III
The study of the complication of motives that prompts a man like Darwin, and many others, to reveal and establish a great scientific discovery in spite of violent opposition is profoundly curious and profitable. It seems to me that a main element in these motives, with the scientist, as with the artist and the politician and the actor and the preacher and the athlete alike, is ambition. As Darwin himself expresses it: ‘The action of unconscious selection, as far as pigeons are concerned, depends on a universal principle in human nature, namely on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbors. We see this in every fleeting fashion, even in our dress.’[410] And again: ‘Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness.’[411] The concrete essence of ambition is the desire for fame, to have one’s efforts, one’s powers, one’s achievement, one’s ego, recognized, appraised, established by the applause and commendation of one’s fellow-men. And surely this desire in itself is a natural and even a laudable one, leading, as it does, to most useful and enduring accomplishment. The drawback is that the thirst for glory is so enticing, so overmastering, that it seduces men into strange and dubious methods of obtaining it. Glory, or notoriety, is got so often by base means, the trickster and the charlatan can so often snatch its rewards and laurels from honest labor and even from genius divinely endowed, that sincere and earnest spirits are impelled to disclaim the pursuit altogether, and to insist, perhaps with genuine self-deception, that fame as a motive hardly enters into their struggle at all. This contention is maintained the more easily, since it is evident that other motives, and those most powerful, do enter in. There is the restless, ever active disposition of human nature to be doing something, almost no matter what. To work, to create, to achieve, is to live. Nothing else can properly be called life. To have done great things, to be doing them, makes you feel that you exist, and why should you vex yourself with what other men think of them? Then for the scientist there is the sheer delight of adding one grain of truth to the slow accumulation of the centuries, as for the artist there is the splendid sense of having created something beautiful. You know it, you feel it: what do the others matter? And there is further the rich reward of believing, or hoping, that you are doing even a little to help or to enlighten your fellow-men, whether they are ever aware of it or not. Few things are more soothing or cheering to the soul than that. So that there have been thinkers and there have been artists who have said, and perhaps sincerely thought: ‘I care not if some other man gets the credit of my work altogether. So the work is done, and I have done it, and know that I have done it, and it endures, and is worthy to endure, what does the name or the glory of it matter?’ There are many who have said this, there may be some who have meant it; but surely there are few who have tried to do great things, and have not longed for the human recognition of them; and why should they not?
It is peculiarly interesting to trace the play of these motives in Darwin, because here, as everywhere, he has such an extraordinary, intimate frankness of revelation. The love of fame was strong in him, and he knew it. He tells us of his childhood: ‘Some other recollections are those of vanity—namely, thinking that people were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance and another for boldness in climbing a low tree, and what is odder, a consciousness, as if instinctive, that I was vain, and contempt of myself.’[412] Of his earlier scientific years he writes: ‘I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men ... whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion.’[413] At a much later period he still recognizes the same stimulus: ‘Without you have a very much greater soul than I have (and I believe that you have), you will find the medal a pleasant little stimulus; when work goes badly, and one ruminates that all is vanity, it is pleasant to have some tangible proof, that others have thought something of one’s labors.’[414] And how charming is the frank admission that he hates to have glory snatched away from him: ‘I always thought it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I had a grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken and punished.’[415] Certainly in him the tranquil appreciation that there was a something of inborn power can hardly be set down to the inferiority complex, and inborn power does yearn for outward applause: ‘Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.’[416]
Yet with the passage of years and the growing sense of the futility and injustice of popular reputation, Darwin was more and more disposed to disclaim all interest in it. The desire for glory, he admits, is a universal human motive, and a natural one; but there are others of as much, if not more account: ‘You do me injustice when you think that I work for fame; I value it to a certain extent; but, if I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.’[417] To the very end it is clear that the sale of his books and the public discussion of his ideas are pleasant to him, perhaps more pleasant than he recognizes. But assuredly no man can be said to be unduly hungry for the laudation of the mob who waits patiently for twenty years before making public his claims to it. And it is certain that never under any circumstances would Darwin have descended to court it by base means or false pretences. As he himself sums up the whole matter, speaking of his youth: ‘All this shows how ambitious I was; but I think I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable review or a large sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame.’[418] We certainly have here no extreme or morbid case of notoriety-seeking.