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.

II

With artistic and general æsthetic matters, Darwin, at any rate in later years, was even more indifferent than with political. It is true that his scientific investigations sometimes involved the abstract analysis of æsthetics: ‘I agree with what you say about beauty. I formerly thought a good deal on the subject, and was led quite to repudiate the doctrine of beauty being created for beauty’s sake.’[330] The theory of sexual selection, as presented in ‘The Descent of Man,’ necessitated a good deal of discussion of the susceptibility to color and form and to music. But such æsthetic discussion has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic enjoyment.

One thing may be said in regard to Darwin; with art as with everything else, he was absolutely free from pretense. He says of one writer, ‘The pretentiousness of her style is extremely disagreeable, not to say nauseous to many persons.’[331] Anything artificial, anything affected, was peculiarly repugnant to him, and never under any circumstances would he have pretended to admire or to appreciate a work of art that really left him cold. Indeed it was partly his intense wish not to appear to feel what he did not feel that made him inclined to underestimate his artistic pleasure as compared with the raptures of those who exclaimed conventionally over what they neither understood nor enjoyed.

Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that art in its varied forms hardly afforded Darwin the delight and solace that it brings to many persons. The theater he cared little for at any period of his life. The effort, fatigue, and constraint outweighed the charm. Mrs. Darwin, who was a lover of average plays, though she found Shakespeare tedious and said so with something of her husband’s candor, is quite anxious on the subject: ‘The real crook in my lot I have withheld from you, but I must own it to you sooner or later. It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head.’[332] Later she takes him to see Macready in ‘Richelieu’ and hopes that he is getting converted, but there are no signs that the hopes were finally realized.

With the plastic arts the case is somewhat better. There is little reference to architecture. One passage in a letter seems to suggest the feeling of cathedral grandeur, but the æsthetic quickly turns into the scientific bearing: ‘Possibly the sense of sublimity excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the vague feelings of terror and superstition in our savage ancestors, when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest.’[333] As regards pictures, his son thinks that he did keep up his love of them to a certain extent.[334] His biographer remarks: ‘His love of pictures as a young man is almost a proof that he must have had an appreciation of a portrait as a work of art, not as a likeness.’[335] And the biographer adds, with entire justice: ‘This way of looking at himself as an ignoramus in all matters of art, was strengthened by the absence of pretence, which was part of his character.’[336] The immediate recognition of a Salvator Rosa scene in one of the Beagle experiences shows an acquaintance with painting in its different forms and periods.[337] Yet pictures make a different showing in Darwin’s letters from what they have in Edward FitzGerald’s, for instance.