Charles wrote in his Autobiography: “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” If he had done that, “Perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use.” Reflecting Wordsworth’s view of the value of imaginative writing for sympathy and moral understanding, he explained that the loss of the taste for poetry was “a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
In the autumn of 1879, Emma persuaded Charles to leave the settled routine of their life at Down and take a holiday with the family in the Lake District. Before they went, he decided that he would try reading some poetry again while he was there. “The place will be propitious.” Visiting the landscapes he had known in Wordsworth’s poems lifted his spirits and the holiday was a great success. Etty, who was with her parents, remembered their expedition to Grasmere where Wordsworth had lived. “A perfect day and his state of vivid enjoyment and flow of spirits is a picture in my mind . . . He could hardly sit still in the carriage for turning round and getting up to admire the view from each fresh point.” He still had his old Wordsworth “marked with his notes as to what to skip and what he cared for.” He reread The Excursion during the stay but “found parts of it preachy.”
One poem which Charles had marked when he first read it in 1841 now had an echo in his own feelings. Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine, the one who at three was “tractable, though wild,” had died suddenly shortly afterwards. Some time later Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about thinking of her.
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! With whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
Again and again, as Charles talked and read, he was reminded of Annie. In January 1880, he received the first volume of the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques. Fabre’s life as a teacher in Provence had been impoverished and hard-working, but his accounts of insects’ lives were recognised as masterpieces of minute observation. Fabre was a devout Catholic and had strong religious objections to Charles’s suggestion that man and animals shared a common nature. In the book, he objected to Charles’s theory of common descent, and criticised a claim by Charles’s grandfather Erasmus in his Zoonomia that a wasp he had observed dismembering a bee’s carcase had shown intelligence rather than instinct. Charles wrote to Fabre, praising him for his observations but giving his grounds for believing that the wasp’s actions had shown signs of reasoning.
Fabre had been helped in his work for many years by his son, but the son had died before the book was published. Fabre ended the last chapter with a moving expression of his loss and a dedication to his son’s memory. Charles wrote at the end of his letter to Fabre: “Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you.”
For his final contribution to natural science, Charles returned to a subject he had first tackled over forty years before. While staying with the Wedgwoods at Maer Hall in Staffordshire shortly after his return from the Beagle voyage, he had been fascinated to see how earthworms worked the soil. He had written a paper “on the formation of mould,” and paid attention to worms ever since. In 1877, with his son Horace’s help, he designed a “wormograph” to measure the effect of worms’ excavations on the level of soil in the garden. For many months he kept pots filled with earth in his study and placed worms in them to observe their behaviour. In 1880, Emma wrote to Leonard that he had “taken to taming earthworms,” but he “does not make much progress as they can neither see nor hear.” Charles set out the results of his work in The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, which was published the next year. With its reflections on the “mental qualities” of worms and their unrecognised role in the history of the world, the book was his last flourish of insight and irony about human arrogance and the value of creatures other people despised. When it appeared, it sold thousands of copies and was widely and warmly praised, but after he had finished it, Charles wrote to Hooker: “I am rather despondent about myself . . . Idleness is downright misery to me . . . I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy, and I have no little jobs which I can do. So I must look forward to Downe graveyard as the sweetest place on this earth.”
Charles continued to puzzle about order and struggle in the natural world and the idea of a First Cause. He could not make up his mind, and did not pretend to anyone that he had an answer. During a visit to London he called on the Duke of Argyll, the leading Liberal politician and scientist who had argued against the evolution of man and for Divine Creation. Charles found him modest and easy to talk to, even though they disagreed on most subjects. After talking about politics and foreign affairs, the duke drew him back to the question of God’s providence in creation, suggesting that it was impossible to look on some of the wonderful contrivances in nature without seeing that they were the effect and expression of a creative mind. The duke wrote later that he would never forget Darwin’s answer to his point. “He looked at me very hard, and said ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding ‘it seems to go away.’ ” Charles had as full an understanding as anyone then living of “the wonderful contrivances” in the natural world; he often felt that they must be “the effect and expression of mind,” but then “he shook his head vaguely . . .” The sense of a mind behind the order of life faded like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
Shortly afterwards, Charles mentioned to another acquaintance the uncertainty he shared with David Hume about human understanding. He wrote of his “inward conviction . . . that the Universe is not the result of chance.” “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Later in the year, Charles’s brother Erasmus died and his body was brought to the graveyard at Downe for a family burial by the eighty-five-year-old Allen Wedgwood, who had married Charles and Emma at Maer and then christened Annie there so many years before. With Emma beside him at the graveside, Charles saw his own end ahead. He understood Emma’s hopes for reunion with her loved ones in a life after death, but had no such hopes himself. Francis remembered his father “standing in a long black funeral cloak in the scattering of snow that fell, with a grave look of sad reverie.” Hooker wrote to Charles shortly afterwards expressing “heartfelt sympathy.” He suggested it was better to lose a young person than an old one because with an old person you knew better the value of what you had lost. Charles thanked him for his note but said he could not quite agree. Touching carefully on the losses he and Hooker had shared over the years, he wrote that the death of a young person, “when there is a bright future ahead, causes grief never to be wholly obliterated.”
He remained preoccupied by the “horrid doubt.” When Snow Wedgwood came to stay for the last time before his death, he came up to her in the dining room “quite abruptly,” as she remembered later, “and began without any preface, in a
way as if the subject had been much in his mind. ‘The reason that I can never give in to the belief that we are all naturally inclined to, of a First Cause . . . is [that] I look on all human feeling as traceable to some germ in the animals.’ ” Faced with the paradox of purposeless pain at the heart of all life, and looking forward to his own death, Charles saw again the force of Hume’s philosophical doubt about the ability of human thought to encompass such issues, and decided that the solution of the riddle must lie beyond our mental reach. His words as Snow remembered them were emphatic. We are “all naturally inclined to” the belief in a First Cause, but he could “never give in” to it. Coming to the end of the long chain of thought that he had followed from his first speculations about human nature over forty years before, he recognised again that the human brain was not a perfect instrument for finding essential truths. His theory suggested that, like other organs of the body, it has been evolved for human survival through a long history of piecemeal adaptations. Our understanding is built out of our animal past and serves only to meet the needs of the species as conditions change. Human reason is a powerful tool and should be used to the full to reveal all it can about the hidden workings of natural life, but we find it has limits, and when we reach the boundaries of present understanding, we should venture beyond only with great care.
In September 1881, the German materialist Ludwig Büchner visited Charles at Down with his young British supporter, Dr. Edward Aveling, whom George Bernard Shaw described as having “a voice like a euphonium” and “the face and eyes of a lizard.” Aveling was struck by Charles’s easy, frank and unassuming manner, and wrote of the meeting that Darwin was “a man intensely human whose being near you made your own life more intense.” Charles asked Büchner and Aveling about their declared atheism and said that he preferred the word “agnostic.” After explanations and comment, Charles suggested that much energy was wasted in argument about the idea of God and the supernatural. “Man had so little time, so much strength at his disposal.” While there was work to be done on earth and for humanity, while nature still held so many of her secrets, the effort devoted to aims other than natural could be put to better use.
In its Almanack for 1882, Punch portrayed Mr. Darwin to its readers as the culmination of evolution with the caption “Man is but a worm.” The caricature showed Charles the change his ideas were leading to in people’s thinking about human nature. The “Lord of Creation” had been set down; humans could now acknowledge their ancestors among the lowest orders of animal life.
The following January, Charles and Emma were reminded of the life Annie might have lived when her nurse Brodie’s “other Anny,” William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter, came to stay. The Darwins and Thackerays had kept in touch in the 1850s and 1860s when Brodie came from Scotland to visit both families. Anny Thackeray had married a civil servant in the India Office and was now Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, a novelist and essayist and a close friend of Tennyson, Browning, Edward Fitzgerald and Thomas Carlyle.
The Ritchies had made a mistake about the invitation and they came a week before they were expected. “We drove to the door; the butler hospitably said ‘Mr. and Mrs. Darwin are sure to want you to remain; pray don’t go.’ ” Charles and Emma invited them in, and Charles said: “You’re as welcome as can be, and you must forgive me for laughing. I can’t for the life of me help laughing.” A dinner was scraped together and Mrs. Evans, the cook who had been a servant in the household for almost forty years, “thought it quite a providence that she had a pigeon pie.”
During the Ritchies’ stay, they talked with Charles and Emma about Brodie, who had lived to the age of eighty-three in a tenement in Aberdeen. They also spoke about fairy tales. Anne Ritchie had published her own tellings of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack the Giant Killer, and Emma showed her The Bird Talisman from Annie and Etty’s childhood. Anne Ritchie read it through and admired it so much that Emma decided to have it printed again for the family. They also talked about children’s games and the Darwin staircase slide. When the Ritchies returned home to Wimbledon, they found that Charles had had one made and delivered as a present for their small son and daughter.
If Anne Ritchie talked with Emma and Charles about her childhood with Brodie, she may have mentioned the family home in Kensington when it was still a village outside London. “I can remember the tortoise belonging to the boys next door crawling along the top of the wall where they had set it, and making its way between the jessamine sprigs . . . I liked the top schoolroom the best of the rooms in the dear old house; the sky was in it and the evening bells used to ring into it across the garden and seemed to come in dancing and clanging with the sunset . . . We kept our dolls, our bricks and our books, our baby houses in the top room, and most of our stupid little fancies. My sister had a menagerie of snails and flies in the sunny window sill; these latter chiefly invalids rescued out of milk jugs, lay upon rose leaves in various little pots and receptacles.” She also remembered her waking dreams. “I used to dream a great deal when I was a little child, and then wake up in my creaking wooden bed, and stare at the dim floating night-light like a little ship on its sea of oil. Then from the dark corners of the room there used to come all sorts of strange things sailing up upon the darkness. I could see them all looking like painted pictures. There were flowers, birds, dolls, toys, shining things of every description.”
Charles told her about his travels with Captain FitzRoy on their own “little ship,” HMS Beagle. “He told us about birds, he told us about fishes, how the little hen starlings lead off and seem to know the way when the time of migrations arrives, and he told us about the tortoises in the Island of Ascension hatched from the eggs in the sand and starting off and plunging into the sea. ‘And by Jove,’ says he, ‘the little tortoises without compass or experience sail straight across by nearest way to Algiers; it’s perfectly wonderful.’ ”
Emma and Charles also shared one of Anne Ritchie’s loves, for the letters of Madame de Sévigné in Louis XIV’s Paris. In 1881, Mrs. Ritchie had published a short life of the writer with many of her letters. Charles and Emma had enjoyed reading it and he told Mrs. Ritchie at breakfast that when they were all young, they knew Madame de Sévigné’s world so well that they gave all their friends the names of her characters. Charles had once written to Emma: “I am in love with Madame de Sévigné. She only shams a little virtue.”
During the morning, the Ritchies walked with Charles in the garden and “he showed us his worms which had just been turned out of the study after a course of french horn.” The year before Charles had wanted to establish whether earthworms possessed a sense of hearing. They had taken “not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon.” They were “indifferent to shouts” and when a piano was played “as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet.” From which, Charles concluded: “Worms do not possess any sense of hearing.”
Charles enjoyed the Ritchies’ company and warmed to his Annie’s namesake. Anne Ritchie felt his affection and returned it eagerly. Emma wrote to Etty: “Mrs. Ritchie was so effusive when she went away with the tears in her eyes, that I felt I could not properly respond.”
A few weeks later, a schoolteacher in Liverpool wrote to Charles asking for his views on the origin of life and its bearing on the existence of God. The schoolteacher suggested that “If we deny the derivation of life from inorganic matter . . . the most probable alternative is the idea of an eternal or ever-living being filling all immensity with his presence, and breathing into the first animal the breath of life.” Despite his weariness and depression, Charles wrote back as willingly and frankly as ever. “I hardly know what to say. Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility of this will be proved some day
in accordance with the law of continuity . . . If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come under some general law of nature. Whether the existence of a conscious God can be proved from the existence of the so-called laws of nature . . . is a perplexing subject, on which I have often thought, but cannot see my way clearly.”
One day in early March, Charles had an attack of angina in the Sand-walk. Etty wrote that “He was utterly ill after this, hardly sleeping all night, and for the next few days excessively depressed. My mother said he felt as if he had his death blow and that he did not expect to work again.”
Etty came to stay with a friend from London. Laura Forster, aunt of the young E. M. Forster, was recovering from an illness; Etty remembered her father’s “feeling anxious look as he came out of the study door to learn how she had borne the journey, and his warm sympathy and delight at our having got through it so well.” A fortnight later, they were having “the most heavenly spring weather I ever knew in my life.” Laura’s health improved, and Charles was cheered by her progress. They took short walks in the garden, with Emma, now weakened by the pain of arthritis, in her bath chair. Laura wrote later: “Till I got there I did not realise how much he was changed in strength. Some of the days were sadly weary for him. I remember him coming into the drawing room one afternoon and saying ‘The clocks go so dreadfully slowly, I have come in here to see if this one gets over the hours any quicker than the study one does.’ ”
Charles was still trying to experiment, looking at the effect of animal poisons on insect-eating plants. He wrote at the end of March to a physician who was an expert on the venomous snakes of India. “You will perhaps remember that you gave me some years ago a little cobra-poison for experimenting on Drosera [sundew]—Can you redouble your kindness by giving me ever so little of this or any other snake poison? Half a grain and even a quarter of a grain would probably suffice for an experiment which I am anxious to try.” He wrote to a botanist who had sent him some insect-eating plants to experiment on. “I have roughly tried the effects of [carbonate] of ammonia on the chlorophyll grain, but I find stooping over the microscope affects my heart.” The botanist had commented in his letter on another species, and Charles replied with almost his last words as a scientist. “The facts which you relate about the distribution of the Mitella are very curious; and how little we know about the life of any other plant or animal!”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 36
