by A. N. Wilson
Those, chiefly but not entirely from Cambridge, who first convened the British Society for Psychical Research in February 1882 included Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Lord Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Mark Twain and Alfred Russel Wallace.13 Their aim was to collect evidence, to investigate the plausibility or otherwise of the phenomena of spiritualism – seances, spirit-writing and so forth. Wallace had been converted to a belief in spiritualism by Mrs Marshall, who had tapped out a message to him from his dead brother Herbert, which he considered incontrovertibly authentic. The Society still exists today, and has accumulated an enormous archive of ‘evidence’, but nothing which would be considered a proof to the unconverted.
Poor Mrs Marshall, incidentally, unhappily married to Frederick Myers’s cousin Walter, tried to cut her throat and then, when she botched the task, walked bleeding into the shallows of a Swiss lake, and then out, further and further.14
Myers, a sceptical would-be believer – it was he who had that famous conversation with George Eliot in the gardens of Trinity Cambridge about God, immortality, duty – was a friend of Darwin’s brother-in-law Hensleigh Wedgwood. In the decade before the SPR was actually established, there were many attempts either to debunk or to investigate the spiritualist fad.
Ras Darwin, Charles’s brother, arranged for a seance in his house in 1874 conducted by a paid spirit medium. Present were Darwin and Emma, Etty and Richard Litchfield, George Lewes and George Eliot, Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, Frederic Myers, Francis Galton and Ras’s friend Mrs Bowen. Lewes and Ras spent a couple of hours beforehand checking under tables and chairs for the apparatus which might be used to move the furniture or create the effect of a psychic phenomenon. When Charles Williams began, however, he insisted upon the room being completely dark, upon which the Leweses and the Charles Darwins left. Darwin’s son George, however, remained, as did the others. ‘We had grand fun one afternoon,’ Darwin wrote,
for George hired a medium, who made the chairs, a flute, a bell, a candlestick, and fiery points jump about in my brother’s dining room, in a manner that astounded every one, and took away all their breaths. It was in the dark, but George and Hensleigh Wedgwood held the medium’s hands and feet on both sides all the time. I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place. How the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding. I came downstairs and saw all the chairs, etc. on the table, which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting around it. The Lord have mercy on us all if we have to believe in such rubbish.15
Ras – whimsical, more charming than Charles, and far more social – became no less social with the years. He liked to carry a small kitten in his waistcoat in case he met a child who enjoyed playing with it – presumably, only on occasions when kittens could easily be found. His nephew Frank Darwin was another cat lover, and would send up kittens in a basket by train to Uncle Ras. Frank married, in 1874, Amy Ruck, and they set up house in a village cottage at Downe, so that the young man could act as his father’s secretary. Ras, with his round-rimmed black hat and black cloak, could have been a mad clergyman, even down to the detail of his entirely sharing his brother Charles’s lack of belief. Emma’s life of prayer and Bible study had small effect upon her offspring. Gwen Raverat, daughter of George Darwin, recalled how her sister Frances – in Cambridge, where else? – ‘took me to a very private place under the wooden bridge on the Little Island and told me there, in confidence, that it was not at all the thing to believe in Christianity any more. It simply wasn’t done.’16 She went on to assert, of her Darwin father and his brothers: ‘They were quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked, or the religious.’17
Frank, as the secretary at Down House, had a heavy workload. The fact that The Origin of Species, by the time it reached its sixth edition, had been emended so many times as almost to have contradicted its original sunny confidence, in no way diminished the enthusiasm with which, all over the world, those whose imaginations had been opened to the fact of evolution attributed their enlightenment to Darwin. In the year after The Descent of Man had been published, Darwin wrote over 1,500 letters, and, although the numbers diminished somewhat, much of his time, for the rest of his life, would be devoted to the fan club. At 9.30 each morning he would come into the drawing-room at Down for the letters, rejoicing if there was only a small postbag. If there were family letters, he would lie on the sofa and hear them read aloud. Then, at half past ten, he would return to the study, with its makeshift privy behind a curtain, and work on his public correspondence until midday.
The retchings, flatulence and bowel disorders were worse on some days than on others. In the lavatorial fug of the study, the patient Frank would sit and help his father cope with the admiring correspondents, from Europe and from America. What the younger German evolutionists had in common was a sense that evolution had finally got rid of religion, disproved it once and for all. Darwin in turn so much admired Haeckel that he said, if he had read the German’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte – published in German in 1868, but only translated into English two years later – he would not have bothered to write The Descent of Man.18 The title of Haeckel’s work is self-explanatory: the story of creation is to be explained naturally. Man evolved. There is no need for a Creator to have started the impersonal process of evolution.
Karl Marx sent Darwin a copy of the second German edition of Das Kapital in 1873. Darwin thanked him politely for it: ‘Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind.’19 Janet Browne pointed out that Marx’s book was still on the shelf at Down House, but that the pages had not been cut.20
There are certain paradoxes about the relations between Marx and Darwin. Darwin’s moment of enlightenment about the struggle for survival came to him while reading Malthus, an economist Marx especially deplored. Ideology, however, is seldom logical, and though Darwin’s social and political thought was an extension of Malthus, and though the struggle for survival could plausibly be seen as a pseudo-scientific justification of the exploitation of the working classes by the idle bourgeoisie, Marx evidently felt he should admire Darwin. When Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery on 17 March 1883, with the faithful gaggle of a dozen mourners, they heard Friedrich Engels declare, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in human nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’21 Edward Aveling, the spurious English doctor who helped Sam Moore translate Das Kapital into English, had been drawn to Darwin before he became a Marxist.22 In the early 1880s, he would address working-class evening classes on Darwinian ‘philosophy’, and published such penny tracts as The Student’s Darwin and Darwin Made Easy. Aveling – the model for Shaw’s Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma, who in effect murdered Marx’s daughter by persuading her to enter a suicide pact and then failing to keep his side of the bargain – was probably influential in persuading Engels that Darwinism could be fed into the Communist world-view. Darwin and Marx, according to Aveling, looked alike. (Yes, they both were tall and had white beards, but here the resemblance rather fades.) ‘That which Darwin did for Biology, Marx has done for Economics,’ Aveling told Engels. ‘Each of them by long and patient observation, experiment, recordal, reflection, arrived at an immense generalisation – a generalisation the likes of which their particular branch of science had never seen.’23
Probably there has never been a phase in the intellectual history of the West to compare with our own times, in the early decades of the twenty-first century; when ‘immense generalisations’ have lost their appeal. It is easy to see why, given the vacuum left by the apparent collapse of Christianity among intellectuals, the ‘theories’ or ‘generalisations’ of Marx and Darwin made their metaphysical appeal. The decade in which Marx and Darwin died was, by contrast, hungry for a new faith. John Ruskin, writing Praeterita – his formidably impressiv
e autobiography – during the same decade, looked back to his young manhood and his agonized agnosticism. In the mid-1840s, he had visited Pisa and had what amounted to an epiphany in the Campo Santo: ‘The total meaning [of Christianity] was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures, took at a certain time upon the earth, the flesh and form of man’.24 Ruskin rather fudges whether he actually believed this doctrine, after his Pisa moment of enlightenment, or whether he believed it at the time of writing in the 1880s. He was right, however, to see it as central to the way that Western humanity had viewed the world until the Enlightenment. Marx and Darwin between them constructed alternative Grand Narratives. After such mainstream figures as Lyell had come round to the belief in evolution – in some shape or form – it is impossible to doubt that evolution would have become a scientific given even if Charles Darwin had never been born. Once the connection in respectable English minds had been dissolved between Lamarck and the tumbrils and guillotines of revolution, evolution would have been absorbed. It is not necessary for scientific truth, once apprehended, to be completely understood. Niels Bohr said that anyone who says they have understood quantum mechanics has demonstrated that they do not understand quantum mechanics. But we know it is true because it works, within the fraction of a millimetre. Einstein likewise said he did not understand the nature of a photon. There is no need in science, and perhaps no need in religion, for a ‘theory of everything’.
Darwin himself vacillated between a deep modesty about his central theories and a Faustian pride. On the one hand, John Stuart Mill was right:
Mr Darwin’s remarkable speculation on the origin of species is another unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis . . . It is unreasonable to accuse Mr Darwin (as has been done) of violating the rules of induction. The rules of induction are concerned with the condition of proof. Mr Darwin has never pretended that his doctrine was proved. He was not bound by the rules of induction but by those of hypothesis.25
Equally, however, there can be no doubt that Darwin set out to destroy ‘the old argument from design in Nature’.26 He had thereby abandoned science tout court and set up his stall beside those of Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and others – Dr Freud would not be slow to join the bazaar – of ersatz religions, theories of everything.
We began this chapter with Lord Salisbury offering to award Charles Darwin an honorary degree at the University of Oxford. I will conclude it with some words with which Salisbury addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1894. They are words which the childish pursuers of a theory to explain everything will never understand. They think, because they believe that the gradualist evolutionary theories explain all that there is to be known, that those who disbelieve this are obliged to come up with a rival theory. This, however, is not the case. In Salisbury’s words, ‘We live in a small bright oasis of knowledge surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery.’27
16
Evolution Old and New
THE DARWIN–WEDGWOOD–ALLEN HABIT of marrying cousins, and of thereby keeping the money safely in the family, was not always a recipe for personal happiness. The twentieth-century Hensleigh Wedgwood, joint author of The Wedgwood Circle (1980) was of the view that ‘apart from that of Emma and Charles, there were no completely happy marriages among the third generation, though they all maintained the pretence of happiness’.1 Josiah III, known as Joe, was Emma’s brother. He married Darwin’s sister Caroline. They lived at a beautiful house called Leith Hill Place in Surrey, later the residence of their kinsman Ralph Vaughan Williams. Caroline had a nervous breakdown, and became an agoraphobic recluse, seldom leaving Leith Hill Place. Joe was a domestic tyrant, who made his three daughters, Margaret (Ralph Vaughan Williams’s mother), Lucy and Sophy, line up each afternoon for a ‘treat’ – a spoonful of cream – but only if they had been ‘good’ in the morning.2
It was while staying at Leith Hill Place in June 1877 that Darwin was ‘made very happy by finding two very old stones at the bottom of the field’. They were ancient slabs from a lime kiln. Caroline’s gardeners were enlisted to lift them – they were five feet long and of considerable weight – to reveal the fine black mould of worms.3 Darwin had had a passion for earthworms as a very young man, but his many other interests had forced him to place it to one side. Every now and again, the interest flickered into life. One of the things which endeared Frank’s wife Amy Ruck (who died, as did the baby, giving birth to their first-born) to Darwin was her willingness to measure Welsh worm-holes.4
The strains of controversy, and in particular his inability to meet the objections of Mivart to his theory, had taken their toll on Darwin. As so often in life when confronted with a challenge, he was rescued by a physical collapse. Back in August 1873, when he was only sixty-four, he had what Emma called a ‘fit’. He suffered twelve hours of memory loss. When a doctor who specialized in nervous disorders came down from London, however, he pronounced that there were no obvious causes for the ‘fit’, opining that ‘there was a great deal of work’ in Darwin yet.5
This was not really true. Between answering his correspondence and meeting the many fans who had the temerity to go down to Down House unannounced to see the great man, he had no energy for further controversy – even though it would be forced upon him at the last. Being a naturalist was, first and foremost, what Darwin was. He was one of the greatest naturalists who has ever lived, with the most acute eye and an encyclopaedic knowledge of species. The worms were perfect objects of study in these twilight years. For although, when he was peering excitedly under Caroline and Joe’s lime-kiln slabs, he was only sixty-eight, he appeared like the Ancient of Days in William Blake’s drawings, with his thin stooping figure and his flowing beard.
It had been back in July 1874 that Darwin had begun the last truly fructiferous intellectual friendship of his life. By now he was used to receiving sacks full of sycophancy with his morning mail, as well as having to brace himself for the strains of controversy. In George John Romanes, however, he found a friendship during his last eight years on earth which was not only emotionally supportive but of intense intellectual interest.
When he first wrote to Darwin, Romanes was twenty-six, the child of a wealthy, landed Scottish family whose clergyman father was Professor of Greek at Kingston, Ontario. Romanes himself had prepared to take orders, but, entering Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he had been drawn first to mathematics, then to physiology. Frail health intervened, and ultimately prevented Romanes from following a medical career, and he began research on the nervous systems of invertebrates – chiefly jellyfish (medusae) and echinoderms (sea urchins). He set up a laboratory in his summer home in Dunskaith, at the entrance of the Cromarty Firth in Ross-shire, as well as in his London house near Regent’s Park, 18 Cornwall Terrace.6 He did not live long. He outlived Darwin by only twelve years, dying soon after his forty-sixth birthday.
There were three factors of fundamental importance about Romanes’s approach to science which were helpful to Darwin, and, as Joel Schwartz has said, this was a time when Darwin most needed support.7 One was his scientific research, particularly into the jellyfish and the sea urchins, specifically conducted with the hope of proving a Darwinian account of evolution. Darwin at this stage no longer had the energy to spend hours each day conducting experiments. He was trying to prove his theory of heredity, pangenesis; and Romanes conducted repeated experiments, grafting plant hybrids. He also helped Darwin with his continued work on animal intelligence, demonstrating a Darwinian breadth. He bought a pet monkey which was kept under constant observation; while also taking a keen interest in earthworms, suggesting to Darwin that worms could be called intelligent if they were ‘taught by experience how best to manipulate some unknown exotic leaf’.8
These were the kind of inquiries which Darwin himself found most satisfying, and this is the tenor of nearly all their correspondence.
Dear Mr Romanes. I hear from Mr Farrar tha
t his gardener has raised some young plants of the cut-leaved vines & that they will be hardened off enough to travel in 3 weeks time – Unless I give further instructions, they will be dispatched by Railroad to your Scotch address, in (now) rather under 3 weeks . . . [7 April 1875]
My dear Romanes [as intimacy grew, he dropped the ‘Mr’, though Romanes always called him ‘Mr Darwin’] I am terribly sorry about the onions, as I expected great things from them . . . As tubers of potatoes graft so well, wd. it not be good to try other tubers as of dahlias & other plants? [24 September 1875]
Dear Mr Darwin . . . you are afraid I am neglecting Pangenesis for Medusae . . . I should like to assure you that such is not the case. [18 December 1875]9
The year 1877 found Romanes experimenting with rabbits and guinea pigs and telling Darwin that ‘tame’ rabbits, even if very hungry, will not eat nettles.10
This, the day-to-day pleasure of observing and discussing the results of experiments, was what Darwin liked best. Romanes, who left money for the foundation of the annual lectures at Oxford which bear his name, was always concerned with the bigger picture, and his friendship furnished Darwin with two other areas of support which even Huxley could not quite provide.
One was an out-and-out rejection of Christianity. Romanes, having abandoned his intention of following his father into a clergyman’s career, had agonized about the relationship between faith and science. He had won the Burney Prize at Cambridge with his essay On Christian Prayer and General Laws. Like so many Victorian intellectuals, Romanes was a divided soul, who asked his Cambridge friend Francis Paget (later Dean of Christ Church) how he could help his children to be Christians while himself nursing doubts. To Darwin he presented a much more materialist face, and he looked to Darwin to bolster his own unbelief in religion. ‘The entire structure of Pauline theology’, Romanes was to write to his friend the Revd J. T. Gulick in 1891, ‘has had its foundation undermined by Darwinian science: the “first man” having been politely removed, there is no longer any logical justification (according to this theology) for the “second man”.’ He went on, rather loftily, to ask, ‘If the saviour of the world had so little knowledge of its reputed destroyer, as to believe that evil spirits were the cause of epilepsy, madness, deaf-mutism, etc., what is the value of his teaching on other matters?’
