Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  When he set out his view of the sources of human nature at the end of The Descent of Man, Charles explained his feelings about the value of memory. They were points of moral sensibility, not science, and one of the experiences from which they stemmed was the importance to him of his lasting feelings for Annie. Charles now suggested that “The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental . . . bases of conscience. This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being . . . Whatever renders the imagination more vivid, and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive.” As he had shown twenty years before when he wrote about Annie after her death, he wanted to remember, even when pain came with the memory.

  Charles’s ideas echoed themes he and Emma had found in George Eliot’s writings of the 1850s and 1860s. Following Wordsworth’s suggestions about the Romantic imagination, George Eliot saw memory and feeling, self and other, as bound closely together. In Scenes of Clerical Life, she had written: “Sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form.” In Adam Bede, Charles and Emma’s favourite of her novels, she commented on Dinah Morris’s vivid imaginings of Hetty Sorrel’s suffering that “It was in this way that Dinah’s imagination and sympathy acted and reacted habitually, each heightening the other.” At the end of the book, she linked experience and memory with sympathy in another way when she described how Adam never outlived his sorrow for Hetty. “Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves . . . the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy— the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.” She offered another view in Maggie Tulliver’s words in The Mill on the Floss. “Love is natural, but surely pity, and faithfulness, and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them.”

  Despite his deeply held view that morality was rooted in the human affections and sympathy, Charles maintained his unflinching sense of the ruthlessness of natural selection as a force shaping instincts, and he also kept the strong sense of the ad hoc and imperfect nature of human instincts that he had first expressed when he wrote in his notebook about the “Devil under form of baboon” being our grandfather. He extended the point to morality, and illustrated it deftly by comparing humans with insects. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.” The sharpness of this passage is breathtaking, as it contradicted the moral assumptions of the age.

  Charles believed that morality had been perverted repeatedly throughout human history by religious beliefs. Taking the ideas David Hume had offered in his Natural History of Religion, Charles wrote that “The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs. Many of these are terrible to think of, such as the sacrifice of human beings to a blood-loving god, the trial of innocent persons by the ordeal of poison or fire, witchcraft, etcetera. Yet it is well occasionally to reflect on these superstitions, for they show us what an infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason, to science, and to our accumulated knowledge . . . These miserable and indirect consequences of our highest faculties may be compared with the incidental and occasional mistakes of the instincts of the lower animals.”

  A child Annie had played with in Malvern had become a tragic and sensational victim of the shortcomings of human morality and affections. Marian Marsden, daughter of James Marsden, the water doctor in Malvern, had been Annie’s age. She was as unlucky with her parents and carers as Annie was lucky with hers. Her mother had died when Marian was six; her father fell in love with a young patient and married her, and he then paid his children’s French governess Celestine Doudet to take them to Paris. Dr. Marsden wrote to Mademoiselle Doudet about discipline that “Morals are more important than everything else.” When Marian fell ill in Paris, a group of neighbours wrote to Dr. Marsden claiming that the children were being ill-treated. He asked John Rashdall, the vicar who had conducted Annie’s burial service, to visit them in Paris. Mr. Rashdall found them “as well as could be expected” and reported that when he asked them about Mademoiselle Doudet, they praised her. Shortly afterwards Marian died and a post mortem revealed a fracture in her skull. Dr. Marsden went to Paris and found the other children starved and bruised. He removed them from Mademoiselle Doudet’s care, but Marian’s elder sister died shortly after, “crying out in her delirium that Mademoiselle Doudet had sworn to pursue her, even in death, if she revealed what had gone on in Paris.” She was buried in Malvern churchyard, and her gravestone stands near Annie’s.

  Mademoiselle Doudet was tried in Paris for cruelty to the Marsden children and the murder of Marian. The case was reported at great length in a popular periodical, Les Causes célèbres de tous les peuples, and the trial was also covered in some English newspapers. One feature of the proceedings was how some actions by Mademoiselle Doudet, seen by the accusers as murderous cruelty, were claimed by her and other witnesses to be sound discipline, and therefore moral. She was found guilty, but Les Causes célèbres voiced widespread sympathy for her. The case pointed obliquely to the relative nature of accepted moral thinking, as it revealed how close some forms of righteous conduct were to evildoing.

  Mademoiselle Doudet with the Marsden children

  When Charles had first thought about the moral sense in 1838, he had suspected that it was “an hereditary compound passion.” He now had a notion of its make-up. “Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.” Just as geology had given him the vast time-frame needed for evolution to work in, so philosophy and psychology pointed to mental forces and links operating below personal awareness. The new science of man that he envisaged would not simply trace the complexes of feeling and belief down to one or two supposedly primary factors; it would try to understand the interplay of instinct and conscious thought in order to fathom their workings with each other.

  Charles’s view of the moral sense prompted him to think again about the involvement of mankind in the struggle for existence. In one comment linked with Annie’s death, he contradicted a conclusion that many people had drawn from his ideas about the survival of the fittest. Before the appearance of The Origin of Species, some commentators had based a theory of social progress on Malthus’s view of perpetual competition in human life. The idea fitted in with the laissez-faire attitude towards the “undeserving poor” which was widely held among prosperous people. When Charles explained his theory of natural selection in The Origin, some saw it as further justification for their approach, and applied the idea to the physically unfit. Charles was always respectful towards Herbert Spencer, the social philosopher linked with the ideas which became known as “social Darwinism,” but he often felt that his writings were too abstract, and admitted that he did not understand them.

  Charles was particularly unhappy with the argument linking social progress with harsh treatment o
f people who were “unfit” to survive in the struggle for life, and used an opportunity in The Descent of Man to make his point. He wrote: “With savages, the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.” Thinking perhaps of himself and his chronic illness, he suggested: “Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.” He then argued that what prompted the aid we “feel impelled to give to the helpless is . . . the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but [was] subsequently rendered . . . more tender and more widely diffused.” Mindful of his own experience with Annie and others, he went on with the force of his own conviction: “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

  In the year when The Descent of Man appeared, Henry Maudsley the psychiatrist lectured on “Body and Mind” at the Royal College of Physicians. Charles noted his suggestion that our moral sense was a recent inheritance, and the link he made with the observation that “a perversion or destruction of the moral sense” was often one of the earliest symptoms of mental derangement. “As the latest and most exquisite product of mental organisation,” the moral sense was “the first to testify to disorder of the mind-centres.” The point echoed Charles’s comment in 1838 about Emma’s mother and how her affections had been destroyed when she became demented. Maudsley now shared Charles’s view that human feelings were faculties of our organism that needed to be understood as elements in a complex and obscure mechanism which had developed over time and could break down in a pattern. He described strange animal-like traits in the behaviour of “idiots” and asked whether they might be due to the reappearance of primitive instincts, “an echo from a far-distant past, testifying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown.”

  Maudsley visited Charles at Down, and gave more of his darkening view of the human mind in his next book, Responsibility in Mental Disease. One passage showed clearly the sea change in thinking about human nature which Charles had helped to bring about, reversing the theologians’ former proud notions of man as the sole rational being. Maudsley opened his last chapter on “The prevention of insanity” with a comment that undermined the complacency of the age about human reason. “Most persons who have suffered from the malady of thought must at one period or other of their lives have had a feeling that it would not be a hard matter to become insane, that in fact something of an effort was required to preserve their sanity.” With his languor, his swimming head, his hysterical crying and the sleepless nights when he could not get a painful idea out of his mind, Charles knew the malady.

  Charles had started his next book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as a chapter of The Descent of Man, but took it out because he found he had more to say than would fit in The Descent. One theme was how our common nature with animals extends from body to mind, to our feelings and their expression. He aimed to refute a suggestion by a previous writer, Sir Charles Bell, that the Creator had given us our facial muscles and expressions to enable us to show our feelings to each other for spiritual purposes. He grouped expressions in a number of kinds, and offered explanations of how each had developed by the natural workings of the body. Some he suggested were inherited versions of “serviceable associated habits.” Others he explained by a principle of antithesis whereby an opposite emotion to one with a set response would trigger opposite behaviour, and a third group he believed were due to an excess of nervous energy spilling over into other channels. Nowadays, most explanations focus on communication, but some refer to habitually associated actions.

  Charles described many careful observations he had made of human emotions and their expressions. He dwelt again on intense feelings, and the obscure links between mind and body. He returned to his point in The Descent of Man about humans baring their canine teeth. “With mankind some expressions, such as bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition . . . No doubt as long as man and all other animals are viewed as independent creations, an effectual stop is put to our natural desire to investigate as far as possible the causes of expression.” Again, he wanted to look into the depths of our nature, and he wanted to set aside the obstacles in the way. “He who admits on general grounds that the structure and habits of all animals have been gradually evolved, will look at the whole subject of expression in a new and interesting light.”

  In exploring emotions and how they are expressed, Charles gathered anecdotes; he corresponded with doctors in charge of lunatic asylums; he looked again inside himself, and he thought of Emma and the children. From his own experience, he wrote: “A strong desire to touch the beloved person is commonly felt; and love is expressed by this means more plainly than by any other. Hence we long to clasp in our arms those whom we tenderly love. We probably owe this desire to inherited habit, in association with the nursing and tending of our children, and with the mutual caresses of lovers.” Something of the feeling that lay behind this was caught in a recollection by Francis. “I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and colour. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in.”

  On parental affection, Charles suggested that “an emotion may be very strong, but it will have little tendency to induce movement of any kind, if it has not commonly led to voluntary action for its relief or gratification.” Thinking perhaps of Emma with her reserve, he wrote: “No emotion is stronger than maternal love; but a mother may feel deepest love for her helpless infant, and yet not show it by any outward sign; or only by slight caressing movements, with a gentle smile and tender eyes.” William’s photograph of his mother watching Charles Waring in her lap again captures what his father had in mind.

  Charles’s comments on infants and young children were remarkable for the focus of his interest and the detail of his recollections almost twenty years after his last child went away to school. His phrasing was now light, now heavy. He wrote about “the art of screaming” which infants “finely developed from the first days” because it was “of service” to them. Then, “When an infant is uncomfortable or unwell, little frowns . . . may be seen incessantly passing like shadows over its face; these being generally, but not always, followed sooner or later by a crying fit.” Later, “With very young children it is difficult to distinguish between fear and shyness; but this latter feeling with them has often seemed to me to partake of the character of the wildness of an untamed animal.” Charles had clear memories of his children in high spirits. “Under a transport of joy or of vivid pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds. We see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy.” He remembered a remark by Leonard. “I heard a child, a little under four years old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer, ‘It is laughing, talking, and kissing.’ It would be difficult to give a truer and more practical definition.”

  Returning to his old interest in emotions and their expression, he took up the mystery of the links between the mind and the body, and things we do not understand about our feelings. “The feelings which are called tender are difficult to analyse; they seem to be compounded of affection, joy, and especially of
sympathy. These feelings are in themselves of a pleasurable nature, excepting when pity is too deep . . . They are remarkable under our present point of view from so readily exciting the secretion of tears.” His eyes still moistened when he thought of Annie. Why?

  Charles described how once on a railway journey he had watched “an old lady with a comfortable but absorbed expression” sitting opposite him in the carriage. As he was looking at her, he saw that her depressores anguli oris, the muscles that pulled down the corners of her mouth, “became very slightly, yet decidedly, contracted; but as her countenance remained as placid as ever, I reflected how meaningless was this contraction, and how easily one might be deceived. The thought had hardly occurred to me when I saw that her eyes suddenly became suffused with tears almost to overflowing, and her whole countenance fell. There could now be no doubt that some painful recollection, perhaps that of a long-lost child, was passing through her mind. As soon as her sensorium was thus affected, certain nerve-cells from long habit instantly transmitted an order to all the respiratory muscles, and to those round the mouth, to prepare for a fit of crying. But the order was countermanded by the will, or rather by a later acquired habit, and all the muscles were obedient, excepting in a slight degree the depressores anguli oris. The mouth was not even opened; the respiration was not hurried; and no muscle was affected except those which drew down the corners of the mouth . . . In this case, as well as in many others, the links are indeed wonderful which connect cause and effect in giving rise to various expressions on the human countenance; and they explain to us the meaning of certain movements, which we involuntarily and unconsciously perform, whenever certain transitory emotions pass through our minds.” Charles watched the lady opposite him with clinical attention to her depressores anguli oris, and guessing at once when he saw her eyes moisten that she was thinking of a long-lost child, as he did so often himself. This curiosity and compassion, the detached observation sharpened and deepened by his own feeling, was the essence of his approach to the science of man.