Hooker’s letter shook Charles deeply. In the few days after receiving it, he tried to reply but could not manage to write anything. Eventually, at the end of the month, he penned a brief note which was unlike any other he ever sent. “My dear old friend, I must just have pleasure of saying this. Yours affect[ionatel]y C. Darwin.” He added a short postscript that he had a letter from a geologist. “I do not know whether you would care to see it. It has something on spreading of European plants.” He could not focus on what the letter said. His own message, lamely inconsequential as it was, was a reaching out to his closest friend in the memory of his own pain.
During the following days, he tried again many times to write to Hooker, but still could not find words to put on the page. A physician came from London to examine him and suggested that “a little head-work” might help. Charles’s mind kept swimming, but a week later he managed to write to Hooker about a botanical matter, explaining: “I have tried many days to write to you, but could not.” He hoped he could recover. “Unless I can, enough to work a little, I hope my life may be very short, for to lie on sofa all day and do nothing but to give trouble to the best and kindest of wives and good dear children is dreadful.”
As the days passed, Charles could not concentrate on any work or practical matters, but sat in his study watching another climbing plant growing in a pot on the table next to the sofa. It was a wax flower from Queensland which Hooker had sent him from Kew. In the third week of November, he jotted scrappy notes as a shoot circled near an arm of the sofa, and then back past a bell glass, a copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology next to it, and the Post Office Directory. The day after the tendril reached the Directory, he was at last able to write again to Hooker, but he had to ask him to “excuse my jumping from subject to subject.” “The more I look at plants, the higher they rise in my mind; really the tendril-bearers are higher organised, as far as adapted sensitivity goes, than the lower animals.” He had looked again at Hooker’s letters about his daughter Maria. “How well I remember your feeling, when we lost Annie, that it was my greatest comfort that I had never spoken a harsh word to her. Your grief has made me shed a few tears over our poor darling; but believe me that these tears have lost that unutterable bitterness of former days.” He was “so glad” to hear that Hooker’s son William was recovering from scarlet fever, and ended: “Goodbye. I am tired.”
In the last week of November, Hooker wrote to say that William had relapsed. Charles wrote back at once. “I grieve to hear about the scarlet fever.” He had learnt that his own sister Susan was now very ill with the disease. Thinking again of Hooker’s worry for his child, he ended his letter with a short string of remarks in which he voiced his feelings about the strength and pain of human affection with utter simplicity and directness. “I shall be glad to hear sometime about your boy, whom you love so. Much love, much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love. God bless you. C.D.”
Writing to Hooker in the first week of December, Charles explained why he cared so much. He hoped that Hooker would have “some lull in anxiety and fear” for his children. “Nothing is so dreadful in this life as fear: it still sickens me when I cannot help remembering some of the many illnesses our children have endured.” Not “when I remember” but “when I cannot help remembering.” The sickening memory of the fear of loss struck again and again.
In the next weeks, Charles experienced “very bad sinkings” and his head swam. He stayed upstairs in his bedroom with one or two climb-ing plants for company, watching their tendrils reaching, touching and curling round any object they found. As the year turned and the January days passed, he recovered slowly, but fears for children were still eddying round his mind. He wrote to Hooker in the last week of the month: “As I do nothing all day, I often get fidgety and I now fancy that Charlie or some of your family ill. When you have time let me have a short note to say how you all are.” Charlie was one of Hooker’s young sons. This remark was revealing. There was no reason for Charles to worry about Charlie’s health; it was nothing more than a “fancy,” but the idea was clearly preying on Charles’s mind.
On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1865)
Charles’s collapse during October and November 1863, with the days when he could not even put words together for a message to his closest friend, was one of the most severe in his forty years of illness. In the years that followed, Hooker looked to Charles again and again for sympathy when his father, mother and wife died, and on the anniversary of Maria’s death. Charles offered companionship and said what he could to help. On one occasion he wrote: “You have sometimes spoken to me as if you felt growing old: I have never seen any signs of this, and I am certain that in the affections, which form incomparably the noblest part of a man’s nature, you are one of the youngest men that I know.” Charles did not dwell on the pain Hooker had lived through any more than he did on his own, but looked instead straight to the love for his children of which the pain was one reflection.
In 1866, when a lady wrote to ask Charles whether his theory about the origin of species was compatible with a belief in God, he replied: “It has always appeared to me more satisfactory to look at the immense amount of pain and suffering in this world as the inevitable result of the natural sequence of events, i.e. general laws, rather than from the direct intervention of God.” It was easier to come to terms with pain and suffering if there was no question of a Divine purpose governing the life and death of individuals you cared for.
A few years later, a Dutch writer asked for Charles’s views on the grounds for belief in God. He replied that “the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God,” but if we assumed a First Cause, “the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose.” He went on: “Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world . . . The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty.”
Emma devoted her life to caring for Charles and running the household so that he could work without distraction. She claimed to take no interest in his work, but helped with experiments and read proofs of his books when he needed her help. Francis remembered that when he was ill or in distress, “he depended entirely on her presence to make his discomfort bearable. And she would often sit drumming on his head as he lay down.”
Emma kept her deep thoughts and feelings to herself, but broke her reserve on one occasion. Sometime before or in June 1861, she looked after Charles while he suffered a few weeks of acute sickness. She wrote a note to him. “My heart has often been too full to speak or take any notice . . . I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, and to try to believe that all suffering and illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds and to look forward with hope to a future state.” When she saw his patience and sensed his gratitude to her, she could not help “longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness.” But she found it difficult enough for herself. “I often think of the words ‘Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.’ It is feeling and not reasoning that drives one to prayer.” She ended the note with the same diffidence she had shown in her two letters to Charles over twenty years beforehand. She felt “presumptuous” in writing to him. “I shall keep this by me till I feel cheerful and comfortable again about you, but it has passed through my mind often lately, so I thought I would write it, partly to relieve my own mind.”
Emma did, though, manage to give the note to Charles, and he wrote on it: “God Bless you. C. D. June 1861.”
When Etty was ill in the early 1860s, Emma would read to her. William Cowper, the evangelical poet of the 1780s, was one of her favourite authors, and Etty remembered her reading from his “Winter Walk at Noon.” In one insistent passage Cowper argued against the Deist
view of a remote Creator which Charles had adopted, asserting instead that God was everywhere and in everything.
The Lord of all, himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect
Whose cause is God . . .
For those like Emma who hoped for the Last Judgement and a life after death, Cowper offered a quiet approach to their final destiny.The groans of nature in this nether world
Which heaven has heard for ages, have an end . . .
The time of rest, the promised sabbath comes.
Six thousand years of sorrow have well-nigh
Fulfilled their tardy and disastrous course
Over a sinful world. And what remains
Of this tempestuous state of human things,
Is merely as the workings of a sea
Before a calm, that rocks itself to rest.
For he whose car the winds are . . .
Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend
Propitious, in his chariot paved with love,
And what his storms have blasted and defaced
For man’s revolt, shall with a smile repair . . .
Thus heavenward all things tend. For all were once
Perfect, and all must be at length restored.
So God has greatly purposed . . .
A few years later, Emma read two books by Ashton Oxenden, an Anglican clergyman whose devotional writings were popular for their plain and simple language. In Words of Peace; or the Blessings and Trials of Sickness he wrote: “What are God’s reasons for afflicting us? Is it to punish? Sometimes it is; but not, I think, usually . . . There must be another and truer reason why the Lord chastens. It is because He desires to do you some great good. The gardener cuts and prunes his tree, to make it grow better, and bear more precious fruit; and God often uses His sharp knife for some gracious purpose . . . God cannot afflict wrongly. He never makes mistakes . . . Before then you go a step further, ask God to convince you of this precious truth—It is my Father who corrects me, even He who loves me.” In Fervent Prayer, Oxenden wrote about the “spirit of unbelief which is ever creeping into the hearts of God’s people, tempting them to feel that the Lord is far off, that their prayers will not be heard, and that it is useless to seek Him. Who has not felt something of this?” We should constantly implore God “to give us that faith, which is not in us naturally, but which comes from Him. ‘Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.’ ”
During these years, Charles and Emma were as close to each other as ever in their marriage, but the “painful void” which Emma had spoken of just before their wedding still lay between them. Unable to share her faith with Charles, Emma felt it weaken. Etty wrote that “As years went by her beliefs must have greatly changed, but she kept a sorrowful wish to believe more, and I know that it was an abiding sadness to her that her faith was less vivid than it had been in her youth.”
Emma’s feelings for Annie remained as deep as ever. In April 1875, Aunt Fanny Allen, who had been with her at Down when Annie died, was ninety-four and the last survivor of Emma and Charles’s parents’ generation. Emma wrote to her as she approached death. The letter does not survive, but Aunt Fanny replied that Emma’s “grateful remembrance of the sad April days of ’51 makes my heart beat with gratitude to you for its recollection, coupled as it was by the memory of your grief for your darling.” Taking up what Emma had said, Aunt Fanny went on: “It is true gaps can never be filled up, and I do not think we should wish them to be filled other ways than as our memory fills them.”
While Charles and Emma lived with their private thoughts and worries, they presented a picture of ease and contentment to the world. In 1869, Henry James, then a young American visitor to London and as yet unknown as a writer, accompanied a friend to lunch at Down. He wrote to his family that the Darwins’ carriage met them at Bromley Station, and they “rolled quietly along through a lovely landscape, between springing hedges and ivy-crowned walls . . . ineffably verdurous meads and tender-bursting copses . . . fine old seats and villas.” “Darwin’s house is a quiet old place . . . We lunched and spent an hour and a half seeing the old man, his wife and his daughter. Darwin is the sweetest, simplest, gentlest old Englishman you ever saw . . . He said nothing wonderful and was wonderful in no way but in not being so.”
Within the privacy of the household, Charles revealed a growing dislike of established religion. While Emma was reading Fervent Prayer, he subscribed to The Index, a newspaper produced by a group of disaffected American Unitarians and philosophical unbelievers. The paper advocated a spirit of reform “without deference to authority of Bible, Church or Christ.” It argued for rejection of the Christian confession, and proposed in its place a humanistic “Free Religion” in which “lies the only hope of the spiritual perfection of the individual and the spiritual unity of the race.” Charles allowed the editor to print in each issue a comment by him endorsing these views, and pressed the newspaper’s claims in conversation with his sons and daughters. Francis remembered how his father would tell the family “the most extraordinary facts” from the newspaper and was indignant with anyone who doubted their complete accuracy.
In his published writings Charles paid lip service to Christian belief, but his words were carefully chosen and non-committal, as when he wrote in The Descent of Man that “the question whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe . . . has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects.” He made occasional tongue-in-cheek comments, suggesting, for instance, that there might be a link between religious devotion and “the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings.” He commented on the primitive origins, or “natural history,” of religious belief. The idea that “natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory.” In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals he wrote about the torment of eternal punishment: “There is said to be ‘gnashing of teeth’ in hell; and I have plainly heard the grinding of the molar teeth of a cow which was suffering acutely from inflammation of the bowels.”
Emma and Charles talked together in the 1870s about another form of spiritual life: “manifestations,” the other world and messages from the departed. At a time of intense concern about the natural or supernatural reality of spiritual forces and life beyond death, mediums were coming from America with parlour performances claiming to confirm both. Some men of science took an interest in the phenomena, hoping they could find sound evidence to resolve the issues. Among Charles’s acquaintances, Dr. Gully was a firm believer and Alfred Russel Wallace had been converted in the mid-1860s. Charles took an interest because he wanted his theory to explain as much as could be explained by the regular working of observable and purely natural forces, and if he had to accept the reality of a separate spiritual realm, human life would have to be approached in a different way.
The mediums played boldly on people’s feelings about loved ones who had been taken from them by death. One produced a book, Heaven Opened; or Messages for the Bereaved from our Little Ones in Glory. Charles’s acquaintance Robert Chambers, the publisher, amateur geologist and secret author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which had argued for evolution many years before The Origin of Species appeared, started attending séances in 1853 in a cool and critical frame of mind, watching carefully fo
r fraud. In 1857, he met Daniel Dunglas Home, a charismatic showman from America, and was greatly impressed by his performances. He took copious notes of a number of sessions and decided that the phenomena compelled a reasonable man to believe in a “spiritual agency,” immortality and the hereafter, as no other explanation would fit what he had witnessed. At a séance in 1860, an accordion was provided and Chambers called for his deceased father to play his favourite Scottish and English tunes. “Ye Banks and Braes” and “The Last Rose of Summer” were sounded as if by magic, and Chambers told the company that they had indeed been his father’s favourite airs. Home was always seeking public endorsements from men of science and other prominent figures, but Chambers was not prepared to give him one, and Home’s friends kept working on him quietly.
Chambers had lost two daughters and was greatly affected by their deaths. In 1866, Home formed a society called the Spiritual Athenaeum with Dr. Gully and some other friends, one of whom knew Chambers’s family. At two meetings, Home saw the spirits of the two daughters; one gave a message to be passed on to their father, and the other gave the last words she had spoken to him, “Pa, love,” to prove their identity. The society wrote to Chambers and he confirmed that those were his second daughter’s last words. The message was then sent to him; he acted on it and was convinced it was genuine. He now openly declared his support for Home, and wrote to Wallace: “My idea is that the term ‘supernatural’ is a gross mistake. We have only to enlarge our conceptions of the natural and all will be right.” It is strange to realise that if Home and his friends had thought the notorious Mr. Darwin might welcome a message from a loved daughter beyond death, and Dr. Gully had told them about Annie, Home might have received a table-tapping from her.
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 32
