At the outset, as we have already intimated, Lyell and Darwin were equally fortunate, in that each found a critic, in one of the chief organs of public opinion, who was at the same time both competent and sympathetic. The story of the lucky accident by which this came about in Darwin's case has been told by Huxley himself[136].
'The Origin was sent to Mr Lucas, one of the staff of the Times writers at that time, in what was I suppose the ordinary course of business. Mr Lucas, though an excellent journalist, ... was as innocent of any knowledge of science as a babe, and bewailed himself to an acquaintance on having to deal with such a book. Whereupon, he was recommended to ask me to get him out of the difficulty, and he applied to me accordingly, explaining, however, that it would be necessary for him formally to adopt anything I might be disposed to write, by prefacing it with two or three paragraphs of his own.'
'I was too anxious to seize upon the opportunity thus offered of giving the book a fair chance with the multitudinous readers of the Times, to make any difficulty about conditions; and being then very full of the subject, I wrote the article faster, I think, than I ever wrote anything in my life, and sent it to Mr Lucas who duly prefixed his opening sentences[137].'
Many journalists, however, were less conscientious than Mr Lucas, and most of the other early notices of the book were pretty equally divided between undiscriminating praise of it as a novelty and foolish reprobations of its 'wickedness.'
It was fortunate that Darwin followed the strong advice given to him by Lyell, and did not attempt to reply to the adverse criticisms; for the only effect of these was to arouse curiosity and thus to increase the circulation of the book.
Although Darwin had wisely avoided the danger of exciting prejudice against his work by definitely applying the theory of Natural Selection to the case of man—simply remarking, in order to avoid the charge of concealing his views, that 'light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history'—yet friends and foes alike at once drew what was the necessary corollary from the theory. It is as amusing, as it is surprising at the present day, to recall the storm of prejudice which was excited. At the British Association Meeting at Oxford in 1860, after an American professor had indignantly asked the question, 'Are we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?' as a comment on Darwin's views, Dr Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but flippant attack on the Origin by enquiring of Huxley, who was present as Darwin's champion, if it 'was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?'
Huxley made the famous and well-deserved retort:—
'I asserted—and I repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel ashamed in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice[138].'
The violent attack on Darwin's views by the once-famous Bishop of Oxford was outdone, a few years later, by an even more absurd outburst on the part of Benjamin Disraeli, who—after stigmatising Darwinism as the question 'Is man an ape or an angel?'—declared magniloquently to the episcopal chairman, 'My Lord, I am on the side of the angels!'
But in spite of attacks like these and numerous bitter pasquinades and comic cartoons—perhaps to some extent in consequence of them—Darwin's views became widely known and eagerly discussed, so that the circulation of the Origin of Species went up by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, as Huxley said, 'years had to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule and denunciation, ceased to be the most notable constituents of the multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press.'