Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

I

At different times Darwin commented on the gradually increasing absorption of his life by scientific pursuits and on the consequent atrophy of other intellectual and spiritual interests, which in earlier days had meant a good deal to him. In other words he was illustrating the favorite text of Sainte-Beuve, ‘All longings fail except that to understand.’ Sometimes he expresses this loss with terse vigor: ‘It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.’[309] Or again: ‘It is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.’[310] And elsewhere he analyzes it with more elaborate regretful curiosity: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry or listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.’[311]

THE STUDY AT DOWN

Having recently had occasion to make a somewhat extended study of Darwin’s remarkable contemporary the evangelist D. L. Moody, I have been struck by this similarity of lack of general interest in both of them. Darwin was of course a far better educated man fundamentally than Moody. But in both, their very bigness and power made the one engrossing passion—about as different in the two cases as can be imagined—dwarf and drive out the varied distractions and desires which relieve and stimulate the curiosity or the indolence of more ordinary men. So far as Darwin is concerned, with the exaggeration natural to reminiscence, he perhaps somewhat overestimated both the original aptitude and the later atrophy. But it is exceedingly instructive to trace his relation to the various occupations and experiences of life outside of the scientific.

Take first the external human interests, other than purely social. In the larger movements of history Darwin seems not to have been particularly well versed or to have concerned himself very much with them. Of course, in relying upon his volumes of published letters as evidence, we must remember that those volumes were naturally edited with a view in the main to scientific pursuits, and therefore it is to be expected that other interests should figure less conspicuously. Still the testimony, both positive and negative, to the unimportance of those interests is very decided. As to this matter of history, Darwin himself tells us that he read the historians in his youth. He even insists that when he had lost æsthetic pleasures, ‘books on history, biographies, and travels ... and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did.’[312] Of his earlier life he records that ‘I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school.’[313] Perhaps on this Shakespearean basis, he retains, with many other English conventions, that of reverence for rank, though no more natural democrat ever lived, and he makes gentle fun of himself for his snobbishness: ‘I have the true English reverence for rank, and therefore liked to hear about the Princess Royal.’[314]

Nevertheless, in his letters and in his books, you get the sense that the great currents of development in Europe and in the world were not familiar to his thought. With the unfailing candor, he admits this: ‘I believe your criticism is quite just about my deficient historic spirit, for I am aware of my ignorance in this line.’[315] And an acute and sympathetic analyst of his work, points out that it suffered to some extent from the deficiency. The tendency to extend evolutionary analogies from the individual to society was partly Darwin’s fault, says this critic, because of his ‘embarking upon the discussion of social and moral matters, in “The Descent of Man”; matters concerning which he was little better informed than any other non-specialist.’[316]

In contemporary politics it was not to be expected that Darwin should have much immediate concern. One can hardly imagine a man less likely to choose an active political career, or on the whole less adapted to it, though the tact which enabled him to deal successfully with his fellow-scientists would no doubt have been helpful in more practical spheres. There are occasional glimpses of his taking some part in local interests, and for a time at any rate he attended to the judicial duties which we so generally associate with the English country squire: ‘I attended the Bench on Monday, and was detained in adjudicating some troublesome cases one and one half hours longer than usual, and came home utterly knocked up, and cannot rally.’[317]

Darwin would not have been an Englishman, if he had not entertained political opinions of some sort. He could not pretend to escape the tradition so strongly planted in the blood of the race. He does indeed resent the suggestion that politics are more important than science: ‘Did you see a sneer some time ago in the Times about how incomparably more interesting politics were compared with science even to scientific men?... Jeffrey, in one of his letters, I remember, says that making an effective speech in Parliament is a far grander thing than writing the grandest history. All this seems to me a poor short-sighted view.’[318] But he has been brought up a Whig, a Liberal, and Whig prejudices are inherent in his system. This was true in the early days of the Beagle voyage: ‘The Captain does everything in his power to assist me, and we get on very well, but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles.’[319] And it remained true to old age. When answering a questionnaire in 1873, he described himself as ‘Liberal or Radical,’[320] but the radicalism was of a very conservative and English order.

The Whig partisanship even shows itself in quite normal fashion in hatred of the Tories, and on this head the tolerant and kindly scientist expresses himself with a rather amusing bitterness: ‘Thank God, the cold-hearted Tories, who, as J. Mackintosh used to say, have no enthusiasm, except against enthusiasm, have for the present run their race.’[321] But these outbursts are not to be taken very seriously.

There are occasional glimpses of interest in current public men and current public affairs. Lord Bryce gives a striking account of a visit which Gladstone paid to the great thinker. Darwin’s comment was, ‘he seemed to be quite unaware that he was a great man, and talked to us as if he had been an ordinary person like ourselves.’ On which Bryce remarks: ‘The friend who was with me and I could not but look at each other and exchange covert smiles. We were feeling toward Darwin just as he had felt toward Gladstone.’[322] During the early portion of the Franco-German War Darwin’s sympathy, like that of many Englishmen, was with Germany: ‘I have not yet met a soul in England who does not rejoice in the splendid triumph of Germany over France: it is a most just retribution against that vainglorious, war-liking nation.’[323] But the struggles of party politics, as they went on about him, aroused little attention and little ardor.

There was, however, one political event of his time that called forth Darwin’s keen sympathy and extended comment, and that was the American Civil War. As is well known, English opinion was much divided on this question, and the prejudices of the upper class, at any rate among the more conservative, were in favor of the South. Although Darwin was by no means confident that the North would win, he was strongly on that side from the start, and his numerous letters to Asa Gray show how decided his feeling was.

The feeling was not based on the abstract political and constitutional considerations that appealed to Americans, but on Darwin’s rooted, bitter antipathy to the system of slavery in any form. When he was in South America with the Beagle, he had plenty of opportunity to watch the working of human servitude, and it disgusted and repelled him beyond measure. ‘To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.... Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.’[324] As a result of these experiences and many others, Darwin imbibed a detestation of slavery and slave-holders which lasted through life, and which led him to oppose them where he could, whether in England or America.

The hostility to slavery was based even more deeply on an intense hatred of cruelty, barbarity, and the infliction of physical suffering of any sort. The dislike of such suffering was so keen that from the start it incapacitated Darwin for the medical profession, which his father would have been glad to see him follow. He could not bear the sight of blood, and fled from an operation with disgust. Ill-treatment of animals was especially tormenting to him, and he interfered to prevent it, when he could: ‘He returned one day from his walk pale and faint having seen a horse ill-used, and from the agitation of violently remonstrating with the man.’[325]

With such a general sensibility, Darwin’s attitude towards vivisection is extremely curious. Knowing as he did the importance of animal experiment, he could not possibly range himself on the side of the anti-vivisectionists. But he supported every effort to have humanity legally emphasized and rigidly insisted upon. The nature of his feeling in the matter appears clearly in a passage of ‘The Descent of Man’: ‘Every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.’[326]

In sociological questions of a broader bearing, which made no such immediate appeal to his susceptibilities, Darwin took much less interest. Now and then some special point arouses him. He was excited about any attempt to interfere with the marriage of cousins, because he had married his cousin and had in consequence largely investigated the subject.[327] He was decidedly opposed to the English tradition of primogeniture, and felt its unfairness. On the land-question he writes to Wallace: ‘I see you are going to write on the most difficult political question, the land. Something ought to be done; but what, is the rub.’[328] In the same spirit of remoteness and uncertainty, he writes also to Wallace in regard to Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’: ‘I will certainly order “Progress and Poverty,” for the subject is a most interesting one. But I read many years ago some books on political economy, and they produced a disastrous effect on my mind, viz., utterly to distrust my own judgment on the subject, and to doubt much every one else’s judgment. So I feel sure that Mr. George’s book will only make my mind worse confounded than it is at present.’[329] But it is clear that the remoteness did not imply contempt or cynical disregard, merely a feeling of complete inability and diffidence in regard to economic problems, and one is slow to condemn this state of mind, when one thinks that such problems are usually dealt with and solved, if it can be called so, by those in whose equipment freedom from diffidence is the most aggressive and impressive instrument.