As to his own personal enjoyment of literature, one form of it at least continued to attract him to the very last, and that was fiction. Relief from the strain of his scientific labors was best found in stories which distracted and absorbed: ‘He was extremely fond of novels,’ says his son, ‘and I remember well the way in which he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice.’[276] Darwin himself confirms this statement: ‘Novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.’[277] He enjoyed Miss Austen, he adored Scott, and cites the Laird of Redgauntlet’s facial peculiarity in the book on Expression. He did not like realism, even in the mild form practiced by George Eliot, and he wished things and people to be agreeable: ‘A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all the better.’[197]
But for the higher orders of literature, the loss was indubitable, and Darwin himself makes it very emphatic. He tells us that in his youth he enjoyed poetry. Shakespeare was his favorite reading. He read Thomson and Byron, and he got much pleasure from ‘Paradise Lost’: ‘Formerly Milton’s “Paradise Lost” had been my chief favorite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single volume, I always chose Milton.’[198] The solid evidence of this enjoyment is the frequent reference to poetical reading in Darwin’s books. Even in connection with strictly scientific topics he is apt to introduce some citation from the poets which not only proves his point, but shows his familiarity.
Yet in later years all this poetical interest disappeared, and Darwin bewails the disappearance deeply. Shakespeare, who had touched and stirred him, ceases to awaken any emotion, rings merely hollow and empty: ‘Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’[199]
A clever writer in the Popular Science Monthly some years ago endeavored to prove that here, as in other things, Darwin’s humility much exaggerated his defects, and that his natural poetical sympathy was greater than he recognized. This writer urges Darwin’s early enjoyment and his constant, apt, and accurate quotation to establish the thesis: ‘By his unconscious confession and the evidence of his written works, his mind was leavened with poetic feeling; all through his mature life he is ready with quotation when the occasion calls; and the very poignancy of his regret for the loss of poetry witnesses to his poetic endowment.’[200] But the contention though ingenious, is exaggerated. Darwin’s quick intelligence was interested in the substance of Shakespeare and Milton and other poets and prose writers. But it seems to me impossible that any one who had really felt the high stimulus of the splendor of Shakespeare’s imagination could ever have lost it to any such extent as Darwin deplores with obvious sincerity. Sainte-Beuve had as wide and varied a scientific curiosity as Darwin’s. But he said when he was well over fifty, ‘I rarely write about poetry, precisely because I have loved it so much and because I still love it more than anything else.’[201] Goethe’s old age was filled with scientific preoccupations, yet the glory of poetry was more to him than any possible science.
III
The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world.
To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a butterfly, the
‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate, too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase: ‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]
The secret of the enjoyment must lie mainly in obscure processes of association, hints and suggestions of buried joy and sorrow, which go down deep into the roots of subconscious memory. But at any rate it is true that such enjoyment is bound up far more with simple scenes and home surroundings than with the remote or the picturesque or what Darwin so often refers to as the sublime. The hurrying tourist, who rushes about the world in search of some higher mountain or rougher glacier or wilder valley is not the one who feels the secret charm of nature, but rather he who strolls in lonely, quiet fields or woods that he has always known and loved. The return of violets in early spring, the song of thrushes in summer twilights, these are the things that bring tears, that come full charged with the weight of all that Cowper means when he writes of