IV
Meantime, it is interesting to consider how many of the great spirits of the last generation, and especially of those most intellectually influential, were profoundly moved by Darwinism and felt more or less its haunting gloom of destruction and its far-reaching effect. In Ibsen the struggle for existence shows itself in the intense assertion of the individual and his passionate emphasis of the right to live and develop himself, and the same tendency in Nietzsche grew into the cloudy and colossal phantom of the Superman. With Tolstoi the obsession of Darwinistic conflict and survival appears in the earlier novels, ‘Anna’ and ‘War and Peace,’ but in the end, like Zola or John Fiske, he found the pressure too great and too horrible, and endeavored to establish an antidote for human misery in human love. In Renan the subtle, delicate, enchanting irony serves only to make the fundamental, dissolving nihilism more deep and ruinous. As he expressed it, through the dramatic characters who are merely his mouthpiece: ‘Uncertain as we are about human destiny, the wisest course is to see to it that in making all sorts of hypotheses, one at least avoids being too absurd’;[192] again: ‘Though the universe should prove not serious, science might be serious still. Vast sums of virtue have been expended on chimæras. It is better to take the more virtuous course, even though one may not be sure that virtue is more than a word.’[193] Or our own American Henry Adams asks evolution to educate him, and asks in vain. All it can teach him is that terebratula can remain unchanged in its insignificance for centuries, while man evolves, yet in the end proves to be no whit more significant than terebratula. And Adams goes out, like a spent torch, uneducated, in the huge, unmeaning, whirling acceleration of theories and discoveries and plain sufferings and questions that must remain forever unanswered. Yet perhaps Adams was quite as adequate to the universe as Dr. Cadman.
There are, especially, two figures, not so important for the quality of their thought, but immensely important for the influence of it, who stand out as being overweighted and overcome by the evolutionary blight. Anatole France, following Renan, filled his books and his life with gentle, indulgent, kindly tolerance, with rare human insight and sympathy. Yet beneath it all, beneath the lenient tenderness of Sylvestre Bonnard, and the kindly curiosity of Jérôme Coignard, and the patient comprehension of Monsieur Bergeret, always there was the sense of the nullity of human effort and the futility of human fate. All the motives and interests of men and women are reduced to the Darwinian residuum of self-preservation and propagation, or as France repeatedly puts it, more boldly and baldly, love and hunger are the two poles of our being. And when he makes intimate confession of the workings of the theory in his own person and life, this is the result: ‘It is said, “Man is the lord of creation.” Man is the lord of suffering, my friend. There is no clearer proof of the non-existence of God than life.... If you could read in my soul, you would be terrified.... There is not in all the universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me happy. I have never been happy for one day, not for a single hour.’[104]
Or take the case of Mark Twain, far more important for Americans than Anatole France, because it may safely be said that few if any authors more influenced and to-day influence the youth of America than the creator of Huckleberry Finn. Mark, like France, was the kindest, the gentlest, the most humane of men and writers. His energetic sympathy and support were given to relieve suffering and oppression everywhere. But although he was not particularly expert in science or philosophy, the plague of utter nihilistic disbelief had infected his soul as completely as that of France, and far more militantly. The destructive effect of the evolutionary teaching cannot be more fully displayed than in the arguments which Mark, to save his own credit, puts into the mouth of Satan in ‘The Mysterious Stranger’: ‘A God ... who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!’[105]
In conclusion, perhaps one may introduce oneself, not in the least as connected with all these distinguished persons, but simply as a type of a great number of average human beings, who live and suffer and have to fight their way somehow through the blinding mist of years and tears. When I was sixteen, I read the ‘Origin,’ and I think the impression it produced has never been obliterated. It is not, it has never been, the maintenance of any deliberate philosophical theory. I am too utterly without intellectual training or equipment even to form such a thing. It is not any aggressive or militant agnosticism. It is simply a feeling of utter insignificance in face of the unapprehended processes of nature, such as Leopardi expresses with bare intensity: ‘Nature in all her workings has other things to think of than our good or ill.’[106] It is a sense of being aimlessly adrift in the vast universe of consciousness, among an infinity of other atoms, all struggling desperately to assert their own existence at the expense of all the others.
Apparently this sense of struggle among individuals, struggle everywhere, among theories and beliefs, as well as living creatures, does not affect every one with the same oppression of distress. There are natures so healthily constituted that they have the mere joy of adventure in it, and can go on forever elbowing their way through the crowd of other nothings with the splendid affirmation of their individuality in the conflict. If it is a question of theories, they can say with Professor Whitehead: ‘A clash of doctrines is not a disaster; it is an opportunity.’ If it is a case of more material strife, they can disguise it with the ameliorations of the social instinct, or such substantial optimism as sustained President Eliot through his ninety years in the view that the joy of life is in ‘contest without conflict.’
More infirm, more frail, more doubting tempers may not take it so. There is the weary horror of endless multiplicity, sweeping from eternity to eternity. There is the embodiment of the universe in one individual, and yet the sense that that individual is more fragile than the universe itself, the sense that reduces all life and all one is to a mere shifting maze and complication of fleeting sensations, held together by the vaguest gauze of memory, and liable to be scattered and disseminated at any moment by the slightest shock. No doubt the corrective for such a dissolving terror is to live intensely in one’s own personality, without thinking of it, to emphasize every moment instinctively the huge importance of one’s ego, which if it has its way is at all times adequate to fill the endless spaces of the universe and crowd out the major stars. But for some of us such emphasis is difficult to accomplish, and instead, when one is thoroughly penetrated by the evolutionary attitude, one is too apt to find oneself more insignificant than terebratula, because one is conscious of one’s own insignificance and terebratula is not.
And it was Darwin, the gentle, the kindly, the human, who could not bear the sight of blood, who raged against the cruelty of vivisection and slavery, who detested suffering in men or animals, it was Darwin who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked the universe for me and for millions of others.