Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

III

It seems to be of interest to consider one or two types of the scientific spirit in lines quite different from Darwin’s. There is Sainte-Beuve, to whom I have referred in earlier chapters. The great French critic was almost exactly contemporary with Darwin, being born in 1803 and dying in 1870. I do not discover that he ever mentions Darwin’s books, though he must have known something of them. In any case, he typifies admirably many of the scientific methods and qualities, the vast curiosity, the research, the labor, the patience, the passion for seeing all sides and allowing for all points of view. Only, he was concerned, not with plants and animals, not with the material, evolutionary world, but with the subtle phases and motives and passions and developments of the human spirit. He studied human life and character with endless curiosity and the results of his study are embodied in the forty volumes of portraits and in the seven solid volumes of the History of the Monastery of Port Royal, one of the most profound and searching investigations of religious psychology that has ever been made. Sainte-Beuve himself liked to compare his work with the researches of the more specific scientists. I have quoted earlier his brief statement: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[149] And elsewhere he puts it more elaborately, ‘It is absolutely as in botany for plants and in zoology for the species of animals. There is a moral natural history, with a method (as yet hardly developed), of the natural families of souls.’[150] And he loved to analyze souls of all sorts, good and bad, strong and weak, happy and unhappy, to analyze them and compare them and classify them, and bring out in them the profound common elements of human nature, under the endless play and diversity of the superficial differences.

It is peculiarly interesting to watch in Sainte-Beuve, as in Darwin, the working and the complication of the scientific spirit with the more personal elements. Sainte-Beuve made much more definite assertion than Darwin did, of sacrificing and effacing the personal life for scientific purposes. The Frenchman boasted that he mingled with all sorts of groups and associated himself with all sorts of causes and experiences, not from devotion to the things themselves, but from pure curiosity and from the passion for analyzing the working of these causes in human minds. He carried this so far that he was often accused of disloyalty to his friends and of espousing causes and then deserting them, and he himself handles the defense of the subjective attitude in such a way as to give some justification for the charge. His life, his thought, his work, were perfectly impersonal, he said, and in consequence he was epigrammatically branded with betraying all truths for the sake of truth.

On the other hand, it is very evident that some personal elements lingered about him much more than he thought or admitted. His early ambition, his undying ambition, was to be a poet. As a poet he failed, at least made no popular or conspicuous success. He saw the ardent contemporaries and close associates of his youth, Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Sand, Musset, making great popular reputations, while he was compelled to drag along in comparative shadow; and for all his boasted impersonality, this to a certain extent embittered him. The vast comprehension, the high intellectual impartiality, which distinguish him when he is dealing with the past, fail and shrink in a measure when he discusses contemporary work, and you cannot but feel that he is unconsciously hampered and tormented by a jealousy from which Darwin was wholly and nobly free.

But what marks Sainte-Beuve’s work most of all, as I have elsewhere emphasized, and what distinguishes him from Darwin and many other notable scientists, is the extraordinary concreteness of it. He had of course a vast background of general intellectual training and experience and of conversance with general thought and principles. But with this background always instinctively present, he devoted himself directly to the study of individuals. Only rarely does he deal in the discussion of theories of any sort, and then his handling is apt to be so complex and difficult that you feel him to be out of his element. What fascinates and absorbs him is the endless, close, minute, sympathetic study of individual men and women, and just because he is not hampered by theories, has no ends to attain nor points to prove, the study is endlessly varied, flexible, mobile, adaptable, and profoundly, inexhaustibly human. The incessant, fruitful application of scientific method has never been better exemplified than in Sainte-Beuve’s work.

Or, to take another of the broader types of the scientific spirit, perhaps one of the noblest and most luminous that has ever existed, Goethe. Goethe was a half century older than Sainte-Beuve and Darwin, but he lived well down into their period and the clarity of nineteenth century scientific thinking could find no better example than he. His actual scientific work is far from contemptible, and he to some extent anticipated Darwin as to the possibilities of metamorphosis in the natural world. His speculations on the theory of light, in contradiction to those of Newton, show at least the active and energetic intelligence.

But Goethe’s value to the scientific spirit rests on far broader grounds than any mere detail of scientific research or experiment. No one cultivated or practiced more than he the attitude of vast, unprejudiced curiosity, of eager search and relish for pure truth, independent of all considerations of party, or consequence, or practical bearing. It is this spiritual latitude which Matthew Arnold means when he calls Goethe the greatest poet of his own time and the greatest critic of all times. The free, broad, ample, mobile working of the human intelligence has never found a more lucid exponent than Goethe, and everywhere through his writings there are passages which will help the lover of truth, while the distilled essence of his mental attitude is to be found in the collection of ‘Maximen und Reflexionen,’ which gives the kernel of wisdom without the somewhat otiose Teutonic wrapping of amplification in which Goethe was often inclined to envelop it.

It is in the highest degree curious, remembering the weaknesses of Sainte-Beuve to which I have already alluded, to read all his numerous comments on Goethe, but particularly the following: ‘Goethe understood everything in the universe—everything except perhaps two things, the Christian and the hero. There was a weakness here which belonged to the realm of heart. It seems likely that he considered Leonidas and Pascal, the latter especially, as monstrosities in the order of nature.’[151] And Sainte-Beuve prided himself upon understanding the Christian and the hero both, and it is probable that he did.

The interesting point in Goethe, and also in less degree in Sainte-Beuve, as compared with Darwin, is that the full development of the scientific spirit in both of them did not exercise the same sort of spiritual blight with which Darwin thought that it affected him. No human being ever lived who was more susceptible to beauty than Goethe was, and his passion for pure truth did not prevent his retaining the highest sense of artistic ecstasy through his whole long life. With him and with Sainte-Beuve both, it could hardly be said that thinking came before emotion, for both of them adored the incomparable beauty of form and the rapture that came with it up to the very end.

On the other hand, neither Goethe nor Sainte-Beuve is for a moment to be compared with Darwin in that ineffable sweetness and simple charm which endeared him to all who came into contact with him and which breathe everywhere through his letters and even his more formal scientific works.

One striking feature in Sainte-Beuve is that he recognized fully the absorbing, engrossing nature of the scientific spirit, yet appreciated that the pursuit of knowledge does not necessarily bring happiness. No one has expressed the barren desolation of mortal life with more acrid bitterness than he. Shakespeare tells us that ripeness is all. Sainte-Beuve doubts whether it exists. ‘Ripen?’ he cries. ‘Ripen? We never ripen. We harden in some spots. We rot in others. We ripen never.’[152] Years bring with them—for him—an utter indifference to everything and everybody: ‘I have arrived in life at a complete indifference: provided I do something in the morning, and go somewhere at night, life has nothing more for me.’[153] And again, life is nothing but the pricking of one illusion after another, till one becomes bitterly convinced that no illusion is worth the pains of being pricked. As he sums it up in a vivid figure: ‘Why I no longer care for nature, for the country? Why I no longer care to walk in the little footpath? I know well that the footpath is the same, but there is no longer anything on the other side of the hedge. In old times there was rarely anything, but always there might be something.’[91]

It is true that Sainte-Beuve’s melancholy and disgust are closely connected, as he himself admits, with the gross sexual disorders of his celibate career, and he speaks of ‘the incurable disgust with everything which is peculiar to those who have abused the sources of life.’[92] In his later years he seems to have had no principle of sexual restraint whatever, and to have indulged as freely in indiscriminate commercial amours as did Pepys or Aaron Burr, though he was as much without Burr’s gay oblivion as without Pepys’s touches of remorse. He proclaims as a cynical creed his method of seeking wisdom: ‘Like Solomon and like Epicurus, I have made my way to philosophy through pleasure. It is a better road than traveling thitherward by logic after Hegel’s or Spinoza’s fashion.’[93] And the sum of the philosophy was akin to Solomon’s. ‘Sainte-Beuve said to me,’ records Goncourt, ‘One should make the tour of everything and believe in nothing. There is nothing real but woman.’[94] Solomon would hardly have made the exception. The curious thing is that, with all this abandoned personal license, Sainte-Beuve, in his critical judgments, preserved the most delicate sensibility as to moral excellence in sexual lines, as in all others.

When we turn to Goethe, we find perhaps little more regard for sexual morals than with Sainte-Beuve, but at any rate a temperament far better poised, and to all appearances charged and glorified with luminous serenity. Yet with Goethe also the scientific spirit, even though enriched with the artist’s delight and the artist’s creative power, could not bring happiness in its train. The sorrows and sufferings of Werther might perhaps be accredited to the extravagance of youth. But in extreme old age we hear Goethe proclaiming the emptiness and misery of life in terms almost as bitter and complete as those of Sainte-Beuve or of Anatole France. ‘I will say nothing,’ he said to Eckermann, ‘against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.’[95]

So far as we know, Darwin had no sexual cause of spiritual disturbance, and his scientific pursuits obviously brought him interest and delight. But we have seen how much even Darwin complained that absorption in science stunted and atrophied the higher sides of the spiritual nature. Work was largely a means of forgetting life, and when work failed, Down cemetery became singularly attractive. The pursuit of truth for itself, exciting and engrossing as it may be, would seem to have something abnormal and unwholesome about it and Pascal’s consolation for the reedlike insignificance of man in the thought that he is a ‘thinking reed’ sounds a little chill and comfortless, even with Scherer’s amplification about the glory of ‘the dream that knows itself to be a dream, of thought that thinks itself.’ The final emptiness and futility which at times appear to attach to the profoundest search for truth have never been more grandly stated than in the words with which Sainte-Beuve brings his vast history of Port Royal to a close: ‘I have been and I am only an investigator, a sincere observer, attentive and scrupulous.... I have been after my fashion a man of truth, so far as I have been able to attain it. But how little is the best we can attain! How bounded is our vision and how quickly it reaches its limit! It is like a pale torch lighted for a moment in the midst of an enormous night. And he who most had it at heart to know his subject, who had the keenest desire to grasp it, and the greatest pride in treating it, most feels himself impotent and below his task, on the day when, seeing it almost completed and the result obtained, the intoxication of power fails him, the final exhaustion and the inevitable disgust overwhelm him, and he perceives that he too is but an illusion the most fleeting on the breast of the Illusion which is infinite.’[96]