The fire for which all thirst.’
There is Byron’s cry:
‘I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that about me, and to me
High mountains are a feeling.’[204]
And with the realization that the longing cannot be satisfied, that we are forever imprisoned within the insuperable barriers of this petty I, from which there is no escape, comes a bitter revolt of despair, or a profound melancholy of questioning. It is Obermann, with his, ‘There, in the peace of night, I questioned my uncertain destiny, and this inconceivable universe, which, containing everything yet does not contain my desires.’[205] Or, as an American contemporary has expressed the deep suggestion of the earnest stars: ‘O Lyra, I have gazed at you, until I could not tell your brightness from my own eyes. I have gazed at you till my soul left my body, and circled with you through the stars; but there is something which I am and you are not, something which will not let me rest....
‘Infinite Intelligence! Infinite Beauty! Either make me what thou art, take me to thyself, or free me from this passion which I cannot gratify and cannot destroy. Make me as other men are, toilers and forgetters, seeking yesterday in to-day, and to-day in to-morrow, and illusion always; or fulfill for me the hope which the waters whisper, which I can feel throbbing forever in the heart of thy world.’
Of all this in Darwin nothing whatever, nothing, nothing. It may indeed be said that with nature, as with other things, many people have feelings and experiences that they do not express or try to express. But persons who cherish such experiences with the natural world usually have a more constant regard and interest for the expression of them in others than Darwin had. Any such melancholy or passionate longing as is suggested above one would of course not expect in him. There was no natural melancholy in his temperament. He was depressed and discouraged when things went badly, yet in the main his disposition was even and serene. But his enjoyment of natural scenes and objects, which is indisputable and proved by his own testimony and that of others, would seem to have been generally of a rather superficial character, and certainly not to have partaken of the nature of passion. How far, far different is his touch from that of Lucretius, for example.
Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally, also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth. There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable, and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in the Forest of Fontainebleau.
But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not emotional.