some extent on mammals as a whole, he has a skill and sureness of touch, a knowledge and instinct, even a kind of insightful genius, that eludes him when he comes to man, and the more one reads the trilogy and reflects upon it, the more apparent this discrepancy becomes.
Not that volumes two and three were failures in any way. Certainly not commercially. The Descent of Man made two thick volumes selling at £1 4 s., a much bulkier proposition than Origin, and more copies printed. But all were sold out in three weeks, and soon 4,500 copies were in print. Darwin made £1,500 immediately, the largest sum he was ever to earn in a lump. Expressions had a print run of 7,000 copies and proved highly popular, being on a subject that fascinated the least scientific people and illustrated by photographs of hysterics, lunatics, savages, and other interesting mug shots. Both books also helped substantially to reinforce Darwin’s theory that man differed from other animals only in degree, not in kind, which was the real issue once evolution had been accepted. But neither book had the impact of Origin among clever and educated people, and Descent came in for a good deal of criticism, much of it justified. If either or both had been published without Origin preceding them, they might have attracted little attention. And neither could be successfully published today, except on the solid stone bedrock of Darwin’s unshakable reputation.
The trouble with Descent really starts in chapter 5, “On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primæval and Civilised Times.” It is a mass of generalizations usually unsupported by strict evidence. Much of it was derived from Darwin’s friends, the jack-of-all-trades journalist W. R. Greg and his cousin Francis Galton, who was an ingenious compiler of dubious sociological statistics. Greg and Galton examine, for instance, the way in which human folly and improvidence hold back the improving work of natural selection. Thus, “As Mr. Greg puts the case: ‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, farseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late and leaves few behind him.’” Publishing this today would risk prosecution under the hate laws. Even in 1871, it brought a letter of protest from an Irishman, asking Darwin to remove the slur from later editions, but the author flatly refused. There is much to the same effect: “The very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, while the careful and frugal, who are genuinely otherwise virtuous, marry late in life.” Darwin makes some odd assertions derived from French figures: “Unmarried men throughout France . . . die in a much larger proportion than the married,” and “Twice as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died out of the same number of the married.” He quotes a D
r. Stark: “Bachelorhood is more destructive to life than the most unwholesome trades, or than residence in an unwholesome house or district. . . .” Stark concludes that lessened mortality is the direct result of marriage. Another of Darwin’s odd French sources told him that “civilised man” had been found “whenever compared, to be physically stronger than savages.”
Darwin tells us that vaccination works against natural selection, as it “has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.” For the same reason, he opposed any form of birth control. When Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were prosecuted for copublishing contraceptive advice and subpoenaed Darwin to give evidence for them, he instantly refused, pleading illness, and said that in any case, he would have to give evidence against them. He quoted Descent: “Our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means.”
As for moral qualities, he was happy to report in Descent that the tendency of the improvident and vicious to breed more than the frugal and virtuous was checked by various factors. “Some elimination of the worst dispositions is always in progress.” “Malefactors are executed or imprisoned for long periods. . . .” “Melancholic and insane persons are confined, or commit suicide. Violent and quarrelsome men often come to a bloody end.” And so on. This is rambling stuff of no scientific value whatever, the points, even if true, not worth making. It is accompanied by many racial generalizations that now would be denounced as racism or chauvinism. There is a passage, for instance, praising Anglo-Saxon emigration and conquest of lesser breeds—“a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations.” He regretted that the principle of natural selection, even so, was not always working powerfully enough, for “we see in many parts of the world enormous areas of the most fertile land capable of supporting numerous happy homes, but peopled only by a few wandering savages.” This was the line soon to be taken by Cecil Rhodes, the sort of man, in Darwin’s view, required for natural selection to work at its best. As it was, he detected a softening of once valuable forces. In South America, “a people which may be called civilised, such as the Spanish settlers, is liable to become indolent and to retrograde, when the conditions of life are very easy.” Selection did not, alas, work so well among such folk, as they “do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.” He thought progress depended to a great extent on education during youth, “whilst the brain is impressible.”