The accounts of Darwin’s conversation are as attractive as of his appearance and manner. That he entered into it usually with intense eagerness appears from his own account of his fatigue from it: ‘I find that on my good days, when I can write for a couple of hours, that anything which stirs me up like talking for half or even a quarter of an hour, generally quite prostrates me, sometimes even for a long time afterwards.’[240] But it is very evident that he did not engross the talk and even after his high position was established had not the slightest tendency to hold forth or deliver orations, as is the habit of some distinguished men. Norton even declares that ‘His talk is not often memorable on account of brilliancy or impressive sayings—but it is always the expression of the qualities of mind and heart which combine in such rare excellence in his genius.’[241]
Instead of himself talking to excess, he liked to draw his visitors out, to get at their interests and their point of view, not in any intrusive fashion, but with instinctive sympathy, and with his natural modest sense that their affairs were more important than his own. He clearly had in a high degree the exquisite art of listening intelligently, and of asking questions which would bring out all that was best and most profitable in the person with whom he happened to be talking. This well appears in Charles Kingsley’s account of his first interview with him: ‘I was deeply moved at meeting for the first time Darwin. I trembled before him like a boy, and longed to tell him all I felt for him, but dare not, lest he should think me a flatterer extravagant. But the modesty and simplicity of his genius was charming. Instead of teaching, he only wanted to learn, instead of talking, to listen, till I found him asking me to write papers which he could as yet hardly write himself—ignorant in his grand simplicity of my ignorance and of his own wisdom.’[242]
The conversation was not by any means always serious. It does not appear that Darwin had any great enjoyment of humorous literature. Nor was he inclined to witty flings or brilliant repartee. His mind worked too slowly for a rapid-fire exchange of this sort. It was only occasionally that he hit out at a promising interlocutor, as when he remarked to Lady Derby, who had been describing her remarkable peculiarities of vision, ‘Ah, Lady Derby, how I should like to dissect you.’[243] Above all, he had no taste for the satirical or bitter, and it was only under extreme provocation that he could write to Huxley: ‘God bless you!—get well, be idle, and always reverence a bishop.’[244]
But he was full of genial, kindly fun, and was ready to see the laughable side of little incidents and even great. He laughed heartily and frequently and with an infectious gayety and buoyancy. He liked merry and humorous talk, with plenty of anecdote and sparkle, and he was ready to chaff and joke his friends and to take the same sort of thing himself. He was even willing to find a comic side in the sacred subject of natural selection and to turn his own deepest interests into matter for smiles when the occasion was suitable. Thus he writes to Lubbock, of his son: ‘See what it is to be well trained. Horace said to me yesterday, “If every one would kill adders they would come to sting less.” I answered, “Of course they would, for there would be fewer.” He replied indignantly: “I did not mean that; but the timid adders which run away would be saved, and in time they would never sting at all.” Natural selection of cowards!’[245]
In Darwin’s later years he might of course have been crowded with social engagements all the time. Everybody wanted to see him, to know him, to talk with him, to entertain him. The preoccupation of his work and the limitations of his health made any such social activity impossible, and it is not likely that he greatly missed it. Yet, wherever he went, he was welcome, his society was appreciated, not only for his reputation, but for itself, and when he could get about, it evidently gave him pleasure: ‘I dined with Bell at the Linnean Club, and liked my dinner ... dining out is such a novelty to me that I enjoyed it.’[246] At an earlier period, when there was more strength to spare for such diversions, he entered into them with hearty enthusiasm, and even, it appears, with a thorough rollicking zest. When he settled himself in Cambridge, after his return from the Beagle voyage, he complained that the only trouble was that life was too pleasant and some agreeable party every evening made morning labor rather difficult.[247] And of the miscellaneous social gatherings of still earlier days he writes: ‘We used often to dine together in the evening, though these dinners often included men of a higher stamp, and we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards. I know that I ought to feel ashamed of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very pleasant, and we were all in the highest spirits, I cannot help looking back to these times with much pleasure.’[248]
In the matter of sports and diversions Darwin’s tastes seem to have run rather to those which are not in their nature social, though what attracted him was the character of the sports themselves, and not the element of solitude. In his youth he was passionately fond of outdoor sport, of fishing and hunting. He had a keen love for angling, he says, and would sit for hours watching his float in some solitary pool or stream, though when some one told him that he could kill the angle worms with salt and water instead of spitting them on the hook, it was a great relief to his feelings.[249] He was especially eager with a gun, and long before he took the slightest interest in the scientific study of birds, he liked to kill them. He tells us that the killing of his first snipe excited him so much that he trembled till it was difficult to reload his gun. Even after his scientific interest had begun to develop, he dropped every vestige of it in the shooting season: ‘at that time I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science.’[250]
He became an excellent shot and, as his son says, had all his life a remarkable power of coördinating his movements, so that he was not only accurate with a gun, but in throwing, and after he was a grown man, simply to test his skill, he threw a marble at a cross-beak and killed it: ‘He was so unhappy at having uselessly killed the cross-beak that he did not mention it for years, and then explained that he should never have thrown at it if he had not felt sure that his old skill had gone from him.’[251] Perhaps the most striking witness to the depth of Darwin’s passion for these field sports is the unusually harsh remark of his father who loved his son and was deeply beloved by him: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’[252] Which is not the first case of imperfect prevision on the part of a father, nor the last.
Of games that are more essentially social, there is no indication that Darwin was an ardent practitioner. When he was at school he played ‘batfives,’[253] but there is no mention of football or cricket. In describing his personal tastes in later years, he speaks of cards with something of contempt: ‘Have not played for many years, but I am sure I should not remember.’[254] His tone about them in 1842, however, is quite different: ‘This walk was rather too much for me, and I was dull till whist, which I enjoyed beyond measure.’[255] In 1859, the year of the ‘Origin,’ he set up a billiard-table, ‘and I find it does me a deal of good, and drives the horrid species out of my head.’[256] But his special pleasure in the game line was backgammon, which he played with Mrs. Darwin, year after year, keeping a score of victories and defeats, getting or pretending to be, greatly excited over his failures and even indignant at his antagonist’s good-fortune. In 1875 he wrote to Asa Gray: ‘Pray give our very kind remembrances to Mrs. Gray. I know that she likes to hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah, 2795 games.’[257]
But through it all Darwin’s humanity is evident everywhere. He loved his fellow-creatures, loved to mix with them, and to have them care for him, and his interest went far deeper than a mere, though absorbing, curiosity as to their animal origin.