Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  The rosy darling crows with glee;

  Tomorrow in a darkened room

  A pallid, wailing infant see,

  Whose every vein from head to heel

  Ferments with poison from my steel.

  Wallace championed ‘Leonainie’, a long poem attributed to Edgar Allan Poe – supposedly Poe’s ‘Farewell to Earth’, transmitted through the trance speaker Lizzie Doten – which Wallace introduced in the Fortnightly; he had used it as his own peroration in his San Francisco lecture, ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ He also returned to one of his favourite motifs, in a delightful article on ‘The Birds of Paradise in the Arabian Nights’, a rich blending of ideas about geography and trade, literature and myth. His own reading continued to expand in range, in spite of trouble with his eyes: astronomy, psychology, spiritualism, psychic research, religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, education, capitalism, poverty, socialism. He bought pamphlet after pamphlet by Tolstoy: ‘How much land does a man need?’, ‘How I came to believe’, ‘The meaning of life’. He acquired William Morris’s Songbook for Socialists, Bernard Shaw’s Fabian essays, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.8

  His most serious occupation, though, was his autobiography, which he began in 1904. He already had quite extensive materials to hand: he hoarded letters, notebooks, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings, copies of articles, page proofs, house plans, lists of plants, though not in a particularly systematic way. He did not possess a very accurate memory for dates, but he had clear recollections of events, and especially of feelings. He wrote off to various friends and families, asking for the temporary loan of his own letters in many cases. He enjoyed the process, and the renewed contacts. He even had a wonderful free holiday in Wales as a result, when a friend of a friend lent him a cottage – and a motor car – in the wild mountains of the Vale of Neath, one of his ‘most favourite early hunting grounds’.9 He had, of course, his own travel books as sources for his journeys in the Amazon and the Archipelago; and several of his other books recorded his personal experiences, for example On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. The full title – My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions – signals a certain reticence. There is a great deal about his intellectual development, and his temperament; comparatively little about his personal relationships, and almost nothing about his family. It is not an evasive book, so much as a reticent and modest one, though he does not spare himself, nor seek in any way to gloss over disappointments and setbacks, and he is frank about his shyness and his initial awkwardness in company. He seems amazingly free from resentment, and radiates the calm certainties and positiveness that stemmed from his spiritualist beliefs. He looked back on his life, and saw in it a pattern of providence, leading him step by step towards his particular contributions to the world’s sum of knowledge, and ways in which he could disseminate them. The book was well received, though some notices suggested that it was much too long. In places, Wallace seems to have included just everything that came to hand, including some very early writing, such as an article on ‘The South Wales Farmer’. He admitted to Meldola that when he began he did not think he would have enough to fill one good-sized volume, and so put ‘almost everything in that seemed suitable, intending that it should be severely cut down before printing’; but when Arthur Waugh, the managing director of Chapman and Hall, read the manuscript he suggested the omission of only a few pages in one chapter and a few sentences in another.10 Three years later, with advice from his son, he produced a condensed one-volume version, which gives a clearer picture of the shape of his life, and an idiosyncratic assessment of his achievements. Wallace read all the reviews, and even enjoyed the critical ones. He regaled Meldola with choice extracts, such as this paragraph in Reviews:

  For on many subjects Mr Wallace is an antibody. He is anti-vaccination, anti-state endowment of education, anti-land-laws, and so on. To compensate, he is pro-spiritualism, and pro-phrenology, so that he carries, as cargo, about as large a dead weight of fancies and fallacies as it is possible to float withal.

  He especially liked ‘antibody’, and the whole paragraph was neat and refreshing – and then the reviewer went on to praise his biological and travel books as much as any of them! Wallace was feeling optimistic. The majority of notices were positive, and very fair; and the political scene was beginning to change. ‘The most Radical Government yet known in England, with John Burns & Lloyd George in the Cabinet, gives me a new interest in life & the hope to live a few years longer to see what will come of it.’11

  Rejuvenated by his extended visit to the past, and the thought that the kinds of social change he had been advocating might become reality, Wallace now tackled a much postponed act of homage to his closest scientific friend, Richard Spruce. Spruce had never properly recovered his health after his fourteen years in the Amazon, and all the energy he could spare for writing went into his work on the Hepaticae. Now, with the blessing of Spruce’s executor, Mathew Slater, and the encouragement of Joseph Hooker and Clements Markham, Wallace gathered up all the available material: notebooks, journals, letters, plant catalogues, maps, sketches. He bullied a grant from the Royal Society to have Spruce’s letters to Hooker and George Bentham, held at the Kew Herbarium, copied, and even attempted – unsuccessfully – to track down one missing journal with the help of a medium.12 Spruce recorded everything, in a beautifully regular hand, but he also wrote in a minute script at times, with many abbreviations, his ‘hieroglyphics’, as he called them. This was taxing stuff, requiring patience, and long hours, and extensive correspondence. But it was a labour of love; and through Spruce’s vivid but meticulous descriptions, and his sardonic turn of mind, the Amazon years came alive again for Wallace. People and places long forgotten were recalled ‘and to some extent visualised’, and he recalled the formative years when he had learned his own trade, and made the preliminary sketches and frameworks for his theories. By the time the book appeared, Spruce’s fellow bryologist, William Mitten, was dead. Wallace was the executor, and spent much time trying to sell Mitten’s collection, for the benefit of his sisters-in-law.

  As Wallace revisited his first steps as a field naturalist, both in his autobiography and through Spruce’s records, the full extent of his achievements began to crystallise for other people. Wallace, in the twentieth century, was not only the popular exponent of the previous century’s scientific achievement, but represented the living embodiment of its changes and developments. His steady stream of books, and his articles and letters in the intellectual and popular press, kept his name in the public eye. You might not agree with Wallace; you might think that his views on this or that were eccentric, even perverse, but that did not invalidate his contribution to mainstream scientific thinking, and certainly did not detract from the force of his personality, or the sense of his sheer humanity. July 1908 was the fiftieth anniversary of the reading of the Darwin–Wallace papers: the Linnean Society proposed a jubilee celebration, and – ‘very strangely’, according to Wallace – issued a medal with busts of the two great scientists, one on each side. Wallace was, naturally, invited to the ceremony, and gave an account of the events leading up to his paper: for this once, he overcame his increasing reluctance to visit London. ‘I think nothing but such an occasion would have brought me,’ he told Meldola, and added a postscript, ‘Very Private & Quite Confidential!’: ‘I suppose I have to thank either yourself or Poulton for this quite “outrageous” attempt to put me on a level with Darwin! If I live through it, I shall have something to say on this point!!’13 Poulton thought that Wallace attended from a sense of duty, and ‘because it was a unique opportunity of paying homage to the mighty genius’ whose name had been associated with his own.14 Hooker, by now the only other survivor among the prime movers of the affair, was also asked to speak. ‘They gave me one in Gold,’ Wallace reported to his young naturalist friend Fred Birch, ‘and six other Naturalists, 3 English and 3 Foreign in silver. So I was bound to go.’15 Sir John Lubbock invited him to a breakfast, but Wallac
e refused politely; he had for years been obliged to adopt the plan of ‘no breakfast’, and ‘no dinner’ either, to keep off attacks of asthma and enable him still to do a little work. He wished Lubbock success with his Importation of Plumage Bill: ‘To stop the import is the only way – short of the still more drastic method of heavily fining everyone who wears feathers in public’ – ‘with imprisonment for a second offence,’ the old bird-collector added firmly, ‘But we are not yet ripe for that.’16 He duly wrote and delivered an ‘address’ – ‘in which I glorified beetle and butterfly catching & bird collecting in the tropics [this was what Birch was doing in Guyana] as that really led Darwin & myself to the same theory’.

  This characteristically self-deprecatory account does not do Wallace’s speech justice. The 1908 meeting, held at the Institute of Civil Engineers, Great George Street, was a full recognition of Wallace’s independent contribution. ‘It is you, equally with your great colleague, who created the occasion we celebrate,’ read the citation. Wallace gave his version of his own moment of vision:

  The idea came to me as it had come to Darwin, in a sudden flash of insight; it was thought out in a few hours – was written down with such a sketch of its various applications and developments as occurred to me at the moment – then copied on thin paper and sent to Darwin – all within a week. I was then (as often since) the ‘young man in a hurry’: he, the painstaking and patient student seeking ever the full demonstration of the truth he had discovered, rather than to achieve immediate personal fame.

  It was a nice distinction. Wallace went on to disclaim credit for the idea: ‘No one deserved praise or blame for the ideas that came to him, only for the actions resulting therefrom.’ He would accept the medal

  not for the happy chance through which I became an independent originator of the doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’, but as a too liberal recognition by you of the moderate amount of time and work I have given to explain and elucidate the theory, to point out some novel applications of it, and (I hope I may add) for my attempts to extend those applications, even in directions which somewhat diverged from those accepted by my honoured friend and teacher Charles Darwin.

  He was unrepentant to the last about his ‘little heresy’.

  Hooker followed, with an account of his own role in the original Linnean Society proceedings. He added two interesting glosses to the sequence of events, which was now available in subtly varied versions in Darwin’s Life and Letters, and in Wallace’s own autobiography. He stressed, first, that at no point did he and Lyell and Darwin meet: everything had been arranged by letter. He also pointed out that there was no ‘documentary evidence’ for his account beyond what Francis Darwin had produced in the Life and Letters: no letters from Lyell, replying to Darwin’s, and none of his own ‘to either Lyell or Darwin, nor other evidence of their having existed beyond the latter’s acknowledgement of the receipt of some of them; and most surprising of all, Mr Wallace’s letter and its enclosure have disappeared’.17 This was a slightly controversial statement to make, at an official event held to honour Darwin and Wallace. The letters sent by Darwin had for the most part been preserved, and published; why not Hooker’s own, and Lyell’s, and Wallace’s? It sounds like an open question to Francis Darwin – a question that never received an answer.

  The presentations continued – in absentia to Professors Haeckel and Weismann, in person to Professor Strasburger, who spoke warmly of Wallace, to Francis Galton, and Ray Lankester. Wallace did not linger: there was no celebratory reception or dinner. He took a cab to Waterloo, and was back home by half past seven, relieved that his public exposure was over.

  The Linnean Gold Medal served as a nudge to the rest of the scientific world. In October, while ‘feeling very bad’, Wallace opened a letter from William Crookes, the Honorary Secretary of the Royal Institution, asking him to lecture on Darwinism at the January meeting. ‘I felt so bad that I was almost at the point of sending back a positive NO!’ he confessed to Birch. ‘But I waited a few days, got a little better, & while on my couch by the fire, suddenly got an idea for the lecture, that I felt sure would do.’18 He had declined the Royal Institution’s invitation thirty or forty years before, he explained to Poulton, because he ‘did not feel up to it at the time’. ‘I am a believer in inspiration. All my best ideas have come to me suddenly. I had quite determined to decline this one – when, lying on my couch, an idea suddenly came to me!’ – an idea that would suit the audience, and ‘do good’.19 He recognised this invitation as an honour, recollecting that Davey, Faraday and Tyndall had been professors at the Institute, while Crookes himself was an old friend – and besides, he was a fellow spiritualist. Within a week, he had a letter from the Royal Society, announcing that he had been awarded the Copley Medal – rather overwhelming, because he was an ‘outsider’ in science, had never sent them a single paper, and was considered a ‘mere theoriser’: he accepted Poulton’s offer to receive it on his behalf from Sir Archibald Geikie: as it would come in a leather case, Poulton need only call at the nearest post office, ‘get a strong linen Registered Letter Envelope, & despatch it’.20 A few days later, he heard from Lord Knollys, the King’s Private Secretary: ‘His Majesty proposed to offer me “The Order of Merit”, among the Birthday Honours!’ The exclamation marks thudded on to his letters. ‘Is it not awful – two more now! I should think very few men have had three such honours within six months!’ He never rated himself highly enough for the Copley, and as for the Order of Merit being given to a red-hot radical, land nationaliser, socialist, anti-militarist, etc., it was ‘quite astonishing and unintelligible’.21 It was a pity that the Order was for military as well as civil achievements, as the military had so many distinctions already. But he composed a polite letter of acceptance, and then wrote to excuse himself from attending the Investiture at Buckingham Palace on the grounds of age and delicate health, having discovered that court dress, ‘a kind of very costly livery’, was obligatory. Colonel Legge, one of the King’s Equerries, eventually travelled down to Broadstone to present the Order, a ‘very handsome cross in red and blue enamel & Gold – rich colours – with crown above, & a rich ribbed silk blue & crimson ribband to hang it round my neck!’ (A Bournemouth tailor, commissioned to sew the ribbon on to Wallace’s dress waistcoat, had to confess that a workman had inadvertently swallowed the eye.22) Wallace wore the decoration when he gave his Royal Institute lecture on 22 January 1909. His idea for the lecture was a kind of missionary effort, he informed Meldola, to put Darwinism in a new light, and ‘to leave “Mutationism” etc. etc. nowhere!’ Meldola offered to read the lecture for him, if necessary, but Wallace assured him that Crookes was standing by, in case his own voice did not hold out. ‘I suppose Crookes has a voice that can be heard or he would not have made the offer.’ He was relieved that Meldola saw, as he did, ‘the utter futility of the claims of the Mutationists – and the Mendelians are like unto them! I may just mention them in the lecture, but I hope I have put the subject in such a way that even “the meanest capacity” will suffice to see the absurdity of their claims.’ Another postscript rammed home the point: ‘I do not know whether the critics of “Darwinism” are most to be admired for their impudence, their vagueness, or their utter inability to reason logically.’23 Wallace advanced on the Royal Society like a latter-day Elijah from his cave, preaching the pure truth of Darwinism, and smiting the unbelievers hip and thigh.

  Wallace’s mind was still active, grappling with the same great issues, and with every new threat, as he saw it, to the central tenets of Darwinism, or of Darwinism modified by his own added dimension. The lecture became an article, ‘The World of Life: As Visualised and Interpreted by Darwinism’, and the article became a full-length book. He described The World of Life as his attempt to summarise a ‘half-century of thought and work on the Darwinian theory of evolution’, but its thrust is signalled by the subtitle: ‘A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose’. Wallace felt dissatisfied with h
is previous philosophical overview, Man’s Place in the Universe, and sought here to lay out a simpler, broader framework. He could do this without opposing Darwin, because Darwin, he argued, purposely excluded certain fundamental problems from his enquiries: the nature and causes of life itself, and the powers of growth and reproduction. Stepping delicately around Darwin’s sanctuary, he opened his story with an assault on the materialists’ view of life, and of consciousness, and selected as his examples Haeckel and Huxley, ‘our greatest philosophical biologist’. Haeckel expressed everything that Wallace opposed:

  Our own ‘human nature’ which exalted itself into an image of God in an anthropistic illusion, sinks to the level of a placental mammal, which has no more value for the universe at large than the ant, the fly of a summer’s day, the microscopic infusorium, or the smallest bacillus. Humanity is but a transitory phase of the evolution of an eternal substance, a particular phenomenal form of matter and energy, the true proportion of which we soon perceive when we set it on the background of infinite space and eternal time.24

  Wallace cracks into Haeckel with characteristic vigour: dogmatic, assertive, out of his department, combining negation and omniscience, ‘not science, and very bad philosophy’. He himself will try to arrive ‘at a juster conception of the mystery of the Life-World’, by giving a kind of bird’s-eye sketch of the great life-drama in its various phases as part of the grand system of evolution. But he does this from a position quite clearly staked out: that the Earth was prepared for Man ‘from the remotest eons of geological time’. The book is a wonderful survey of the development of life, illuminated by Wallace’s personal experience, by his wide reading, by his intimate knowledge of so many of the organisms he uses as illustrations. The distribution of species, floras and animals, examples of adaptation, the earth’s surface changes, the geological record, the life of the tertiary period, all these flow across the pages eased by the comfortable familiarity of old acquaintances: the tail feather of a bird of paradise, the curling tusks of the Sulawesi babirusa, the small lilaceous plant Simethus bicolor found ‘in a single grove of pine trees near Bournemouth, now probably exterminated by the builder’. Wallace’s friends and correspondents urge him on, as he quotes their insights and researches: Richard Spruce, Alfred Newton, Edward Poulton, Archibald Geikie, Joseph Hooker, Thiselton-Dyer. It is an immensely readable retrospective of his life’s work and interests, but he grapples too with current scientific developments, with Weismann and the germ-plasm, with chromosomes and molecules and atoms; and he adds a chapter on the purpose and definition of pain, ‘Is Nature Cruel?’ His intellectual curiosity about the ‘how’ is as sharp as ever, but ‘why’ is what really interests him. In this, his final synthesis, he seeks to resolve the apparently unbridgeable chasm between science and religion, by supposing an intervening series of intelligences.