113430
By William Irvine
"WAI-TER BAGEHOT
THE UNIVERSE OP G.B.S.
APES, ANGELS, AND VICTORIANS
What is the question now placed before society with a
assurance the most astounding! The question is this Is man
an afe or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.
Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech at Oxford, 1864
Apes,
Angels, and
Victorians
The Story of
Darwin, Huxley, and
Evolution
WILLIAM IRVINE
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO
APES, ANGE:LS, AND VICTORIANS
Copyright 1955 by William Irvine. All rights in this book
are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, motion-, or
talking-picture purposes without written authorization from
the holder of these rights. Nor may the book or parts thereof
be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission
in writing, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews. For information, address the
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Trade Department, 330
West 4zd Street, New York 36, New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-11269
Published by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
For Richard foster Jones
7 wish to than\ the Imperial College of Science for allowing me
to read the Huxley Papers, and the American Philosophical Society
for allowing me to read the Charles Darwin Papers. I wish also to
than\ the Cambridge University Library for sending me microfilms
of many unpublished Darwin letters, as well as of the manuscript
of his "Autobiography!' I am grateful to all three of these institu-
tions for permission to quote from their collections of unpublished
materials.
1 am indebted to Lady Nora Barlow for aiding me to gain ac-
cess to Darwin letters and manuscripts, to Professor Arthur Giese
for checking some of my expositions of biological principles, and
to Dr. Walter C. Alvarez for a valuable letter on Darwin's ill-health.
CONTENTS
PARTI
/. Revolution in a Classroom 3
2. A Scientific Odyssey 9
3. A Prophet in His Own Country 26
4. The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 42
5. A Premeditated Romance 57
6. Barnacles and Blasphemy 67
+fi The Most Important Boo\ of the Century 83
8. Convulsions of the National Mind 101
9. An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley,
and the Universe 127
&f. Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 135
*TT Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 151
Z2. The Subject of Subjects 178
JTJ. "I Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 203
PART II
14+ An Eminent Victorian 233
75. The Metaphysical Society 247
16. The Educator 264
77, Triumphal Progress 289
zS. TA<? Pleasant Avocation of War 311
/p. '77 JF##/ Cultivcr Notre Jardin" 331
Notes 360
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page
Charles Darwin and the Beagle 50
Charles and Emma Darwin in 1840 51
Darwin and Huxley in the 1850*5 82
Vanity Fair's Darwin and Huxley, 1871 83
Lyell, Wallace, Gray, and Hooker 210
Darwin and the house at Downe 211
Huxley and the house at Marlborough Place 242
Huxley and the residence at Hodeslea 243
Part One
1
Revolution in a Classroom
TN June, 1860, the British Association met at Oxford. Science was
JL not very much at home there, and neither was Professor Huxley,
Beneath those dreaming spires, he always felt as though he were
walking about in the Middle Ages; and Professor Huxley did not
approve of the Middle Ages. At Oxford, he feared, ideas were as
ivy-covered as the buildings, and minds as empty and dreamy as the
spires and quiet country air. Professor Huxley's laboratory was set
squarely in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the narrow
downtown London thoroughfare of Jermyn Street, which was as
crowded and busy as Professor Huxley's own intellect.
Reciprocally, Oxford did not feel in the least at home with such
people as Professor Huxley. In fact, she felt rather desperately at bay
between a Tractarian past and a scientific future. Newman's con-
version to Roman Catholicism had opened an abyss of conservatism
on one side; now Mr. Darwin's patient and laborious heresy had
opened an abyss of liberalism on the other. The ground of sanity
seemed narrow indeed. But sanity can always be defended. After
all, there was something obviously ridiculous in a heresy about
monkeys.
Mr. Darwin himself was too ill to attend the meeting of the As-
sociationas on a former even more important occasion, when
4 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell had acted in his place. A por-
tentous absence from crucial events which deeply concerned him
was already making Mr. Darwin a legend. It was just six months
since his Origin of Species had appeared. Of course Darwinism was
in everybody's mind. It was also on the program.
In Section D of the meeting, Dr. Daubeny of Oxford read a paper
"On the final causes of sexuality in plants, with special reference to
Mr. Darwin's work on The Origin of Species." Huxley was invited
to comment by the president but avoided discussion of the vexed
issue before "a general audience, in which sentiment would unduly
interfere with intellect.*' 1 Thereupon, Sir Richard Owen, the great-
est anatomist of his time, rose and announced that he "wished to
approach the subject in the spirit of the philosopher.** In other words,
he intended, as in his anonymous review 2 of a few months before,
to strike from under the cloak of scientific impartiality. "There were
facts," he felt, "by which the public could come to some conclusion
with regard to the probabilities of the truth of Mr. Darwin's theory."
He then declared that the brain of the gorilla "presented more dif-
ferences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when com-
pared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of
the quadrumana."
Huxley rose, gave Owen's words "a direct and unqualified con-
tradiction," pledged himself to "justify that unusual procedure else-
where/* 1 and sat down. The effect was as though he had challenged
Owen to a duel, and infinitely more dramatic than an immediate
refutation, however convincing, would have been, though that duly
appeared in the dignified pages of The Natural History Review?
Between Darwin and anti-Darwin the lines of battle were now
drawn. The program of the Association encouraged peace on Friday,
but the air was filled with rumors. A general clerical attack was to
be made on Saturday, when a somewhat irrelevant American was
to speak on the "Intellectual Development of Europe considered
with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin." The Bishop of Oxford
was arming in his tent and Owen was at his elbow, whispering the
secret weaknesses of the enemy. Quite unaware that his larger des-
tiny awaited him in a lecture room next day, Huxley had decided
not to witness the onslaught. He was very tired, and eager to rejoin
his wife at Reading. He knew that the Bishop was an able contro-
Revolution in a Classroom 5
versialist and felt that prevailing sentiment was strongly against the
Darwinians. On Friday evening he met the much reviled evolutionist
Robert Chambers in the street, and on remarking that he did not
see the good of staying "to be episcopally pounded," was beset with
such remonstrances and talk of desertion that he exclaimed, "Oh! if
you are going to take it that way, I'll come and have my share of
what is going on." 4
Perhaps revolutions often have their quiet beginnings in the class-
room, but they seldom have their turbulent crises there. Saturday,
June 30, 1860, was the exception. The Museum Lecture Room proved
too small for the crowd, and the meeting was moved to a larger
place, into which 700 people were packed. The ladies, in bright sum-
mer dresses and with fluttering handkerchiefs, lined the windows.
The clergy, "shouting lustily for the Bishop," 6 occupied the center
of the room, and behind them a small group of undergraduates
waited to cheer for the little known champions of "the monkey
theory." On the platform, among others, sat the American Dr.
Draper, the Bishop, Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and, as president of
the section, Darwin's old teacher Henslow.
Dr. Draper had the compound misfortune to be at once a bore and
the center of this exciting debate, having chosen to pick up the
burning question of the day by its biggest and hottest handle. His
American accent added a quaint remoteness to his metaphysical
fulminations. "I can still hear," writes one witness, "the American
accents of Dr. Draper's opening address when he asked *Air we a
fortuitous concourse of atoms ?' " 6 But had he luxuriated in the com-
bined gifts of Webster and Emerson, he would still have seemed an
irrelevance. The audience wanted British personalities, not Yankee
ponderosities; and they had already smelled blood.
Dr. Draper droned away for an hour, and then the discussion be-
gan. It was evident that the audience had tolerated its last bore. Three
men spoke and were shouted down in nine minutes. One had at-
tempted to improve on Darwin with a mathematical demonstration.
"Let this point A be man and that point B be the mawnkey." 7 He
was promptly overwhelmed with cries of "mawnkey." And now
there were loud demands for the Bishop. He courteously deferred
to Professor Beale and then, with the utmost good humor, rose to
speak.
6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Bishop Wilberforce, widely known as "Soapy Sam/' was one of
those men whose moral and intellectual fibers have been permanently
loosened by the early success and applause of a distinguished under-
graduate career. He had thereafter taken to succeeding at easier and
easier tasks, and was now, at fifty-four, a bluff, shallow, good-
humored opportunist and a formidable speaker before an undiscrim-
inating crowd. His chief qualification for pronouncing on a scientific
subject derived, like nearly everything else that was solid in his
career, from the undergraduate remoteness of a first in mathematics.
Huxley listened to the jovial, confident tones of the orator and
observed the marked hostility of the audience toward the Darwinians,
How could he make an effective reply? He could hardly expound
The Origin of Species, theory and evidence, in ten minutes. But
Huxley was not the man to brood on disadvantages. He was en-
couraged to find that, though crammed to the teeth by Owen, the
Bishop did not really know what he was talking about. Nevertheless,
exploiting to the full the popular tendency to regard every novelty
as an absurdity, he belabored Darwinism with such resources of
obvious wit and sarcasm, saying nothing with so much gusto and
ingenuity, that he was clearly taking even sober scientists along with
him. Finally, overcome by success, he turned with mock politeness
to Huxley and "begged to know, was it through his grandfather
or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?" 8
This was fatal. He had opened an avenue to his own vacuity.
Huxley slapped his knee and astonished the grave scientist next to
him by softly exclaiming, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine
hands." The Bishop sat down amid a roar of applause and a sea of
fluttering white handkerchiefs. Now there were calls for Huxley,
and at the chairman's invitation he rose, a tall, slight, high-shouldered
figure in a long black coat and an enormous high collar, which
seemed to press the large, close-set features even more tightly to-
gether. His face was very pale, his eyes and hair were very black,
and his wide lips were calculatingly, defiantly protruded. His man-
ner, gauged with an actor's instinct, was as quiet and grave as the
Bishop's had been loud and jovial. He said that he was there only
in the interests of science, that he had heard nothing to prejudice
his client's case. Mr. Darwin's theory was much more than an hy-
pothesis. It was the best explanation of species yet advanced. He
Revolution in a Classroom 7
touched on the Bishop's obvious ignorance of the sciences involved;
explained, clearly and briefly, Darwin's leading ideas; and then, in
tones even more grave and quiet, said that he would not be ashamed
to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be "ashamed to be
connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." 9
The sensation was immense. A hostile audience accorded him
nearly as much applause as the Bishop had received. One lady, em-
ploying an idiom now lost, expressed her sense of intellectual crisis
by fainting. The Bishop had suffered a sudden and involuntary
martyrdom, perishing in the diverted avalanches of his own blunt
ridicule. Huxley had committed forensic murder with a wonderful
artistic simplicity, grinding orthodoxy between the facts and the
supreme Victorian value of truth-telling.
At length Joseph Hooker rose and botanized briefly on the grave
of the Bishop's scientific reputation. Wilberforce did not reply. The
meeting adjourned. Huxley was complimented, even by the clergy,
with a frankness and fairness that surprised him. Walking back to
lodgings with Hooker, he remarked that this experience had changed
his opinion "as to the practical value of the art of public speaking,"
and that from this time forth he would "carefully cultivate it, and
try to leave off hating it." 10 Huxley had just enough of the sensitive
romantic in him to imagine that he hated public speaking. How he
actually felt at the time, he himself indicates in another sentence,
"I was careful . . . not to rise to reply till the meeting called for
me then I let myself go." u
Huxley's destiny had thus been captured by another man's book,
and discovering almost with astonishment how many talents for ac-
tion he possessed, this young professor of paleontology became the
acknowledged champion of science at one of the most dramatic mo-
ments in her history. He defended Darwinian evolution because it
seemed to constitute, for terrestrial life, a scientific truth as significant
and far-reaching as Newton's for the stellar universe more par-
ticularly, because it seemed to promise that human life itself, by
learning the laws of its being, might one day become scientifically
rational and controlled.
He had no doubt that his victory over the Bishop was one of light
over darkness. That scientific freedom might be bought at some cost
8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
to the human spirit, that an absurd theory about the origin of the
world could be a valuable repository of spiritual energy, that it could
somehow be psychologically linked with the soundness of contem-
porary morals, Huxley was too optimistic to believe. In so far as
selfish motives are necessary for goodness, he felt that science could
provide far solider and more tangible ones than religion* Of course
he was too busy to develop a scientific ethics of his own. His ethics
proceeded directly from his controversial position and from the
commonplaces of his age. Truth-finding was the greatest glory of
the thinker and spiritual leader; truth-telling, his most solemn obli-
gation. Judged by these standards, the Bishop richly deserved his
fate. Huxley had enlisted the Victorian moral sense against Victorian
theology.
Theology usually gave Darwin indigestion. The stories of these
two men are joined not by similarities of taste and character, nor
even by continual and intimate transaction. Hooker and Lyell, far
more than Huxley, shared Darwin's research. Tyndall and Spencer,
far more than Darwin, shared Huxley's warfare in the world. But
Darwin and Huxley are united by joint preeminence in a great tra-
dition. They are also united by an idea, which one developed and
the other defended. Darwin is the quiet, sedentary cause; Huxley, the
brilliant event. Darwin caused history and Huxley made it
11
A Scientific Odyssey
TN his "Autobiography," Huxley notes with a biologist's interest
JL in heredity that he inherited a quick temper, tenacity, and artistic
aptitude from his father, and from his mother, swiftness of appre-
hension, which he seems to have valued most and rightly, for,
joined with the clarity which he later made a test both for truth and
for style, it lies at the very basis of his mind and character. 1 He had
the coolness, the sureness, the self-confidence which clarity and swift-
ness bestow. He was always mobilized for action. He never hesitated,
was never less than himself. In fact, he was not so much the patient
solver of problems as the prodigious performer the rapid and volu-
minous reader, the ready and eloquent speaker, the facile and felici-
tous writer. He possessed the obvious virtues in nearly as much
splendor as Macaulay, and was almost as magnificently adequate to
his age. Like Macaulay also, he remained personally modest but
gratified his self-esteem by taking his duties and his world very seri-
ously. In fact, he had some of Macaulay's faults, but he had them
in less extreme degree. He was less inclined to formularize himself
and his goods for mass production. He felt somewhat less, one sus-
pects, the need of having a stream of ready-made thoughts going
through his head at all times like a Fourth-of-July parade. He was
probably more patient in groping for an idea or .in grappling with a
io Apes, Angels, and Victorians
problem. He certainly did not retreat from difficult subjects. Meta-
physics was one of his natural elements. Here he differed from
Macaulay and resembled Voltaire. He had Voltaire's combativeness,
his eager curiosity about facts and theories, his heroic but often nega-
tive and incredulous common sense, which sometimes closes the
mind to large and daring conceptions.
At any rate, the obvious virtues turned his youth into a rather
obvious Victorian success story. He was born in 1825 at Ealing near
London, and went to Ealing School, of which his father was an as-
sistant master. But the school had fallen on evil days, and he gained
little from it but a practical demonstration of the struggle for sur-
vival and a post-bellum friendship with a boy who turned up years
after as a transported convict in Australia. When he was ten years
old, the family moved to Coventry, where his father became man-
ager of a small bank. After that time Tom had very little formal
schooling.
But he went to church. The warfare between Huxley and religion
was essentially fratricidal, for he was a born preacher and sermonized
from nearly every platform but the pulpit. As a little boy he greatly
admired the local rector, and once, turning his pinafore around
backwards to represent a surplice, he delivered a sermon in the man-
ner of his hero to the maids in the kitchen. 2 Somewhat later, sitting
in church, he heard dark horror-stricken allusions to skeptics and
infidels. At eleven or twelve he began insensibly to move still farther
from orthodoxy by plunging into that course of amazingly rapid
desultory reading, which, growing always more intensive and sys-
tematic and continuing throughout life, made him one of the most
learned of Victorians. "Not satisfied with the ordinary length of the
day, he used ... to light his candle before dawn, pin a blanket
round his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read Hutton's Geology!' 8
He had a boy's eye for big tides and big subjects, from Guizot's
History of Civilization in Europe to Sir William Hamilton's "Phi-
losophy of the Unconditioned"; nor was his eye bigger than his
stomach. He now noticed that village parsons frequently used bad
grammar and used it to little purpose but to express ignorance of
nearly everything except the Bible. He also began to resent long
sermons so fiercely that in later life he could hardly see a surplice
without wanting to snub the reverend gentleman inside of it
A Scientific Odyssey n
It was Hamilton's article on the "Unconditioned/* which he found
in an old volume of The Edinburgh, that finally explained every-
thing. Employing the skeptical intellect, Sir William ponderously
undermined all conditioned and finite knowledge in order to estab-
lish the Scottish Kirk, by intuition, in the sublimity of the uncondi-
tioned and the infinite. 4 Huxley abandoned the Kirk and embraced
the skepticism. By the age of fifteen, he saw, probably with some
secret misgivings, that he was himself very close to being a skeptic
and an infidel, and merited the horror-stricken tones of the preacher.
But the preacher had left an indelible mark. In all but doctrine,
Huxley remained a staunch Victorian Christian throughout his life.
He was as morally earnest, as devoted to practical virtue, as suspicious
of elaborate theological dogma as the most pious evangelical He felt
justified by the grace and sanctity of scientific method and doubted
with the deep and passionate sincerity of conviction.
At thirteen or fourteen, he had suffered a more lurid illumination.
Two of his elder sisters had married physicians, and he had been
thrown a good deal with medical students. Having through his read-
ing acquired a knowledge of the human body, he went with some
of his new friends to a post-mortem examination, which probably
took place in a typical close, dark, village dissecting room of the
period. Mr. Houston Peterson recreates the scene:
He suddenly finds himself in the presence of a naked human corpse. He
is almost stifled by the mortuary & medicinal odors. He shudders inwardly
as he sees the first large incision made in the torso. He sees exposed the
lungs and heart, the stomach and bowels. The knives work quickly, cruelly.
The dissectors are casual and matter of fact about their business. Now a
serious remark, now a little joke. And young Huxley stands there not
for a few minutes but for two or three hours, gratifying his scientific
and morbid curiosity. 5
Immediately afterward he sank into "a strange state of apathy,"
which seemed so serious that his father sent him away to friends in
Warwickshire. There he soon recovered, but for the rest of his life
suffered from "internal pain*' and "hypochondriacal dyspepsia."
Though he had exhibited no physical symptoms, he always believed
that he had been "poisoned somehow." No doubt he had suffered a
severe mental shock. Still believing in God and immortality, he had
suddenly been confronted, at the sensitive period of adolescence,
iz Apes, Angels, and Victorians
with a bloody and nauseating spectacle of physical death. Apparently,
he had identified himself with the corpse. Recovery was a return to
life.
I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring
morning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed
to come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odour
of woodsmoke, like that which floated across the farm-yard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." 6
Mr. Peterson maintains that as Huxley's later outbursts of temper
and virtuous indignation were probably produced by the nervous
strain of a strenuous sense of duty, so his aggressiveness was the
result of a fear neurosis springing from his early encounter with a
human corpse. Whether due to this or other causes, there is an under-
tone of anxiety in his many expressions of courage or trust in the
face of the unknown. Perhaps he distracted himself by pommeling
bishops. Perhaps he wanted to make bishops and archdeacons face
the gruesome fact he had faced. Like Marx, he regarded religion as
an opiate.
But of course Huxley's whole career cannot be derived from a
single experience. In an age morbidly preoccupied with belief in
personal immortality, he found himself imprisoned in a universe of
uncertainty and death. He felt loss of faith more deeply than many
have supposed. As late as 1847, in the first year of his long cruise on
the Rattlesnake, he wrote: Ich \ann nichts andersl Gott hilfe mirl
Morals and religion are one wild whirl to me of them the less said
the better. In the region of the intellect alone can I find free and
innocent play for such faculties as I possess." And in 1849 he adds,
beside the same entry: "Is it better with me now? A little." 7
But his religious problem never came to an acute crisis. He found
a substitute for religion in Carlyle, from whom he also gained, as he
acknowledged, sympathy for the poor, hatred of shams, devotion to
work, and the impetus to study German language and literature. 8
Probably Carlyle also awakened the young man's literary s&ase.
That he did not turn so fine a talent permanently to literature, is
not surprising. Huxley was too little attracted to the characteristic
subject matter of the writer. He became interested in man as a physi-
cal mechanism, as an anthropoid ape, as a social unit and a citizen,
A Scientific Odyssey 13
as a delicate machine for the discovery of scientific truth, but never
to any appreciable extent in man as a personality and a human being.
With all his splendid talents for friendship and affection, he re-
mained, from the psychological point of view, largely indifferent to
people. He was not even interested in himself. Seldom has so vivid
and articulate a writer had so litde of importance to say, even in his
most intimate letters, about himself. It is the absence of human
knowledge that gives his prose, with all its verve and humor, an arid,
antiseptic quality. For him, writing was an instrument, never an
end. It meant the art of clarity, of controversy, which he cultivated
for the purposes of the scientist and the philosopher.
Huxley wanted as a boy to be a mechanical engineer, but no op-
portunity for training appeared. On the other hand, he did receive
some instruction in medicine from his brother-in-law Dr. Cooke,
and when in 1841 his parents moved to Rotherhithe, in east London,
he was apprenticed to a Dr. Chandler, who served a parish in the
dock region. Here for the first time he crossed the frontier of middle-
class life and came to know the great Victorian wilderness of metro-
politan poverty, about which he had read in Carlyle. The spectacle
itself was even more eloquent. Huxley was not haunted by it, but he
never forgot it.
At first he did not like medicine and comforted himself with
voluminous reading on all subjects, from chemistry to ancient his-
tory. A natural linguist, he was constantly improving his knowledge
of French, German, and Italian. After a year with Dr. Chandler, he
was apprenticed to his brother-in-law Dr. Scott, at whose house in
northern London he went to live. There, under the care of his favorite
sister Elizabeth, he grew more interested in medicine.
One day, having as usual threaded through the narrow alleys of
the London jungle to the library of the College of Surgeons, he saw
the notice of a public competition for medals in botany. It seemed
ridiculous to enter his name, for the other competitors were older and
university-trained. Yet he looked longingly at the notice, and some-
one asked, "Why don't you try for it?" He did. Soon he found
himseff studying from nine in the morning till midnight, often till
sunrise. At last, the day of examination came. There was a nine-hour
fever of writing, a longer, more terrible fever of waiting. Then the
whole family was astonished. Tom had won second prize a silver
14 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
medal. His later career was paved with gold medals, but none ever
shone so brightly as this silver one.*
Soon after this time Tom won a scholarship for Charing Cross
Hospital. Here again he drifted into the boyish pursuit of universal
knowledge, but was soon rescued by his professor of anatomy, who
not only captured his imagination but gave a permanent direction
to his life. This heroic individual was a pale, dry-looking little man,
who lectured "with downcast eyes, and fingering his watch chain." 10
What he said was cold, lucid, logical, and severely exact, indicating a
great and precise knowledge. "Quite to my taste," wrote Huxley. 11
From Wharton Jones he learned exact scientific method in the search
for truth, which he pursued with so much zeal that his window,
framing an inevitable silhouette, became known among students as
The Sign of the Head and Microscope. Thus wooed, truth finally
appeared. At the age of nineteen Tom made an original discovery,
and in a first contribution to the Medical Gazette, reported the exist-
ence of a membrane in the root of the human hair which is still
known as "Huxley's Layer," It is curious that Jones had to correct
numerous errors in composition, as Huxley "detested the trouble of
writing, and would take no pains over it." 12
After three years at Charing Cross Hospital, Huxley passed his
M.B. examination with a gold medal in anatomy and physiology.
Still too young for the College of Surgeons, he took service in the
Navy, and was soon appointed assistant surgeon to the Rattlesnake.
In 1847 this twenty-six gun frigate was ordered to chart the waters
of northeastern Australia, a region then totally unknown to science
and all but unknown to exploration of any kind. Huxley's medical
*The prolonged study preceding this examination brought about "a sort
of ophthalmia" (Life and Letters of Huxley f I, 19), which prevented him from
reading at night for months afterward. Dr. George M. Gould believes that
Huxley's later headaches, dyspepsia, and depression are traceable to eyestrain
produced by a lifelong habit of intensive reading coupled with astigmatism and
anismetropia. According to Dr. Gould, vision remained normal; and the strain
upon the eyes was transferred, through Nature's "perfect wisdom," to organs
less vitally important to the human machine (Biographic Clinics: The Origin
of the Ill-health of DeQuincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Browning
[Philadelphia: P. Blakiston's Son & Company, 1903], p. 119). This theory may
have some truth, but eyestrain would seem an aggravation rather than the
primary cause of Huxley's ills.
A Scientific Odyssey ij
duties were to occupy only a small part of his time. By far the greater
part was to be employed in such scientific work as he thought im-
portant. Wharton Jones had provided him with a method. The Navy
had provided him, under Spartan conditions, with infinite leisure
and an inexhaustible museum.
The nineteenth century was of course the heroic age for voyages
of scientific discovery, as the Renaissance had been for those of geo-
graphic. Equipped not with diving bells, helicopters, and floating
laboratories but chiefly with a simple mariner's compass of scientific
conscience and common sense, a series of great men Humboldt,
Darwin, Hooker, Huxley, Wallace, and Haeckel had embarked
on seas of ripe and boundless possibility, where every ability and
strength won a fabulous reward. Each man was weighed, quite
accurately perhaps, by infinite opportunity. Each brought back a
famous store; and one Darwin high on a peak in theoretical
Darien, had glimpsed with industrious and somewhat prosaic excite-
ment his own particular Pacific. Of these sedate and meditative
conquistadores, Huxley was by no means least a very young man
setting out in search not only of truth, but of the world and of his own
life. He found a wife, uncovered nearly all his talents including
that for literature and almost discovered himself.
For this famous voyage and intricate surveying mission, the Royal
Navy had provided a distinguished crew and an antiquated vessel.
Young Captain Owen Stanley, the son of a bishop and brother of the
famous dean, was kindly, energetic, conscientious, idealistic, and full
of ambition to be a great savant and a great explorer. He was backed
by a large stafi of surveyors, magneticians, and other experts,
including the naturalist Macgillivray, an avid if unenlightened
collector with a flair for primitive languages. But no doubt in its
wisdom the Royal Navy had decided that too much shining equip-
ment belittles and depersonalizes heroes. A complement of 180 men
were therefore crowded into a slow, clumsy wooden sailing vessel
of the type known to the service as a "donkey frigate." There was an
almost complete lack of scientific instruments for biological research
and when, at Huxley's suggestion, Captain Stanley requested one
hundred pounds' worth of reference books, the response was a persist-
ent and dignified silence.
Huxley was shocked at the crowded, stuffy, smelly wooden world
1 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
in which he found himself. His first impression of the ship's company,
however it bristled with technicians, was that he had never seen so
many stupid, ignorant fellows in his life. Because of bad refitting, the
lower deck of the Rattlesnake was under water throughout the
voyage. Huxley's most modern reference work was Buffon's Suites;
his laboratory was a small corner of the chartroom; his bedroom,
storeroom, and library was a cabin not much larger than one of
Louis XFs torture cages; he could never stand upright in it and he
could scarcely turn around. Most disturbing of all, he was treated by
"regular officers" as a crank unworthy of serious consideration. If he
left specimens lying on the deck for an hour or two, he was only too
likely on his return to find them swept away as an offense to nautical
neatness. But at least he had a cabin to himself. At least the ocean
was roomy and the air bracing. Madeira, Rio, and Mauritius were
beautiful. Captain Stanley was helpful and sympathetic. Huxley
began to reproach himself with injustice. The crew were fine fellows
after all. He even liked some of the officers.
According to the elaborate plan which he had drawn up, Huxley
was to dissect mollusks and Radiata, study the coral animal, search
for Epizoa on the eyes and gills of fish, and at the suggestion of
Professor Owen, collect as many fish brains as possible. Actually, he
never collected anything. Unlike Darwin, he lacked the patience and
the acquisitive instinct to be a good collector. Nor did he have
Darwin's catholic eagerness in observation. He had to be piqued and
aroused by particular problems, and inevitably these lay in the range
of his medical preparation. He therefore carried out only the anatomi-
cal studies on his program, being guided by his impulse for clarity
and his "engineer's instinct for ... the essence of construction." 18
One of Huxley's principal achievements on the voyage out was to
bring some order out of the chaos of invertebrate zoology and
particularly of the mollusks, coelenterates, and tunicates. Most o
these were tiny, fantastic creatures stalking and eluding each other
under the concealment of transparency in the brilliant light of the
ocean surface. Their transparency made them admirable subjects for
a scientist without delicate instruments: they could often be studied
without being dissected or cut into sections. A notable triumph was
the classification of Appendicularius, a minute and ingenious animal
that manufactures gelatinous houses in which to trap microscopic
A Scientific Odyssey 17
plants. Its translucent secret of identity had defied even the discerning
eye of the great Johannes Miiller. Huxley gave sound reasons for
locating it among the tunicates, a branch of which was later proved
in startling fashion to be related, far back in its long past, to the verte-
brates. But in those pre-Darwinian days organisms had, from the
structural point of view, neither past nor future. Huxley's method was
peculiarly congenial to the clear, platonic kind of intellect: he tried to
get behind particular adaptations to a generalized structure or "arche-
type" which would be basic, and therefore critical, for all actual
species of a class. That the archetype is but the static conception of an
evolutionary prototype in short, of Darwin's idea of a common
ancestor need not be explained.
These discoveries were made on shipboard. In Sydney Huxley
discovered, quite incidentally, parties, dancing, and young ladies.
More particularly, he discovered Miss Henrietta Heathorn, the
sister-in-law of Mr. Fanning, a leading merchant of the city. He loved
her almost at first sight with that decision and strength of mind which
is so admirable in the Victorians. Miss Heathorn was a person of
equal decision, and she needed to be, for they were engaged seven
years. Of course they would have waited forever and in their case
loyalty to love was but loyalty to reason, for they were ideally suited
alike in much and different only that need might find and admire
strength. Both were intelligent, efficient, and well educated. Both
loved nature, art, and literature. Henrietta had even gone to school
in Germany, spoke his favorite German, and knew his beloved
German authors. He never could decide whether she was beautiful,
but suspected, quite happily, that she was not. Much better, she was
small, very fair, pale, and fragile-looking in order that he might be
tall, dark, strong, and tenderly protective. He was ambitious, moody,
sometimes despondent in order that she might be constant, en-
couraging, 'and sympathetically understanding. She was delicate, in-
experienced, and a little naive and sentimental in order that he might
be wise, superbly capable, and sternly realistic. In short, consciously
or unconsciously, they had fallen in love as sensibly as Jane Austen
herself might have wished.
Theirs was a romance only possible in an age when etiquette was
awful and camellias and handkerchiefs were eloquent. Henrietta
remembered every bit of it and as a very old lady wrote down some
1 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
of the best parts as freshly as a girl might confide them to her diary on
the day they happened. She and Tom had met toward the end of a
dancing party. He promptly asked for a dance, but her brother-in-
law felt obliged to intervene. Netty's sister and chaperone had al-
ready gone for her wrap. "Never mind said Mr. Huxley, we shall
meet again & then remember you are engaged for the ist dance." 14
They did meet and Tom had his dance. From that time forth, when-
ever he entered the ballroom, she would think, "There is that wonder-
ful doctor!"
"What an evening of glamour it was," the old lady wrote of another
party. "Before I left he begged of me the red camellia I wore which
after my darling died I found preserved among his papers! labelled
The First." 15 But romance is savorless without adversity. As a climax
to all the festivities surrounding the visit of the H.M.S. Rattlesnake,
there was to be a great party given by the ship's company itself a
picnic on an island in the afternoon and dancing on board in the
evening. At last the incredible event materialized, but the wonderful
doctor did not. "Everyone said they had had a lovely time," wrote
the old lady, "but I my heart was sick and weary of it all. I began
to think that all that had gone before was my imagination, or that it
was just a sailor's way."
The next day, from her bedroom at her sister's house just as she
finished dressing and the lunch bell sounded she heard the clatter
of a horse in the drive! Could it be he? Her hair! Her dress!
Luncheon was over when she finally brought her toilette to perfection
and came downstairs. There were seven people in the drawing room,
and miraculously, Dr. Huxley was one. Then Dr. Huxley eliminated
four of the unnecessary six: he would accompany Henrietta and two
other girls on an expedition to a nearby farm. Then he eliminated
the two girls. As he hadn't "3 arms to offer us, and it would be in-
vidious to offer one ... to two of us, leaving out the 3rd young
lady," he offered only one, and invited Henrietta to take it. During
the walk she slipped on a loose branch. He removed it, saying, "So
would I remove all hindrances from your path in life," "His eyes had
an extraordinary way," she noted, "of flashing under strong emotion,
when they seemed to be burning." He even managed to explain his
absence from the picnic. He had been ordered to accompany au excur-
sion party which could not return in time.
A Scientific Odyssey 19
The situation now seemed quite simple and cheerful to Huxley.
They were engaged. Soon he would make his fortune and they would
be married. "I tell Netty," he wrote his sister, "to look to being a
Trau Professorin' one of these odd days, and she has faith, as I
believe would have if I told her I was going to be Prime Minister." 16
Perhaps he would have been surprised to know some of the thoughts
that were passing through his Netty's mind in part just because
he was so mesmerically determined and confident. Deeply as she
loved and trusted him, she had moments of fear and hesitation in
allowing herself to be absorbed in so masterful and compelling a
personality. "You draw out my thoughts and feelings and appropri-
ate them most tyrannically," she wrote him later, "and yet 'tis perhaps
one of the things which has bound me with stronger love to you.
You are a tyrant still conquering by strength where influence
fails." 17 Moreover, her faith in the Frau Professorin was by no means
so implicit as he imagined. She was far from seeing the infinite
practical wisdom of writing essays about jellyfish and salps. "I had
only the dimmest idea ... of how a description of a marine creature
should win for him fame, or help in any way, to bring about his
obtaining a position that would enable us to marry." 18
And then, after three months in Sydney, the Rattlesnake sailed
north to perform its mission, which was to chart the inshore waters
of the Great Barrier Reef and find a passage through the Torres
Straits to India in short, to trace with a clumsy wooden sailing
vessel and a tender the vast labyrinths, visible and submerged, of the
Coral Sea. It was a little like trying, blindfold, to pass a camel through
the eyes of a great many needles, with death the penalty for a single
blunder: a trial by danger and by tedium.
Sometimes a small boat put off to explore a bay or an inlet and
disappeared for days. Sometimes a few" men landed and traveled
inland, as did Huxley and the ship's naturalist Macgillivray on bleak
Facing Island. Such excursions were long disciplines of unceasing
watchfulness, though on Facing no savages appeared. But mostly,
the Rattlesnake sailed monotonously to and fro beneath a bright,
hot sky or hovered, tantalizingly and without ever putting a boat
out, off an inscrutable, dark-jungled shore "always mute," as Conrad
says, "with an air of whispering, Come and find out." *
* 'The Heart of Darkness."
20 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
But on this cruise Huxley had no time to stare nostalgically at sea-
coasts. He had become interested in jellyfish, and the coastal waters of
eastern Australia were brilliant with these creatures. It was a unique
opportunity, for the more delicate specimens were unfit for examina-
tion after a few hours and a constant fresh supply was essential.
Huxley now did the work for his most famous paper of the Rattle-
sna^e voyage "On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family
of the Medusae." Here he shows that the Medusae, or jellyfish, are
related not to other Radiates like the starfish or sea urchins, but to
extremely dissimilar groups like the polyps and siphonophores, being
formed of two fundamental membranes, an outer and an inner. At
the end of his article, almost casually, he observes that the archetype
Medusa is constructed on the same plan as the embryo chick. In
those days a biologist could hardly make a discovery without staring
evolution in the face. But Huxley was still thinking about nineteenth-
century facts with eighteenth-century ideas.
After some three months at sea, the Rattlesnake returned to Sydney.
Torn stayed with the Fannings, under the same roof with his Netty.
Even so, he managed to finish his paper on the Medusae, which
Captain Stanley then forwarded to the Royal Society.
The Rattlesnake was nine months on its second cruise northward,
surveying the Inner Passage as far as New Guinea and the Louisiades.
It then convoyed the bark Tarn o f Shanter to Rockingham Bay, where
the smaller vessel landed thirteen men to explore northeastern Aus-
tralia as far as Cape Yorke. The leader of the expedition, Edmund
Kennedy, had become friendly with Huxley and had invited him to
come along. He would certainly have done so, had the rules of the
service permitted. At the time appointed for picking up the explorers
once more the Rattlesnake's tender, the Bramble, was sent ahead to
exchange signals with Kennedy. No signals were observed. The
Bramble waited ten days, then proceeded with the Rattlesnake to
Cape Yorke. Again no news of Kennedy, His fate was not known
until the Rattlesnakes fourth visit to Sydney. The expedition had
been a nightmare journey through nearly impassable bush. Rations
had ma short and the men had sickened one after another. Kennedy
had pushed forward with three, then only with his faithful black,
Jackie. Actually in sight of the vessel that was waiting for them, he
was speared to death by natives, and Tackie barelv escaped. Of twelve
A Scientific Odyssey 21
whites, only two were eventually rescued. Naval regulations
Huxley's own private fate in those days had for once proved
beneficent.
The third cruise northward took Huxley into the heart of the Coral
Sea. Here was an unparalleled opportunity to study the coral animal,
which he had listed prominently in his program of research. Here
were green-jungled islands, ringed round with white surf, beckoning
silently on every hand with their strange life, their primitive peoples
and cultures to be observed. Yet time and again he remained in his
cabin, complaining of the heat and refusing to go ashore. Sometimes
he wished he could sleep the whole voyage out and sometimes he
felt "like a tiger fresh caught and put into a cage." 19
Quite clearly, he had sunk into a prolonged depression. Through-
out his life he seems to have been subject to manic alternations of
furious hard work and lethargic despondency. In the present in-
stance, he had just spent a month or more in Sydney, where he had
labored hard on his Medusae paper and had the constant excitement
of living in the same house with Netty. Now, in separation and
loneliness, the reaction had set in. Soon he was to leave Netty perhaps
for several years. He had asked her to marry him, but when would he
be in a position to marry? He had heard nothing of the scientific
papers he had sent back to England. Were they utterly negligible?
Was a scientific career beyond the reach of his abilities? Back there
was the great world the big, really important world of London
waiting to be conquered not only for his own practical satisfaction but
for the benefit and admiration of a wonderful earnest-eyed, yellow-
haired girl; and here he was trapped in an irrelevant abyss of hot
sunshine and steamy ocean.
A sense of responsibility and of frustration had at once sharpened
ambition and awakened self-doubt. He longed to prove himself and
at the same time half feared the contest. Naturally, he thought a good
deal about the vanity of human ambition. After a moonlight revery
on the ship's deck, he wrote:
That great sea is Time and the little waves are the changes and the chances
of life. The ship's side is Trouble, and it is only by meeting with this that
the little creatures in the water shine and grow bright. They are men. If
it were calm they would not be bright. See, there is a big one; he shines
like a fiery glove. He is some great conqueror. He keeps on shining for full
22 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
a minute that is Fame and then gives place to darkness like the rest.
Oh brave! who would not be great. 20
Scientific work reminded him of the oblivion into which his papers
had fallen. He therefore escaped into literature, improving his Italian
and reading The Divine Comedy.
An ocean voyage transpires in a microcosm and a macrocosm, in
the narrow ship and the wide world; and often the first becomes a
good deal stranger than the second. Up till now Huxley had been
chiefly occupied with the macrocosm. The microcosm had been simply
an annoyance. But now the annoyance mounted sufficiently to elicit
some vivid descriptions:
I wonder if it is possible for the mind of man to conceive anything more
degradingly offensive than the condition of us 150 men, shut up in this
wooden box, being watered with hot water, as we are now. . . . The
lower and main decks are completely unventilated: a sort of solution of
man in steam fills them from end to end, and surrounds the lights with a
lurid halo. It's too hot to sleep, and my sole amusement consists in watch-
ing the cockroaches, which arc in a state of intense excitement and hap-
piness. 21
That ships are fantastic little despotisms floating in a void, that
men dissolved in steam and the acid of each other's eccentricities
become stranger and stranger, that they reveal this strangeness more
and more, opening up long vistas of complex and bristling individu-
ality to curious analysis Huxley began to see vividly, in the long
and painful ruminations of his third cruise. But he saw the fact
without seeing into it, developing sensitiveness without insight* Of
course he never did need to understand people. He led and managed
them. When himself, he felt and was so strong that he had no motive
to brood enviously and analytically about the strength of others; and,
though at this time still very young and sorely perplexed, he was
obviously admired by all the most admirable men on the boat.
Returning to Sydney and seeing Netty evaporated much of Huxley's
low spirits. The last cruise northward did the rest. As subjects of
study, he abandoned the jellyfish for man. Most of his encounters
with the natives were tense, dangerous, rather opaque little farces.
Once a fine-looking young fellow received a hatchet for a pile of
yams and was so delighted that he seized Huxley and waltzed him a
A Scientific Odyssey 23
quarter of a mile down the beach. Huxley guided the waltz toward
the village, so that he could examine the huts. On another occasion,
a fat sailor, suddenly finding himself surrounded by savages, suc-
ceeded in diverting them only by giving away all his clothes and
then by doing an impromptu dance in the broiling sun until help
came.
But Huxley owed his most informative experience, in part at least,
to Macgillivray's knowledge of primitive languages and ideas. Aus-
tralian natives believed that white men were reincarnated ghosts of
the dead. During an extended stay which he and Huxley made
among the friendly inhabitants of Mount Ernest Island, Macgillivray
convinced an old man, Paouda, that he was the ghost of the latter's
recently deceased father-in-law. Paouda then became very open and
hospitable. Macgillivray now pleaded pathetically to see his daughter
and grandchildren, for the women of the island had been hidden
away. The old man, after many pledges of secrecy, finally took the
two white men to the family, who received them with a mixture of
awe and affection. Forty years later, in his campaign against demon-
ology and animism in the Bible, Huxley told of this lesson in human
credulity at length. 22
His diary of the voyage contains no systematic account of native
life. He lacked the training to write such an account. He knew no
native languages. The standardized methods by which skin color is
gauged and skulls are measured had not yet been established. He was
trying to be an anthropologist before anthropology had really been
invented. What he could do, he did diligently and well, narrat-
ing incidents, describing people, dwellings, canoes, and implements,
and illustrating with the vivid drawings for which he had an ex-
traordinary talent. His schematic sketch of an outrigger canoe is a
model of descriptive draughtsmanship. Beyond this, Huxley's anthro-
pology suffered from the same want of human insight which was
later, though in lesser degree, to characterize his social and political
criticism, and one is tempted to think that savages aroused his sense
of humor more than his impulse to understand. But such a
judgment is unfair. If he did not take them quite seriously, if like
many Victorians he thought of them as children, at least he regarded
them steadfastly as human beings. Against the occasional violence
and impulsiveness of the Papuans must be set "their invariable
24 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
gentleness towards each other; the kind treatment of their women;
the cleanliness of their persons and of their dwellings; their progress
in the useful arts; . . . [and] the perseverance and grace of design
displayed in many of their carved works." 23
On the fourth cruise, the great island-continent of New Guinea,
"shut out," as Huxley wrote, "from intercourse with the civilized
world, more completely than China, and as rich if not richer in
things rare and strange," unfolded its green, mist-shrouded coasts
before them. 24 And one day the men of the Rattlesnake saw the low
mists and thick clouds suddenly roll away and beheld with astonish-
ment the lofty blue mountain range which, till then unknown to
white men, thereafter bore their captain's name. But Owen Stanley
himself, though equally exalted and still consumed with ambition
to be a great explorer, remained securely on his ship or went through
timid and tentative motions of exploration. He felt too responsible
to let his men run avoidable risks, and he was too humanitarian to let
natives be shot at even in self-defense.
As a matter of fact, his world had turned to glass at the very
moment when he was preparing to discover it. Three years of guiding
his fragile, populous little wooden kingdom through the steamy waters
and sharp labyrinths of the Coral Sea had changed an ambitious,
idealistic young commander into a fearful, snarling, boasting, scruple-
ridden neurotic. The whole atmosphere of the ship altered, and the
study of the captain's character became the absorbing preoccupation
of the crew. Huxley's solution at the time was simple. "Funk," he pro-
nounced, after another instance of extreme caution with the natives.
"What does the man want? I suppose nothing would satisfy him of
the security of his little body but seeing all the bows and arrows in
the boat and all the men bound on the beach." 25
The crisis came when the Rattlesnake once more turned southward
toward Sydney. The captain suffered a complete prostration. Even
in convalescence his mind was uncertain, and he dreamed and talked
continually of great fame as a scientific explorer. He had to put him-
self in Dr. Thomson's charge and Lieutenant Yule took command of
die ship. In March, 1850, one month after his arrival in Sydney, the
captain died. He had not scaled the summits of the Owen Stanley
range, but at least he had done his surveying job: he had discovered
a broad deep passage through the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait*
A Scientific Odyssey 25
When at last the fourth cruise was over, Huxley made a final entry
in his diary:
Could the history of the soul be written for that time [the voyage] it
would be fuller of change and struggle than that of the outward man, but
who shall write it? I, the only possible historian, am too much impli-
cated, . . ,
I have besides no talent for writing on any such subject. * . . I am not
of a 'subjective' disposition and unless I have some tangible object for my
thoughts they all go woolgathering. 26
He had discovered himself as little as Stanley had discovered the
rivers of New Guinea. He had contemplated the broad reaches of the
obvious, but failed to move upstream.
Late in the evening of May 7, 1849, Netty Heathorn made an entry
in her journal:
This morning I woke to sorrow. Scarcely could I believe in dear Hal's
departure yet the bitter parting of the previous night was too vivid to let
me doubt about it. So much did I struggle to suppress my grief that when
he was gone I almost feared my parting had not evinced sufficient feeling,
but . . . after he had gone ... it burst forth in all the vehemence of
despair such anguish inexpressible convulsed me. . . .
Still his last dear words murmured in my ear 'God help you Menen
dear.' I felt his arm round me as he patted poor Snap and bade me pet him
for his sake his last dear kiss ere he sprang upon his horse and was (oh
how soon) out of sight 21
Ill
A Prophet in His Own Country
HUXLEY came home nerved to rational patience. He expected
no more than a brilliant and moderately remunerative success
in a moderately short period of time. The project began well. The two
papers he had sent home from the Rattlesnake had both been pub-
lished and already won considerable recognition, particularly from
Edward Forbes, professor at the Government School of Mines, a
genial and talented geologist with a romantic weakness for assuming
lost continents to explain peculiarities of plant and animal distribution,
On the recommendation of Forbes and Sir Richard Owen, Huxley
was granted six months' leave by the Royal Navy with the possibility
of another six months thereafter. But though Huxley was rationally
moderate, the Royal Navy was only moderately rational. It was
willing to donate Huxley's time, but, despite its declared policy, not
its own money, for the publication of the remaining material he had
gathered on the cruise of the Rattlesnake. Eminent men interceded
with eminent men, even within the ministry itself, but to no avail*
That inscrutable abstraction, the Royal Navy, was adamant, either
in neglect or hostility.
And now his rational expectations suffered another blow. One could
be paid for classical knowledge but, only in rare instances, for
scientific knowledge. The classics were necessary to the cultivation
26
A Prophet in His Own Country 2-7
of gentlemen and the manufacture of clerics, but science was essential
only to a few rather vulgar and utilitarian professions. Therefore it
remained in large degree, like cricket and football, the pursuit of
amateurs, of whom Sir Charles Lyell was the most famous.
There is [Huxley writes his sister] no chance of living by science. I have
been loth to believe it, but it is so. There are not more than four or five
offices in London which a Zoologist or a Comparative Anatomist can hold
and live by. Owen, who has a European reputation, second only to that of
Cuvier, gets as Hunterian Professor 300 a year! which is less than the
salary of many a bank clerk. 1
To reform his own position, Huxley needed almost to reform English
intellectual life. Eventually he did both, but at the moment he could
do little more than fret and complain. He was beginning to feel
imposed upon.
Meanwhile honors appeared with ironical swiftness. Before he was
quite twenty-six he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a
year later was awarded the Royal Medal, over tfife heads of many far
older men who had done a greater quantity of work. Best of all, he
was received at once into the most distinguished scientific society in
England, dining with men like Lyell and Owen and discovering with
refreshing surprise that Sir Richard was human enough to smoke his
cigar and sing his song "like a brick." 2
"I take all these things quite as a matter of course," he says, "but
am all the while considerably astonished." 3 He was immensely,
delightfully astonished. At twenty-six he could not have been other-
wise, with all his rational expectations. When Forbes told him that
he was "all right for the Royal Society," Huxley "spoke and looked
as cool as a cucumber," but afterward he "wandered hither and thither
restlessly half over London." 4 What a sense of power to keep the
tightest grip on himself in the midst of so much exhilarating recogni-
tion!
Having plunged into the struggle, he had a moment of youthful
revulsion, which took the form of extravagant idealism and consider-
able misconception of his own nature. He was burning with ambition,
yet he wrote his sister, "The worst of it is I have no ambition. . . .
A worker I must always be ... but if I had ^400 a year I would
never let my name appear to anything I did." 5 He loved the
28 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
personality of conflict and the excitement of crowds, yet he aspired
"to be a voice working in secret and free from all those personal
motives which have actuated the best." 6 "The real pleasure, the true
sphere, lies in the feeling of self-development in the sense of power
and growing oneness with the great spirit of abstract truth." 7 He
asserted with suspicious iteration that his only care was to leave his
mark "free from the abominable blur of cant, humbug, and self-
seeking," and denied passionately that he had obtained his member-
ship in the Royal Society by intrigue. To be sure, he announced else-
where with genial frankness that he was going to a meeting of the
British Association "to do a little necessary trumpeting.** 8 Huxley
was of course neither an intriguer nor a hypocrite. His moral aspira-
tion was very genuine. If he trumpeted judiciously for himself, he was
later to trumpet heroically for Darwin. He advanced himself almost
by instinct but served the ideal by conscious choice.
At the Ipswich meeting of the British Association in 1851, Huxley
met some of the gifted young scientists of his own generation
notably Hooker and Tyndall. Belonging to the inner circle of Eng-
land's scientific families, Joseph Dalton Hooker was born with
botanist's drying papers in his mouth and a small volume of Linnaeus
in his hand. His life was a brilliant foregone conclusion. He diligently
performed the lessons set before him by his father Sir William and
others, voyaged adventurously to the Antarctic and later to the
Himalayas, accumulated specimens, grew learned and shrewd, re-
mained plodding and somewhat unimaginative and at thirty-two
discovered without much astonishment that he was one of the ablest
botanists in England. His one extravagance was a hot temper; his
one indulgence, a tendency to reprehend the same fault irx his new
friend.
Tyndall was of atmosphere all compact, having devoted much o his
life to studying it scientifically and to describing it poetically. He
was Huxley rarefied and intensified, Huxley without the solidity and
the mass. He was at once more fanciful and more logical, more im-
pulsive and more restrained. He had all of an Irishman's generosity
with all of an Irishman's jealous insistence on his rights. He took
himself very seriously and, for humor, was capable only of a boister-
ous and farcical playf ulness. His courage, both moral and physical,
was rash and quixotic. His loyalty was absolute, being coupled with
A Prophet in His Own Country ^^
an almost feminine intensity of devotion and gentleness of manner
which made him the life-long friend of men so unlike as Carlyle and
Faraday. His admiration of Carlyle had led him not only to read the
Germans, but to study among them, at Marburg and Berlin, where
he had already made discoveries in magnetism and radiant heat. If
Huxley became the statesman of nineteenth-century science, Tyndall
became its knight-errant. His popular writing was in a sense even
clearer and simpler than Huxley's but narrower and slighter, often
evaporating into diluted Wordsworthian nature rhapsody. That the
two should become close friends was almost inevitable.
Huxley formed another memorable friendship at this time that
with Herbert Spencer, then subeditor of the London 'Economist and
one of the most remarkable men ever to write a dozen volumes of
philosophy. Trained by his father from infancy to find causes for
everything, he soon found cause for being a delightful eccentric, a
confirmed bachelor, and a relentless theorizer about everything that
came under his lynx-eyed mental vision. His massive Autobiography
one of those books that is very amusing in retrospect, like a bore
from whom one has escaped demonstrates that he took himself
quite as seriously as he took the universe, and could explain himself
as exhaustively and polysyllabically. Largely self-educated despite the
desperate efforts of a pedagogical uncle and a pedagogical father to
interfere, Spencer had learned much science and no Greek; invented,
successfully and unsuccessfully, a great number of gadgets, from rail-
road speedometers to wire-drawn flying machines; embarked on
several careers, from teaching school to constructing bridges; and
was now gradually settling down to the comfortable and sedentary
destiny of explaining everything.
He had discovered his capacities and his tastes by a calm and almost
encyclopedic process of elimination. He had tried the opera several
times, but was profoundly disturbed by the irrationality of people
singing duets and trios while going about the business of the plot.
He had tried vegetarianism and desisted for the singular reason that
it took the vigor out of his style. One day George Eliot said to him
that considering how much thinking he did, she was surprised to
see no lines in his forehead. "I suppose it is because I am never
puzzled," replied Spencer. 9 He had die faculty of automatic induc-
tion. In his Autobiography he explains that facts accumulated in his
30 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
mind until they had arranged themselves neatly into a generalization.
There it was, ready-made. Obviously, such a man would be a fool not
to explain the universe.
At the 1852 meeting of the British Association, Spencer heard
Huxley's paper on oceanic Hydrozoa, and having thereafter used
some of the facts in his equally brilliant "Theory of Population
deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility," presented
Huxley with a copy. The two young men were impressed with each
other.
Spencer's article on "Population" was even more significant than
Huxley realized. It expounded a theory of social evolution based on
something very close to natural selection. "From the beginning,"
wrote Spencer, "pressure of population has been the proximate cause
of progress." 10 And again:
For those prematurely carried off must, in the average o cases, be those
in whom the power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidably follows,
that those left behind to continue the race, are those in whom the power
of self-preservation is the greatest are the select of their generation. 11
In The Leader for the same year, Spencer had published "The
Development Hypothesis," in which he had subscribed to biological
evolution according to Lamarck's hypothesis. He frequently argued
the question with his new scientific friend, but as Huxley was as
sharply critical as Spencer was resourcefully constructive, the result
was a prolonged and friendly disagreement.
The two rapidly became intimate. In one sense, it was a friend-
ship between a plenum and a vacuum. Spencer thought busily to
keep his head full of speculation. Huxley thought just as busily to
keep his head antiseptically free from speculation. Huxley was full
of facts. Spencer was full of ideas that craved facts. In a discussion of
tragedy Spencer's name was mentioned. "Oh!" exclaimed Huxley,
". . . Spencer's idea of a tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact.'* 12
In 1858 Spencer moved to St. John's Wood to be near Huxley*
Meanwhile, eminent men continued to intercede with eminent
men in Huxley's behalf up to an apparently acquiescent prime
minister, and still the Royal Navy remained inflexible in ambiguity.
It granted Huxley two more periods of six months* leave, recognizing
that he should not be available for further duty until his book was
A Prophet in His Own Country 31
published, but firmly refused to provide the publication money which
would render him available. At the end o the extreme interval,
Huxley once more applied for both time and money. Thereupon,
four letters, in a crescendo of threatening urgency, ordered him to
report to the H.M.S. Illustrious. But his fame had by now become
moderately lucrative. He had obtained from The Westminster
Review and a publisher of scientific textbooks sufficient work to pay
for subsistence. He therefore became a civilian, and immediately
afterwards the Royal Society, prevented until then by its regulations,
granted him the money he had requested.
He still had to find a science professorship in a country where
science professorships hardly existed. In the years that followed,
openings appeared at Toronto, Aberdeen, Cork, and King's College,
London. He was steadily recommended by the leading scientists in
his field, and the friends and relatives of politicians were steadily
appointed to the vacancies. He scarcely hoped for a place in London,
though distinguished men begged him to wait for the brilliant future
that lay before him there. But he couldn't be a promising young man
forever, accumulating academic honors in a financial vacuum. Sooner
or later, he must marry Netty or release her from her engagement.
Perhaps, after all, science and marriage were simply incompatible.
He began to think of giving up his profession.
At last, he appealed to Netty in desperation:
There are times when I cannot bear to think of leaving my present pur-
suits, when I feel I should be guilty of a piece of cowardly desertion from
my duty in doing it, and there come intervals when I would give truth and
science and all hopes to be folded in your arms ... I know which course
is right, but I never know which I may follow; help me ... for there is
only one course in which there is either hope or peace for me. 13
Months passed, and no answer came. Of course the mails were slow.
He realized that. But he also realized how hard it must be for a
woman living so far away, in a world so different, to understand his
dilemma. He tried to make up his mind to migrate to Australia as a
doctor. No, medicine would be too close to his beloved scientific work.
He must go as a squatter, a storekeeper. At length he recognized these
follies for what they were and manfully made up his own mind.
"My course in life is taken," he wrote. "I will 120* leave London." 14
32 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
And in fact the metropolis was as important to him as ever it was to
any eighteenth-century wit or statesman. Science meant for him not
so much retreat and inspiration, as discussion and debate, politics
and action. London, he declared, "is the place, the centre of the
world." 15 But he also wrote to Netty, "Depend upon it, the trust
which you placed in my hands when I left you to choose for both of
us has not been abused." 14 Nor had his trust in her. Soon after, he
received the long-hoped-for letter of acquiescence and encourage-
ment.
Now that he had resolved to wait her out, Destiny became, though
not without some savage rebellion, the servile old woman she usually
is with dominating men. In 1854 Edward Forbes accepted a chair at
Edinburgh and urgently recommended that Huxley be appointed
to succeed him as professor of natural history and paleontology at
the Government School of Mines. Huxley was given one of Forbes's
lectureships and then fell heir to the other when his "new colleague
was suddenly afflicted with a sort of moral colic, an absurd idea that
he could not perform the duties of his office, and resigned it" ie In
the same year he was offered various temporary lectureships, as well
as an assignment with the Geological Survey, which soon became
permanent.
But his good fortune was filled with ironies. Soon after succeeding
to Forbes's post through Forbes's intercession, he was obliged, as a
member of the Royal Society Council, to vote on candidates for the
Royal Medal. Hooker, named first, had received his warm support.
Then Forbes was named. Huxley told the Council that in his
opinion neither candidate should exclude the other and that he would
vote for both. In letters of characteristic courage and frankness, he
explained to both candidates precisely what he had done, even adding
to Hooker that he would have given "a great deal to be able to back
Forbes tooth and nail.*' 1T The Medal was awarded to Hooker. "Your
way of proceeding," Forbes had replied to Huxley, "was as true an
act of friendship as any that could be performed." He concluded,
"And so, my dear Huxley, I trust that you know me too well to think
that I am grieved or envious, and you, Hooker, and I are much of the
same way of thinking." 1$ Huxley valued this letter as one of his
dearest possessions the moifc so as Forbes died within the year.
A Prophet in His Own Country 33
Huxley had scarcely recovered from the first shock of his friend's
death when he was offered the vacant seat at Edinburgh. The salary
was one thousand pounds but the duties were heavy and he had
resolved never to leave London. Determined by this time that he
should not leave, the London authorities equaled Edinburgh's offer.
The nobler course was becoming pleasantly profitable.
Shortly before Huxley obtained his post at the School of Mines,
Netty's father decided to return with his daughter to England.
Huxley proposed the marriage take place early in the following
summer. When at last after six years he saw Netty again, he was
shocked to find her gravely ill. A year before leaving Australia, on a
strenuous trip to a newly opened mining camp, she had caught a
severe chill and then fallen into the hands of a doctor of the blood-
letting, calomel-dosing school. A more modern practitioner had
rescued her almost at the last moment. In his character of doctor,
Huxley took her, as if she were simply one of his patients, to a
famous London colleague, asking privately for an opinion afterward.
"I give her six months of life," said the eminent man.
"Well, six months or not," Huxley burst out, "she is going to be
my wife." 19
The eminent man was immensely indignant. The comfortable
conspiracy of professional ethics had been flagrantly violated.
Happily, another eminent man commuted the death sentence to
very slow recovery. Determined at all events to have a few months
of happiness, the young people were married soon after, in July,
1855, while Huxley was still in the midst of his strenuous first lecture
course. In spite of black prospects, his spirits rose. He resisted with
difficulty an impulse to howl and crow in class. A month later they
were honeymooning at Tenby in Wales. Mrs. Huxley was still so
weak that her husband had to carry her to and from the beach. When
she became ill, he waited on her with professional efficiency. "Un vrai
mart"* pronounced the French maid admiringly.
CojQgratulations flowed in upon Huxley from the scientific world.
"I hope your marriage will not make you idle," wrote Charles
Darwin, a new friend. "Happiness, I fear, is not good for work." At
almost die same time* Huxley was writing Hooker such letters as the
following:
34 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
So far as I can judge there can be no doubt that this really is a case of
downward movement. The stools of the trees are in their normal posi-
tion, and their roots are imbedded and interwoven in a layer of stiff blue
clay. 21
Darwin did not yet understand his new ally. Huxley's temptations
were overwork and rigorous self-denial. His wife and children
became his greatest happiness and fully as important to him as his
science, yet he was so abstemious of their society that he used to refer
to himself as "the lodger."
"Once we were married," wrote Netty, "the whole atmosphere
was scientific his occupation, his friends, his books the lectures he
gave that I attended. ... It was a revelation that ennobled the
world I lived in, made everything, for me, full of the strangest wonder
and interest." 22 It was hardly a Christian revelation. Before her
marriage, she had prayed that "Hal's" heart might be touched by
faith. Afterward, she came gradually to think of herself as an agnostic.
And yet to the end of her days she thanked "the Eternal Goodness" 23
for what was noble in her life and Hal's. In any case, they made a
religion of each other.
Wonderful and strange as the scientific world was to her, Netty
found she could instruct Hal in some of its niceties. When they came
home from a party or a dinner, he would ask her what she thought
of various learned colleagues. "Of one I said he was a miser, of another
I gave another characteristic,"
"Good heavens!" her husband would exclaim after an obviously
correct diagnosis, "have I married a witch? What makes you say
that?" 24 Perhaps he never learned what.
Netty was now paid the delicate compliment of respectful admi-
ration from a philosophic bachelor. Like most celibates, Herbert
Spencer never outgrew a cautious and playful interest iu women,
particularly when they were safely married. He would even have
been capable of romance, except that tender thoughts about a lady's
charms were invariably followed by sober reflections about her
purse* Congenial souls he sometimes found in this imperfect world,
but not congenial pocketbooks. With young Mrs. Huxley, there was
no question of either pocketbook or romance, and therefore he settled
down comfortably to a long friendship* She invited him to dinner,
and if he foresaw no prospect of "head sensations" or "cardiac en-
A Prophet in His Own Country 35
f eeblement," he responded with polysyllabic gallantries of acceptance.
Far from making him idle, Huxley's marriage made him incredibly
busy. By dispelling doubts and creating a citadel of certainty and
love, it seems to have released floods of new energy, so that he laid
Herculean labors on himself and accomplished them triumphantly.
Besides his regular lectures, averaging seven to eight a week from
February to June, he gave a supplementary night course in January,
regukr courses through the year to workingmen, the Fullerian series
at the Royal Institution from 1856 to 1858, and a large number of
occasional lectures. Many of these, delivered in halls crowded with
distinguished scientists, statesmen, and men of letters, required
original inquiry and meticulous preparation. He also carried on his
own investigations, wrote reviews and summaries of scientific books
for the journals, reorganized the Museum of Practical Geology for
student use, and with Hooker and others laid for the natural history
collections at the British Museum elaborate plans which were realized
many years later at the South Kensington. By way of vacations, he
performed his duties for the Geological Survey at Tenby or, when
headaches, dyspepsia, prostration, and other Victorian ills assailed
him too persistently, made mountain-climbing excursions into the
Alps, which resulted in a study of glaciers in collaboration with
Tyndall.
On the last evening of 1856, while his wife lay in the next room
waiting for her first child to be born, he planned his future in a spirit
of solemn dedication:
1856-7-8 must still be "Lehrjahre" to complete training in principles of
Histology, Morphology, Physiology, Zoology and Geology by Mono-
graphic Wor\ in each Department. 1860 will then see me well grounded
and ready for any pursuits in either of these branches.
It is impossible to map out beforehand how this must be done. I must
seize opportunities as they come, at the risk of the reputation for desul-
toriness.
In 1860 I may fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty "Meisterjahre,"
and with the comprehensive views my training will have given me, I
think it will be possible in that time to give a new and healthier direction
to all Biological Science.
To smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to
set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of
toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the
3 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
work is recognized as mine or not, so long as it is done are these my
aims? 1860 will show. 25
This amazing plan proved not only practicable but prophetic
even to the date 1860 and the reputation for desultoriness. He made
contributions to each of the sciences enumerated. He seized oppor-
tunities as they came, in particular that presented by the Darwinian
controversy in 1860; and here certainly he undertook work with al-
most complete indifference as to whether it was recognized as his
own. He did raise the tone of science, and he smote humbug as
heartily as Gladstone smote sinecure and extravagance. In fact, he
lived according to Carlyle's dictum: he did not know himself, but he
knew what he had to do.
Like many good lecturers, Huxley began by being a rather medi-
ocre one. His first venture, made at twenty-seven before one of the
glittering and monumentally starched audiences of the Royal Institu-
tion, was begun in terror and concluded in an earnest conviction of
intelligibility:
When I took a glimpse into the theatre and saw it full of faces, I did feel
most amazingly uncomfortable. I can now quite understand what it is to
be going to be hanged, and nothing but the necessity of the case prevented
me from running away. . . .
For ten minutes I did not quite know where I was, but by degrees I
got used to it, and gradually gained perfect command of myself and of my
subject. 26
Nevertheless, he received two letters of criticism one from a "work-
ing man" and another from a Mr. Jodrell, who afterward founded
the Jodrell Lectureships at University College, London. Huxley was
warned against "running his words, especially technical terms, to-
gether," "pouring out new and unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed,"
and "lecturing in a colloquial tone, suitable to a knot of students
gathered round his table, but not to a large audience." a7 His manner
at first seems also to have been overtense and at times belligerent 28
He labeled the letters "Good Advice*' and kept them always at hand
as a reminder.
But his very fear of an audience allowed him no peace except in
mastery- and mastery was inevitable for a man so quick-witted and
clear-headed, so elaborately disciplined and omnisciently well-read*
A Prophet in His Own Country . 37
In those days words and reasons still settled issues and events. To
speak well was to wield power and command respect, and to speak
like Huxley was to be a Hector among Trojans, a famous hero in the
long Victorian wars of discussion. Huxley accepted his destiny with
gusto. Yet every man is the prisoner of his talents. Huxley's kept him
on the battlefield rather too much of the time. The arts of peace are
higher than the arts of war.
An interesting specimen of Huxley's more popular lectures is that
"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences," which
he gave at St. Martin's Hall in the hurry and strain of his first year
of teaching. It seems to have been hastily written and is rather loose
in organization. Yet the exposition is always clear and vigorous, the
phrasing often vivid and memorable. Here one finds the famous
metaphor in which science is called trained and organized common
sense, as well as others less well known but quite as striking and
indicative:
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll
is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths
of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of
natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are
worth turning round. 29
Clearly, at twenty-nine Huxley had discovered his pen.
The lecture is equally significant in content. It reveals Huxley, at
this point in his career, as a theist, a romantic, and a disciple of
Carlyle. Science is recommended as much on ethical and aesthetic
grounds as on intellectual and practical. It disciplines the spirit as
well as the mind, and by teaching us to observe nature closely and
reason about her accurately, enables us to appreciate her aesthetically.
In short, natural beauty tends to be identified with scientific truth, and
spiritual consolation with both:
Leave out the Physiological sciences from your curriculum, and you launch
the student into the world . . . blind to the richest sources of beauty in
Gpd's creation; and unprovided with that belief in a living law, and an
order manifesting itself in and through endless change and variety, which
might serve to check and moderate that phase of despair through which,
If he takes an earnest interest in social problems, he will assuredly sooner
or later pass. 80
38 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
The reference to social problems is significant. In another passage,
Huxley aims a sharp thrust, almost in the language of Past and
Present, against the philosophy "which exhibits the world as a slave-
mill, worked with many tears, for mere utilitarian ends." 81
These tendencies are even more pronounced in another lecture,
delivered in 1856, "On Natural History as Knowledge, Discipline,
and Power." Here he states flatly that "nature is not a mechanism
but a poem," that where Cuvier's "correlation of organs" or agree-
ment in homologous structures fail to explain animal anatomy,
biologists may have to seek a higher principle which "appeals to the
aesthetic sense as much as to the mere intellect." 32 We rightly see our
sense of beauty answered in the beauties of nature because nature
results "from the benevolent operation, under the conditions of the
physical world, of an intelligence similar in kind, however superior
in degree, to our own." Huxley had evidently given himself up, for
a time at least, to the rhetorical and transcendental fervors of Car-
lyle's theism.
The lecture "On Natural History" is a curious combination of
cautious common sense and extravagant romanticism. He soberly
upholds inductive logic against Cuvier's doctrine that a whole
skeleton can be deduced from a single bone, and then seems quite
recklessly to throw all logic overboard in favor of the aesthetic sense.
He makes the most exaggerated claims for the spiritual benefits of
science, and then shrewdly warns that we may expect nemesis if
there are too many thinkers who have one moral faculty for science
and another for daily life.
It is just possible that in making this wise reservation, Huxley was
thinking of his illustrious contemporary Sir Richard Owen, then
Director of the Hunter Museum and widely known as "The British
Cuvier," Sir Richard had begun by being very kind, supporting the
young naval surgeon for various honors, and writing more than once
to the Admiralty in his behalf. But Huxley had been instinctively
on his guard. The British Cuvier was so frightfully polite* He had
such a ghastly smile. Moreover, he was infamous to the backstairs
of science. Actually, he seems to have been a social experimenter with
a penchant for sadism and mystification,
la 1852, Huxley had on Forbes's advice asked Owen for a letter of
recommendation :
A Prophet in His Own Country 39
I ... got no answer whatsoever of course I was in a considerable rage
. . . met him I was going to walk past but he stopped me and in the
blandest and most gracious manner said, 'I have received your note I
shall grant it.' The phrase and the implied condescension were quite
'touching' so much that I felt if I stopped a moment longer I must knock
him into the path [ ? ] I therefore bowed and walked off. Finally received
'The strongest and tyndest testimonial any man could possibly wish for/
. . . I give up any attempt to comprehend him from this time forth. 83
Plainly, Owen was both a tyrant and a prima donna: he loved power
and glory. He aided promising young men so long as they did not
become too promising and welcomed new ideas so long as they
agreed with his own. Huxley soon became far too promising, and by
1856 his ideas had become unwelcome also. As early as 1852 he wrote
his sister that his paper "On the Morphology o the Cephalous
Mollusca" would be held up if he did not keep it out of the hands o
a "particular friend/' "The necessity for these little stratagems utterly
disgusts me," he added. "... I do so long to be able to trust men
implicitly." 34 Huxley was a little like the brilliant professional
general who detests war.
Meanwhile, war was of course inevitable. In recent papers Huxley
had vigorously criticized Cuvier, the tutelary deity of comparative
anatomists, and had aroused much pious horror not so much by
his criticism itself as by its vigor. He had committed that last Vic-
torian enormity, that worst of virtuous errors he had made a mistake
in tone. Even Darwin, who had for many years been quietly and
decorously removing the bottom from Cuvier's universe, felt obliged
to write his young friend a letter of gentle remonstrance. In the
general outcry Owen took no part, but as Cuvier's principal heir,
he must have decided that Huxley could do no right. He had offended
first by denying Cuvier and upholding God. Soon he was to offend
even more unspeakably by denying God and upholding Darwin.
In 1856, Sir Richard Owen transferred from the Hunter to the
British Museum. Shortly after, having been given permission to use
the lecture theater at the School of Mines, he deliberately assumed
the tide of Professor of Paleontology in that institution. This was a
direct blow at Huxley, who though originally little interested in
fossils, had through his teaching and his work with the Geological
Survey become more and more of a paleontologist. The School of
40 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Mines asked Owen to explain. When he failed to do so satisfactorily,
Huxley broke off all personal relations with him.
And now Owen delivered himself into his enemy's hands. He was
a sacrifice to his own devious orthodoxy, for in those days bones had
theological significance. They represented the final stage in a long
retreat. In the seventeenth century it had been conceded that the
earth was not the center of the material universe. Must it finally be
conceded in the nineteenth that man was not anatomically unique?
How could he be sure there was a God if God gave him no material
sign of special favor? Goethe had done religion a disservice by
discovering the intermaxillary bone, common to apes, in the human
ear. Apparently Owen hoped to save man's soul by discovering in the
human skull large areas of bone which did not exist in any other
animal. Whether he really thought he had discovered them or
merely pretended to do so for other people's edification is not clear,
for the paper which he read before the Linnean Society in 1857 was
not only as pious, but fully as ambiguous as the Thirty-nine Articles
of the Anglican Church. At one point he emphasized that man and
monkey were astonishingly homologous down to the last tendon and
metatarsal. At another, he emphasized that man differed so much
from monkey and everything else that he must be assigned to a
separate subclass under Mammalia* Owen's zeal had led him to make
"elementary blunders in the anatomy of the human brain," 3<$ but his
immense prestige silenced opposition.
Not for long* If Sir Richard could not face his own facts, Huxley
was quite prepared to face them for him. He had taken Owen's
measure. The man was immensely learned and he was acute on fine
points, but he could "only work in the concrete from bone to bone." 8$
In broad generalization he was sentimental, pretentious, and feeble
a very shaky Goliath to attack so formidable a David, Huxley
possessed every honest weapon in the arsenal of controversy. Owen
had little but his duplicity, his deviousness, his ill-nature, his mastery
of detail, and his immense reputation all stilettoes and blunder-
busses> and of very dubious advantage in a losing battle* "Let him
beware!" concluded Huxley. 87
Having with several brief papers suavely knocked some cracks and
crevices in Owen's reputation, Huxley made a heavy frontal attack
in his Croonian lecture of 1858 "On the Theory of the Vertebrate
A Prophet in His Own Country 4*
Skull," delivered before the Royal Society and with carefully pre-
meditated cruelty on an evening when the British Cuvier himself
was in the chair. Huxley showed fundamental inconsistencies and ab-
surdities in Owen's favorite view that the vertebrate skull is a continu-
ation of the vertebrae, and then offered sounder views based on em-
bryological evidence. These were almost immediately accepted by
comparative anatomists. Huxley had here undertaken a course of in-
vestigation which later enabled him not only to demolish Owen, but
to produce his own epoch-making book on Man's Place in Nature. His
antagonism to Owen's theological anatomy had drawn him away
from Carlyle and was preparing him for Darwin. There was little
time for preparation.
IV
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince
/N fact, Owen's defeat would probably have seemed much sharper,
had not a more spectacular event immediately followed. On
June 18, 1858, the day after Huxley delivered his brilliant lecture,
Charles Darwin, the recluse author of a number of sound and
laborious books and papers, received a fateful letter from the Malay
Archipelago. It was from Alfred Russell Wallace and contained the
abstract of a theory explaining the evolution of species and their
adaptation to environment by natural selection:
I never saw a more striking coincidence [wrote Darwin to his friend Sir
Charles Lyell] ; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could
not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads
of my chapters. ... So all my originality, whatever it may amount to,
will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, wiU not
be deteriorated. 1
As usual his words failed completely to express his feelings. Thank
God! He didn't want anyone to see how keenly he felt being antici-
pated. Lyell had warned him that he might be. "I fancied that I had
a grand enough soul not to care," he wrote Joseph Hooker; "but I
found myself mistaken and punished.'* 2
Perhaps Darwin never really faced the possibility* He was so
4*
The Talc of an Unlikely Prince 43
absorbed in his work, and he made such slow progress with it. He
felt weak and listless so much of the time, was so easily upset and
made ill. He read so slowly, wrote so slowly, even thought so slowly,
that he always felt desperately behindhand, like a tortoise con-
centrating every energy on the next step, as he creeps in frantic haste
toward impossible horizons. How could such a man find time to
think of the world outside? And the thought of it was so unpleasant.
Darwin had a gentleman's fear of being conspicuous, an invalid's
sensitiveness to the idle curiosity of crowds. How could he come before
the nation with theories that were not only a scandal to orthodox
biology, but a blasphemy against religion and Victorian decency?
He knew how it would be, for his opinions had already leaked out
a little. "You will do more harm than any ten Naturalists will do
good," his old friend Falconer had grumbled to him. "I can see you
have already corrupted and half-spoiled Hooker!" 3 He had gradually
come as a matter of course to expect opposition and even contempt
from his nonnaturalist relations, among whom he had been a great
favorite.
For a number of reasons he had laid the world on a shelf and
pretty much forgotten about it. He had already been forestalled in
minor discoveries, but had not minded very much. "This is E. Forbes'
theory," he wrote to Asa Gray at the end of a geological discussion,
"which, however, I may add, I had written out four years before he
published." 4 And so he proceeded deliberately, testing every generali-
zation by hosts of relevant fact. And no man ever enjoyed a fact more:
"I was in London yesterday for a few hours with Falconer, and he
gave me a magnificent lecture on the age of man. . . . He has a
grand fact of some large molar tooth in the Trias." 5 Facts were his
pleasure and his amusement, but his serious business and his constant
care were his ideas about evolution, which had developed him in these
twenty years or more, nearly as much as he had developed them. It
was almost as though the ideas had grown a brain around- themselves.
"Why the shape of his head is quite altered," his father had said on
first seeing him after the voyage of the Beagle? His father noticed
such things.
Charles was frequently to discover kingdoms while searching for
asses, and he was always cautiously following his nose to the most
bizarre and extravagant destinations. His commonest reaction to
44 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
experience was a well-bred ejaculation of amazement. The commonest
phrases in his letters are "I was astonished," and "I was utterly dum-
founded." In short, Darwin muddled into genius and greatness like
a true Englishman.
His youth was a prosaic and comfortable variation on the folk tale
of the unlikely prince. The role of the king, his father, was very
adequately represented by Dr. Robert Darwin, a huge, energetic,
formidable man, who dominated a company as a mountain dominates
a landscape and who almost invariably concluded his day's work with
a two-hour monologue delivered to his awe-stricken children. Unlike
most talkers, he could read other people's thoughts. It is not surprising
that his four children felt ever in this great taskmaster's eye,
He was inclined to be severe with his son and seems to have reduced
him to an almost permanent posture of amiable and affectionate
apology. Charles's elder sister Caroline, who watched over him after
the early death of their mother, was "too zealous in trying to im-
prove" him. "I clearly remember after this long interval of years,
saying to myself when about to enter a room where she was *what
will she blame me for now?'" 7 But then, though a spirited and
attractive girl, Caroline apparently felt obliged to be an old maid to
take care of her father's household.
Growing up in the midst of so much moral sternness, Charles was
a timid, rather backward child, given to unconscious rebellion. He
stole fruit from the family garden by ingenious methods and some-
times gave it to certain older boys because they admired his swift
running. He loved dogs, was early moved by natural scenery, and
had a passion for collecting things, from franks and seals to newts
and beetles.
His student career was a good-natured attempt at respectability
by the member of a clan which honored neither ignorance nor idle-
ness, however affluent and graceful. As a schoolboy he was con-
scientious but uninspired. As a medical student at Edinburgh, he
was deterred from serious effort by the conviction that his father
would leave him a comfortable property. True, he disliked medicine,
He was pathologically sensitive and could not bear to watch an
operation. He also thought the Edinburgh professors extremely dull.
In desperation his father proposed Cambridge and the clergy* Having
consulted a sensitive but docilely orthodox conscience, Charles
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 45
agreed, looking forward to the prospect with some pride and perhaps
some secret rebellion. He resuscitated his Greek with good-humored
patience and positively enjoyed the close and cogent argument of
Paley's Evidences. But he obviously enjoyed snipe shooting and
beetle collecting a good deal more. "You care for nothing but
shooting, dogs, and rat-catching," exclaimed his father in exaspera-
tion, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and family.'* 8
And yet people noticed this amiable young snipe shooter. His
uncle, taciturn, hard-headed Josiah Wedgwood, hereditary manufac-
turer of china, mysteriously approved of him; and the great Sir James
Mackintosh was pleased to say, "There is something in that young
man that interests me." 9 To be sure, Charles had listened eagerly
to the eminent man's conversation, but then Sir James was one of the
best talkers in Great Britain. Charles could be bored with as much
discrimination as he could be interested. That was what was so
promising about his bitter protests against the Edinburgh professors,
whose erudition left no room for their sense. 10 And he was promising
in other ways. For one thing, he was a remarkably good shot. Though
physically awkward, he had a capacity for enthusiastic concentration
which enabled him to overcome handicaps. At the height of his rage
for hunting, he used to practice throwing up his gun before a mirror,
to make sure he always brought it to the correct position. He also
had an insatiable appetite for tabulation and other forms of minor
certainty. Shooting was almost a grief if he could not record every
hit and miss. Beetle collecting, begun without the slightest intellectual
curiosity, developed observation and practical knowledge. Eventually,
it led to constant attendance on J. S. Henslow, professor of botany at
Cambridge; so that Darwin became known among the dons as "the
man who walks with Henslow." u And thus, entering science by the
genial path of friendship, he absorbed a casual knowledge of zoology,
botany, and geology.
That his science and his religion could in any way be at odds
seems never to have entered his head. The scientists whom he knew
were very safe. Henslow, a minister of the church as well as professor
of botany, was so impeccably orthodox that he once confided to
Charles he would be grieved if a single word of the Thirty-nine
Articles were to be changed. Sedgwick, a professor of geology and
likewise an active divine, was famous for the intricacy and soundness
46 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
with which he reconciled the metaphysical claims of his two profes-
sions. Charles had no cause to doubt church dogma. He doubted only
himself:
We had an earnest conversation about going into Holy Orders [wrote
his old college friend J. M. Herbert]; and I remember his asking me, with
reference to the question put by the Bishop in the ordination service, "Do
you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit, &c.," whether
I could answer in the affirmative, and on my saying I could not, he said,
"Neither can I, and therefore I cannot take orders." 12
These doubts the reaction of a sensitive conscience to moderate
zeal and dedication never became sufficiently acute to provoke an
overt action. Charles shot snipe, collected beetles, tapped rocks, and
believed in God. But mostly, he shot snipe. "At that time," he wrote
long afterward, "I should have thought myself mad to give up the
first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science." ia
In 1831 he took a respectable degree at Cambridge, Neither he nor
his father said anything about the ministry. In fact, Charles had read
Humboldt's Travels and was longing for tropical scenery and a trip
at least to the Canary Islands. At that point Henslow recommended
him for the post of naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle, a tiny 242-ton
brig which was to sail on a five-year voyage, chiefly to survey the
coast of South America. Here was Humboldt's own adventure the
Canary Islands and heaven tool But at first his father would not let
him go. Captain Fitzroy did not like the shape of his nose. Even these
objections were overcome. Uncle Josiah actually wrote a letter
advising he be allowed to go. Having been rather extravagant at
Cambridge, Charles tried to console his father by saying, "I should
be deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on the
Beagle." Dr. Darwin smiled. "But they tell me you are very clever/* u
He gave his consent.
After his arrival in Plymouth, Charles had to wait two months for
the Beagle to sail. It was then that he suffered his first serious illness:
I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends
for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy*
I was also troubled with palpitation and pain about the heart, aad like
many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical
knowledge, was convinced that I had heart disease. I did not consult any
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 47
doctor, as I fully expected to hear the verdict that I was not fit for the
voyage, and I was resolved to go at all hazards. 16
Almost certainly, he did not have heart trouble at this time, for he
was to show during the voyage that he had unusual powers of
physical endurance.
When on December 27, 1831, the Beagle set out, Charles was on
board.
By far the most famous of all the great voyages of scientific dis-
covery, Darwin's was in many respects the least heroic. Its obvious
facts were seasickness, homesickness, and a quiet, amiable young
man who seemed chiefly intent on putting the South American
continent into specimen bottles. Yet his inward adventure is as
quaintly, magnificently impressive as the rise of the House of
Commons or the development of the cabinet system. As with them,
success was the happy result of an alliance between talent and acci-
dent. Darwin profited even from his ignorance, for at least it was
broad and catholic. He was not, like Huxley, restricted by a sound
medical preparation to making all his discoveries on jellyfish and
salps. He excavated the huge Megatheria as bravely as he dissected
marine worms. He thought about continents as naturally as about
rock crystals. And the big things were what needed to be thought
about at that particular time. Above all, he was relatively ignorant
of the theological, cataclysmic geology anterior to Lyell. Henslow's
last counsel had been that he purchase, read carefully, and emphat-
ically disbelieve LyelPs Principles of Geology, the first volume of
which had recently appeared. Charles bought, read, and believed. He
had not meant to believe. But the first bit of land that he saw, St. Jago
in the Cape de Verde Islands, was an incontrovertible demonstration.
He went ashore and discovered the new geology.
The Principles are perhaps the most important link in the long,
tenuous, precarious chain that leads up to The Origin of Species. Lyell
taught Darwin not only how to think about geology, but how to
think. From him Charles learned observation in the higher sense of a
thoughtful activity which suggests and tests hypotheses. Again, he
learned how to construct hypotheses. In other words, he came to see
nature as logical, regular, and self-explanatory. Only on very general
and state occasions should it, in the words of Cardinal Newman, "be
referred forward to design." 16 Otherwise, it should always "be
48 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
referred backward to physical causes." Finally, he acquired the
genetic or evolutionary point of view, for geology was then the most
historical of the natural sciences.
The sublimities of his South American voyage are nearly all
geological. Traveling up the valley of the Santa Cruz River, with the
white Andes all along the western horizon, Darwin was awed by the
realization that the lava capping the great cliffs must have been poured
out by volcanoes deep under the sea. And yet mountains were a
symbol of eternity! His tone toward the younger, higher range of the
Cordillera was positively condescending. What struck his imagina-
tion was time, graphically recorded by the slow geological clocks of
sand and stone. And time was to Victorian speculation what the Holy
Ghost was to medieval theology the invisible presence which ren-
dered all miracles credible. If only it happened gradually, regularly,
and impersonally enough, the impossible became perfectly probable.
What impossibility had excited Darwin? As a matter of fact, a kind
of geological process was going on inside his head, for he possessed
what, in his essay on "Sir Robert Peel,*' Walter Bagehot has called
the "alluvial" mind. 17 In such a mind, an idea develops so slowly that
it hardly seems to have been there at all until it seems to have been
there always. During his long voyage in the Beagle, tiny sands of
evidence had gradually accumulated some very alarming strata of
thought on the very bottom of Darwin's brain.
This process of deposition can be broadly traced in his letters, note-
books, and in the first and second editions of his Journal of the
voyage, 1 * He set sail probably without fixed or definite ideas on the
subject of species. LyelPs second volume, which Charles received in
Montevideo in 1832, rejected evolution because of the incompleteness
and ambiguity of the geological record. Vertebrates are to be found in
some of the earliest rocks known. On the other hand, his discussion
was full of suggestions of natural selection and adaptation to environ-
ment. Moreover, he laid down an elaborate and verifiable theory of
geological evolution. But if mountains and valleys evolved, why not
plants and animals? Darwin's library on the Beagle also contained
Cuvier, who admitted a certain succession of plants and animals in
terrestrial history and attempted to explain them by a neat series of
scientific gcneses and last judgments. Each geological epoch is marked
off by a cataclysm which sweeps away all existing life, and a fresh
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 49
"creation" which provides an entirely new supply, on improved
models.
This theory was revered doctrine, and evolution a disreputable
speculation, because Cuvier had maintained the first and Lamarck,
the second. Cuvier was all that a scientist should be; Lamarck, all that
he should not be. Lamarck's chemistry was an anachronism, his
physiology a museum piece, and his general theory, except for a few
inspired ideas, something between poetry and prophecy. Cuvier's
chemistry was strictly up to date; his paleontology was at once his
own creation and a valid science; his general theory, melodramatic
as it seems, was a cautious modification of Aristotle in the light of
new facts from the strata of the Seine basin and the Alps. Incidentally,
it permitted a vague but comforting compromise with Moses. Cuvier
had developed an old-fashioned idea in a modern and skeptical spirit;
Lamarck had developed a modern idea in a credulous and old-
fashioned spirit. Altogether, it is not surprising that on biological
matters Cuvier's language pervades the first edition of Darwin's
Journal.
And yet he seems to have accepted Cuvier for the wrong reasons.
Lyell was his model of the critical spirit. Cuvier seems to have been
simply a citadel of authority, scientific and theological. Darwin was
too conservative ever to outlive an influence, and therefore not only
Lyell, but Cuvier, Lamarck, Genesis, and even Paley have, either
positively or negatively, left their mark on the Origin.
Meanwhile, facts were continually, secretly building themselves
into an idea. Soon after landing in South America, he discovered
near Bahia the fossil bones of a giant sloth. Mingled with the remains
of this extinct animal, he found, as he wrote Henslow, marine shells
"identical with what now exist." 19 But then Cuvier's catastrophes
did not make a clean sweep. They did not fit the facts. As he traveled
on the continent, he noted that related species occupied similar
environments in adjacent territories. This made no sense according
to the creation theory, but according to an evolutionary one it meant
that a single type had spread out over a wide area and in the course
of time differentiated itself to cope with different environments.
Darwin also observed that vegetation on the west and east sides of
the Andes was markedly different, though soil and climate were
much the same. Why should the Creator introduce an abrupt change
jo Apes, Angels, and Victorians
at a mountain barrier? Charles was also much struck by the close
resemblance between existing species and those of the geological
epoch just past; and he hints that extinction may be due to failure
in the struggle for existence.
The Galapagos Islands were the most illuminating lesson. His visit
there seemed an actual journey into the biological past. "Surrounded
by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large cacti," the giant
lizards and tortoises, replacing the larger mammals in a normal
economy, seemed the veritable denizens of an earlier world. 20 But
the landscape not only suggested evolution, the facts demanded it.
Here distribution reduced the creation theory to an absurdity. Each
island had great numbers of species and varieties peculiar to itself,
but related species and varieties, both in the archipelago and the
adjoining mainland, differed from each other according to the magni-
tude of natural barriers between them. One could assume "a creative
power" with an inveterate sense of localism or an illogical desire for
busy work, but how much more illuminating to assume an evolu-
tionary force producing, with geographical separation, increasing
difference in the offspring of a common ancestor? While still in the
islands he had actually described his data as "undermining the
stability of species." 21 From that time on the subject "haunted"
him. 22
Many have felt that it stared him in the face, for with the heresy
of biological evolution he had been familiar ever since, as a boy in
his teens, he had read his grandfather's Zoonomia, But in those days,
evolution stared everybody in the face. And Charles had many other
matters to think about. The long voyage of the Beagle was his creative
period the withdrawal of the prophet to his wilderness, of the
scientist to his laboratory. In this crowded interval nearly every
important idea of his life appears at least in germ. He didn't have
time to develop them all. His principal achievements were geological
& revolutionary history of the South American continent and a
theory, equally revolutionary, of the growth of coral reefs and islands.
In any case Darwin was not the man to make himself notorious
by heresy at least, not until, by slow, imperceptible degrees, he had
become persuaded that notoriety, uo less than heresy, was absolutely
unavoidable. At the beginning of the voyage, he was still earnestly
religious and, much to the amusement of the officers on board,
Above: The Beagle laid ashore, River Santa Cruz.
Below: Darwin in 1849, from a sketch by Maguire.
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince ji
commonly settled moral questions by quoting the Bible. He also felt
that a primrose by the river's brim was very far from being simply
a Latin name and an aggregation of plant cells. Long after he had
returned from the tropics and discovered that nature was red in tooth
and claw, he continued to think of the Creator in terms of the idyllic
beauty of the English countryside. Moreover, his daydreams still
flowed docilely in the channel of his father's dispensation. "I steadily
have a distant prospect," he wrote his sister Caroline, "of a very
quiet country parsonage, and I can see it even through a grove of
Palms." 23
But as the months passed, this decorous vision underwent subtle
changes. First, hunting and fishing faded from the prospect and
scientific work replaced them. Once, shooting the first partridge of
the season had made his hands tremble so violently that he could
hardly reload his gun. Now, a "first day's partridge shooting . . .
cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which
tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue." 24 And
after climbing from dawn to dusk up the cold, windswept trails of
the high Andes, he could "hardly sleep at nights" for thinking of the
day's geology. 25 In fact, his recondite enthusiasm retained a boyish
gusto and freshness which made it, at least in his eyes, seem slightly
reprehensible. He justified geology to himself and his father as diffi-
dently as he had once justified snipe shooting. And no wonder!
Geology, he confided from Rio to his friend Fox, "is like the pleasure
of gambling. Speculating, on first arriving, on what the rocks may
be, I often mentally cry out 3 to i tertiary against primitive; but the
latter have hitherto won all the bets." 26 In middle life, it amused him
that he picked up information on the variability of species by con-
sorting with pigeon fanciers at village gin palaces.
The months lengthened into years, and the quiet parsonage itself
grew dim obscured not by a grove of palms, but by piles of un-
Biblical bones. Darwin learned gradually to contain his enthusiasm
for the Thirty-nine Articles. He began the voyage quoting Scriptures
and ended it mildly criticizing them in argument with the pious
Captain Fitzroy. Subtle changes in his ideas about species had been
mysteriously accompanied by subtle changes in his ideas about
Christianity. To think about evolution was to think about creation
and immutability. It was to think about ethics, religion, the Bible,
j 2 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
nature, and God. It was to think about what sound and weighty
scientists, what his father and Uncle Josiah, would think about him.
Charles was also discovering with some astonishment that all his
wonderful fun was actually a valuable work. Henslow had written
high praise of his letters and collections. Still better, Sedgwick had
called on his father and predicted a distinguished scientific career.
After reading the letter which contained this news, said Charles,
"I clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a bounding
step, and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological
hammer." 2T Perhaps, after all, he would become the kind of man
his father could admire. Both his ambition and his sense of guilt
were, as Dr. Douglas Hubble points out, connected with his feeling
for his father; 28 and no doubt ambition quieted guilt, and guilt
strengthened ambition, so that the two wove themselves into a long,
gently arching bridge between the repentant snipe shooter and the
great biological genius.
One day at St. Jago, as he took refuge under a rock ledge from the
glare of the sun and thought of the bold, simple geology of the island,
it struck Charles with a thrill of delight that he could write something
about the geology of the places he visited. Here was a book! Later,
Fitzroy bade him read aloud from his Journal and pronounced it
worth publishing. Here was another book! The quiet parsonage
receded into the future.
And yet a five-year cruise can hardly be all enthusiasm and dis-
covery. In such an immensity of time and space there must be much
monotony, vacancy, loneliness, and even privation. "Everything in
America," Charles wrote Fox, "is on such a grand scale the same
formations extend for 5 or 600 miles without the slightest change,
for such geology one requires 6 league boots." 2 * Sometimes he pcnt
ten hours in the saddle without a rest, and when food ran short,
smoked cigarettes like a Gaucho to fight off hunger. Except from his
immediate family, letters grew fewer and fewer* Meaawhilc^ his
college friends were finding their places in life. Fox had married.
"I shall be an old man," wrote Charles, **by the time I return, far too
old to look out for a little wife*" 80
As their sails wore thin and their tackle turned to shreds, Charles
and his comrades became obsessed with dreams of home. Absence
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 53
from England was a long and slow starvation. "I hate every wave of
the ocean," he wrote Fox, "with a fervour, which you who have only
seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand." 31 A
sailor's life is a paradox of folly. He sails the sea to tell incredible
tales afterward at a comfortable fireside, and talks of nothing but the
comfortable fireside while enacting the incredible tales.
On returning to England in 1836, he found that Sedgwick's
prophecy was already coming true. All sorts of busy, preoccupied
people knew about him and took him seriously. Of course, though
they had pronounced his collections priceless, they were at first too
busy and preoccupied to study them, but he was soon at work on fossil
bones and pickled insects with some of the most eminent scientists
in England. He became a fellow of the Royal Geological and Zoologi-
cal Societies, and was shortly after appointed to the council of the
first and the secretaryship of the second. "I remember," he wrote many
years later of his Cambridge days, "one of my sporting friends,
Turner, who saw me at work with my beetles, saying that I should
some day be a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the notion seemed to
me preposterous." 32 In sudden realization of his debt, he wrote to
Fitzroy that the voyage of the Beagle had been the making of his
life.
Dr. Darwin did not mention the fading parsonage. His change of
heart, if it really was such, took the form of a health measure. While
in South America, Charles had been stricken with a long and severe
illness, which, though he reflected long on the symptoms and after-
effects, Dr. Darwin could not diagnose. Nevertheless, he pronounced
his son too delicate to assume regular duties in the world. By de-
grees Charles became worse, so that for forty years he "suffered
terribly from weakness, fatigue, headache, insomnia, sinking feelings,
and dizziness." As time went on, the slightest deviation from routine
became disastrous. A half-hour's conversation with a stranger could
give him a sleepless night. An hour in church could produce dizziness
and nausea. Most of his waking life was spent on a sofa recuperating
from brief intervals of exercise or work. At times of fatigue even the
weight of a book was insupportable. The worst of it was that he
usually appeared ruddy and healthy. "Every one tells me that I look
54 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
quite blooming and beautiful," he wrote feelingly to Hooker in 1849;
"and most think I am shamming, but you have never been one of
those." 33
Dr. Douglas Hubble is convinced he was shamming, or at least
he regards the illness as psychopathic, having its cause in environ-
mental factors and, by a pleasant irony, chiefly in the puzzled paternal
physician himself. Dr. Robert Darwin's cold and gloomy tyranny had
resulted in a household of "disagreeable and unfulfilled daughters,
and neurotic sons." 34 His elder son Erasmus was so lamed in
initiative that he was capable of nothing but graceful bachelordom,
and Charles was left with a morbid craving for affection that en-
couraged excessive care from his wife and so led to lifelong hypo-
chondriacal illness. Darwin's biographers have commonly pitied
him his many years of suffering and wondered that he could complete
vast researches working only two hours a day. And yet, after reading
the Darwin correspondence, one cannot but feel that his illness was a
very useful adjustment to his career, enabling him to concentrate
ruthlessly and avoid all distractions, from attending official dinners
to reading metaphysics and religion. Late in life, he explained to a
clergyman that physical weakness had prevented him from feeling
"equal to deep reflection, on the deepest subject which can fill a man's
mind." 35 Dr. Hubble believes that Darwin's ills were not only a
negative but a positive benefit: "His disordered and sleepless nights
allowed his laborious mind to brood in solitude over a generalization,
while two hours' observing and recording in the morning would
expose the night's hypothesis to realistic examination and complete
the day's work." 3e
Dr. Hubble concedes that Darwin's illness may also have had
some hereditary basis. In another illuminating diagnosis. Dr. Walter
C. Alvarez stresses this factor, describing Darwin as an asthenic or
"constitutional inadequate." ** Nervous tension frequently expresses
itself in visceral disturbances and may be due, according to Dr.
Alvarez, to a neural weakness closely related to insanity. It usually
occurs in families where insanity or other grave psychic trouble is
also present. On his paternal side, Charles's grandfather Erasmus
"stammered badly and in other ways was odd." His uncle Erasmus
committed suicide; his father stammered and was hypersensitive; his
brother complained often humorously of mental fatigue and fail-
The Tale of an Unlikely Prince 55
ing faculties. On the maternal side two of his aunts were eccentric
and his uncle Thomas Wedgwood suffered from fits of depression
"hardly distinguishable from insanity." 38
Soon after his return to England, Darwin called on his hero Lyell.
A substantial country gentleman turned scientist, Charles Lyell was
then nearly forty a handsome, dignified man who curiously com-
bined Scottish prudence with generous enthusiasm and unselfish
devotion to science, scholarly abstraction and absent-mindedness with
friendly manners and an open, social nature. He surprised Charles
by actually being interested not only in his travels but in his ideas.
They discussed coral islands. Lyell had already explained them as
due to volcanic craters. The difficulty was that in many cases no
evidence of volcanic action had been found and the coral deposits
extended down to depths much greater than those at which coral
organisms can live. Diffidently, Charles outlined his own theory. To
be sure, when they were alive, the organisms had been in shallow
water, but as they had built upward, the ocean floor had been very
slowly sinking. Lyell was all attention. He put cautious questions.
Charles's evidence was as impressive as his theory. Suddenly, Lyell
jumped from his seat and began to prance about the room, chuckling
with delight. What wonderful simplicity! The explanation was
certainly correct, immensely preferable to his own craters. Moreover,
it was a key to subsidence and elevation throughout the Pacific.
Again Charles was naively amazed. He had no idea he had made
such an important discovery. He also noticed that Lyell was much
more tolerant of biological evolution than his Principles of Geology
indicated.
Charles's scientific heroes seldom survived personal acquaintance.
The great botanist Robert Brown, whom he met just before sailing
on the Beagle, was ridiculously cautious about communicating his
discoveries. Humboldt, whom he met at a breakfast shortly after
returning to England, was unheroically cheerful and overtalkative.
On the other hand, Lyell successfully maintained his pedestal for
many years, but not without some desperate balancing and squirming.
Charles long remembered with gratitude all that he had learned from
the Principles of Geology. He also found more and more reason
to value Lyell's practical sagacity and later, when Darwinism was
5 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
becoming an intellectual empire with extensive practical affairs of its
own, affectionately called him his "Chancellor of the Exchequer,"
Yet, a shrewd observer, Charles was never a great admirer of the
Scotch and worldly virtues. "Lyell's over-estimation of a man's
position in the world seemed to me his chief foible. He used to discuss
with Lady Lyell, as a most serious question, whether they should
accept some particular invitation." 89 Charles probably also thought
it a little absurd that, though Lyell rigidly limited himself to three
invitations a week, he "looked forward to going out oftener in the
evening with advancing years as to a great reward," 40
Being a young man of good family and to his never-ceasing
astonishment of considerable eminence in his own right, Charles
came to know many of the eminent literary and political, as well as
scientific, men of the day. He was seldom overawed by great abilities,
and rather distressed by great abilities combined with serious faults.
He preferred geniuses who were gentlemen, liberals, and humani-
tarians. He therefore much preferred Macaulay to Carlyle. Macaulay
did not talk too much and he always talked facts and good sense.
George Grote was so pleasant and unpretentious that Charles was
quite shocked to hear Carlyle call the History of Greece "a fetid
quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it" 41 At this time he thought
Carlyle's sneers were partly jokes.
For good-natured eccentricity, on the other hand, he had an
Englishman's zest. He was very fond of genial, downright old Earl
Stanhope, who inflexibly wore brown to match his complexion and
who firmly believed what was utterly incredible to everybody else*
"Why don't you give up your fiddle-faddle of Geology and Zoology,
and turn to the occult sciences?" he once demanded of Charles. 42
Charles treasured the remark for over forty years.
V
A Premeditated Romance
November 12, 1838, Charles confided to Lyell, "I write because
I cannot avoid wishing to be the first person to tell Mrs. Lyell
and yourself that I have the very good, and shortly since very un-
expected fortune, of going to be married." * If Darwin discovered
evolution by accident, he arrived at marriage by logic. More than a
year before the event and, it would seem, in the complete absence of
any visible and possible lady, he had jotted down a series of notes
on this unscientific subject. Among the advantages of matrimony he
listed: "children (if it please God) constant companion (& friend
in old age) charms of music & female chit-chat." Among the dis-
advantages: "terrible loss of time, if many children forced to gain
one's bread; fighting about no society." But he reflects, "What is the
use of working without sympathy from near and dear friends? Who
are near and dear friends to the old, except relatives?" And his
conclusion is: "My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one's
whole life like a neuter bee working, working, and nothing after all.
No, no won't do. Imagine living all one's days solitarily in smoky,
dirty London house Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a
sofa, with good fire and books and music perhaps compare this
vision with the dingy reality of Gt Marlboro St.
"Marry, marry, marry. QJE.D." 2
57
5 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
It was inevitable that Charles should marry a Wedgwood. His
family had done so for generations. In 1837 his sister Caroline had
braved her father's displeasure and terminated with an acceptance
the long and reticent courtship of Josiah Wedgwood. "He was 42, and
she was 37 years old. His mother had longed for this to happen thir-
teen years ago." 8 In marrying a Wedgwood, Charles could show his
respect and affection for his Uncle Jos, his love for his Aunt Bessy,
and his strong attachment for Maer itself, where he had spent some
of his happiest days and where life was as gay and social as it was
cold and austere at Shrewsbury. What more logical than to marry a
fragment of Maer and carry it off into his own studious solitude?
Whether he considered the Darwin-Wedgwood heredity, one cannot
be sure. Some years later, he feared "hereditary weakness'* 4 for his
children, though he may have been thinking simply of his own
family.
The only remaining question was, what Miss Wedgwood of his
own age was available? Providentially, there was just one Emma,
who was thirty and a year older than himself. From an early age
she had been described by sober and reticent Wedgwoods and Aliens
as "good-looking," "pretty," and above all "sweet-tempered." Her
life had been "crowded with incident" only in the sense of Oscar
Wilde's Cecily Cardew. At five she had astonished everybody by
reading Paradise Lost through to the end. At nine she had survived
the whooping cough "more sweet and gentle than ever." * At twelve
she was called Little Miss Slip-slop because of her indifference to
dress and her ability to make a "litter," and in this character she
persisted even after marriage, so that Charles, in whom the firm
inculcation of his father had made order almost a temperamental
necessity, was obliged to accept chaos outside the confines of his
study.
At eighteen, Emma was a pretty girl of middle height and dignified,
graceful carriage, with large gray eyes, fine brown hair, a straight
nose, a fresh complexion, considerable expanses of forehead and chin,
and a calm, kindly, resolute expression. Her manner toward young
men was frank and open, but there were in her letters a decision and
firmness of tone that, introduced into the pleasant inanities of gallant
conversation, must have seemed formidable. When at this time
Emma, her sister Fannie, and Edward Drewe, a youthful and distant
A Premeditated Romance 59
relative, were taken to Geneva for a year by Aunt Jessie and her hus-
band Sismondi, the historian, there was some quiet hope of a match
between Edward and Emma. Her references to the young man in her
letters were as laconic and cheerfully impersonal as the reports of a
vivisectionist on the reactions of a decapitated rabbit. To her amused
disgust, Sismondi, whose Continental ebullience was the wonder of
the family, thought it wise to counsel her in the art of effective
maneuver. At the end of two or three months, Edward fell in love
with a French-Swiss girl several years older than he and much less
attractive than Emma.
On her return to England, she began a young lady's customary
round of dances, theaters, and concerts. She enjoyed herself thor-
oughly, but very much in her own way. Her married sisters occasion-
ally made desperate and defeated allusions to her toilette and attire.
Apparently she was invincible in her idea of having no ideas about
dress. "If you happen to be in a ribbon shop," she wrote one sister,
"will you get three yards of not very handsome ribbon for a turned
straw bonnet. I am quite indifferent about the colour, except not
straw colour." 6 The years passed. Little nieces and nephews appeared
on all sides, and her mother became an invalid. Emma went to fewer
dances, and her natural vivacity was sobered by her responsibilities
as nurse and caretaker.
At this perilous moment, which neatly coincided with Charles's
return to England, destiny intervened in the substantial shape of at
least a dozen conspiring Wedgwoods and Darwins. "It is a match that
every soul has been making for us," Emma confided later to her dear
Aunt Jessie, "so we could not have helped it if we had not liked it
ourselves." 7 Fortunately, the two young people had been thinking
earnestly about each other. Perhaps, in spite of his theoretical approach
to romance, Emma was one of the objects which Charles had seen
beyond his grove of palms; and certainly his return from the South
American void had produced in her letters a tone which the doings
of other young men had entirely failed to evoke. She was expecting
the chicken pox and Charles at about the same timethe one with
characteristic calm and matter-of-factness, the other with an excite-
ment which she was at some pains to conceal.
Of course, there were difficulties. Charles feared that his face was
repellently plain, that he was too selfishly given up to his solitary
60 Apes, Angds, and Victorians
habits; and Emma herself was afraid there might be trouble about
the theater, which she thoroughly enjoyed and he particularly ab-
horred. Again, he must have perceived that, though extremely intelli-
gent, she was definitely indifferent to the more recondite mysteries
of nature. She felt no poetic emotion about beetles, ostriches, or mega-
theria. In fact, she was interested not in extraordinary animals but in
ordinary ones, and for ordinary reasons. Happily, however, Charles
shared this unscientific interest; and he was also fond of music and
the piano, which were Emma's real talent and delight. They shared
enough to know that they could share a great deal more. Above all,
they had fallen in love. "He is the most open, transparent man I ever
saw," she wrote Aunt Jessie, "and every word expresses his real
thoughts. He is particularly affectionate and very nice to his father
and sisters, and perfectly sweet tempered." 8
One Sunday in November, 1838, having thrown off the usual
fears, Charles came down to Maer and made his proposal It was
"quite a surprise," wrote Emma demurely, "as I thought we might
go on in the sort of friendship we were in for years, and very likely
nothing come of it after all." He was as surprised by her consent as
she was by his proposal, and so they spent the day in happy bewilder-
ment. There were tears in old Josiah's eyes when he heard the news.
The two fathers now exchanged brief letters of heartfelt congratula-
tion, with solid details about a settlement Aunt Jessie Sismondi also
wrote Emma a letter of tactful advice on an old subject:
If you do pay a little more, be always dressed in good taste; do not despise
those little cares which give everyone more pleasing looks, because you
know you have married a man who is above caring for such little things.
No man is above caring for them, . . I have seen it even in my half-blind
husband. The taste of men is almost universally good in ail that relates to
dress decoration and ornament. They are themselves little aware of it, be-
cause they are seldom called to judge of it, but let them choose and it is
always simple and handsome. 10
Having long known by reading Emma's palm that she would marry
a Darwin, Aunt Jessie rejoiced it was Charles instead of Erasmus,
whose growing eccentricity was already becoming notorious through-
out the family. "Seeing Charles did not come ou, which Fan a**d I
used to speculate on and expect i& every letter from Maer," she added,
"I began to fear it was Erasmus." n
A Premeditated Romance 6*
Charles and Emma had decided to live in London. In their letters,
the poetry of mutual gratitude and unworthiness now gives way to
the prose o anxiety and alarm at not finding a house. Erasmus
prosecuted the search even more vigorously than Charles and accepted
defeat with whimsical desperation, suggesting that his brother end
all letters to Emma "yours inconsolably." 12 He had also taken Charles
to have tea with the Carlyles. On an earlier occasion the great Thomas
had praised Emma highly, and therefore on this occasion Charles
thought all his sarcasms very funny, but feared that "Jenny," whom
an hysterical giggle made almost unintelligible, was neither quite
natural nor ladylike. Faced with the prospect of meeting Lyell,
Emma began to think seriously of attacking The Principles of Geol-
ogy. Charles earnestly counseled her against so extreme a step.
"Depend upon it you will hereafter have plenty of geology." 12
As a matter of fact, he had given considerable thought to the impact
of the new science on Emma's mind. She was a staunch believer in
Revelation. Should he confess his own doubts? He consulted his
father, who was famous in the neighborhood of Shrewsbury as a
healer not only of bodies but of souls, and particularly of feminine
souls.
My father [he wrote after many years of married life] advised me to con-
ceal carefully my doubts, for he said he had known extreme misery thus
caused with married persons. Things went on pretty well until the wife
or husband became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably
by doubting about the salvation of their husbands, thus making them like-
wise to suffer. 13
Apparently, he took his father's advice. After a few years, however,
he found himself obliged, for scientific reasons, to rattle his skeleton
rather loudly from time to time.
Deep in his collections and his Journal as well as in houses and
practical arrangements, Charles found that he could think about
nothing very long together except Emma herself, and even there he
felt hopelessly inadequate. "What can a man have to say, who works
all morning in describing hawks and owls, and then rushes out and
walks in a bewildered manner up one street and down another,
looking out for the words To let.' " u And then, having had a good
deal to say and covered several pages in saying it, he concluded mildly,
"How provokingly small the paper is, my own very dear Emma."
62 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Emma boasted to her Aunt Jessie about the expensiveness of her
trousseau, and assured her uncle Sismondi that she would bring
Charles to Switzerland many times in the future, though for the
present he was too busy. He was always to be too busy or too ill
and never to reach Switzerland.
At length they found in Gower Street the best of all possible houses.
It was moderately ugly outside and so exquisitely ugly inside that
even Emma mildly recorded the fact in a letter. Charles called it
Macaw Cottage in honor of the color scheme in the drawing room>
and often laughed in later years at the happy calm and indifference
with which, at the beginning of their married life, they had contem-
plated so much bad furniture and hideous wall paper.
Rented before the wedding, the house remained vacant for some
time. But Charles could not resist. Assembling his rocks and fossils
in trunks and boxes of astonishing weight, he moved in by himself
and spent his days writing geology, steeling himself to the drawing
room, and dreaming of the time when he would have a wife by his
side as well as a fire before his feet. Meanwhile, in the shape of
wedding presents, the mysteries of the conjugal board already stared
him in the face. "My good old friend Herbert/' he wrote Emma,
"sent me ... a massive silver weapon, which he called a Forficula
(the Latin for an earwig) and which I thought was to catch hold of
soles and flounders, but Erasmus tells me, is for asparagus." 16
He thought much about future responsibilities, sometimes gravely
resolving to improve and sometimes gaily predicting decay.
The Lyells called on me to-day after church [he wrote Emma], as Lycll
was so full of Geology he was obliged to disgorge. ... I was quite
ashamed of myself ... for we talked for half-anhour unsophisticated
Geology, with poor Mrs Lycll sitting by, a monument of patience. I want
practice in ill-treating the female sex. I did not observe Lyell had any
compunction; I hope to harden my conscience in time: few husbands
seem to find it difficult to effect this. 1 *
He concluded by observing, with a mixture of alarm and satisfaction,
that the drawing room had begun to look less ugly.
The wedding took place on January 29, 1839, at Maer Church.
Happiness could be reached only through the awful gates of ceremony*
As the excruciating moment drew close, Charles's usual symptoms
A Premeditated Romance 6$
appeared. "My last two days in London, when I wanted to have
most leisure," he wrote Emma, "were rendered very uncomfortable
by a bad headache, which continued two days and two nights, so that
I doubted whether it ever meant to go and allow me to be married." 16
But of course, Charles did not take no for an answer and the
headache succumbed to the vigorous rocking of the train. The
newly weds journeyed immediately to Gower Street, where the next
day Emma "set herself up" by facing the cook in her own region and
finding fault with the boiled potatoes. Charles, on the other hand,
adjusted himself somewhat more slowly to the practical details of his
new happiness. Looking absent-mindedly through his mail one morn-
ing, he turned up a letter and inquired with astonishment who Mrs.
Charles Darwin was. Zealously dedicated, in spite of much illness,
to his high resolves, he went to concerts and plays, and even pre-
tended to enjoy shopping.
In the wider panorama, Emma's many aunts speculated sagely
about her marital future. All were agreed that at the very least she
had the stability and the good sense to be happy. "Her feelings are
the most healthful possible; joy and sorrow are felt by her in their
due proportions, nothing robs her of the enjoyment that happy cir-
cumstances would naturally give." 1T What sort of effect would she
make in London society, Fanny Wedgwood wondered, if the word
could be "applied to such simplicity and transparency?" 18
Of course neither Emma nor Charles had any ambition to glitter,
but fronted by a physically magnificent butler and backed by a fairly
good cook, they did attempt a series of modest dinners for relatives
and scientists. If on these occasions Emma felt any trepidation, it was
on account of her relatives. On nearer view, the remoter stars of the
scientific galaxy seemed to her anything but brilliant. One evening
she gave a party which included Fitton, Henslow, Lyell, and Robert
Brown:
We had some time to wait before dinner for Dr Fitton, which is always
awful, and, in my opinion, Mr Lyell is enough to flatten a party, as he
never speaks above his breath, so that everybody keeps lowering their
tone to his. Mr Brown, whom Humboldt calls "the glory of Great Britain,"
looks so shy, as if he longed to shrink into himself and disappear en-
tirely; however, notwithstanding those two dead weights, viz., the greatest
botanist and the greatest geologist in Europe, we did very well and had no
64 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
pauses. Mrs Henslow has a very good, loud, sharp voice which was a great
comfort^ and Mrs Lyell has a very constant supply of talk. Mr Henslow was
very glad to meet Mr Brown, as the two great botanists had a great deal
to say to each other. Charles was dreadfully exhausted when it was over,
and is only as well as can be expected today. 18
Emma, like Charles, had a very considerable capacity for being
bored; and this, joined with great frankness, sincerity, and increasing
gravity of manner, made her a formidable person. When someone
asked her how she liked Tennyson's Queen Mary, she answered, with
devastating matter-of-factness, "It is not nearly so tiresome as Shake-
spere." 20
Though at the beginning of their marriage she had resolved to
become interested in her husband's work, she soon found that science
was for her, quite definitely and irrevocably, a bore. Charles was
amused rather than dismayed, and often told how he had said to her
at a meeting of the British Association, "I am afraid this is very
wearisome to you"; and she had replied, "Not more than all the
rest." 21 Emma was bored by so many things, and Charles was either
bored or overexcited by so many things that they soon found them-
selvesfrom the time they sat in their armchairs after breakfast
watching the clock until they sat in their easy chairs after dinner
doing nothing (and Charles "in an apoplectic state") settled into
the quietest and firmest of routines. 22 Was it a little too dull for
Emma? Charles wondered. For himself, he liked it immensely.
Secure behind such a routine, he even liked London. It was "so cheer-
ful," so different from the dreary country. 28
But a domestic routine is always subject to heroic interruptions.
William Erasmus was born in 1839, Anne Elizabeth in 1841. Often
Charles found himself toiling desperately over unmanageable sen-
tences with a sick child tucked up on the sofa nearby. There is much
worry in the letters to Maer and Shrewsbury about wet feet and
warm clothes, and particularly about the #'s and #/'$ of little William,
wbo persisted discouragingly in asserting that his name was "Villy
Darvin." Once Emma ventured to the pantomime with the Hcnsleigh
Wedgwoods to see the children's fun:
The first thing was a most dreadful blood and thunder thing with a
gibbet on the stage, and I thought it would be very bad for Bro's dreams*
A Premeditated Romance 6$
. . . Poor Erny put his head down on my lap when he expected any firing,
or whenever the chief comic character, a beadle with a very red face, was on
the stage, whom he seemed to think quite as alarming as any of the mur-
derers. ... I was surprised at the extreme innocence of even Snow's
questions. "Whether they were really killed?" . . . "whether the wicked
squire was really a bad man?" . . . The first play ended by the military
coming over a wall and shooting almost all the characters dead, to our
great relief. 24
As time passed, it became clear that London was too much with
them, late and soon. Emma, particularly, longed for the country.
One did not have to go far to find it in those spacious days of slow
locomotion and untroubled leisure. Following the railway lines,
nineteenth-century civilization was a slender-tentacled octopus ex-
tended upon an immemorial rural quiet. After some search, Charles
discovered at Downe in Kent, a moderate-sized, three-story house of
stuccoed-over brick. It was square, unpretentious, and uninspired;
but on the ground level, all along the west side, the drawing room
and larger dining room looked out through sunny, wide, floor-length
windows on a broad expanse of lawn which sloped gently upward,
so that the flower beds made a brilliant effect. The landscape was
somewhat melancholy "waterless uninhabited valleys, bleak uplands,
with occasional yews in the hedges, and here and there a white
chalkpit." 26 But it was remarkable for an unusual variety of natural
vegetation. Down House was a quarter-mile from the village
(Downe), ten miles from a railroad station, and yet only sixteen
miles in all from London, which was occasionally visible as a haze of
smoke in the sky. From this vantage point, Charles saw, he could
swiftly descend on Erasmus's London house of a Friday evening-
listen there to Carlyle's eloquent wrongheadedness, breakfast with
Lyell, attend the meetings of the learned societies and then disap-
pear into pastoral oblivion the following Monday.
For Down House and eighteen acres adjoining, the owner wanted
twenty-five hundred pounds. Emma was doubtful, but on the whole
Charles was enthusiastic particularly when he thought how expen-
sive other country houses were. To his sister Susan, who had an
appetite for the sordid details of his illnesses and his finances, he
wrote letters that bristled with considerations and counter-considera-
tions. Of course he apologized for doing so. "How you and my Father
66 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
can take so much interest about Down, as to like to hear all the
foolish particulars I send you, is something wonderful. Your sym-
pathy in other people's pleasures . . . always makes me full of
admiration and envy." 2e "After many groans," 27 he offered twenty-
two hundred pounds, which was supplied by his father. The offer
was accepted, and in late spring, 1842, the Darwins moved in. Charles
was for a while quite lighthearted, even about the cost of improve-
ments. "Emma seems to like the place," he wrote, "and Doddy [his
son William] was in ecstasies for two whole days." 28
The house was to grow, as the Darwin family grew, to considerable
size. Henceforth, all Charles's voyages were to be intellectual, and
all were to be made at the fireside of Down. Surely, his happiness
was perfect. Unfortunately, he was not the man to be tranquil, even
in tranquillity. He soon fell to worrying once more about his health,
the expense of improvements, about the responsibilities of his rapidly
growing family, and probably about his own inability to earn money,
should other income fail. When he confided to Dr. Darwin his "fears
of ruin and extravagance," he got only an emphatic "stuff and non-
sense" for sympathy; and when he spoke of a "dreadful numbness"
in his finger ends, the mountainous Shrewsbury oracle was only a
little gentler, cutting his son short with, "Yes yes exactly tut-
tut, neuralgic, exactly, yes, yes." 28
Emma never made such replies. Her method was to soothe and
placate all those with whom she lived in intimacy; sometimes she
carried this policy to the un-Victorian length of bribing the children
to act in their own best interests. In any case, Charles's complaints
always aroused her love and sympathy, never her sense of criticism
and her frankness. "Without you when sick I feel most deso-
late, . , ." wrote Charles from Shrewsbury. "I do long to be with you
and under your protection for then I feel safe." $0 And others felt as
Charles did. "Towards your mother," wrote Henrietta Huxley as a
very old lady to one of Emma's daughters, "I always had a sort of
nestling feeling. More than any woman I ever knew, she com-
forted? 81 Dr. Hubble observes in her the "Wedgwood devotion in
illness.* 1 8a When she married Charles, "the perfect nurse had mar-
ried the perfect patient,'*
VI
Barnacles and Blasphemy
ALMOST immediately on his return to England, Charles had
-/I begun to prepare his Journal for publication. Reconsidering
his manifold observations in many fields of science, he was more than
ever struck with the virtues of the transmutation hypothesis. To be
sure, there was a great preponderance of gray hairs against it. Though
he did not finish the Journal until 1837, when already far advanced
in evolutionary speculations, he characteristically made no allusion
to them in his narrative, but simply eliminated a few bolder expres-
sions of his earlier creationism.
The Journal appeared in 1839 as the third volume of Fitzroy's
Narrative. "If I live till I am eighty years old," Charles wrote Hens-
low, "I shall not cease to marvel at finding myself an author." * He
marveled even more at finding his book a decided success. It sold
steadily and a second edition was necessary in 1845. With its volumi-
nous and graphic observations on plant and animal life, its brilliant
analysis of South American geology, and its full summary of
Darwin's coral island theory, the Journal is a worthy successor of
Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and in its turn became an inspiration
to the youthful Hooker and other scientific explorers.
In spite of repeated illnesses, Darwin published his Coral Reefs
in 1842 and his Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands in
6B Apes, Angels, and Victorians
i844- 2 Both works were received with admiration, and the first is
still recognized as containing the most generally accepted explana-
tion of its subject. Rereading it seven years later, Darwin exclaimed
with engaging emphasis, "7 am astonished at my own accuracy IT 3
Throughout this period he also contributed frequently to the scien-
tific journals. In 1846 he published his Geological Observations on
South America, Being the Third Part of the Geology of the Voyage
of the Beagle and began his great work on Cirripedia, or barnacles.
While on the coast of Chile, he had found a peculiar species for which
he had to create a special suborder. At the outset he had no idea that
he was to spend eight years in the study of barnacles; but the new
barnacle could not be understood without a knowledge of the old
ones, and Darwin found to his dismay that barnacles had been much
misunderstood*
One might think that chronic indigestion could be more pleasantly
employed than in the patient dissection of thousands of smelly little
sea animals, yet as the years passed this pursuit became so familiar
and inevitable to the Darwin family that one of the little boys, born
into the midst of it, inquired about a neighbor, "Then where docs
he do his barnacles ?" 4 Fresh knowledge led to the metaphysical
intricacies of classification and the barren intricacies of nomencla-
ture. Darwin's letters burn with moral indignation against the vanity,
which he acknowledged in himself as a young man, of attaching
one's name to a species simply because one has discovered it.
There were compensations, "Pure observation" was in itself a joy.
To Fitzroy he writes of being "for the last half-month daily hard at
work in dissecting a little animal about the size of a pin's head, from
the Ohonos archipelago, and I could spend another month, and daily
see more beautiful structure." * And there were odd facts, satisfying
to a man with an appetite for odd facts.
The other day I got a curious example of a unisexual instead of a hermaph-
rodhe cirripede, in which the female had the common cirripedial
character, and in the two valves of her shell tad two Htde pockets, in
eack of which she kept a Htde husband; I do not know of any other case
where a female invariably has two husbands. 6
The fact was not merely curious. In another letter he cxplaiae4 with
noticeable excitement of discovery;
Barnacles and Blasphemy 69
I should never have made this out, had not my species theory convinced
me, that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by
insensibly small stages, and here we have it, for the male organs in the
hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, and [therefore] independent males
[are] ready formed." 7
But were even such facts worth eight years? "I do not doubt," wrote
Darwin somewhat ruefully, "that Sir E. Lytton Bulwer had me in
his mind when he introduced in one of his novels a Professor Long,
who had written two huge volumes on limpets." 8 In later years he
was inclined to agree with the criticism implied, but at the time he
seems to have thought the barnacles worth while. With characteristic
enthusiasm for feats of scientific industry, Huxley agreed.
Your sagacious father [he wrote Francis Darwin in retrospect] never did
a wiser thing than when he devoted himself to the years of patient toil
which the Cirripede-book cost him. . . .
It has always struck me as a remarkable instance of his scientific insight,
that he saw the necessity of giving himself such a training, and o his cour-
age, that he did not shirk the labour of obtaining it. 9
Sir Joseph Hooker confirms this account: "Your father recognized
three stages in his career as a biologist: the mere collector at Cam-
bridge; the collector and observer in the Beagle; and the trained
naturalist after, and only after, the Cirripede work." 10
As barnacles followed each other unceasingly beneath the micro-
scope, the observer himself grew stooped and bald, and his face became
deeply lined. Three more daughters were born Mary, Henrietta, and
Elizabeth and two more sons George and Francis.
Moreover, old Dr. Darwin's health had greatly declined. Always
massive, the oracular physician had lately grown so corpulent that,
when he tipped the scales at 336 pounds, he decided never to be
weighed again. Some years afterward he could scarcely turn in his
bed without assistance. Dressed in old-fashioned knee-breeches and
a broad-lapeled coat, he spent most of his time in his wheelchair in
the garden, surveying disconsolately the shrubs and fruit trees he had
once enjoyed so much. He no longer delivered buoyant two-hour
lectures on the day's happenings partly because nothing ever hap-
pened. He did not want anything to happen. More and more, he
protected himself from experiences and recollections to which he felt
70 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
unequal. His memory was as acute as his sensitivity, and he was
trapped between the two faculties. He could not forget a date, and
therefore the deaths of many old friends were annually recalled to
him. Charles suggested that as he could not walk, he should drive
out for exercise. "Every road out of Shrewsbury," he replied, "is
associated in my mind with some painful event." u
Even so, he could still be cheerful and spirited. He could still lose
his temper. The memory of his wrath remained green and awful in
the minds of his middle-aged children, though he and Charles had
grown much closer in these last years. They shared a taste for gossip
and an interest in people. Both were good observers and had the
quick, instinctive understanding which stops short of self-conscious
analysis. The doctor was clairvoyant about his former patients. Charles
retailed the latest news from the London scientific societies. He
accepted the human side of science much more calmly than Huxley,
and relished the anecdotes about Buckland's lust for notoriety, Fal-
coner's bluntness and hot temper, Murchison's ebullient worship of
rank,
Charles's own health seemed to be growing so precarious that,
sitting with his father in the garden at Shrewsbury, he may have
wondered which one would go first. Dr. Darwin only hoped that his
end would be sudden. Sometimes they remained silent for long in-
tervals, and then Charles made notes about barnacles or read
Madame de Sevign, with whom, following a gallant literary prac-
tice which he shared with his brother Erasmus, he had quite fallen
in love.
In October he saw his father for the last time. The aged doctor
died as he had wished, quite suddenly in November. His daugh-
ter Catherine wrote the news. "God comfort you, my dearest
Charles/' she concluded, "you were so beloved by him." 12 Charles's
own daughter Henrietta, then a little girl, remembered "feeling
awe-struck, and crying bitterly" out of sympathy with her father.
As soon as he heard the news, Charles journeyed to Shrewsbury, but
felt so ill that he did not take part in the funeral and refused to act
as an executor of his father's large property.
During these years, Darwin's intellectual horizons were by no
means confined to the rim of a barnacle shell. Barnacles were partly,
Barnacles and Blasphemy 71
as has been indicated, a preparation for a much greater subject,
perhaps partly an escape from it. That subject was of course evolu-
tion.
Nobody would have been surprised if Huxley had explained evo-
lution. Nearly everybody who has read the facts is a little surprised
that Darwin did, and clever people from Samuel Butler to Mr. Jacques
Barzun have demonstrated that he shouldn't have. Huxley had more
talents than two lifetimes could have developed. He could think,
draw, speak, write, inspire, lead, negotiate, and wage multifarious
war against earth and heaven with the cool professional ease of
an acrobat supporting nine people on his shoulders at once. He knew
everything and did everything, and in his own time seemed a move-
ment and an epoch in himself. In short, he enjoyed all the luxuries of
genius. Darwin possessed only the bare necessities. He was a slow
reader, particularly in foreign languages. He could not draw. He was
clumsy and awkward with his hands, and despite his interest and
belief in experiment, he was in some ways oddly careless and in-
efficient. He had great faith in instruments, yet his instruments were
mostly crude and makeshift. His children astounded him by proving
that one of his micrometers differed from the other. He could not
make a speech and dreaded appearing in public so much that in 1871
he could hardly sit through the church service at his daughter's
wedding. "He used to say of himself that he was not quick enough to
hold an argument with anyone," 13 and his conversation was an ad-
venture of parentheses within parentheses which often produced a
stammer and sometimes terminated in unintelligibility and syntacti-
cal disaster. He wrote fairly clear and interesting English only by
slowly and painfully improving the impossible, and when he took pen
in hand laughingly grumbled that "if a bad arrangement of a sentence
was possible, he should be sure to adopt it." 14
How could such a man escape ordinary failure, much less achieve
spectacular success ? How could he possibly discover a great principle
like natural selection and bring to completion a long work on organic
evolution? Perhaps he succeeded partly at least in explaining evo-
lution for the delightfully English reason that explaining evolution
was a tradition in his family. In any case, his idea grew like a tradi-
tion slowly, almost inevitably. The secret of his miracle is that it
eventually happened. He had faith in the facts. He saw a problem
72 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
and he felt that, with patience and a sincere desire for truth, the
problem could be solved.
In 1837 he opened his first notebook on the mutability of species.
From that moment he was a man living with an idea a decent,
safe man living with a shockingly indecent, horribly unsafe idea.
The result was to turn a quiet young gentleman who wrote checks
for causes into something of a fanatic and a crusader, to give a
modest, uncertain young man a secret stay and sense of moral im-
portance, and to add to a frank, open nature a touch of benevolent
mystery.
I remember [said Huxley], in the course of my first interview with Mr.
Darwin, expressing my belief in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation
between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms, with all
the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge, I was not aware, at
that time, that he had then been many years brooding over the species-
question; and the humorous smile which accompanied his gentle answer,
that such was not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled me. 18
At first Darwin seems to have told no one his secret, though in-
evitably his wife knew, and feared, as old Dr. Darwin had predicted,
for the salvation of her husband's soul. Quite early he confided in
Lyell, who, though sympathetic, was not converted till twenty years
later. In 1844, with fearful and conspiratorial reluctance, Darwin
divulged his heresy to Joseph Hooker, then recently returned from
his Antarctic voyage on the Erebus:
I am almost convinced . . that species are not (it is like confessing a
murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a
"tendency to progression," "adaptations from the slow willing of animals,"
etc! . . , I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way
by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will
now groan, and think to yourself, "on what have I been wasting my time
and writing to." I should, five years ago, have thought so. 16
Hooker put aside respectability and considered evolution on its
merits* Hostile at the outset* he became more and more receptive;
and though always critical^ he was likewise always helpful, with
information as well as with constructive suggestions. For Darwin
he was apparently the one man with whom argument resulted in
Barnacles and Blasphemy 73
pleasure and clarification rather than in stupidity and confusion at
the moment, and in brooding and insomnia afterward.
Like many amiable, charming people in ill-health, Darwin seems
to have got a good deal of help from his friends without particularly
meaning to. His old college chum Fox was set to observing spinal
stripes on horses. Huxley reported on the embryology of fish, Asa
Gray on alpine plants in North America, Hooker on New Zealand
flora and a multitude of other subjects. Later, Darwin's children
helped illustrate his books, Hooker and Lyell acted as his inter-
cessors before the world of science, and Huxley became his "general
agent" and champion against hostile armies of bishops and arch-
deacons. Darwin tried conscientiously to give as much as he received.
He also tried to ask for little; but his enthusiasm carried both him
and his friends along. "How I do hope you will get up some moun-
tains in Borneo," he wrote Hooker with an eye to his own theory
about the distribution of alpine plants; "how curious the result will
be." 17
To be sure, what drew so many able and brilliant men to such a
recluse was not primarily a personality but an idea, or rather a system
of ideas, which was to bring revolution into every field of biological
science. Darwin's thinking could not be ignored. Moreover, it con-
tinued, even after the publication of The Origin of Species, to be
done by Darwin. The strongest proof of his greatness is that he
not Wallace, Huxley, nor anybody else was die center of Darwin-
ism. Despite his illnesses and his limitations, he had the largeness,
sobriety, and concentration of mind to retain leadership within his
own broad area of investigation. He could see the ultimate conclu-
sions of his theory without ever jumping to them.
If we choose to let conjecture run wild [he wrote in his first 1837-1838
notebook], then animals, our fellow brethren in rain, disease, death,
suffering and famine our slaves in the most laborious works, our com-
panions in our amusements they may partake of (?) our origin in one
common ancestor we may be all melted together. 18
Perhaps Darwin thought just enough to be a great thinker. Though
"he often said that no one could be a good observer unless he was
an active theori$er>" 19 he seldom got more than a stone's throw
74 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
away from the facts, feeling that if facts without ideas were pitiable
and unfruitful, ideas without facts were fantastic and dishonest a
kind of insanity proceeding often from moral causes. He was at-
tached to the problem rather than to his solution of the problem,
and could therefore live with the facts until they had to yield up their
meaning, "It's dogged as does it" was a saw he observed so faithfully
that he sometimes had to apologize for his patience. 20
One is tempted to see in these qualities further evidence of the
effect of his father on him in the dogged patience, a passionate
desire to win respect and love; in the reluctance to speculate and
the eagerness to return again and again to the facts for corroboration,
a sense of insecurity born of many shattering explosions of paternal
wrath. Perhaps Darwin did not have Huxley's clarity and rapidity
because he did not have Huxley's confidence. The sons of portentous
fathers usually mature late.
Darwin may exaggerate the caution with which he approached his
great subject. "I worked on true Baconian principles," he wrote,
"and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale/' 21
Actually, he began with his observations in South America and with
the strong suspicions they engendered. He also began with a litera-
ture in which evolution and natural selection were open secrets. The
second volume of LyelPs Principles was really The Origin of Species
without Darwinism, or at least without explicit Darwinism. In
almost the same sequence, Lyell took up the problems of the Origin
variability, adaptation, embryological recapitulation, the signifi-
cance of distribution and of the geological record and did every-
thing but solve them*
He had, indeed, carefully considered the evolutionary doctrine as
presented by Lamarck but finally rejected it, deciding that species
do not vary beyond certain restricted limits. Domestic breeds, hav-
ing through the agency of man become adapted to many widely dif-
ferent environments, are extremely variable; but wild species, being
confined to their own habitats and stations, vary little. Similarity of
embryonic development simply indicates similar plan and structure.
What chiefly convinced Lyell of immutability, however, was the
relative sterility of hybrids. Apparently, he demanded that species
change before his eyes. In fact, he seems to have exhausted all his
originality and reccptiveness on geology, as later and in lesser degree
Barnacles and Blasphemy 75
Darwin seems to have exhausted nearly all his on natural selection.
Lyell saw that species were often almost infinitely prolific, that they
competed with one another, that the increase o one might mean the
diminution of another; but he was obsessed with the idea of a pre-
destinedperhaps theological equilibrium and stability of natural
economy. "Every plant . . . ," he declared, 'quoting Wilcke, "has its
proper insect allotted to it to curb its luxuriancy and to prevent it
from multiplying to the exclusion of others." 22
But there was one fact he could not overlook. The dodo was very
dead. Lyell did not admit that extinction implied evolution, but he
did attempt to account for extinction by natural causes; species might
die, like individuals, of old age; or, more probably, they might be
eliminated by adverse changes of environment or by the competition
of more successful rivals.*
Practical observation in South America had provided Darwin
with a catalytic which ultimately precipitated all LyelPs suspended
facts and ideas into a coherent theory. Charles's notebooks show
that he read the second volume of the Principles with great care,
particularly the chapter on extinction. 23 He considered the sugges-
tion that species might have a predetermined life cycle, but he must
have seen that this was an explanation which did not explain, for
it soon disappears from his notes. He must also have been struck
with the idea of competition. If organisms become extinct through
failure in competition, what is the nature of that competition? One
species may be eliminated by an unrelated species or by an improved
variety of itself. While still in South America, Charles had observed
that the smaller Petise ostrich was rapidly vanishing under condi-
tions favorable to its larger competitor. Extinct species might thus
be the cousins or the ancestors of living ones. Extinction might thus
imply improvement and transmutation.
Again, it may have been from reading Lyell that Darwin grasped
* Lyell's quotation from the Swiss botanist Alphonsc De Candolle must have
struck Darwin. "All the plants of a given country . . . are at war with one
another. The first which establish themselves by chance in a particular spot,
tend, by the mere occupancy of space, to exclude other species the greater
choke the smaller, the longest livers replace those who last for a shorter period,
the more prolific gradually make themselves masters of the ground, which
species multiplying more slowly would otherwise fill" (Principles of Geology,
II,
j6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
the importance of domestic animals to the species question. They
might illustrate, for example, why related species, like the pig and the
tapir, are often so different from one another. Obviously, the inter-
mediate forms no longer exist. In his notebook Darwin wrote: "Op-
ponents will say show them me. I will answer yes, if you will show
me every step between bulldog and greyhound." 24
But how do varieties like the race horse and the tumbler pigeon
arise? Studiously perusing stud books and fraternizing genially
with horse-breeders and pigeon-fanciers, Darwin soon became as
deeply erudite in their lore, both written and unwritten, as any
contemplative stable-keeper or Derby-struck nobleman. The secret
o animal breeding was clearly the selection of desirable variations,
which then accumulate, generation after generation, into more and
more pronounced characteristics. If breeds originate by man's selec-
tion, obviously species might originate by nature's. But how does
nature select?
The fancier's skill had suggested the idea of selection; the problem
of extinction, the idea of the struggle for existence. How long would
it have taken Darwin, swimming tentatively and conscientiously in
oceans of fact, to connect these two unaided? In half a dozen passages
he is within an ace of the answer. Fortunately, in her evolutionary
aspects nature is almost tritely mid-Victorian. In October, 1838, he
happened to read "for amusement" Malthus's Essay on Population?*
The mystery was solved.
Ironically, what Darwin h'ad not quite seen in the grim anarchy
of nature, he saw clearly in the modified anarchy of "civilization,"
Malthus emphasized two facts, both of which Darwin understood
perfectly well: the infinite fertility of mankind and the limited size
and resources of the planet. Malthus had studied the situation nega-
tively, showing how population is kept down by famine, disease,
and war. Darwin took a positive view. Granting that animal num-
bers are checked even more intensively by similar factors, he asked
himself which individuals survive and procreate? Obviously, those
whose variations represent a better adaptation to environment Na-
ture breeds a vast oversupply of experiments and then sterilizes the
failures by murdering them. Malthus had led Darwin to a new
application of the economic doctrine o competition*
Charles now had a theory to work with, yet he feared so much
Barnacles and Blasphemy 77
the seductions of thought that not until 1842 did he commit his
ideas to paper, and then only to the erasable impermanence of a
thirty-five page pencil sketch. In 1844, however, he wrote out a
statement of 231 pages, which is very complete, in its earlier part
closely paralleling the first half of The Origin of Species, and con-
taining a discussion not only of natural, but also of "unconscious"
and sexual selection, as well as of nearly every important detail of
the final theory. Nevertheless, it did omit, as he discovered with as-
tonishment, the problem of why organisms of the same stock diverge
as they become modified. The solution was that "all dominant and
increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversi-
fied places in the economy of nature." 2e Late in life he wrote: "I
can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when
to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had
come to Down." Apparently, this was his only sudden illumination,
his single thunderclap of intellectual grace. The 1842 sketch is inter-
esting for the emphasis which it laid on mutations or abrupt changes;
and the 1844 sketch, for the importance it gave to external conditions
in accounting for variations. 27
Darwin had his moments of speculative exaltation at this time.
He delighted, though with some qualms at the treachery of logic,
in the logician's ingenuity with which he fitted the theory of natural
selection to all facets of evolutionary phenomena. Moreover, he could
not but see that his ideas, if accepted, would have a tremendous
effect on contemporary thought and science. "My theory," he wrote
in his early notebook, "would give zest to recent and fossil compara-
tive anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity, and
mind-heredity, [the] whole [of] metaphysics." 28
At such times he felt the terrible urgency of his task, the impera-
tive need to be free and tranquil for the one absorbing thought of
his life. But who was ever free or tranquil? "Eleven children, ave
Maria! it is a serious look-out for you," he ejaculated with awe to his
old college friend Fox. "Indeed I look on my five boys as something
awful, and hate the very thought of professions." 29 Money symbol-
ized the intrusive practicality of the world, the haunting uncertainty
of all human comfort and well-being; though comfortably rich and
always generous, Charles was very anxious and careful about money.
He practiced many small economies, some of them quite irrational,
7 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
like his hobby for saving paper. He not only hoarded partially used
sheets but waste paper, objecting, "half in fun, to the careless custom
of throwing a spill into the fire after it had been used for lighting a
candle." 30
Behind all his petty anxieties there were two great ones: that he
was not strong enough to complete his study of species and that his
children would not be strong enough to support themselves and live
normal, healthy lives. "If one could insure moderate health for them/'
he continued in his letter to Fox, "it would not signify so much, for
I cannot but hope, with the enormous emigration, professions will
somewhat improve. But my bugbear is hereditary weakness." 31
It was probably the fear of dying before his work was done which,
more than anything else, made him set his theory on paper. Yet even
the lengthy sketch of 1844 seemed to him a poor and inadequate
record of his researches. Immediately after completing it, he wrote
his wife a letter, pathetic in its suppressed urgency, solemnly re-
questing that in the event of his death she engage a competent editor,
at a fee of four hundred pounds, to prepare his statement for the
press. It should be enlarged, corrected, and documented from ma-
terials collected in his library. The list of desirable editors, beginning
with Lyell and ending with Hooker, is again pathetically long. In
1854 he noted on the back of the letter that Hooker would be much
the best.
All this suggests that Darwin hardly expected to witness the im-
pact of his theory upon the world. And in fact his problem was so
staggeringly immense, it ramified into so many fields of science and
required investigation of factors so tenuous and complex, that even
the swiftest and healthiest worker might have despaired of doing it
justice in a lifetime. "In my wildest day-dream," wrote Darwin about
1845, "I never expect more than to be able to show that there are two
sides to the question of the immutability of species." 82 And yet he
wanted to make the negative as strong as possible. Moreover, there
was his debt to the Cirripedia, boundless and morally imperative, to
be discharged. Hooker and Charles's own conscience had dinned
into him that no man should presume to work on the species ques-
tion without first having studied and described many particular
species.
In the years between 1851 and 1854 he published his study of
Barnacles and Blasphemy 79
Cirripedia in four monographs. He was now free to turn his whole
energies to evolution. He might at any time be anticipated by an-
other man. Though dubious about any theory of organic evolution,
Lyell urged the immediate publication of a brief sketch. Hooker
counseled against a sketch. Darwin must not anticipate himself with
a trifling and undocumented paper, but must write and publish a
definitive treatise as rapidly as possible. After some anxious hesita-
tion and a false try at the sketch, he resolutely settled down to the
treatise, on a scale three or four times greater than that of the Ori-
gin.
The years slipped past. His evidence heaped up higher, and his
book became longer and longer. Of course he worked as fast as he
could. In fact, like many plodders, he lived in an extended paroxysm
of defeated haste. When a talk with John Lubbock showed him he
had wasted two or three weeks' work, he burst out to Hooker: "I am
the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England, and am
ready to cry with vexation at my blindness and presumption." 33
He dreaded being laughed at almost more than being anticipated,
for he felt that his subject had already been discredited by the ex-
travagant though original speculations of Lamarck and "Mr. Ves-
tiges." That he should ever have embarked on anything so unsavory
and grandiose seemed to him an appalling paradox. "I have asked
myself," he wrote Lyell, "whether I may not have devoted my life
to a fantasy"; later on he was astonished to find that Hooker had
apparently come to believe in natural selection more firmly than he
did himself, 3 * He never suggested an original idea even to Hooker
or Lyell without the preface, "You will think all this utter bosh."
His imagination was fastidiously sober and prosaic. He was per-
meated with the idea of theoretic economy. Forbes's fancifulness
made him physically ill, and though aware that his own position was
sufficiently vulnerable, he was so indignant at the freedom with
which LyelPs pupils indulged in lost continents that he wrote the
father of modern geology an impassioned protest, backed by subse-
quent letters and a great mass of evidence:
If you do not stop this, if there be a lower region for the punishment of
geologists, I believe, my great master, you will go there. Why, your disciples
in a slow and creeping manner, beat all the old Catastrophists who ever
lived. You will live to be the great chief of the Catastrophists. 35
8o Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Darwin also shrank from being taken too seriously by all kinds
o very serious people. It gradually became known among his rela-
tives that he was preparing for publication a lengthy and learned
blasphemy. Their pious horror must have been particularly formi-
dable as the corporate emotion of a family so large and close-knit,
so affectionate and worthy of respect, as the Wedgwoods and the
Darwins. But imagine the pious horror of a whole nation! And the
more effective the book, the more intense and pious the horror.
Subconsciously at least, he must have wished to postpone this pain-
ful dilemma, perhaps to escape it altogether. "I almost think Lyell
would have proved right, and I should never have completed my
longer work," he wrote Wallace when he had finished The Origin
of Species. "... I look at my own career as nearly run out/'
Later of course, when the Origin was in proof and he observed how
much it impressed and staggered men like Hooker and Lyell, he
partly forgot his fears in his eagerness to observe its effect on the
thoughtful public. "You may think me presumptuous/' he wrote
Hooker, "but I think my book will be popular to a certain extent . * .
among scientific and semi-scientific men; why I think so is, because
I have found in conversation so great and surprising an interest
among such men." 37
As early as 1855 D a * w i& noticed in the Annals of Natural History
a paper on species by Alfred Russell Wallace. The ideas bore an
alarming resemblance to his own. "I rather hate the idea of writing
for priority," Darwin wrote Lyell, "yet I certainly would be vexed
if any one were to publish my doctrines before me.'* 38 In May, 1857
he received a letter from Wallace, then in Celebes, putting questions
on varieties and the breeding of domestic animals. "I can plainly see,"
Darwin answered, "that we have thought much alike and to a certain
extent have come to similar conclusions." s * He was friendly but
cautious, mentioning that he had been working on the species ques-
tion for twenty years. In December o the same year he received
another letter from Wallace putting questions on distribution,
"Though agreeing with you on your conclusions, . * /' Darwin re-
plied, "I believe I go much further than you; but it is too long a
subject to enter on my speculative notions." * Again he mentioned
that he had been at work for twenty years*
Barnacles and Blasphemy 81
Wallace's next letter, containing the famous paper on evolution
and natural selection, struck him like a bombshell. Within a single
week, while lying ill with malarial fever in the jungles of the Malay
Peninsula, Wallace had leaped from his earlier position to Darwin's
most advanced conclusions. What Darwin had puzzled and wondered
and worried and slaved over with infinite anxiety and pain for two
decades, Wallace had investigated and explained far less elaborately
but still to precisely the same result in some three years. The
familiar ideas, the older man could not help noticing, were conveyed
with un-Darwinian force and clarity.
Darwin met the crisis with magnanimity, but with a rather
anxious, questioning, backward-glancing magnanimity. "Do you not
think his having sent me this sketch ties my hands?" he asked Lyell.
". . . I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any
other man should think that I have behaved in a paltry spirit." 41
He had begun a letter to Wallace renouncing all claims, but he could
not finish it; he could not quite close the door. "If I could honourably
publish," he suggested to Lyell, "I would state that I was induced
now to publish a sketch . . . from Wallace having sent me an out-
line of my general conclusions." Of course he despised himself. "My
dear good friend forgive me," he concluded. "This is a trumpery
letter, influenced by trumpery feelings." 42
Upon this recondite and esoteric tragedy the simple realities of
life intervened with ironical savagery. Scarlet fever appeared in
Darwin's numerous household and in a short time his infant daugh-
ter was dead. "I am quite prostrated, and can do nothing," he wrote
Hooker. 43 And a little later, "I am quite indifferent, and place myself
absolutely in your and LyelFs hands." 44
Lyell and Hooker did what Darwin had suggested. While he was
still overcome with grief and illness, a joint paper, containing Wal-
lace's report and a brief sketch of his own, was read before the Royal
Society. The hour was heavy with grave Victorian suspense. Both
Lyell and Hooker were present and endorsed the proceedings.
The interest excited was intense [wrote Hooker], but the subject was too
novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armour-
ing. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath: Lyell's ap-
proval, and perhaps in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair,
82 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against
the doctrine. We had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the
authors and their theme. 45
Wallace declared the course taken before the Royal Society more
than generous and gracefully resigned himself for a lifetime to being
the moon to Darwin's sun. The latter, reassured by Wallace's reply,
was soon asking him to observe the stripe on horses and donkeys. He
could not, however, refrain from mentioning a third time that he had
written the first summary of his ideas just twenty years ago.
Darwin now began to prepare a brief paper on evolution for the
Linnean Society. Characteristically, in spite of iron resolutions for
ruthless compression, he allowed it to grow by imperceptible degrees
to a large volume. Still insisting that he was writing a mere prelimi-
nary abstract and still meditating a greater work to come, Darwin was
writing the most important book in the nineteenth century.
Vanity Fair immortalizes two
men of science in their "Men of
the Day" series in 1871: Darwin
(left) and Huxley (right).
Vll
The Most Important Book of the Century
/CERTAINLY no one who began so cautiously with facts ever got
^J quite so deeply involved in ideas as Charles Darwin. He care-
fully avoided issues, and issues sprang up on all sides. He gravely
eschewed speculation, and speculation enveloped him. In fact, his
very caution and austerity, his very contempt for mere ideas, made
him an unparalleled intellectual and controversial force in Victorian
England. Herbert Spencer wallowed for decades in evolutionary
speculation of the boldest sort without arousing one-tenth the scandal,
excitement, loyalty, hatred, and animosity. Darwin's great investiga-
tion was not only central to scientific thought in many fields. It placed
him directly athwart almost every great issue in philosophy, ethics,
and religion. The old questions of necessity and free-will, mechanism
and spontaneity, matter and spirit, realism and nominalism, relativism
and the absolute were faced all over again and argued in a new light
because of The Origin of Species.
Like nearly everything else, evolution was invented, or almost
invented, by the Greeks. From Heraclitus and Anaximander came
the suggestion that animal species are mutable; from Aristotle, the
idea of a graded series of organisms, the idea of continuity in nature
or the shading of one class into another, and a model of evolutionary
process in the development of the germ into the plant. 1 From both the
84 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Stoics and the Epicureans, and particularly from Lucretius, came the
doctrine that man is a part of nature and that his origins are animal
and savage rather than godlike and idyllic.
But meanwhile Plato had changed the direction of occidental
thought : the shifting, evanescent world of things is transcended by a
more real, static world of ideas, which is comprehended and unified
by the idea of the Good, or God. To be sure, Plato's God was a self-
sufficient Perfection dwelling apart from the world, and at the same
time a superabundant Perfection flowing down into the world and
actualizing the myriad objects and creatures which He had con-
ceived. 2 In short, He implied unity, concentration, and other-worldli-
ness on the one hand and diversity, expansion, and naturalism on the
other. Medieval thinkers developed both conceptions, but emphasized
the first. Moreover, following Plato, they thought in terms of being
rather than becoming. The great historical enemy of evolution has
been the Platonic tendency -so congenial to logic, morals, and
mathematics to regard the universe as a fixed order, in which reali-
ties remain perspicaciously what they are while the mind thinks about
them.
Renaissance philosophers emphasized the infinite creativeness of
God and the infinite vastness and variety of the universe. Creation was
a great "chain of being" which extended in a linear gradation imper-
ceptibly fine from lowest to highest.* But time was a decided incon-
venience. If, according to Plato's system, every actuality depends on
an eternal essence and the ground plan of the world is simply a
conjunction of all possible essences why does not everything possible
exist at once? In short, the principle of plenitude called out for
evolution, for a time dimension. So did the facts of embryology and
paleontology.
In the eighteenth century Buffon treated the subject o evolution
for the first time "in a scientific spirit/* 3 He maintained that animals
vary in response to changes in environment, habit, and inwardly felt
* In the seventeenth century Leibnitz carried the principles of plenitude,
continuity, and linear gradation to their logical extreme. Cod bad created all
things possible that could exist togetherin terms of quantity and variety,
therefore, the best of all possible worlds. Naturally, an infinite diversity of
creatures meant almost infinite conflict and suffering. Leibnitz's universe was
not so much rational because it was good, a* good because it was rational.
The Most Important Boof( of the Century 85
need, passing the variations on to their offspring by a process of
hereditary memory.* Buffon is in every respect remarkable, being
himself a kind of cultural mastodon, or magnificent extinct animal
such a wonderful combination of artist, gentleman, and scientist as,
preserved in the fossil immortality of literature, illustrates whole
movements of thought and transitions between epochs.
Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather (1731-1803), was no
less remarkable. A wit who stammered, a physician who versified
botany, a mechanical inventor and walking encyclopedia who fasci-
nated women, he was in his way as remarkable as Benjamin Franklin,
as quaint as a porcelain statuette savage in red heels and ostrich
feathers. And yet his modernity reaches comfortably to the twentieth
century; for his evolutionary ideas, though no doubt mainly inspired
by Buffon, have a definitely Freudian tendency. Animals evolve, and
thereby adapt themselves to a changed environment by reacting f o
stimuli in terms of love, hunger, and the need for security. Dr.
Darwin went beyond Buffon in maintaining that all life is descended
from a single, very simple organism; but fell below him in explaining
inherited habit and function by conscious imitation rather than by
unconscious memory or instinct. His grandson read his Zoonomia
twice and was disappointed to find so many ideas and so few facts. 4
Certainly it contains plenty of ideas, including a very clear exposition
of his grandson's theory of sexual selection.
Lamarck's reputation is greater than Erasmus Darwin's mainly
because his facts are stronger. As Charles Darwin embraced evolution
largely because it explained the data of geographical distribution, so
Lamarck embraced it because it explained those of comparative struc-
ture. Apparently inspired by the Aristotelian principle of continuity,
he asserted there are no species, only individuals. Nevertheless, individ-
uals can usefully be grouped according to their structure, and function
determines structure. Organs arise and develop with use and de-
generate and disappear with disuse. 5
What discredited Lamarck among scientists was that he explained
too much and in too antiquated a manner. His theory of the nature
* What Darwin and others regarded as Buffon's fluctuations of opinion may
have been, as Samuel Butler maintained with delight, but skillful and daring
maneuvers in a long and grave flirtation with the authorities of the Sorbonne,
who finally compelled him to a public apology.
86 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
of life itself is a strange mixture of mechanism and vitalism, by which
the essential characteristics of all living things are traced analytically
to the mere motion of a metaphysical fluid or ethereal fire. What dis-
credited him among the religious was the reckless logic with which
he insinuated that man himself was not exempt from the evolutionary
past. "I devoured Lamarck en voyage," wrote the youthful Charles
Lyell. "His theories delighted me more than any novel I ever read."
Yet in proving "men may have come from the Ourang-Outang," he
had in Lyell's eyes reduced himself to a fascinating absurdity. 6
Meanwhile, the romantic movement with its wonder at nature,
its nostalgic curiosity about origins, its fascination with change, its
exultation in plenitude and diversity had caused students in every
field to think in terms of evolution. Kant and Laplace found it in the
solar system, Lyell on the surface of the earth, Herder in history,
Newman in church doctrine, Hegel in the Divine Mind, and Spencer
in nearly everything.
In fact, biological evolution itself was rapidly becoming the com-
monest heresy in Europe. In England it seemed for a while likely to
become orthodox without serious bloodshed, for the political and
intellectual climate of the later twenties was extremely favorable. The
Tory party was making itself unpopular in office; philosophical radi-
calism was opening up logical vistas into a reassuringly prosaic
Utopia; and science itself was unfolding momentous discoveries in a
manner which combined the excitement of novelty with the imposing
decorum of solid vested interest and responsible conservatism.
This very English exhibition of scientific tact was largely the
achievement of a single man, who worthily represented the learning,
the science, the statesmanship, and even the religion of the ruling
classes. That man was of course Charles Lyell a Chancellor of the
Exchequer among scientists as Darwin called him who never
entered into controversy and who always wrote with a grave sense of
the weight of authoritative words magisterially penned* Acknowl-
edging the claims not only of truth scientific and religious but of
error and prejudice as well, Lyell was admirably qualified for the
complex and delicate task of stating the simple facts in an age of
inquiry and expanding knowledge. 7 With ail of Gibbon's monu-
mental dignity and none of his secret sedition, Lyell unfolded in his
Principles the relentless uniformity o natural causes and geological
The Most Important J$oo\ of the Century 87
evolution as far back in terrestrial time as one could see. Yet he was
careful not to assert that natural causes had of necessity always
operated: the advent of man was an exceptional event in the moral,
though hardly in the physical, world. With statesmanlike abandon
of logic he drew, like Pope Alexander VI, a line straight across the
world, proclaiming evolution in the realms of geology and botany,
and a Creator in those of man and animals. He made no allusion to
Hebrew cosmogony, but described similar primitive traditions, which,
he pointed out at length, were a credit both to the intelligence and the
moral feelings of their authors. Nearly everything he said was at
variance with the Mosaic narrative, yet he contradicted it with so
much tact and dignity that sound Englishmen could not long with-
stand him.
The Principles of Geology occasioned little scandal. Sixteen-hun-
dred-page treatises seldom cjo. There was some pained regret among
the Tories, some dignified suffering among the clergy. Oddly enough,
there was eager enthusiasm among ordinary readers. Harriet Mar-
tineau declared that in the period after the vogue of Scott's novels
the general middle-class public "purchased five copies of an expensive
work on geology for one of the most popular novels of the time." 8
Behind the scenes at the Royal Geological Society, there was a sharp
battle between the "Diluvialists" and the "Fluvialists," but it was
good-humored, even hilarious. Within a decade, the new ideas had
been accepted on their merits. Lyell had guided the advance of
science as wisely and moderately as the Duke of Wellington had
conducted the retreat of the British Constitution.
Unfortunately, liberalism had enfranchised its executioners. The
middle classes, coming into power after 1832, were conservative and
pietistic in their religion. Nearly every outstanding figure in the new
generation, from Gladstone to Newman, was a fervid Christian and a
dogmatic believer in Revelation. Nearly every important sect identi-
fied the validity of the spiritual life with the literal truth of a creation
story directly contradicted by scientific facts.
Under these circumstances, science could scarcely hope to advance
by tact alone, however statesmanlike. Evolution crept back into foot-
notes and appendices, as in Patrick Matthew's Naval Timber and
Arboriculture; or ventured forth anonymously, as in Robert Cham-
bers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation only to be hooted
88 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
down by surpliced geologists like Sedgwick. Lyell himself was driven
to complain of the Mosaic superstitions as "an incubus on our
science." 9 Many investigators waxed prosperous and eminent by
"proving" a Cosmic Intelligence with scientific discoveries which later
made it seem less likely than ever. A few carried LyelPs politic
decorum to bewildering extremes of hypocrisy and self-contradiction.
In fact, to what depths of respectability the scientific mind could sink
became evident only after the explosion of Darwinism had occurred.
In the venomous and confused counterattacks of men like Si^Richard
Owen the only certainty which emerges is that the pillars of orthodoxy
themselves did not believe literally in the Old Testament. Owen is
said to have talked as an evolutionist in private conversation; in public
he defended creationism in terms so ambiguous that no one under-
stood him and he himself, in letters to the editor of The London
Review, actually felt free to claim priority over Darwin in developing
the theory of natural selection.
But even while in England the very atheists were observing the
decencies, a theological disaster occurred in Germany. At least partly
concealed in the formidable Trojan horse of Hegelian metaphysics,
David Strauss had got inside the evangelical fortress and surprised
the garrison, subjecting miracles to such devastating textual criticism
as seemed to convert the New Testament itself into a weapon against
official religion. Though Strauss published Das Leben Jesu in 1835,
England remained impregnable in her ignorance for several years.
Those who dared speak, spoke obscurely or were themselves obscure.*
But cautious insinuations gave place in the forties and fifties to
bold assertions. Science waxed and religion waned* From the remote
empyrean of German science came the news that Helmholtz; had
formulated mathematically the law of the conservation of energy, and
so turned the universe into a great account book of mechanistic
*In 1838 Charles Hennell published his Inquiry Concerning ike Origin of
Christianity, in which, an unlettered merchant entirely innocent of the refine-
ments of theological decorum, he expressed his disbelief as simply and frankly
as he had previously maintained his belief. The book caused hardly a ripple.
In 1840 H. R Milman, already under suspicion for his History 0} the Jews,
published a History of Christianity in which, for hundreds of pages, he steadily
implied the view which Strauss and Hennell had explicitly declared and saved
himself only at the last moment by a halfhearted statement o divine inspira-
tion*
The Most Important Boo% of the Century 89
causes. In his Logic Mill expounded universal causation with all the
authority of a great reputation and five hundred pages of closely
reasoned analysis. Comte constructed a theory of progress which made
scientists its dedicated priests, scientific method its indispensable
technique, and a scientifically directed society its ultimate goal and
destiny. Carlyle proved that a deep sense of religion could be separated
from theology and from genuine religion as well, for that matter.
At the same time, the air was electric with evolution. Chambers's
Vestiges was annihilated again and again by furious clerical cannon-
ades, and each time rose from its ashes in the augmented strength of
corrected and revised editions.
Among the new generation of churchmen few were as talented as
their predecessors and none were as orthodox. Maurice rejected
original sin and the atonement. Martineau went beyond and rejected
the trinity. Baden Powell embraced evolution itself as the chief argu-
ment for design. Pattison traveled all the way from Newmanism to
agnosticism. And while liberals plunged into skepticism, conserva-
tives embraced the Woman of Babylon. In 1845 Newman became
a Catholic. Evangelical orthodoxy shrank back in horror within its
oak-paneled studies, and from castellated deaneries and moated
bishops' palaces emanated influences, injunctions, and journalistic
thunderings that created a reign of ecclesiastical terror. Gaitered
gentlemen waited with pens poised, ready to strike when the Arch
Fiend should raise his head. It was at this juncture that The Origin of
Species appeared in 1859.
"Get rid of your genius for a session," the veteran orator Sheil had
counseled the young Disraeli after a first successful speech. "Try to
be dull. . * . Quote figures, dates, calculations." 10 Darwin did not
need such advice. No one except perhaps Sir Richard Owen has
ever complained that The Origin of Species was "too clever by half."
It does not, with dazzling clarity of phrase and plan, derive a whole
science from a piece of chalk or a whole philosophy from a bit of
protoplasm. It does not spin a universe out of a few dry polysyllables
or diarm down a theological Jericho with a dozen epigrams. Rather
it masses its facts in the forefront and carefully hides its paradoxes in
the rear. It begins with the humdrum and the prosaic, and moves
almost imperceptibly into the vast and mysterious. The Origin of
Species is a long and dignified argument in which, almost with reluc-
90 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
tance, the author convinces himself that evolution is a fact and natural
selection is its explanation. Sir Robert Peel himself could not have
put his case more effectively.
After a quiet, cautious introduction, in which he outlines his basic
ideas and their arrangement, Darwin begins with the solid and re-
assuring facts of horse-breeding and pigeon-fancying.* Probably
because man is constantly subjecting them to new conditions, indi-
vidual animals of a domestic variety differ from each other much more
than do individuals of a wild species. Moreover, they evolve almost
before our eyes. How? By artificial selection. The farmer allows only
his best stock to reproduce. The expert breeder consciously plans the
animal he wants. Carefully noting differences which, Darwin cun-
ningly observes, "I for one have vainly attempted to appreciate," n he
mates those individuals which vary from their fellows in the way
desired, and continues to do so, accumulating favorable variations by
heredity through successive generations, until he approximates or
achieves his purpose.
Darwin now shows that naturalists widely disagree as to what
constitutes a species. As commonly used, the term implies little more
than a vague conception of difference dignified by a vague doctrine of
special creation. Darwin seeks a more precise meaning in a fresh
approach to the evidence. Any typical classification of flora and fauna
reveals that more species appear in populous genera than in those less
populous, and more varieties in populous species than in those less
populous. If species are the products of special creation* this striking
fact has no significance; but if species are but strongly marked varie-
ties, and varieties but incipient species, then it means that divergent
evolution proceeds from large and successful species. Species contain-
ing many individuals occupy a wide territory. Coming in contact
with a great diversity of conditions, they tend to produce a greater
range of individual differences than do smaller species.
* For the sake of completeness, I follow the sixth edition of The Origin of
Species, as it appears in the Authorized Edition (New York: D. Appleton &
Company, Inc,, 1896). Nevertheless, I indicate, in the text or in the notes, any
deviation from the first edition (see Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Speries
by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life, a Reprint of the First Edition, with a Foreword by Dr, C* D
Darlington, FJR.5, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951).
The Most Important Boo\ of the Century 91
Do they also, like domestic breeds, evolve rapidly and by a similar
process of selection? Of course Darwin answers yes, and discovers his
principle of selection in Malthus:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see the super-
abundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are
idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus con-
stantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their
eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do
not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant,
it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year. 12
In short, the natural order is a very intricate kind of war, in which,
basing itself on the limited resources of the planet, superabundant
life builds up into a vastly complex and interrelated structure of hunter
and hunted, parasite and host, sheltered and shelterer, eater and eaten.
The slightest peculiarity resulting in better adaptation may permit
an individual to survive, reproduce, and in passing on his advantage,
strengthen the position of his species.
The constant pressure of fertility and selection forces species to
diverge and specialize, seizing "on many and widely diversified places
in the polity of nature." 13 Thus plants become more complexly and
efficiently adapted to many different kinds of soil and climate. Ani-
mals become powerful and ferocious, or swift and wary, or slow and
impregnable; and some grow intelligent and adaptable in dealing
with a great diversity of conditions. Life blindly breeds, battles, and
slaughters its way up to mind and rationality. The author himself is
apparently more impressed by the progress than by the slaughter.
"When we reflect on this struggle," he observes, "we may console
ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant,
that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigor-
ous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." 14 Confronted
by this dilemma between progress and suffering so typical of his
century, Darwin was not always cheerful. On occasion he could
feel all of a humanitarian's moral indignation against man and God
for the evils o the world.
Darwin explains sex as a means partly of obtaining a division of
labor, partly of strengthening and stabilizing a strain by cross-
fertilization. He also outlines his theory of sexual selection. Females
92 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
prefer gorgeous, virile, or ferocious males; therefore such males pro-
duce more progeny and are selected into even greater gorgeousness,
virility, or ferocity.
Already in The Origin of Species Darwin is haunted by the mystery
o genetics. If variations cause evolution, what causes variations? He
attacks the problem in the first and second chapters, and finally at
length in the fifth. The discussion is cautious and sensible but also
vague and occasionally confused. He sometimes talks as though
natural selection not only sifts variations but causes them. Later,
when taken to task for these lapses by Lyell and Wallace, he rectified
many passages but allowed a few to remain, even in the last edition
of his book. In general, he holds that variations arise through un-
known hereditary factors within the organism, through use and dis-
use, the correlation of parts, and changes in environment. Domestic
animals are extremely variable because man has introduced them into
many and diverse regions. The domestic duck cannot rise from the
ground because it has long ceased to need or use its wings. Signifi-
cantly, its young can still fly. In short, he is often, so to speak, a
Buffonian or a Lamarckian on the genetic level. At his best, he simply
acknowledges a complete ignorance of the whole subject.
The sixth and seventh chapters * of the Origin answer objections
mostly foreseen by the author but in later editions identified with the
persons who urged them. Here Darwin reveals unexpected talents as
a debater. Confused, stammering, and unsyntactical in the presence
of triumphantly articulate people like Huxley, he is deadly in the
careful and premeditated quiet of the study. As usual, his confessions
of weakness are irresistible. He freely acknowledges that the objec-
tions to his theory are grave. Nevertheless, after prolonged thought, he
has in each case arrived at a solution which he hopes will prove satis-
factory.
An assertion frequently made by his opponents is that if species
and varieties are constantly diverging, die face of nature should
present a continuity of forms shading into each other by minute
degrees, instead of the many gaps and sharply separated species which
we observe in fact. Not at all, Darwin replies. There is a selection of
* The first edition devotes only one chapter (the sixth) to objection It$ re*
maining chapters, though closely paralleled in subject matter, number from
VII to XIV, rather than from VIII to XV, as in the sixth edition.
The Most Important Eoo\ of the Century 93
varieties and species as well as of individuals. A successful breed will
spread into the surrounding territory and necessarily eliminate many
related varieties, including the parent stock itself.
Next come the curious histories and the animal and vegetable
prodigies which, it was thought, could not possibly have been pro-
duced by any combination of happy accidents. How, for example,
could natural selection have revolutionized a carnivorous land animal
into a marine leviathan like the whale? The first step would inevitably
be a step away from adaptation. How could it ever be taken? Darwin
answers somewhat in the anecdotal vein of Gilbert White, by citing
the single instance of the brown bear which swam "for hours with
wide open mouth, thus catching, almost like the whale, insects in the
water." 15 More convincingly, he explains the flying squirrel by calling
attention to the whole squirrel family, which graduates from relatively
heavy ground animals, through light tree climbers, to very light
gliders. Again, how could natural selection ever account for such a
perfection of ingenuity and design as the human eye? Darwin frankly
confesses that this organ has always staggered him. Nevertheless, he
gives a possible evolution according to natural selection, and quotes
a learned German to the effect that as a microscope, telescope, or
common optical instrument, the human eye is, like everything else
in nature, very far from perfect.
Bronn objects that many plant and animal characteristics, and
particularly those that distinguish varieties and species, are of no
apparent use and cannot therefore be affected by natural selection.
Darwin replies that one would expect precisely the useless characteris-
tics to be most important in classification, for, being unaffected by nat-
ural selection, they have changed little and so indicate the more distant
past of the organism. Again, Mivart objects that small variations are
not sufficient to account for major changes. New species probably
arise all at once. This view, similar to that later held by De Vries, is
in Darwin's opinion contradicted by the finely shaded differences
between many species and varieties, by the close continuity of develop-
ment indicated by embryology, and by the beautiful adaptation of
many structures to environment, which would hardly have been
possible if the organism had evolved by abrupt mutations. In fact,
mutations result in impracticable "monstrosities." Darwin deprecates
their importance in every way.
94 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Instinct he explains as resulting partly from habit and environment,
but much more from a natural selection of useful variations in behav-
ior. How did the European cuckoo acquire the instinct to lay its
eggs in the nests of other birds ? Darwin approaches the problem by
his favorite method of seeking gradations of the same characteristic
in related species, and he strengthens his case by emphasizing correla-
tions between instinct and structure. In the first place, all known
varieties of the cuckoo seem to lay their eggs not in relatively quick
succession, but at intervals of two or three days. Consequently, the
American cuckoo, which makes its own nest, must deal at the same
time with unhatched eggs and young birds of various ages. Driven
apparently by this predicament, she sometimes lays an egg in the
nest of another bird. The Australian cuckoo represents an advance,
but with some variability of behavior, laying sometimes one, and
sometimes two or three eggs in the nest of another bird. The Euro-
pean species has made a complete and triumphant adjustment to her
egg-laying habits. Her eggs are innocently small; she lays only one
in each nest; and the young bird is amazingly strong soon after birth,
so that he may thrust out his foster brothers and enjoy exclusive care.
But why does an organism vary its behavior, particularly in a
situation of difficulty like the cuckoo's? Darwin has nothing to say
about mental factors. He will not discuss the origin of mind, any more
than that of life itself. He simply asserts that behavior tends to vary.
Few theorizers on the grand scale have skirted so judiciously such
vast regions of the unknown, or been so shrewd in their reticences.
In Chapters X to XIII Darwin deals with the evidence from paleon-
tology and geographical distribution. If a record of the biological
past i$ preserved in the rocks, why docs it not provide an explicit
proof of evaluation? Why does it not reveal the species of living
families graduating back to common ancestors? In some degree
it does, says Darwin In future years it was with increasing discoveries
to do so infinitely more but scientists must recognize that the
geological record is fragmentary and episodic in the extreme. Organic
remains usually decay and disappear before they can become im-
bedded in sand or gravel To be preserved they must be deposited in
shallow bottoms which are slowly sinking as sediment accumulates.
Under these rare conditions rich fossiliferous beds of great depth may
be formed, but they may then be as slowly raised and eroded away*
The Most Important Boo\ of the Century 9$
Formations of great paleontological importance found in England
are entirely absent in Russia and North America.
That the geological record should be full of crucial silences is there-
fore not surprising. What is surprising is that its broken story should
seem at first glance distinctly unfavorable to the evolutionist. Why
do new species appear quite suddenly in a formation? Why do very
similar and closely related ones appear in the same formations, and
therefore in roughly the same era, throughout the entire world? The
answer, says Darwin, is that a new species develops in a restricted,
perhaps isolated region and then spreads with comparative rapidity
at the expense of antiquated competitors. The geological record tends
to preserve the ubiquitous fait accompli, not the isolated first innova-
tion.
The two chapters on geographical distribution are a triumphant
illustration of Darwin's mental grasp, of his ability to reduce a chaos
of facts to a sound and intelligible world of law. The distribution
of plants and animals on the globe is to be explained in terms of
natural barriers and common ancestry. For terrestrial organisms the
great division is that between the Old and the New Worlds. For
marine, one great division exists between the east and west shores of
the Pacific Ocean, and another between the east and west shores of
the American land mass. Many aquatic species on either side of the
isthmus of Panama are related to each other because they originated
and spread before the isthmus formed a continuous barrier.
In the Origin there is no nostalgic extravagance with lost continents
to solve either the minor or the major problems of distribution.
Darwin thought about oceans and continents with sober common
sense, assuming they were pretty much what they are now. He found
his explanations in observed facts, present and past, prying with sober
detective cunning into many kinds of casual transport and, inci-
dentally, into some of nature's most genial ingenuities of dog-eat-
dog. For example, seeds can be eaten by a fresh-water fish on one
continent, conveyed to the coast, the fish eaten by a sea bird, the seeds
transported across an ocean and ultimately deposited in excrement on
another continent. They can be carried across water on icebergs, on
driftwood, in dirt clinging to the feet of flying birds, or in the carcasses
of dead birds miraculously spared by fish. Again, some seeds can
float in sea water for months with unimpaired fertility. Darwin was
9 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
also one of the first to explain the islands of closely similar alpine
vegetation on mountaintops throughout the world as the result of a
general migration of plants from the arctic zones during glacial
periods.
Chapter XIV is devoted to the problems of classification in the
plant and animal kingdoms. The principle of descent, with its
attendant concepts of divergence and extinction by natural selection,
explains similarities in embryological development and in rudimen-
tary organs. On the other hand, analogical resemblances are to be ex-
plained as primarily the effect of environment. They are conver-
gences, produced by similar adaptation, in organisms not closely al-
lied. Fish and whales are not closely related, yet they have in their
more recent pasts made an analogous adaptation to environment.
Discrepancies in the habits of related larvae are also traceable to en-
vironment. Larvae are history books to be sure, like all embryos, but
they are history books which must get up and walk, provide them-
selves with food and drink, and take a part in the history which they
record. Hence they develop differences where one would normally
expect similarities.
The Conclusion is a curiously Victorian combination of cautious
statement and soaring conviction, of deep sincerity about science and
diplomatic piety * about religion, of calm realism about the terrible
facts of nature and vague optimism about the awful fact of the Un-
known. Darwin once more declares himself firmly convinced that
his theories are correct and predicts they will bear abundant fruit in
many fields of thought. He concludes:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the
higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator
into a few forms, or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling
on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning end-
less forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved. 16
Leibnitz, Darwin observes, once condemned Newton's Pnncipia
as a danger to religion. His denunciation is now an anachronism.
* The reference to the Creator, however, did not appear in the first edition*
The Most Important Bool( of the Century 97
Similar denunciations of the Origin, Darwin implies, will one day
be equally so. No doubt. The Tennessee monkey trial would now be
an anachronism even in Tennessee, but not because Darwin is recog-
nized as a bulwark of religion.
Between him and Newton, as religious influences, there is probably
not much to choose. The law of gravitation concerns mechanics and
since in the long run philosophers cannot resist analogy implies'
that the universe is a machine. The law of evolution concerns living
things and by analogy implies that the universe is an organism. In
so far Darwin might have the advantage, for a living universe sug-
gests warmth, response, kinship in short Deity more than a dead
one. On the other hand, a machine requires a mechanic, whereas an
organism does not obviously require anything but food and water.
A machine may be perfect, whereas an evolution must be imperfect
in order that to satisfy human hope it may evolve toward perfec-
tion; and as a matter of fact Darwin's world abounds in mere approxi-
mations of perfect adaptation and even in the most grotesque of com-
promises in snakes with useless limbs, insects with welded wings,
birds that cannot fly, mammals that cannot walk. Finally, Darwin's
explanation of evolution is mechanistic without the favorable implica-
tions of mechanical design. Natural selection represents not a har-
mony but a conflict and is effectuated not by the precise, mathematical
idealism of invisible force but apparently by a crude, random sorting
out of variations by environment. Darwin had documented the
romantic, organistic universe of Schelling and, as many felt, docu-
mented it atheistically, in terms of blind chance and purposeless
mechanism.
Schelling himself had pointed out that a romantic and imperfect
universe might be the work, if not of a perfect and self-sufficient,
then of an immanent and evolving, Intelligence. But many who were
willing to believe in an evolving Deity could not believe in one who
dealt in random variations. They could accept an evolving universe
but not a universe shaken out of a dicebox. As the century wore on,
Darwinism fared in metaphysics as the older liberalism fared in
politics. People were impressed less with the achievements of biological
progress and more with its irrationality, with the expense in waste,
conflict, and suffering. "Advanced" thinkers either became agnostics
9 8 * Afes, Angels, and Victorians
or, like Butler and Shaw, acknowledged an evolving Deity conceived
on Lamarckian rather than Darwinian terms.
The similar fortunes o liberalism and natural selection are signifi-
cant. Darwin's matter was as English as his method. Terrestrial
hfstory turned out to be strangely like Victorian history writ
large. Bertrand Russell and others have remarked that Darwin's
theory was mainly "an extension to the animal and vegetable
world of laissez faire economics." 17 As a matter of fact, the eco-
nomic conceptions of utility, pressure o population, marginal
fertility, barriers in restraint of trade, the division of labor, progress
and adjustment by competition, and the spread of technological im-
provements can all be paralleled in The Origin of Species. But so, also,
can some of the doctrines of English political conservatism. In reveal-
ing the importance of time and the hereditary past, in emphasizing the
persistence of vestigial structures, the minuteness of variations and
the slowness of evolution, Darwin was adding Hooker and Burke to
Bentham and Adam Smith. The constitution of the universe exhibited
many of the virtues of the English Constitution.
As science, Darwin's work has always seemed to the more fastidious
critic less admirable than Newton's because it is so much less exact,
complete, and conclusive. In spite of his facts, he is sometimes regarded
as little more than a speculator. He proves by appealing to the in-
completeness of the geological record, and demonstrates with "I
firmly believe" and "as far as I am able to judge, after long attending
to the subject." He explains vaguely and he explains too much. There
is at the same time too much accident and too much finality in his
theory. He seems to explain not only how but why a cat has claws,
and the why is quite simply that they are a help in the struggle for
survival. His language is felt to imply that natural causes, the struggle
for survival, and cat's claws are ideological finalities in themselves, 18
Part of this objection is sirrtply that Darwin's theory is less aestheti-
cally satisfying, less beautiful, than Newton's. It lacks the elegant
precision of a mathematical solution. It is the prose realism, not the
poetic truth, of science. But apparently most biological generaliza-
tions are prose realism are less precise, perhaps less universal, than
those of physics and chemistry. 10 In any case, natural selection has
not been supplanted by a more graceful substitute. Darwin has proved
only superficially confused and, on the whole, astonishingly right.
The Most Important Eoo\ of the Century )9
Paleontologists have uncovered infinitely more than he knew about
the biological past. They have discovered radioactive chronometers
in the rocks and arrived at much more accurate conceptions of
geological time. They have estimated the life span and the compara-
tive populations of extinct genera and species. They have drawn con-
clusions about the "rate" of evolution, tracing a great class like the
reptiles, for example, from obscure beginnings, through "explosions"
of adaptive radiation, periods of relative stability accompanied by the
increased specialization of some species and the elimination of those
less efficiently specialized, to rapid decline before new competitors. 20
Some of these discoveries Darwin foresaw in broad outline. On the
whole, his appeals to future research have been justified. Posterity
has documented his arguments.
Moreover, his "simple" 21 explanation has not been discredited; it
has merely shifted emphasis a little and grown infinitely more compli-
cated. Beneath variation yawn the Mendelian profundities; beneath
natural selection, the endless complexities of speciation and differential
reproduction.
According to Mr. Julian Huxley, Darwin's insistence on the
importance of small variations proved entirely sound. Many scientists,
including Mr. Julian Huxley's grandfather, had maintained that such
variations, even though useful, might be swamped and lost.* The
discussion of natural selection is an instance of how shrewdly a gnat
may speculate on the hide of an elephant. Darwin's chief error consists
in the Malthusianism which makes Victorian economics so gloomy.
* Having conceived of inheritance as a blending, as of colored fluids, rather
than a combining, as of colored marbles, Darwin faced in an acute form this
problem of the swamping of useful variations. He attempted to extricate him-
self by assuming that acquired characteristics are to some extent inherited and
that a changed environment increases the rate at which useful characteristics
appear. Unfortunately, domestic plants show most variability in the countries
where they are longest cultivated. More than a half century after Darwin's
death, R. A. Fisher solved these problems when, applying neo-Mendelian
principles, he discovered that mutant genes can remain in storage indefinitely
till needed. The principle of dominance, for example, aids in preserving
variants until environment is ready to select them out. They are then "un-
packed" by degrees as selection reduces dominance. In the same way, the
variability of domestic animals is explained by the mating of individuals with
stored-up variants. T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics,
pp. 173-185.
ioo Apes, Angels, and Victorians
He assigns too large and positive a role to death and elimination, even
in the broad history o evolution itselfto the pressure of numbers,
"Ichthyosaurs became extinct millions of years before porpoises and
dolphins arose," says Professor George G. Simpson, "and during the
interval this adaptive zone was simply empty." 22 Contemporary
scientists regard natural selection not as a fine filter but as an intricate
series of rather coarse sieves. It may daily and hourly scrutinize in-
dividuals and eliminate misfits, but it may also allow thousands of the
potentially strong to be slaughtered indiscriminately. It is not so
much a spectacular struggle for survival as a prosaic competition in
general efficiency. Failures are not only those who leave no survivors
but those who leave few. Natural selection is complexly determined
by the organic and inorganic environment; by the intensity and char-
acter of competition; by the size, pattern, and stability of populations;
and by the gene structure, mode of reproduction, manner of growth,
and physiology of individuals. 23 In short, the evolution of life is de-
termined by intricate competition in the great world without and by
curiously random play on infinitesimal chessboards within.
Vlll
Convulsions of the National M.ind
rHILE an unparalleled outburst of acrimony, ridicule, hatred,
admiration, and professional envy beat down upon the Origin,
Darwin was far away in the somnolent depths of Ilkley and a water
cure. He responded not a word, nor was it in his nature to respond.
With the passage of years, his meekness grew legendary. The bright-
eyed, fabulous-bearded sage of omniscient calm and inscrutable de-
tachment is a myth suggested to a garrulous age by a romantic por-
trait and a long newspaper silence. Even after Darwin's death, some
biographers ignored die evidence of published letters and continued
to infer the man from his myth and his achievement. "The great
thinker," writes G. T. Bettany, "fulfilling his duties as head of a
family, charged with the burden of new thoughts and observations,
slowly perfecting his life work, had neither time nor inclination for
controversy." 1 Not perhaps for controversy, but for almost every
other kind of partisanship.
Darwin was as sensitive to other people's opinions as he was curi-
ous about them. Praise filled him with elation, and blame plunged
him into depression and uncertainty, or plagued him with indigna-
tion and insomnia. The extravagance of his language betrays the
intensity of his feeling. After being thrown to the theologians by a
fellow scientist, he broke out in humorous self-pity to Hooker, "He
101
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
would, on no account, burn me, but he will get the wood ready and
tell the black beasts how to catch me." 2
Essentially, Darwin was an enthusiast a sportsman, a humani-
tarian, a collector of rare and wonderful bugs. One of his enthusiasms
was for facts; and the enthusiasm for facts, stimulating a large mind
and an immense perseverance, gradually became an enthusiasm for
truth. Darwin was professionally rather than temperamentally de-
tached. Samuel Butler was in part right about him. Though a much
franker, more open nature, he did resemble Gladstone in combining
a somewhat devious egotism with relative unselfconsciousness. There
was not, inside the visible Darwin, any more than inside the visible
Gladstone, a tiny articulate spectator of crystalline intelligence who
saw everything and excused nothing. Darwin's integrity was founded
on dedication rather than detachment, on warmth rather than in-
sight.
As a matter of fact, he had been thinking for months about the
reception of his book. He had Lyell's example before him. Like Lyell,
he avoided controversy and practiced the British art of reticent and
unprovocative statement. But his book was more scandalous than
LyellY He had reason to fear a more determined opposition. On the
whole, his campaign was much more personal* more elaborate, and
more skillful a curious mixture of deliberate planning and instinc-
tive maneuver. He early decided that his work would be $ae if he
could convince three judges Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley. He could
hardly have made a shrewder choice. They were not necessarily, as
has often been said, the three greatest experts on their respective
phases of the species question (Owen had as great a reputation as any) ,
but, being humane, honest, and foresighted, they were natural leaders
and capable, once converted, of converting others. By November,
1859, Darwin had convinced Hooker and brought Lyell a good way
along the short road he had to travel. These had been not merely
intellectual, but personal, victories. It must be remembered that
Darwin was a very charming man, with extraordinary powers of
interesting other people in his concerns and ideas*
There remained Huxley, To be sure, the case was delicate* Darwin
understood both the younger man's cleverness and his audacity* He
could be a formidable critic and aa even more formidable ally*
What was his attitude toward the species question at this time?
Convulsions of the National Mind 103
It is .almost more difficult to explain why every able scientist was not
an evolutionist by the middle of the nineteenth century than to
explain why one or two were. To be sure, nobody would admit the
glacier moved until he could show how it moved. But why, with his
great knowledge, his quick, far-ranging mind, his intellectual daring
and contempt for tradition, had not Huxley attacked this great
problem? His most brilliant work pointed directly toward it. He had
also read Lamarck, Chambers, and Lyell. Actually, his position was
characteristic. He gave up his belief in creation but could not accept
evolution. Arguing the question with Spencer, he maintained that
the evidence for evolution was not sufficient. No theory adequately
explained all the phenomena. Consequently he took refuge in Goethe's
tatige Scepsis, awaiting developments with a feeling that evolution
might prove true after all.
The cautious and divided state of his opinions is vividly indicated
by an unpublished letter of June 25, 1853, to Sir Charles Lyell. "The
finite and definite limits of species, genera, and larger groups," he
writes, "appear to me to be perfectly consistent with the theory of
transmutation. In other words, I think transmutation may take place
without transition" 3 What he has in mind, as he goes on to explain,
is the analogy of chemical compounds, in which the addition or
subtraction of a single atom may cause an abrupt and profound
change. He then proceeds to a meticulous weighing of the evidence,
concluding the negative case with the question, so pertinent both to
evolution and the scientific attitude : "How much evidence would you
require to believe that there was a time when stones fell up-
wards?" . . .
And yet [he continues] the difficulties in the way of these beliefs are as
nothing compared to those which you would have to overcome to believe
that complex organic beings made themselves (for that is what creation
comes to in scientific language) out of non-organic matter.
His summing-up is at once farsighted and cautious:
I by no means suppose that the transmutation hypothesis is proven or
anything like it but I view it as a powerful instrument of research
Follow it out and it will lead us somewhere while the other notion is like
all the modifications of 'final causation.' . . .
And I would very strongly urge upon you that it is the topical develop-
104 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
ment of uniformitarianism and that its adoption would harmonise the
spirit of Paleontology with that of physical Geology.
But why didn't Huxley take his own excellent advice? Probably
he was much less favorable to evolution than he realized. He was
extremely hostile to Chambers's Vestiges of Natural Creation, about
which he wrote the only review he ever admitted to be harsh; and in
spite of the letter just quoted, he was apparently little stirred by
Lyeirs Principles, which demonstrated orderly change in geology
with all the facts and sobriety he particularly admired. Rereading
the Principles almost thirty years afterwards, Huxley was surprised
to discover how strongly they implied Darwin. When an able man
fails to see the obvious, the causes usually go deep. Jones, the most
influential teacher of his youth, had been violently opposed to evolu-
tion. He had also infused his youthful disciple with his own skeptical
attitude, which in Huxley's strongly moral nature, became a kind of
intellectual asceticism. The lures and blandishments of ideas, to which
he was highly susceptible, he resisted with Puritan austerity. To ab-
stain from speculation, to insist fastidiously on absolute proof, to
undertake humbler, more routine tasks was not only sound common
sense, but high moral idealism. Perhaps Darwin had his friend Huxley
in mind when he wrote, many years after this time:
I am not very sceptical, a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious
to the progress of science. A good deal of scepticism in a scientific man is
advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men,
who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or ob-
servations which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable* 4
Perhaps Huxley was not only cold toward large ideas, but in too
much of a hurry for them. He spent time "keeping up" with them
rather than in thinking about them. In fact, he had heard species
discussed so much and so unsoundly that, as he says, he had grown
thoroughly bored with the subject. Momentous and pressing prob-
lems often become tiresome to alert, well-informed people like
Huxley and have to be solved by patient, apologetic people like
Darwin*
Perhaps also the conception of evolutionary change, with its tend-
ency to blur outlines and undermine categories, was fundamentally
Convulsions of the National Mind roj
uncongenial to the sharp clarity of Huxley's intellect. His enthusiasm
for the archetypal idea in comparative anatomy is significant. Indeed,
there was something not only Platonic, but eighteenth century about
his mind. One notices this in his taste for Berkeley and Hume, his
negative common sense, his somewhat attenuated and static rational-
ism, his habit of explaining living phenomena by mechanistic analo-
gies.
The story of his conversion is, in part at least, the story of his
growing friendship with Darwin. He was never, early or late, a mere
hero-worshiper, but always independent, always critical. Estimating
the foremost biologists with the ruthless eye of an ambitious beginner,
he wrote in 1851, "Darwin might be anything if he had good health." 5
In the later fifties the two men seem to have grown more intimate,
and Huxley's opinions, rather less settled. "When Huxley, Hooker,
and Wollaston were at Darwin's last week," wrote Lyell in 1856 to
Sir Charles Bunbury, "they (all four of them) ran a tilt against
species farther I believe than they are deliberately prepared to go." 6
Apparently Darwin was preparing Huxley more than he was
enlightening him. He realized that if he confided his ideas too freely,
the younger man might plunge them into reckless controversy before
the Origin, with its armor of solid fact and heavy guns of weighty
argument, could be brought into action. Huxley was of course present
at the meeting of the Linnean Society on July i, 1858, when the famous
joint paper was read, but even then, his excitement was a little per-
functory. "Wallace's impetus seems to have set Darwin going in
earnest," he wrote Hooker in September, "and I am rejoiced to hear
we shall learn his views in full, at last. I look forward to a great
revolution being effected." 7
But if Darwin's ideas did not surprise Huxley, Darwin's book
astonished him. 8 As a matter of fact, it surprised even Lyell and
Hooker, who had watched its growth almost day by day. The idea
of variations selected by competition was a commonplace of Vic-
torian thought, not likely when developed in conversation or presented
in summary to impress clever men as a dazzling ingenuity. In the
Origin it gained grandeur through the infinite resource and courage,
even the temerity and obsessive single-mindedness, with which it was
applied to a vast number of facts and problems, for Darwin's great-
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
ness consisted partly in his having, in his cautious, prosaic way, so
completely accepted his destiny as a discoverer. Huxley laid down
the book with a mixture of awe and anticlimax. "How extremely
stupid not to have thought of that!" he exclaimed, and yet "that"
explained very nearly everything. It provided the working hypothesis
which he had demanded. "Since I read Von Bar's essays nine years
ago," he wrote Darwin, "no work on Natural History Science I have
met with has made so great an impression upon me." 10 Darwin grew
taller as the years passed. Von Baer became Harvey, Copernicus, and
finally Sir Isaac Newton.
Once the scales of skepticism had fallen from his eyes and one or
two Buffonian or Lamarckian misapprehensions had been overcome,
Huxley grasped the new ideas and the new facts with his usual quick-
ness, seeing problems and consequences which had hardly occurred
to Darwin. Even before reading the Origin, he had perceived that the
theory of natural selection was incomplete without a theory of what
causes variations. Still meditating transmutation without transition,
he felt, like De Vries afterward, that many difficulties, such as the
absence of transitional forms, could be more easily met by basing
evolution not so much on minute changes as on large, abrupt ones
in short, on mutations.* Vaguely anticipating Mendel, he also saw
that mutations, and indeed heredity in general, might be due to
combinations of definable unit-factors. He realised, as Darwin did
only later, that evolution does not necessarily imply progress, and
developing this point in an early lecture on "Persistent Types,'* he
removed an objection to the Origin before that book actually ap-
peared. On the other handy he insisted that artificial selection does
not prove natural selection. Darwin had not so much proved that
natural selection does occur as that it must occur* His great achieve-
ment was in Huxley's opinion that, for the most important problem
of biological science, he had provided a simple* adequate working
hypothesis which did no violence to Lyell's principle o uniformity*
Fair-minded observers should give it the most serious consideration*
vigilantly maintaining Goethe's attitude of t&tige Sfypsis,
However skeptical, Huxley soon became very active. Even in 1858
he had begun to emit pugnacious noises, airing the subject in the
lecture room and terminating his letters with ominous postscripts.
*Scp* 175,
Convulsions of the National Mind 107
When the Origin came out, he saw at once what a battle it was to pro-
voke. "I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted
or annoyed," he wrote Darwin, "by the considerable abuse and mis-
representation which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you." 11
And toward the end of the letter he added, "I am sharpening up my
claws and beak in readiness." Six months earlier this announcement
might have alarmed Darwin as much as it would his enemies, but
now the anger even of this mild man had been aroused by the treat-
ment he had received.
Though England was overripe, she was terribly unready for the
Origin. It rose before the national mind like a Banquo's ghost ter-
minating the long banquet scene of the Exposition decade. Inevitably,
it suggested the analogy from nature to man and became a kind of
anti-Bible. And as the Bible itself had long been taken for a biological
and geological treatise, so the Origin became a treatise on religion and
ethics, eventually on politics and sociology. Scientists themselves
didn't know whether to reply to it with science or theology, and often
maintained the most incoherent and contradictory opinions with the
utmost vehemence. Seldom has scientific detachment met so severe a
trial or come off so badly. A zoologist determined to read the book yet
never to believe it. An admiring ethnologist would neither change nor
accept a word of it. "Lyell . . . ," wrote Hooker, "is absolutely
gloating over it." 12 And yet Lyell pleaded pathetically with Darwin
to introduce just a little divine direction or "prophetic germ." 13
Whewell wrote that the book was too impressive to be criticized
lightly, but refused to allow a copy to be placed in the Trinity College
Library. The great mathematician, Sir John Herschel was shocked not
so much at the atheism which natural selection implied as at the
niggling slovenliness it imputed to nature. It "is the law of higgledy-
piggledy," he pronounced severely, filling Darwin with bewildered
consternation. 14 H. C. Watson wrote Darwin that he was the greatest
revolutionist in nineteenth-century biology and at the same time rather
irritated him by enclosing a dusty offprint showing that he himself
had maintained very similar ideas many years before. F. E. Gray
thought the Origin absolutely nothing more than Lamarck all over
again and couldn't for the life of him understand what all the fuss
was about.
The Origin, as I have suggested, elicited some of the keenest
io8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
theology from some of the most eminent scientists, though how much
this was religious zeal and how much professional jealousy was often
difficult to determine. Many objections proceeded from a misconcep-
tion of theoretical method. You could not see natural selection at
work. Therefore it was a mere empty speculation. But in a more
particular sense the sore point was natural selection itself. It seemed
to substitute accident or, as some felt, mechanism for intelligent
purpose in the natural order. Sternly confining his theology to his
footnotes, Herschel declared in his Physical Geography of the Globe
that he didn't in the least mind thinking of cosmic intelligence as oper-
ating impersonally through scientific laws. But neither cosmic intelli-
gence nor anything so rationally ordered as the organic world could
ever be regarded as the result of chance. 15 Natural selection was an in-
genious hypothesis but of course it could not be taken seriously. It
omitted its own ultimate and governing factor. The American Asa
Gray, a warm and sincere Darwinian, held that, so far from represent-
ing chance, natural selection embodied a blind necessity totally in-
compatible with theism, unless the stream of variations themselves
could be conceived as guided by design. 10
In his letters Darwin countered these criticisms with the utmost
patience and showed incidentally that when practical occasion re-
quired, he was no mean metaphysician. You could not see natural
selection at work? Of course not. Neither could you see gravitation
at work. You inferred its working from its results. He grumbled a
little that the astronomer Herschel wanted so much divine direction
in biology and so little in astronomy. But Herschel was ill-disposed.
When Asa Gray pleaded that variations might be divinely guided,
Darwin was all sympathy and understanding. Nevertheless, he felt
that the more divine guidance in variations, the less reality in natural
selection. Moreover, his study of domestic animals convinced him
that variations were totally undesigned* Surely God had no interest
in enabling man to develop such vanities as the fantail and tumbler
pigeons. Darwin was quick to defend the integrity of his own princi-
ples but slow to follow the argument into theology. He was delighted
to hear a clergyman endorse the theism of his book, but reluctant to
do so himself*
In an age when everybody talked religion, when atheists dogma**
tized as boldly as clergymen and agnostics wrote volumes about their
Convulsions of the National Mind 109
ignorance, Darwin maintained for a lifetime a discreet and sensitive
reticence. He shrank from wounding delicately orthodox feelings and
felt, as other Victorian gentlemen did about their property, that his
religious views were his own concern. When hard pressed, he pleaded
somewhat nervously that he was too ill, too busy, or too old to think
about religious subjects; or that, not being a specialist, he had not
reflected deeply enough upon them to have anything worth saying.
But of course when so many people talked so much, he could not
help thinking a little^-or perhaps a good deal. At the end of his life,
he spoke out frankly in the "Autobiography."
As usual, he explained himself with a history. His religion had
wasted away before his science in a war of attrition so gradual that,
in his own words, he "felt no distress" and hardly realized that a shot
had been fired. Soon after his return to England, while yet hesitating 1
between an evolutionary and a theological biology, he had discovered
no doubt with astonishment that he had become a complete
skeptic about Revelation. His ideas of progress and evolution
secondarily, his humanitarianism had been decisive. He saw that
scriptures and mythology were part of the evolution of every people.
"The Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books
of the Hindoos," 17 not only because of "its manifestly false history
of the world" but because of "its attributing to God the feelings of a
revengeful tyrant." 18 He rejected Christian miracles because they
were similar to those in other mythologies, because they rested on
dubious and conflicting testimony, and because they contradicted the
uniformitarianism he had learned from Lyell. He also rejected the
divinity of Jesus and doubted the supremacy of Christian ethics.
"Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be
denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation we
now put on metaphors and allegories." 19 Clearly, Darwin was a
progressive to the core.*
For many years after this time, he clung rather absent-mindedly to
a vague theism. But natural selection finished what evolution had
begun. The issue presented itself as a choice between chance and
design more specifically, between the method and the achievement
*To Francis Galton he wrote in an undated letter (probably 1879), **I gave
up common religious belief almost independently, from my own reflections."
Unpublished letters, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: University Library).
no Apes, Angels, and Victorians
of natural selection. If the achievement is emphasized, then the
universe the physical, aesthetic, and moral habitat of such a creature
as man seems too wonderful and coherent not to be the work of an
intelligence similar to our own. If chance variations and the struggle
for existence are emphasized, then it seems a rather unhappy accident.
But surely, he felt, method has contaminated achievement. Surely the
universe cannot be the product of design unless the sawfly is
expressly designed to devour living larvae, or the intestinal worm to
lodge in the intestine of its victim. Darwin put finally the humani-
tarian question: is there more suffering or happiness in the world?
He invented an optimistic answer. In the struggle for survival,
pleasure is always a stimulus and a guide to success; whereas pain,
though a useful admonition when limited and monetary, is a harmful
depressant when protracted. Consequently, pleasure tends to be se-
lected over pain in the evolutionary process. But he did not convince
himself. Individual failure is infinitely more frequent than individual
success. In fact, failure, in the sense of death, is universal. He always
came back ultimately to "the suffering of millions of the lower animals
throughout almost endless time." 20
Again, neither the laws of nature nor the intuitions of man
necessarily imply cosmic purpose. The law of gravitation operates
on the moon, but a lifeless desert does not indicate a living intelli-
gence. Savages firmly believe, as Tylor had shown, in the most
fantastic superstitions, but their beliefs do not indicate a fantastic
universe, any more than those of civilized man indicate a benevolent
one.
Darwin seems also to have been aware that a belief-pattern, once
suppressed as a spiritual, may reassert itself as a secular dogma.
Reasoning that solar energy is limited and constantly being expended
in radiation, Lord Kelvin had begun in the sixties, like a kind of
cosmic actuarial expert, to calculate the future life expectancy o the
sun* Some day the earth would be as cold and dead as the moon* "To
think of the progress of millions of years, with every continent
swarming with good and enlightened men," Darwin exclaimed in a
letter of 1865, "all ending in this, and with no fresh start until this
our planetary system has again been converted into a red-hot gas. n 3 *
Expressing the same sentiment in his "Autobiography," he concluded,
Convulsions of the National Mind in
"To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the
destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful." 22
Darwin made no serious effort to resolve the dilemma between
design and chance. Perhaps there were other alternatives, of which
the human mind, at best a makeshift improvement on the mentality
of the lower animals, can have no conception. A dog might as well
speculate on the mind of man, as man on the mind of the Creator.
Basically, of course, Charles had never felt a strong will to believe.
His faith had never been, like Newman's, the result of deliberate
choice. He did not choose, but evolved. Probably the first step toward
irreligion had been his Cambridge religious education. Paley had
taught him to delight in reasoning about material phenomena and to
regard the power of assent as dependent on rational argument and
physical evidence. Design had thus led him to physical fact; and with
facts he had soon become much more at home than with the Cam-
bridge God of Theology. When called on to reason about such matters
as the finite and the infinite, free will and necessity, or matter and
spirit, Charles soon got into "a hopeless muddle." His muddleheaded-
ness made him a modern. Reality for him was a process evolving
constantly higher values in a universe bounded by cosmic question
marks. For a time, perhaps, the question marks had loomed somewhat
uncomfortably over his shoulder; but he had kept his mind on his
work, and now they had long since receded into a useful and benefi-
cent fog. Slowly, almost painlessly, Charles had become an agnos-
tic.
These views with many protestations of bewilderment and pain
Darwin communicated at length to Asa Gray.
Only Gray could have dragged so much theology out of Darwin.
"Do not hurry over Asa Gray," he told Lyell. "He strikes me as one
of the best reasoners and writers I have ever read. He knows my book
as well as I do myself." 23 "A complex cross," he wrote on another
occasion, "of lawyer, poet, naturalist, and theologian." 24
Gray was magnificently equipped to lead the evolutionary crusade
in the United States. He was the foremost American botanist and
as a man of ready sympathy and vast correspondence an unparalleled
power among his younger colleagues. He was a vivid and indefati-
gable writer of textbooks and therefore a major force in general
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
education. As a Harvard professor and a handsome, charming gentle-
man with open manners and an expression of shrewd benignity, he
exerted a wide influence in the most important cultural city of
America. As a leading scientist with a deep and personal sense of
religion, he inspired confidence throughout that whole section of
American liberals who were optimistically convinced that science and
religion could effect a beneficent compromise. As a stern idealist
who devoted to flowers the heroic strenuousness and superb enthusi-
asm which his countrymen commonly lavished on more remunerative
pursuits, he could be as fiercely partisan after a judgment as he was
loftily impartial before; and once aroused, he could wield the fork
and net of controversy almost as subtly and dangerously as Huxley
himself. Evolution gave him the opportunity, for the Origin divided
Harvard as it divided the world. In a series of dramatic public debates,
Gray won an impressive victory over the famous geologist Agassiz*
It was during these years immediately after the appearance of the
Origin that Gray joined the inner circle of those who shared the
master's confidence and gave valued advice*
Darwin told friends that he hoped for more from intelligent lay-
men than from professional scientists, "who have too firmly fixed in
their heads that a species is an entity." 25 Certainly laymen were
interested, for the first edition was sold out in a single day. Newspaper
and magazine writers jumped to every obvious conclusion: Darwin
had exalted blind chance and he had exalted divine law- He had
proved that might was right and therefore Napoleon was right.
He had offered a vista of unlimited progress operating on the demo-
cratic principle of fruitful competition.
Among the clergy, a few liberals were ready to accept the new ideas*
Long a believer in evolution and strenuously convinced it offered
ultimately a noble conception of God, Kingslcy declared himself
ready to follow any "villainous shifty fox of an argument*' into what-
ever bog$ and brakes it might lead,* 6 The great majority of his
fellows, however, attacked with all the ferocity o vested interest
sorely threatened. The controversial cliches of folly, madness, and
atheism were worn to transparent thinness*
Probably the most formidable and wounding attack came from a
man who was both a priest and a scientist. This was Darwin's old
Convulsions of the "National Mind 113
geology professor, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, who had once
predicted for him a brilliant scientific future. Condemning the Origin
both in his published review and in his letter of acknowledgment to
the author, Sedgwick maintained that "there is a moral or meta-
physical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this
is deep in the mire of folly." 27 Ignoring causation, which is the will
of God, Darwin has deceptively gone through the motions, not
achieved the reality, of true induction. Natural selection is "but a
secondary consequence," a sham battle maneuvered from above. By
utterly repudiating final causes, Darwin has betrayed "a demoralised
understanding" and done his best to plunge humanity "into a lower
grade of degradation" than any yet recorded. 28 Sedgwick particu-
larly objected to "the tone of triumphant confidence" with which, at
the end of his book, Darwin appeals to "the rising generation." 29
Other passages made him laugh till his sides ached.
Quite characteristically, Darwin found Sedgwick's letter simply
unintelligible. On occasion he could see the ultimate consequences
of a theory as well as any man; but in general, metaphysical ideas
made him uncomfortable, and unpleasant metaphysical ideas made
him ill. His mind had a useful tendency to reject what was at once
unpleasant and irrelevant to the scientific problem in hand. "The
more I think the more bewildered I become" terminates more than
one unwelcome religious discussion in his correspondence. 30 Only
after discussing Sedgwick's letter with Lyell at some length did he
concede, "I dare say I did greatly underrate its clearness." 31 Never-
theless, he failed to see a legitimate criticism. Now that his theory
was embodied in a book and placed before the world, he suddenly
felt very closely identified not only with its scientific actualities but
with its metaphysical implications. The supernatural interfered with
the aesthetic symmetry of his ideas. The Deity had become aix
epistemological inconvenience.
Sometimes criticism was uncomfortably personal:
Here is a good joke: H. C. Watson (who, I fancy and hope, is going to
review the new edition of the 'Origin') says that in the first four para-
graphs of the' introduction, the words "I," "me," "my," occur forty-three
times! I was dimly conscious of the accursed fact. He says it can be ex-
plained phrenologically, which I suppose civilly means, that I am the most
ii4 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
egotistically self-sufficient man alive; perhaps so. I wonder whether he
will print this pleasing fact; it beats hollow the parentheses in Wollaston's
writing.
I am, my dear Hooker, ever yours,
C. Darwin.
P.S. Do not spread this pleasing joke; it is rather too biting, 32
Meanwhile, he continued to pull wires with unflagging zeal. There
was hardly an eminent scientist in Europe or America to whom he
did not send a gift copy, accompanied with a letter exhibiting all that
talent for disarming the mighty and pedagogically awful which he
may have learned as a boy from propitiating his father. To utter
irreconcilables he wrote letters which began, "My dear Falconer,"
and which ended, "I remain, my dear Falconer, Yours most truly,
Charles Darwin." In between he suggested, "Lord, how savage you
will be, if you read it, and how you will long to crucify me alive!"
And then he added, "But if it should stagger you in ever so slight a
degree . . / >3S He was grave and respectful to Agassiz, flattering
to De Candolle, He encouraged Hooker, egged on Huxley, argued
with Lyell, asked Henslow for corrections. He acknowledged a great
debt to Carpenter's Comparative Physiology, cautiously sounded him
out, and on finding him favorable, urged him to write a review. When
the review appeared, it was highly complimentary but fell short of
announcing complete conversion. Darwin was pleased, but could not
refrain from complaining to Lyell, "He admits that all birds are from
one progenitor, and probably all fishes and reptiles from another
parent. But the last mouthful chokes him. He can hardly admit all
vertebrates from one parent" 8 *
To the intimate and sympathetic, he spoke of his exhaustion and
his illness; to the timidly doubtful, he referred to the great men al-
ready converted; to the timidly respectable, he declared that all the
theological opprobrium would fall OE him as the first offender, and
grumbled humorously about suffering the silent pain of his female
relatives* He wanted everybody to tell him what everybody else
thought: "I fear these is no chance of Bentham being staggered- Will
he read my book? Has he a copy? I would send him one of the re-
prints if he has not." $5 He was quick to sniff out anonymities; **I am
perfectly convinced , . . that the review in the 'Annals* is by Wallas-
Convulsions of the National Mind
ton; no one else in the world would have used so many paren-
theses." 36 Of one intricately and obstinately doubtful scientist he
writes, "X. says will go to that part of hell, which Dante tells us is
appointed for those who are neither on God's side nor on that of the
devil." 37
Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley continued to render invaluable service.
Hooker made his fine introduction to Flora Tasmaniae a confession
of evolutionary faith. Lyell gave a lawyer's suggestions for better
marshaling the argument of the Origin, announced his conversion,
and began to think of applying the perilous new principles to the
perilous subject of man. With a magnificent display of his talents,
Huxley began to hurry up history to an early and triumphant accept-
ance of Darwinian ideas. He buttonholed formidable opponents and
stultified them with superior knowledge and readiness. He delivered
lectures and fired off brilliant reviews one in particular, an anony-
mous marvel of clarity and apt phrases, which created a sensation
in the scientific world and threw Darwin into ecstasies. 38 "Who can
the author be?" writes Darwin archly to the author himself. Whoever
he is, he actually comprehends natural selection. He knows and over-
estimates the barnacle book. He is "a profound naturalist," quotes
Goethe in the original German, and writes with an admirable flair
for phrases. The only man in England who could have written this
article is Huxley, who "has done a great service to the cause." 3d
Darwin's delight at the review, however, was scarcely more intense
than his disappointment at the lecture which Huxley delivered Febru-
ary 10, 1860, before the Royal Institution. He had carried his aches and
pains all the way to London to hear natural selection expounded with
Huxleyan force and clarity. Instead, he heard an eloquent sermon
on the advance of scientific truth, with the Origin serving as the point
of departure. At the time he persuaded himself that the lecture was
good, but later he could not repress his vexation. "It was really
provoking," he wrote Hooker, "how he wasted time over the idea
of a species as exemplified in the horse, and over Sir J. Hall's old
experiment on marble." 40
But as time went on Huxley proved himself a critic with whom
even an author could be content. As a matter of fact, his relationship
to the Origin was paradoxical. He did not, like Spencer, attempt
n6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
to expand evolution into a metaphysics; nor, like Bagehot, to apply
the concept of natural selection to other fields o thought. He did not
devote his strongest effort to extending Darwin's biological research,
though here he made important contributions. Rather, he tried in
the last analysis to realize what was actually an ethical idealto
constitute himself, toward both the evolutionists and their opponents,
the impartial spokesman o the scientific method, the objective
defender of objectivity, criticizing Darwin where he thought neces-
sary and defending him in everything else. Naturally, he felt that
both Darwin and science needed very little criticism and a great
deal of defense. One cannot make objectivity an educational and
political program, a religion, an ethics, and even a war cry without
some sacrifice of objectivity.
While the great anti-Darwinians were creeping down into murky
cellars of anachronism and ineptitude, new champions of the light
were springing up on every hand. The most notable among these
was the young German zoologist Ernst Haeckei, whose "exceedingly
valuable and beautiful monograph,** D/> Radiolarien, Huxley soon
discovered. He sent a warm and admiring letter together with appro-
priate gifts of Barbados deposit and deep-sea mud, A fast friendship
was formed.
For the progress of Darwinism abroad, Huxley's friendship with
Hacckel was as important as Darwin's with Asa Gray* Intellectually,
Haeckei was like one of those extremely dense and fiery stars that
must linger for eons on the utmost verge of explosion. He constantly
threatened to fly luminously to all the horizons at once, political,
scientific, and philosophical, with an appalling cosmic bang* Religious
by nature and upbringing, he had lost his faith, as well as his political
conservatism, in the excitement of 1848. For a while he had relieved
the dangerous accumulation of incandescent energies by denouncing,
with splendid rhetorical pyrotechnics, the priests and archdukes of
the reaction, until Darwinism provided him, in his own field of
biology, with a positive faith and a new mission. At the scientific
congress of 1863, he greatly advanced the evolutionary cause in Ger*
many by giving a lecture on the Origin, identifying natural selection
with the "natural" law of progress, which "neither the weapons of
tyrants nor the curses of priests" could suppress* 41
Haeckei waged intellectual war against the German enemies of
Convulsions of the National Mind 117
evolution with a Schrectyichfeit which brought pallor to the cheeks
of his English allies. Apparently, however, they themselves did not
suffer. In the opinion of Ernst Krause, the historian of Darwinism in
Germany, Haeckel "concentrated on himself ... all the hatred and
bitterness which Evolution excited in certain quarters," so that in a
surprisingly short time it became the fashion in Germany that
Haeckel alone should be abused, while Darwin was held up as the
ideal of forethought and moderation." *
It is part of Huxley's importance that, together with Haeckel, he
brought the man of science as a cultural type into the broader arena of
European civilization. The warfare between evolution and orthodoxy
created a splendid dramatic opportunity, and with the quick instinct
of a man of action Huxley seized it. To the cleric as the benighted and
prejudiced defender of a fading superstition, he opposed the scientist,
the impersonal investigator who, though somewhat satanically god-
less and inhumanly detached, is by virtue of his dedication and
discipline devoted to truth in the field of thought, to rectitude in the
field of action, and because truth is power, and in its nineteenth-
century form rectitude is sympathy to humanitarian progress in
both fields. Lecturing in defense of the Origin at this time, he
delivered an eloquent indictment against the Divine Will as a natural
cause. It has been swept by advancing science from position after
position, but reappears again and again, an obstinate and illogical
ghost, far behind its former lines:
But to those whose life is spent, to use Newton's noble words, in picking
up here a pebble and there a pebble on the shores of the great ocean of
truth who watch, day by day, the slow but sure advance of that mighty
tide, bearing on its bosom the thousand treasures wherewith man ennobles
* Charles Darwin und sein Verhaltniss zu Deutschland (Leipzig: E. Giin-
ther, 1885), p. 162; quoted in Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 251. HaeckeFs
Morphologic- was everything Darwin ordinarily disliked. It was German,
metaphysical, and so intricately obscure that even Germans complained. But
Charles himself did not complain. Apparently he understood enough to see
that the book propounded natural selection as something very like omniscience
implicit if not explicit. If the Origin did not explain everything about organic
life, it provided a clear basis for explanation. Naturally, Darwin felt that the
Morphologic should be translated into English. For once Huxley disagreed
strongly. He was right. The Morphologic was a success neither in England nor
in Germany.
n8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
and beautifies his life it would be laughable, if it were not so sad, to
see the little Canutes of the hour enthroned in solemn state, bidding that
great wave to stay, and threatening to check its beneficent progress. 42
He then outlined the glorious role that England can play.
Will England play this part? That depends upon how you, the public,
deal with science. Cherish her, venerate her, follow her methods faith-
fully and implicitly in their application to all branches of human thought,
and the future of this people will be greater than the past.
Listen to those who would silence and crush her, and I fear our children
will see the glory of England vanishing like Arthur in the mist; they will
cry too late the woeful cry of Guinever:
"// was my duty to have loved the highest;
It surely was my fro-fit had 1 %nown;
It would have been my pleasure had I seen" 43
This is the language of the pulpit. It evoked, in many at least, the
response of a congregation both toward the new orthodoxy and its
consecrated representatives.
What would the evolution controversy have been without Huxley?
No doubt, sooner or later, the Origin would have exerted its profound
effect on science and religion. No doubt Darwin's reputation would
have been nearly as great. Leslie Stephen would probably have
invented the word agnostic, and John Tyndall would have been the
foremost popular preacher of naturalism. But science would not have
enjoyed such dazzling prestige among politicians and businessmen,
nor figured, perhaps, so prominently in the late-nineteenth-century
school curriculum. Its general victory over tradition would have been
slower, less complete, and certainly less dramatic. Huxley turned
what promised to be a dull war of attrition into a brilliant campaign.
He created a legend, both for himself and for Darwin, founded a
new priesthood, and very nearly made England a scientific na-
tion.
Looking on, fascinated at the agonized convulsions of the English
mind, lay, scientific, and religious, Charles had very nearly forgotten
about his suffering family. Gradually he became aware that they
were with him almost to the last old maid. Had his book been uni-
versally ignored, they might have resented every blasphemous word
Convulsions of the National Mind 119
of it. As it was, they worried a little, but devoted their main energies
to hating offensive reviewers with a hearty and solid tribal loyalty.
Even Erasmus took part in the great campaign of the Origin to the
extent of sounding out Dr. Henry Holland, who was undergoing a
first perusal. Erasmus happened to mention the eye before the emi-
nent physician got to that point. Like everybody else, Dr. Holland
boggled. In fact,
it took away his breath utterly impossible structure function, &c.,
&c., &c., but when he had read it he hummed and hawed, and perhaps it
was partly conceivable, and then he fell back on the bones of the ear,
which were beyond all probability or conceivability. 44
Erasmus confessed that for his own part he had been a little weak
in the head of late. Nevertheless, the Origin seemed to him the most
interesting book he had ever read. Perhaps he didn't feel enough "the
absence of varieties," but he doubted "if everything now living were
fossilized whether the paleontologists could distinguish them." As
a matter of personal taste, he preferred a priori reasoning. "If the
facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feel-
ing." 45 He repeated that he was astonished at the book. Neverthe-
less, he predicted that the ideas would prove to have been thought up
already by somebody else. He also predicted that if his brother studied
ants long enough, he would discover that they had their bishops as
well as their soldiers and slaves. "Ants display the utmost economy,"
observed Charles somewhat regretfully, "and always carry away a
dead-fellow creature as food." 46
Of his immediate family, only Emma caused him deep concern.
Not long after their marriage she had written him a letter about
religion in which she had stated the Victorian dilemma with an un-
Victorian courage and clarity. "The state of mind that I wish to
preserve with respect to you," she said, "is to feel that while you are
acting conscientiously and sincerely wishing and trying to learn the
truth, you cannot be wrong." 47 On the other hand, she perceived that,
being constantly preoccupied with scientific ideas, he might come to
regard religious considerations as a disquieting interruption. More-
over, "may not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing
till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which
cannot be proved in the same way, and which, if true, are likely to
120 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
be above our comprehension ?" 48 Charles's science might bore her,
but never Charles the scientist. "Don't think," she concluded, "that
it is not my affair and that it does not much signify to me. Everything
that concerns you concerns me, and I should be most unhappy if I
thought we did not belong to each other for ever."
She seems to have given little sign that she was troubled by Charles's
want of faith. Her letters to the children were as terse and laconic
as the military dispatches of the Duke of Wellington:
Down, Brownley, Kent, Nov. 13, 1863.
My Dear Lenny,
You cannot write as small as this 7 know. It is done with your crow-
quill. Your last letter was not interesting, but very well spelt, which I care
more about.
We have a new horse on trial, very spirited and pleasant and nice-
looking, but I am afraid too cheap. Papa is much better than when Frank
was here. We have some stamps for you: one Horace says is new Am. 5
cent
Yours, my dear old man,
E.D.
Begin your jerseys. 49
Yet Emma was not imperturbable. The children remembered the
publication of the Origin as a "time of frozen misery." 50 The whole
family was shivering in icy, uncomfortable lodgings at Ilkley, where
Charles, utterly exhausted, was taking the water cure. Then came a
great stream of letters from eminent scientists. Both parents were
much excited. Apparently, Emma read most of the letters to the
children, but Sedgwick's with its "horrified reprobation" of the
Origin, she did not show even to Henrietta.
While eminent scientists bungled and frowned and scratched their
heads over the Origin, all the young Darwins were becoming Dar-
winians with the quick, clear, instinctive apprehension of intelli-
gent children. Horace astonished his father with a theory about ad-
ders:
Horace said to me yesterday, "If every one would kill adders they
would come to sting less." I answered: "Of course they would, for there
would be fewer." He replied indignantly: "I did not mean that; but the
timid adders which run away would be saved, and in time they would
never sting at all." Natural selection of cowards! 51
Convulsions of the National Mind
Even as he anxiously studied the battlefield where Darwinians and
anti-Darwinians fought in rivers of printer's ink, Charles was living
another life, very full and on the whole very happy, in the midst of a
numerous family already growing up. To his children, the Victorian
Newton was an extremely human as well as a slightly comical hero.
They early discovered his fallibility, which ranged all the way from
discrepant micrometers to permanent bewilderment with the com-
plexities of the German sentence, so that his older and more precocious
children were continually astonishing him with intelligible meanings
as well as with accurate measurements.
Yet the familiarity of laughter bred only love and admiration
partly because Charles dared to confess a larger fallibility. To one of
his daughters he said "that if he had his life to live over again he would
make it a rule to let no day pass without reading a few lines of poetry.
Then he quietly added that he wished he had not 'let his mind rot
so.'" 52
"How often, when a man," wrote Francis, "I have wished when
my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my
hair, as he used to do when I was a boy." 53
Himself a charming combination of man and boy, and a fabulous
storehouse of knowledge and accomplishments, Charles was inevi-
tably a hero to his children. He read them Scott's novels, explained
steam engines, taught them how to covet rare beetles and stamps, and
shared their youthful experiences with easy equality and at the same
time a persistent suggestion of the mature view.
"What a tremendous, awful, stunning, dreadful, terrible, bothering
steeple-chase you have run," he wrote Willy, who had just entered
Rugby: "I am astonished at your getting in the 5th." 54 Again,
addressing himself to "My Dear Old Gulielmus," he related some of
his encounters with pigeon fanciers in the neighborhood gin palaces:
Mr. Brent was a very queer litde fish; . . . after dinner he handed me a
clay pipe, saying "Here is your pipe," as 'if it was a matter of course that I
should smoke. ... I am going to bring a lot more pigeons back with me
on Saturday, for it is a noble and majestic pursuit, and beats moths and
butterflies, whatever you may say to the contrary. 55
Charles could make almost anything as intimate and interesting as
pigeons and steeplechases. Advising Willy how to prepare for reading
122 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
in chapel, he wrote, "When I was Secretary to the Geolog. Soc. I had
to read aloud to Meeting MS. papers; but I always read them over
carefully first; yet I was so nervous at first, I could somehow see
nothing all around me, but the paper, and I felt as if my body was
gone, and only my head left*" &6
Later on, when Willy was a Cambridge student occupying his
father's old rooms at Christ's, Charles became less boy to boy, giving
opinions on professors and courses with courteous deference and
inviting Willy to be gently amused both at paternal preaching and
at the delightfully pious reception of it by his younger brothers :
By the way, one evening I said to Frank, who is getting on very well in
French, that he would be very glad of it all his future life, and a few days
after Lenny was dissecting under my microscope and he turned round very
gravely and said "Don't you think, Papa, that I shall be very glad of this
all my future life." 5T
To be sure, Charles still preached. Remembering his own idleness at
Cambridge, he was almost pathetically anxious about Willy:
I do hope that you will keep to your already acquired energetic and in-
dustrious habits: your success in life will mainly depend on this. So much
for preachment, but it is a good and old established custom that he who
pays may preach; and as I shall have to pay . . . , so I have had my
preach. 58
Remembering also that his own want of ambition had depended
partly on a sense of affluence, he put the facts very plainly: Willy
must drive through to a profession, "You must see that when my
fortune is divided amongst 8 of you, there cannot be enough for each
to live comfortably and keep house, and those that do not work must
be poor (though thank God with food enough all their lives)." 59
His letters to Willy were full of money and the care with which it
must be spent.
One is not surprised that Charles wanted Willy to be pleasing and
well mannered. "You are almost always kind and only want the
more easily acquired external appearance/' he wrote. "Depend upon
it, that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please
everybody you come near, your school-fellows, servants and every-
one. Do, my own dear Boy, sometimes think over this, for you have
Convulsions of the National Mind 123
plenty o sense and observation." 60 Willy became the most charming
as well as the most eccentric of the later Darwins. Many years after-
ward he testified that his father practiced what he preached:
To be present with him ... at a small luncheon party with congenial
friends, especially if a sympathetic woman were seated near him, will not
be easily forgotten by anyone who has experienced it He put everyone at
his ease, and talked and laughed in the gayest way, with lively banter and
raillery that had a pleasant flavour of flattery, and touches of humour; but
he always showed deference to his guests and a desire to bring any stranger
into the conversation. 61
By continual practical demonstration, Charles communicated his
interest in nature, his experimental method, and his love of truth.
Of course all the young Darwins became amateur biologists and
insisted on helping their father. But because they were his children,
he was often humbly doubtful whether they could do the bits of
work that offered; and when they triumphantly succeeded, he was
overcome with astonishment, and then they laughed at him because
he praised them too highly. Later, they became genuinely useful and
then he depended on them a good deal.
He never had much time for them. They disturbed his working
hours with a moderation singular to children. Not that they were
really overawed. When four years old, one of them valued his father
so highly as a playfellow that he once tried to lure him away from his
study with the bribe of a sixpence. "I remember his patient look,"
wrote his daughter Henrietta after his death, "when he said once,
'Don't you think you could not come in again, I have been interrupted
very of ten.'" 62
As a disciplinarian, Charles fell below the lofty standard of his time.
In the opinion of relatives, the children were "decidedly spoilt." 63
When strictly necessary, however, he could approximate the stern
Victorian father. A letter to Willy contains several times "You want
pitching into severely," 64 and Lenny remembered an interview about
a soiled jacket as "rather awful." 6S But such occasions were rare.
Charles's power depended on his extraordinary ability to compel
interest and sympathy: his children would rather please him than
please themselves.
They particularly dreaded interrupting him to get sticking plaster
which was kept in the study not only because he disliked seeing they
124 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
had cut themselves but because the sight of blood was so painful to
him. Undoubtedly his extreme sensitiveness protected him from
disturbance by infusing a sympathetic sensitiveness in the chil-
dren.
In fact, when he was ill, a pall settled over the whole family. The
children played half-heartedly, in a depressed hush. And sometimes,
even when he was well, they seemed to sense something that lay
deeper than sickness. As quite a little boy, Lenny approached his
father while strolling: "after a kindly word or two," he "turned away
as if quite incapable of carrying on any conversation. Then there
suddenly shot through my mind the conviction that he wished he was
no longer alive." 65 To be sure, particularly when speaking to his
children, Charles emphasized that his life was a happy one. Emma
best knew his sufferings. Charles wrote his sister Susan during a dose
of water cure that "Dr. Gully has generously allowed me 6 pinches
of snuff for all this week which is my chief comfort except thinking
all day of myself and complaining [?] to Emma, who, bless her old
soul, thinks about me as much as I do even myself." 66
The family attitude toward sickness was unwholesome. "There
was a kind of sympathetic gloating in the Darwin voices," a grand-
child recalls, "when they said, for instance, to one of us children, 'And
have you got a bad sore throat, my poor cat?' " 67 Charles was such a
graceful, charming invalid, and Emma such a tireless, loving nurse,
that the children could hardly resist being ill. Of course heredity
made the situation doubly dangerous. All the children except William
showed a tendency to melancholy, and Etty, Horace, and later George
suffered from their father's complaint.
In 1851 Darwin lost his ten-year-old daughter Annie. Characteristi-
cally, his grief expressed itself in terms of his powers of observation.
He wrote a memorial in which he carefully described her ways and
habits:
Even when playing with her cousins, when her joyousness almost passed
into boisterousness, a single glance of my eye, not of displeasure (for I
thank God I hardly ever cast one on her), but of want of sympathy, would
for some minutes alter her whole countenance. 68
Often Annie's nurse during her last illness, he remembered her un-
failing cheerfulness and gratitude. "When I gave her some water,
Convulsions of the National Mind 125
she said, 1 quite thank you'; and these, I believe, were the last
precious words ever addressed by her dear lips to me." 69
The letter Emma wrote the day after Annie's death is eloquent of
the relation between man and wife: "I knew too well what receiving
no message yesterday means. . . . My feeling of longing after our
lost treasure makes me feel painfully indifferent to the other children,
but I shall get right in my feelings to them before long. You must
remember that you are my prime treasure." 70
The Darwin children were surrounded by indulgent elders. There
was Emma's quiet, unmarried sister Elizabeth, who was devoted to
everybody but herself. There was Emma's aunt sweet, intense,
intelligent Jessie Sismondi, who took the most passionate, yet dis-
criminating interest in the children while waiting impatiently to
join her absurd, beloved, good-hearted Sismondi in heaven. Above
all, there was Charles's bachelor brother Erasmus, who diminished
his great height with gentleness as he diminished his talents with
modesty. He spoiled legions of nephews and fell remotely and whimsi-
cally "in love" with each niece as she grew up.
The relationship between the two brothers themselves is one of the
most charming in biography. Mildly astonished at everything and
deeply surprised at nothing, Erasmus accepted his brother's greatness
with gentle exclamations and a quiet pride that was most flattering.
On his side, Charles retained for Erasmus to the end of their days
something of a schoolboy's reverence for an elder brother. In her
"beautiful letter" about religion, Emma guessed that Erasmus's ag-
nosticism had made agnosticism easier for Charles. He felt a tender
sympathy for Erasmus's loneliness and would often murmur, "Poor
dear old Philos," using the nickname the latter had earned at school.
Meanwhile, the Origin exhausted edition after edition, filling
Murray's coffers with money and Darwin's letters with exclamations
of astonishment.
What a grand, immense benefit you conferred on me by getting Murray
to publish my book [he wrote to Lyell], I never till to-day realised that
it was getting widely distributed; for in a letter from a lady to-day to E.,
she says she heard, a man enquiring for it at the 'Railway Station!!! at
Waterloo Bridge; and the bookseller said that he had none till the new
edition was out. The bookseller said he had not read it, but had heard it
was a very remarkable book!!! n
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
When he corrected for the second edition, however, he found that
two things annoyed him: "those confounded millions of years (not
that I think it is probably wrong), and my not having (by inadver-
tence) mentioned Wallace toward the close of the book in the sum-
mary, not that anyone has noticed this to me. I have now put Wallace's
name at p. 484 in a conspicuous place." 72
IX
An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley,
and the Universe
/N his personal journal at a blank space immediately below the
entry recording the birth of his first child Huxley made another
significant entry:
Sept. 20, 1860
And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four
years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight
hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his
resdess head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all
day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here
into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too
on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking. 1
Doubtless Huxley received many letters of sympathy and wrote
replies more or less conventional and restrained. But one letter stirred
him to the depths and elicited a whole spiritual autobiography and
justification of faith or lack of faith in response. His correspondent
was almost a total stranger: the Reverend Canon Kingsley, novelist,
poet, pamphleteer and Chaplain to the Queen. Kingsley's letter of
condolence has not been preserved. He seems to have roundly de-
clared that he could not himself face the loss of a loved one without
127
128 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
the confident assurance of knowing that person in another existence.
Fortunately, he had that assurance. The strong sense of personality
proves the permanence of personality. Kingsley may also have
touched on his early doubts and struggles, so similar to Huxley's,
and on the consolations of work and a happy married life. Certainly
he divined, with the double insight of a novelist and a kindred spirit,
Huxley's state of mind in this crisis of grief.
Huxley replied:
My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you
speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great
blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had
I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at
me and them and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself
of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my
only reply was and is Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I
have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and
name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty,
still I will not lie. 2
As for immortality, Huxley neither denies nor affirms it. He has no
a priori objections:
It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestruct-
ibility of matter. . . . The longer I live the more obvious it is to me
that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, "I believe
such and such to be true." All the greatest rewards and all the greatest
penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the
same throughout; and if the condition of my unravelling some little dif-
ficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put
faith in what does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that
the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.
. . . I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of inverse squares,
and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions.
Man's first duty is to seek truth. Here science, evangelicalism and
pantheism find common ground. To act on a false theory is to dis-
regard nature's laws and to incur an inevitable punishment That
would seem a practical matter. But the matter is not altogether prac-
tical. To think wishfully, to rest in comforting illusion when scientific
truth is conceivably within reach, is to desecrate both one's self and
An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley, and the Universe 129
the universe. Doubt and ignorance are sanctified when based on a
firm resolve to believe nothing but truth.
After explaining how he became an agnostic by reading Hamilton
on the unconditioned, Huxley returns to the theme:
Science . . . warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps
with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief
than for one to which I was previously hostile.
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact,
not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the
great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire sur-
render to the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little child, be
prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever
and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have
only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at
all risks to do this.
Intellectual humility is not basically different from religious. The
ultimate mystery extends to the very borders of the known. Discovery
thus becomes a religious discipline. The chemist at his bench is a
priest at an altar. Huxley indignantly denies that a "system of future
rewards and punishments'* is necessary either to practical morality or
to the moral government of the world.
I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Govern-
ment (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the "customs of
matter") is wholly just.
The more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of
my own), the more obvious it is to me that the wicked does not flourish
nor is the righteous punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in mind
what almost all forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedi-
ence to the whole law physical as well as moral and that moral obedience
will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa.
The ledger of the Almighty is stricdy kept, and every one of us has the
balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute
of hjs existence.
Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding uni-
verse that conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess
of pain. In short, as we live we are paid for living.
And it is to be recollected in view of the apparent discrepancy between
men's acts and their rewards that Nature is juster than we. She takes into
130 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
account what a man brings with him into the world, which human justice
cannot do.
The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any
scientific fact. The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the
earth to the sun, and more so for experimental proof of that fact is
within reach of us all nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but
the eyes to see it.
This passage summarizes Huxley's basic faith for the greater part
of his life. As Mr. David G. Aivaz has observed in an unpublished
paper, Huxley's ultimate problem is man's place in nature, or value's
place in fact. 3 His solution was to assert a simple identity. An ad-
mission of fact does not require a rejection of value, nor is any meta-
physical substructure of false information necessary to sustain value.
Truth thus becomes morality; error, sin; agnosticism, faith and one
might add science, religion. If one knew enough, he would see that
he was receiving precisely what he deserved and presumably, would
hasten to deserve all that his natural endowment permitted.
In more ways than one, the solution was heroic. One thinks of
Darwin's intestinal worm and his accidental bolt of lightning. Hux-
ley was faced, in the most personal and tragic sense, with a fact of
just this kind. His response was a fierce reassertion of faith: he would
follow scientific truth wherever it might lead, confident that it would
lead to some moral or spiritual equivalent of God. As a matter of
fact, he rather often, as in the famous passage of the hidden chess
player, conies close to smuggling God into his immaculately imper-
sonal universe in a metaphor:
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The
player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is al-
ways fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never
overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To
the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of over-
flowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And
one who plays ill is checkmated without haste, but without remorse. 4
A similar infusion of nature with spirit and personality pervades the
letter to Kingsley. In the hour of grief the need for clarity had become
irresistible. He strove for clarity without God and attained something
like God without clarity.
An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley, and the Universe 131
Probably inspired by a similar passage in Kingsley's letter, Huxley
now plunges into astonishing self-accusation: "Kicked into the world
a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none, I confess
to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin
than I." The confession need not be taken literally. It represents a
puritan's dissatisfaction with his instincts. "Happily,'* he continues,
"my course was arrested in time." And then, in a famous passage, he
explains what rescued him:
Sartor Resartus led me to know that a deep sense of religion was com-
patible with the entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her
methods gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition.
Thirdly, love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature,
and impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility.
Huxley concludes almost with a threat, pointing ominously to the
prostrate form of his recent victim, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce:
And I write this the more readily to you, because it is clear to me that
if that great and powerful instrument for good or evil, the Church of
England, is to be saved from being shivered into fragments by the advanc-
ing tide of science an event I should be very sorry to witness, but which
will infallibly occur if men like Samuel of Oxford are to have the guidance
of her destinies it must be by the efforts of men who, like yourself, see
your way to the combination of the practice of the Church with the spirit
of science.
The correspondence between these two men continued for several
years. There is something here of the encounter between Glaucus
and Diomedes: two great champions of opposing hosts happen to
meet at close range and discover that a deep bond exists between
them. That bond was a great similarity of character and outlook.
The canon was quite as much at home as the professor under the
nodding plumes of oratorical and literary war. He was as amazingly
energetic, as indomitably frail and unhealthy, as sumptuously talented
for versatile performance, as tensely mobilized for action, and with a
mind as splendidly adequate to any intellectual adventure but that of
patiently groping through labyrinths of logic to a subtle and complex
truth.
His Odyssey had been a parade of dazzling Victorian triumphs
over Circes and Scyllas very similar to Huxley's. At a tender age he
132 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
had made his voyage down into the underworld and like Huxley
seen his grisly visions of suffering and death. He had performed equal
prodigies of undergraduate study and taken firsts with an ease as
terrible and wonderful, though with less intellectual zeal, having
lusted after hounds, hunters, and a military career. His family could
not afford to make him a soldier he had to be a poet and prophet
instead. Yet throughout life part of his enjoyment of nature on walks
and rides consisted in planning fortifications for likely sites; and
when in later years he preached for the first time in the chapel of a
military school, the clank of the officers' swords and measured tramp
of the men brought tears to his eyes.
He had passed through a period of doubt, and eventually achieved
an affirmation at the expense of logic and clarity. His Kingdom of
God, perhaps even more than Huxley's scientific Utopia, became a
rather mundane destination at the end of the busy road of social
progress; he was secure in the domestic paradise of an ideal married
life, with Carlyle and tobacco for occasional solace. He had offended
orthodoxy on political grounds, as Huxley had on scientific; and he
also had known the orator's bliss of swaying a hostile crowd at a
moment of national crisis. In short, he illustrates strikingly that, in
its essential human terms, Huxley's career could have been passed
under a shovel hat as well as a mortarboard, and that life on one
side of the Victorian spiritual gulf could be much like life on the
other.
Even at the time of Noel's death Huxley's wife was far ad-
vanced in pregnancy. On December 11, 1860, a second son, Leonard,
was born. Mrs. Huxley urged that the child be christened, and at
length, in spite of agnostic scruples, her husband consented, feeling
it "only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual
organization of its country." 5 Nevertheless, he wrote Hooker, the
prospective godfather, that he would be in a bad temper until the
ceremony was done with.
In the spring of 1863 Huxley and Kingsley exchanged a number
of letters. Darwin's Fertilization of Orchids and Bates's The Natural-
ist on the Amazons had filled Kingsley with ecstasies of enthusiasm
and piety. Undoubtedly he was very curious about science and very
curious about Huxley of course not without designs of conversion.
An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley, and the Universe 133
Huxley was much less curious about Kingsley, and inclined to be
scientifically oracular about man's ignorance and personal immor-
tality. And yet he was more open with this noisy, aggressive clergy-
man than, one suspects, he was ordinarily with himself. Kingsley
was challenging but never disconcerting. He had the sympathetic
insight to understand Huxley without the depth and subtlety to be
critical of him. He also spoke Huxley's moral idiom. The blunt
courage with which he put questions, the colloquial geniality with
which he discussed the ineffable, unlocked Huxley's most sacred
interiors. "I am often astonished," wrote the latter of their first ex-
change of letters, "at the way in which I threw myself and my troubles
at your head." 6
What Kingsley evoked in these later letters was the philosophical
skeptic. P. E. More has pointed out that Huxley's strategy against
bishops and archdeacons was not free from inconsistency. 7 When on
the offensive, he tends to be an uncompromising materialist, insisting
on the primacy of matter and the absolute determinism of natural
law. When pressed by questions and counterarguments, he falls
back on the fluid defense of Pyrrhonism:
I know nothing of Necessity, abominate the word Law (except as mean-
ing that we know nothing to the contrary), and am quite ready to admit
that there may be some place, "other side of nowhere," far exemple,
where 2 + 2 = 5, and all bodies naturally repel one another instead of
gravitating together.
I don't know whether Matter is anything distinct from Force. I don't
know that atoms are anything but pure myths. 8
He goes even farther: "My fundamental axiom of speculative philos-
ophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the
same absurdity the absurdity of imagining that we know anything
about either spirit or matter." 9 Then for the first time he develops
the metaphor, quoted above in its most famous form, of the hidden
player, with its tenuously ambiguous implications of impersonal per-
sonality. He sums up:
For, if you will think upon it, there are only four possible ontological hy-
potheses now that Polytheism is dead.
134 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
L There is no x = Atheism on Berkeleyan principles.
IL There is only one x = Materialism or Pantheism, accord-
ing as you turn it heads or tails.
m. There are two *'s | _ Speculators/^/*^.
Spirit and Matter J r
IV. "There are three *'s | = Orthodox Theol ians .
God, Souls, Matter J &
To say that I adopt any one of those hypotheses, as a representation of
fact, would to my mind be absurd; but No. 2 is the one I can work with
best. It chimes in better with the rules of the game of nature than any
other of the four possibilities, to my mind.
But who knows when the great Banker may sweep away table and
cards and all, and set us learning a new game? What will become of all
my poor counters then? It may turn out that I am quite wrong, and that
there are no x's or 20 *'s. 10
, At the close of this letter he concludes, without much humility:
"Maurice * has sent me his book. I have read it, but I find myself
utterly at a loss to comprehend his point of view." u
*F. D. Maurice, the theologian, and the intellectual leader of Kingsley's
group.
X
Human Skeletons
in Geological Closets
period from 1859 to 1863 was for Huxley both a transition
JL and a culmination. It was a transition in that he now entered on
a life too broad and varied to be reconciled permanently with arduous
and effective scientific research. It was a culmination in that, for the
time at least, the prophet found his mission, the literary artist devel-
oped his most characteristic vein, the platform champion won some
of his most notable victories and yet the scientist did not suffer. In
fact, he managed in large measure to combine all his activities and to
achieve all his destinies in a single work, Evidence of Man's Place
in Nature, which was at once excellent writing, superb Darwinian
propaganda, and perhaps his most remarkable scientific achieve-
ment.
The year 1861 saw him working at the materials of this book
with one hand and performing the amenities of controversy with
the other. In Edinburgh he gave two lectures on the relation of
man to the lower animals. Skeptical Edinburgh came to applaud.
Religious Edinburgh stayed away to snub heard incredible rumors,
and suddenly filled the newspapers with shrieks of wounded piety.
Quite unruffled, Huxley answered with a public letter. His two
135
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
lectures, scientifically original as well as popularly exciting, were
later published as the second part of Man's Place in Nature.
How general was the impact of Darwinism and how much Huxley
was its living embodiment, may be gathered from his effect on
audiences of workingmen, to whom he delivered in 1862 his lectures
"On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic
Nature." "I never saw an audience more intent, intelligent, and
sympathetic . . . ," wrote Frederic Harrison. "I could not but be
struck with the vigour and acuteness of their looks. It was a perfect
study of heads, such foreheads and such expressions of hungry in-
quiry ." 1
Published in pamphlet form, these lectures sold in great numbers.
One can readily understand the thrill of intellectual wonder with
which they were received. In easy, vivid language they reveal the great
and dazzlingly intricate structure of mechanical causes which science
had recently uncovered in the world of living matter, bringing the dis-
coveries of Cuvier, Lyell, and Darwin on the one hand into relation
with those of Mayer, Du Bois Reymond, Helmholtz, and Pasteur on
the other. With characteristic virtuosity, Huxley explores this com-
plicated wonderland and here a pun is almost unavoidable on
horseback. He expounds that animal as a physiological machine, con-
tracts him to his constituent protoplasm, ramifies him out into various
types of vertebrate adaptation, traces him back to the embryo and
forward to death and the chemical enrichment of the soil. He explains
the life cycle, including the photosynthesis of plants and the ultimate
derivation of energy from the sun. Lectures IV and V are devoted to
an exposition of Darwinism, and VI, to a criticism which amounts to
a judicial defense.
"The Phenomena of Organic Nature" represents the confident and
dogmatic Huxley, as passages in the letters to Kingsley do the
skeptical and agnostic. The constituents of reality are energy and
matter, of which everything in the universe, including man, is a more
or less subtle combination. There is no essential distinction between
organic and inorganic. Thought is an electric current running along
the nerves. These lectures, together with Man's Place in Nature, indi-
cate pretty well the effect of the Origin on Huxley* Darwinian evolu-
tion confirmed him in the religion of matter that he learned from
Helmholtz and gave to that austere creed a ray of millennial hope.
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 137
Apparently, man could look forward not only to unlimited scientific
knowledge but to unlimited biological improvement.
These lectures were as much admired by experts as by workingmen.
Darwin looked upon his servant's handiwork and was well pleased.
"Though I have been well abused," he wrote, "yet I have had so much
praise, that I have become a gourmand, both as to capacity and taste;
and I really did not think mortal man could have tickled my palate in
the exquisite manner with which you have done the job.*' 2 As to the
lectures themselves, "I have read Nos. IV and V," he wrote Huxley.
"They are simply perfect. They ought to be largely advertised; but
it is very good in me to say so, for I threw down No. IV with this
reflection, 'What is the good of my writing a thundering big book
when everything is in this little green book so despicable for its
size?' " 3 He was so much impressed that for the first time he ex-
pressed a doubt whether Huxley's future really lay in research. Per-
haps he should write a new textbook on zoology. It was much needed
and would have an immense influence. Huxley repelled the sugges-
tion.
The year 1862 saw Huxley Hunterian Professor at the College of
Surgeons, the man with whom he shared the post having resigned.
The new professor promptly found that twenty-four lectures were
much easier to give than twelve, and contracted to publish the sub-
stance of them from year to year in a work which eventually became
his Comparative Anatomy.
The process by which twenty-four lectures became easier than
twelve did not involve any superficiality of preparation. It was his
rule, says his colleague Sir William Flower, "never to make a state-
ment in a lecture which was not founded on his own actual observa-
tion"; and as the vertebrata were somewhat new to him, he began
with the primates and made "a series of original dissections of all the
forms he treated of." 4 Much of this work was valuable in the prepara-
tion of Man's Place in "Nature. Yet only a limited number of birds
can be killed with one stone, and Huxley was accomplishing a
stupendous slaughter. Plagued with neuralgic rheumatism, f requently
prostrated with headaches and dyspepsia, he measured skulls during
free days, dissected primates every evening, sat on commissions, gave
infinite lectures, wrote Man's Place in Nature, read metaphysics and
philosophy through the small hours lengthened by insomnia, and
138 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
still with unflagging ebullience could write to Darwin, "If one had
but two heads and neither required sleep!" 5
All this labor was both rapid and purposeful. Sir William Flower,
who usually assisted him in his evening work, described Huxley in
action:
In dissecting, as in everything else, he was a very rapid worker, going
straight to the point he wished to ascertain with a firm and steady hand,
never diverted into side issues, nor wasting any time in unnecessary
polishing up for the sake of appearances; the very opposite, in fact, to what
is commonly known as "finikin." His great facility for bold and dashing
sketching came in most usefully in this work, the notes he made being
largely helped out with illustrations. 6
In the general war which followed the publication of the Origin in
1859, the battle over man was the fiercest. Evolution meant low
origins, and low origins meant that man was a disgusting upstart.
There were many who resented the imputation.
Yet long before 1859 the fact had become embarrassingly clear.
As early as 1797, in a short paper before the Societies of Antiquaries in
London, John Frere had described finding flint instruments in rock
strata dating from a period well before that at which an act of the
Creator could be counted on. The paper was received with pain and
piously forgotten. In 1847, having made a great find at Abbeville,
Boucher des Perthes had published his Antiques Cehiques, in
which he proved that man had existed at the glacial epoch and,
theologically speaking, had herded with the mastodon and the
rhinoceros. Des Perthes* book was too large and his case too detailed
to be ignored. Lyell, Flower, Prestwich, and others went to Abbeville
and returned convinced.
In 1848 a very curious skull had been found on the Rock of Gibral-
tar. The brain cavity was extremely shallow, the encasing wall very
thick, the forehead shockingly low and recessive, and there were
heavy ridges over the eye sockets. The Gibraltar Scientific Society
reported simply "a Human Skull." In 1856 a similar skull and a
skeleton were found in the valley of the Neander in Germany. The
paleontologist Schaaffhausen was on hand and investigated. He con-
cluded that the bones were extremely ancient and, though human,
more primitive than those of the most barbarous tribes now living.
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 139
It was upon this sequence of anthropological events that the Origin
burst in 1859. In the ensuing battle over the nature of man, field
generalship on the scientific side passed from Lyell to Huxley. How-
ever illuminated by the new ideas and determined to approach the
study of man in their light, Lyell found in the moment of crisis
that the religion of his boyhood had returned to him. As time went
on, it became more and more evident that his conscience would allow
him to do little beyond reckoning divine intervention according to
geological, rather than Mosaic, time. In the evolution of man, he felt,
natural selection could not be more than a secondary cause. Darwin
offered him no "consolatory view," 7 and indeed, when Lyell was
beginning to have his first uncomfortable qualms, had jauntily
summed up embryological evidence for him: "Our ancestor was an
animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming
tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite!" 8
To be sure, Darwin uttered his blasphemies in strict confidence. His
was still biology with the heroic theme omitted.
Huxley did not share either LyelFs doubts or Darwin's reticence.
"I will stop at no point," he had warned Darwin, "so long as clear
reasoning will carry me further." 9 By a happy coincidence, the cause
of truth was also the case against Owen and it was at the Oxford
meeting of the British Association in this year that Huxley sacrificed
the famous anatomist on the altar of Darwinism.
In February, 1862, he began a series of lectures on "The Relation
of Man to the Rest of the Animal Kingdom," which had great success.
"By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are
monkeys," he wrote his wife. 10 These lectures, published in The
Natural History Review, brought Owen to life for another contro-
versy, and at the 1862 meeting of the British Association, he went
to absurd lengths of opposition. But the sugar-of-lead smile was no
longer formidable, for what lay behind it was too well understood
by everybody. Huxley triumphed at every point and only gained
further glory from the wild Sailings of his adversary. To climax
the meeting, Sir William H. Flower annihilated Owen once more
and buried him afresh under a long and unanswerable demonstration
of the Darwinian position. Owen had become almost an historical
curiosity by the time Huxley's Evidence of Man's Place in Nature
appeared in 1863.
140 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
That book was the natural fruit of controversy. It was a triumph of
courage even more than of intellect; a contribution to scientific liberty
even more than to scientific truth. Huxley said not so much what
nobody had thought as what nobody had dared say- and said it so
forcefully that many who hardly thought at all were persuaded. He
had been warned again and again not to imperil his career by
meddling with the dread theological bones, but he was more than
justified by the event. People had been waiting for a strong, clear
voice of scientific authority.
Not that his book was simply an act of daring. Huxley was the
first to use embryology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy
his own specialties to establish the anthropoid origin of man. He
gathered together all the available evidence; laid down suitable
criteria, including some new ones; and embodied his work in a
biological treatise which, for style and convincingness of proof, can,
in the opinion of Sir Arthur Keith, be equaled only by Harvey's
Movement of the Heart and Blood. 11
As published in 1863, Man's Place consisted of three essays. The
first is a history, beginning with Pigafetta and Purchas, of what
civilized man has learned about the higher apes. Throughout, Huxley
emphasizes their human characteristics. The second essay marshals
the evidence from embryology and comparative anatomy. Here
Huxley's strategy is to show by a series of comparisons that, in
biological terms, there is no gap between man and the rest of nature.
In his embryological development, man is far nearer to the apes than
the apes are to the dog. In the measurements of his skull and skeleton,
he is closer to the gorilla than the gorilla is to the gibbon. Huxley
argues that his moral and cultural achievements are not due to the
weight of his brain but, primarily, to the possession of articulate
speech. He is not degraded because he shares many instincts with the
lower animals : he is raised up because he has developed some of those
instincts and controlled others. 12 The essay culminates in a poetic
expression of the unity of all living things on the one hand and the
sublimity of human development on the other:
In comparing civilised man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine
traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly
discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where
the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awestruck voyager may be excused
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 141
if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these
glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the
cooled slag of subterranean furnaces of one substance with the dullest
clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly
inaccessible glory. 13
The third essay presents the evidence from paleontology. Are there
any fossilized remains from the past which would indicate a transi-
tion from the higher apes to man? Huxley discusses in detail the
newly discovered Engis and Neanderthal skulls. His conclusion is
cautious. These skulls and particularly the Neanderthal are cer-
tainly human, but more apelike than those of any living race. Early
races of men introduce the question of present races. Still restricting
himself to skull types and employing a neat, geometrical mode of
measurement which was his own invention, Huxley finds, among a
multitude of varieties, two extremes the straight-jawed, short-
headed, and the "snouty" or prognathous, longheaded which are
also opposed in geographical distribution:
Draw a line on a globe, from the Gold Coast in Western Africa to the
steppes of Tartary. At the southern and western end of that line there live
the most dolichocephalic, prognathous, curly-haired, dark-skinned of men
the true Negroes. At the northern and eastern end of the same line there
live the most brachycephalic, orthognathous, straight-haired, yellow-
skinned of men the Tartars and Calmucks. The two ends of this
imaginary line are indeed, so to speak, ethnological antipodes. A line
drawn at right angles, or nearly so, to this polar line through Europe and
Southern Asia to Hindostan, would give us a sort of equator, around
which round-headed, oval-headed, and oblong-headed, prognathous and
orthognathous, fair and dark races but none possessing the excessively
marked characters of Calmuck or Negro group themselves. 14
Neither of the two extremes is necessarily lower in the evolutionary
scale than the other. The Negro's jaws are more apelike than the
Calmuck's, but his cerebral cavity is much longer. As a matter of
fact, the lowest or most pithecoid type is the aboriginal Australian,
whose skull in many respects surprisingly approximates that of Nean-
derthal Man.*
*The 1894 edition of Man's Place expands the 1863 edition with three
periodical essays on ethnology published in the interval. The first, on 'Method
and Results" (1865), recommends that races be defined by their physical
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Huxley's researches into the structural similarities between man
and ape led his friend Charles Kingsley to draw some surprising con-
clusions. About the time the first edition of Man's Place appeared, the
canon wrote to his friend Frederic Maurice:
If you won't believe my great new doctrine . . . , that souls secrete
their bodies, as snails do shells, you will remain in outer darkness. ... I
know an ape's brain and throat are almost exactly like a man's and what
does that prove? That the ape is a fool and a muff, who has tools very
nearly as good as man's, and yet can't use them, while the man can do the
most wonderful things with tools very little better than the ape's. 15
Huxley showed remarkably little enthusiasm when "this great new
doctrine" was pressed on him as the tendency of his book. What
he felt he had done was, by a bold act of vivisection, to amputate
man's soul, so that the primate remainder could be subjected to
scientific study.
Man's Place in Nature, despite the fears of Huxley's friends, was
received with just enough vituperation to make Huxley feel like a
daring spirit. Even by 1863 orthodoxy was chastened. It hoped piously
for better days. It had developed a sense of humor. The Athenaeum,
reviewing Man's Place together with The Antiquity of Man, observed
that Ly ell's object was to make man old; Huxley's "to degrade" him.
"Man probably lived a hundred thousand years ago, according to
Lyell; man probably had a hundred thousand apes for his ancestors,
according to Huxley." And with a somewhat edged concession to
Huxley, the reviewer decides, "Thus, then, it appears that while Owen
and Huxley differ, apes and men do not." 1C
What impressed The Athenaeum reviewer, as well as everybody
else, about Man's Place in Nature was that there was so little of it.
The Antiquity of Man enunciated an elaborate ambiguity in five
hundred pages. In less than two hundred Man's Place laid down a
characters, rather than by language, arts, and customs, which evolve and
migrate. The second, on "British Ethnology" (1871), is remarkable for its
extensive use of Latin literary sources, for a very sensible little homily on the
vanity of speculating about the moral attributes of Celtic blood, and for some
very bold and speculative conclusions about the primitive race and language
of Great Britain. The third, on the "Aryan Question" (1890), attempts, in
spite of earlier cautions, to connect the Aryan language with an Aryan race.
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 143
clear-cut, far-reaching principle. Huxley astonished the cultivated
Victorian world with a lesson in twentieth-century brevity.
He also filled the Darwinians with pride and superlatives. Hooker
found the book "amazingly clever"; 1T and Lycll, always generous
and enthusiastic, thought it needed only to be a little longer in order
to be perfect:
If he had leisure like you and me [he told Darwin], and the vigour and
logic of the lectures, and his address to the Geological Society, and half
a dozen other recent works (letters to the Times' on Darwin, etc.) had
been all in one book, what a position he would occupy! 18
Darwin likewise wished for greater length. There might have been
something about false ribs, the intermaxillary bone, the muscles of
the ear, and the habits of young orangutans in European zoos. But
even so, his delight and admiration were unbounded. Pages 109 to
112 were as grand and condensed as any passage in Bacon; and "what
a delicious sneer" (at Owen, of course) on page io6. 19 And how not
be pleased with an author who fought one's battles so successfully,
explained one's doctrine so clearly, and identified it so poetically with
the cause of civilization and the march of progress?
Darwin was the more comforted by Man's Place in Nature because
he was bitterly disappointed in The Antiquity of Man. The history of
the friendship between Lyell and Darwin is the quiet, somewhat
abstruse tale of a master who, in old age, very nearly becomes a
disciple: a prolonged and subdued encounter between Sohrab and
Rustum in which there is no violence, much generosity, some es-
trangement, more pathos, and a kind of death. We who are so much
less passionately lost between two worlds find it difficult to understand
the desperate tenacity with which Victorians defended the shakiest
of cotnpromises. Part of the tragedy was of course that Darwin owed
Lyell so much.
Since the middle forties, when he had studied the findings of
Boucher des Perthes at Abbeville, Lyell was convinced that man was
far older than he or Moses had ever thought. After reading the
Origin in 1859, he resolved to speak out.
Well accustomed to the view from the summit of the evolutionary
hypothesis, Darwin was at first both encouraged and somewhat
alarmed at his friend's audacity. "It is a good joke," he wrote Hooker;
144 Apes, An gels > and Victorians
"he used always to caution me to slip over man." 20 It early became
a maxim with Darwin that those who went a little way toward his
doctrine would eventually go much farther, and that those who went
a great way, would eventually become converts. Lyell had already
gone a good way, and in those exciting days immediately after the
Origin had come out, he seemed on the very point of conversion.
He fully understood all that conversion implied:
I am ... well prepared to take your statements of facts for granted [he
wrote Darwin in 1859], . . . and I have long seen most clearly that if
any concession is made, all that you claim in your concluding pages will
follow.
It is this which has made me so long hesitate, always feeling that the
case of Man and his Races and of other animals, and that of plants, is
one and the same, and that if a vera causa be admitted for one instant, or a
purely unknown and imaginary one, such as the word 'creation,' all the
consequences must follow. 21
As a matter of fact, he had reckoned with his head but not his
heart. He was not, like Darwin, one of those men whose whole in-
tellectual and spiritual life had been absorbed by a single idea. His
constant geological travels were also human travels. He lived as
much in the politics and culture of his own age as in the geology of
the cretaceous or the oolitic. He had a more genuinely sympathetic
interest in the religious thought of his time than either Darwin or
Huxley and religion meant much to him:
I plead guilty [he wrote Huxley] to going farther in my reasoning
towards transmutation than in my sentiments and imagination, and per-
haps for that very reason I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you,
than one who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to
abandon of old and long cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to
me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days, when I believed
with Pascal in the theory, as Hallam terms it, of 'the archangel ruined.' 22
Having gone a long way, he began, to Darwin's inexpressible dis-
may, to back up step by step. The more he thought about evolution,
the more he liked divine interference. "I feel that Darwin and Huxley
deify secondary causes too much," he wrote Hooker. "They think
they have got farther into the domain of the 'unknowable' than they
have by the aid of variation and natural selection." M Lvell seems
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets
also to have had a sneaking preference for Lamarck, of which he
thought Darwin simply a modification. "I will look at Lamarck
again," Huxley promised him, "but I doubt if I shall improve my
estimate," And he continues very justly:
The notion of common descent was not his still less that of modification
by variation. . . . Darwin is right about Natural Selection the discovery
of this vera causa sets him to my mind on a different level altogether from
all his predecessors and I should no more call his doctrine a modification
of Lamarck's than I should call the Newtonian theory of the celestial
mechanics a modification of the Ptolomaic system. 24
But Lyell could not see with such crystal clarity. Late in 1860 he
was still brooding obstinately about such evolutionary trifles as
rodents in Australia and mice in the Galapagos.
Even so, Darwin remained hopeful:
I have had [he wrote Hooker] a long letter from Lyell, who starts in-
genious difficulties. . . . This is very good, as it shows that he has thor-
oughly mastered the subject; and shows he is in earnest. Very striking
letter altogether and it rejoices the cockles of my heart. 25
But the mice and rodents refused to evaporate. They were in fact
theological mice and rodents. Once thoroughly awakened and
alarmed, LyelTs religious sense threatened to swallow his uniform-
itarianism. Darwin wrote:
I grieve to see you hint at the creation "of distinct successive types, as well
as of a certain number of distinct aboriginal types." Remember, if you
admit this, you give up the embryological argument (the weightiest of
all to me), and the morphological or homological argument. You cut my
throat, and your own throat; and I believe will live to be sorry for it. So
much for species. 26
Despite their differences the correspondence between Lyell and
Darwin during these years is one of unusual charm. The dingo and
the Amblyrhyncus wander cheerfully in the gloomy forests of meta-
physics. "Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute" are discussed
cheek by jowl with the "gestation of hounds" and "adaptation in
woodpeckers." 27 Unfortunately, many of Lyell's letters are lost. The
heretic's history must be traced in the saint's replies. "I rather demur,"
wrote Darwin, "to Dinosaurus not having free will, as surely we
have." 2 *
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
As always when his great subject was at stake, Darwin showed
infinite patience and resource:
One word more upon the Deification of Natural Selection: attributing
so much weight to it does not exclude still more general laws, i.e. the order-
ing of the whole universe. I have said that Natural Selection is to the struc-
ture of organised beings what the human architect is to a building. The
very existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general
laws; but no one, in giving credit for a building to the human architect,
thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has appeared. 29
And in the same letter:
I cannot believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in
the construction of each species than in the course of the planets. It is only
owing to Paley and Co., I believe, that this more special interference is
thought necessary with living bodies. 30
Despite incidental disappointments, Darwin continued to be hope-
ful until he actually read Lyell's manuscript. In July, 1860, he wrote
Gray of Lyell: "Considering his age, his former views and position
in society, I think his conduct has been heroic on this subject." 31 As
late as September 26, he felt that Lyell "has, perhaps unconsciously to
himself, converted himself very much during the last six months." 32
Thereafter he said no more about conversion, but continued to be
generous. Reading portions of the unfinished manuscript, he was
enthusiastic about the precise geology and the splendid heap of facts.
"What a fine long pedigree you have given the human race!" 33 he
exclaims; and again, characteristically, "P.S, What a grand fact
about the extinct stag's horn worked by man!" 84
The Antiquity of Man, like Man's Place in Nature, appeared in
January, 1863. Although Lyell's book represented much more work
and his name was still much more famous, time had moved past him.
He was still sailing on the hither side of Pope Alexander VFs line,
still practicing a reticent and dignified statesmanship. In fact, the
sagacious ambiguity of his language had entered into his thought.
The Antiquity of Man begins like a geological treatise and ends like
an essay on liberal theology. Lyell could not make up his mind about
evolution, natural selection, man, or the degree and manner of divine
interference. Therefore, his book is, as Darwin observes, necessarily
"a compilation." s5
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 147
"But," Darwin adds, "of the highest class." There are elaborate
analyses from firsthand observation of the Engis, Neanderthal,
Natchez, and other remains, as well as of their geological sites. There
is a lengthy account of the hippocampus-minor controversy between
Huxley and Owen, with a decision tactfully handed down in Hux-
ley's favor. There are chapters on the glacial period which, Darwin
feels, are "in parts magnificent." Up to this point, all is firm, con-
sistent, and full of the authority of professional knowledge. But with
the discussion of species begins that protracted indecision which
makes The Antiquity of Man so interesting as a human document
and so ineffective as a scientific treatise. "He has shown great skill,"
says Darwin, "in picking out salient points in the argument for
change of species"; and yet one of his strongest endorsements begins,
"If it should ever be rendered highly probable that species change
by variation and natural selection . . ." His application of Darwinian
principles to language is exact and precise, exhibiting at once a great
knowledge of evolution and a great ignorance of linguistics; but the
chapter concludes, probably in answer to Huxley's emphasis on
speech in Man's Place, with a discussion of Humboldt's "profound
saying" that "Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to
invent speech he must be already man." 3e
The humanism of Humboldt fittingly introduces the last chapter,
which deals with the classification of man the culminating problem
of Lyell's book as it is the central problem of Huxley's. Huxley ar-
rives at a solution largely because, for the time at least, he rules out
mind. Lyell fails to arrive at a solution because he will not forget
mind for a moment. To classify man as an ape may be illuminating,
but Lyell refuses to profit by an illumination which implies, even
provisionally and temporarily, a denial that man is formed in God's
image. He opens with a survey of biological classifications, em-
phasizing "an immaterial principle" which, though it is "traceable
far down into the animate world," 37 takes a great leap as it ascends
to humanity. Then he paraphrases Carlyle, quotes the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and concludes with a rather Tennysonian picture "of the
ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter." 38
The Lyells are coming here on Sunday evening to stay till Wednesday
[Darwin wrote Hooker], I dread it, but I must say how much disap-
pointed I am that he has not spoken out on species, still less on man. And
148 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
the best of the joke is that he thinks he has acted with the courage of a
martyr of old. 39
Actually, Darwin was very far from taking The Antiquity of Man
as a joke. A little more than a week later he wrote Lyell straight out,
"You . . . leave the public in a fog." 40 He complained of such
phrases as "Mr. D. labours to show" and "is believed by the author
to throw light," which were almost worse than direct negatives. 41
Most unkind of all, Lyell repeatedly referred to natural selection as a
modification of Lamarck's view. With increasing exasperation Dar-
win protested against an opinion which connected his own and
Wallace's ideas with what he considered "a wretched book," and one
from which he "gained nothing." 42
Darwin regretted his frankness almost as soon as he had written,
but Lyell replied with "a kind and delightfully candid letter," 43 and
the correspondence quickly regained its old cordiality. Darwin was
soon discussing the Duke of Argyll on sexual selection and giving
thanks for excellent advice about the footnotes in the "Dog chapter"
of his new book. 44 But now, perhaps, there was a difference. "You and
Hooker," he wrote Huxley, "are the only two bold men." 45
And yet, among Darwin's old friends, Lyell had been almost the
only disappointment. Nearly everybody else had been "staggered."
Hooker and Huxley had seen the light early and seen it in floods.
George Bentham, a more casual friend, had been so staggered by the
famous joint papers of Darwin and Wallace that he had withdrawn
one of his own, scheduled to be read at the same time, on the fixity of
species. The Origin had converted him completely. Henslow, the bot-
any professor with whom Darwin had walked at Cambridge, and
now Hooker's father-in-law, had received the Origin in deep silence,
presided with alert impartiality over Huxley's famous slaughter of
the Bishop of Oxford, drifted into guarded defense of the new
heresy, and in the last days before a slow and patient death allowed
his orthodoxy to be cautiously and discreetly "shaken."
But the proselyte who gave Darwin greatest joy was the ponderous,
massive-tusked, loud-bellowing Hugh Falconer, who had once thun-
dered that Darwin was corrupting both Lyell and Hooker with his
accursed evolution. When the Origin appeared, Falconer was in the
midst of a "heavy" and adventurous research on the congenial sub-
ject of elephants, living and extinct. 46 "The story has gone through all
Human Skeletons in Geological Closets 149
Switzerland," reported Lyell, "how Falconer threw up his cap to the
ceiling when he saw" the splendid fossil Mastodon angustidens of
Winterthiir. 47 To Darwin's amazement and joy, he very nearly threw
up his cap to the ceiling when he read the Origin. He immediately
sent his elephant paper for approval.
With all my shortcomings, I have such a sincere and affectionate regard
for you and such admiration of your work, that I should be pained to find
that I had expressed my honest convictions in a way that would be open
to any objection by you. 48
"There is not a single word in your paper to which I could possibly
object," replied Darwin with delight. Falconer was very nearly
orthodox!
There follows a jovial and affectionate correspondence about ele-
phants. When by an elaborate maneuver Owen stole the naming of
an extinct American elephant away from Falconer, Darwin lay awake
till three o'clock fuming with indignation. When Falconer returned
from one of his paleontological forays to the Continent, he announced
triumphantly:
I ... have brought back with me a live Proteus anguinus, designed for
you from the moment I got it. ... The poor dear animal is still alive
although it has had no appreciable means of sustenance for a month and
I am most anxious to get rid of the responsibility of starving it longer. In
your hands it will thrive and have a fair chance of being developed with-
out delay into some type of the Columbidae say a Pouter or a Tumbler. 46
The caresses of an affectionate pachyderm could be a little embar-
rassing. Darwin expressed profuse thanks, protested that he had no
aquarium, and hastily suggested that the poor dear animal be sent
to the Zoological Society. A little later, with tusks and trunk elevated
and an appalling salvo of bellows, Falconer charged into print ac-
cusing Lyell, in The Antiquity of Man, of having appropriated with-
out acknowledgment some of his choicest fossils. "It is too bad to
treat an old hero in science thus," Darwin wrote to Hooker; but
he could not deny Falconer his affection. 50
By 1863 Darwin had made evolution credible to European science.
"Darwin is conquering everywhere," Kingsley wrote Maurice, "and
rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact." 51 He had
the satisfaction not only of winning his battle, but of having predicted
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
the precise course it would take. The older generation remained
divided and doubtful, but those who "were staggered ever so little"
lived to be staggered more. Even the most eminent and fastidious
could not carp for long. Von Bar, who, as the father of embryology,
had spent a lifetime looking through a microscope at the most graphic
evidence of evolution, expressed in French a reserved but respectful
interest. De Candolle, a fellow student with Lamarck and a great
botanist frequently cited in the Origin, declared himself very nearly
a convert. Braun, an eminent and intelligent compiler, offered to
superintend a German translation.
But what particularly pleased Darwin and best confirmed his
prophecy was the enthusiastic support of the younger generation.
H. W. Bates, a youthful friend of Wallace, brilliantly explained the
phenomena of mimicry by natural selection. At the urging of Darwin,
he also produced in 1863 the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons,
which became a classic of scientific travel literature. "He is second
only to Humboldt," declared Darwin proudly, "in describing a tropi-
cal forest." 52
In 1864 two eminent scientists sharply criticized the Origin. One
was R. A. Kolliker, famous for the clarity of his expositions in
microscopies; and the other was M. J. P. Flourens, who, though he
had done distinguished work in nerve physiology, rejoiced rather
too much in being Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of
Sciences. Being very busy at the time, Huxley disposed of both men
in a single review, crushing Kolliker beneath the weight of his own
clear, precise misapprehensions of Darwin, and grinding Flourens
between the two millstones of his fatuity and his academic position:
But the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences deals
with Mr. Darwin as the first Napoleon would have treated an "ideologue";
and while displaying a painful weakness of logic and shallowness of in-
formation, assumes a tone of authority, which always touches upon the
ludicrous, and sometimes passes the limits of good breeding. 58
And then after a devastating illustration: "Being devoid of the bless-
ings of an Academy in England, we are unaccustomed to see our
ablest men treated in this fashion, even by a 'Perpetual Secretary.' "
Darwin crowed with delight: "If I do not pour out my admiration
...I shall explode." 54
XI
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity
OUPERFICIALLY, the next decade of Darwin's lif e is the story of
vJ a quiet recluse with delightfully eccentric habits. But there are
undercurrents the sadness of prodigious labor and fading inspira-
tion, the burden and strain of increasing concentration and the re-
sulting persistence of ill-health and greater ceremony of cure.
Being the author of The Origin of Species proved to be a profession
itself. There were always new editions to be prepared, translations to
be arranged. The question of priority, rendered painful from the first
by the appearance of Wallace, was a constant source of petty in-
dignity. Erasmus's prediction not only came true it came true again
and again. Apparently, the idea which had cost Charles so much
thought and perplexity had casually occurred to half the crackpots in
Europe.
A few months after the Origin came out, Mr. Patrick Matthew
wrote an indignant letter to The Gardner's Chronicle, claiming credit
for the theory of natural selection, which, by a refinement of cruelty,
he had tucked into the appendix of a work on Naval Timber and
Arboriculture written some thirty years before. Darwin hastily pro-
cured the book. Yes, there in three scattered passages was a clear
statement of his hypothesis. Of course he was astonished. He anx-
iously consulted Hooker, swallowed his suffering, and wrote a suit-
152 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
able reply, mingling dignified apology with an undertone o mild
complaint that his ideas should ever have been put into the appendix
of a book on arboriculture. Matthew refused to be mollified and had
"Discoverer of the Principle of Natural Selection" printed on his
visiting cards and title pages.
In 1865 a "Yankee" called Darwin's attention to a paper read by
Dr. W. C. Wells before the Royal Society in 1813 and to his "Two
Essays upon Dew and Single Vision" in 1818. Natural Selection
again! "So poor old Patrick Matthew is not the first," x Darwin wrote
Hooker with heartfelt satisfaction. The old man would have to alter
his title pages. In 1866 he prefixed "An Historical Sketch" to the
sixth edition of the Origin. None of his other writings expresses so
little gusto. Lamarck gets a grudging paragraph and grandfather
Erasmus, a martyr to family modesty, is perfunctorily immortalized
in a phrase at the end of a footnote.
The great book drew many visitors and occasioned countless letters.
"An awful Russian bore has been here," 2 he notes; and again, "Half
the fools throughout Europe write to ask me the stupidest ques-
tions." 3 And then there were the correspondents who fervently ad-
mired the Origin but who had written a very similar book which
"goes much deeper." A German doctor, for example, "explains the
origin of plants and animals on the principles of homeopathy or by
the law of spirality. Book fell dead in Germany. Therefore would I
translate it and publish it in England." 4 On the other hand, Lyell
wrote that he had an animated conversation about Darwinism with
the Princess Royal, who, a true daughter of Prince Albert, took a
keen interest in the great contemporary battle of the books. "She was
very much au fait at the 'Origin,' and Huxley's book, the 'Antiquity/
&c.," wrote Lyell. "I have the true English instinctive reverence for
rank," replied Darwin somewhat sedately, "and therefore liked to
hear about the Princess Royal." 5
In 1865, looking over the Origin for a second French edition, Dar-
win had a refreshing experience. "I am, as it were, reading the 'Origin*
for the first time . . . ," he wrote Hooker, "and upon my life, my
dear fellow, it is a very good book, but oh! my gracious, it is tough
reading." 6
The German translation by Victor Carus was a sterner ordeal. "I
well remember," wrote his son Francis, "the admiration (mingled
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 153
with a tinge of vexation at his own short-comings) with which my
father used to receive the list of oversights, &c., which Professor Cams
discovered in the course of translation." 7
The Origin saddled Darwin with a double task: he had to write
a book and to solve a problem. The book was the great work of
which the Origin was meant to be a mere summary. The problem
was of course evolution particularly in its unsolved aspect of hered-
ity and its controversial aspect of man's place in nature. One cannot
but feel that in his anxious, scrupulous way Darwin became a little
confused at the complicated interlocking character of his purpose,
that he sometimes thought writing the book nearly equivalent to
solving the problem. He must have been often tempted to mistake
labor for achievement. There is a suggestion of Laocoon in Darwin's
later intellectual history.
He had hardly finished the Origin when he settled down doggedly
to his longer work, which confronted him at once with the enigma
of heredity; and this line of inquiry led back to an earlier study of
fertilization in plants. In the summer of 1839 he had begun to in-
vestigate the cross-fertilization of flowers by insects, on the theory
"that crossing played an important part in keeping specific forms
constant." 8 Gradually his interest had centered on orchids. He had
read Robert Brown's paper in The Linnean Society's Transactions
and on Brown's advice had procured C. C. Sprengel's Das entdecfye
Geheimniss der Natur.
He was soon as irrevocably dedicated to orchids as he had formerly
been to barnacles. It was a briefer and perhaps a more fortunate
dedication, though he had waxed nearly as lyrical over structural
beauty in the sliminess and smelliness of the barnacle as he now did
over that in the bright color and exotic form of the orchid. Neverthe-
less, he preferred flowers :
He would often laugh at the dingy high-art colours, [says his son], and
contrast them with the bright tints of nature. 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 re-
member him gently touching a flower he delighted in. 9
Like many somewhat inarticulate people, Darwin used his hands a
great deal when talking "in a way that seemed rather an aid to him-
self than to the listener." 10 His son remembers that in explaining the
154 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
fertilization of an orchid, he would use his hands as another man
might use pencil and paper.
Orchids proved to be the perfect subject, so much so that he scarcely
regarded them as serious work. They were a delicious waste of time:
It is mere virtue in me [he wrote Hooker] which makes me not wish to
examine more orchids; . . . Nevertheless, I have just been looking at
Lindley's list in the Vegetable Kingdom, and I cannot resist one or two
of his great division of Arethuseae, which includes Vanilla?*
And a little later: "I must keep clear of Apostasia, though I have
cast many a longing look at it in Bauer." 12
Of course both Vanilla and Apostasia were included; of course
what was meant to be a paper swelled gradually into a book. As a
matter of fact, Charles found himself obliged to be more of a dis-
coverer than he had intended to be, for in spite of the excellent work
of Brown and Sprengel, orchid science was a little unsound at its
foundations. Flowers did not look quite as the great Bauer drew
them. What had seemed solved and simple proved all at once to be
desperately puzzling and complex. "If I cannot explain the case of
Habenaria" he exclaims tragically to Hooker, "all my work is
smashed. I was a fool ever to touch orchids." 13 But eventually, of
course, each variety yielded up its secrets. What ingenuities of
adaptation! "I carefully described to Huxley," he wrote to a new
friend, T. N. Farrer, "the shooting out of the Pollinia in Catasetum,
and received for an answer, 'Do you really think I can believe all
that?'" 14
As usual, Darwin had plenty of assistance. Hooker and Lindley
sent him rare specimens; his sons caught pollen-bearing moths at
night; and everybody watched orchids for visiting insects. Even Lord
Avebury received orders :
I write now in great haste to beg you to look (though I know how busy
you are, but I cannot think of any other naturalist who would be careful)
at any field of common red clover (if such a field is near you) and watch
the hive-bees: probably (if not too late) you will see some sucking at the
mouth of the Htde flowers and some few sucking at the base of the flowers,
at holes bitten through the corollas. All that you will see is that the bees
put their heads deep into the [flower] head and rout about. Now, if you
see this, do for Heaven's sake catch me some of each and put in spirits and
keep them separate. 16
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity
Alas! The next day he wrote in a fresh ecstasy of apology and paren-
thesis: "I beg a million pardons. Abuse me to any degree, but forgive
me: it is all an illusion (but almost excusable) about the bees. I do so
hope that you have not wasted any time from my stupid blunder. I
hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees." 16
He was also harassed by the incidental catastrophes which assail a
numerous family in an unhygienic age. Ever since an attack of
diphtheria in 1858, his daughter Henrietta had been ailing and
was eventually sent to a warmer climate. In the summer of 1862
one of his sons caught scarlet fever. When the boy had recovered
sufficiently, Darwin took a house in Bournemouth, but on the way
his wife came down with the disease. "We are a wretched family, and
ought to be exterminated," he wrote Asa Gray. "There is no end of
trouble in this weary world." 1T And again he wrote:
Children are one's greatest happiness, but often and often a still greater
misery. A man of science ought to have none perhaps not a wife; for
then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring for, and a
man might (whether he could is another question) work away like a
Trojan. 18
The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by In-
sects appeared in 1862. It is a study of nature's trap doors and spring
mechanisms. Orchid fertilization is a melodrama of ingenuity which
transpires in a microcosm of exotic beauty. The insect is attracted by
a sweet odor. Sometimes a petal-door opens up before him and snaps
shut behind. Sometimes a ridged passageway, like the secret stairway
in a haunted house, guides him to precisely the spot where he may
sip nectar and at the same time release the mechanisms of the flower.
When he touches a certain point on the rostellum, the pollen-masses
are either shot at him like arrows, or they grip his proboscis with a
clasp, or, more frequently, they simply slide through a kind of trap
door and are cemented to his eyes by two viscid discs. After an interval
sufficient to allow the insect to sip nectar and make his exit, the pollen-
masses bend forward on their discs so as to be in exactly the right
position to touch the stigma of the next flower. Most orchids are in-
variably cross-fertilized and completely dependent on insects. Darwin
regards the few species which fertilize themselves as degenerates:
I should like to hear [he wrote, perhaps slyly, to Asa Gray] what you
think about what I say in the last chapter of the orchid book on the mean-
1 56 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
ing and cause o the endless diversity of means for the same general pur-
pose. It bears on design, that endless question. Good night, good night! 19
Certainly the book is less innocuous than it seems. Orchids were a
natural stronghold of anti-Darwinians. In the first place, they were
held, like other intricate structures, to be a conspicuous instance of
botanical art for art's sake or at least art for man's sake. As such,
they had no relation to utility or natural selection. Darwin therefore
demonstrated that orchids are not simply beautiful to men but use-
ful to themselves, that "apparently meaningless ridges, horns" have
meaning and utility . 2a
But even if God had intended usefulness rather than beauty, Dar-
win's book still seemed to support the argument for divine intent in
nature. Actually, it undermined that argument. Asa Gray was quick
to see this and Darwin was quick to respond: "Of all the carpenters
for knocking the right nail on the head you are the very best; no one
else has perceived that my chief interest in the orchid has been that
it was a 'flank movement' on the enemy." 21
In short, he does not directly attack the ideas of creation and divine
intent, but he labors to make them untenable so far as practical
science is concerned. The adaptations of orchids, varied and intricate
as they are, could not possibly have resulted from a single act of the
Creator. There is too much history in orchid structure for that. The
little treatise concludes with a discussion of homologies in which
Darwin traces all species back to a monocotyledonous flower of fifteen
organs. This evolution from a general to a highly complex and
specialized form is best explained by natural selection. In fact,
the more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-
increasing force, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly
acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in
many ways, with the preservation of those variations which were bene-
ficial to the organism under complex and ever-varying conditions of life,
transcend in an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations
which the most fertile imagination of man could invent. 22
Such reasoning might suggest that natural selection renders cosmic
mind unnecessary.
When the book came out, the Duke of Argyll, writing in The
Edinburgh,pomted out that while Darwin's argument proved natural
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 157
selection, his language proved design. He constantly used phrases
such as "beautiful contrivance,'* "the labellum is ... in order to
attract," "the nectar is purposely lodged." 23 The reviewer concluded
that Darwin was unintentionally right. Wallace made a brilliant
reply, and Darwin remained cheerful.
As a matter of fact, Charles did not fear the theologians quite so
much as the botanists. He intended the orchid book as an example
of how natural selection could be applied to the plant kingdom, and
was full of trepidation at the thought of laying down fundamental
law in a field not his own. But the botanists were full of praise. The
book also sold widely among the general public. Charles was so
astonished and delighted at his success, that he had to compose
devastating reviews against himself to keep his vanity within bounds.
His orchid study remained a lifelong pleasure to him. "They are
wonderful creatures, these Orchids," he wrote almost at the end of his
days, "and I sometimes think [of them] with a glow of pleasure, when
I remember making out some little point in their method of fertilisa-
tion." 24
On November 30, 1864, the Royal Society yielded to history and
awarded Darwin the Copley Medal. Not that British science yet
ventured to endorse his ideas. Availing himself of the dignified
ambiguity of official language, General Sabine emphasized in his
announcement speech at the anniversary dinner Darwin's general
achievement in geology, zoology, and botany, and then, carefully
knocking the brains out of the Origin, admired it as "a mass of ob-
servations" valuable to science. 25 He also explained that the award
was based more particularly on such masterly treatises as The
Fertilisation of Orchids.
Indignant at the slur against his friend's greatest achievement,
Huxley rose at once and inquired whether General Sabine had ex-
pressed the attitude of the Society. The offensive expressions were
softened in the minutes. Equally indignant, Lyell also protested,
though still lost between two worlds. Afterwards he reported the
event to Darwin, who had been absent as usual, "I said I had been
forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to
a new one. But," he added pathetically, "I think you would have
been satisfied with the length I went." 2e
As a matter of fact, a strong movement to give Darwin the Copley
158 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Medal had been defeated in 1863, and even in 1864 some members of
the Society had been bitterly opposed. Who were they ? Darwin had
inquired of Hooker with eager curiosity. Less inclined than Huxley
to expect logic either in himself or in others, he regarded the bizarre
proceedings of Sabine and the Royal Society as hopeful and prom-
ising. "Sabine, through you to a large part," he wrote Huxley, "has
made me very proud of myself." 27
Within another year there was a veritable stampede of societies,
royal and otherwise, to press their decorations upon him. He was
elected an honorary member of the Berlin Academy and of the
Edinburgh Royal and Royal Medical Societies. To be sure, he lost his
diplomas and forgot which societies he belonged to:
Does the Berlin Academy of Sciences send their Proceedings to Honorary
Members? [he inquired anxiously of Hooker]. I wanted to know, to ascer-
tain whether I am a member; I suppose not, for I think it would have
made some impression on me; yet I distinctly remember receiving some
diploma signed by Ehrenberg. 28
He was deeply pleased at being recognized by the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, for as a young medical student he had been taken to a
meeting by LyelFs father-in-law, Leonard Horner, and had seen in
the chair the famous man whose novels, then and in later life, he
had read over and over again:
Sir Walter Scott [sat] in the chair as President, and he apologised to the
meeting as not feeling fitted for such a position. I looked at him and at
the whole scene with some awe and reverence ... If I Had been told at
that time that I should one day have been thus honoured, I declare that I
should have thought it as ridiculous and improbable, as if I had been told
that I should be elected King of England. 29
And if he had ever been told that he would one day be introduced
to the Prince of Wales Charles would either have laughed outright
or begun to think it very possible that he might be elected King of
England. Yet he was not only presented but presented as Emma
wrote Fanny Allen the first of a very distinguished and select three.
It was at a soiree of the Royal Society. Charles had just grown himself
a complete Victorian beard, which proved so effective a disguise that
he had to name himself even to his old friends. The Prince, "a nice
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 159
good-natured youth, and very gentlemanlike," 30 murmured some-
thing which Darwin could not hear. Charles therefore bowed very
low and went on. What Bertie thought of such a convocation of gray
beards and learned foreheads, what he thought of the notorious mon-
key-sage in particularposterity has no record. Perhaps he did not
feel obliged to think.
Preparing for further botanical work, Darwin decided to have a
small hothouse. With the aid of a neighbor's gardener, it was planned
and built with gusto. "The new hothouse is ready," he wrote Hooker,
"and I long to stock it, just like a schoolboy." 31 And a week later:
"You cannot imagine what pleasure your plants give me (far more
than your dead Wedgwood ware can give you *) ; and I go and gloat
over them." 32 Even nausea and headache could not keep him away.
The stove-plants, he said, "do so amuse me. I have crawled to see
them two or three times." 3S
A note by Asa Gray on the tendrils of climbing plants had set him
off on a fresh scent. He got a Wild Cucumber f plant to observe in
his study. He noticed that in an interval of from one-half to two
hours the uppermost part of each branch twisted round in a circle.
After two or three revolutions, it rested a half-hour and then un-
twisted, revolving in the opposite direction. The movements had no
relation to light. Moreover, whenever the searching tendrils touched
any object, their sensitivity, on which Gray had remarked, caused
them to seize it immediately and make fast. Darwin was astonished.
A "clever gardener" came in that evening for a talk and observed
the plant. "I believe, Sir," he declared, "the tendrils can see, for
wherever I put a plant it finds out any stick near enough." 3 *
"The tendrils have some sense," Darwin told Hooker, "for they do
not grasp each other when young." 35
Now, of course, he was dedicated to climbing plants. They would
not interfere with the great book and the great problem. "It is just
the sort of niggling work which suits me, and takes up no time and
rather rests me whilst writing." 35
My present hobby-horse I owe to you [he wrote Gray], viz. the tendrils:
their irritability is beautiful, as beautiful in all its modifications as any-
* Darwin had been astonished to learn, some time earlier, that Hooker
actually collected Wedgwood ware.
^Echinocystis lobata.
160 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
thing in Orchids. About the spontaneous movement (independent of
touch) of the tendrils and upper internodes, I am rather taken aback by
your saying, "is it not well known?" I can find nothing in any book which
I have. 36
Would Gray please tell him whether anything had been published
on the subject? "I shall hardly regret my work if it is old," he con-
cluded, "as it has much amused me.* 5 37
The new hothouse was soon rapidly filling up with all sorts of
climbers, which Hooker sent from Kew. Darwin toiled through
two long German books and lusted after the exotic climbers there
described. Despite a prolonged illness, he observed and experimented
in idyllic happiness through the spring of 1864.
At last he had to begin writing to keep himself from further ex-
perimenting. Then came the horrible last phase, which, temporarily,
poisoned all the many months of happiness. "I finished and des-
patched yesterday my climbing paper. For the last ten days I have
done nothing but correct refractory sentences, and I loathe the whole
subject." 38
'The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants" was published
in 1864 in the Linnean Journal, and in 1875 it appeared as a book.
Darwin found that the ability to climb depends basically on a sensi-
tiveness to contact with any firm support. In the more perfect tendril
bearers it becomes an elaborate combination of differential growth
and spontaneous, surprisingly rapid movement of the young shoots
and other organs. Inevitably he preached a homily on natural selec-
tion. Plants move less than animals not because they are necessarily
inferior, but because, being fixed to one spot, they could derive no
advantage from great mobility.
Charles thought this book too dull and obscure for general readers,
and too obvious and trivial for the experts. But all his friends liked
it and said so in the warmest terms. "I think my friends must perceive
that I like praise," he told his wife, "they give me such hearty
doses." 8d
His next project grew out of a friendship with John Scott, a young
gardener employed as head of the propagating department at the
Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. A great admirer of the Origin, he first
wrote Darwin to point out, very modestly and deferentially, aa error
in the orchid book. The letter was five long pages, bristling with
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 161
not fail to notice a mind beneath the syntax and the Latinisms. "He
had interested me strangely," Darwin wrote Hooker, "and I have
formed a very high opinion of his intellect. I hope he will accept
pecuniary assistance from me." 40 With his customary skill and eager
shyness, he conspired to get Scott's articles accepted, and he conspired
still more to get them noticed and reviewed.
Meanwhile the disciple bemoaned his style and the master gave
shrewd and at the same time revealing advice:
Do not despair about your style; your letters are excellently written,
your scientific style is a little too ambitious. I never study style; all that I
do is to try to get the subject as dear as I can in my own head, and express
it in the commonest language which occurs to me. But I generally have
to think a good deal before the simplest arrangement and words occur to
me ... I would suggest to you the advantage, at present, of being very
sparing in introducing theory in your papers (I formerly erred much in
Geology in that way): let theory guide your observations, but till your
reputation is well established be sparing in publishing theory. It makes
persons doubt your observations. 41
Scott expected a great deal of himself and a great deal of other
people. When the authorities offered him what he considered a
slight, he abruptly left the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, and found
himself, with some alarm, without means of support. Hooker was
helpful in securing him a position with the Botanic Garden at Cal-
cutta, and Darwin paid the passage out.
He had great hopes for his protege. In diffident, yet enthusiastic
terms, he recommends one of Scott's papers to Asa Gray: "A most
remarkable production, though written rather obscurely in parts." 42
And he interposes, with anxious calculation, "He is a most laborious
and able man, with the manners almost of a gentleman." 43 But
launching into a full summary of the article, he can hold back his
enthusiasm no longer. Scott has provided what Huxley required as a
final proof of natural selection an experimentally developed species
incapable of producing fertile offspring when crossed with the parent
stock. "The red cowslip is very sterile when fertilising, or fertilised
by the common cowslip. Here we have a new 'physiological
species.' " 44
1 62 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
there is a break of seven years, and then a kindly, yet rather formal
letter from Darwin. "You have done good work," he concludes, "and
I am sure will do more." 45 And thus, softly damned with faint praise,
Scott passed into oblivion. He returned to Edinburgh in 1880 and
died in the same year. But Scott's subject did not die with the man
in Darwin's mind. The common interest in primroses and other
dimorphic flowers led him to publish a series of papers in which he
showed that sterility is after all no test for species. It is the simple re-
sult of a difference in the sexual organs.
Through these years his illness seemed to grow more serious. "A
succession of doctors and a plenitude of treatment," says Dr. Douglas
Hubble, "were necessary to protect him from the suspicion of sham-
ming." 46 He was long devoted to Dr. Gully and hydropathy, under-
going faithfully a program of "the lamp" five times a week, as well as
a "douche daily for five minutes and dripping sheet daily." He began
to doubt hydropathy only as he came to know Gully better. "It is a
sad flaw ... in my beloved Dr. Gully," he wrote Fox, "that he be-
lieves in everything. When Miss was very ill, he had a clairvoy-
ant girl to report on internal changes, a mesmerist to put her to sleep
an homeopathist, viz. Dr. , and himself as hydropathist! and the
girl recovered." 4T Gully was followed by Lane, Brinton, and then
Bence- Jones, who half -starved Darwin and prescribed riding. But one
day Charles's horse Tommy fell on Keston Common. Severely
shaken, Charles placed himself in the care of Sir Andrew Clark, that
courteous, reassuring professional presence at so many eminent Vic-
torian bedsides.
As his fame spread rapidly through the world during these labo-
rious years, Darwin could feel the scope of his own life contract. More
and more, his infirmity was regulating his tastes and habits down to
the last detail. Society had become very nearly intolerable for him.
He avoided all formal occasions and saw only close relatives and old
friends. He went less and less often to London. An evening at the
Linnean Society cost him days of suffering afterwards. Even a half-
hour's conversation with a distant relative was followed by a sleep-
less night. He was astonished at his susceptibility. He deplored it.
But he yielded to its tyranny and doubtless turned the time he saved
to good account.
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 165
People not only excited him; they evoked problems and if at all
possible, every problem must be solved, every shadow must be
cleared from his mind, before he went to bed. Had he hurt anyone's
feelings? Had he involuntarily misrepresented a fact? His conscien-
tiousness about even the most trivial facts would have seemed fan-
tastic pedantry in anyone less genuinely free from that vice.
One evening, when his younger friend and disciple Romanes was
a guest at Down, the conversation turned to the difficulty of explain-
ing the evolution of the aesthetic emotions, and particularly of the
sense of the sublime. Darwin said that he had felt the sublime most
deeply when he had stood on one of the summits of the Andes and
surveyed the prospect all around. It had seemed as though "his nerves
had become fiddle strings and had all taken to rapidly vibrating.'* 48
The talk had then turned in another direction and after about an
hour Darwin went to bed. One of his sons sat until late with
Romanes in the smoking room. At one o'clock in the morning the
door opened softly and Darwin appeared in dressing gown and slip-
pers:
Since I went to bed [he explained], I have been thinking over our con-
versation in the drawing-room, and it has just occurred to me that I was
wrong in telling you I felt most of the sublime when on the top of the
Cordillera; I am quite sure that I felt it even more when in the forests of
Brazil. I thought it best to come and tell you this at once in case I should
be putting you wrong. I am sure now that I felt most sublime in the
forests. 49
Having said this, he returned to bed.
In a world of possible problems and threatening nervous tension,
Down House was a tiny island regulated by Emma and blessed
routine. Charles rose early, took a brief turn in the garden, break-
fasted alone at 7:45, and then worked an hour and a half till 9:30.
At that time "he came into the drawing room for his letters rejoicing
if the post was a light one and being sometimes much worried if it
was not. He would then hear any family letters read aloud as he lay
on the sofa." 50 After the letters came a chapter or two of some current
work of fiction, and thereafter until twelve, another period of work,
which was then, in the austerer sense of writing or experiment, con-
cluded for the day, so that he "would often say, in a satisfied voice,
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Tve done a good day's work.' " 51 At midday, accompanied by his fox
terrier Polly, he took his constitutional, stopping for a few minutes at
the greenhouse, and then proceeding to the "Sand-walk," a one and
one-half acre strip planted in hazel, alder, dogwood, and privet
with a gravel path around it. Usually he paced methodically, keeping
careful count of his round trips, but sometimes, particularly when
alone, he would stand still or walk stealthily to watch a bird or an
animal. "It was on one of these occasions that some young squirrels
ran up his back and legs, while their mother barked at them in an
agony from the tree." 52
After lunch, he retired once more to the drawing room sofa and
read the newspapers. Then he answered letters. Seated comfortably
in a huge horsehair chair by the fire, he would either write straight
off in his swift, illegible hand or make a rough draft from which to
dictate later. His friends complained piteously about his handwrit-
ingoften he could not read his own notes so that he commonly
used an amanuensis, cautioning him to write plainly and begin an
important sentence with a new paragraph. Following his father's
rule, Darwin answered and preserved every letter. He had a printed
form for troublesome communications, but rarely used it. Even the
most personal inquiry into religious principles received a polite and
evasive, sometimes a frank and open, reply. Minor celebrities must
have been surprised at the deference with which this major celebrity
addressed them. His first letters to a new correspondent with their
"I hope you will excuse the liberty" and "I must apologize for
troubling you" betray his shyness. Nevertheless, conscientiousness,
the constant search for information, and perhaps a certain curiosity
about his correspondents made him one of the most voluminous
letter-writers of his time. Like many a recluse, he was positively
gregarious with pen in hand.
From three until four he rested in his bedroom, listening to a novel
and smoking cigarettes. Cigarettes were for relaxation in idleness,
snuff for stimulation during work. Late in the afternoon since the
best rules are made to be broken he sometimes got in another half-
hour's work before dinner at seven-thirty.
After dinner came the traditional game of backgammon with his
wife. He played with gusto, as he did everything he liked, "bitterly
lamenting his bad luck and exploding with exaggerated mock-anger"
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 165
at his wife's success. 53 He carefully kept track of the score into the
thousands of games.
Charles's reading falls into two classes and was done in two pos-
tures. Strenuous or disagreeable scientific reading he got through
late at night in his study. Because of his long legs he raised himself
by putting cushions in the seat of his study chair; then, to neutralize
the effect, he raised his feet onto a footstool. One is tempted to imagine
him, in the course of a long German work, rising rather close to the
ceiling. For all other reading, he lay on a sofa. Such reading consisted
in lighter or more agreeable scientific works, travel books, history, and
above all fiction. He held a low opinion of novels as works of art,
yet he frequently blessed all novelists. "A novel, according to my
taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person
whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the
better." 54 In later years he cared much less for music because it set
him to thinking about his work.
Passing much of his intellectual life on a sofa, Darwin believed,
with an almost missionary strenuousness, in easy and comfortable
reading. At times he found every unnecessary movement, and even
the weight of a book, intolerable. His remedy was surgery on the
book. With a ruthless, unbibliophile hand he dismembered heavy
and dignified tomes, in order to read them in light and manageable
sections. Even Lyell's Elements of Geology was not exempt. "With
great boldness," he coolly informed its author, "[I] cut it in two
pieces, and took it out of its cover." 55
In some respects, Charles's reading had narrowed nearly as much
as his personal life. Philosophy and metaphysics almost invariably
gave him indigestion. He intended to read Bishop Colenso but read
reviews of him instead. He had only the most desultory interest in
poetry:
Give my kindest remembrance to Mrs. Huxley [he wrote his old friend],
and tell her I was looking at 'Enoch Arden/ and as I know how she ad-
mires Tennyson, I must call her attention to two sweetly pretty lines
(p. 105) . . .
. . . and he meant, he said he meant
Perhaps he meant, or partly meant, you well.
Such a gem as this is enough to make me young again, and like poetry
with pristine fervour. 5 *
1 66 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
History when it flattered his preconceptions or general science
when it bordered on his own researches, he could still enjoy. He
liked Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind but
thought Lecky's Rise of Rationalism too vague and full o abstract
phrases. He was so much impressed by Spencer's Principles of Biology
that he felt ignorant and feeble-minded by comparison.
I could bear, and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious
and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my
superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved. 57
This praise is obviously not without edge. At about the same time he
wrote Hooker, "I went this afternoon to the Lubbocks to have an
interview with Herbert Spencer, and I enjoyed my talk much though
he does use awesomely long words. I plainly made out that Lady
Lubbock thinks him like you do, not a small bore." 58 Still, he was
inclined to believe that Spencer needed only to observe more, and
think a little less, to be a very great man.
The one nonscientific work that thoroughly aroused his enthusiasm
was Buckle's Introduction to the History of Civilisation in England:
Have you read Buckle's second volume? it has interested me greatly;
I do not care whether his views are right or wrong, but I should think they
contained much truth. There is a noble love of advancement and truth
throughout; and to my taste he is the very best writer of the English
language that ever lived, let the other be who he may. 59
The passage speaks volumes about Darwin's nonprofessional read-
ing. In fact, he seems to be defending himself as well as Buckle. He
read not to be critical, but to be entertained, agreed with, stimulated
to feeling. For these purposes, Buckle must have been admirable. He
is irrepressibly curious about origins, studies the animal man broadly
and naturalistically in his planetary environment, is boundlessly
enthusiastic about science, progress, humanitarianism, freedom in
short, all of Darwin's favorite ideas. Science is daily reducing great
chaoses of the unknown to luminance and order. It needs now only
to investigate man to make morals, history, and nearly everything
else as undeviatingly regular as mechanics. Again, as a writer, Buckle
is often ponderous but seldom vague and abstract like Lecky. And
when he comes to narrative, the ponderosity falls away and he is
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 167
simple, swift, and vivid, fighting with contagious zeal the battle of
Victorian progress in a dozen historical settings.
Darwin's curiosity about the world was omnivorous. He liked all
kinds of facts, even nonscientific ones. The Times was one of his most
important ceremonies. It was taken up directly after lunch, and
though it suffered the indignity of the sofa, was read personally and
with great thoroughness. Charles was a spirited politician; that is to
say, he was inclined to feel much and think little about politics.
The American Civil War confronted him with the classic dilemma
of the patriotic humanitarian complicated by some of those delicate
ironies of which the infinite variety of history alone is capable. A
brash, unpleasant, vulgar people were fighting for a good principle
against a charming, refined, aristocratic people with a bad principle.
Moreover, the bad principle meant cheap cotton for British manu-
facturers; the charming people augmented British wealth, whereas
the unpleasant people seemed to threaten British power. To be sure,
the dilemmas of history are sharp and real only in the transitory and
unperspicacious logic of the moment. Time dissolves them all often
tragically into paradox and anticlimax. The temptation to use black
soldiers brought ttie South to the verge of emancipation; the Ameri-
can Union eventually became a bulwark of British security.
Darwin did not, of course, make any clear-cut choice between
North and South. In fact, he expressed for both sides several shades
of enthusiasm, even of fanaticism, slightly tempered at times by the
detachment of the spectator who welcomes distraction from more
immediate concerns. His correspondent on this subject was chiefly
Asa Gray, who was both more critical and more deeply involved.
I never knew the newspapers so profoundly interesting [Darwin wrote
soon after the outbreak of hostilities]. North America does not do England
justice; I have not seen or heard of a soul who is not with the North. Some
few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of mil-
lions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery.
In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the
cause of humanity. What wonderful times we live in! Massachusetts seems
to show noble enthusiasm. Great God! how I should like to see the great-
est curse on earth slavery abolished! 60
After the Confederate victory at Bull Run, Darwin is doubtful that
the North can win. He also distrusts "the men of Washington" and
1 68 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
their good intentions toward England. 61 Gray reiterates that the
Union would be insane to want war with England as well as the
Confederacy. On the other hand, "it is generally believed that the
governing influence in England desires to have us a weak and divided
people, and would do a good deal to secure it." 62 Consequently, many
Americans are hostile.
In the first year of the war the Confederacy had been recognized as
a belligerent, though not as an independent, state, by both France and
Britain. It now sent John Slidell and James Mason to act as repre-
sentatives in Paris and London. These two men were taken from the
Trent, an English vessel, by a Union man-of-war. Great Britain pro-
tested. Meanwhile, a dinner to celebrate the seizure was held in
Boston, where the old enemy was verbally conquered with all the
ruthless violence of American hyperbole. Darwin wrote to Gray:
What a thing it is that when you receive this we may be at war, and we
two be bound, as good patriots, to hate each other, though I shall find this
hating you very hard work. How curious it is to see two countries, just
like two angry and silly men, taking so opposite a view of the same trans-
action! 63
"If we do go to war," he adds rather naively, in the light of facts
"it will be with the utmost reluctance by all classes, Ministers of
Government and all." 64
But a month later he decides on second thought that he is really
very angry about the Trent affair. "I must own that the speeches and
actions recently of your leading men . . . , and especially the Boston
Dinner have quite turned my stomach . . . and I have begun to think
whether it would not be well for the peace of the world, if you were
not split up into two or three nations." 65 He had now very nearly
reversed his initial stand on the American conflict. In fact, "the
present American row," as he wrote Hooker, "has a yery Torifying
influence on us all." 66
Gray apologized for the Boston hyperbole. "Such men should not
have talked bosh, even at a little private ovation." Wiser men, "some
of whom refused to attend the dinner," criticized the incident as
sharply as Darwin. "It was really as bad as the speeches of some
members of Parliament, and worse because it was foolish." 67 Gray
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity
continued to blame bad relations with England on the press and
sends American newspapers to let a little air into the mental world
created by the London Times.
Darin's reply is all mildness and propitiation the more so, per-
haps, because Lincoln had in response to the English protest ordered
the two Confederate agents released.
For a while the correspondence rests cautiously on the solid ground
of professional interests. In August Gray sends stamps to Darwin's
little boy, and in November Darwin mentions Miss Cooper's Journal
of a Naturalist: "Who is she? She seems a very clever woman, and
gives a capital account of the battle between our and your weeds."
And then he adds, "Does it not hurt your Yankee pride that we thrash
you so confoundedly ? I am sure Mrs. Gray will stick up for your own
weeds. Ask her whether they are not more honest, downright good
sort of weeds." 68
Gray insists that no compromise is possible. The war can only end
in victory for the Union, whose resources and man power are almost
unlimited. The country laid waste and desolate? By no means. Even
while fighting the rebels it is building vast new industries and span-
ning and crisscrossing the continent with railroads:
I fear it is true that the English do not really care about slavery [wrote
Darwin after the Emancipation Proclamation had been published]; I
have heard some old sensible people say here the same thing; and they
accounted for it ... by the present generation never having seen or
heard much about slavery. 69
He had by this time begun to distrust The Times. "The Times is
getting more detestable (but that is too weak a word) than ever. My
good wife wishes to give it up, but I tell her that is a pitch of heroism
to which only a woman is equal. 1 ' 70 And now apparently with
vigorous assistance from Gray he comes to realize the extent of
British partisanship. "Do not hate poor old England too much" 71
becomes almost a refrain in Darwin's later letters.
Almost to the end, he refused to foresee a Northern victory. In the
very month Sherman took Atlanta, he once more succumbed to The
Times and wondered whether "there will be peace and that the
Middle States will join with the South on slavery and reject the
170 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Northern States. In this latter case, I suppose you will marry
Canada, and divorce England, and make a grand country, counter-
balancing the devilish South." 72
With this rather wild speculation the American conflict seems for a
long interval to vanish from Darwin's correspondence. Of Gettys-
burg, of victory in the West, of Grant's massive attack on Richmond,
of Sherman's march to the sea or Lee's surrender at Appomattox
there is not a word. Even Lincoln's death does not interrupt the
steady stream of discussion about pigeons and orchids, dogs and
glaciers. But Darwin must have made further comment, for in May,
1865, Gray writes, "Don't talk of our 'hating 1 you." Americans ap-
preciate England's good feeling and "hearty grief at the murder of
Lincoln." 73 Several years later Darwin confesses with generous
frankness, "How egregiously wrong we English were in thinking that
you could not hold the South after conquering it. How well I remem-
ber thinking that slavery would flourish for centuries in your
Southern states." 74
Darwin read the morning news as he read world history en
pantoufles, without much attempt at analysis and criticism. In fact,
he found it difficult to be critical of anything:
I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remark-
able in some clever men, for instance, Huxley. I am therefore a poor critic:
a paper or book, when first read generally excites my admiration, and it
is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My
power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited;
and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathe-
matics. 75
Only when thoroughly aroused by a problem was Darwin capable
of the tension of close criticism and analysis. His feelings were quick
and alert, but his mind was not.
His intellectual vices were curiously linked with his intellectual
virtues. Perhaps, after the inspiration of the Origin had passed, his
strong, affectionate grip on fact expressed itself too often as a timid
and confused reluctance to deal with abstraction; his obstinate, un-
relaxing grip on a few ideas, as a tendency to consider them and the
phrases in which they were couched, inevitable and unchange-
able.
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 171
Once he had finished writing a book, Darwin hated to return
to it, either for criticism or revision: he had worked too hard and suf-
fered too much; he had begun with too passionate an enthusiasm
and ended with too deathly an exhaustion. At such a time, and per-
haps for long after, one dares not think of error. In 1866 Wallace
astounded Darwin by pointing out that in the fourth chapter of the
Origin he frequently seemed to personify nature and used the term
"natural selection" in two senses for the preservation of favorable
variations and also for the species-forming result produced by such
preservation. Wallace suggested that Spencer's "survival of the fittest"
would clarify much of this confusion. Did Darwin understand? Yes,
for once everything was "as clear as daylight." 76 He resolved in the
next edition to carry Wallace's advice into effect, though he didn't
think the confusion had been very serious. Some people particularly
clever people can misunderstand anything. Besides, he observed
with foreboding, survival of the fittest "cannot be used as a substan-
tive governing a verb."
Meanwhile, a reluctant and preoccupied Columbus, he had con-
tinued to sail the inscrutable seas of heredity. He had long been try-
ing to ascertain what he was looking for, but apparently he decided
only when his voyage was almost over that it was something he had
sketched out twenty-six or -seven years before. 77 In 1865 he wrote to
Huxley, requesting that he read the statement of a theory called
pangenesis. "It is a very rash and crude hypothesis, yet it has been
a considerable relief to my mind, and I can hang on it a good many
groups of facts." Huxley must briefly give his verdict burn or pub-
lish. Darwin concluded with trepidation, "I must say for myself
that I am a hero to expose my hypothesis to the fiery ordeal of your
criticism." 78
Huxley's answer began with a cry of bewilderment, "I shall have
to put on my sharpest spectacles and best considering cap." 79 Dar-
win's exposition of the subject has since earned a reputation for ob-
scurity. On mature reflection, Huxley was for neither burning nor
publishing. The theory was highly speculative. Moreover, something
very like it had been developed by Buffon.
Anticipated again! Darwin thanked his friend with patience. "It
would have annoyed me extremely to have re-published Buffon's
views, which I did not know of, but I will get the book. I will try
1 72 ApcSj Angels, and Victorians
ous and cheering. He did not mean to express an absolute negative.
"Somebody rummaging among your papers half a century hence will
find Pangenesis and say, 'See this wonderful anticipation of our mod-
ern theories, and that stupid ass Huxley prevented his publishing
them." 581
Darwin's spirits rebounded at once. He could even regard Buffon
with amusement. "I have read Buffon: whole pages are laughably like
mine." 82 Nevertheless, there was a fundamental difference. Darwin
feared he would publish, but he would be humble and tentative.
A year later he wrote Wallace not to expect too much of pangenesis,
and almost on the eve of publication he confided to Haeckel rather
pathetically that the book itself was hardly worth translating. "A
naturalist's life would be a happy one," he told Lyell, "if he had only
to observe, and never to write." 83
The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication was
published in two volumes on January 30, 1868. As a matter of fact,
Darwin had already been forestalled. The primary experiments
in genetics had just been performed by a Moravian monk in a
monastery garden. Setting out to discover the mechanism of heredity,
with the influence of environment as a constant, Gregor Mendel very
deliberately selected as his subject the ordinary garden pea. It was
comparatively short-lived and could be rapidly studied through
several generations. It might be either self- or cross-fertilized, so that
each mating could be controlled. Its progeny were numerous and
could be treated statistically. They also differed in clearly marked
characters.
Mendel crossed yellow-seeded peas with green-seeded. The hybrid
seeds were all yellow. He therefore called the yellow-seeded charac-
ter dominant, and the green-seeded, recessive. Allowing 258 of the
yellow-seeded hybrids to seed themselves, he obtained 8,023 seeds, of
which 6,022 were yellow and 2,001 were green or the three-to-one
proportion which occurs for every pair of characters involving a
dominant and a recessive. The recessive gene or trait-determiner re-
expressed itself in the second hybrid generation wherever it was by
chance combined with another recessive.
Altogether, Mendel studied seven pairs of contrasted characters in
the pea. He communicated his results to the naturalists' society of
Brno and his paper was published in their journal. It there suffered
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 175
the supreme irony of learned publication and while pangeneticists,
germ-plasmists, and Lamarckians battled furiously over their own
errors, lay neglected until 1900, when it was unearthed after three
scientists had rediscovered the same law.
Darwin's attack on the problem of heredity was almost as irresolute
and confused as Mendel's had been bold and perspicacious. He had
accepted the lore and hearsay of fanciers nearly as confidently as he
had his own careful observations. He had studied not one domestic
plant but scores, and he showed a decided preference not for plants
but for the complex, slow-maturing animals favored by breeders. He
had studied not one or two sets of characters but all that exhibited
variation, and he had concentrated on minute, scarcely perceptible
changes ill-adapted to elementary work in genetics. Here, of course,
he was guided by his early conviction, probably correct on the whole,
that such minute changes are the primary material of natural selec-
tion. On the other hand, he admitted in this book, almost for the
first time, that the more abrupt changes later emphasized by De Vries
might have a considerable role in the formation of species. In any
case, Darwin apparently could not, even for purposes of temporary
study, make a clear-cut separation in his mind between variations and
natural selection, as he could not make a separation between the
problem of heredity itself and his old preconceptions regarding the
influence of environment and of use and disuse.
Perhaps one good thought had corrupted his mind on this subject.
Animal breeders had shown him how varieties might develop in
nature. Therefore he seems to have felt they could show him how
variations themselves originate. Accordingly, his first volume is a
very learned and astute breeder's manual. It contains chapters
bristling with facts, many of them antiquarian on each of the com-
mon domestic animals. One learns that there were cats in ancient
Egypt, mastiffs in ancient Assyria, and lap dogs in ancient Rome.
Darwin not only investigates breeds, but breeders also, explaining
their methods, psychology, and objectives. One seemsf to catch echoes
of talk from the gin palaces. "Baron Cameronn challenges, in a Ger-
man veterinary periodical," he cites with gusto, "the opponents of
the English race-horse to name one, good horse on the Continent
which has not some English race-blood in his veins." 84 And he quotes
with solemnity a great breeder of Shorthorns:
i/4 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
The eye has its fashion at different periods: at one time the eye high and
outstanding from the head, and at another time the sleepy eye sunk into
the head; but these extremes have merged into the medium of a full, clear
and prominent eye with a placid look. 85
Jehovah in a whirlwind, or Schiaparelli in an advertisement, could
not describe a creature or a creation more impressively.
The second volume deals primarily with heredity, and here again
one must admire Darwin's grip on enormous bodies of facts. He is
familiar with all the phenomena that Mendel studied, and many
more. He is aware that in hybrids characters do not necessarily
"blend" but may contrast sharply, that they may be sex-linked, that
one may be dominant, or as he says, "prepotent," over another, so
that the second skips a generation and reappears thereafter. Yet these
facts are not particularly meaningful to him chiefly because he
thought others more important.
What he thought important were first, his own preconceptions and
second to do him justice certain observations on the most com-
plex and difficult aspect of his subject. All of these elements he com-
bined in his theory of pangenesis. He believed that acquired charac-
teristics are inherited. He also believed and as we now know
rightly that "inheritance must be looked at as merely a form of
growth" the pattern of which lies implicit in the fertilized ovum or
in the simpler organism itself. 86 Simple organisms divide and each
part grows toward maturity. Certain worms may be cut into many
sections and each section grows into a complete individual. A young
salamander can replace a lost limb or tail. Growth thus seems con-
nected with reproduction and regeneration, possibly with the direct
influence of environment.
In seeking an explanation, Darwin was thrown off the track by
his stubborn old ideas ultimately traceable to Buffon and Lamarck
of direct environmental influence and the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. He saw that if function and environment directly
modify heredity, they must do so through the body cells. He was
thus led to a neat inversion of Mendel's theory. The body cells secrete
minute corpuscles or "gemmules" which record and embody growth
pattern in relation to the total organism. These gemmules are carried
along by body juices and the blood stream to the reproductive organs,
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 175
where they are packed into the ova or spermatozoa to determine
the characteristics and growth pattern of a future individual.
Darwin had picked up his problem by its most slippery and un-
wieldy handle. Pangenesis attempted to explain too much too crudely.
It contained so many variable and intangible factors that it was very
hard to test by experiment and very easy to support by argument. In
fact, it called forth the parliamentarian rather than the investigator
in Darwin and he was as ready to argue it as he seemed reluctant to
probe it. Even so, it did provide, as Darwin hoped, a kind of sum-
mary of what was known about heredity, and De Vries has told how
Darwin's gemmules led him to the conception of unit characters and
so ultimately to the rediscovery of Mendel's law.
Darwin's conclusion illustrates his growing frankness about the
Creator. Asserting his belief that living forms in their wonderful mul-
tiplicity derive from one common progenitor, he asks whether such a
conception can be reconciled with design. In so far as the ultimate re-
sult is order and harmony, yes. In so far as the basic means of effecting
that result are accidental variations, no. The dilemma, he says, is as
profound as that between free will and necessity.
It "will be called a mad dream," Darwin assured Asa Gray after
seeing pangenesis published. 87 His fears were as usual exaggerated.
Nevertheless, the famous chapter was certainly not greeted with
shouts of intelligence and joy, even by his most faithful admirers.
"Bates says he has read it twice, and is not sure that he understands
it." 88 Hooker felt, with perfect justice, that the theory merely
summed up ^contemporary ignorance about heredity, and Huxley
apparently said something "so deuced clever" to Hooker on the sub-
ject that Hooker could not for the life of him remember what it
was. 89 Wallace alone expressed unreserved admiration. Darwin was
deeply touched, for his ugly duckling had become his favorite
child "an infant cherished by few as yet, except his tender parent,
but which will live a long life," he told Gray, and added, "There is
parental presumption for you!" 90
With Variation finally published, Darwin began, at least for a
time, to lose the old sense of hurry and desperation. He was no longer
a tortoise creeping in frantic haste toward the horizon. If he had
176 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
become less human, at least he now had more time to be human in. In
1869, with one of his daughters, he visited his father's old house in
Shrewsbury. Too eager, perhaps, to do honor to his famous land-
lord, the tenant remained with them during the entire visit. As they
went away, "with a pathetic look of regret," Charles said, "If I could
have been left alone in that green-house for five minutes, I know I
should have been able to see my father in his wheel-chair as vividly
as if he had been there before me." 91
Charles's recollections of his father had remained very clear, and
particularly those of the last years, when they had sat together, each
with his own ailment, gossiping of the people they knew. The pater-
nal terrors the vocal mountain erupting in its wrath had faded
away. Dr. Darwin had grown ever more kind, sensitive, and oracular
in his son's memory. "My father, who was the wisest man I ever
knew . . ." prefaced many an observation or anecdote. 92 As a young
man, Robert Darwin had hated his profession, for he had scarcely
been able to endure the sight of blood and "to the end of his life the
thought of an operation had almost sickened him." 93 Nothing could
have induced him to continue with medicine had old Erasmus left
him any choice. Such stringency, Charles reflected with gratitude,
he had never known! Later Robert discovered a genius for the psycho-
logical side of his profession and became a psychiatrist before psychi-
atrists were invented. His personal charm and quick sympathy "gave
him unbounded power of winning confidence," and he had once
assured Charles of medical success for the same reason.
Charles did not think he gained much from his father intel-
lectually. "My father's mind was not scientific," he wrote, "and he did
not try to generalize his knowledge under general laws; yet he formed
a theory for nearly everything which occurred." 94 Long before the
fact was established, he was convinced that two different diseases
were lumped under the name of typhus. On several occasions, he
loaned considerable sums to strangers and never failed of payment.
He once astonished a gentleman who had brought his nephew for
consultation by saying, "I am sure that your nephew is ... guilty of
... a heinous crime." "Good God, Dr. Darwin, who told you!" ex-
claimed the gentleman. "We thought no human being knew the
fact except ourselves." 95
Orchids, Politics, and Heredity 177
father a second time. His daughter Henrietta remembered his saying
with the most tender respect, "I think my father was a little unjust
to me when I was young, but afterwards I am thankful to think I
became a prime favourite with him." 96 Henrietta also recalled "the
expression of happy reverie that accompanied these words, as if he
were reviewing the whole relation, and the remembrance left a deep
sense of peace and gratitude."
Xll
The Subject of Subjects
Jermyn Street, Feb. 20, 1871
My dear Darwin Best thanks for your new book, a copy of which I
find awaiting me this morning. But I wish you would not bring your
books out when I am so busy with all sorts of things. You know I can't
show my face anywhere in society without having read them and I con-
sider it too bad. 1
Poor Huxley, obliged to be omniscient on more and more sub-
jects as he grew oilier! How the professorial heart goes out to him!
And yet how far away he was now from that quiet, passionate, in-
tricate world in which he was thought to be so much at home, how
far away from auditory organs in the Orthoptera and possible polyg-
amy among the butterflies!
Darwin's new book was The Descent of Man. He had not meant
to write it. He was still toiling away at the great work: in the intro-
duction to the two volumes of Variation under Domestication, he had
promised more and larger volumes on variation in a state of nature.
But the treatise on domestication had been a powerful argument
against mere bulk, and though it had sold well, Darwin himself had
been somewhat appalled by that "huge" and "unreadable" book,
with all "the horrid, tedious, dull work" 2 which it had required.
The Subject of Subjects 179
Meanwhile, the world had long awaited the master's word on this
subject of subjects.
Yet man was hardly adapted, like the orchid, to happy and tranquil
investigation. He leered mockingly with imponderables and intan-
gibles, and towered awfully with a vast accumulation of data, hu-
manistic and traditional as well as scientific. And though already
somewhat accustomed to the teasing inquiry of the scalpel and
geological hammer, he could still turn ferociously on the zealous
investigator. He also remained the sacred animal of theology, history,
literature, and ever so many ancient and established profundities.
For a long time Darwin had hoped somebody else would write the
book. Huxley had shown with great clarity and boldness that man
was an animal, but he had not shown how man had evolved into such
an extraordinary animal.
And what was the relation of man to Darwinian theory? From one
point of view, natural selection was but the most dramatic embodi-
ment of a master idea of the nineteenth century. As struggle for
survival, this idea had appeared at least as early as the seventeenth
century in Hobbes's Leviathan. It assumed a more elaborate and char-
acteristically modern form in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The
competition of individuals produces an abundance of goods, services,
and capital at the proper times and places. Laissez faire implied en-
lightened self-interest and freedom of action limited only by sanctity
of contract and a criminal code. Though in practice increasingly
modified by social legislation, economic law was in theory long re-
garded as natural and immutable. And therein lay a chief danger of
extreme laissez faire: it tended in fact to establish a state of nature,
to banish the higher and gentler virtues from practical life as ir-
relevant. It offered freedom with too little justice and judged excel-
lence with too little reference to what is humanly and culturally ex-
cellent.
For these reasons the romantic artist was against it. Ethically con-
fused, he attacked it sometimes in the name of Christian morals and
sometimes in that of romantic eccentricity or humanitarian pity. He
emphasized that it repudiated duties and that, paradoxically, it pro-
duced a narrow and uninspired conformity, for men must find com-
mon ground in order to give battle and must herd together in order
to compete. From all forms of prosaic and utilitarian competition.
i8o Apes, Angels, and Victorians
the romantic drew back with scorn, haughtily enfolded in his proud
uniqueness. He strove with none, for none was worth his strife. True,
like Byron or Carlyle, he -could admire a conqueror or a captain of
industry, if only his triumph were violent or titanic enough. Na-
poleonism was the tribute which the romantic paid to the vulgar
republic of hard knocks.
In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels joined the
concept of competition to one of social decadence. They asserted that
history in general is produced by a Hegelian process of class struggle
and that the decline of capitalism in particular will be produced by
the "atomic" competition of individual capitalists. What laissez faire
economists tend to regard as the immutable laws of nature are simply
the rules of a game legislated by capitalists to favor capitalists, but
not, it would seem, to favor them permanently; for the profit motive
leads deterministically to its own destruction, after which enlightened
self-interest, directed by revolution to juster and broader class ob-
jectives, is ultimately transformed into something more generous and
altruistic. In the larger dialectic of history, the class conflict is in each
of its phases at first economic, then political, and finally armed and
violent; and out of armed violence is ultimately to materialize the
idyllic vision of a classless society. Marx used competition to destroy
competition.
Far more famous in its time than the Communist Manifesto, but
unhappily far less influential today, is Mill's "On Liberty." Published
in the same year as the Origin, this essay resembles it strikingly in
theoretical structure. As Darwin sums up the realism of Victorian
conflict, so Mill sums up the idealism. For British society he lays
down in effect a principle of rational selection based on discussion
and public opinion. Freedom of speech is necessary in order that,
in the competition of ideas, truth or at least the half-truth best
adapted to the needs of the hour may survive and propagate itself.
Freedom of action, in so far as it does not injure others, is necessary
in order that new types of moral character may freely develop and
then, in competition with other types, either perish or survive to
enrich English life. Darwin's spontaneous variations are thus paral-
leled by a romantic emphasis on the value of diversified or eccentric
moral character. Mill's fault is not only that he counts too much on
The Subject of Subjects 181
environment. Moral excellence is the result not only of thought and
competition, but of aspiration, habit, experience, and tradition. More-
over, reason seems not so much to select a new variety of moral
excellence as to refine and broaden by criticism a moral tradition al-
ready established. The interminable debate of infinitely energetic
but comparatively skeptical minds would be likely, in the long run,
to produce nothing so much as the deathly silence of dictatorship.
The Origin of Species gave the doctrine of competition a
thoroughly naturalistic setting, freeing it from the last restraint of
moral law and showing how, in the plant and animal kingdoms,
warfare between individuals, species, or social communities could
lead to evolutionary progress. And if in the natural, why not in the
human realm also? What an opportunity for an ingenious writer
with a turn for paradox and a taste for sensation! Meanwhile, history
itself was daily becoming more paradoxical and sensational. The time
was rapidly approaching when neo-Darwinism would almost seem
sober sense.
But the Origin encouraged knowledge before it encouraged folly.
Evolutionary ideas were getting into all sorts of sedate gray heads
and producing the most novel and amazing discoveries, truths, and
half-truths. While the geologist was gauging man's antiquity and
the anatomist was estimating to a nicety his kinship to the gorilla
and the orangutan, the anthropologist and the scholar, observing him
in his jungles and south sea islands and exhuming him from his
old epics and law codes, uncovered depths of cruelty and supersti-
tion hitherto unsuspected in the repository of reason and the lord
of creation. Nevertheless, though hardly a noble savage, primitive
man was a moralist, a lawyer, a politician, a speculator on nature and
the unseen a complex, thoughtful, though dirty and scrambling bi-
ped, just conceivably capable of rising eventually to the majesty of
an umbrella and a top hat. In this decade of Darwinian enlighten-
ment about man, the advantage passed from the biologist and the
comparative anatomist to the anthropologist and the historical scholar.
The two former, having located man among his fellow creatures,
could do little more than speculate, sometimes naturalistically and
sometimes transcendentally, on remote and grandiloquent dawns
and origins; whereas the latter two, facing lesser and more soluble
problems, moved triumphantly from doctrine to doctrine, building
1 82 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
up intricate structures of fact and inference. Nearly every year
brought forth some classic work, and Darwin's silence on the great
subject was golden with the wisdom of other authors.
The earliest of these by several years was Sir Henry Maine, who
in 1861 produced his Ancient Law. Inspired by Savigny rather than
Darwin, he showed that, in the few progressive societies in which
law evolved very far, it followed the same general pattern, arising
in custom, crystallizing into a code, and then breaking free for a fur-
ther development in terms first of legal fictions, then of equity, and
finally of legislation. In Maine's sagacious pages, primitive man, as a
legal thinker, develops a startling resemblance to the nineteenth-
century English Tory.
In 1864 Wallace published a paper on man in The Anthropologi-
cal Review? Arguing that humanity derives from a single species, he
inferred that physical differences among the races probably date
back to the dawn of reason, for when clothing, tools, weapons, and
social organization had rendered fur, claws, and fangs unnecessary,
natural selection ceased to operate on the bodies of individuals and
began to operate on the brains of herds and social groups, so that
"the most favored races" were preserved. The severest environments,
setting up high standards of ingenuity, selected the best brains.
This essay, though it contained very few facts, did contain many
illuminating ideas; and Darwin was impressed. He objected only to
the way in which Wallace referred to natural selection. "You ought
not ... to speak of the theory as mine," he protested; "it is just as
much yours as mine." 4 Since the Origin had long since made it his,
Darwin was probably much better able to appreciate both Wallace's
magnanimity as a rival and his imaginative resource as a theorist. "I
never heard anything more ingenious," he exclaimed, and farther on,
"That is a splendid fact about the white moths; it warms one's very
blood to see a theory thus almost proved to be true." 5 Why shouldn't
Wallace write the indispensable book about man? Darwin offered all
his bibliography and notes, a twenty-seven years' accumulation, but
Wallace courteously refused. He was busy with a book about his
travels in the Malay peninsula.
Darwin now brought himself to think cautiously of "a little essay"
on the great subject. He had a theory about facial expressions and an-
other about the origin of races. Could he not introduce both into his
The Subject of Subjects 183
essay? In 1867, when Variation had been sent off to the printer, he
began "a chapter on Man," and soon discovered with horror that it
was rapidly growing into the spacious antechamber o another great
verbal edifice. He decided to publish it separately as a "very small
volume." 6 But then Variation descended on him in avalanches of
proof. His consequent frustration showed him that he was already
hypnotized by the new subject. He could not wait to resume it.
Nothing else had any savor.
The year 1868 was a prolonged experience in the desiccation of
living without science. He had hardly finished his proofs when he
fell ill; and he- had hardly recovered from his illness when he was
carried off to Freshwater in the Isle of Wight by his family. To be
sure, Freshwater offered compensations. Erasmus stayed at the same
house, and their landlady, the photographer Mrs. Cameron, was an
extraordinarily vivid and intelligent woman. She made a photograph
of Charles which actually aroused his enthusiasm; and it was pub-
lished with the inscription, in his own hand, "I like this photograph
very much better than any other which has been taken of me." 7 She
won the hearts of so many Darwins that when they were about to go
and Charles had paid the bill, Erasmus called out to her with a
bachelor's boldness, "You have left eight persons deeply in love with
you." 8
Meanwhile, the younger Darwins had begun to distinguish them-
selves: George was second wrangler at Cambridge, and Lenny had
passed the entrance examination for Woolwich second on the list.
Charles was beside himself with astonishment and joy. But so much
achievement brought consequences. The children decided they could
no longer use the terms "p a P a " and "mama." Charles was very firmly
informed that henceforth he was "father." He received the news with
extraordinary bitterness: "I would as soon be called Dog." 9
While at Freshwater, the Darwins dined several times with the
Tennysons, but were not amused: though better than his poetry,
Tennyson was really rather absurd. Longfellow, passing through
Freshwater on a European tour, was a little more interesting because
he talked of Agassiz. The famous Swiss geologist, then professor at
Harvard, had of late shown increasing respect, if not for the argu-
ments, at least for the success, of the Origin.
Returning home in August, Charles underwent further brief in-
184 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
cidental martyrdoms of delay, including the rather tedious immor-
talization of a bust by Woolner and then gave himself up to the
problems of sexual selection. To be sure, work, though not so bad as
vacation, was its own special kind of torture. Darwin faced minor
puzzles in his data as Flaubert faced the fearful alternatives of a
relative clause and a prepositional phrase in a fallible sentence with
an eager, fascinated suffering. He was "fearfully puzzled" by pro-
tective coloring in females and "driven half mad" by polygamy and
the proportion between the sexes in many animal species. 10
Moreover, his old friends, always ready with advice and comfort
in the past, could not for one reason or another follow him into this
new and difficult field. A confirmed botanist, Hooker seldom wan-
dered far from the herbarium; Huxley was busy with schools; and
Lyell had declined into age and transcendentalism. Seeking invet-
erately the sympathy and stimulus of an interlocutor, Darwin had
turned insensibly of late years to his old rival Wallace, who had once
been nothing so much as an accusing reminder of a humiliating ex-
perience.
To be sure, he still anticipated ideas in the most embarrassing
manner :
I have been greatly interested in your letter [wrote Charles in 1867], but
your view is not new to me. If you will look at p. 240 of fourth Edition
of the Origin you will find it very briefly given with two extreme examples
of the peacock and black grouse. ... I have long entertained this view,
though I have never had space to develop it. But I had not sufficient knowl-
edge to generalise as far as you do about colouring and nesting. In your
paper perhaps you will just allude to my scanty remark in the 4th Edition,
because in my Essay on Man I intend to discuss the whole subject of
sexual selection, explaining as I believe it does much with respect to man.
I have collected all my old notes and partly written my discussion and it
would be flat work for me to give the idea as exclusively from you. 11
Wallace replied by sending all his notes on sexual selection. Darwin
returned them at once:
I earnestly . . . hope that you will proceed with your paper ... I con-
fess on receiving your note that I felt rather flat at my recent work being
almost thrown away, but I did not intend to show this feeling. As a proof
how little advance I had made on the subject, I may mention that though
I had been collecting facts on the colouring and other sexual differences
The Subject of Subjects 185
in mammals, your explanation with respect to the females had not oc-
curred to me. I am surprised at my own stupidity, but I have long recog-
nized how much clearer and deeper your insight into matters is than
mine . . .
Forgive me, if you can, for a touch of illiberality about your paper. 12
Wallace was so retiring, so reassuring, so generous.
As to the theory of Natural Selection itself [he wrote Darwin in 1864]
I shall always maintain it to be actually yours and yours only. You had
worked it out in details I had never thought of, years before I had a ray of
light on the subject, and my paper would never have convinced anybody
or been noticed as more than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book
has revolutionised the study of natural history, and carried away captive
the best men of the present age. 18
Moreover, he was so receptive, so full of sympathy for an aching
stomach and of suggestions for an ailing theory. What had once made
him a rival now made him a friend: he had pursued the same studies,
faced the same problems, lived with the same ideas. He was, at least
in some degree, the masked alter ego, the mysterious and threatening
stranger who turned out, in a strange, Conradesque way, to be Dar-
win himself. Charles came to feel that they should agree in every-
thing scientific.
Fortunately, they hardly ever did except on essentials. Pointing to
the incessant war among savage tribes, Darwin supposed that natural
selection must operate in human evolution. Wallace countered that
war only eliminated the brave and the strong. Darwin yielded, and
then maintained that sexual selection explained the brilliant coloring
of male birds. Wallace urged that brilliant coloring in either sex
might be explained in terms of protection and mimicry. Sometimes
he was a little trying.
I agree about Wallace's wonderful cleverness [Darwin told Hooker], but
he is not cautious enough in my opinion. I find I must (and I always dis-
trust myself when I differ from him) separate rather widely from him all
about birds' nests and protection; he is riding that hobby to death. 14
Wallace's enthusiasms were a little tedious, too. Darwin must read
Spencer's Social Statics. Later, he must read George's Progress and
Poverty. Darwin replied that political economy always made him ill.
Wallace was sympathetic. In fact, he thought Darwin much more
1 86 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
gravely ill than his poor friend Spruce, and was naively astonished
when Spruce died and Darwin produced two enormous books and a
new edition of the Origin in three years. Nevertheless, he continued,
in the most comforting manner, to insist against long letters and
long hours of study. Darwin could not but relent. Besides, Wallace
had dashed off such a wonderful explanation for gaudy caterpillars
and for brightly plumaged female birds nesting in holes. Darwin
had been thinking along much the same lines. "It is curious how we
hit on the same ideas." 15 Wallace responded by offering all his notes.
Darwin refused. Wallace could write a much better paper on the
subject.
Though very shy, Wallace opened his own heart, and confessed a
broken engagement. Between inquiries about East Indian pigs and
Amazonian butterflies, Darwin administered comfort. Later Wallace
married, and at length announced the birth of a son, whom he named
"Herbert Spencer." Darwin congratulated him, hoped that "Herbert
Spencer" would write better than his namesake, and in the next
sentence begged Wallace to note down the date at which the child
began to secrete tears.
Still struggling with the problems of color in animals, Darwin
seemed for a time in 1868 to be moving away from his own sexual
selection to Wallace's protective principle. "This morning I oscillated
with joy towards you; this evening I have swung back to the old
position, out of which I fear I shall never get." le He tried, almost
pathetically, to bring about closer agreement by restating the whole
problem. "We differ, I think, chiefly, from fixing our minds perhaps
too closely on different points." 17 And a few days later, he wrote, "I
grieve to differ from you, and it actually terrifies me, and makes me
constantly mistrust myself." 18 He was persuaded the truth was one;
he wanted both Wallace and himself to recognize it. But Wallace
remained obdurate. He was much less anxious for finality. "The
truth will come out at last, and our differences may be the means of
setting others to work who may set us both right." ld
In April, 1869, Wallace published in The Quarterly Review "Sir
Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the Origin of Species," in
which he dealt once more with man. Darwin was almost afraid to
read the article. Apparently he feared that Wallace might reject
natural selection altogether. "I hope you have not murdered too com-
The Subject of Subjects 187
pletely your own and my child," he wrote. 20 So far as Wallace on
man was concerned, Darwin's worst fears were justified. Never was
infanticide more blandly committed. Clearly, Wallace felt that hu-
man intelligence could only be explained by the direct intervention
of Cosmic Intelligence.
The mental requirements o the lowest savages [wrote Wallace], such as
the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very litde above those of
many animals. . . . How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond
the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only have endowed
the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he
actually possesses one but very litde inferior to that of the average mem-
bers of our learned societies. 21
In the margin of his copy Darwin wrote a vehement "No," triple
scored and showered with exclamation points. As often before, he
was as nervously alarmed at the disagreement as he was obstinately
loyal to his original convictions. He told Lyell he had been "dread-
fully disappointed," and to Wallace himself he wrote, "If you had not
told me, I should have thought that [your remarks on man] had been
added by someone else." 22
Wallace's article was of course primarily concerned with Lyell.
Calling attention to the latter's latest confession of evolutionary faith
in the tenth edition of The Principles of Geology, he wrote:
The history of science hardly presents so striking an instance of youthful-
ness of mind in advanced life as is shown by this abandonment of opinions
so long held and so powerfully advocated; and if we bear in mind the ex-
treme caution, combined with the ardent love of truth which characterise
every work which our author has produced, we shall be convinced that
so great a change was not decided on without long and anxious delibera-
tion, and that the views now adopted must indeed be supported by argu-
ments of overwhelming force. If for no other reason than that Sir Charles
Lyell in his tenth edition has adopted it, the theory of Mr. Darwin deserves
an attentive and respectful consideration from every earnest seeker after
truth. 23
Darwin read such passages with enthusiasm. He had almost forgotten
what a great man Lyell was. "I have often said to younger geolo-
gists . . . ," he wrote Wallace, "that they did not know what a
revolution Lyell effected; nevertheless, your extracts from Cuvier
have quite astonished me." 24
1 88 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Wallace's Malay Archipelago, finished at last, came to him later
in the same year. Here, implicitly at least, was the record of how his
own idea had been discovered in the middle of a tropical forest by
another man. And yet the tropical forest, the creatures in it, the col-
lecting, the adventures, and the adventurer himself were all
strangely familiar. In Wallace's book Darwin rediscovered his own
scientific odyssey, and much else besides. "That you ever returned
alive is wonderful ... Of all the impressions which I received from
your book, the strongest is that your perseverance in the cause of
science was heroic." And to catch such splendid butterflies! "Certainly
collecting is the best sport in the world." 25 Wallace's book had made
him feel quite young again.
In 1869 the book on man suffered further interruptions a vacation
among old haunts in North Wales, as usual reluctantly undertaken
and fretfully enjoyed; and a fifth edition of the Origin, perhaps even
more reluctantly undertaken, but much more heartily enjoyed, for
now the general chorus of praise was swelled by unmistakable sounds
from pulpits and vestries. But while bishops cheered, reviewers began
to look askance. Having conceded that the Origin was a very im-
portant book, they now began to discover that it was also rather dull.
Men like John Robertson in The Athenaeum were obviously as-
tonished that so ordinary a composition should have produced so
extraordinary an effect. Charles was to be pursued into the farthest
Elysium of celebrity by this annoying kind of critical astonishment.
A new German edition, meticulously and reverently prepared from
the English fifth, now came out under Darwin's benevolent eye and
particular blessing. Shortly after, a third French edition, still based
on the first English and accompanied by a very critical preface nearly
as long as the text, appeared unceremoniously without the author's
knowledge or permission. Darwin tried hard to be amused. "I must
enjoy myself," he wrote Hooker, "and tell you about Mile. C. Royer,
who translated the 'Origin' into French. . . . Besides her enormously
long preface to the first edition, she has added a second preface
abusing me like a pickpocket for Pangenesis, which of course has no
relation to the 'Origin.' " 26 Darwin at once entered into an arrange-
ment with Mr, Reinwald for an authoritative and up-to-date French
translation.
The Subject of Subjects 189
titude toward his ideas. Le Darwinisme was still simply an interest-
ing speculation, perhaps a little less respectable than that of Lamarck
and well within the range of armchair refutation. To J. L. A. de
Quatrefages, who had just published a polite but severe book of
criticism, Darwin conceded "a wonderfully clear and able discussion"
and some "strictures" with which he felt compelled to agree. 27 Never-
theless, the inaccurate French translation of which M, de Quatrefages
had made use invalidated many of his arguments. Darwin could not
refrain from observing in conclusion:
It is curious how nationality influences opinion; a week hardly passes with-
out my hearing of some naturalist in Germany who supports my views,
and often puts an exaggerated value on my works; whilst in France I have
not heard of a single zoologist, except M. Gaudry (and he only partially),
who supports my views. 28
In 1870 Darwin received a reprint of Wallace's Natural Selection,
which contained many fresh instances of the author's generosity.
"There has never been passed on me, nor indeed on any one," wrote
Darwin warmly, "a higher eulogium than yours. ... I hope it is a
satisfaction to you to reflect . . . that we have never felt any jealousy
towards each other, though in a sense rivals." And then he added, "I
believe that I can say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely
sure that it is true of you." 29
Darwin voyaged widely into his past during this period and found
much old enmity reconciled, much old friendship lost forever. In May
he went down to Cambridge to see his boys. The whole family stayed
at the Bull Hotel, and Charles found "the backs of the Colleges . . .
simply paradisaical." With some trepidation he went to visit his old
professor, Adam Sedgwick, who ten years before had, in an angry
and caustic review, found such bewildering fault with the Origin.
The magnificent old fellow was most hearty in his welcome, but his
cordiality was nearly as formidable as his enmity had been:
After a long sit he proposed to take me to the museum, and I could not
refuse, and in consequence he utterly prostrated me; so that we left Cam-
bridge next morning, and I have not recovered from the exhaustion yet.
Is it not humiliating to be thus killed by a man of eighty-six, who evidently
never dreamed that he was killing me? As he said to me, "Oh, I consider
190 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
But Cambridge was too changed and too unchanged, too much a part
of his own youth and now of his children's youth to be, even in the
bright spring sunshine, an altogether cheerful place. "Cambridge
without dear Henslow was not itself," he told Hooker; "I tried to get
to the two old houses, but it was too far for me."
Huxley's essays, which poured in on him in a steady stream, were
one of his greatest pleasures. He read them with all the envy of an
awkward and painful writer for an easy and brilliant one. Huxley's
style fascinated him somewhat as a large, sharp pocketknife would
fascinate a small boy. One could do such things with it, but it would
be oh, so dangerous! "There is no one who writes like you," he
declares, in acknowledging Huxley's "Anniversary Address" of 1869
to the Geological Society, but "if I were in your shoes, I should
tremble for my life." 31 To be sure, he thought that Huxley partic-
ularly when not slaughtering anti-evolutionists used his knife a
little too freely. "I return Huxley's letter . . . ," he wrote Hooker in
a revealing passage. "I think he was right pro bono publico; but . . .
I for one could not have dared to do so disagreeable a thing." 32
Meanwhile, several brilliant works on man had appeared. In 1865
John McLennan had published his Primitive Marriage, which ob-
viously owes much both to Darwin's Origin and to Maine's Ancient
Law. Fastening on weak points in Maine's patriarchal theory of the
state, McLennan attempted to show that behind patriarchal society
lay a long and un-Victorian evolution from anarchy and sexual
promiscuity through various stages of polyandry and female rela-
tionship to tribal communities based on monogamy and descent
through the father. He also showed that savages adapt themselves by
tribal law to tribal environment; and he implied that such adaptation
is at least in part produced by natural selection operating on com-
munities.
The last idea, applied by Darwin to social insects and afterwards by
Spencer to mankind, forms the basis of Walter Bagehot's Physics and
Politics, which was first published in The Fortnightly Review as a
series of articles, beginning in November, 1867. Bagehot shows how
the universal war of savage life evolves into the rational peace of
civilization and thus he bridges the gulf between the realism of the
Origin and the idealism of the essay "On Liberty." Skirting the un-
The Subject of Subjects 191
known with Darwinian circumspection, Bagehot says little about
the formation of races and the origin of primitive communities. A
polity grows up because a polity is necessary to survival. Generally,
"a cake of custom" is formed: an elaborate structure of traditions
and taboos, bolstered by religious sanctions, exercises a rigid control
on the fierce waywardness of savage nature. In the competition of
war, disciplined communities overcome the undisciplined and im-
pose their discipline upon them. "Civilization begins because the be-
ginning of civilization is a military advantage." 33 Innovations, par-
ticularly when introduced by a revered leader, may be widely spread
through imitation, but they are even more likely to be repressed at
the outset through superstitious fear, for as a rule the cake of custom
hardens sooner or later into complete rigidity. Steady progress is
possible only in societies which, like the Greek, Roman, and English,
have developed the moral restraint to debate and decide fundamental
issues without resorting to repressive violence or civil war. Thus,
not only are freedom and democracy essential to sustained progress,
but a certain type of moral character which, as it appears in the
English, Bagehot calls "animated moderation" is essential to free-
dom and democracy. Bagehot may not have got all of Darwin's wild
animals back into their cage, but at least he had triumphantly built
Victorian discussion on its roof.
In the middle sixties, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton published
several articles on man and in 1869 a book on Hereditary Genius,
which, though a little vague and more than a little inconsistent, put
forth a number of startling ideas with some force and distinction. A
pioneer in statistical method, Galton presents considerable evidence
to show that talent and genius, as well as the inclination toward all
kinds of moral traits, tend to be inherited and concentrated in
families and understandably so, for in the competition of civilized
life, there is a sexual selection of the factors that make for civilized
achievement. In fact, by developing the appropriate qualities, certain
families adapt themselves to success in their traditional professions.
Galton also suggests that as chance, natural selection, and many other
factors may improve a human breed partially and temporarily, so
artificial selection, guided by scientific study, might improve it greatly
and continuously.
This work was full of reverence and admiration for Darwin, who
j 92 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
on his side was much struck, "I do not think I ever in all my life read
anything more interesting and original/' he wrote the author. 34 But
the program of eugenics he wisely thought "utopian," 35 though he
was as zealously hopeful as Galton for the evolutionary future of the
human race. "To me," he had written Lyell a few years before, "it
would be an infinite satisfaction to believe that mankind will progress
to such a pitch that we should [look] back at [ourselves] as mere
Barbarians." ae
Eugenical speculation, with its heady fumes and its Dionysian ex-
altation, mounted rapidly in Galton, though, like a true Englishman,
he retained his decorum of style to the end. His "Gregariousness in
Cattle and Men," published in 1871, expresses Nietzschean ideas in
irreproachably sturdy, common sense Anglo-Saxon. It sets up, both
for beasts and men, an opposition between the leader and the herd.
In the past, civilization has favored the human herd, for society repre-
sents, as Nietzsche said of Christianity, "a deadly enmity against . . .
aristocrats." 37 Galton speaks of "the slavish aptitudes" of the masses,
"their exaltation of the vox populi," and "their willing servitude to
tradition, authority and custom." 3S He implies that leaders are by
contrast bold, original, and emancipated from traditional restraint:
in short, they are romantic supermen. He seems to believe that the
aristocratic few and the slavish many are separate strains produced
by natural selection, and that artificial selection should be employed
to eliminate the latter, who are no longer adapted to the requirements
of modern civilization. In this recommendation Galton presages Shaw
rather than Nietzsche. He wants not an aristocracy, but a populace of
supermen.
Similar ideas, expressed with a nonconformist zeal and piety which
would have made Nietzsche shudder, are to be found in another
article, published anonymously in 1868, "On the Failure of 'Natural
Selection* in the Case of Men," 3 * which Darwin attributed to W. R.
Greg. 40 The author points out that the modern state protects failures
and allows them to propagate. In fact, the two least valuable classes in
the state, the extremely rich and the extremely poor, are precisely those
who have the largest families. The author regards the middle class as
the elite that should be improved by eugenics, though he is realistic
enough to see that the British state is not likely to sacrifice the present
The Subject of Subjects 193
realities of democracy and freedom for the distant possibility of
bourgeois supermen.
In 1870 Darwin worked almost without interruption on The De-
scent of Man. It grew longer and longer, so that he saved it from the
interminability of Variation only by amputating The Expression of
the Emotions. As the manuscript neared completion, he turned it
over to Henrietta, who once more assumed her role of Miss Rhada-
manthus, questioning and testing and simplifying the tortured poly-
syllables into a blessed stream of intelligibility. Looking over the
corrections, Charles was as usual astonished, and when after its
appearance the book was admired for its "lucid, vigorous style," he
attributed this unwonted virtue wholly to his daughter's efforts
and presented her with thirty pounds from his royalties. 41 "By Jove,
how hard you must have worked," he exclaimed, "and how thor-
oughly you have mastered my MS." 42 By 1871, having labored three
years and driven himself to the extremity of boredom and disgust
with his subject, he sent the last corrections to John Murray, and then
plunged, with passionate eagerness, into his study of the emotions.
Murray sent proofs to Whitwell Elwin, who, like so many intelli-
gent men before and after him, declared the book with cries of
astonishment and exasperation to be "little better than drivel," and
prophesied that Darwinism would not long survive the criticism of
"a really eminent naturalist." 43 But Murray was not deceived. His
ledgers had taught him that, however dull and ridiculous clever men
might think them, Darwin's writings would continue, at least in the
near and practical future, to enjoy the solid repute of a wide and
ready sale. Moreover, this work had long been awaited. It was pub-
lished in February, 1871.
The Descent of Man is usually considered Darwin's second best
book. As a matter of fact, despite much amputation and other drastic
surgery, it is really two books in one pair of covers. Having dealt
with man for 206 pages, the author digresses to sexual selection and
persists indefatigably in that digression to the last and 688th page.
Considered apart from its giant appendage, the Descent is un-
doubtedly Darwin at a disadvantage Darwin at grips with an un-
congenial animal in uncongenial environments, Darwin without the
194 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
miracles of inspiration and discovery, in large part without even the
exhaustive, first-hand research and the tireless, sympathetically under-
standing observation which were among his most dependable gifts.
He himself says in his Introduction that if HaeckeFs Naturliche
Schopfungsgeschichte had appeared before he began to write, he
would probably never have completed his essay. And yet in that case
we should lack one of the most important books in the nineteenth
century, for the Descent is just good enough to fill up the space
between a great thinker and a great opportunity. It sums up and
evaluates, sometimes with authority and always with balance and
common sense, a decade of brilliant anthropological thinking.
Studying man somewhat less exhaustively than the barnacle, Dar-
win maintains that his preeminence is due not to any one charac-
teristic, like the acquisition of language, but to many to his upright
position, the freedom and delicacy of his hands, the use of tools and
language, and above all, the mental capacity which made tools and
language possible. Nevertheless, Darwin believes that increasing
powers of expression must have interacted with increasing mental
powers to bring intelligence to a genuinely human level. Like Spen-
cer, he regards mind as an adaptation to environment and a weapon
in the struggle for survival, but, unlike Spencer, he soberly refrains
from pursuing the metaphysical implications of this view. He insists
on the great gap between, man and the higher mammals, and dis-
agrees with Wallace that the savage could have discovered fire or
developed language with a brain little better than that of the ape; yet
he insists also that, as a product of natural selection, man differs from
animals physically, mentally and morally not in kind but in degree.
Monkeys use sticks and stones as tools; dogs exhibit loyalty and
other moral virtues; and many of the higher species are capable of
very elementary reasoning. Darwin is always at his best with animal
anecdotes:
One female baboon had so capacious a heart that she not only adopted
young monkeys of other species, but stole young dogs and cats, which she
continually carried about. ... An adopted kitten scratched this affection-
ate baboon, who certainly had a fine intellect, for she was much astonished
at being scratched, and immediately examined the kitten's feet, and with-
out more ado bit off the claws. 44
The Subject of Subjects 195
Like a good Darwinian, he is cautious about theories which, like
Bain's and Spencer's, involve inherited memory and the recording o
thought patterns on the nervous system of succeeding generations.
Deeply ingrained habits may transmit tendencies, but scarcely, per-
haps, the habits themselves. Otherwise, absurd customs, like the
Hindoo's aversion to certain foods, ought to be inherited.
Making no pretensions as an ethical thinker, Darwin does not
attempt any elaborate account of moral experience, nor is he entirely
free from confusion and inconsistency. Nevertheless, his general posi-
tion is pretty clear. Broadly considered, conscience arises from the
evolutionary process; more particularly first, from sympathy and
the social instincts, which are supported by opinion, and second,
from rational reflection on the consequences of actions and from the
emergence of the idea of ought, which may, in idealistic individuals,
rise above mere public opinion. Darwin had prepared himself for the
moral problem by extensive reading in Bain, Mill, Adam Smith,
Hume, Bacon, and even Marcus Aurelius. His reading indicates that
he belonged to the very English tradition of Shaftesbury and the
Utilitarians; his thinking indicates that, like John Stuart Mill, he
usually rose above the characteristic limitations of this school. He
follows Smith in stressing the importance of sympathy, and Hume in
emphasizing the nonrational basis of conduct. Yet he avoids the
speculative subtleties of the Utilitarians, and particularly their tend-
ency to turn moral consciousness into an epicurean balance sheet of
pains and pleasures keeping as close as possible to the broad gen-
eralities of common sense on the one hand and the solid facts of
animal behavior on the other. In general, he sees clearly that the moral
life consists in a struggle between duty and desire, and that virtue
and happiness depend first on humility and self-knowledge and
second on effort and rational discipline.
His discussion of man in society is equally sound but less definite
and clear-cut. Within the community, physical, mental, and moral
excellence tends to be preserved both by natural selection and by
deliberate cultivation. Social achievement is spread within the com-
munity by imitation and beyond it by Bagehot's natural selection of
communities. Darwin sees only a partial truth in the arguments of
Greg and Galton that civilization preserves weaklings and failures.
196 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Successful men in all walks of life tend to leave more offspring; and
the diseased, the pathological, and the criminal tend to be eliminated.
The total result is apparently that all peoples progress biologically
at a very slow rate, and a few peoples progress socially at a very
rapid rate.
Undoubtedly, the Descent encouraged the trend toward natu-
ralism, but it also pointed the way toward that more complex,
cautious, and critical naturalism which recognizes salient differences,
as well as a basic unity, in the immense region of organic phenomena.
It emphasizes that as man grows more civilized, the natural process
is in all its higher and determining phases superseded by an ethical
Darwin was no crude leveler down to origins. He may more readily
be accused of making animals too human, than of making men too
animal. With regard to method, he is of course extremely modern in
emphasizing behavior rather than introspection.
The first part of the Descent concludes with a chapter on race,
for which Darwin promises to account by sexual selection. He is
thus led to his Olympian tour de force on sex, in which he explains
everything in order to explain something. In short, he analyzes
another kind of biological warfare, in which, for the possession of a
mate, the males of a species not only fight each other physically, but
compete in erotic dances, in artistic displays of plumage and other
ornamentation, or in musical concerts with instruments, voice, or
penetrating odors, sometimes accumulating aesthetic extravagance
upon extravagance until the principle o utility seems actually to give
way to that of beauty. Moreover, behind the outward display of in-
stinctive art is the inward intensity of erotic passion. Certainly, the
Descent adds new and violent colors to Darwin's picture of nature.
Returning at last to man in the final chapters, Darwin explains
race differentiation by divergent masculine conceptions of female
beauty. Negroes are black and flat-nosed because the remote male
ancestors of Negroes preferred women with dark skins and flattened
noses. The strongest and most virile males mated with such women,
and by rearing more children than their weaker rivals, brought their
tribe, and ultimately their race, to a closer approximation of their
ideal. Darwin also maintains that sexual selection made women more
tender, affectionate^ and unselfish, and men more courageous, ener~
getic, and intelligent thereby proving once more that biolozv was a
The Subject of Subjects 197
soundly Victorian science. The three primary masculine qualities
are, in Darwin's opinion, closely bound together. In their highest
manifestations, they constitute genius, which is essentially "patience,"
or "unflinching, undaunted perseverance." 45
Darwin awaited publication in his usual state of superficial collapse
and exhaustion resting on a broad basis of latent eagerness and
curiosity. He protested he hardly knew whether the book had been
worth writing. Nevertheless, he wanted Murray to send him all out-
of-the-way reviews and notices. The public response was a very
pleasant surprise. One indignant Welshman, it is true, did in a per-
sonal letter abuse him "as an old Ape with a hairy face and a thick
skull." 46 But, on the whole, having steeled himself for fresh waves
of virtuous horror and pious vituperation, he was astonished to find
that everybody was interested without being in the least shocked.
A happy change [pronounced Huxley in his most authoritative tone
as Darwin's vicar in the world outside Down] has come over Mr. Dar-
win's critics. The mixture of ignorance and insolence which, at first, char-
acterised a large proportion of the attacks with which he was assailed, is
no longer the sad distinction of anti-Darwinian criticism. 47
The new politeness, though certainly a tribute to the Origin, was
perhaps scarcely so to the Descent itself. Its fame might last longer,
if at its first appearance clerical tempers had been shorter. Sir
Alexander Grant, writing thoughtfully on the side of the angels in
The Contemporary Review, grumbled a little that Darwin thought
so well of monkeys and so ill of Tories and churchmen, but exhibited
no symptoms of shock or intellectual dazzlement. Darwin had given
us simply "the theory of Epicurus with the atheism removed." Grant's
final pronouncement, uttered with just the suspicion o a yawn, was,
"There is very little that is absolutely new." 48
Darwin feared the worst from scientists, especially from those who
had one foot in religion. "I shall probably receive a few stabs from
your polished stiletto of a pen," he wrote Asa Gray. 49 He was partly
right. Most scientists admired his science, but a few objected to his
theology. Wallace was as usual full of praise but reiterated his view
that something more than natural selection was necessary to produce
man. The Roman Catholic St. George Mivart, whose Genesis of
Species had appeared shortly after the Descent, agreed with Wallace,
198 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
adding that new types in particular must be explained by teleological
forces acting within the organism. Mivart also objected that Darwin
made morality too little self-conscious and rational. On the other
hand, he not only accepted evolution but, citing the medieval Jesuit
Suarez, declared it in accord with the doctrines of the Catholic
Church.
Darwin was alarmed at Mivart's criticisms and feared they might
do natural selection real harm. In the sixth edition of the Origin,
issued in 1872, he answered them at length, and at his own expense
republished as a pamphlet Chauncey Wright's article against Mivart's
Genesis. Meanwhile, emerging dramatically from the fire and smoke
of educational controversy, Huxley descended on both Wallace and
Mivart for their heresies. Inevitably, from much exercise in slapping
and cuffing, the corrective hand was none too gentle. Even Wallace
was ridiculed for introducing an intelligent agent, "a sort of super-
natural Sir John Seebright," 50 and for reducing men to the mentality
of gorillas and then pronouncing them intellectually superior to any
process of natural selection. But for Mivart the punishment was made
to fit the crime with a cruelly Gilbertesque appropriateness. Suspi-
cious of any open-mindedness in the Woman of Babylon, Huxley had
looked into Suarez's venerable tomes "as the careful robin eyes the
delver's toil," 51 and found that neither the learned Jesuit, nor for
that matter, St. Thomas, approved of anything remotely like evolu-
tion. Huxley wielded his bludgeon, and while Mivart staggered under
a massive theological blow, neatly riddled his professional armor
with lighter scientific weapons.
Darwin's fears turned at once into jubilation and for a while Mivart
disappeared from his correspondence. "What a wonderful man you
are to grapple with those old metaphysico-divinity books!" 52 he ex-
claimed to Huxley, and quoted Hooker's saying, "'When I read
Huxley, I feel quite infantile in intellect?. By Jove I have felt the truth
of this throughout your review." 53 *
When a second edition of the Descent appeared in 1874, Mivart
rose up like a decapitated knight in a medieval romance to renew
the attack, indirectly accusing Darwin of entertaining degraded views
about man and of fraudulently concealing a change of opinion. On
this occasion, the master was defended by Wallace, who gently repre-
hended Mivart's language and firmly confuted his ideas.
The Subject of Subjects 199
A little later George Darwin published an article "On Beneficial
Restrictions to Liberty of Marriage" in the Contemporary. In the
Quarterly Mivart accused him o encouraging at once tyranny and
sexual license. This was turning the Victorian Unmentionable into
an assassin's dagger with which to strike at the father through the
son. Beside himself with indignation, Darwin appealed to the great
master of controversy for advice. Huxley entered heartily into his
old friend's emotion. "If anybody tries that on with my boy L.," he
growled almost hopefully, "the old wolf will show all the fangs he
has left by that time, depend upon it." 54 Nevertheless he felt that
Darwin's most terrible weapon was silence. "You ought," he con-
tinued in significant language, "to be like one of the blessed gods of
Elysium, and let the inferior deities do battle with the infernal
powers." Darwin contented himself with writing Mivart privately
that he would never speak to him again.
The Descent was received by the Darwins and the Wedgwoods
with, the quiet and dignified conviction that, having been written by
a master, it was clearly a masterpiece. Of blasphemy or heresy there
was no question. Charles's genius had become a family dogma, and
dogmas cannot be heretical. "I hope you are successfully helping the
great Man out of his thorny brake," Fanny Allen had written her
niece Henrietta, "and are drilling his contingencies into rank and file
order it is a great privilege, as well as honour, to be the Lion's aid
(not Jackal)." 55 That was the tone. To the same "Henrietta," with
whom he had apparently by now "fallen in love," Erasmus wrote
admiring not only his brother's book but Wallace's review in the
Academy. "The way he carries on a controversy is perfectly beautiful,
and in future histories of science the Wallace-Darwin episode will
form one of the few bright spots among rival claimants." 56
In spite of the quiet hum of family applause, one Darwin still
could not overlook the heretic in the genius. While Charles was still
working at the Descent, Emma wrote, "I think it will be very inter-
esting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God
farther off." 57 Charles and Emma shared one world and divided
another. About their large household of children and animals; about
Henrietta's cleverness and Charles's dyspepsia; about Polly, the
terrier who, after her young had been done away with, licked and
tended Charles as her "very big puppy" and Bobby, the dog who put
200 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
on his "hot-house face" of despair when Charles delayed his walk
to look in at his experiments in the hothouse; about Louis Napoleon's
folly and Bismarck's wickedness, about the irrationality of war and
the absurdity of Americans they were in close agreement. The
world they divided was of course that of first principles. Religion
was nearly as important for her as science for him. Yet even here
she was open to argument, and changed as she grew older. Through-
out her life she remained in doubt whether she should knit, em-
broider, or play patience on Sunday; and among her papers after
her death was found a document in which she had listed in separate
columns very sensible reasons for and against a strict observance of
the Sabbath. What he thought of her Sabbatarian scruples and quiet
piety, Charles does not say, but when the sagacious and useful
Henrietta married R. B. Litchfield, a barrister and a follower of
Maurice, her father wrote to her on her honeymoon:
Well, it is an awful and astounding fact that you are married; and I shall
miss you sadly. But there is no help for that, and I have had my day and a
happy life, notwithstanding my stomach; and this I owe almost entirely
to our dear old mother, who, as you know well, is as good as twice refined
gold. Keep her as an example before your eyes, and then Litchfield will
in future years worship and not only love you, as I worship our dear old
mother. 58
Etty and her Litchfield lived happily ever after in a very odd way.
A lifelong invalid waited on hand and foot by an indefatigable maid,
she carried the Darwinian cult of illness to its logical extreme, em-
ploying all the talents and energies of an unusual mind to develop a
fantastic and ingenious system of precautionary measures. To these
she condemned not only herself but her husband, who submitted with
great meekness and no apparent injury to his health. One of Etty's
nieces remembered him as, in later middle age, "a nice funny little
man, whose socks were always coming down/' and who "had an
egg-shaped waistcoat, and a fuzzy, waggly, whitey-brown beard,
which was quite indistinguishable, both in colour and texture, from
the Shetland shawl which Aunt Etty generally made him wear round
his neck."
Etty did not at once abandon her Radamanthine role among the
quiet, anxious, syntactical perplexities of her father's studies. In fact,
The Subject of Subjects 201
she interested her husband in Charles's next book, The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, and presently Litchfield made
some suggestions about expression in music, which Henrietta, ac-
customed to anonymity, proposed that Charles insert as his own. He
replied that he would not.
I used at school to be a great hand at cribbing old verses [he wrote], and
I remember with fearful distinctness Dr. Butler's prolonged hum as he
stared at me, which said a host of unpleasant things with as much meaning
and clearness as Herbert Spencer could devise. Now if I publish L. 9 s re-
marks as my own, I shall always fancy that the public are humming at
me, 60
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published
in 1872, is written at lower tension and within a more restricted
range than the Descent. Observation is at a maximum, theory at a
minimum. There is much precise, almost novelistic description of the
facial expressions, together with relatively little analysis of what lies
behind them. In general, they are explained by three principles: use-
ful associated habit, antithesis, and the direct influence of nervous
excitement. Thus, an infant screams to release the nervous excite-
ment generated by rage. But in screaming, he contracts the muscles
about his eyes to prevent too much blood flowing into them. By so
doing, he frowns. In later life, through association, he frowns to
express many shades of anger and indignation when he has no in-
tention of screaming. When an infant feels love and affection, he
learns, partly by antithesis, to express his emotion by soft sounds and
protective gestures, which are contrary to the harsh, threatening
manifestations of rage. Clearly, Darwin's treatment implies, as he
was aware, additional principles of evolution and adaptation to en-
vironment. From this point of view, the Expression was a consider-
able innovation. All previous works on the subject, with the exception
of Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), had analyzed facial ex-
pression in terms of design and special creation.
Darwin's evolutionary theory was now living an ever expanding
life of its own, reaching out into new fields and bringing about all
sorts of fresh thoughts and new discoveries in other men's minds. His
letters were therefore becoming more and more the business corre-
202 Apes, Angeh, and Victorians
spondence of an immortal with posterity. Distinguished scientists
and philosophers wrote from all parts of the world, deferentially put-
ting queries, asking advice, and suggesting criticisms. Weismann and
Moritz Wagner differed with him on the formation of species; Hyatt
and Cope outlined a theory of "acceleration"; Bastion and de Soporta
speculated about the origin of life and of man.
A modest and somewhat anxiously preoccupied immortal, Darwin
expressed astonishment at new discoveries, bewilderment at extreme
speculation, delight at the overthrow of opponents, gratitude for in-
telligent compliments and in the face of criticism, sturdily defended
his old opinions. In 1875 ^ e sat f r a P ortra it by Ouless. "I look a very
venerable, acute, melancholy old dog," he wrote Hooker when it was
finished; "whether I really look so I do not know." 61
Xlll
"I Am Not
the Least Afraid of Death'
j /
IHE Descent was Darwin's last large-scale encounter with the un-
JL known. It marks the end of a long dedication. Though he did not
avowedly give up his Great Work until 1877, he scarcely ever men-
tioned it after 1871, and eliminated many of the references to it from
the final edition of the Origin. He excused himself to his friends by
declaring that his mind was weakening and that he was determined
not to make a fool of himself, like some aged scientists, by spending
his final years in grandiose generalization about everything. Un-
doubtedly he had less confidence in his abilities at this time, but he
can hardly have thought himself in danger of plunging into an old
age of reckless speculation. Rather one suspects that having completed
the most difficult part of his program, he now felt free to become an
old man and do what he wanted. That is, he gave up nearly all
amusements and devoted himself unremittingly to the more congenial
kinds of hard work. As much as possible, he abandoned his study
and his desk for his garden and his hothouse, living more and more
with flowers and facts and less and less with words and ideas. "I have
taken up old botanical work/' he joyfully wrote Wallace, "and given
up all theories." * Under this congenial regimen and the sympathetic
203
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
guidance of Sir Andrew Clark, whom he often consulted after 1870,
Darwin's health improved considerably and remained fairly good
until a few months before his death in 1882.
His last decade was valedictory, even somewhat posthumous.
Living more and more withdrawn into his house and his family, he
revised old books, completed old studies, saw old friends, lived with
old ideas and old furniture even with old pets, for now the aging
terrier Polly, which he had inherited from his daughter Henrietta,
was his constant companion.
Of course he still had to write a little. Worse, the agonized composi-
tion of a lifetime had to be passed in agonized review. He published
a revised edition of the Descent and of the Coral Reefs in 1874, of
Variation, Climbing Plants, and The Fertilization of Orchids in
1875. In 1876 he permitted the Volcanic Islands and the South
America to be reprinted as a single volume.
Having finished with man, he fled happily almost to the other
extreme of the organic world, resuming the study of his beloved
Drosera, a rather messy little insect-catcher, of which in 1862 he had
written to Hooker, "It is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious
animal I will stick up for Drosera until the day of my death." 2 A
decade later he wrote to Asa Gray with undiminished zest, "It is
an endless subject" and launched, with the freshest enthusiasm, into
its intricacies. Darwin loved Drosera partly for the fine old tory
reason that he had studied it a long time, partly for the liberal reason
that it is a nonconformist, an evolutionary freak. Its leaves and
tentacles react to 1/70,000 of a grain of nitrogenized matter. An opera-
tion severing a critical point in the nervous system of a leaf is "exactly
like" an operation severing the spinal marrow of a frog. 3
The result of these delightful labors was Insectivorous Plants
(1875), a work full of the gusto of painstaking detail, measurements
minutely exact, and ingeniously varied experiment. Darwin arranged
the insect-bearing plants in an evolutionary series of increasingly
specialized adaptation, but on their paradoxical history was so
cautiously reticent that Wallace expressed concern:
You do not make any remarks on the origin of these extraordinary con-
trivances far capturing insects. Did you think they were too obvious? I
daresay there is no difficulty, but I fed sure they will be seized on as in-
"/ Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 205
explicable by Natural Selection, and your silence on the point will be held
to show that you consider them so! 4 *
The subject of plant movement was eventually rounded out by
The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), in which, collaborating
with his son Frank, Darwin attempted to prove that all plants revolve
in all their parts as they grow, and that from this fundamental re-
volving movement they have developed all their more complex
movements in relation to light, food, and gravitation. In short, like
animals, plants move in order to live, though they move with invisible
slowness. The imposing idea of organic unity informs this work as
no comparable idea informs Insectivorous Plants or The Expression
of the Emotions.
Darwin now resumed an investigation which he had begun about
1866, on observing that cross-fertilized plants were more vigorous
than self-fertilized. In his orchid book he had studied the mechanisms
of cross-fertilization; now, in The Effects of Cross- and Self -Fertiliza-
tion (1876), he studied the benefits. "Nature tells us, in the most
emphatic manner," he asserted, "that she abhors perpetual self-
fertilization." 6 Why? Here he was once more faced with the old
mysteries of sex and heredity. But apparently he had renounced
mysteries. Though aware that sex was a means of diversifying hered-
ity, he was content to make the point that cross-fertilization in-
vigorates the offspring when the parents are of but slightly different
constitution. They differ in constitution, he supposed, taking his hint
from pangenesis, because their progenitors have been subjected to
slightly different conditions.
The Forms of Flowers (1877), an expansion and reworking of
papers published in the sixties, deals with significant cases of cross-
fertilization, particularly with that of heterostyled plants, the "making
out" of which was one of his greatest pleasures.
In these later years, the moment of synthesis and composition be-
came increasingly terrible. "I am overwhelmed with my notes," he
confessed in 1879, just before writing Movement in Plants, "and am
almost too old to undertake the job which I have in hand." 6 First
drafts, which he now wrote at breakneck speed, drew from him,
in the crises of revision, comic but exasperated threats of madness and
suicide. Final drafts left him calm but unhopeful. "Please observe,"
zo6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
he wrote Gray of Cross- and Self -Fertilization, that "the first six
chapters are not readable, and the six last very dull." 7 Oddly enough,
his writing at this time shows no indication of increasing obscurity.
It is, if anything, a little simpler and clearer than before.
The botanical works, selling from 1,500 to 3,000 copies each, were
certainly not popular. Nevertheless, all were received with appropri-
ate if somewhat incurious awe by the public, and those on fertiliza-
tion, with rare and gratifying warmth by scientists. Gray placed
Darwin beside Robert Brown in botany and Wallace declared flatly
that he had revolutionized the science. 8 The Power of Movement in
Plants, however, was not generally accepted, and ponderous scientific
sneers were distinctly audible from across the North Sea. Perhaps
Darwin's Methodologie was not quite up to Teutonic standards. He
was himself quick to admire German experiments, but, with all his
self-deprecation, he sturdily resented German amusement. "They
may sneer the souls out of their bodies," he wrote Thiselton Dyer, one
of Hooker's lieutenants at Kew, "but I for one shall think [plant
movements] ... the most interesting part of Natural History." 9 On
the other hand, he could write with detached, if somewhat mournful
admiration, "Wiesner of Vienna has just published a book vivisecting
me in the most courteous, but awful manner, about the Tower of
Movement in Plants.' " 10
In August, 1876, while vacationing at Hensleigh Wedgwood's
house of Hopedene, Charles began his "Autobiography," writing
thereafter for nearly an hour every afternoon until his last illness in
1881. He had not got the idea all at once. He hardly ever got an idea
all at once. The request of a German editor for a brief self-portrait
had sown the seed. Then he reflected how he would have prized
"even so short and dull a sketch" from his grandfather. 11 He had
begun to think more about old Erasmus lately. He may also have
been thinking more about himself.
Very properly, he entitled his narrative "Recollections of the Devel-
opment of my Mind and Character." It was to be the evolution of
Charles Darwin, treated in a thoroughly scientific spirit. "I have at-
tempted to write ... as if I were a dead man in another world look-
ing back at my own life." 12 Fortunately, he did not succeed in quite
such unearthly detachment. "The Autobiography" was intended only
for his children, and one of its greatest attractions is its strong atmos-
"I Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 207
phere of family feeling and intimacy. In fact, filial affection leads
Charles at the very outset to such a prodigious digression on his
father that he seems in great danger of never getting back to himself.
Altogether, Charles's "Autobiography" combines the conscientious-
ness of Mill's, with the warmth and intimacy of a prolonged family
letter.
A man who could be noticeably charming about barnacles and
earthworms should be markedly charming about himself. In Darwin
this quality is partly an openness and transparency of manner. He not
only explains, but depicts and illustrates himself. The result is that
the eager little boy who stole fruit evolves convincingly into the eager,
white-bearded sage who even at the moment guides the pen.
But not convincingly for the sage himself. He is quite frankly as-
tonished at having evolved into himself. He remarks with wonder
that he once loved music, that he once enjoyed Milton and Words-
worth, that he now can do nothing but grind scientific facts into
scientific generalizations. He is astonished that he ever became a seri-
ous worker, an author, a member of the Royal Society, a celebrated
thinker. He is astonished that he ever had a revolutionary idea. His
concluding words are, "With such modest abilities as I possess, it is
truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable ex-
tent the belief of scientific men on some important points." 13 But of
course Darwin is not just surprised. His explanation of himself might
be called Lamarckian: he was able to think successfully because he
felt the need to think.
He traces in some detail the development of his ideas and of the
mind that thought those ideas. On the moral significance of his life he
has much less to say:
I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my
life to science. I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin;
but have often and often regretted that I have not done more direct good
to my fellow-creatures. My sole and poor excuse is much ill-health and
my mental constitution which makes it extremely difficult for me to turn
from one subject or occupation to another. I can imagine with high satis-
faction giving up my whole time to philanthropy but not a portion of it;
though this would have been a far better line of conduct. 1 *
The note of apology is revealing: in the last analysis, he does not ex-
pect to be judged severely; he does not j udge himself severely. Darwin
zo8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
was appealing in his humility, warm and human in his domestic
affections; but he was neither profound in self-knowledge nor lofty
in moral aspiration. He was virtuous above the level of most men, but
heroic chiefly in prodigious intellectual labor in the face of nervous
and physical suffering. About his moral life there is a distinct sugges-
tion of comfort and upholstery.
The want of self-knowledge revenges itself in occasional ironies. "I
cared very little," he writes of the greatest crisis of his professional
life, "whether men attributed most originality to Wallace or to me." 15
His gravest moment of humility comes, characteristically, when he
acknowledges his debt to his wife:
She has never failed in the kindest sympathy towards me and has borne
with the utmost patience my frequent complaints from ill-health or dis-
comfort. I do not believe she has ever missed an opportunity of doing a
kind action to anyone near her. I marvel at my good fortune that she, so
infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my
wife. She has been my faithful adviser and cheerful comforter throughout
life, which without her would have been, during a very long period, a
miserable one from ill-health. 16
Scratching rapidly each afternoon in an undecipherable hand, mix-
ing the casualness of anecdote with the solemnity of a final reckoning,
Darwin took autobiographical farewell not only of his life but of his
world; and for him the latter meant chiefly the eminent men he had
known. He seldom ventures on a moral judgment. Of Owen, Mivart,
and Butler, who had injured him, he says little. Of literary men he
says mostly good. On fellow scientists like Brown, Babbage, and
Murchison, he is full of anecdote, good humor, and incidental illumi-
nations. Falconer, now dead, is still his "poor dear Falconer," 17 be-
cause he had loved a fact so ardently and because he had been so
shaken by the Origin, plunging dramatically from elephants to
evolution. On Spencer whom he had heard so much admired, and
had been compelled so much to admire by Wallace and Huxley he
permits himself the luxury of a frank, though cautious criticism:
Herbert Spencer's conversation seemed to me very interesting, but I did
not like him particularly and did not fed that I could easily become inti-
mate with him. I think that he was extremely egotistical. After reading any
of his books I generally feel enthusiastic admiration of his transcendental
talents, and have often wondered whether in the distant future he would
"/ Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 209
rank with such great men, as Descartes, Leibnitz, etc. about whom, how-
ever, I know very little. Nevertheless, I am not conscious of having
profited in my own work by Spencer's writings. His deductive manner
o treating every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His
conclusions never convinced me, and over and over again I have said to
myself, after reading one of his discussions, "here would be a fine subject
for half-a-dozen years work/' 1S
For Huxley and for Hooker, who had so long stood upon his right
hand and his left, he has almost nothing but praise. Hooker is delight-
ful, kindhearted, acute, tireless, honorable to the backbone. He is,
however, "very impulsive, and somewhat peppery in temper." 19 But,
concludes Charles, "I have known hardly any man more lovable than
Hooker." 20
Darwin seems to regard Huxley as the most gifted among his
intimate friends, though he says little more than the obvious in un-
relieved superlatives. "His mind is as quick as a flash of lightning and
as sharp as a razor. He is the best talker whom I have known." 21 The
gentleness of his conversation gives no idea of the ferocity of his
controversial writing. Having dwelt briefly on the length of Huxley's
fangs and the massiveness of his jaws, Darwin continues, with some-
thing of a small boy's pride and awe:
He would allow me to say anything to him: many years ago I thought that
it was a pity that he attacked so many scientific men, although I believe
he was right in each particular case, and I said so to him. He denied the
charge indignantly, and I answered that I was very glad to hear that I
was mistaken. We had been talking about his well-deserved attack on
Owen, so I said after a time, "how well you have exposed Ehrenberg's
blunders"; he agreed and added that it was necessary for science that such
mistakes should be exposed. Again after a time, I added "poor Agassiz
has fared ill at your hands." Again I added another name and now his
bright eyes flashed on me and he burst out laughing, anathematizing me
in some manner. He is a splendid man and has worked well for the good
of mankind. 22
Huxley has been "a most kind friend"; he has been the "mainstay in
England of the evolutionary principle; and he has done much splen-
did work in zoology, though he might have done much more, had
he not been so much preoccupied with writing, education, and official
duties."
2io Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Another close friend, less warmly celebrated in the "Autobiog-
raphy," had already died.
I met Lyell in Waterloo Place to-day walking with Carrick Moore
[Huxley had written in July, 1871] and although what you said the other
day had prepared me, I was greatly shocked at his appearance, and still
more at his speech. There is no doubt it is affected in the way you describe,
and the fact gives me very sad forebodings about him. 23
To these ills blindness was added soon after.
Lyell had looked forward to old age as a time when he might re-
ward himself for a lifetime of hard work by dining out a little more
frequently than before. But dining out was not possible for a man
who could scarcely talk and who could not see at all. Quite apart from
physical misfortunes, which he bore without a murmur, there was
about his later years something of the tragedy of a man who has not
received an important invitation. Lyell had brought about a revolu-
tion in geology. He had quibbled with a larger revolution in biology.
He had hesitated and lost his entree. It was a heavy punishment, and
sometimes he complained a little. When he made his last confession of
evolutionary faith, he wrote reminding Darwin of the latter's own
words against the foes of the new geology that every scientific man
should die at sixty, and so escape an authoritative old age of opposition
to "all new doctrines." 24 Lyell hoped that he might now be allowed
to live. And when in 1868 Haeckel sent him a copy of The History of
Creation, Lyell thanked him warmly, and especially for the chapter
"On Lyell and Darwin." "Most of the zoologists forget," he wrote,
"that anything was written between the time of Lamarck and the
publication of our friend's 'Origin of Species.' " 25
But now Lyell moved into deeper shadows. In 1873 he lost his
devoted Mary, who had followed him on so many scientific journeys
in Europe and America and who, as still a quite young woman, had
sat patiently by while he and Darwin had vanished into geological
unintelligibilities. Surely nothing more remained for Lyell? As a
matter of fact, his days were passed in an eager and enthusiastic study
of the ancient volcanoes of his native Forf arshire, which he explored
with the brilliant young geologist Judd. The old veteran trudged
patiently in his darkness, listened to descriptions of the rock forma-
tions, offered painfully articulated opinions, and rejoiced in the sue-
Above: Darwin's house at Downe
in Kent, where he lived from
1842 until his death in 1882.
Left: The legendary sage Dar-
win in 1881, from a portrait by
John Collier.
"7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death' 9 211
cess of his young friend's book. The last letter of his correspondence,
addressed to, Darwin, was full of Judd's ancient volcanoes, and with-
out a word of his own failing health.
He died on February 22, 1875. Hooker was stunned. He was "my
loved, my best friend, . . . whose affection for me was truly that of a
father and brother combined." 26 Darwin was surprised at Hooker's
grief. "I cannot say that I felt his death much, for I fully expected it,
and have looked for some little time at his career as finished.'* 2T Then
he rejoiced that Hooker, as President of the Royal Society, had re-
quested and obtained for Lyell the honor of a Westminster burial.
"The possibility . . . had not occurred to me when I wrote before."
He was asked to be a pallbearer but refused, fearing giddiness and col-
lapse. His letter to Lyell's secretary Miss Buckley was less muted and
remote than that to Hooker, but there was an indefinable perf unctori-
ness about its superlatives. "It seems strange to me," he concluded,
"that I shall never again sit with him and Lady Lyell at their break-
fast." 2S That was his deepest note. Lyell had never been closely identi-
fied with Darwinism. Inevitably, therefore, he had faded out of Dar-
win's select, intimate little world, as nearly all old friends were fading.
Charles confessed that he was no longer capable of strong feeling,
except for his own family.
Lubbock, now Lord Avebury and a figure in public life, was the
Mercury who usually ushered into that tiny world, horizoned with ap-
plause, the brief visitations of celebrity. One Sunday afternoon in Feb-
ruary, 1877, he emptied nearly half the Victorian political Olympus on
the astonished somnolence of Down, bringing not only Huxley,
Morley, and Lord Playf air, but that grandly courteous and volubly de-
clamatory Jove, the Right Honorable William E. Gladstone. Charles
emerged from the sapient tentacles and folial stomachs of Drosera
with a jerk. Surely here was an episode, unexplored by Landor, in
which history should have ascended to the philosophic generality of
poetry : the great statesman of liberalism met for the first time the great
scientist of liberalism. Gladstone was on the very point of abandoning
an heroic posture of thought for an even more heroic posture of
action. Holding himself haughtily aloof from the low and venal
noises of the forum, he had sat for the last three years, the Bible in
one hand and Homer in the other, symbolizing the intellectual history
of Europe. But meanwhile Disraeli had committed clever follies in
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
order that his great rival might display a noble, simple wisdom in
denouncing them, and Turks had massacred Christians in order that
he might display his zeal and eloquence by pouring out the long
periods of his virtuous and cadenced wrath against barbarism and
murder.
Unfortunately, he was a little too full of zeal and eloquence. No
luminous bridge could be built between the iniquities of Turks and
the ingenuities of Drosera. Having hurled his furious thunderbolts
at the Turks with inexhaustible zest and good humor through the
whole week end at Lubbock's house, he continued to do so throughout
his visit with Darwin. Charles listened with unaffected delight. Here
were all his Brazilian slaves and maltreated horses avenged in one
glorious crusade! At length the polished, oratorical thunder died away
and the company broke up. Shading his eyes against the setting sun,
Darwin stood, with his scholar's stoop and his long white beard,
watching Gladstone's erect alert figure as he walked away. Turning
to Morley, who waited to say good-by, he exclaimed with simple,
heart-felt gratitude, "What an honour that such a great man should
come to visit me!" 2d Gladstone remembered only the Turks. His
papers simply record "a notable party" and "interesting conversa-
tion." 30
"We have both," Emma wrote Fanny Allen, "been reading a grand
sermon ... on Darwinism. I sometimes think it very odd indeed
that anyone belonging to me should be making such a noise in the
world" 31 But Charles had made the noise quite a long time ago.
More and more, he and Emma found themselves spectators of the
story which they had begun. Now the children were making some
noise of their own. George, the mathematician, was improving on Sir
William Thompson and would soon explain himself to the Royal
Society. Frank, a physician turned biologist, had become his father's
assistant and was discovering protoplasm in the most improbable
pkces. Lenny, whom Emma a few years before had commanded to
"begin his jerseys," was soon to build forts and was even now setting
forth, as photographer, on a scientific Columbiad to New Zealand.
"Oh Lord, what a set of sons I have, all doing wonders," exclaimed
Charles. 52 They were so obviously and gratifyingly cleverer than he
had been at their age.
And yet little of this early promise was to be fulfilled. In their
"7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 213
mature years the younger Darwins were intelligent, unself-conscious,
absent-minded, innocent, eccentric, delightful. One became a major in
the army; another, Lord Mayor of Cambridge. All married admirable
and exemplary young women. All lived in large houses and disposed
of even larger checkbooks. They were the friends of eminent men,
but not eminent men in their own right. As a matter of fact, a kind of
retrospective nostalgia seems to have taken the forward direction from
their lives. In a time of mounting insecurity and self-assertion, they
remained placidly secure and diffident. In an age that was rapidly
becoming indiscreet, they remained sensitively proper and mid-
Victorian so much so that when at a dinner party Virginia Stephen
made "a slightly double-edged joke," George to his daughter Gwen's
astonishment "actually understood it" and then "turned away:
shocked." 38 The trouble with them, says Gwen, was that their father
had been too indulgent, too easily pleased, and above all too charming.
He had therefore always been their hero and childhood had remained
their happiest and most significant experience. He should have been
mean enough to make them rebel or deeply concerned enough to
make them strike out and experiment for themselves. "At any rate, I
know I always felt older than they were. Not nearly so good, or so
brave, or so kind, or so wise. Just older." 34
To the general growing-up of sons, Emma was less resigned than
Charles. Lenny's New Zealand adventure did not fill her with any
enthusiasm. "I feel rather flat. One is so awfully used to New Zea-
land," she remarked to Etty, ironically using the verb with which, as a
child, Lenny had expressed boredom with bread and butter for tea. 35
Perhaps neither she nor Charles quite realized what was happening
to them until they visited William in his villa at Basset. Not that the
visit was in any sense a failure. "William says how quiet and dull
the meals are, and how much he enjoyed our visit. I believe he quite
misses us " and here she put into words the unpleasant possibility
"though F. [father] would think that quite too presumptuous an
idea, he being a man and we fogies." S6
Every evening for many years they played exactly two games of
backgammon. When fortune went against him, Charles, employing
a ritual expression borrowed from The Journal to Stella, would ex-
claim, "Bang your bones!" and no doubt Emma made a ritual reply.
This solemn frivolity also exercised his passion for numeration. "Pray
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
give our regards to Mrs. Gray," he wrote to his old friend Asa. "I
know she likes to hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now
the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature,
has won only 2,490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah, 2,795
games!" 37
Emma corresponded, dutifully and lovingly, with a remote past of
maiden aunts and elderly widows. Of the generation of Josiah Wedg-
wood and Dr. Robert Darwin, Fanny Allen was now the sole sur-
vivor. She was a bright, alert, indomitable old maid in her nineties,
who lived in a pretty, cheerful house by the sea and steadfastly re-
fused to pay her cook more than twelve pounds a year, though
Elizabeth Wedgwood and Fanny Hensleigh secretly augmented the
amount to the contemporary standard. With eighteenth-century clear-
headedness, Fanny scorned Tennyson and his "bland and mild"
Shakespeare, citing the murder of Duke Humphrey in the chronicle
plays as a refutation. She gave her grandniece Henrietta a volume of
Burns cuttingly inscribed with the hope that it might wean her away
from "Mr, Tennyson."
Emma explained modern youth to Fanny. "Henrietta , . . has been
going to a workingman's ball," she wrote, "and danced with a grocer
and a shoemaker, who moved and behaved exactly like everybody else
and were quite as well dressed. The ladies were nicely dressed but
not expensively, and much more decently than their betters in a
ballroom now-a-days." 38 She and Charles several times welcomed
Litchfield's class from the London Workingman's College. Some
sixty or seventy in number, they wandered about the garden, sang
under the lime trees, and finally had tea on the lawn. Charles got on
well with them. Nevertheless, he must have moved through these
afternoons with an anxious eye to his symptoms and a terrifying prob-
ability of headaches and insomnia afterwards.
At about this time Emma very quietly became very liberal in her
religious ideas. Nearly forty years of evolutionary dinner conversation
had taken its toll. To respect Charles's fame was to face his facts, and
to face his facts was to reject the Deluge and the Garden of Eden.
Emma now began to admire Bishop Colenso, though more for his
exploits among the Caflfres, perhaps, than for those against the Old
Testament. "Dean Stanley had the courage to ask him to preach at
Westminster Abbey," she wrote, "but Colenso declined, saying he had
"7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 215
not come to England to stand up for his own rights, and he would
not make a fuss." 39 She had also come to take a fond and motherly,
if somewhat vague interest in Charles's science. Her husband was so
much the eager and lovable boy, continually busy about his projects
with earthworms and primroses. "F. is much absorbed in Desmodium
gyrans," she wrote Henrietta, "and went to see it asleep last night. It
was dead asleep, all but its little ears, which were having most lively
games, such as he never saw in the day-time." 40
"F. was made very happy,'* she wrote sometime later, "by finding
two very old stones at the bottom of the field, and he has now got a
man at work digging for the worms. I must go and take him an
umbrella." 41 Charles had begun to investigate how stones are buried
by the castings of earthworms. His adventures with these humble
animals came to their logical climax in a monumental event: he
visited Stonehenge. "I am afraid," wrote Emma in prospect, "it will
half kill F. two hours' rail and a twenty-four mile drive but he is
bent on going, chiefly for the worms, but also he has always wished
to see it." 42 George met them at Salisbury and conducted the tour
with great gusto. Charles stood about in the sun with wonderful
perseverance and immunity to headache. But at Stonehenge the vic-
torious worm had obviously failed to obliterate the works of his
traditional victim. "They did not find much good about the worms,
who seem to be very idle out there." 43
All the male Darwins took earthworms very seriously. Horace ob-
served how they buried stones; William, how they covered over
ruined terraces; and Frank, how they dragged leaves into their bur-
rows. Finally, Charles's book (1881) demonstrated that, though sim-
ple little creatures, they lead ingenious, complicated, and highly useful
lives. They are blind, deaf, and dumb; yet they construct remarkable,
humus-lined burrows extending sometimes six or seven feet under-
ground and terminating in litde spherical, pebble-floored chambers
where they roll themselves up into balls and hibernate* They
have extraordinary gizzards and esophagi that moved Charles to
eloquent admiration. They are quite sagacious about picking up
leaves by the most convenient end. Above all, they literally swallow,
digest, and excrete nearly all the surface soil of the globe, refining
and enriching it into the fertility which makes abundant plant growth
possible.
zi6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
In 1876, youth, in the rather terrifying form of a newly born baby,
re-entered the Darwin household. Frank had married, lost his wife,
and come back to live at Down House with his son. Emma took up
the task with energy and courage, though the sudden loss of her
daughter-in-law had left her, in Henrietta's opinion, a more fearful
and anxious woman. Her references to the baby are divided between
anxiety and admiration, but mostly admiration. "We think he ... is
a sort of Grand Lama," she told Henrietta, "he is so solemn." 44
The infant and the sage were on easy and confidential terms from
the first. Charles may have suffered atrophy of his organ for appreci-
ating Shakespeare, but not of that for responding to children. It was
such a pleasure to see the boy's little face opposite him at luncheon.
"He and Bernard used to compare their tastes; e.g., in liking brown
sugar better than white, &c.; the result being, *We always agree, don't
we?'" 45
Meanwhile, Charles and Emma were concerned about their eldest
son. A prosperous banker in Southampton, William was modest,
serene, genial, and sweet-tempered. He had only one fault: he was a
bachelor* Was he doomed to be another Erasmus? Like his uncle,
William was devoted to solitude and reading. When Emma urged
him to marry, he replied with a ritual "Why if I did I shouldn't have
any time to myself." 46 But sometimes, looking over the top of his
book, he must have given way to conjugal thoughts, for in 1877 he
became engaged to Sara Sedgwick, the sister-in-law of that elegant
Bostonian and fastidious Anglophile, Charles Eliot Norton.
Convinced that William's had been a narrow escape and that he
had won a remarkable young lady, Charles wrote Sara one of his
inimitable letters of personal gratitude. "For many years," he declared,
"I have not seen any woman, whom I have liked and esteemed so
much as you." He admitted that Southampton was dull but modestly
urged that William was not. Moreover,
I can say with absolute truth that no act or conduct of William has ever
in his whole life caused me one minute's anxiety or disapproval. His
temper is beautifully sweet and affectionate and he delights in doing little
kindnesses. That you may be happy together is my strong desire, and I
thank you from the bottom of my heart for having accepted him. 47
Sara is an index to the propriety and innocence which, beneath
the informality, were rather awful in the Darwins. She was an intelli-
"7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 217
gent, animated young puritan with an appetite for moral heroism
which in a prosaic age could express itself in no other dedication than
that of being a perfect lady. Having nothing to die for, she lived in
order that her life and William's might be a monument to correctness.
They inhabited a large, hideously faultless late-Victorian villa with
lawns, a carriage sweep, a monkey-puzzle tree, plate glass windows,
and bells which footmen never failed to answer. Unlike Sara herself
the house did not excite Charles's admiration. Happening to be
alone in it for a few hours, he collected every ugly object of bric-a-brac
that he could find and then arranged them all together in a single
room. When William and Sara returned, he laughingly led them
through his chamber of horrors.
Apparently William had his uncle Erasmus's gift for quiet and
intelligent reverence. Certainly both had a way with Carlyle. One of
the most delightful of the Darwin letters is an account written by
William to his mother of a carriage ride with the aged transcenden-
talist. In the warmth of William's sympathy, the dark, dyspeptic
clouds melted away from the frosty brow, the proud suspicious heart
opened, and the sharp tongue ceased to be the slave of its own satiric
art. Carlyle spoke of the terrible difficulty of rewriting the first volume
of The French Revolution after the manuscript had been accidentally
burnt by Mill's charwoman. Trying to write without notes or refer-
ences had seemed like trying to fly without wings. He said that his
friendship with Goethe had prevented him from going mad at the
horror and mystery of this world. Had Carlyle ever reread any of his
own works? Yes, he had actually reread Frederic^ in its eleven-
volume entirety (proving thereby that such books can be read as well
as written). All this and much more he said with the utmost frank-
ness and good humor, but William was constantly losing immortal
words in the rumbling of carriage wheels. In parting, Carlyle inquired
after Charles's health, and showing his teeth a little, remarked with
a grin, "The origin of species is nothing to me." 4S
Charles's own later relations with the prophet of hero worship were
less fortunate. Carlyle could not swallow the monkeys; and Darwin
could not quite swallow Carlyle, particularly after the Reminiscences,
which devote one rapid, patronizing page to the Darwin brothers,
upsetting the honest fame of the younger with the intelligent obscu-
rity of the elder:
2i 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seek us out
very soon ("had heard of Carlyle in Germany" etc.); and continues ever
since to be a quiet house-friend, honestly attached; though his visits latterly
have been rarer and rarer, health so poor, I so occupied, etc. etc. He has
something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sin-
cerest, naturally truest, and most modest of men. Elder brother of Charles
Darwin, ... to whom I rather prefer him for intellect, had not his
health quite doomed him to silence and patient idleness. 49
In his "Autobiography,** Darwin revenged himself by doing Carlyle
justice. Carlyle was a good talker but he talked too much. Darwin
recalls with some gusto how the great writer once silenced a whole
dinner party, including two formidable raconteurs, with a gigantic
lecture on silence. Carlyle sneered too much and the Reminiscences
seemed to indicate that his sneers came too much from the heart.
Even so, he was a sincerely benevolent man. His descriptions of men
and things were unexcelled in vividness but not necessarily in truth.
He was a grandly influential moralist, but one who did not know the
difference between might and right.
In 1877 Cambridge shed prestige on science, and orthodoxy on
evolution by conferring an LL.D. on Charles. The occasion, one of
the most memorable in university history, was something between a
riot and a ritual. Entering by a side door with her daughter Bessie and
her two youngest sons, Emma found the Senate House an almost un-
endurable pandemonium of noise, stifling air, and crushed humanity*
Undergraduates not only carpeted the floor and jammed the aisles
but perched on the statues and stood in the windows. Sardonic catcalls
alternated with deafening cheers. Presently Charles, positively
Chaucerian in his white beard and magnificent red cloak, was ushered
in by a squadron of brightly robed dons. For several minutes, the
cheers were so stupendous that Emma half expected her husband
to wilt and evaporate away out of sheer sensitiveness and ochlophobia.
Quite the contrary. He sat waiting, with his most charming smile, for
the Vice-Chancellor. Meanwhile, there were loud groans for an un-
popular proctor, who responded with a stern, angry face, "which/ 5
observed Emma with the sageness of great experience, "was very
bad policy." 50 Some undergraduates now stretched cords from one
gallery to another, and Emma was not surprised to see first a dangling
"1 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 219
monkey and then a large ring tied with ribbons, which she con-
jectured to be the missing link. There was a fresh outburst o catcalls
about "our ancestors," in the midst of which the Vice-Chancellor
appeared. Charles was now marched down the aisle by two men
with silver maces. The Public Orator made his long harangue, which
Emma found extremely tedious and which was interrupted in the
middle by a cheerful, valedictory voice calling out, "Thank you very
kindly!" At length the Vice-Chancellor, in scarlet and white fur,
said a few Latin words over Charles, and Charles was an LL.D.
Emma conceded that she felt very proud walking through the quad-
rangles with her red-robed husband.
That evening Charles ate a quiet dinner with Emma in the pleasant
and contented knowledge that in his honor a great many other people
were eating a very ceremonious dinner with the Vice-Chancellor.
Huxley as usual represented him, expressing thanks and making the
principal address. Darwin's alter ego could say things that Darwin
would never think of saying, and Huxley said them with relish. In
fact, the actor reinforced the Puritan on these occasions. Huxley loved
to dumfound, not the bourgeois, but the accepted idols and potentates
of this world. In spite of his large geniality and friendliness, he liked,
in an atmosphere of conviviality sickening toward social horror, to
turn gala dinners into punitive expeditions. He began by expressing
the gratitude of his old friend. The university had shown wise fore-
sight and singular restraint in not bestowing this delicate academic
wreath until it could run no risk of being crushed under the marks
of approbation which had accumulated since the first appearance of
the Origin. Huxley then searched scientific history in vain for a name
of equal luster between those of Aristotle and Darwin. In conclusion,
he was very glad to hear from Dr. Humphrey that in conferring a
degree on his old friend, the university had accepted the doctrine of
evolution. The younger Darwins reported the speech to their father
with glee and exultation.
The red robe was timed to the snail's pace of general opinion, for
from about this time forward, Charles wore an invisible red robe of
celebrity wherever he went. When he attended Burdon Sanderson's
lecture on movement in plants and animals, he was applauded as he
entered and ushered with ceremony to a place next to the chairman.
In this stooped, shaggy-browed, white-bearded old man with his
220 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
earnest, bright-eyed expression of pain, people recognized an immor-
tal who would soon vanish from the prosaic haunts of mortality.
In 1879, with characteristic piety, Charles carved another an-
cestral head on the top of his totem pole. A typically Victorian bit of
woodwork, it was meant to represent grandfather Erasmus. Charles
had recently been much struck by Ernst Krause's article on Erasmus
in the German periodical Kosmos. Perhaps Erasmus's exuberant spec-
ulation was not so disgraceful after all. He decided to have Krause's
essay brought out in English; then, finding scientific work more
strenuous than formerly, himself undertook a biographical introduc-
tion by way of literary relaxation. To be sure, the introduction soon
grew longer than the essay.
At that particular time Erasmus was probably best known through
a footnote in the "Historical Sketch" prefixed to the Origin. Ap-
parently Charles imagined he was better known through the vindic-
tive contemporary biography of Miss Anna Seward, who had re-
venged the secret crime of never having been made Mrs. Erasmus
Darwin by depicting a monster capable of so dastardly an omission.
Collecting evidence from old family papers and letters, Charles had
attempted "to refute the calumnies of Miss Seward." To be sure, one
does not paint a vivid or even a veracious portrait by refuting
calumnies. Nor could he even refute calumnies with a perfectly clear
conscience. "Do you know her maiden name?" he had once asked
Hooker about a certain lady. "I suspect she is Granddaughter of Dr.
Darwin of Zoonomia; who had some illegitimate daughters who
were brought up like ladies." 51 By judicious quotations and even
more judicious silences, Charles succeeded, not in bringing his grand-
father to life, but in making him a thoroughly edifying character. The
erudite lover, the brilliant virtuoso and armchair philosopher becomes
what in part he was, a scientist, humanitarian, and benefactor of
mankind.
The whole Darwin family was dubious about the "Erasmus."
Charles cut, revised, and agonzied to no avail. Everybody was pes-
simistic, and for once the pessimism was justified. Less than a thou-
sand copies were sold.
The little book was not only unpopular, it was unfortunate as well.
Samuel Butler, who had spent his boyhood in developing a sense of
injury and half his lifetime in detecting elderly malevolence, dis-
'7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 221
covered almost at a glance that Krause's essay was an insidious veiled
attack against himself. Moreover, he saw that Charles's whole scien-
tific career was a long and dignified burglary o ideas from Erasmus
Darwin, Buffon, and Lamarck. Butler could not blink at the facts.
Reluctantly but resolutely, he quarreled his way into contemporary
notice, demonstrating as many talents for defamation as Gladstone
for oratory. He was suspicious, critical, alert, witty, devious, elusive.
He also had the satirist's power of turning his victims into vivid,
plausible villains who thoroughly deserved the savagery of his pen.
The Darwin of Luc\, or Cunning?, like the Theobald Pontifex of
The Way of All Flesh, causes the reader to burn with moral indigna-
tion*
Butler's quarrel with Darwin is not an incident. It involves his total
biography. In the early sixties, while still a young man, Butler made a
modest fortune at sheep raising in Australia and discovered the lead-
ing idea of his life in New Zealand. That idea was evolution and he
found it in the Origin. The theory of natural selection he hardly took
in at all. What fascinated him was the thought that living things
grow, develop, and evolve. Quite characteristically, he began to ex-
periment with the idea, as a scientist experiments with guinea pigs
or wrinkled peas. First he assumed that men were machines. This
proved rather tame and unfruitful. Then he assumed that machines
were alive. This proved delightfully exhilarating, and soon he had
a sketch in a New Zealand newspaper. But despite all his skill in
making out a case, Butler could not quite convince himself that
machines were alive. He therefore turned to the more cautious and
rather Lamarckian notion that machines are exterior and detachable
limbs that men have made for themselves and published another
newspaper sketch.
In 1870 and 1871, as a prosperous dilettante bachelor in London,
he used both sketchesand much elseto construct a very compact
and suggestive little satire called Erewhon, of which he sent a copy
to Darwin. Charles thought it great fun, and Butler hastened to ex-
plain that it was not, as some critics thought, intended as a satire of
the Origin, for which he could "never be sufficiently grateful." 50 He
now paid visits to Down House and struck up a friendship with
Frank.
Butler resumed his chiropractic experiments on the analogy be-
222 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
tween mechanisms and organisms, twisting and pushing and wrench-
ing it into all sorts of grotesque shapes. He had considered machines
as limbs or organs. What if organs were machines? He quickly saw
that animals might "invent" them through need, improve them
through use, maintain them through habit, and pass them on through
unconscious memory. Individuals of the same descent would then
enjoy unity of personality and experience. They would live "with the
accumulated life of centuries." 53 Standing on the mountain of Mon-
treal, one magnificent summer evening while on a business trip to
Canada, he viewed with exaltation the grandeur of the St. Lawrence
River and of his own idea. He listened to the bells of Montreal Ca-
thedral, and as the sounds died away they seemed to symbolize the
gradual diminution of generic memories losing themselves in the
abyss of past experience.
Butler hardly realized that he had evolved a new theory, much less
that he differed greatly from Darwin. As he began to write Life and
Habit in 1876, however, friends put him on the track of Lamarck and
Hering, who had anticipated him. He also read Mivart's objections
to Darwin with great sympathy, and then, looking into the sacred
book once more after several years, bristled at what seemed the
summary manner in which those objections were answered. In-
cidentally, he discovered a good deal of wool in his idol's head and
therefore, of course, a good deal of clay in his feet. When was Darwin
for Darwin and when was he for Lamarck? Besides, the theory of
natural selection didn't explain anything if it didn't explain the causes
of variations. Butler tried to be respectful but the gusto of destruction
was upon him. The closing chapters of Life and Habit leave the aged
prophet of evolution only the merest shreds and patches of his sage's
mantle.
Life and Habit appeared late in 1877. Butler awaited bolts from the
scientific empyrean somewhat as Ernest Pontifex had awaited blows
from the paternal ferule. Nothing happened except that he received
two courteous and appreciative letters from Frank Darwin. He sighed
with relief, then grew suspicious. Was he to be another victim of that
great warfare of silence which as he was beginning to perceive with
horrified indignation Darwin had waged so successfully against
eminent predecessors? For the fact of organic evolution had been per-
fectly well known to Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. More-
'7 Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 223
over, they had explained it much better than Charles Darwin had.
Why were they so totally unknown? Butler found his answer in The
Origin of Species. Darwin's "Historical Sketch" was a jewel of studied
or unstudied detraction, damning many among them his own
grandfather in little space and small type. His ambiguities, intended
or unintended, were not simply baffling, but interested, deceptive, and
insidious, enabling him to insinuate a claim to the discovery of evolu-
tion itself as well as of natural selection.
By a very romantic logic of his own, Butler had found Darwin to be
first superhuman, then human, and finally inhuman. That inhu-
manity needed only to be demonstrated by an overt act. Of course it
was, almost at once. In May, 1879, Butler published Evolution, Old
and New, exposing Charles and restoring Erasmus, Buffon, and
Lamarck to their proper glory. A few months later, Charles brought
out, together with his own "Preliminary Notice," Krause's Erasmus
Darwin. Clearly, Evolution, Old and New had quickly given him a
bad conscience about his grandfather. Butler read the Erasmus Dar-
win in haste. The sole comment on the new Lamarckianism consisted
of one sentence, in which Krause observed that the recent attempt
to revive Erasmus Darwin's system showed "a weakness of thought
and a mental anachronism which no one can envy." 54 That was all.
Yet, though purporting to be an accurate translation from a German
article published some time before Evolution, Old and New, Krause's
essay contained several mysterious and unacknowledged echoes from
that work. Moreover, Charles's preface seemed to guarantee the
accuracy of the translator, and also mentioned the subsequent pub-
lication of Evolution, Old and New. Butler sent for the original article
and furiously studied German. Sure enough! The article had been
tampered with. Was he to be buried alive, as others had been buried
dead, under these insidious emanations of silence and misrepresenta-
tion? Fortunately, he had seen the trick in time. In phrases exuding
a distinct odor of villainy detected, he wrote to Darwin demanding
an explanation.
The explanation was that Butler had given a very mean and in-
genious interpretation to a rather complicated accident. Darwin had
glanced through Butler's book when it came out, and sent it to
Krause with the comment that it was not worth much attention.
Engaged in revising his article, Krause had apparently used material
224 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
from Evolution, Old and New and at the same time condemned its
doctrine even more heartily than Darwin had. In his preface, Darwin
stated that Krause had revised, but the statement had accidentally
been deleted from the proofs. Now, deep in vegetable mould, and
earthworms, Charles did not remember ever having written it. In
reply to Butler, therefore, he merely acknowledged the revision and
declared the practice so common as hardly to require mention. Ex-
planations were already too late. In the mood of a literary David defy-
ing the scientific Goliath and all his Philistine host, Butler wrote a
letter to The Athenaeum stating his case. His tone was dignified, but
at intervals he made rapid and dexterous use of the slingshot, grimly
noting the "happy simplicity" with which Charles used a common
scientific practice to introduce "a covert condemnation of an op-
ponent." 55
There was a startled consultation among the Darwins. Should
Charles reply or not? He drafted two letters but both were rejected by
the family conclave. In desperation he appealed to the archcontro-
versialist himself. Huxley advised the bludgeon silence. Butler's pun-
ishment was cruel. Just a little fuss, just an angry word or two would
have gratified him so much. He gnashed his teeth with increasing
desperation into an awful and deepening silence, so that his later
books contained more and more rage against Darwin and less and
less thinking about evolution. In the extremity of his warfare, he even
made frantic gestures toward his old enemy the Church, recommend-
ing his own Lamarckianism as a means of salvaging mind in a
mechanistic age. Darwin, he declared, had knocked the brains out
of the universe. In putting them back in, Butler emptied out nearly all
the gray matter. Very few paid any attention to him in any case. What
seemed to him a fearless unmasking of hypocrisy and error was to
most Victorians simply a prolonged and incomprehensible violation
of decorum.
Darwin's final years were as full of domestic happiness and material
prosperity as the concluding chapter of a Victorian novel. In 1879
Mr. Anthony Rich, named with Dickensian appropriateness, wrote
that he intended to leave Charles and Charles's descendants nearly the
whole of a large property. Charles protested he was already wealthy,
but Mr. Rich was obdurate. When in 1880 he inherited another large
'7 Am Not the Least Ajraid of Death" 225
fortune from his brother Erasmus, Charles renewed the protest. To
no avail. Mr. Rich absolutely insisted on carrying coals to Newcastle
and Charles looked forward to the double satisfaction of leaving
more and more money to more and more descendants, for he and
Emma were also wonderfully fortunate in acquiring new relatives-
in-law. Having become a Cambridge don, their youngest son Horace
now married Ida, the only daughter of Lord Farrer, a statesman much
interested in botany. Charles had for some time been deep in Primula
with the father. Emma now became devoted to the daughter.
Having learned in his youth how to be busy, Charles learned once
more in his old age how to be idle. The sense of haste and of work
to be done gradually departed. Vacations ceased to be punitive sen*
tences of exile from his beloved hothouse. He picnicked, excursioned,
and even traveled with the gaiety and enthusiasm of a schoolboy kept
too long over his lessons. Twice he actually got as far from Down
as the Lake country. Apparently he had been a little premature in
bidding farewell to his sense of beauty. He was so devoted to the
rocks about Grasmere that Emma feared he might overexert him-
self.
Charles's last summer was one of the happiest of his life. There
were new Darwins to replace the old; there were the inexhaustible,
constantly unfolding marvels of little Bernard in evolution; and there
was a great deal of fine weather under the lime trees. Henrietta re-
membered one day in particular when there was a beautiful lady to go
with it. The lady was Mrs. Vernon Lushington, who played, sang,
talked, and charmed the seventy-two-year-old sage into the gayest o
spirits.
Yet in the long sunshine of those late summer days Charles must
have felt at times the chill of his own frailty and impermanence. His
second visit to the Lake country was much less satisfactory than the
first. The least exertion even looking at scenery tired him. "I have
everything to make me happy and contented," he wrote Wallace,
"but life has become very wearisome to me.** 5ft The worst of it was,
of course, that he had no heart to undertake any important scientific
task. Short studies did not suit him or they threatened to become long,
and for a long study he did not have time. Moreover, the increasing
swiftness of biological progress made his head swim. He could not
keep up. In fact, he found it hard to concentrate, to grasp facts firmly
zz6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
enough to reason upon them. People should no longer expect dis-
coveries from him. And yet he had to work, and did work in a
desultory, despondent fashion.
Erasmus had been increasingly ill of late years. On August 26,
1881, he died, and was buried in the churchyard at Downe. One of
Frank Darwin's most vivid memories was of the expression of sad
reverie on his father's face as he stood, wrapped in a long black funeral
cloak, in a scattering of snow beside Erasmus's grave. "He always
appeared to me," Charles wrote Hooker, "the most pleasant and
clearest headed man, whom I have ever known. London will seem a
strange place to me without his presence." 57 But Erasmus, as his
brother knew, had not been sorry to leave his beloved London for a
quieter residence. "He was not, I think, a happy man," Charles told
Lord Farrer, "and for many years did not value life, though never
complaining." 58 The real tragedy was that so affectionate a man
should have been so lonely.
Though deeply engrossed in their own new lives and families at
this time, all the younger Darwins mourned Erasmus as an irreparable
loss, and none more than William, who resembled him in many
ways:
Next to coming to Down [William wrote his mother], one of my
greatest pleasures was going to see dear Uncle Eras whenever I was in
London. He seems to me much more than an uncle, and from quite a
little boy I can remember his steady kindness and pleasantness, always
knowing how to make me feel at ease and be amused. After I grew up,
it year by year was a greater happiness for me to go and see him. To me
there was a charm in his manner that I never saw in anybody else. 59
By December there was a new Erasmus, the son of Ida and Horace.
Charles made a last visit to Cambridge in order to see him. Cambridge
undergraduates must have seemed extremely young, extremely noisy,
and extremely irrelevant. But the old buildings and quadrangles were
familiar and pertinent enough, and when he listened once more to the
singing at Kong's College Chapel, old memories flooded back upon
him and gay, youthful Cambridge became a city of ghosts.
He was growing steadily weaker and could hardly work at all.
Fearing for his heart, Emma took him to Sir Andrew Clark, who
pronounced him reasonably sound. Surprised and reassured, Charles
"I Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 227
apparently became more venturesome. A few days later, ringing the
bell at Romanes's door, he suffered a heart attack. Romanes was not
at home, but his butler, perceiving that Mr. Darwin was ill, begged
him to come in. It was one of those occasions when, amid the prosaic
and impersonal commonplaces of a city street, one may have to choose
between impropriety and death. With characteristic shyness and pride,
as well as consideration for others, Darwin chose propriety. He would
prefer to go home. The butler urged him to come in and rest at least
until a cab could be called. But again Charles refused. The butler
watched him walk painfully toward the cab stop. At about three hun-
dred yards from the house, he staggered, leaned against the park rail-
ings, half turned as though to come back, then, as the butler ran
toward him, turned once more and found a cab.
He recovered and was fairly well until the last week of February,
when he was again troubled by an irregular pulse and by pain in the
region of his heart. But spring came on, the crocuses bloomed, birds
sang in the orchard, and Charles sat in the warm sunshine with
Emma. He seldom ventured far from the house without her, but
once, going as far as the Sand-walk alone, he suffered another attack.
Huxley wrote in March, earnestly counseling closer medical super-
vision. Darwin responded with the warmest gratitude. "Once more,
accept my cordial thanks, my dear old friend," he concluded, and
then added, with sly reference to one of Huxley's most terrible
papers, "I wish to God there were more automata in the world like
you." eo
In April it sometimes fatigued him even to look out the window.
Yet he refused to be bedridden and worked whenever he had any
strength. His tenderness and consideration for others seemed to grow
each day. He told Henrietta and Richard that they were "the best of
dear nurses"; and often assured Emma, "It is almost worth while to
be sick to be nursed by you.*' 61 He was always begging her to spend
more time with the others. On April i5th he was seized with giddiness
while sitting at dinner, and fainted before he could reach the sofa.
On the 17th Emma recorded, "Good day, a little work, out in orchard
twice/' 62 The next night he woke Emma, saying, "I have got the
pain, and I shall feel better, or bear it better if you are awake." The
pain increased and he fainted. When he was revived with great
difficulty, he turned to Emma. "I am not the least afraid of death," he
22 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
said. "Remember what a good wife you have been to me. Tell all my
children to remember how good they have been to me." When the
worst o the attack was over, he said, "I was so sorry for you, but I
could not help you." 63
Pain and nausea visited him at regular intervals throughout the
following day. That night he had another attack. "He fainted and
regained consciousness," Frank wrote Huxley, "but remained in a
condition of terrible faintness and suffered very much from over-
powering nausea, interrupted by retchings. He more than once said,
'if I could but die.' " 64 At three o'clock the next morning, April 19,
1882, he died very peacefully.
Emma had been wonderfully calm during the last weeks. After his
death, the only regret that her children heard her express was that
she had not told him how pleased she was when he had put her photo-
graph beside his big chair in the study, so that he could look at it
while working.
Emma and the children wanted him to be buried at Downe; but
long before they could think of practical details, the press and the pul-
pit had spoken, the presidents of learned societies had taken counsel,
cabinet ministers had concurred with cabinet ministers. Westminster
Abbey was inevitable. Death, in fact, had canonized him; his heresies
had become part of the wisdom of our ancestors, so that many English
divines felt obliged to show there was no essential disagreement be-
tween God and "Professor" Darwin. 65 Huxley did not believe a
word of it, nor was he one of the eminent scientists who signed
Lubbock's petition to the Dean of Westminster. Nevertheless, the
Dean telegraphed his "cordial acquiescence." 66
Sorrow was the heroic emotion of Victorian domestic life. The
decent black which in umbrellas and stovepipes made daily life
prosaic crescendoed in velvet-palled coffins and lugubriously gar-
landed horses to a sable grandiosity which made death sumptuous
and splendid. Emma did not approve of such displays, nor did she
attend the ceremony at the Abbey. Charles was conveyed from this
world with a pomp which he had never used while living in it.
Entrance to the ceremony at Westminster Abbey was through the
Poet's Corner by black-edged invitation cards. Full mourning was
required for admission. To the multitude of distinguished ladies and
gentlemen rustling portentously in black silk and broadcloth within
"/ Am Not the Least Afraid of Death" 229
the Abbey, a faint singing of youthful voices became increasingly
audible as the procession moved through the cloisters toward the west
front. At length, the great doors were flung open, the singing grew
suddenly louder, and the Choir began to march down the nave. The
coffin, borne by Huxley, Hooker, Wallace, Lubbock, James Russell
Lowell, Canon Ferrar, an Earl, two Dukes, and the President of the
Royal Society, sent a stir of feeling through the crowd. Huxley,
Lubbock, and Hooker were visibly moved. Sitting among the mem-
bers of the family, William Darwin felt a draught. With the respect
shown by all Darwins for the possible invasion of disease, he calmly
poised his black gloves on the top of his bald head and sat thus
throughout the service. Finally, the coffin was lowered into a deep
grave close by those of Newton and Herschel. The white-robed choir
filled the austere corner of the British scientists and sang, "His body
is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore." Soon the throng
of ladies and gentlemen filed out into the spring sunshine and left the
Abbey to its great population of statues, which, lying in the frozen
compactness of medieval sleep or standing erect in the periwigged
flamboyance of neoclassical gesture, tell from choir to west front a
long and silent tale of English achievement in many strange costumes
and extinct fashions.
The Times recorded the event with decorum and considerable
gusto of funereal detail. Spencer, who overcame his sense of the
absurdity of ecclesiastical ceremony to attend, was struck with the
evident personal sympathy shown by all for the deceased. Galton was
obviously moved at the time, then on second thought found the whole
occasion too much like that of giving a University Degree. Neverthe-
less, he was sufficiently impressed to urge in a letter to The Pall Mall
Gazette that the old creation window, based on a neolithic myth, be
replaced by an evolutionary one in honor of his famous cousin. This
doctrinaire proposal did not meet with "cordial acquiescence" from
the Dean of Westminster.
Almost immediately after the funeral, Huxley wrote for the forth-
coming issue of Nature a brief memorial of his old friend. It contains
some of the most valuable observations he ever made on another
human being. The central principle of Darwin's nature, Huxley felt,
was "a certain intense and almost passionate honesty," which acted
at once as restraint and propulsion, keeping "his vivid imagination
230 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
and great speculative powers within due bounds" and at the same
time compelling him "to undertake the prodigious labours of original
investigation." In his conversation Darwin reminded Huxley of
Socrates. There was the same "ready humour," the same "desire to
find some one wiser than himself," the same "belief in the sovereignty
of reason." 67
Part Two
XIV
An Eminent Victorian
T TUXLEY'S later career suggests further contrast with Darwin's.
JLJL Their lives embraced opposite metamorphoses. Darwin's pat-
tern was essentially crustacean; Huxley's was, in part at least, lepi-
dopteral or butterflylike. Beginning as an active, free-swimming
snipeshooter, Darwin developed evanescent tendencies to Bible read-
ing and theology grubbing, suddenly acquired new microscopic eyes
and fresh appendages of dissecting lancets and geological hammers,
ranged far and wide with great activity of all the appendages and
much storing up for a future to come, and then, returning to his
earlier habitat, abruptly settled down to the sedentary existence of
the mature organism, living parasitically on an idea. Huxley began
as an industrious scientific caterpillar chewing the prosaic vegetables
of fact and creeping cautiously on the solid ground of empiricism. In
certain fleeting but extra-lepidopteral phases* he became suddenly
aquatic and roamed the seas, preying fruitfully on salps and medusae.
At length, returning to his former habitat, he retired briefly into an
academic cocoon and then burst miraculously forth, a gorgeous
literary and philosophic butterfly, sipping innumerable sweet and
unscientific nectars and describing all sorts of wayward arabesques in
die soft, balmy airs of speculation.
234 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
In short, Huxley expanded as Darwin contracted. The two proc-
esses were of coordinate importance to evolution and science, but
expansion was inevitably the more spectacular. Through his friend-
ships, his lectures popular and academic, his writing in the news-
papers and the reviews, Huxley became a figure upon every intel-
lectual battlefield in Europe and the living embodiment of science
militant.
Meetings, lectures, committees, conferences, public and scientific
business of all kinds kept him in railroad trains and hotels so much
through these years that he was hardly more than a visitor in his own
home. He was continually returning to relate his adventures and
to be astonished at new progress in his children. At long or close
range he was always with immense gusto in the midst of their lives.
"Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you you little pepper
pot," he wrote his daughter Jessie, and then argued with her at great
length in his most aggressive manner.
"Children work a greater metamorphosis in men than any other
condition of life," x he told Haeckel. "They ripen one wonderfully
and make life ten times better worth having than it was." 2 He was
constantly advising his bachelor friends to get married.
Against his own deeper melancholy and solitude, Huxley found
in marriage a lifelong stay and strength. "Love opened up to me/'
he told Kingsley in the famous letter, "a view of the sanctity of hu-
man nature, and impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility." 3
Clearly, he experienced romantic love in all its Victorian moral ear-
nestness, but with good practical reason. From his biography one
learns little of his wife directly, except that she disliked dinner parties,
wrote thoughtful notes to bachelors, and pressed copies of Tennyson's
poems on everybody. ("You are subjecting poor Darwin to a savage
Tennyson persecution," her husband warned her. 4 ) Nevertheless,
reading between the lines, one can see that in spite of children and
household cares she could face any problem or confidence he might
lay before her. She was eagerly interested in everything that concerned
him. "I know you will be dying to know how my lecture went off to-
day," he wrote her in 1875, "so I sit down to send you a line, though you
did hear from me to-day." 5 She was his better conscience in all diffi-
cult moral questions. Should he accept money for a lecture to be
given at the opening of the Johns Hopkins University? They de-
An "Eminent Victorian 235
cided no. He submitted everything he wrote to her criticism. One
gets interesting glimpses of her in this role.
I met Grove who edits Macmillan . . . [he wrote her in 1868]. He
pulled the proof of my lecture out of his pocket and said, "Look here, there
is one paragraph in your lecture I can make neither top nor tail of." . . ,
I looked to where his finger pointed, and behold it was the paragraph
you objected to when I read you the lecture on the sea shore! I told him,
and said I should confess, however set up it might make you. 6
Realizing that "Hal" habitually overworked himself, Henrietta
was always conspiring to send him off on vacations, and when in the
eighties his health grew bad, she actually succeeded in getting him to
obey his doctor. Sir Andrew Clark had ordered him to spend four
months in the South, he wrote in 1884 to his assistant Foster. "This
is the devil to pay, but I cannot honestly say that I think he is wrong.
Moreover, I promised my wife to abide by his decision." 7 One
strongly suspects that it was she who finally persuaded him to retire.
A letter of 1884 on the subject bears all the marks of protracted ar-
gument. He pleads that he owes it to his immediate chief and the
School to remain active as long as possible:
If I did not do all that I can to requite Donnelly for the plucky way in
which he has stood by it and me for the last dozen years, I should never
shake off the feeling that I had behaved badly. And as I am much given to
brooding over my misdeeds, I don't want you to increase the number of
my hell-hounds. You must help me in this . . . and if I am Quixotic,
play Sancho for the nonce. 8
Sancho, no doubt, had been her permanent role.
But in the sixties the world and his duties were always too small
for Huxley, and everything he did seemed to bring further power
and influence. Finding that too many affairs and responsibilities
sealed him off from his most intimate friends, he suggested to Hooker
that, in order to meet regularly as well as to plot further affairs and
responsibilities they gather their circle together into a club. Hooker
eagerly agreed and on November 3, 1864, the club convened for dinner
at St. George's Hotel, Albemarle Street, which became accordingly
the convivial Olympus of contemporary science until the later eighties,
when the dinners were shifted to the Athenaeum. Embarrassed by a
2$ 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
superfluity of possible names, the club remained anonymous so long
that, at the suggestion of Mrs. Busk, the wife of a member, it was
called the X. The name soon developed the somewhat sinister em-
phasis of an incognito. One day in the smoking room of the Athe-
naeum, Huxley was astonished to hear, from two scientific colleagues,
the following conversation, which he gravely ignored: "I say, A., do
you know about the X Club?" "Oh yes, B., I have heard of it. What
do they do?" "Well, they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the
whole, they don't do it badly."
The membership Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Lubbock, Spottiswood,
Tyndall, Spencer, Hooker, and Huxley was a very choice and ex-
clusive constellation of the brightest scientific stars. With the excep-
tion of Spencer, all were presidents and secretaries of societies, and
Royal, Copley, or Rumford Medallists the sort of men who could
not dine, however lightheartedly, without arriving at serious deci-
sions. They discussed, often in a systematic manner, the politics of the
learned societies, projects of new museums and journals, the periodical
warfare with religion and the classics, the place of science in contem-
porary education. Moreover, they were not just nine eminent men.
They knew, among them, almost every famous scientist in the world,
as well as many distinguished radicals and sympathizers with science.
Darwin, Helmholtz, Asa Gray, Agassiz, Youmans, John Morley,
Robert Lowe, Bishop Colenso, and many more were at one time or
another guests at their dinners. The members themselves represented
so many sciences with so much distinction that Huxley boasted they
could, among them, have contributed most of the articles to a scien-
tific encyclopedia. For British science they were, in fact, a kind of
fluid cabinet united by the reliable intimacy of an eating friendship,
The X was a godsend for Herbert Spencer. He delighted in their
erudite conviviality the more so as he was constantly on the lookout
for new ways of getting information. In later years he was so little
capable of the docile passivity necessary for getting through a long
book that he could not hear more than a paragraph read aloud with-
out launching on a disquisition of supplement or rebuttal. No modern
thinker has read so little in order to write so much. He prepared him-
self for his Psychology chiefly by perusing MansePs Prolegomena
Logicae, and for his Biology by going through Carpenter's Principles
of Comparative Physiology. He produced a treatise on sociology with-
An Eminent Victorian 237
out reading Comte, and a treatise on ethics without apparently read-
ing anybody. Clubs provided Spencer with an excellent substitute for
reading. He pumped the authors themselves. Strolling about midday
through Kensington Gardens to the Athenaeum, he lunched with
one notability, buttonholed a second, played billiards with a third,
rifled the periodicals in the library for facts and was thoroughly
crammed for the next morning's composition.
Spencer was now as deep in his own physiology as in the meta-
physics of the universe outside. He had discovered that his "head
sensations," with their attendant ramifications, were due to an im-
paired circulation of the blood to the brain. When he began in 1860
to construct his philosophical system, therefore, he hired an amanu-
ensis and retired with him to a Highland loch. Here he rowed for
fifteen minutes to make the blood flow freely to the brain and then
dictated in polished and fluent polysyllables, for another fifteen
minutes, on Simple and Compound Evolution and the Instability of
the Homogeneous. Some of the most abstruse chapters of the Psy-
chology were dictated in a similar manner during the intervals of
a tennis game near London. His rational life had not become less
eccentric with the passing of years.
Obviously, the dinners of tie X f boisterous with high spirits and
bristling with facts, must have been for Spencer a little like master-
ing the encyclopedia by eating it. When he received the algebraic
equation that announced a dinner, he disregarded "head sensations"
and "cardiac enf eeblement" in a most reckless manner, and attended. 9
Perhaps no man has been, intellectually, so provincial on so large a
scale. Building a very big, modern universe which was somewhat in-
consistent within itself but perfectly consistent with his own early
predispositions, Spencer found cosmic reasons for being a utilitarian,
liberal, naturalist, evolutionist, materialist, and agnostic.
What he had in common with Huxley were agnosticism and a
somewhat ambiguous materialism built on evolution, the nebular
hypothesis, and the law of the conservation of energy. Which man in-
fluenced the other is by no means clear. After 1852 they were in con-
stant and intimate contact, and through the later fifties they walked
together every Sunday afternoon. Spencer frequently acknowledged
his debt to Huxley for facts and expert criticism. Huxley ex-
pressed on several occasions a rather vague and courteous admira-
238 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
tion of Spencer's ideas: Spencer bade fair to become a modern
Bacon; 10 he was as sound in his classification of the sciences as Comte
was unsound. 11
Spencer gave expression to his materialism in a series of works
beginning in 1853, Huxley, to his, in a series beginning in 1863. Per-
haps he exerted some influence on Huxley, but certainly not so much
as the scientists themselves, and particularly Darwin and Helmholtz.
Huxley had the scientist's suspicion of philosophers. He seldom ex-
pressed anything like hearty enthusiasm for Spencer's largely verbal
syntheses, and in documenting his own ideas, adhered closely to the
data of science.
Huxley seems, unlike Darwin, to have read the newspapers seated
bolt unright in his laboratory, with his microscope on one side and his
dissecting knives on the other. He allowed himself no prejudices, no
sentimentalities, no illusions. He sometimes faced facts so coura-
geously that they bent over backwards. Moreover, he spoke out on al-
most every conceivable subject from the emancipation of women to
the vivisection of dogs in the firm belief that scientific method could
clarify morals and politics as triumphantly as it was revolutionizing
industry and sanitation. Inevitably, he spoke with a noticeable air of
authority, of special grace and illumination.
He was divided on the American Civil War, as he wrote his sister
Elizabeth, who had a fifteen-year old son in the Confederate Army:
"My heart goes with the South, and my head with the North." He
had "not the smallest sentimental sympathy with the negro." Never-
theless, slavery meant bad economics, bad politics, and bad morality.
It must go, no matter which side won. 12
Much the same views he expressed in "Emancipation Black and
White," which he published at the end of the war in The Reader.
This is a curiously concentrated bit of writing, full of the sharp,
geometric clarity of truth and error. A bare page disposes of black
emancipation. The rest of the essay deals with white in other words,
with the woman question, which was then just beginning to be aired
and was drawing so much sentimentality from poets, melodrama
from playwrights, and nonsense from philosophers. The passionately
affectionate father of many daughters, Huxley faces female inferiority
as bluntly as he faces Negro. History proves that woman is less in-
An Eminent Victorian 239
telligent, less responsible, less artistic, less passionate, and less beautiful
than man: in short, she is simply man minus. Clearly Huxley does
not approve of "the new woman-worship.'* 13 But at least he does not,
like Tennyson, endow woman with every sentimental perfection in
order to lock her up in the purdah of the domestic hearth, nor like
Mill, make her a giantess of the intellect simply to qualify her for the
vote and for competition with men. Let her compete, by all means,
urges Huxley; educate her, give her every opportunity. "'Golden
hair* will not curl less gracefully ... by reason of there being brains
within." 14 Woman may thus grow stronger and more intelligent,
and she will then rear stronger and more intelligent men. In any
case, she will never surpass the male.
Actually, Huxley seems to have been even a little less liberal than
his essay indicates. Five years before, in a letter to Lyell, he had de-
clared that female education was essential to progress, but apparently
he felt that such education need not extend much beyond childhood.
In any case, he seemed rather comfortably convinced that his ad-
vanced ideas would never be generally followed.
I have fully made up my mind to give my daughters the same training in
physical science that their brother will get, so long as he is a boy. . . .
But you know as well as I do that other people won't do the like, and
five-sixths of women will stop in the doll stage of evolution; to be the
strongholds of parsondom, the drag on civilizations, the degradation of
every important pursuit with which they mix themselves "intriguers"
in politics and "friponnes" in science. 15
In 1872 Miss Jex Blake, a medical student at Edinburgh, confronted
him with the woman problem in the concrete and Huxley responded
with what seems a decidedly Victorian compromise. The demon-
strator at the Surgeons' Hall had been conducting a separate anat-
omy class for women, but now the University Court refused him
recognition, explaining that they had no evidence of his qualifications.
At the same time, they refused to examine him. Through Miss Blake
the women students therefore begged that Professor Huxley examine
their teacher. Huxley replied that he fully sympathized with young
women who aspired to qualify themselves for medical practice. Never-
theless, he added, "I as completely sympathize with those Professors
of Anatomy, Physiology, and Obstetrics who object to teach such
subjects to mixed classes of young men and women brought together
240 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
without any further evidence o moral and mental fitness for such
association than the payment of their fees." 16 Giving ill-health and
inadequate laboratory facilities as his reasons, he declined to examine
the former demonstrator.
In 1865 Governor Eyre put down a Negro uprising in Jamaica with
great violence. He invoked martial law, allowed the troops a pretty
free hand with the civil population, and hanged a Negro Baptist
minister named Gordon. Though slavery in the Empire had long
since been abolished, these events had a classic generality and took
hold of the British mind at many points. Liberals, humanitarians, and
nonconformists felt that justice and law were in danger. Tories,
Anglicans, and hero-worshipers felt that British power and prestige
were in danger. Mill headed a committee of all the talents for one
party; Carlyle, a committee of all the talents for the other. Eminent
Englishmen fell upon each other with an altogether Jamaican sav-
agery. The mild and humanitarian Mill started proceedings to indict
Eyre for murder. Goldwyn Smith called Ruskin "a sentimental
eunuch," and Carlyle pitied poor Mill with a withering benevolence,
while the father of Herbert Spencer, dying of an overdose of lau-
danum, spent his last moments dreaming furiously of the whole
affair. It was the Dreyfus case of the British Empire.
Among the scientists, Tyndall followed his hero Carlyle, while
Darwin, Lyell, and Huxley gave their support to Mill. Darwin con-
tributed ten pounds to the Jamaica Committee, half apologized for
his fanaticism to lukewarm friends, and maintained a decorous news-
paper silence.
As soon as Huxley put his name down for the Jamaica Committee,
controversy sought him out. The Pall Mall Gazette observed that,
having defended the spirituality of gorillas, he could hardly do less
for the political virtue of Negroes. Resenting nothing so much as an
accusation of sentimentality, he at once fired off a reply, duly pub-
lished in the Pall Mall. Carlyle himself could not view the insignifi-
cance of the Negro with harder, more illusionless clarity. The ques-
tion was not whether Gordon was "a Jamaica Hampden" or a "psalm-
singing firebrand" or Eyre, an Odin or a Loki. Grant that Gordon
was bad and Eyre was good, still "English law does not permit good
persons, as such, to strangle bad oersons, as such." 17 The letter con-
An Eminent Victorian 241
eludes with sarcastic logic burning lambently beneath a thick ice of
formal understatement.
The Jamaica affair very nearly caused a break between Huxley and
Tyndall. "I am afraid that, if things had been pushed to an extremity
over that unfortunate business," wrote Huxley after TyndalPs death,
"each of us would have been capable of sending the other to the
block. But the sentence would have been accompanied by assurances
of undiminished respect and affection." 1S In the heat of battle he
wrote, in a spirit little compatible with permanent bitterness, "If you
and I are strong enough and wise enough, we shall be able to ...
[differ], and yet preserve that love for one another which I value
as one of the good things of my life." 19 Tyndall was not the man to
resist such an appeal.
Though they included the flower of English literary genius, neither
the supporters nor the opponents of Eyre were capable of the artistic
villainies which gave the Dreyfus case its brilliant reversal and climax.
The agitation continued prosaically for a few years and then died
away. Eyre was recalled but never tried.
This controversy appears to mark the time when Huxley ceased to
take Carlyle seriously as a thinker. Ironically, Huxley faced the
facts of human misery and human limitation with such desperate
bravery that he tended, in some respects, to be as conservative as
Carlyle himself. But as the stupidities of Gladstone and the liberals
were later to make him very nearly a Tory, so now the stupidities of
Carlyle and the conservatives kept him a liberal. He thought Carlyle
lacked logic and good sense, as Carlyle probably thought he lacked
soul and constructive power. Carlyle regarded society as an organism
ruled by passion, instinct, and imagination, which expressed itself
in various kinds of poetry and hero worship. Huxley regarded society
as a body of individuals united by history, and ruled by reason and
expediency, which are ideally embodied in science. Huxley's ultimate
was truth. Carlyle's was rapidly becoming force and the fait accompli.
He could never forgive Huxley Man 's Place in Natttre, yet by sudden,
appalling Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde transformations, his hero was
coming to look more and more like Huxley's gorilla. Carlyle seemed
simply to be traveling to the neo-Darwinian destination by a more
romantic and picturesque route.
In his memorial essay on Tyndall, Huxley said that he regarded
242 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Carlyle not as a teacher but as "a great tonic." 20 In fact, Carlyle had
become a kind of solemn moral music which inspired him to feel
religiously on atheistical subjects.*
No doubt Carlyle did not like his own qualities in Huxley, for
Huxley also was a desperado of the intellectual life who went about
always watchful and alert, with verbal pistols and cutlasses in his belt.
Even the glances, coughs, and sneezes of such a man can become
terrible. When, in W. H. Mallock's satirical New Republic, Dr. Jen-
kinson-Jowett reads the Athanasian Creed at Sunday morning serv-
ice, Mr. Storks-Huxley creates consternation simply by blowing his
nose. On another occasion,
Mr, Storks turned sharply round, and, with an awful look in his eyes
of contemptuous indignation, stared Mr. Saunders into silence. He held
* In 1866, while the Jamaica agitation was still going on, Huxley witnessed
Carlyle's greatest personal triumph his inauguration as Rector of Edinburgh
University.
Early one morning, Tyndall called for his hard-bitten, sour-stomached hero
of rhetoric in Chelsea, and having seen him drink his brown brandy and soda
and embrace for the last time in this world his aged spouse, took him off on
the journey northward. At Freystone, where Tyndall cured his friend's in-
somnia with a five hours' gallop through muddy fields, they were met by
Huxley, and the three traveled on together. At Edinburgh Carlyle spread
consternation among Scots by not writing out his address. The Rector's address
had always been written out. Tyndall feared the frail old man might fail to
sleep the night before the inauguration and wake up pallid and dumb. Back
in London, Mrs. Carlyle feared that on seeing the great sea of faces he might
fall down dead with excitement. On the crucial day, Huxley, Tyndall, and others
were solemnly doctored, and then, nervously clasping the speaker's table and
looking down earnestly at his audience, Carlyle began: "They tell me that I
ought to have written this address, and out of deference to the counsel I tried
to do so, once, twice, thrice. But what I wrote was only fit for the fire, and to
the fire it was compendiously committed. You must therefore listen to and
accept what I say to you as coming straight from the heart" 21 He then held his
audience spellbound for an hour and a half, speaking with great power and
fluency on his favorite themes.
There followed such a round of dinners and festivities as only the country-
men of Burns could provide. Mill's Examination of the Philosophy of Sir
William Hamilton had just appeared, and Lord Neaves had, with happy in-
appropriateness, turned this unlikely material into a kind of drinking song.
Tyndall remembered that Carlyle, wielding his knife as a baton, had led the
refrain, which ran "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter." 22
About all this so full of echoes out of his early intellectual life, so crowded
Above: Huxley's house at 4 Marl-
borough Place, St. John's Wood,
where he wrote many of his
works. Right: Huxley in 1890,
after thirty years of dedication.
Above: Huxley's residence at
Hodeslea. Left: Huxley in 1893,
"... a familiar figure in pro-
vincial breakfast rooms a cele-
brated man with sad eyes and
white sideburns."
An Eminent Victorian 243
him fixed in this way for a few moments, and then said to him in a voice
of grim unconcern, *May I trouble you for the mustard.' 23
Carlyle liked sweet, gentle men, like John Sterling.
When, some years later, Huxley saw the old man, near the end of
his life, walking slowly and alone down the opposite side of the
street, he crossed over and spoke. Carlyle looked at him, and ob-
serving, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are all
descended from monkeys," went on his way. 24
History, on one extraordinary business or another, was always on
Huxley's doorstep, furiously ringing the bell. Being a busy man, he
sometimes slammed the door in her face. That was what he did when
spiritualism importuned. How could one speak with authority about
ghosts if one could not dissect them? Besides, the decerebrated frog
was much more interesting:
If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of
old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline
the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual
world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them
to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the
demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional
argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be
made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance?*
But ultimately the opportunity to discover trickery drew him. One
day in January, 1874, he received a request which he looked on as
very nearly a command.
We had such grand fun, one afternoon [wrote Darwin from Erasmus's
house in London], for George hired a medium, who made the chairs, a
flute, a bell, and candlestick, and fiery points jump about in my brother's
diningroom, 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. 26
Somewhat anticlimactically, Charles added that as the whole per-
formance was very hot and tiring, he had retired before the miracles
occurred. The company had been large, including Lewes and George
with colorful personalities and memorable incidents Huxley is completely
silent. Great occasions found him a brilliant actor but a poor spectator.
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Eliot, as well as Francis Galton. Lewes had been troublesome, making
jokes and refusing to sit quietly in the dark. Though astounded by
the whole proceeding, Charles was sure that spiritualism was all
rubbish, and believed that the medium had freed himself by getting
George and Hensleigh to join hands. But George and Francis Galton
were curious and baffled. There must be another seance and Huxley
must come to detect the imposture. Huxley came and saw and de-
tected. Of course Darwin had once more absented himself, but his
friend wrote him a full report:
My conclusion [he summed up] is that Mr. X is a cheat and an impostor,
and I have no more doubt that he got Mr. Y to sit on his right hand,
knowing from the turn of his conversation that it would be easy to distract
his attention, and that he then moved the chair against Mr. Y with his leg,
and finally coolly lifted [it] on to the table, than that I am writing these
lines. 27
Darwin declared that he felt vindicated before his whole family.
A few months later the two men joined forces against a more
threatening folly. By 1875 the bitter agitation against vivisection had
reached a climax. To acquire knowledge had long been felt by many
Englishmen to be a somewhat reprehensible and unhealthy activity,
but to acquire knowledge by dissecting live animals was a perversion
of the heart as well as the mind. People lost their tempers and then
looked around for good reasons for having done so. They found that
very good reasons could be manufactured by slightly misquoting
Huxley. A letter in The Record charged him with advocating that
vivisection be conducted before children, if not by them, and cited
passages from his Elementary Physiology, which, understood as re-
ferring to the subject discussed, made a very sinister impression.
Thoroughly taken in, the Earl of Shaftesbury reiterated the accusa-
tion in a speech. Huxley fired off a letter to The Times straightening
out the passages and accusing the Earl of ignorance and misrepre-
sentation. Lord Shaftesbury, after expressing some astonishment that
the vigorous language of the Physiology could have a meaning so
little bloodthirsty, accepted Huxley's word in such simple good faith
that the controversy was ended with an amicable exchange of private
letters.
The result of this and other incidents was that Huxley found him-
self once^more seated across the table from his theological enemies on
An Eminent Victorian 24 j
a Royal Commission appointed in this instance to report on vivisec-
tion. Though himself prevented by personal feeling from performing
experiments on the higher animals, he felt obliged to assert the right
of others to do so if for a worthy object and without inflicting un-
necessary pain. He did not see why people should be allowed to eat
meat and slaughter vermin, boys to use live bait, and ducks to swallow
frogs whole and slowly crush them in their stomachs when scientists
were forbidden to perform carefully limited dissections on anesthe-
tized animals for the sake of increasing knowledge and saving lives.
In spite of the hideous gnashing of philanthropic teeth, Huxley was
optimistic, though he relied more on the fox-hunting instincts of the
Commons than on their respect for science to save England from
sentimental obscurantism. For a time all went well. He began by
collecting testimony from eminent scientists. And here Darwin was
unexpectedly active and helpful. At once a famous biologist and a
repentant snipeshooter, he was passionately engaged on both sides of
the question. If anything, he was more acutely sensitive than Huxley
to human and animal suffering. The shrieks of tortured slaves in
Brazil haunted his memory, particularly at night, even into old age.
The sight of a horse ill-treated brought him back from a walk pale
and shaken, and indeed coachmen hardly dared urge their horses
to a moderate speed in the vicinity of Down for fear of "being abused"
by Mr. Darwin. 28 Nevertheless, he was convinced that physiology
can progress only by "experiments on living animals." 28 At Huxley's
urging, he made pronouncements and signed testimonials, rising with
un-Darwinian rashness to the epistolary heroism of a letter to The
Times. In fact, even before the Royal Commission was appointed, he
had been consulting with scientists in London and had helped his
son-in-law Litchfield draw up a vivisection bill very similar to one
partially approved by Huxley and brought before the House, un-
happily without result, by Lyon Playf air.
Having gathered all possible testimony from the upper empyrean of
Victorian science and then donned his robes of pontifical authority,
Huxley began the work of illuminating, conciliating, and overawing
his colleagues on the Royal Commission. It seemed as though even the
tenderest philanthropic heart and the thickest philanthropic head
could not hold out against him. But one day when he was absent
at a Council meeting of the Royal Society, the Commission, apparently
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
quite by accident, questioned a very benighted vivisectionist. "I am
told," Huxley wrote Darwin, "that he openly professed the most en-
tire indifference to animal suffering, and said he only gave anaes-
thetics to keep animals quiet." 30 Huxley himself was as shocked as
any member of the Commission. "I declare to you I did not believe
the man lived who was such an unmitigated cynical brute as to profess
and act upon such principles, and I would willingly agree to any law
which would send him to the treadmill"
Huxley still made heroic efforts. He even achieved a deus ex
machina. Darwin would testify in person! "We expect you at 13
Delehay Street at two o'clock to-morrow," wrote Huxley. "I have
looked out the highest chair that was to be got for you." 31 But the
course of mercy was not to be arrested. Deeply divided, the Commis-
sion reported cautiously and indecisively in 1876, and a few months
later, somewhat to the astonishment of the Commission, Lord Carnar-
von introduced a drastic anti-vivisection bill, which was duly carried.
Inevitably, so many and such varied activities left Huxley less
time for scientific work, yet from 1864 to 1870 he published thirty-
nine papers, of which three at least were extremely important and
particularly that which traced the development of birds from reptiles.
Reptiles and birds had commonly been regarded as opposites. Reptiles
crawled; they were heavy and cold-blooded. Birds flew; they were
light and warm-blooded. Fresh from his studies of evolution and of
man, Huxley was quite ready to accept paradoxes between ultimate
origin and present adaptation. In 1864 he showed that many extinct
reptiles had bird characteristics and many extinct birds, reptilian
characteristics. 32 He therefore proposed a threefold division of the
vertebrates: (i) mammals, (2) sauroids (birds and reptiles), and
(3) ichthyoids (fish and amphibia) . The relationship between birds
and reptiles has been universally acknowledged. In 1867 Huxley
revolutionized the classification of birds themselves, finding salient
differences not in webbed feet or aquatic habits, but particularly in
certain small, seemingly insignificant bones of the palate. Animals
are historical skeletons masquerading in the flesh and epidermis of
changing adaptation. 33
XV
The Metaphysical Society
AS he now gradually turned from controversies arising out of the
JLJL Origin to those involving the whole destiny of science in modern
culture, Huxley inevitably became less of a scientist, more of a
debater, a propagandist, and a statesman. In this period he developed
his characteristic philosophy one might almost call it his definitive
plan of campaign. He also arrived at maturity as a prose and a plat-
form artist.
The 1868 meeting of the British Association at Norwich was a great
triumph for Hooker, who was president, a greater triumph for Hux-
ley, who gave a lecture, and the greatest triumph of all for Darwin,
who stayed at home and experimented with plants.
Huxley's lecture, the famous "On a Piece of Chalk,** was addressed
to the workingmen of Norwich as well as to the members of the
Association. Once more Huxley discovers infinite riches in a little
room. As Cuvier derived a whole Megatherium from a single bone,
so from a piece of chalk Huxley brings forth not only half a continent
and a whole sea bottom, but long vistas of evolution, geological and
biological, and even a brief sermon against Moses, which leaves Dar-
win as the only alternative. "Either each species of crocodile has been
specially created," says Huxley, "or it has arisen out of some pre-
existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypoth-
esis; I have chosen mine.'* x
248 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
"A Piece of Chalk" was a sample lesson, an illustration of what
elementary scientific education should be. Another illustration, equally
simple and eloquent in expression but much more complex in idea,
was "The Physical Basis of Life," which Huxley delivered about the
same time in the "holy city" of Edinburgh.
"The Physical Basis of Life" might be described as the philosophy
of Hume expressed in the language of Macaulay, but it is also Huxley
in a nutshell. His agnosticism, his materialism, some of his deepest
contradictions and confessions, the ironic paradox of his later develop-
mentall are explicit or implicit in the apparently untroubled clarity
of this brief essay. Even to the most liberal of Victorian Christians,
it must have seemed very bold, a desperate attempt to cure super-
stition by administering one deadly spiritual poison and then counter-
acting it by another. To modern readers, it begins innocently enough
with a fresh lesson based on the contemporary researches of Max
Schultze and others in elementary science.
Appearing before a large audience with a bottle of smelling salts
and other familiar, commonplace articles, Huxley declared that he
had before him the essential ingredients of protoplasm the physical
basis of life. All life, from the amoeba up to man, is composed of this
single substance, which uniformly exhibits the same properties and
the same functions. Plants are distinguished from animals by the
ability to generate organic matter from inorganic, but as there is no
sharp distinction between simple plants and animals, so there is no
distinction between simple protoplasm and nonliving matter except in
a certain arrangement of molecules. In fact, mind itself is but "the
result of molecular forces" in "the protoplasm which displays it." 2
Man is therefore, as Houston Peterson observes, brother not only to
the monkey, but to the amoeba, even to the molecule and the atom. 3
Intellectual progress consists in the gradual victory of matter and
causation over spirit and spontaneity. Unfortunately, religious leaders
persist in regarding this glorious vision as a terrifying nightmare,
"The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls; the
tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest
man's moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom." 4
Having frozen his auditors with a terrible certainty, he now sought
to revive than with an equally terrible skepticism. Following Hume,
he asked what was matter but "the name for the unknown and hypo-
The Metaphysical Society 249
thetical cause of states of our own consciousness?" 5 What was law
but an observed uniformity, a mere will without any must of neces-
sity? In a world full of evil and uncertainty we need only to believe
that the order of nature is ascertainable to an unlimited extent, and
that our volitionor as he emended in 1892, "the physical state of
which volition is the expression" "counts for something" in the
course of events. 6
No doubt Huxley sounded as though he were demonstrating a
theorem in geometry. Actually, he was simply pointing up an old
dilemma in metaphysics. If man is brother to the molecule, then
presumably his will is subject to the mechanism then thought to be
very close knit of molecular law. But if his will "counts for some-
thing," then he must only in a restricted sense be brother of the
molecule. Huxley's position must be sought in his emphasis. He
argues at length to show how mind is involved in the mechanism of
matter, but offers only a few vague suggestions to indicate how it
might in any sense be free.
Hume's skepticism was the fluid of uncertainty in which Huxley
cushioned the shock of logical contraries. When pommeling religion,
he emphasized the achievements of science and the omnipotence of
matter and law. When intent on rescuing ethical responsibility from
the consequences of his own offensive tactics, he declared, with equal
gusto, that matter was an unknown and law a mere probability. In
"The Physical Basis of Life" Huxley seems to enjoy all the pedagog-
ical strength of dogmatism and all the polemical security of skepti-
cism.
Having delivered this composition as a lecture, Huxley submitted
it to the youthful John Morley, who in 1867 had taken over the
languishing Tartnightly Review from G. H. Lewes. Morley published
the essay with delight and compared the sensation produced with
that created by Swift's Conduct of the Allies and Burke's French
Revolution.*
* In "The Physical Basis" Huxley had declared that Comteism was "Cathol-
icism minus Christianity" (Methods and Results, p. 156). This epigram brought
a passionate reply from the leader of the English Comteists, Dr. Congreve, who,
unable to associate hostility with anything but ignorance, accused Huxley of
refuting the master without having read him. No charge could have been more
dangerous. In 'The Scientific Aspects of Positivism," duly published in The
Fortnightly & later in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (New York:
250 Apes, Angds, and Victorians
Nowadays man is awed not so much by the universe as by man's
power to blow it up. But in the nineteenth century truth was neither
a super-explosive, nor an angry newspaper statement, nor an edict of
state, nor an objective o the thought police, nor even in its most
remembered form a mathematical formula. It was not only abstract
but human; not so much made as discovered. To be sure, it was
sometimes more like a skeleton in the closet than a treasure in the
earth, and in the human and religious sense, it had already been rent
so desperately asunder by intellectual conflict that men like Carlyle
seemed to think of it as a kind of poetic rubber which could be
stretched between any number of logical contraries. But at least it
could be poetic; at least it was something people felt they should live
by. And if the search was sometimes harrowing and terrible, it could
also be joyous and spontaneous, even gay and convivial. One found
truth while eating dinner or while smoking with friends by the fire-
side. Particularly, one found it in the "ingenious collision of divergent
points of view." 7 If only an argument was big enough and lasted
long enough, a considerable body of correct opinion was bound to
emerge.
Consequently, debating societies were as common in Victorian life as
psychiatrists and boosters' clubs are in our own. Every conceivable
question was debated, but particularly the great question of religion vs.
science. Since the publication of the Origin, the argument had been
going strongly in favor of science, and Huxley's "Physical Basis of
Life," which had carried The Fortnightly into a seventh edition, left
the religious mind prostrate and quivering with horror. Something
had to be done. In consultation with his friend Alfred Tennyson,
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1870), pp. 147-173, Huxley made it clear that
he had not only been familiar with Comte for some sixteen years but had
read him with much greater care than had Dr. Congreve himself. Huxley
sees no reason to retract his epigram. He sets the father of positivism once
more firmly down in the chair of St. Peter and then excommunicates him
from the church of science. Comte shows too slight a grasp both of logic and
of science to be a worthy representative of that reformed and purified com-
munity of reason. Neither his classification of the sciences nor his famous
law of the three stages is consistent with the facts or with itself. What Huxley
was here attempting to stamp out was the spirit of authority. He did so with
a suspiciously pontifical air. **Pope Huxley," The Spectator dared to call him a
little later, after a similar exhibition (January 29, 1870), pp. 135-136.
The Metaphysical Society 251
James Knowles, famous as the editor of The Nineteenth Century,
conceived the idea of bringing together in one society all the most
distinguished men of the age genuinely concerned with religion.
Dean Stanley demurred. The other side must be represented also.
It was an appalling suggestion a little like inviting the Devil to a
debate on morality but it was also in the most grandiose spirit of
Victorian liberalism. A kind of Great Exposition of the contemporary
mind would be held for the benefit of the contemporary mind. A
whole culturerepresented by those who had excelled in the highest
competitions of the intellectual and spiritual life would argue, il-
luminate, and persuade itself into greater truth and unity.
The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869. Its membership of
forty names reads like a muster roll of Victorian celebrity. Gladstone,
Tennyson, Manning, Ward, Ruskin, Bagehot, Hutton, Lubbock,
Tyndall, and Huxley were only among the most famous. Of those
invited, only three refused Newman, because he disapproved of
religious argument with free thinkers; Spencer, because he feared
overexcitement and head sensations; and Mill (who in "Liberty" had
given the doctrine of discussion its classical formulation), because he
feared the discussion would prove unprofitable: Socratic conversation
among the few would accomplish far more than set lectures and
general debate among the many. To be sure, eminent public men
do not like to seek truth Socratically in private. The Metaphysicians
were held together, partly at least, by the gravitational force of the
sheer mass of their combined and diversified fame. A political states-
man like Gladstone and an ecclesiastical statesman like Manning
actually found time to attend these meetings. The Society lasted eleven
years.
Respectable clergymen like the Bishop of Peterborough were prob-
ably a little apprehensive about being seen to descend at a common
destination with such princes of darkness as Manning and such de-
mons of illumination as Huxley and Tyndall. And the name Meta-
physical Society! One of the less notorious members was relieved
when a hotel porter greeted him with, "A member of the Madrigal
Society, sir, I suppose?" 8
The first regular meeting was solemnly opened by James Knowles,
who read Tennyson's recently completed poem, "The Higher Pan-
theism."
Apes, Angeis, ana Victorians
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the
hills and the plains,
Are not these, Soul, the Vision of Him
who reigns?
asked Tennyson; and later he added, perhaps to indicate that he had
read "The Physical Basis o Life" :
Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool,
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent
in a pool.
It was a somewhat tritely poetic statement o the intelligent, well-
informed half-belief which had characterized In Memoriam* Phil-
osophical poems are not easily grasped on a first hearing especially
after dinner. Some say "The Higher Pantheism" was received in
silence. Others remember that Tyndall remarked with sacrilegious
calm, "I suppose this is not offered as a subject for discussion." 9
Having very appropriately communicated with the Argonauts
through bis Mercury, Mr. Knowles, Tennyson now subsided into
the magnificent and ornamental silence for which he had so much
talent. On one occasion, however, he did dumf ound the undumf ound-
able Huxley by asking if the sap rising in a plant did not suspend
the law of gravitation. Huxley tried in vain to see the joke.
After the poem had been read, R. H. Hutton, editor of The Spec-
tator, gave a paper "On Mr. Herbert Spencer's Theory of the Gradual
Transformation of the Utilitarian into Intuitive Morality by Hered-
itary Descent." In a letter to Mill, Spencer had explained the moral
intuitions as utilitarian precepts which had evolved into habits and
instincts. Hutton objected that moral habits separated from their
rational authority would better account for a degeneration of the
moral sense than for its mystical extension and development. He also
argued that, historically, utilitarian justification has followed rather
than preceded an ethical concept. The attack was a strong one, in-
tended to stimulate Spencer and propel him into the Society. Vigor-
ously stimulated, he completely lost his temper, but at long range,
hotly replying two years later in a periodical.
The angels of light and the angels of darkness did not meet face
to face without some ruffling of wing feathers. Apparently Manning
was astounded to find that atheists did not really believe in God. "It
The Metaphysical Society
was a pathetic spectacle," wrote E. S. Purcell, "to note the ill-disguised
amazement with which Manning listened to the ruthless and cold-
blooded denials of what to him were self-evident and eternal
truths." 10 When it was suggested that moral disapprobation should
be avoided in debate, there was a pause, and then the Catholic W. G,
Ward said, "While acquiescing in this condition as a general rule, I
think it cannot be expected that Christian thinkers shall give no sign
o the horror with which they would view the spread of such extreme
opinions as those advocated by Mr. Huxley." There was another
pause, no doubt expertly measured to equal Ward's, and then Huxley
replied, "As Dr. Ward has spoken, I must in fairness say that it will
be very difficult for me to conceal my feeling as to the intellectual
degradation which would come of the general acceptance of such
views as Dr. Ward holds." u For a moment the Society, desperate
and gasping, clutched the torn roots of propriety above the abyss
then drew itself up to safety. It was clear that hand-to-hand fighting,
however deadly, would have to observe the amenities. Courtesy was
at first cold, then almost too cordial.
Consorting for the first time with living representatives of the age-
old theological and philosophic positions, Huxley faced a novel but
Huxleyan embarrassment. Everybody else was some kind of ist or ite;
he alone was nothing, a fox without a tail, "a man without a rag of a
label to cover himself with/' 12 He therefore invented the term
agnostic, which speedily became famous and served to clothe him
and a great many others in a mantle of high-minded and surprisingly
respectable infidelity.
In the first paper Hutton had set the issue which the Society was to
debate to the end of its history: can truth be arrived at by the spirit
as well as the senses, by intuition as well as experience? Does it
reside in mind as well as in matter? The physiologist Carpenter read
the second paper, in which, following the tradition of Paley, he made
God accessory to the crime of a mechanistic universe. In the third
paper, Huxley, with the aid of Hume, Kant, and Wliately, once
more demolished the immortality of the soul. In the fourth, Ward
attempted to strike at the heart of empiricism by proving that mem-
ory, on which all science depends, is an intuition which cannot prove
its validity in present experience. These papers were all clever, but
perhaps a little disappointing. Sparks were produced in plenty, but
254 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
they were the same old sparks; and in spite of the powerful chemicals
present, there was no considerable precipitate of truth.
Quite apart from the vital question of correct tone, the exchange
between Ward and Huxley was prophetic. From the brilliant, dis-
organized Homeric warfare of the early debates, these two men stood
out as the opposing champions. Tall, dark, and intense, Huxley
looked rather like a talkative mystic; and Ward, jovial, round, and
rosy, looked very much like an equally talkative country squire. Both
were clear-headed and quick-tongued. More the dialectician, Ward
tended toward the subtle and self-conscious, combining great open-
ness of mind and readiness for logical adventure with lighthearted
assurance in the certainty of Catholic truth and the paradoxical fresh-
ness of extreme conservatism rationally defended. Questioned about
Catholic doctrine on a point of conduct, he replied, "There are two
views, of which I, as usual, take the more bigoted." 13
Henry Sidgwick emphasized "the feeling one had that he gave
himself up to the Xoyos like an interlocutor in a Platonic dialogue and
was prepared to follow it to any conclusions to which it might lead."
On the other hand, Sidgwick regarded Huxley as perhaps unsur-
passed "in the quickness with which he could see and express with
perfect clearness and precision the best answer that could be made,
from his point of view, to any argument urged against him." 14 He
also remembered Huxley "as the most combative of all the speakers
who took a leading part, . . . though always strictly within the
limits imposed by courtesy." 15
These two men learned to fight each other with rare cordiality,
building a gay and even intimate comradeship on ruthless hostility
and complete disagreement. Huxley combined a sincere respect for
Ward's dialectic with a profound conviction that he was wrong. He
was "a philosophical and theological Don Quixote," but one who was
often extremely damaging to agnostic windmills. "And it all seemed
to come so easily to him; searching questions, incisive, not to say
pungent replies, and trains of subtle argumentation, were poured
forth . , . [with] an air of genial good-humour, as if the whole busi-
ness were rather a good joke." 16
Ward was equally pleased with his new enemy. When they had
first got on an easy footing, he drew Huxley aside after the meeting
and began very confidentially, "You and I are on such friendly terms
The Metaphysical Society
that I do not think it is right to let you remain ignorant of something
I wish to tell you." With secret fears of impending salvation, Huxley
begged him to go on. "Well, we Catholics hold that so and so and so
and so (naming certain of our colleagues who were of less deep hue
than mine) are not guilty of unpardonable error; but your case is
different, and I feel it is unfair not to tell you so." Immensely relieved,
Huxley replied, with a hearty handshake, "My dear Dr. Ward, if you
don't mind, I don't." 1T
Sometimes the fascinations of intimate combat proved irresistible.
"I do not ever remember my father's breaking in upon his regular
hours at night," wrote Wilfred Ward, "except on occasion of one talk
with Huxley, when each reached home alternately some five or six
times, ending in a final parting very near cock-crow." 18 Ward found
that though controversy with Catholics made him ill, controversy
with skeptics and atheists invigorated and restored him. He took to
inviting Huxley and other metaphysical desperadoes to dinner. The
first occasion immediately followed a period in which Ward's in-
exorable logic, despite all the protests of his overflowing good nature,
had led him to inflict cruel punishment on his scientific friend. Huxley
went immediately to a window and stared out at the garden. Ward
asked him what he was doing. "I was looking in your garden for the
$tal(e t Dr. Ward, which I suppose you have got ready for us after
dinner." 19
Though such picturesque warfare could not but enliven other mem-
bers, Mill's prediction came true. The Society was too large and too
little interested in metaphysics. When attendance was good, the dis-
cussion fell into triviality and irrelevance. When attendance was poor,
it became keen, Socratic, and genuinely though briefly fruitful.
But if no minds were changed, at least many were stimulated. Even
Gladstone, who according to Huxley did not know the meaning of
the word metaphysics, was said to have become so much interested in
unpolitical problems that he lectured the Liberal Whip, impatient
for instructions on an impending division, at Gladstonian length
on the immortality of the soul.
In "The Metaphysical Society: A Reminiscence," R. H. Hutton,
who had a talent for both reverence and drama, has compressed the
whole of metaphysical history into a single ideal meeting. Before they
fought, the Metaphysicians dined. Looking about him at the table,
25 6 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Hutton notices Ward chuckling "over the floundering o the orthodox
clergy" in their criticism of Stanley's latitudinarianism, Tyndall dis-
coursing in his "eloquent Irish voice" and perhaps with some failure of
discretion, "on the proposal for a 'prayer-gauge,'" and Huxley
"flashing out" with a skeptical defense of Bible teaching in the Board
Schools. 20 Huxley "always had a definite standard for every question
which he regarded as discussible at all, yet made you feel that his
slender definite creed in no respect represented the cravings of his
large nature." 21
As speaker, Ward asked how mere experience can prove the uni-
formity of nature and therefore the impossibility of miracles with-
out examining every exception. A somewhat hackneyed, yet clever
discussion followed, eliciting from almost every man his own in-
genious cliche or prejudice. Huxley broke off short in a very graphic
sketch he had been making on his sheet of foolscap to declare that
scientists "were too busy in their fruitful vocation" to investigate every
asserted case of miracle. Besides, miracle-hunting gave scientists a bad
professional reputation. Ruskin observed that if a second Joshua
caused the sun to stand still, he would not be in the least surprised.
The wonder to him was that it moved at all. Bagehot admitted that
as a child he may have expected such wonders as stationary suns,
but "the disillusioning character" of his experience no longer per-
mitted him to do so. Then the lawyer Fitzjames Stephen, "in the
mighty bass that always exerted a sort of physical authority over us,"
laid down the laws of evidence by which miracles should be judged.
"Looking at Mr. Stephen with a benign smile," Archbishop Manning
assured him that in canonizing the Holy See went into evidence as
critically as even he could wish. The Archbishop then touched on the
undoubted authenticity of the miracles at Lourdes. "Speaking with a
singularly perfect articulation," Dr. Martineau disagreed with almost
everybody, but particularly with Archbishop Manning, whose views
on the uniformity of nature, like St. Thomas's, could hardly be justi-
fied by Scripture.
Did Manning's benignity, Martineau's perfect articulation, Hux-
ley's invisible surplice, or Fitzjames Stephen's authoritative, slightly
bullying bass ever get on anybody's nerves? The definite and didactic
Martineau certainly irritated Sidgwick, and Sidgwick irritated Leslie
The Metaphysical Society 257
Stephen, who exclaimed of him after a meeting, "A man has no right
to be so fair to his opponents/* 22
Gradually, the Society became self -critical: each man developed an
acute perception of his neighbor's faults. In 1873 Manning gave "A
Diagnosis and a Prescription." In his opinion the Metaphysicians suf-
fered from the disease of chronic anarchy which stemmed from the
Renaissance and Reformation. A confusion of philosophic tongues
and concepts had produced a paralyzing confusion of thought. He
recommended closer logic and sharper definition above all, a correct
method and terminology. In short, he prescribed the scholasticism
of St. Thomas. Manning's diagnosis was accurate, but his cure was
somewhat heroic. Everybody wanted to be logical, but few were will-
ing to admit that logic and St. Thomas were one. To encourage a
greater sharpness of definition, the Society appointed a committee,
but it accomplished little beyond spreading a gloomy, inquisitorial
atmosphere.
Pushed by the attacks of Ward and his own pugnacity, Huxley
became, in the later years of the Society, steadily more sarcastic and
destructive. He was heavily ironic even in his second paper, "Has the
Frog a Soul?" (1871), in which, early in its long martyrdom to
science, he crucified the unredemptive batrachian on paraffin in order
once more to crucify the immortality of the soul on the hard facts of
physiology. In his last, "The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrec-
tion" (1876), he attempted, "in the style of a great criminal court
advocate," to destroy the central case for the supernatural in Chris-
tianity. 23 These papers were bare abstracts rather than polished lec-
tures such as he delivered to scientists and workingmen. Plainly, he
reserved himself for the discussion, in which he was unrivaled. The
presence of the immortals drew out the logic-fencer in him rather
than the prose artist.
In the late seventies the Society began to change character. Bagehot
died in 1877, Tennyson ceased to attend after 1878, Ward was kept
away by ill-health. Most important of all, James Knowles, that cool,
daring ringmaster of hoop-jumping genius, resigned the secretary-
ship in 1879. Into the vacuum left by such men as Ward flowed the
mighty bass voice of Fitzjaines Stephen, Quite as formidable as its
vocal instrument, his massive common sense, with acute, annihilating
*5 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
obviousness, ruthlessly depreciated the intricate impalpables of both
science and religion. He was profoundly convinced of man's iniquity
and therefore reluctant to give up hell, but he was less enthusiastic
about heaven. He not only denied Darwin but failed to see the neces-
sity of inventing him. In the words of Leslie Stephen, "Darwin was to
his mind an ingenious person spending immense labour upon the
habits of worms, or in speculating upon what may have happened
millions of years ago. What does it matter? Here we are face to face
with the same facts/* 24 Stephen probably made the Society more un-
comfortable for everybody, but particularly for those who did not
quite know what they were talking about.
For this reason, as well as for many others, the Metaphysical Society
was becoming less and less a Victorian Olympus and more and more
a seminar of professional philosophers. Discriminating newcomers
were not impressed. John Morley described it to his sister as "an il-
lustrious little club" which first confused itself with a bad dinner and
then made "confusion worse confounded by bad metaphysics." 25 One
evening in November, 1880, Martineau, as chairman, held up the
mirror. With an unprecedented unanimity, the Metaphysical Society
quietly voted itself dead.
It died, declared Huxley afterwards, "of too much love.*' 26 But
more combat, in itself, could hardly have produced more agreement.
Knowles was probably the more sagacious coroner. In his opinion,
death supervened when everything had been said too many times.
After a decade of discussion, the Metaphysicians finally understood,
not each other, but the completeness of their fundamental disagree-
ment. They were too old and too famous to learn anything new,
much less to find common ground between Christian theology and
the requirements for scientific truth, between faith in God and faith
in evolutionary process.
But now old issues were taking new shapes. While scientists
were explaining how dogma produced superstition and hatred, science
itself was producing a new dogmatism and a new hedonism. More-
over, while the older empiricists were using the test of experience to
refine truth into a rather dry and austere question mark, newer
empiricists were using the same test to make it a tropical forest of
abundance, variety, and vividness. Agnosticism is the reverse, and
The Metaphysical Society
pragmatism the face, of the same coin. 27 Both creeds are undogmatic;
but for one the criterion of belief is scientific evidence; for the other
it is psychological need, William James held that a belief is true if it
makes life more vivid and productive. Pragmatism was an ironic
conclusion to an age of debate on fundamentals, but it was an even
more ironic beginning to an age of persecution for ideas.
The long debates with Ward and others did for a time put Huxley
at least in a posture of compromise. He was invited in 1870, as a kind
of inspirational Professor Beelzebub, to address the Cambridge
Y.M.C.A. His lecture "On Descartes' Discourse" is in part an attempt
to extend the evolutionary point of view to the field of ideas. The
history of thought is best symbolized not by a single great chain or
an endless dialectic but by the ramifying branches of a tree or plant.
Descartes, more than any other thinker, represents the main stem of
modern science and philosophy. He "consecrated Doubt" as the
primary duty of the scientific conscience and himself set the example,
attempting to get rid of all preconceived notions. He did not entirely
succeed, but he did succeed in pointing the way toward the two great
modern traditions of thought. His doctrine that the mind can know
nothing outside itself led directly to the idealism of Berkeley and
Kant. His doctrine that, to our knowledge, thought invariably derives
from a human machine ultimately reducible to matter and motion led
with equal directness to the materialism of Priestley and De la Met-
trie. These two systems are complementary rather than antagonistic;
"and thought will never be completely fruitful until the one unites
with the other." 28
Even so, Huxley believes "that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a
mechanical equivalent of consciousness." 29 He speaks in a parenthesis
of the human machine "adjusting itself within certain limits," but
he follows immediately with the sentence, "I protest that if some great
Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what
is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound
up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close
with the offer." 30 On the whole, the earnest Christians of the Cam-
bridge Y.M.CA. would have done well to fear Professor Beelzebub.
His great evangelical earnestness made his horns and barbed tail
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
seem the most superficial disguise, and he wore them in the sincere
conviction that they were much less dangerous than a halo and a
harp.
Much larger audiences than the Cambridge Y.M.C.A. were eager
to hear Professor Huxley. In 1870 he gathered together the best
known of his shorter writings, from the early reviews of the Origin
to the "Descartes," and published them as Lay Sermons, Addresses,
and Reviews. His first book since Man's Place in Nature, it was even
more widely applauded than that work had been execrated seven
years before. The difference was not altogether due to change in the
public mind. Lay Sermons had, as its title portended, a strong moral
tone. It was acclaimed not only by The Westminster, which praised
alike its "sound common sense" and "brilliancy of literary treat-
ment/* 31 but by such less radical journals as The Contemporary,
which, though criticizing Huxley's interpretation of Descartes, re-
garded his attempt to reconcile science and religion as sincere, gen-
erous, and farsighted. 32
As usual, The Spectator was more dubious. Huxley denied not only
that religion was credible, but even that it conduced to virtue, which
could best be achieved by treating self-denial, like everything else,
as "a working hypothesis." 33 But, said The Spectator, one cannot
"pray to a hypothesis." 34 As a matter of fact, by refining truth to
such a thin probability, Huxley was undermining not only religion,
but rationalism itself. When reason produces only a working hypoth-
esis, many people cease to be reasonable.
Insomnia costs ordinary mortals much discomfort and waste of
time. It provided Huxley with a very exact knowledge of English
philosophy. He seemed to master difficult authors by sheer intellectual
momentum. When Morley persuaded him to write a book on Hume
for the English Men of Letters Series, he found the work already quite
complete in his head. He needed only to consider the trouble of com-
position, and that was very little trouble. He "picked" at his task a
little, early in the summer of 1878, and then, relaxing on vacation at
Penmaenmaws, finished it off in the next six weeks.
Hume is such a book as a brilliantly gifted and educated man might
write in six weeks. It is compact and well organized, sometimes witty
and eloquent. It not only makes Hume clearer than Hume, but im-
proves and corrects him in many important particulars. Yet a rather
new kind of subject has not called forth new talents in Huxley, He
had largely omitted Descartes from his essay on Cartesianism, but
what is understandable in a brief essay becomes reprehensible in a
three-hundred page book. The Hume required a biography, and
biography implies character. Huxley shows little interest in either.
His narrative is bare and rapid* He suggests that vanity led Hume
to forsake philosophy for history. He touches swiftly on Hume's outer
awkwardness and inner calm in the midst of a brilliant Parisian
debut. But "success and wealth are rarely interesting"; Hume is
hurried unceremoniously to his deathbed. 36 In a page, or a volume, or
a dozen volumes, Carlyle would have painted his man to the life.
Six-weeks' casual study hardly suggested the problem to Huxley.
If he produces only a superficial picture of the mind that thought
Hume's ideas, he gives a splendid account of the ideas themselves.
Abjuring metaphysical folly, Locke had pealed away from philosophi-
cal thinking layer after layer of unwarranted assumption. Hume laid
open the bare bone of empiricism, reducing virtually all knowledge
and thought to sense perceptions, the power to recall them, and the
tendency to "associate" them according to similarity, succession, and
coexistence. 36 Even our most familiar and trustworthy abstractions,
like those of time, space, cause and effect, are apparently not innate
or intuitive; they seem to arise from the association of particular im-
pressions. We can never be sure even when they have proved re-
liable guides to future experience how far our ideas correspond to
exterior reality. Empiricism recognizes no complete certainty.
But even Hume is not a perfect empiricist. He falls occasionally
either into positive dogmatism, as when he maintains certain mathe-
matical truths are necessary and independent of sense experience
or into negative, as when he maintains that the mind is nothing but a
heap of impressions. It may be nothing but a heap of impressions, but
again it may be highly unified according to a principle much less
mechanical than that of association.
Huxley simplifies and modernizes Hume at some length, indi-
cating, for example, how a subjective empiricism which analyzes
mind in terms of impressions can be equated with an objective em-
piricism analyzing behavior in terms of nervous system. Hume him-
self was aware of this possibility, but did not, like Descartes, pursue
26 z Apes, Angels, and Victorians
it, except to argue animal intelligence from animal behavior. He
also outlines an evolution of theology according to the expansion of
thought and the refinement of feeling. These presages of nineteenth-
century naturalism Huxley elucidates with admiration.
Coming to religion, Huxley reprehends his own faults in Hume
with much acumen and considerable sternness. Empirical doubt is
hardly a decisive weapon in theological controversy. Hume was
therefore often very positive about the uniformity of nature, using it
to destroy miracles on the one hand and to prove an intelligent
Creator on the other. But we know that nature is uniform only so
far as we have observed it. We cannot therefore be certain that
miracles are a violation of natural law, or indeed that a partially
intelligible universe indicates a perfectly intelligent Creator.
Huxley has nothing but approval for Hume's determinism : Hume
defines free will as a belief or impression which springs from a
consciousness of purpose and the sensation of having carried out that
purpose. He does not deny that men make choices and act on them.
He argues simply that those choices are part of the order of nature.
Men are not free to love pain or to associate any emotion with
any idea. The doctrine of free will leads to absurdity. The doctrine
of necessity follows from the very rational view that men have always
been governed by the same motives or causes. Huxley urges that
it does not diminish, but increases, the sense of moral responsibility.
"The very idea of responsibility implies the belief in the necessary
connexion of certain actions with certain states of mind." 37 Rage,
if sufficiently violent, causes an act of rage.
On Hume's ethics Huxley is sound and critical as far as he goes.
He once more praises Hume for his empirical approach and traces
his derivation of the good from the useful:
The moral approbation, therefore, with which we regard acts of justice
or benevolence rests upon their utility to society, because the perception
of that utility or, in other words, of the pleasure which they give to other
men, arouses a feeling of sympathetic pleasure in ourselves. The feeling
of obligation to be just, or of the duty of justice, arises out of that associa-
tion of moral approbation or disapprobation with one's own actions, which
is what we call conscience. 88
He rightly observes that Hume takes too little account of the reality
of temptation and the difficulty of virtue.
The Metaphysical Society
The Hume volume also contains two separate essays. "Bishop
Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sensation" (1871) is another trium-
phantly lucid exposition of a philosophical system. It was meant
eventually to grow into a new volume for Morley's series, but Huxley
was always too busy or too ill to expand it. "On Sensation and the
Unity of Structure of the Sensiferous Organs" (1879) winds up the
whole discussion of idealism and materialism, of inward consciousness
and the outward unknown, with an inquiry into the mechanism of
sense. In the case of each organ, a wall of sensation intervenes between
the impression and its stimulus. How stimuli become impressions is
still a mystery. Sound metaphysics can teach us only our essential
ignorance. Science alone can teach us new facts.
In the 1894 preface to this volume, Huxley gave his final word on
the historical positions of Hume and Berkeley. Both are descendants
of Descartes. The first carried Cartesian doubt to its logical result;
the second, the Cartesian principle that we can be certain only of the
facts of consciousness. It is significant that Huxley consistently em-
phasizes Cartesian doubt rather than Cartesian rationalism. In one
sense Hume was the complete negation of Descartes. Taking geom-
etry as his model, Descartes insisted that true ideas must be logically
connected. He never doubted that truth was rational because he never
doubted that the universe was rational. What is not logical is not
knowledge. Hume maintained that the reasoning faculty was simply
a form of associative activity useful in ordering experience. The uni-
verse itself may be only superficially and incompletely logical. Des-
cartes tries to explain everything by mathematics. Hume explains
nearly everything but mathematics. Perhaps Huxley admired these
two men too much to think them very different from each other,
or from himself. One of them ministered to his impulse for clarity;
the other, to his need for puritanically denying himself the luxuries
of certainty.
XVI
The Educator
BY 1870 Huxley's scientific work was nearly at its minimum,
while half the administrative business of English science traveled
about under his hat. Within the last few years he had been president
of the British Association, and of the Ethnological and Geological
Societies. From 1871 to 1880 he was secretary of the Royal Society, a
post of great strategic importance. As a member of the X, he belonged
to the inner cabinet of science; and as a member of the Metaphysical,
he was the chief spokesman for science in the exalted agora of the Vic-
torian gods. During the next eight years he was on one Royal Com-
mission after another, dealing with every problem from public
schools to contagious diseases. He was several times asked to stand
for Parliament, but always declined, feeling that he could perform
more valuable service without political position.
The world was becoming a stage better and better suited to
Huxley's particular talents and attainments, for while he was taking
over science, science was taking over Victorian civilization. In a
sense it had created Victorianism, having made possible the Industrial
Revolution and the dominance of the middle class. Middle class
victory had thrown into relief the antithesis, long latent in the
middle class mind, between evangelical faith and utilitarian rational-
264
The Educator 2.65
ism; and the second had already triumphed. Darwin had superseded
Moses as an authority on origins and was beginning to be regarded
as an authority on morals also. As a matter of fact, evangelicalism
itself had, despite much excellent Christian rectitude, long since con-
doned laissez faire red in tooth and claw, and was even now listening
with some tranquillity to Spencer's homilies on the virtuous and
necessary starvation of failures.
Meanwhile prosperous Philistia had achieved an instant of monu-
mental equilibrium which, in our present maelstrom of change, has
become a majestic symbol of social permanence. By repealing the
Corn Law and the Combination Acts, by improving factory condi-
tions and restricting factory hours, it had won temporary allegiance
from the working classes; and by voting peers into office and voting
them out, by bullying them in the press and the pulpit and by brow-
beating them from the throne, it had converted the aristocracy into
something nearly as respectable and unheroic as itself. If England
had not quite solved her problems, at least she had stared them down.
Impressively unified despite much latent contradiction, voluminously
articulate in poetry and prose despite much muddleheadedness,
splendid in energy and cautious in compromise, she had inspired
herself with the wonders of the Exposition, frightened herself with
nightmares of simian ancestry, and was now comforting herself with
profits and progress that seemed as steady and inevitable as the
flow of time itself.
Progress was no longer the precarious, sporadic result of genius
and accident. It had become organized, methodized, even mecha-
nized. The method and the mechanism were of course science and
its instruments. A scientist with his instruments, like an Erewhonian
millionaire with his capital, was a superhuman individual, bringing
to bear Olympian faculties, luminously perspicacious and trem-
blingly sensitive, upon the twin abysses of the infinitely great and
the infinitely small. Hypotheses were constantly reaching out Into
the darkness slowly, almost inevitably refining and rectifying them-
selves through empirical contact with reality.
Necessity was rapidly ceasing to be the mother either of invention
or of discovery. In fact, the practical old woman had all she could
do to keep in sight of them. MaxwelTs study of electromagnetic
waves, for example, waited fifty years to be translated into Marconi's
266 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
invention of the wireless. By industriously rubbing the lamp of
science, the Victorians were evoking its slaves in such legions that
only the feebler and more obvious could be put to work.
Yet even these weak and obvious few, keeping very busy, had
been sufficient to launch the primal age of technology. Chiefly by the
systematic application of steam power to his daily tasks, man had
changed his physical environment more in a few decades than in
as many centuries. He had also begun his weird Pilgrim's Progress
in the mechanical forest. It was a forest which changed almost with
the swiftness of illusion and, in which, more and more as time went
on, man lived awfully in the presence of his powers and temptations,
always in the crisis of his human dualism. Utopia smiled at him
from one side and pandemonium threatened from the other.
In 1870, the perils of the forest were hardly suspected. Experience
had shown that the machine could impoverish and oppress physi-
cally, creating the most savage paradoxes of abundance and want,
paralysis and opportunity. Ruskin had attempted to show it could
also impoverish and oppress spiritually, concentrating artistic skill
and initiative in a few hands and imposing artistic silence and de-
humanizing routine on everybody else. On the other hand, it had
poured forth a deluge of cotton cloth. It hauled people in large
numbers rapidly across land and sea. It permitted Europe and
America to converse by means of a wire laid down on the bottom of
the Atlantic. The steam engine, the gas light, the telegraph, the
isolation of disease bacteria and the development of serums to combat
them had both shrunk and complicated, lit up and cleansed the
planet, which seemed likely to become as neat, intricate, and manage-
able, as a fine Swiss watch. What had solved so many old problems
must eventually solve the new problems it had created.
In any case, mechanization had become a national necessity. The
Americans promised heroic competition in a few decades; the
Germans threatened dangerous competition at the moment. Prussia,
that native country of clockwork conformity, had, after more than a
hundred years, once more found in Bismarck a clockwinder of
genius. Once more the wheels turned smoothly and the seconds
ticked with fateful precision, and as the hours struck, empires fell
like card houses and all Europe trembled. Germany, the land of
quarreling princes and erudite visionaries, had suddenly become a
The Educator 267
super-Prussia a great military state backed by a great industry and
an unrivaled system of scientific and technological education.
In spite of their navy and their bank balances, thoughtful English-
men were justly concerned. R. H. Hutton regretted that so great a
people as the Germans should be ruled by a military caste so much
below them in character and culture. 1 At the beginning of the war
of 1870, Huxley was strongly sympathetic to the fatherland of his
beloved Goethe and violently critical of Louis Napoleon. But the
appalling destructiveness of modern warfare and perhaps the mar-
tial ferocity of the German press soon cooled his enthusiasm. "Bad
days are, I am afraid, in store for all of us," he wrote his friend
Dohrn, "and the worst for Germany if it once becomes thoroughly
bitten by the military mad dog." 2
Romantic tradition painted the Germans as a combination of noble
innocence and poetic profundity. History was even then demon-
strating that they combined great practical energy and speculative
power with a singular tractability to command. They peered curi-
ously into the foundations of the universe and fell back in awe before
a military cap and a pair of epaulettes. Discipline and system, joined
with an illustrious intellectual tradition, had made German educa-
tion a resource more valuable than all the iron and coal in the Ruhr.
Germany was even more vigilantly and aggressively mobilized for
discovery, and for the commercial exploitation of discovery, than for
war.
Meanwhile, until well into the century, English education ignored
science. Schools particularly the public schools were something be-
tween a ritual and a riot. They subjected young boys to jungle law on
the playground and in the classroom they inculcated, by rote and rod,
the Egyptian mysteries of a gentlemanly education. The survivors of
this process usually possessed much stoicism, assorted vices more or
less grave, some knowledge of Greek and Latin grammar, and a
disagreeable acquaintance with fragments of classical literature. In
1828 Dr. Thomas Arnold founded a benevolent Christian despotism
at Rugby, where students were taught to regard life as a grave moral
responsibility, to read French and German, and to understand the
classics as well as to translate them. Arnold's example produced some
imitation and a great deal of criticism, particularly at Oxford, where
Rugby men were much disliked for their priggishness.
268 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
In the early stages of the education controversy the chief spokes-
men for science were F. W. Ferrar and Herbert Spencer. Ferrar,
who had been a classical master at both Harrow and Winchester,
was famous in his own time for writing very bad novels about very
good little boys. His good little boys were not happy at school. Ferrar
believed not only that the aristocratic institutions of England offered
a poor moral environment, but that they taught the wrong things
and taught them ineffectually. He maintained that the ideal curricu-
lum should emphasize science, mathematics, and modern languages.
Spencer's theory was his own experience generalized for ordinary
mortals, plus biological laissez faire an impossible idealism modi-
fied by an even more impossible realism. Skillful, well-informed
tutors like his father were lovingly to educe from commonplace little
boys an original genius like Herbert's own for abstract reasoning
and encyclopedic knowledge which might lead eventually to a
million pounds or a synthetic philosophy. On the other hand, they
were not to teach too lofty .an idealism, lest little boys be unfitted for
the aboriginal struggle which civilized life actually is. Finally, science
is more liberal and more useful than classical literature: it provides
the mind with facts and a method of thought rather than with mere
standards of beauty and a training in taste.
By 1860 the increasingly sharp competition of Victorian life pointed
an ungentlemanly finger at Victorian education. Having inherited
the public schools along with everything else, the upper middle class
had become increasingly dissatisfied with them. It did not object to
the Egyptian mysteries as such. They conferred the authoritative
mark of gentility. On the other hand, successful business men wanted
their sons not only to be gentlemen, but to be successful gentlemen.
The awful fact was that the Egyptian mysteries, as then taught, did
not enable young men to do well with the competitive examinations
for the army and the civil service. Men like Matthew Higgins and
Henry Reeve declared that such an institution as Eton was run not
for the moral and intellectual benefit of the students but for the
financial benefit of the masters. Mathematics and modern languages
should be included in the curriculum, A Royal Commission should
investigate the public schools.
The liberal attack was met by a flood of nostalgic conservative
The Educator 269
eloquence. Edmund Burke had not defended the British Constitu-
tion more grandly. The public schools are the majestic embodiments
of long accumulated experience. The elaborate fabric of moral and
material masonry which makes an Eton or a Winchester is so delicate
and complex that the rude finger of reform might shatter it with a
touch. But the indignant lowing of great Tory cattle beneath the
British oak did not silence the importunate chink of liberal grass-
hoppers; and though Gladstone himself felt that a strict classical
curriculum was at once a buttress of religion and a liberal exercise
for the mind, a Royal Commission was duly appointed in 1861. It
agreed with the liberal critics, recommending in effect that the
public schools reform their governing bodies, give a large place to
competitive examinations, and include music, drawing, history, geog-
raphy, English composition, spelling, and above all natural science,
in their curricula.
In 1867 Disraeli took his famous leap in the dark and by en-
franchising the poor-rate payers gave the vote to the bulk of the
middle class. Attention was thus dramatically focused on lower
middle class schools, which for the most part were feeble and dingy
imitations of such places as Eton and Harrow.
Having at this fateful moment been made principal of the South
London Workingmen's College, Huxley delivered his inaugural
address on "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It," aiming
drastic criticism at the whole English system, but particularly at the
primary and secondary schools. The three R's are worth little i they
serve only to make ignorance articulate. The classics are useless if
they give no idea of ancient life and thought. Huxley protests that
he would not deprecate the classics they state "with grand simplic-
ity ... the everlasting problems of human life" 3 though of their
basic importance to European civilization he gives no adequate idea.
English universities contain few great scholars, produce little signifi-
cant research, and offer almost no opportunity for advanced study
in the great field of modem science and culture.
England needs a broader, more realistic conception of a liberal
education. Such education should develop and discipline the total
man. It should make his body a strong and efficient "mechanism";
and his mind, "a clear, cold, logic engine." 4 It should cultivate a
270 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
love of beauty, a tender conscience, healthy and vigorous passions,
and a strong will with which to control them. It should also inform
him, in so far as possible, with the totality of modern knowledge.
Artificial education should take its cue from natural.
Nature is continually inculcating her truths with the long ferule
of pain and pleasure. Or, as a hidden antagonist, she plays with each
man a game of chess. Obviously, a good education should teach the
rules of that game, for "nature's pluck means extermination." 5
Huxley implies here, as on other occasions, that the scientific method,
not to say matter itself, is the key to nature both outside and within
man. Moral law is as certain in its action as physical. "Stealing and
lying are just as certain to be followed by evil consequences, as
putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a garret window." e
Apparently, moral education should expose the consequences of
right and wrong with such scientific clarity that virtue would become
a rational necessity. Huxley faces the unpleasant implications of his
position with typical courage some will call it typical complacency.
If an occasional workingman must starve to death, he should have
the satisfaction of knowing why.
Would it not be well to have helped that man to calm the natural prompt-
ings of discontent by showing him, in his youth, the necessary connection
of the moral law which prohibits stealing with the stability of society
by proving to him, once for all, that it is better for his own people, better
for himself, better for future generations, that he should starve than
steal? 7
Huxley rather hurriedly leaves these unpleasant alternatives and
turns to a more cheerful future. The working class do not need
religion to keep them quiet, but science to make their work effective.
The middle class do not need Latin grammar to make them fashion-
able but economics to make them capable of retaining the industrial
and commercial leadership which has been their great modern achieve-
ment.
Huxley's dichotomy between the useful and the fashionable is
indicative. He understood much better the requirements of the new
world than the virtues of the old education. His attempt to mediate
between the two does not go very deep. He speaks of education a
good deal in terms of breadth, humanity, happiness, beauty, and
The Educator 271
leisure; but his eloquence and his metaphors emphasize mechanism,
determinism, strength, success, and extermination. By exaggerating
the struggle of civilized man with nature or with his fellows, Huxley
claims for the sciences a stronger sanction than they should have:
education to save the skin must come before education to save the
soul.
In 1869, at a dinner of the Liverpool Philomathic Society, Huxley
made a speech on "Scientific Education," which he published from
his notes. Here the strident accents of the Philistine are even more
distinctly audible, though with some tribute of irony to more liberal
values. Most Englishmen are devoted to the religion of "getting on."
Very well! The mysteries of that religion are destined more and more
to be scientific:
As industry attains higher stages of development, as its processes become
more complicated and refined, and competition more keen, the sciences
are dragged in one by one, to take their share in the fray; and he who can
best avail himself of their help is the man who will come out uppermost
in that struggle for existence, which goes on as fiercely beneath the smooth
surface of modern society, as among the wild inhabitants of the woods. 8
Huxley believes that a scientific education should accomplish two
purposes: it should inculcate the idea of causality, and it should un-
fold the infinite panorama of the scientific universe. The student
should grasp both the uniformity and the immensity of nature. But
his training should not include all the sciences. Huxley counsels that
the child should proceed from the concrete to the abstract, beginning
with physical geography, and then studying with some thoroughness
one science which deals predominantly with classification, such as
botany, and one which deals predominantly with cause and effect,
such as physics. Above all, he should get a grounding in the inductive
method, which of all disciplines alone proceeds from facts to generali-
zation, and so provides the best preparation for practical life. In this
essay Huxley seems somewhat to fall into the utilitarian error of
assuming that a rational subject matter generates a mind to deal with
it.
By establishing a program of grants-in-aid, the Education Act of
1870 encouraged local school boards to offer universal free instruc-
tion. It also stipulated that national schools, built solely with state
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
funds, should be undenominational. Huxley saw at once that if the
school boards could stop wrangling about theology long enough to
think about secular, and even nondenominational religious, educa-
tion, they might strike an unparalleled blow against ignorance. He
was in bad health and already had far too much to do. Nevertheless,
he could not escape the logic of the situation. With a heavy heart
and a clear conscience, he ran for the London School Board. He ad-
dressed several large meetings, wrote an article for The Contem-
porary "Review which Knowles, the editor, circulated as an election
manifesto and finished second among the elected candidates.
The election article had a great effect. "The School Boards: What
They Can Do and What They May Do" is a statesmanlike political
pamphlet, full of sound compromise and even sounder appeal to the
good sense of the voters. Huxley declares that religious education
need not cause dispute. What has so much divided and embittered
men is not religion itself but theology the science, or pseudoscience,
treating of "the nature of the Deity, and his relations to the uni-
verse." 9 Religion is basically awe and reverence, and these feelings
are essential to morality. In England religion is best taught in the
primary schools by nondenominational reading of the Bible, which
has become "the national epic of Britain," and remains with all its
faults, "a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur.'*
He lays down a broad elementary curriculum, which, besides
reading, writing, and arithmetic, should include drawing, music, and
the rudiments of physical science. He also emphasizes domestic econ-
omy. Poverty should in the first instance be solved by the poor
themselves: prosperity begins at home in the frugal efficiency of
wife and husband. What argument could speak more eloquently
to the hearts and pocketbooks of solid Victorian citizens?
Earnest Christians and dignified clergymen on the School Board
awaited the advent of Professor Beelzebub with some trepidation.
It was well known that he had devoured alive the worthy Bishop of
Oxford almost before the eyes of his congregation, leaving nothing
but a shovel hat and a pair of gaiters visible on the platform. But to
the London School Board he bared his teeth only in courteous smiles.
He arranged that pious members could use the committee room for
prayer before meetings, and, refusing to align himself with the
The Educator 175
extreme secularists, strongly supported Bible instruction in the
elementary schools.
However, Huxley's tact and diplomacy did not extend to Roman
Catholics, though there were three on the Board. His experience
with such men as Ward in the Metaphysical Society had taught him
that the Church was as dangerous as it was benighted. It exercised
intellect with consummate skill to defeat the natural purpose of
intellect, which is the disinterested pursuit of truth. It was the "great
antagonist," valuable only in keeping science and liberalism alert by
its relentless warfare. 10 One could dine with Catholics, but one could
never agree with them. Over the committee table, as in the forum,
one must be ready at any moment to dispense with the amenities in
order to thwart a plot or pursue a tactical advantage. When it was
suggested that the Board should pay directly to denominational
schools the fees for poor children, Huxley was bitterly opposed
because public funds would thus be handed over to the Catholic
Church.
As an educational statesman, Huxley fell short only through his
old fault of attempting too much in too little time. Otherwise, he was
a miracle of success. In the fourteen months he was a Board member,
he put through a curriculum which endured many years and still
remains the basic framework of instruction in London schools. What
the schoolboy studied English history, English grammar and com-
position, geography, drawing, elementary physical science were what
Huxley recommended in "A Liberal Education" and other essays.
To be sure, being neither omnipotent nor omnipresent, he could not
prevent some mismanagement. Ironically, science suffered most. In
the elementary schools, Huxley's physical geography was whittled
down to mere geography; and in the secondary, his physics and
botany were replaced by chemistry badly taught and badly tested.
The memorization of chemical formulas was substituted for the
memorization of Latin paradigms. There was no romantic pursuit
of knowledge in the open air, no exciting rediscovery of truth in the
laboratory.
Huxley knew that he could not turn the world upside down from a
committee armchair, nor win a victory simply with pen and ink.
Much as he emphasized the right curriculum, he knew that the right
curriculum weU taught must be the ultimate goal. Science teaching
274 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
would fail unless there were good science teachers. In the summer of
1871, therefore, he gave a six-week course in general biology for
teachers. As a part of the Victorian-Norman, grimly castellated vast-
ness of the South Kensington Natural History Museum had been
placed at his disposal for the purpose, he was able to do what he had
not been able to do in his cramped quarters in Jermyn Street: he in-
troduced, for the first time in biology, laboratory work together with
instruction by lecture. Nature at first hand was almost too much for
some of his students. One clergyman, who had taught textbook
science for years, was shown a drop of his own blood under the
microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture in
Huxley's Physiology!" lx Despite all of Huxley's efforts, science
teaching in the schools was only very gradually improved. In 1872,
when the biological department of the School of Mines was trans-
ferred to South Kensington, Huxley made laboratory work a per-
manent part of all his courses.
As a political operative, Huxley was devastatingly efficient. On the
School Board he accomplished a miracle more incredible than any
he ever tried to discredit: he proved that he could lead, as well as
annihilate, clergymen. His memory long remained green and sweet
among Board members, and several of them, clerical and otherwise,
wrote eulogies. "Towering as was his intellectual strength and keen-
ness above me ... ," wrote the Reverend Benjamin Waugh grate-
fully, "he did not condescend to me." In fact, what impressed Mr.
Waugh most about Huxley was his "childlikeness." "There were no
tricks in his talk. He did not seem to be trying to persuade you of
something. What convinced him, that he transferred to others." 12
One doubts that Huxley was quite so guileless as Waugh thought
him. Nevertheless, he did not make the impression of a hardened
veteran. After admiring his energy and practical sagacity, his ability
to combine strong convictions with a readiness to enter into the
thinking of others, Dr. J. H. Gladstone recollects with mild surprise
that Huxley's only political weakness was a certain sensitiveness, a
lack of that "pachydermatous quality" which enables one to sit
comfortably while listening to personal abuse. 13 Several competent
observers attested to his political ability. "I do not think," Sir Mount-
stuart Grant-Duff wrote Leonard Huxley in 1898, "that your father,
if he had entered the House of Commons and thrown himself
The Educator 275
entirely into political life, would have been much behind Gladstone
as a debater, or Bright as an orator." 14
Huxley had so many opportunities to run for Parliament and
refused them so steadfastly that some people thought he had no
opportunities at all and was trying very hard to get them. Yet he
never thought of himself as more nor less than a statesman of culture.
Moreover, he did not desire power for its own sake, and preferred to
be useful rather than merely prominent and illustrious. No one
thought, when it became vacant in 1871, that he would accept the
secretaryship of the Royal Society. It was known to be an anxious and
laborious post, and he was overtaxed and in bad health. Moreover, he
was certain before very long to be president. Nevertheless, feeling that
he could be more useful as secretary, he let it be known that he was
available. He served for the next ten years.
Throughout 1871, he continued as a matter of course to wage multi-
farious literary warfare, defending Darwin against biologists,*
biology against clergymen, and state education against those who
scarcely believed either in the state or in education. Much of the work
was done at St. Andrews, to which he conducted a long and difficult
migration of his entire family (but then collectively recovered from
whooping cough), so that he could combine a summer holiday with
proximity to the meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh. He
relaxed characteristically, playing golf until his arms ached, astonish-
ing the librarian by delving into the Latin works of Jesuit theologians
in order to confute Catholic evolutionists, and devoting every remain-
ing moment to the composition of papers. The most remarkable of
these, "Administrative Nihilism," was aimed at the doctrinaire liber-
als.
Such people maintained that the government should not educate
because it should not do anything, and that the poor should not be
educated because they would thereby become discontent with their
poverty. But the middle class had risen by their own efforts. Why
should they favor a system which closed the door to ability ? A nation
should economize its brains by cultivating them to the utmost and
allowing them to get easily to the top.
* See p. 198.
276 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as explosive power, beats
gunpowder hollow. . . . What gives force to the socialistic movement
which is now stirring European society to its depths, but a determination
on the part of naturally able men among the proletariat to put an end . . .
to the misery and degradation in which a large proportion of their fellows
are steeped? 15
In short, Huxley is for equality of opportunity, though never for
equality of goods.
In Huxley's opinion, Mill's "Liberty" lays down too negatiye a
doctrine for the modern world. If the individual is free to do only
what does not injure others he is not free to do very much. One
cannot think or act without influencing the thought or action of
others. An erroneous opinion or an ill-advised act is always an evil,
never a good, in itself. A neighbor who neglects his drains is as dan-
gerous to life and liberty as a neighbor who flourishes a pistol. In
other words, a certain amount of government regulation is inescap-
able. How much is wise and expedient can only be determined by
common sense and experience. Even Hobbes did not draw the line
at mere security, and Locke boldly declared that "the end of govern-
ment is the good of mankind."
What, then, is the good of mankind? Huxley defines it as "the
attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy
without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men." 16 And in such
happiness Huxley would count all that flows from security, wealth,
art, science, sympathy, and friendship. The last two benefits, Huxley
felt, might be secured by an established church, whose "services
should be devoted, not to the iterations of abstract propositions in
theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of true, just,
and pure living." 17
Returning from the comparative idyll of St. Andrews, Huxley
plunged once more with gusto into crushing routine. He had com-
pleted his term as president of the British Association, but in addition
to all ordinary duties, he was of course still lecturing schoolmasters,
still busy with the Royal Society and the School Board. He was
serving on two Royal Commissions one for contagious diseases and
the other for aid to science and he was turning out a stream of text-
books, both elementary and advanced: Vertebrate Anatomy in 1871,
'Elementary Biology in 1875, Invertebrate Anatomy in 1877, Physiog-
The Educator 277
raphy in 1877, and several others. His life had become a maze of
official appointments, a melodrama of impossible deadlines; and yet,
even while playing a little delicious hooky to lunch with Tyndall or
week-end with Darwin, he carried everything off triumphantly, to
the envy and admiration of all other busy and efficient men.
In December, 1872, Huxley changed his residence from 26 Abbey
Place to No. 4 Marlborough Terrace, where he had enlarged a small
house into something more ample and comfortable. He had purchased
the property against the advice of his lawyer, who apparently feared
trouble from the man next door. "There is something delightfully
refreshing," he wrote his lawyer, "in rushing into a piece of practical
work in the teeth of one's legal adviser." And he signed, "Yours will-
fully." 18 Meanwhile, the impossible grew daily easier. In December
he told his wife that his mind had never been clearer or more vigor-
ous. Yet within a week he had broken down, and could neither work
nor think.
Dyspepsia descended upon him with all its Victorian horrors. He
took a brief holiday without lasting benefit. "I've come back grunting
and grumbling like an ungreased block," he complained to Hooker. 19
In the next summer he was once more seriously ill. "I begin to sus-
pect," he wrote his friend Dohrn with remarkable innocence, "that
I overworked myself last year. Doctors talk seriously to me, and
declare that all sorts of wonderful things will happen if I do not take
some more efficient rest than I have had for a long time." 20 At
length, halfheartedly, he set out for Egypt. At Malta and Gibraltar,
he stopped over to investigate for the Admiralty the continued and
mysterious presence of a small grub in the sea biscuit. The culprit was
apparently distasteful as well as elusive, and discontent among the
men was becoming serious. After a rapid investigation, Huxley found
large stores of unpurified cocoa near where the sea biscuit was being
packed. Insect eggs were being blown into the naval stores. Huxley
ordered that the sea biscuit be packed elsewhere, and the criminal
was frustrated.
In Egypt, the fatherland of history, he observed that the top of
Cephren's pyramid was limestone, not granite, and that the unbaked
brick at Memphis was stratified exactly like Nile mud. Among his
most vivid drawings was one of a vulture waiting impatiently while
a jackal feasted on a carcass. His son declares that Egypt made a
278 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
"profound impression" on him. 21 It may even have taught him a
little patience, for there he decided to resign from the School Board
and never to overwork again. Nevertheless, his letters from Italy were
ominously full of volcanoes, ashes, and lava flows.
Huxley landed once more in England on April 6. He was sun-
burnt and heavily bearded, but not really well. English bustle and
hurry soon brought a return of dyspepsia and melancholy. His physi-
cian, Sir Andrew Clark, put him on a strict diet, and for a time he
retired to the depths of Devonshire. But fresh eminence and responsi-
bility found him out. After a close contest he was elected Lord Rector
of Aberdeen University, and about the same time he found himself
defending Hooker from the renewed machinations of Sir Richard
Owen.
He now occupied his new house in Marlborough Terrace and his
lawyer's warning proved justified. The dubious neighbor maintained
that Huxley's drainage well made his basement damp. He attempted
blackmail, then went to court. Although his suit failed and he was
compelled to pay costs, the additional strain and worry had put
Huxley once more in a serious condition. Sir Andrew Clark ordered
him abroad but he had no money with which to go. In fact, he had
accepted a loan from Tyndall to pay some of his building costs. The
situation was humiliating. Two years before he had been trium-
phantly administering British science. Now he had not the means
to restore himself to health. Then he received the following letter:
My Dear Huxley I have been asked by some of your friends (eighteen
in number) to inform you that they have placed through Robarts, Lubbock
and Company, the sum of 2100 to your account at your bankers. We
have done this to enable you to get such complete rest as you may require
for the re-establishment of your health; and in doing this we are convinced
that we act for the public interest, as well as in accordance with our most
earnest desires. Let me assure you that we are all your warm personal
friends, and that there is not a stranger or mere acquaintance amongst us.
If you could have heard what was *said, or could have read what was, as
I believe, our inmost thoughts, you would know that we all feel towards
you, as we should to an honoured and much loved brother. I am sure that
you will return this feeling, and will therefore be glad to give us the
opportunity of aiding you in some degree, as this will be a happiness to
us to the last day of our lives. Let me add that our plan occurred to several
The Educator 279
of your friends at nearly the same time and quite independently of one
another. My dear Huxley, your affectionate friend,
Charles Darwin. 22
The offer had been the result of a dark and devious conspiracy, as
benevolence among good friends should be. Lady Lyell had first con-
ceived the idea. She had whispered it to Emma Darwin, who had
passed it on to Charles. He had caught at it eagerly and put it into
execution. "He sent off the awful letter to Mr. Huxley today," Emma
wrote Fanny Allen, "and I hope we may hear to-morrow. It will be
very awful." 23 It was not awful at all. Deeply touched and somewhat
humbled, Huxley accepted.
In the summer of 1873, he set out for France with Hooker as volun-
teer nurse and a heavy load of medical instructions as a guidebook.
In spite of forced good spirits and a constant readiness to undertake
more than his share of the travel arrangements, he obviously suffered,
in Hooker's judgment, from "severe mental depression" until he
happened in a Paris bookstall on a History of the Miracles of
Lourdes, "which were then exciting the religious fervour of France
and the interest of her scientific public." 24 The prospect of a little
congenial destruction both raised his spirits and quieted his digestion.
Plunging happily into a great pile of treatises, he soon reduced all
visions and cures to natural causes. Hooker perceived that his friend
had healed himself by an act of unf aith, and eager to consolidate this
gain, threw himself into the trip with as light and boyish a heart as
he could muster. He succeeded magnificently. Setting off on a geo-
logical odyssey of the Auvergne, they scaled extinct volcanoes, ex-
plored valleys for evidence of glaciation, smoked cigars, discovered
the skeleton of a prehistoric man in a museum, gaily suffered an
attack of diarrhea in Grenoble, and finally gave themselves up to mere
naive curiosity and idleness.
Toward the end of his trip, Huxley wrote his wife a remarkable
letter.
I have been having a great deal of talk with myself about my future
career. . . . The part I have to play is not to found a new school of thought
or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old schools. We are in the midst
of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced
the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement. But
28o Apes, Angels, and Victorians
there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the movement,
nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional
authority. One or other will have to succumb after a struggle of unknown
duration, which will have as side issues vast political and social troubles.
I have no more doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I
have that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will organise
itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one
harmonious whole. But this organisation will be the work of generations
of men, and those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest
in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions. I may be able to help a little in
this direction perhaps I may have helped already. 25
Rarely, after this time, was he to express so much confidence in the
future.
The two travelers now journeyed from the Auvergne to the Black
Forest, and there separated. Hooker returned to his professional
duties at Kew. Huxley was joined by his wife and his son Leonard,
then twelve years old. He now had the leisure and the freshness to
discover, with some surprise, that his son was a very clever, promising
young fellow. "I began to tell him something of the glaciers the other
day," he wrote Tyndall from Switzerland, "but I was promptly shut
up with, 'Oh yes! I know all about that. It's in Dr. TyndalPs
book.'" 26 At this point the loving father bursts out, "He is the
sweetest little fellow imaginable" and spends half the letter apolo-
gizing for his pride.
Returned home in good health at last, Huxley resumed his various
careers and particularly that in education. He had become an aca-
demic pluralist with a vengeance, being Lord Rector of Aberdeen, a
Governor of Owen's College, as well as professor at the School of
Mines.
Early in 1874 he delivered his belated inaugural address as Lord
Rector of Aberdeen. "Universities: Actual and Ideal" begins with an
intellectual history of Europe and ends with a sober estimate of the
value of lectures and examinations. Practically, it proposes that the
medical curriculum consist of fewer subjects more thoroughly studied.
Botany and Zoology should be lopped off medicine and together
constituted a separate faculty, with adequate facilities for teaching
and research : if England is ever to catch up with Germany and France
The Educator 281
in science, investigators must be able to investigate. This paper, like
other recent ones, continues Huxley's personal feud with the Pope.
The Scholastic Philosophy, once the best available explanation of the
universe, is still the strongest intellectual superstition in the world.
It has absorbed into its school curriculum the new classicism, but not
the new science, which is the voice of reason and therefore its "ir-
reconcilable enemy." 27 Protestantism was simply a step toward reason
and rationalism.
To the glitter and brilliance of this ceremonial year of high aca-
demic office, the Bristol meeting of the British Association added a
still further, though somewhat baleful, glitter and brilliance. In his
opening address as president, Tyndall expounded the victories of
scientific discovery over theological error from Democritus to Darwin.
He admitted there was as yet no bridge between consciousness on the
one hand and molecular activity on the other, but he proclaimed
matter, properly understood, the magic substance by which all myster-
ies would be penetrated and all contradictions resolved the very
principle and symbol of progress, uniting invisible atomicity with
invisible intelligence and both with infinite possibility beyond. But
science is not the whole of life. It must dominate the cognitive facul-
ties, but religion will dominate "the creative,** though the latter
whatever they are disappear rapidly into "the infinite azure*' of
TyndalPs rhetoric. 28
The speaker expressed these now familiar views with so much force
and eloquence that he produced along clerical spines something of
the authentic shivers of 1859. There was great excitement at the
meeting and great indignation in the newspapers, both Irish and
English. Huxley began to debate whether to give his own speech,
scheduled for the third evening, "On the Hypothesis that Animals
Are Automata, and its History.** It was the kind of scruple which he
loved to entertain and loved even more to dismiss. "I must grasp the
nettle," he told his young friend and assistant Lankester savoring
his reluctance. 29 Of course there was an immense crowd in the audi-
torium. He gave them one swift, appraising glance, then turned
down on the table his carefully prepared notes, and for ninety minutes
spoke eloquently and extemporaneously on an extremely intricate
subject.
"Animal Automatism" elaborates at length Tyndall's most offensive
282 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
theme with the firm optimism of a dentist assuring his patient that
the drill is painless. Descartes, says Huxley, had maintained that
animals are essentially machines without consciousness. With the
discovery of reflex action in the nineteenth century, scientists had
revived automatism and extended it to man. Under the formidable
aegis of the decerebrated frog and its German student Goltz, Huxley
expounds automatism in its boldest form, reducing consciousness to
a mere reflection or echo of molecular movement: psychic events in
the mind are caused by physical events in the nervous system. He thus
seems to assert not only that thought cannot affect action, but that
thought is impossible, for in recognizing only physical cause, he ex-
cludes causality from mental phenomena.
Some critics have felt that his educational achievements were thus
reduced to a paradox. But not necessarily. He could still maintain with
some logic that books, lectures, demonstrations, and other physical
stimuli being received into the nervous system and ingeniously com-
bined and stored up there may later result in useful behavior. The
ultimate tendency of Huxley's views is to magnify the utilitarian and
depreciate the liberal and aesthetic values of education. If the apprecia-
tion of poetry is a mere reflection of molecular movement, why culti-
vate poetry? That Huxley had no intention of undermining the
intellectual life and its pleasures need hardly be pointed out. What
he really wanted to do was to rescue psychology and morals from the
sinister contamination of invisible influence. For how could causes
be isolated, unless they could be weighed and described unless in
short they expressed themselves materially?
Huxley threw away the mind in order to preserve the brain in all
the sharp, precise integrity which his faith and his appetite for clear-
ness demanded. So one-sided a proceeding seldom leads to common
sense. In a cogent chapter of his Principles of Psychology, William
James points out besides much else against "the automaton-theory"
that pleasures and pains would hardly be so intense if the former
were not connected with truly beneficial and the latter with truly
injurious events. If it were not the sensation of burning which causes
a child to withdraw his finger from the flame, why should he be use-
lessly subjected to so much pain? Significantly, in The Descent of
Man, published some three years before Huxley's paper, Darwin
The Educator 283
leans toward James's view. Though acknowledging that many actions
are quite automatic, he has nothing to say of nerves and reflexes, and
a great deal to say of pleasure and pain and the efficacy of purpose and
choice. His whole discussion implies that consciousness is a salient
utility existing not only in man but at least to some degree in animals
as well. Darwin is as cautious and common sense as Huxley is bold
and doctrinaire.
Inevitably, Huxley's propaganda for scientific education led him
into conflict with Matthew Arnold. In 1869 Arnold had published
Culture and Anarchy, and solved the education problem by solving
all English problems. A Victorian prophet could do no less, and yet
of all Victorian prophets Arnold was the least obviously prophetic.
He was a seer who carried an umbrella, a Socrates who parted his
hair fastidiously in the middle. He dared to contaminate prophecy
with elegance, even with humor. Victorians were puzzled. They liked
to hear their doom pronounced with a fitting awfulness of rage. They
expected their Jeremiahs to lose their tempers.
At least Arnold's urbanity enabled him, in the midst of controversy,
to solidify a fast friendship with Huxley. These two men offer the
happy spectacle of antagonists who never fully realized how deeply
they were at variance. In spite of much cordiality and even more
agreement, they differed a little and differed profoundly. Basically,
one was a scientist and utilitarian and the other a poet and humanist,
yet there was much of the scientist in the poet, something of the poet
in the scientist, and a great deal of the moralist in both. One was too
dogmatic about his science; the other, too dogmatic about his poetic
and cultural intuitions. One was deficient in human and aesthetic
insight; the other, in abstract thought and definition. Both were
essentially stoics and at bottom unsympathetic to religion. Both hated
the narrow and benighted complacency of the middle class and recog-
nized the national need for more intelligence, a wider curriculum in
education, and a greater state control over schools. In fact, Arnold's
classicism was in many respects much like Huxley's science. The
"prime direct aim" of a liberal education, wrote Matthew Arnold, "is
to enable a man to faow himself and the world." 30 The definition
is almost exactly the same as Huxley's in "A Liberal Education,"
except that, in application, Arnold stresses inwardness and self-
284 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
knowledge and Huxley, action and a knowledge of the world and
nature. This difference in emphasis presaged, among other things, a
revolution in curriculum.
The two men had known each other at least since 1868, when
Huxley, as president o the Geological Society, invited Arnold to the
annual dinner. Apparently, they got along very well by secretly
admiring each other's talents and openly mocking each other's hob-
bies and stratagems. As Past and Present had its heroic Abbot Samson,
Culture and Anarchy had its oracular Bishop Wilson. Huxley de-
clared he had never heard of this perspicacious ecclesiastic and insisted
that Arnold had invented him, yet one day Arnold received the fol-
lowing letter :
My Dear Arnold Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness
and then inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful brown
smooth-handled umbrella which is not your property.
Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised and bring it
with you next time you come to the club. The porter will take care of it
for me,
Ever yours faithfully,
T. H. Huxley. 81
In Arnold's St. Paul and Protestantism, which appeared in 1870,
Huxley saw his own ideas and an attack on puritanism. He tells
Arnold he has been picking up many good things: "One of the best
is what you say near the end about science gradually conquering the
materialism of popular religion." 32 This idea he himself later used as
a weapon against Christian orthodoxy. The rest of the letter is devoted
to the narrowness of puritans. Huxley concludes, "I am glad you like
my Descartes article. My business with my scientific friends is some-
thing like yours with the Puritans, nature being our Paul."
This friendship, like many others, indicates Huxley's great per-
sonal force and magnetism. No doubt Arnold exhibited his usual
charm to gain his usual ends. Still, he seems to feel the weight of an
imposing knowledge and authority. He is eager to agree and grateful
for being agreed with. "It gave me strong pleasure," he wrote, "to find
you so fully owning the charm and salutariness of J. C. [Jesus Christ]
. . . The faults of Christianity come from its immense popularity,
and from good and bad, fit and unfit, impelled to have dealings with
it." a3 He also emphasizes that "the dictum about knowing 'the best
The Educator 28$
that has been known and said in the world' was meant to include
what has been done in science as well as in letters." 34 Inevitably, he
appeals to Huxley for advice and for facts. How could he get a higher
price for his books? Is the biology in a passage on Butler's arguments
for a future state correct? Arnold's last letter concludes, "Ever yours,
in spite of old age, poverty, low spirits and solitude." 35
The end of this friendship was enlivened by a polite, yet significant
disagreement. Speaking on "Science and Culture," Huxley gave on
October i, 1881, the inaugural address at the opening of Sir Josiah
Mason's Science College in Birmingham. Mason was a practical man
of business. He had made no provision for "mere literary instruction
and education." 36 Huxley saw in the occasion an opportunity to sum
up his whole campaign for scientific education in a swift, comprehen-
sive maneuver against his two principal foes: the men of business who
felt that rule of thumb was the best preparation for modern industry,
and the "levites of culture" who maintained that the Greek and Latin
classics were the best preparation for modern life. A science college
founded by a practical man was in itself a refutation of practical men.
Moreover, one cannot study applied science apart from pure science.
One must be able to think scientifically before one can apply scientific
thought to practical affairs.
But science had in fact already won its battle against rule of thumb.
Huxley turned this victory into a terrible warning to classicists by
boldly approving Mason's exclusion of literary instruction. A merely
scientific education, though less liberal than one which contained some
literature, was at least as liberal as one which contained nothing but
literature, and infinitely more liberal than one which contained
nothing but ancient literature in dead languages. The best training for
life was the scientific study of nature; the best training for citizenship,
the scientific study of society.
"Science and Culture" is moderate in statement, extreme in tend-
ency. It implies that a man had better know his environment than
know himself, that he can acquire ethical and human knowledge
more effectually through the general and impersonal language of
science than through the concrete and moving language of literature,
that science already has more to teach on humane subjects than do
the humanities themselves, that the classics possess no peculiar sanity,
no strategic centrality for the Western community.
286 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Arnold's reply was telling. Addressing an American audience on
"Literature and Science" (1883), he observed that scientists are
inclined to overlook human nature. They do not relate knowledge to
our sense of conduct or our sense of beauty. In fact, they hardly feel
the need to do so. Darwin was content with biology and the domestic
affections, and Faraday was a pious Sandemanian. But men cannot
live by formulas alone. Arnold went so far as to assert that the hairy
quadruped which, according to Darwin, eventually became human,
was not only "furnished with a tail and pointed ears," 3T but with an
ultimate and permanent necessity for Greek. Nowadays, even the
rdost stalwart classicists are scarcely so confident. Wisdom may have
been on Arnold's side, but the future was on Huxley's.*
Huxley was well aware that if England was to compete with such
nations as Germany and the United States, she must have not only
a corps of scientific experts but a great army of technicians. He opened
his campaign for technical education in 1877 with a speech at the
Workingmen's Institute and Club.f
"Technical Education*' is another revelation of the adroit politician.
It says very little, but says it with great skill and astuteness. Huxley's
object was of course to convince workingmen that they should have
some scientific training. He begins by telling them that they are all
really scientists and that all scientists, including himself, are really
handicraftsmen. They must therefore bear the elegant scorn of fine
literary men and armchair thinkers and here he does not scruple
to break philosophy mercilessly on the wheel of practical utility in
order to buy a little democratic patronage for science: the "grovelling
dissectors of monkeys and black beetles can [hardly] hope to enter
into the empyrean kingdom of speculation." 38 He also contrives
* Perhaps Arnold's criticisms were made before Arnold made them, for
in his address "On Science and Art in Relation to Education" (1882), Huxley
protested with almost pathetic fervor that he was definitely and indubitably
human and that he had never failed to take an interest in any work of art
or field of knowledge simply because it was interesting and vivid. Even so, his
criticism of life is still too much criticism and too little life, his education still
too much a method of producing scientists and "clear, cold logic engines."
t Workingmen's Clubs, formed to discourage drink and encourage self-
culture, had existed since the middle of the century.
The Educator 287
actually to enlist the British suspicion of mind in the service of mind
itself. Most students should not be allowed to study too much, but a
very few students can hardly study enough. Approximately one man
in a million is a genius, and he is as likely to come from the laboring
as from the upper classes. Such a man is invaluable to the nation. The
educational system must be an intellectual laissez faire in which the
genius can readily work his way to the top. Obviously, every working-
man's son carries a test tube in his schoolbag.
Who could resist such talk? Inevitably, the movement for technical
education formed itself around Huxley. He had been the leading spirit
in the Government's Science and Art Department, which already
offered technical instruction. He was now invited by a committee
of the wealthy Clothmakers Company to draw up a plan for ad-
vancing the cause. Soon, under his guidance, the City and Guilds
Institute had been established and was expending twenty-five thou-
sand pounds a year to provide an adequate knowledge of the scientific
principles involved in each trade. As President of the Royal Society,
Huxley was from 1883 to 1885 a member of the Guilds Committee,
and in that capacity once more exercised a wise and liberal influence
upon the institution which he had formed.
The renewed spectacle of so much political flair led to another
letter this time from George Howell, M.P. urging Huxley to enter
public life. He replied once more that he felt he could be more effective
outside: what he really wanted was to benefit science and to help the
masses of the people to help themselves.
Huxley's later papers on education dea} almost entirely with the
professional and technical phases. His address on "The Connection
of the Biological Sciences with Medicine" (1881) is a concentrated
little history of medical thought, tracing how a modified mechanism
gradually triumphs over animism based on trial and error. His c *The
State and the Medical Profession" (1884) proposes with almost a
Burke's resource in disguised innovation some sweeping new practi-
cal measures to be grafted on old principles and existing institutions.
It also indicates his reluctance to entrust to the state an educational
function which might be performed by a private agency. His last
word on this subject an address on technical education delivered in
1887 indicates the grim pressures behind revolution in the curricu-
288 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
him. 39 England cannot feed herself with what she produces on her
own soil. Therefore, she must produce efficiently and sell cheaply
or perish. Her only hope is in superior technical and scientific knowl-
edge, and she must grow in such knowledge as she grows in popula-
tion, Malthus with his flaming sword stands guardian before any
Eden of classical dilettantism or idyllic simplicity. Only a scientific
people can survive in a scientific future.
XV11
Triumphal Progress
TN the autumn o 1876, Huxley gave ultimate proofs at once of his
JL genius and his liberalism by discovering America. Few dis-
tinguished Europeans have been so little disillusioned by the adven-
ture. Huxley was extremely polite, instinctively sympathetic, some-
what reticent, perhaps not very deeply interested. What was to be
for his grandson a terrifying glimpse into the future was for the
eminent scientist himself a mild surprise and a great personal triumph.
America had long since discovered Huxley. An indefatigable cham-
pion of truth and progress, a monumental embodiment of rational
energy and moral force, he was something better than a great English-
man. He was a great Englishman with American virtues, a mirror
in which Americans might admire themselves in the most flattering
light and as a matter of fact, they were throughout his visit so
ecstatically intent upon their own reflections that they took little note
of the properties of the glass itself. Even before he had ever reached
its shores, the continent was rocked with thunders of applause. Huxley
was astonished and genuinely moved. He responded by behaving
precisely as a celebrity should, making brilliant speeches, acknowl-
edging plaudits, uttering memorable words on memorable occa-
and above all refraining from that strange and ungrateful
289
290 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
perversity o criticism which the contemplation o the American
scene had produced in Dickens and Mrs. Trollope.
The rigors of an American Welcome were to reveal that there were
limits to Huxley's strength. Had he entered politics, he might have
failed, as Grant-Duff had declared, for the lack of a sound digestion.
Huxley had at first intended simply to visit his elder sister and early
confidant "Lizzie," who had settled with her husband in Tennessee.
Some months before his departure an American who had named his
son Thomas Huxley sent through Frederic Harrison a startling
message: "The whole nation is electrified by the announcement that
Professor Huxley is to visit us next fall. We will make infinitely
more of him than we did of the Prince of Wales and his retinue of
lords and dukes." * Shortly after, American adulation took the sub-
stantial form of an offer of one hundred pounds to deliver the cere-
monial address at the opening of Johns Hopkins University.
After some hesitation, Huxley accepted the invitation, though he
refused the honorarium. He already knew the future president of
Johns Hopkins, having met him at Sir Lauder Brunton's and at one
of the gay, conspiratorial dinners of the X. Daniel Coit Oilman be-
longs to the heroic age of American college presidents, when a series
of f arsighted Yankees, armed with a few resolute millions, were buy-
ing up some of the best young brains of Europe. Oilman had ap-
pealed to Huxley for a biologist, and the latter had recommended his
former demonstrator H. U. Martin, who was then with signal success
to establish the first biological laboratory, as well as the methods of his
chief, in the United States.
A migration of the entire family seemed out of the question and
therefore, leaving such children as were still unmarried under the
care of Sir William and Lady Armstrong at Craigside, Huxley and
his wife set out on what he liked to call his "second honeymoon."
Then, as now, America was not only a house of glass, but a house of
magnifying glass. A crowd of reporters came on board as the Ger-
manic pulled into harbor. Standing on the deck, wrote Mr. Smalley,
London correspondent of the New Yor\ Tribune, the great scientist
enjoyed to the full the "marvellous panorama" of the New York sky-
line, for he was at all times "on intimate terms with Nature and also
with the joint work of Nature and Man." 2 As they drew near the
city, "he asked what were the tall tower and tall building with a
Triumphal Progress 291
cupola, then the two most conspicuous objects." "The Tribune and
Western Union Telegraph buildings," replied SmaUey. "Ah," said
Huxley, "that is interesting; that is American. In the Old World the
first thing that you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here
you see, first, centres of intelligence." Surely at that moment the
buttons on Mr. Smalley's waistcoat grew taut with pride. Surely
he swore silent allegiance to science in her warfare against religion.
After the tall buildings, the busy tugboats aroused Huxley's atten-
tion. He watched them earnestly for a long time and said at last, "If
I were not a man I think I should like to be a tug." For "they seemed
to him," explained Mr. Smalley somewhat chemically, "the condensa-
tion and complete expression of the energy and force in which he
delighted."
The Huxleys' welcome was hearty, sincere, spectacular, and exhaust-
ing. Mr. Appleton the publisher seized them at the dock and carried
them off to his country house at Riverdale. From there Mrs. Huxley
was hastened to the great summer resort at Saratoga, while Huxley
was taken to Yale University. There his guide was Professor O. C.
Marsh, a charming early example of the New England gentleman
crossed with the scientist and the frontiersman, who had risked his
scalp in Indian country many times to establish the genealogy of the
horse. Conventional in spite of his romantic exploits and as a provin-
cial somewhat in awe of the great Englishman, Marsh proposed the
accepted academic ritual of looking over the buildings. Again came
the masterly reply, cutting straight through American ceremony to
the American heart. "Show me what you have got inside them," said
Huxley; "I can see plenty of bricks and mortar in my own country.** 3
With a will Marsh led the way to the fossils.
And what fossils! "Brontotheres, pterodactyls, mosasauers and
plesiosauers, . . . perissodactyls and artiodactyls," chants A Century
of Science in America* Now at last Huxley had sailed into his own
particular New York harbor. He was a little surprised to find that the
New World was so very old. "The most wonderful thing I ever saw!"
he wrote his wife. 5 Meanwhile, he could not escape the Great Ameri-
can Welcome, nor did he really want to. Installed in the luxurious
apartments of Marsh's uncle, "the millionaire Peabody," he was
promptly called on by the Governor and interviewed by a reporter,
who noted with surprise very little of the "highfalutin" philosopher
292 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
and much o "the commercial or mercantile" type. 6 Marsh collected
notables for him to meet, took him to teas and dinners, told him
Western stories, and drove him up and down New Haven, whose
stately avenues, roofed and bordered with tall elms, pleased him very
much. "I assure you I am being 'made of/ " he wrote Mrs. Huxley
with jovial satisfaction, "as I thought nobody but the little wife was
foolish enough to do."
But lionizing was restricted to leisure hours. Each day from nine
to six was devoted to the serious business of several hundred thousand
years ago. Marsh had brought forth his prehistoric horses only after
some hesitation because they did not fit into Huxley's published
theories. But Huxley was shortly to give a lecture on the subject in
New York, and he must know the facts. He was equal to them. Point
by point, bone by bone, the two men argued their way back into
hippian history. And now the apostle of method received a lesson
in methodology from his provincial colleague. Time and again Huxley
demanded proof, and each time Marsh simply asked his assistant to
fetch box number so and so. The right bone always appeared to illus-
trate the right point. "I believe you are a magician," exclaimed
Huxley at last. "Whatever I want, you just conjure it up." 7 At the
end of two days he capitukted. The horse, unknown to the New
World when Columbus landed, had indeed originated there rather
than in the Old. It had evolved from a small, four-toed animal * to
the large, hoofed animal we now know. But, as Marsh tells the story,
his own discoveries were less remarkable than Huxley's magnanimity
in accepting them.
Huxley was grateful to Marsh for an intellectual, even more for a
moral, benefit: now at last he could believe in evolution with a good
conscience: he had the ultimate proofs which his intensely scrupulous
nature had so long demanded. "No collection which has been hitherto
formed," he wrote shortly after this time, "approaches that made by
Professor Marsh, in the completeness of the chain of evidence by
which certain existing mammals are connected with their older
tertiary ancestry." 8 He left Yale with regret.
Once more reunited, he and Mrs. Huxley went on to Boston, con-
versed with the daughters of Longfellow and Hawthorne, attended
a scientific meeting at Buffalo, and then, as befitted second honey*
*Orohippus. Marsh shortly after discovered a five-toed horse (Eohippus).
Triumphal Progress 293
mooners, spent a week at Niagara. Huxley was at first disappointed
by the Falls, but after observing them from below and passing behind
the wall of water into the Cave of the Winds, he yielded to the spell
of this thundering manifestation of nature's energy. He liked to sit
of an evening and listen to the low sound, distinctly audible despite
the water's roar, of the grinding of great stones at the foot of the cata-
ract.
From Niagara they went on to Nashville, Tennessee, where
Huxley's elder sister, Mrs. Scott, awaited them at the house of her son.
As the train pulled in, Henrietta at once spotted the old lady among
the crowd on the platform by her piercing black eyes and strongly
Huxleyan features. "Tom" was then fifty-one, with spectacles, side-
whiskers, a great reputation, and long experience in ways of command
and responsibility. "Lizzy" was sixty-two, with deep lines and gray
hair and the memory of a great civil war in which her sons had
fought and been defeated. What did these two feel and think, and
what did they say to each other? On this intensely personal point,
as so often, Huxley is silent in his letters.
As a matter of fact, he had very little time for thought, feeling, or
words, for in Nashville he experienced for the first time the full
and unabated rigors of welcome. A performing pterodactyl or a
domesticated dinosaur could hardly have aroused a more lively curi-
osity among the citizens of Nashville than the great English thinker
and evolutionist. He was exhibited and observed at every possible
opportunity, and his every breath and action were recorded in the
newspapers. No fascinating fossils in the cool privacy of the laboratory
this time. In the moist, sweltering heat of a Southern summer, he
visited a public school, the new Vanderbilt University, the state
capitol. He spoke to children on the street and exchanged heavy
witticisms with the head of a theological seminary. At his nephew's
house, a continual stream of visitors rapidly wore him down and
finally drove him to his room. A deputation then waited on him,
begging that he either deliver an address, be entertained at a public
dinner, or "state his views" presumably to a reporter. Faced with
these terrible alternatives, Huxley chose the address, and leaving his
wife to receive callers, retired for the greater part of a day to prepare
a few notes on the geology of Tennessee. Because of the heat,, he spoke
in the evening.
294 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Professor Huxley was greeted last night by the best people of Nashville
[explained The Daily American the next morning]. The professional
men, the solid business men, and the beauty and fashion of the city, and
with them the curiosity seekers, who paid their tribute to the great scientist
whose fame had preceded him. The audience was not only select. It was
a public demonstration which showed the deep interest which all classes
feel in the progress of modern investigation. 9
The best people of Nashville did not escape without actually contem-
plating some of the fruits of modern investigation. Huxley was utterly
exhausted and in very poor voice, yet, speaking of slow geological
changes such as that illustrated by Niagara Falls, he could not refrain
from uttering the defiant whisper:
During that vast time the population of the earth has undergone a slow,
constant and gradual change, one species giving way to another. ... I
need not say that this view of the past history of the globe is a very different
one from that which is commonly taken. It is so widely different that it
is impossible to effect any kind of community, any kind of parallel, far
less any sort of reconciliation between these two. One of these must be
true. The other is not. 10
He insisted no more on this unpleasant issue; and when he had
finished speaking, the crowd applauded wildly. Perhaps they thought
strange opinions quite normal for a domesticated dinosaur. Perhaps
they felt there might even be something in evolution, for, as an
editorial hopefully pointed out, "devout Roman Catholics, like Prof.
Jerome Cochrane of Mobile, and distinguished Presbyterian divines,
like Atkinson of Virginia, hold the views of Darwin and Huxley." 11
But apparently, in its enthusiasm for progress and enlightenment,
Nashville failed to carry along the rest of Tennessee, for after nearly
fifty years of further progress and enlightenment a Mr. Scopes was
found guilty in a spectacular court trial of violating a state law which
forbade the teaching of evolution in the public schools.
The visitors now journeyed to Cincinnati and finally to Baltimore
for Huxley's address at the opening of the Johns Hopkins University.
Here the profits of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad seemed actually
to have called into being a Utopia of the mind. Johns Hopkins was to
be not a club, a mausoleum, or a clotheshorse for the latest architec-
tural fad, but a place of learning, a professors' and students' university.
After half had been subtracted for a hospital, its considerable endow-
Triumphal Progress 295
ment was to be devoted to faculty salaries and the financing of
research.
Surely, here was a theme to call forth the fire of Huxley's enthusi-
asm. Unfortunately, his fire was still guttering desperately under ever
increasing gales of hospitality. The day before the address was to be
given, he had gone off to see Washington and returned very tired,
only to be told that he must attend a formal dinner and a reception
that evening. "I don't know how I shall stand it!" he exclaimed. 12
Shutting himself up in his room, he took two hours' rest, but then
had to dictate his lecture before going out. He had planned to deliver
it from notes; in that case, reporters had explained, they would have
to take it down as well as they could and then telegraph it to the
Associated Press, so that it could be published in New York papers
the following morning. This procedure summoned up such a night-
mare vision of possible error piled on error that, undergoing a fresh
and heroically inconspicuous martyrdom for truth, Huxley dictated
"to a stenographer, in cold and irresponsive seclusion the speech
which he expected to make before a receptive and hospitable assem-
bly." 13 The stenographer promised to return a fair copy early the
next morning, but it did not come until the last moment before the
ceremony. Glancing at it on his way to the lecture hall, Huxley dis-
covered with horror that it was written on "flimsy,*' from which he
could not possibly read with any effect. He wisely resolved once more
to speak ex tempore and did so with fluency, though what was
recorded in Baltimore differed inevitably from what was published
in New York. Huxley liked to say afterwards that though both
versions represented the speaker's words, a future historian might
reasonably pronounce them spurious and conclude that the address
had never really been given.
As a finished essay, "University Education" is somewhat dis-
appointing. A new world had apparently brought very litde new
illumination, or perhaps in that moment of exhaustion nothing could
illuminate him. He confines himself pretty much to education,
emphasizing the importance of theory to a nation obviously too much
devoted to practice. Significantly, he expresses cautious sympathy for
many tendencies now dominant in the American university system.
He disapproves of entrance requirements, prefers course examinations
to comprehensive examinations, and maintains that research is best
296 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
pursued in combination with teaching. With regard to medical
training, he insists that it should be strictly professional, without
liberal frills. A doctor should know what is useful to his patients, not
what is pleasant and broadening to himself. He strongly approves of
Johns Hopkins for preferring brains to architecture and, in terms
which must have delighted the crowd, advises the governing body
of the university to build it a sumptuous fagade a hundred years
hence, when it has provided everything necessary to study and learn-
ing.
Only at the very end of his speech does Huxley turn to the larger
theme of the United States itself. He begins with a handsome compli-
ment:
To an Englishman landing upon your shores for the first time, travelling
for hundreds of miles through strings of great and well-ordered cities,
seeing your enormous actual, and almost infinite potential, wealth in all
commodities, and in the energy and ability which turn wealth to account,
there is something sublime in the vista of the future. 14
But then, taking one lens from Arnold's spectacles and another from
Malthus's, he gives the American future a long, scrutinizing look.
I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness,
or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory
does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sub-
limity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do
with all these things? . . . Forty millions at your first centenary, it is
reasonably to be expected that, at the second, these states will be occupied
by two hundred millions of English-speaking people, spread over an area
as large as that of Europe, and with climates and interests as diverse as
those of Spain and Scandinavia, England and Russia. You and your
descendants have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together
under the forms of a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage;
whether state rights will hold out against centralisation, without separa-
tion; whether centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised
monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent
bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pres*
sure of want is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk among you,
and communism and socialism will claim to be heard. . . . The one con-
dition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual
clearness of the individual citizen. 15
Triumphal Progress 297
As these words were spoken, there crept over the huge auditorium,
crowded as usual "with the beauty, wealth, and intelligence of a
great American city," a somewhat tenser silence. 16 The great evolu-
tionist had confronted confident Americans with un-American possi-
bilities of evolution. He went no further, but concluded with a congrat-
ulatory glance into the future of the university itself, when students
"wander hither from all parts of the earth, as of old they sought
Bologna, or Paris, or Oxford." 17 There was immense applause
partly, perhaps, the applause of relief. He had not meant to scold.
Huxley's blessing did not particularly help the new university. A
sensational letter appeared in a New York religious weekly com-
plaining that not only had Huxley been included, but the prayer had
been omitted, from the Hopkins inaugural program. Another letter,
which came into President Oilman's hands, put the point even more
forcefully: "It was bad enough to invite Huxley. It were better to
have asked God to be present. It would have been absurd to ask them
both/' 18 For several years the spoken address and the unspoken
prayer hung like two dark clouds over the university's future.
Ignorant of the theological lightening he had drawn down, or
ignoring it, Huxley went on to New York, where he was to give
three lectures on evolution. For three nights he was a front-page
sensation. Jenny Lind herself could not have packed Chickering Hall
any tighter. An immense crush, wrote the New Yor% Tribune, but
"a highly respectable crush." 19 At exactly eight o'clock the first
evening Professor Huxley appeared on the platform amid great
applause. "He laid a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost upon the reading
desk; nothing else, neither manuscript nor notes." 20 Leaning slightly
forward over the desk, he began to speak in low, measured tones.
He did not gesture, though sometimes he grasped the desk with both
hands and leaned over it even more intently. There was deep silence
throughout the hall.
These "Lectures on Evolution" are models at once of expository and
polemical economy. By adroit Voltairean arrangement and maneuver,
he tears down the Pentateuch with one hand and builds the new
gospel of evolution beside its ruins with the other. In his first lecture
he presents three hypotheses of terrestrial history: either present
conditions have always existed, or they were specially created some
five thousand years ago Huxley illustrated from Milton rather than
298 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Moses or they have evolved gradually by a natural process. In the
subsequent lectures he demolishes the first and second hypotheses
by demonstrating that the third is the only one which fits the facts of
science, and then, setting up an opposition between morals and ortho-
doxy, he insists that loyalty to truth must come before loyalty to
creed. He also enlists national pride against Christian orthodoxy,
using American scenery to batter Hebrew cosmogony. By the sheer
weight of superior grandeur and antiquity the geological past of the
United States belittles and discredits the theological past of the Old
Testament. The Connecticut Sandstone is a great manuscript record-
ing events many hundred times older than the oldest events recorded
in the Bible. Niagara Falls is a kind of sublime waterclock measuring
out thirty thousand years between us and certain insignificant shell-
fish whose remains are to be found in the region.
The last two lectures marshal recent discoveries to fill out two
important gaps in the geological record the development of birds
from reptiles and the long and intricate history of the horse. In large
degree these lectures are Marsh's facts expressed in Huxley's style.
They were enthusiastically received by the audience and by all news-
papers except the Sun, which was determined in misapprehension
and disapproval. The first lecture was in its opinion too discreet.
"Instead of attacking Moses over the shoulders of John Milton, he
should strike at Moses, face to face." 21 The second lecture was too
rudimentary. "It is evident . . . that Professor Huxley believes his
audience to be totally lacking in scientific knowledge." 22 Actually,
of course, the "Lectures," apparently written during his sojourn in
the United States, were an impressive compliment to his audience.
Clearly, he thought America well worth making safe for Darwinism.
But respect does not imply interest or understanding. Character-
istically, he had, even for a scientist, a great deal to say of America's
extinct animals and very little to say of her living human population.
He returned to England with a firm belief in the paleontological
significance of Orohippus and Hesperornis Regalis and a humorous
and somewhat rueful perception into the fallibility of the American
reporter. "I had a very pleasant trip in Yankee-land," he announced
to Professor Baynes, "and did not give utterance to a good deal that I
am reported to have said there." 28 Of course he lost no time trumpet-
ing Orohippus and Hesperornis to a London audience, and shortly
Triumphal Progress 299
after wrote to Marsh, thanking him once more and complimenting
him on the recent discovery of Eohippus, a still older equine*
And now Huxley's whole life was becoming a triumphal progress
through a world of fame and achievement. In 1877 he published his
American Addresses, Physiography, and Manual of Invertebrate
Anatomy; in 1878, his Hume and an Introductory Primer for the
Science Primer Series. In 1878 also he was made president of the new
Association for Liberal Thinkers and, by way of contrast, a Governor
of Eton College. In the same year just two years after he had soundly
lectured her on the occasion of Darwin's degree he received an
LL.D. from Cambridge. Orthodoxy was bowing to the heretic. "I
find 53," he wrote Dohrn a little later, "to be a very youthful period of
existence. I have been better physically, and worked harder mentally,
this last twelve-month than in any other period of my life.'* 24
In 1881, when the School of Mines was absorbed by the new Nor-
mal School in Kensington, he was made Dean of the College and
Professor of Biology. He bore his new responsibilities with irrepres-
sible high spirits, and was much amused by his new tide. "I am
astonished," he wrote Sir John Donnelly, his immediate superior in
the Education Department, "that you don't know that a letter to a
Dean ought to be addressed 'The Very Revd.' I don't generally stand
much upon etiquette, but when my sacred character is touched I
draw the line." 25
His official life had now migrated from the cramped, downtown
bustle and noise of Jermyn Street to the newly constructed splendor
and spaciousness of the Normal School, known from 1890 as the Im-
perial College of Science. The vast institution at the edge of Kensing-
ton Gardens fabulous symbol of the marriage between Victorian
wealth and Victorian science was then just beginning to unfold its
wild and eclectic grandeur, a nightmare yet undreamed save by its ar-
chitects. But there already rose in red brick and rich mosaic the ornate
Gothic spire of the Albert Monument, where Arthurian romance
mingled suggestions with the Arabian Nights, and the pomp of
India mysteriously joined hands with the primness of England, There
expanded also the giant, squat, Georgian rotundity of Albert Hall,
where Wagner was hissed and Bright applauded. And all around,
more and more extensively as time went on, rose the Imperial College
300 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
itself a wilderness of red brick, five stories of Victorian suburbia,
blossoming at the sixth into the turrets of Camelot and the minarets
of Bagdad. Here the Huxley Building presents the comparatively
modest and rational suggestion of a prosperous nonconformist church
surmounted by a Venetian palace or an arcade from the Alhambra.
There the Natural History Museum raises acres of striped yellow and
brown brick in Moorish ladrillado up into whole forests of early
Norman spires populated by whole zoos of guardian wolves and lions.
In this Victorian Nineveh Huxley gave lectures, conducted ex-
aminations, and did all the dignified and august things that deans do.
His letters betray no unwonted excitement, no sense of architectural
bewilderment or artistic prostration. He simply accepted these build-
ings, as he accepted the mastodon and the emu.
One gets a vivid picture of Huxley at this almost legendary period.
He was by no means lost in his setting. To curious visitors and casual
hero-worshipers, to flustered assistants and awe-stricken students, the
Dean of the College of Science must have seemed at least as impressive
as the facade of the Natural History Building and sometimes nearly
as uninviting. Oliver Lodge remembered all his life the cold eye
which Huxley bent upon him when as a young man he had, even
though with good reason, ventured for the first time on a few friendly
words. 26 Above many a relatively innocuous social occasion, the
Dean hung like a poised avalanche, likely at any moment to come
down with a terrible crashing and splintering of the amenities upon
the head of some minor offender. Where there was so much rectitude,
discipline, and dedication, there could be little sympathy for weak-
ness, little reluctance in castigation. In fact, there was no reluctance
whatever. When Duncan Darroch, apparently a technician, wrote
him that Professor Frankland never showed his face in the chemistry
laboratory, and authorized him to do what he saw fit with the letter,
Huxley replied, "Exercising the discretionary power you gave me, I
will forward it to Dr. Frankland." 27 When his brother-in-law Joseph
B. Heathorn wrote that in turning over his father's papers, he had
found a note bequeathing a gold watch to Huxley's eldest son,
Huxley answered in the following words, "So many years have
elapsed since your father's death, that his unregarded wishes had
better so far as my son is concerned go unfulfilled; and I must beg
leave on my son's behalf to decline the watch." 28 What lay behind
Triumphal Progress 301
this need to sacrifice ordinary people so ruthlessly on the altar of his
own high principles?
An illuminating impression of Huxley at this time was recorded by
Beatrice Potter, later Mrs. Sidney Webb. She sought an interview with
him regarding Herbert Spencer, who wanted her to be his literary
executor. Under May 6, 1886, she wrote in her diary:
Throughout the interview, what interested me was not Huxley's account
of Spencer but Huxley's account of himself. . . . How as a young man,
though he had no definite purpose in life he felt power; was convinced
that in his own line he would be a leader. That expresses Huxley: he is
a leader of men. I doubt whether science was pre-eminently the bent of
his mind. He is truthloving, his love of truth finding more satisfaction in
demolition than in construction. He throws the full weight of thought,
feeling, will, into anything that he takes up. He does not register his
thoughts and his feelings: his early life was supremely sad, and he con-
trolled the tendency to look back on the past and forward into the future.
When he talks to man, woman, or child he seems all attention and he has,
or rather had, the power of throwing himself into the thoughts and feel-
ings of others and responding to them. And yet they are all shadows to
him: he thinks no more of them and drops back into the ideal world he
lives in. For Huxley, when not working, dreams strange things: carries
on lengthy conversations between unknown persons living within his
brain. There is a strain of madness in him; melancholy has haunted his
whole life. 1 always knew that success was so much dust and ashes. I have
never been satisfied with achievement/ None of the enthusiasm for what
is, or the silent persistency in discovering facts; more the eager rush of the
conquering mind, loving the fact of conquest more than the land of the
conquered. And consequently his achievement has fallen far short of his
capacity. Huxley is greater as a man than as a scientific thinker. The
exact opposite might be said of Herbert Spencer. 28
Perhaps he seemed to Beatrice Potter a little more mystical than he
actually was. Perhaps he was a little more mystical in the presence of
a striking young woman than in that of aldermen or gamekeepers.
Even so, the passage is full of hints and suggestions. One notes particu-
larly the sadness in early life, the want of purpose coupled with a
sense of power, the tendency to look forward and back, the need al-
ways to be destroying and conquering in the name of truth. Clearly,
there were things which he dared not face. One suspects in Huxley
despite his dedicated optimism and his demonstrations of clockwork
302 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
harmony a deep sense that the universe is hostile. Darwinism pro-
vided that sense of hostility with a rationale, which in such essays as
"The Struggle for Existence" Huxley had already begun to develop.
And now other authors confirmed him. "Butler's 'Analogy' is un-
assailable," he wrote Darwin, "and there is nothing in theological
dogmas more contradictory to our moral sense, than is to be found
in the facts of nature." 30 One thinks of the calm, strong angel in
"Science and Education," with his threat of "nature's pluck," which
is extermination.
Perhaps, also, Huxley was afraid to face himself. He had found in
life no satisfying constructive purpose, no human or intellectual end
large enough for the working of his whole mind and spirit. Yet he
could not live with that haunting vacancy. He had devoted himself
to demolition, gladiatorial combat, desultory presidencies to achieve-
ments that seemed to promise peace but always turned to "so much
dust and ashes." No less in his fastidious pride could he be content
with himself morally. Some sense of guilt or impurity hinted at
perhaps in the famous letter to Kingsley * kept him always at his
treadmill of self-discipline. Mere human nature he could not accept,
either in himself or others. "The great thing in the world," he wrote
on the occasion of Leonard's eighteenth birthday, "is not so much to
seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect." 31 He tried strenu-
ously for a lifetime to earn them. More and more through these
years his triumphal progress looks like a flight from reality.
But what the world saw in the Dean of the College was of course
"the leader of men." Huxley's rule, writes Professor T. Jeff ery Parker,
was characterised by what is undoubtedly the best policy for the head of a
department. To a new subordinate, "The General," as he was always
called, was rather stern and exacting, but when once he was convinced
that his man was to be trusted, he practically let him take his own course;
never interfered in matters of detail, accepted suggestions with the greatest
courtesy and good humour, and was always ready with a kindly and
humorous word of encouragement in times of difficulty. I was once
grumbling to him about how hard it was to carry on the work of the
* "Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse
than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds
of sin than I." (Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley,
New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1901, 1, 237.) The statement is of course
exasperated.
Triumphal Progress 303
laboratory through a long series of November fogs, "when neither sun
nor stars in many days appeared." "Never mind, Parker/' he said, in-
stantly capping my quotation, "cast four anchors out of the stern and
wish for day." 32
In the classroom Huxley was clear, precise, austerely eloquent, with
occasional flashes of epigram and caustic humor, but with no hint
of the facetiousness or small jocularity in which many lecturers
indulge. "As one listened to him," wrote Jeffery Parker, "one felt
that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a
life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing as
to win a battle." 33 In the laboratory, which he seldom visited in later
years, he was a sudden and rather terrible presence, but not without
occasional declensions into humor, or even into humanity. Professor
H. F. Osborn recalled that he once appeared at the elbow of an
Irish student notorious for his anatomical drawings in watercolor.
Turning over the pages of the young man's drawing book, Huxley
paused at a large blur which was carefully labeled, "sheep's liver."
"I am glad to know that is a liver,*' he observed with a gentle smile;
"it reminds me as much of Cologne cathedral in a fog as of anything
I have ever seen before." 34 At an examination he passed a country
boy who had declared the mitral valve to be on the right side of the
heart. "Poor little beggar!" exclaimed Huxley, "I never got ...
[it] correctly myself until I reflected that a bishop was never in the
right." 35
Despite his austerity, there was that in Huxley which lifted the
mind to admiration and filled the heart with loyalty. He left a stir
of feeling and wonder behind him when he passed. Cabmen refused
to accept his fare, and messengers asked him for a chance signature
on an envelope. Fathers wrote him after their sons' deaths how much
their sons had owed him, and after his own death, his former victim
St. George Mivart was proud to write an essay of laudatory recollec-
tion and anecdote. 36 His assistants prosaic, critical men hardened in
the academic routine broke into poetry at the thought of him. Pro-
fessor E. Ray Lankester wrote:
There has been no man or woman whom I have met on my journey
through life, whom I have loved and regarded as I have him, and I feel
that the world has shrunk and become a poor thing, now that his splendid
304 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
spirit and delightful presence are gone from it. Ever since I was a little boy
he has been my ideal and hero. 37
Meanwhile, Huxley's eldest son Leonard, then eighteen and a
student at St. Andrews, had won a scholarship for Oxford, As one
academic potentate to another, his father wrote a letter to Benjamin
Jowett. To youthful Oxonians and to many eminent personages who
had once been youthful Oxonians, the Master of Balliol was some-
thing in the way of a Delphic Oracle. In fact, "the voice was the man"
a "cherubic chirp," which emerged from terrible silence under the
auspices of a "commanding forehead" and an "infantine smile." 38
Viceroys were uneasy in his presence because viceroys had been his
students; nor did tutorial conferences necessarily cease with gradua-
tion. In a sense, Jowett counseled an empire as Delphos counseled
a civilization.
Like most mysteries, Jowett was full of contradictions. He despised
learning and research, yet he introduced Hegel to Oxford and by his
elegant translations reintroduced Plato to England, He sneered at
logic as a dodge, yet he wanted to set Christian doctrine on a sound
logical and scientific basis. He apparently believed in a personal God
and in the teachings of Jesus, yet in his writings and public utterances
he seemed so broad and liberal a churchman that agnostics like
Leslie Stephen thought he should take off his surplice and give up
the protection of Balliol, Above all, Jowett was a schoolmaster. As
such, he employed the method of Socrates to achieve the results of the
sophists. The Socratic question led first to clarity of thought but
ultimately to worldly success. Too shy and timid, beneath his peda-
gogical facade, to go out into the world himself, he urged his students
to do so and was as ambitious for them as he was for Balliol herself.
Toward ladies and toward men of genius, this eccentric and
rather awful academic personage was meek and amicable. To Ten-
nyson he was a properly deferential admirer; to Browning, a delight-
ful breakfast companion who preached surreptitiously on Sunday; to
Mrs. Huxley, an engaging bachelor who wrote arch answers to arch
invitations. To Huxley himself, Jowett was something between an
awed hero-worshiper and a sagacious tutor in disguise. He was also
a comrade-in-arms. Friendship had been almost inevitable between
one o the authors of Essays and Reviews and the author of Man's
Place in Nature.
Triumphal Progress 305
I am trying to introduce or rather to persuade others to introduce
[Jowett wrote Huxley in 1877] more physical science into the university.
I am inclined to think that some kind of it (as of Arithmetic) should be
one of the requirements for a degree. Some scientific men appear to be
opposed to this on the ground that it will lower the character of such
studies. I cannot agree with them; no study can reach a very high standard
with the mass of students. Yet it may do them great good and gain some-
thing from them in return. 39
Huxley could have confidence in such a man. When Leonard came
to Oxford in 1880, Jowett took his career in charge. A shrewd judge
of character, and an even shrewder judge of success, he quickly
decided that Leonard should be a barrister: he had a very clear,
cool head. But Leonard wanted to get married. "The nearest way to
attain that happiness," Jowett wrote Mrs. Huxley with distaste,
"would be to become a Schoolmaster." 40 The clear, cool head was
not dominant. Leonard became a schoolmaster and got married.
Meanwhile, Jowett was occupied with the father:
It is a good thing [he wrote in 1885] to have been P.R.S. [President of
the Royal Society] and a good thing to have resigned and have the re-
maining years of life free for study and reflection. All the past may be
gathered up in them and there is no reason to fear that the powers of re-
flection will fail. I have a sort of faith that the last ten years of life may be
the best, if only undisturbed, and the calmest and the wisest and the fullest
of invention and creation and the freest from illusion. 41
Jowett now attempted to take Huxley's last ten years in hand. To be
sure, he was only a very courteous and indirect adviser. It was a deli-
cate and fearful task to direct so large and powerful "a logic engine"
along fruitful paths. "What a tremendous controversialist he is!"
Jowett wrote Mrs. Huxley, with an involuntary shudder. "Such
smashing blows! I who am a coward and a man of peace admire his
heroic qualities, but I should like also to hear without controversy
what he would say on some of the Ethical and Philosophical Prob-
lems of the day." 42 By insinuation, by compliment, by gentle depreca-
tion, by confidential indoctrination of Mrs. Huxley, he tried to
deflect the logic engine from shattering creeds and occupying presi-
dential chairs, and to set it once more to making discoveries, not only
scientific but ethical and philosophical. "In the present state of the
world," he observed inconspicuously at the end of a more sententious
306 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
passage, "the decomposing process goes on fast enough generally
whereas there is little or nothing done." 43 One may be a little sur-
prised that he hoped for so much constructive action from Huxley.
To be sure, his attitude reflects the growing superstition about science.
Science had produced physical miracles why not moral?
I am . . . pleased [wrote Jowett] that you do not altogether throw
cold water on the suggestion, which seems to have occurred to your own
mind, that you should try to find a new basis for morals now when it
seems likely to be buried under physics. There is no subject which it is
more natural to consider in the late years of life or one of which the con-
sideration is more needed than at the present time. All men are asking on
what principle they must live and they want an answer independent of
the traditional theology: Will you lend them a helping hand? My impres-
sion is that the answer will come with more effect from you than from
any theologian. 4 *
Very late, perhaps too late Huxley began to do what Jowett wanted.
Had he lived longer, he might even have followed Jowett's advice.
In a progressive country, even orthodoxy is only liberalism a little
behind the times. In 1881 Oxford considered Huxley for two of her
most important posts. He was sounded with regard first to the
Linacre Professorship of Physiology and then to the Mastership of
University College. His own respectability astonished him. "I begin
to think," he wrote Leonard, "I may yet be a Bishop." 45 He refused
both offers. Huxley at Oxford would have been Huxley incessantly
at war. It was easier to convert England than to convert Oxford.
When offered a Fishery inspectorship, however, he promptly
accepted and without vacating any of his other posts. As one of the
two inspectors of the realm, Huxley had both practical and scientific
duties. He had to study fish and fish diseases, investigate weirs and
salmon runs, settle disputes, pass on local by-laws, and write reports.
The veteran of several Fishery commissions and principal author of
one of "the ablest and most exhaustive" reports on the subject ever
laid before Parliament, Huxley was thoroughly at his ease with the
work and looked forward cheerfully to combining his two favorite
pleasures of discovering new scientific truth and "jamming" it "down
the throats of fools." 46 As a matter of fact, he did work out the life
cycle of the salmon disease Saprolegnia ferax, and amassed much
Triumphal Progress 307
valuable information about the herring and the cod. He also conveyed
this, and doubtless much other, truth either gently or forcefully down
the throats of politicians and fishermen. But the old savor was gone.
If the advantage of his new post was much walking in the open air,
its disadvantages were heavy dinners and interminable hearings. At
first he was tolerant. A gala exhibition of fish and fishing tackle
evoked mild approval. "Afterwards," he wrote, "a mighty dejeuner
in the St. Andrew's Hall a fine old place looking its best. I was just
opposite the Princess, and could not help looking at her with wonder-
ment. She looked so fresh and girlish. She came and talked to me
afterwards in a very pleasant simple way." 47 But fat aldermen and
talkative poachers were far more frequent than royal princesses.
Within a few months Huxley had come to loathe dinners and abhor
meetings. "Will you tell me what all this has to do with my business
in life," he wrote Flower, "and why the last fragments of a misspent
life that are left to me must be frittered away in all this drivel?" * 8
In fact, behind its stately f a$ade of political and oratorical achieve-
ment, his life was becoming an ever swifter melodrama of looming
deadlines and paralyzing frustration. He seldom had time to finish
anything and least of all his scientific researches, which after 1870
became more feverish and more fruitless. Ironically, at the very time
when the multiplicity of official duties prevented him from achieving
anything considerable, his powers of intellectual concentration seem
to have reached their heights. When he studied crayfish, he ate, drank,
slept, and breathed crayfish. In 1878 he was so deep in the inverte-
brate complexities of the rare creature spirula that when one of the
demonstrators came to him with a question about the brain of a cod-
fish, he looked up blankly and replied, "Codfish? That's a vertebrate,
isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll consider it." 4S But some-
thing always intervened to render concentration useless. Spirula lay
on his worktable for months and even years.
Interruptions did not always spring from official business. In 1878
diphtheria invaded his family and brought his daughter Madge to
such a crisis that poor Huxley, for all his discipline, could think o
almost nothing else. In the midst of an after-dinner speech, he broke
down for the first time in his life, and for one painful moment forgot
what he had to say.
All permanence seemed to be disappearing from his life. In 1882
3oS Apes, Angels, and Victorians
he lost both a master and a disciple. In April, Darwin died at Down;
in the summer, Francis Balf our fell from a precipice while ascending
one of the peaks of Mont Blanc. Both blows struck home, but
Darwin's career was full and complete, whereas Balfour's had scarcely
begun. Moreover, he was Huxley's scientific heir, the alter ego who
was to have completed Huxley's work. Now that work might never
be done. "A paper *On the Characters of the Pelvis' . . in 1879, is
full of suggestive thought," says Sir Michael Foster, "but its conclud-
ing passages seem to suggest that others . . . were to carry out the
ideas." 50
After Balfour's death, Huxley made redoubled efforts. Often, after
a long afternoon at a public hearing, he would snatch a half hour at
his laboratory bench before going home. Yet when in 1883 the oppor-
tunity offered, he became temporary President, and then in 1884
duly elected President of the Royal Society. He was obviously too
busy, perhaps already too ill, to assume additional burdens. But to
earn, and then refuse, the crown of an official scientific career-
Huxley was in this respect very human; he dearly loved a presidency.
And now the gap between what he wanted to do and what he had
to do, even between what he had to do and what he had strength to
do, grew wider and wider. He was physically and spiritually ex-
hausted. The universe seemed less and less rational, life less and less
permanent and meaningful. No wonder that he found himself long-
ing for the immortality which in years past he had so firmly rejected.
It is a curious thing [he wrote Morley] that I find my dislike to the
thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal.
It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that in
1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in
1800. 1 had sooner be in hell a good deal at any rate in one of the upper
circles, where the climate and company are not too trying. 51
From the later portraits his sharp, alert features look out with a
settled and persistent sadness.
A succession of illnesses now followed. "In reply to your
letter . . . ," he wrote Donnelly, "I have the honour to state * . . that
I have (a) had all my teeth out; (b) partially sprained my right
thumb; (c) am very hot; (d) can't smoke with comfort." 52 He could
also eat nothing but gruel, he had developed a liver complaint, and
Triumphal Progress 309
his hand was like lead, so that he could scarcely hold a scalpel. Worst
of all, he was so utterly exhausted that the thought of the day's work
very nearly nauseated him. His only consolation was Gordon's stand
against the Sudanese. "I should like to see him lick the Mahdi into
fits," he declared, "before Wolseley gets up." 53 The exhausted man
took several brief vacations without benefit. Finally, Sir Andrew
Clark informed him that he would suffer a real breakdown if he did
not take a prolonged rest.
Convinced that he had betrayed South Kensington and the Royal
Society, exposed England to a civil war between the rod men and the
net men, and condemned himself, at the culmination of his career, to
professional oblivion Huxley set out for Italy. At the railway station
in London he received news that his daughter Marion had been
stricken with a slow and treacherous disease which, as he rightly
feared, was to prove fatal. "I am a tough subject," he wrote afterwards,
"and have learned to bear a good deal without crying out, but those
f our-and-twenty hours between London and Luzern have taught me
that I have a good deal to learn in the way of grinning and bear-
ing." 54 It was his second recuperative exile, destined to be much
longer than the first. In fact, his symptoms resembled much more
those of the desperate melancholia which as a young man he had
suffered on board the Rattlesnake. He was full at once of deadly
lassitude and nervous irritability, of eagerness to hide away from his
fellow men and to hate them at a moment's notice. Once more, also,
he distracted himself with literature. He even resumed his study of
Italian and discovered The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The
very thought of science disgusted him.
Full of heavy fears for his daughter, Huxley refreshed himself with
Lido air, endured Verona, battled with cholera-closed hotels in
Naples. Ravenna was a wonderful "deadly lively sepulchre of a
place." 65 It illustrated that art too had an evolution, and itself con-
tained one great phase of that evolution in little. He regarded Rome
as young Matthew Arnold had regarded the elderly George Sand-
as a fabulous old woman still fascinating in advanced decay and the
shadows of a long and sinister past. In the shadows of that long past,
however, he found his cure and the way back to science. He begaa
by sneering puritanically at papal ceremonies, with much talk of
"man-millinery" and "bedizened dolls." 56 From the aesthetic point
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
of view, he would "destroy everything except St. Paolo fuor Le Mure
of later date than the fourth century." 57 On the other hand, he felt
easy in the Catacombs. They were congenial both to his mood and his
temperament. Gradually he became interested in Pagan Rome and
then with the first symptoms of returning health in Roman geol-
ogy and prehistory. One month later he was writing the preface for
a new edition of the Lessons in Elementary Physiology, which he
was bringing out in collaboration with Sir Michael Foster.
His wife had shared all but the first three weeks of this vacation
with him. Early in the spring of 1885, they began to move northward.
They "broke their backs and enlarged their minds" in the art
galleries of Florence, shivered in Venice, thawed out in San Remo,
and finally landed at Folkestone on April 8. 58
Huxley had by no means recovered. The lightest task cost him in-
finite labor. He had developed "a perfect genius for making moun-
tains out of molehills." 6d After some tentative exertions, with im-
mediate consequences of lassitude and blue devils, he resigned his
professorship, his deanship, and at length the presidency of the Royal
Society,
In the midst of the negotiations incident to his retirement, he
received news he was to be awarded the D.C.L. degree by Oxford.
"It will be," he wrote, "a sort of apotheosis coincident with my official
death, which is imminent In fact, I am dead already, only the Treas-
ury Charon has not yet settled the conditions upon which I am to be
ferried over to the other side." 60 His pension caused nearly as much
secret turning of official cogs as the financing of his early monographs
on the oceanic hydrozoa. Eventually, Huxley continued at the college
as professor and honorary dean, with a pension equal to his salary of
fifteen hundred pounds and no duties except that of a general super-
intendence over scientific work.
XV111
The Pleasant Avocation of War
TTUXLEY found health at last not in the sunshine of Italy nor in
JL J- the offices of a physician but in the pages of a review. In the lead-
ing article of The Nineteenth Century for November, 1885, Gladstone
descended on Dr. Reville's scientific Prole gomenes de I'Histoirc des
Religions like a thick and aggressive fog* Skillfully hiding his forest
in his trees, the great man declared for nearly everything he was for
science and for religion, for Moses and for Darwin. Yet he had no
doubt that, with all respect for the high intellectual activity which it
involved, science had done little but footnote the text of Genesis. The
opening verses of that book were simply a compressed and poetic
account of the nebular hypothesis and of biological and paleontologi-
cal study up to the death of Cuvier. In his conclusion Gladstone paid
Darwin a ceremonious but extremely vague compliment, as in par-
liamentary battle he might suavely hail a dubious ally with a view to
producing a convenient silence of acquiescence.
There was to be no convenient silence. Huxley slammed down The
Nineteenth Century and began to blaspheme about the house with a
vigor and heartiness that astonished his family. The angrier he
became the better he felt. Gladstone had administered the electric
shock which finally precipitated the clouds of melancholy, setting of!
a splendid storm of polemical thunder and lightning.
3"
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
The storm lasted more than half a decade. There is something
heroic about so prolonged a commotion; and in his courage and
daring, in the magnitude o what he defended and what he attacked,
in the sheer quantity and inveteracy of his secondary virtues in
common sense, alertness, energy, and learning Huxley was an heroic,
if not always a brilliant, controversialist.
Probably no one quite understood Gladstone's article. Huxley did
not quite understand it, but he understood enough to know that
Gladstone had trimmed and pounded science outrageously to make
it fit the needs of orthodoxy. That the greatest political leader of his
time could hold so lightly the most brilliant epoch in the history of
biology, was shocking and infuriating to Huxley. The Grand Old
Man was really a Grand Old Anachronism. Gleefully, insidiously,
Huxley decided to modernize him a little. He had never shared
Darwin's admiration for Gladstone. He respected the man's ability
to succeed without respecting the abilities which made him a success.
Sometimes he was quite harsh. "Gladstone I see/ 1 he had written
Hooker many years before, "is pumping himself up at Whitby. Some
of these days he will turn himself inside out like a blessed Hydra, and
I daresay he will talk just as well in that state as in his normal
condition." 1
"The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature" ap-
peared in the December issue of The 'Nineteenth Century. "Do read
my polishing off of the G.O.M.," Huxley wrote Spencer. "I am proud
of it as a work, and as evidence that the volcano is not yet ex-
hausted." 2 As a health certificate, the essay is impressive, but as a
literary composition it is rather wordy and pedestrian. Huxley
explains, politely, but firmly and insistently, that neither the phrases
of Genesis nor the theories of science can be stretched into any easy
agreement.
The antagonism of science is not to religion [he concludes], but to the
heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is
often well nigh crushed. And for my part, I trust that this antagonism
will never cease; but that, to the end of time, true science will continue to
fulfil one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men from the
burden of false science which is imposed upon them in the name of reli-
gion. 8
The Pleasant Avocation of War 313
Gladstone was at this time prime minister and almost on the eve
of introducing his first Home Rule Bill. Irishmen were more un-
reasonable and Tories more perfidious than ever. If the aged states-
man was not, as in former years, doing the work of ten men, at least
he was doing the work of five. Nevertheless, he found time to dash
off a reply to Huxley, which appeared in The Nineteenth Century
for January, i886. 4 With unruffled courtesy, he listed all of Huxley's
most telling blows, turned a majestic cheek, and then proceeded to
reconcile Genesis not only with Cuvier but with the latest textbook
writers in geology and paleontology. If in some trifling details the
Mosaic author did not always agree with up-to-date scientific au-
thority, he wrote in obedience to the peculiar purpose of the Deity,
which was not to lecture mankind on science but to instruct it in
morals and religion. Moreover, Gladstone gently concluded, religion
was a rather more serious matter than Professor Huxley seemed to
realize.
The effect of this stately evasion on Huxley may be imagined.
Never was his digestion better; never was his temper worse. He felt
that he had nothing more to say on the subject, but that a reply was
essential. He replied at length. 5 His editor returned the manuscript
in alarm. "I spent three mortal hours this morning taming my wild
cat/' wrote Huxley of his revision. "He is now castrated; his teeth are
filed; his claws are cut; he is taught to swear like a 'mieu'; and to spit
like a cough; and when he is turned out of the bag you won't know
him from a tame rabbit." 6 In fact, he had become a wild cat in
rabbit's clothing. Huxley referred to "the cloud of argument" which
had emanated from the great parliamentarian. He showed that Glad-
stone did not always agree with Gladstone, that he sometimes did not
agree with the "Mosaic writer," and that he never agreed, basically,
with the modern scientific authorities whom he quoted so confidently.
Huxley also wanted to know what the nebular hypothesis had to do
with such statements as "And the spirit of God moved on the face of
the waters." 7
Lesser champions now entered the battle, which echoed and re-
echoed at Homeric length through the pages of The Nineteenth
Century. Huxley, bidding a farewell to arms in his second article,
now vanished like a mythological hero into the starry vault of
scientific detachment: in "The Evolution of Theology: An Anthro-
314 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
pological Study" (1886) he contemplates religion as "a natural
product of the operations of the human mind." 8 The Bible is not a
book but a whole literature a series of "stratified deposits (often
confused and even with their natural order inverted) left by the
stream of the intellectual and moral life of Israel during many cen-
turies." 9 Analyzing religious beliefs in Judges and Samuel, he finds
them at the stage of monolatry, or the worship of a tribal deity, which
stood midway between the refined monotheism of the prophets
into which it was to develop and the animism characteristic of all
primitive cultures from which it had clearly arisen.
But Huxley was always most dangerous when he seemed most
scientific. "The Evolution of Theology" was another Man's Place
in Natureor rather, Theology's Place in Nature. Huxley levels
religion to its origins as he had leveled man to his, and undermines
supernatural causes by showing how satisfactorily natural causes
could take their places. He concludes with a panoramic picture,
indicating how Egyptian and Babylonian influences determine the
evolution of Judaism, and philosophic and scientific influences that of
Christianity. One of the functions of science is to purify religion of
its theology, for religion is advanced and elevated in proportion as it
approaches pure ethics, and primitive and debased in proportion as
it develops dogmas and ceremonies.
Exhilarating as it had been, the massacre of Gladstone did not
completely restore the melancholy Comanche. In the next two years,
Huxley fled before his blue devils to Yorkshire, to Bournemouth, even
to the Alps, where, during a really happy summer, he made a valu-
able study of gentians. When he was cheerful he pursued science.
When he was despondent, he "chewed" theology. In general, he found
that as long as he could walk ten miles a day or gobble up an occasional
statesman or philosopher, he kept in reasonably good spirits.
In the intervals of sending batches of autobiography for criticism,
Spencer slyly threw him a philosopher. Had he noticed that W. S.
Lilly had published in the Fortnightly for November, 1886, an
article on "Materialism and Morals," in which, of course, he proved
that Spencer and Huxley were materialists and therefore not moral?
Huxley read and yielded to his instincts.
The result was "Science and Morals/' which appeared in the next
number of the Fortnightly. This essay says nothing new, but says
The Pleasant Avocation of War 315
it with greater skill than ever before. It actually turns apologetics
into a mode of attack. Huxley comes before his readers in the sack-
cloth and ashes of scientific skepticism and takes his leave in sack-
cloth that has become strangely like the papal regalia of his most
confident dogmatism. He begins with a gentle protest against the
harsh word materialism. Materialism, according to Biichner, ex-
plains the universe in terms of matter and force. But science does not
try to reduce consciousness to matter and force. Moreover, it recog-
nizes that matter and force themselves are immaterial unknowns.
How can an indivisible atom occupy space? How can it affect other
atoms by a force resident in nothingness?
On the other hand, Huxley maintains that mind is certainly
dependent on physical causes. Changes in physiology certainly pre-
cede changes in consciousness, as muscular contraction precedes a
movement of the arm. Again, he acknowledges a belief in "determin-
ism," for the opposite of determinism is spontaneity, and to believe in
complete spontaneity is to believe in utter chaos. Yet he feels that he
is no more a determinist than Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley,
and though a materialist, no less free to believe in an intelligent
Deity. Lilly must have read this essay with some bewilderment, the
more so as Huxley nowhere concedes that mental phenomena really
affect physical phenomena. He ends with the famous metaphor in
which science is Cinderella, and theology and philosophy are the two
ugly sisters:
She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is
rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and
material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken
of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling down stairs. . . .
She knows that the safety of morality lies . . . in a real and living belief
in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganisation upon the
track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical
trespasses, 10
The editor of the fortnightly declared that the article "simply made
the December number." 11
A sermoa by Canon Liddon brought Huxley once more into
theological controversy. The distinguished preacher had asserted that
catastrophies and particularly sacred catastrophies represented sus-
pensions of lower laws of nature by higher. In "Pseudo-Scientific
316 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Realism" Huxley explained that such thinking was plainly a survival
o medieval realism, which conceived universals as actual existences.
Physical laws are not agents or forces in themselves. They do not
bind nature in any way, nor can they counteract or supersede each
other. They are simply generalized records of experience and there-
fore a means by which, with a high degree of probability, future
experience can be predicted.
This essay is remarkable both for its sweep and its verve. Huxley
sketches out the history of metaphysical thought in a few strokes,
disposing of the medieval cosmos in a single sentence:
From the centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hier-
archy of angels and saints, .contemplated and governed the insignificant
sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the de-
basement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to their
perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy of
devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of everlasting
damnation. 12
He concedes that the scholastic philosophers were human, even that
they were intelligent: they kept thinking alive, but they thought
about nonsense.
Huxley had shot an arrow in the direction of Canon Liddon, but
it was the Duke of Argyll who shouted "ouch!" His outcry, full of
metaphysics and moral reprobation, covers some twenty pages of
the Fortnightly for March. He was not only in pain; he was very
angry, and quite naturally he attributed all of Huxley's calm to him-
self and all of his own anger to Huxley. "The Professor" was on the
whole right, but he had made an unseemly and vituperative attack
on the pulpit. The Duke proceeded to explain what the Canon meant
and what the professor meant in such a way that it became very un-
clear what anybody meant. Finally, Darwin's great reputation had
established a scientific "Reign of Terror," against which^ his Grace
predicted, Huxley himself would rebel.
Huxley soon guessed, and after scanning the Duke's Reign of Law
clearly ascertained, that the noble author had been defending his own
confusion in the Canon's name. Responding in "Science and Pseudo-
Science," Huxley neatly traced the concept of natural law from
Bacon's time to his own, showing that the law of the conservation of
energy indicates, throughout organic and inorganic nature, a uni-
The Pleasant Avocation of War 317
formitarianism in the succession of events which permits no shuf-
fling of "higher" and "lower" laws. Finally, he did not spare the Duke,
whose presumptuous ignorance and hopeless confusion had put him,
Huxley declared, to the trouble of writing a good deal of very elemen-
tary exposition.
Huxley expected the Duke to subside into silence. Instead, he
ascended to the stratosphere. In "A Great Lesson," published in the
September Fortnightly, he rhapsodically expounded first Darwin's
coral reef theory and then the countertheory which John Murray
had developed while on the Challenger expedition. Clearly, even
Darwin could err, yet such was the awe in which he was held that
Murray, influenced by other scientific men, hesitated two years before
making public his results.
Huxley did not deign to make a deliberate reply, but at the end of
"An Episcopal Trilogy" he pointed out that Murray had by no
means proved Darwin wrong about coral reefs. After an exhaustive
study, the American Dana had decided that Darwin's theory still
accounted best for all the facts.
Huxley's essay, published in the Fortnightly for November, 1887,
deals principally with speeches made by three enlightened bishops at
a meeting of the British Association. Huxley agrees with them that
science and religion are not essentially in conflict. The spiritual es-
sence of Christianity could be saved intact if only the miraculous husk
could be cast away* The author's language is full of the generosity of
concession and understanding. He grants that prayer may certainly
be efficacious, in a psychological and even in a practical sense. He
acknowledges that scientists have their "full share of original sin." 1S
Astronomy does not teach them greatness of soul nor microbiology,
meekness. But when he comes to speak of the achievement of science,
his real feeling becomes clearer:
Theological apologists who insist that morality will vanish if their
dogmas are exploded, would do well to consider the fact that, in the mat-
ter of intellectual veracity, science is already a long way ahead of the
Churches; and that, in this particular, it is exerting an educational in-
fluence on mankind of which the Churches have shown themselves utterly
incapable. 14
Now his melancholy returned and drove him into fresh exile in the
hotels o Yorkshire and Switzerland. He had become a familiar
318 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
figure in certain foreign and provincial breakfast rooms & celebrated
man with sad eyes and white sideburns, who filled obscure physicians
with rapturous enthusiasm and clerical old maids with indignant and
vituperative piety. Huxley was too much preoccupied to notice the
stir he caused. Henrietta had been ill of late, and in 1887 his second
daughter Marion, Mrs. John Collier, died of pneumonia. She had
been ill for three years. Huxley had hoped and not hoped.
Indeed [he wrote to Hooker in a revealing letter] ... I have feared the
gradual supervention of dementia. . . . She was a brilliant creature with
a faculty for art, which some of the best artists have told me amounted to
genius: she was married most happily to a man who has throughout
shown the most utter devotion to her, and all the world seemed . . . open
to her young life. But after her last confinement more than three years
ago, melancholy set in (of the worst type). 15
Huxley must have seen some of the deep horror of heredity in this.
Providentially, he had almost at once to travel four hundred miles to
make a speech on technical education to a large crowd in a hot,
stuffy room. He returned reinvigorated, if not comforted.
At best, these were sad years. He complained that as often as he
fled to Yorkshire or Switzerland, he returned to find some old friend
gone. In 1888 Matthew Arnold died in a Liverpool hotel. Huxley
could not but think of his own end. "Poor Arnold's death has been a
great shock rather for his wife than for himself . . . ," he wrote
Foster. "I have always thought sudden death to be the best of all for
oneself, . , . but terrible for those who are left. Arnold told me
years ago he had heart disease/' le Huxley had just learned that he
also had heart trouble. A "weakness and some enlargement of the
left ventricle." Luckily, the valves were all right. "I do not suppose
there is any likelihood of an immediate catastrophe in my own case.
I should not go abroad if there were. Imagine the horror of leaving
one's wife to fight all the difficulties of sudden Euthanasia in a Swiss
hotel!" 17
The X Club once the gay, conspiratorial cabinet of science had
by this time dwindled into a knot of ailing, overworked old men, who
were just a little tired of each other and perhaps just a little too deli-
cate for the fare they sat down to.
It has long been too obvious to me [Huxley wrote Hooker as early as
1883"!, that the relations of some of us at the X have been verv strained.
The Pleasant Avocation of War 319
Strong men as they get old seem to me to acquire very much the nature
of apes [ ? ], and tend to become dangerous to one another and run amuck
at everything that does not quite suit their fancy. I am conscious of the
tendency myself. It is hateful to me and where I have time to think I put
it down at all costs. 18
In 1888 Huxley contributed to The Proceedings of the Royal So-
ciety "An Obituary" of Charles Darwin. Obituaries are probably
never easy, and Huxley was more in the mood to write his own than
Darwin's. Yet he had splendid materials at his disposal not only the
rich personal experience of a lifelong friendship but Darwin's own
revealing "Autobiography" and Francis Darwin's newly published
Life and Letters. He took infinite pains, but succeeded only in per-
forming the standard miracle of Victorian biographical piety a Pyg-
malion metamorphosis in reverse, in which a living friend is turned
into a marble statue or rather, a kind of memorial whetstone on
which to grind moral axes. Darwin's youthful indifference to his
studies, for example, demonstrates how little ordinary classical educa-
tion could awaken the interest of a first-rate mind. What Huxley
wrote in personal letters at this time was much more alive and vivid:
"Exposition was not Darwin's forte" he confided to his younger col-
league Foster, "and his English is sometimes wonderful* But there
is a marvellous dumb sagacity about him like that of a sort of
miraculous dog and he gets to the truth by ways as dark as those of
the Heathen Chinee." 19
In 1888, twelve months after his old friend Hooker, Huxley was
awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. So often Darwin's
visible and vocal vicar at gala dinners Darwin could not eat, Huxley
now could not eat his own. He received the medal at the preliminary
meeting and then retired. That autumn he also resigned his seat on
the Eton Board of Governors. He had not been able to attend a
meeting for a year and a half.
The minor tribulations of old age earache and mufflers and extra
heavy overcoats were fast falling to his share. He even had to face
the consequences of his own liberalism. He had always urged as a
matter of simple common sense that a man might marry his deceased
wife's sister. In January, 1889, he learned that his youngest daughter
Ethel was going to marry John Collier, the widower of Marion.
Abruptly Huxley realized he had always hoped none of his own
320 Afes, Angels 9 and Victorians
daughters would make this common-sense experiment. Yet "what-
ever annoyances and social pin-pricks may come in Ethel's way," he
told Hooker, "I know nobody less likely to care about them." 20
The Victorians were so serious that a book did not need to be good
to stagger them. It needed only to be serious. Mrs. Humphrey Ward's
Robert Elsmere was very serious: she had succeeded in translating
her uncle Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma into the cliches
of contemporary moral melodrama. To recuperate from Oxford and
the fever, Robert Elsmere, a young cleric whose virtues are as roman-
tically handsome as the muscles of a more obvious kind of hero, comes
to a sequestered valley of Westmoreland. Here he falls in love with
the beautiful and saintly Catherine Leyburn, who compromises suf-
ficiently with her own lofty Christianity to return his love. He
becomes a rector in Surrey. They marry, have a child, and live
happily ever after until Robert grows friendly with a sinister squire,
who, instead of keeping a mad wife in the garret, reads Gibbon and
Hume in the library. The squire touches on miracles, and Robert's
faith collapses like a house of cards. He renounces his Christian
ministry, goes with his wife to London, founds a new faith of
humanity, and dies a martyr to feeding orphans and comforting
cripples.
Mrs. Ward's novel did not cause a revolution, but it advertised a
revolution that had already occurred. Novel readers who had never
opened such books as the Origin or Literature and Dogma awakened
to the ideas they contained with a shock. Probably Gladstone never
read the Origin, but he certainly read Robert Elsmere and wrote one
of his most perceptive articles about it. Its aim, he noted, was "to
expel the preternatural element from Christianity, to destroy its dog-
matic structure, yet to keep intact the moral and spiritual results." 21
History shows that a religion cannot long survive its deity, nor a type
of character, the religious dogmas out of which it grew. Moreover,
miracles lie at the very basis of Christianity. They are inseparable, on
the one hand, from the miraculous biography which embodies the
divinity of Christ and on the other, from the dogmas according to
which that divinity may be worshiped. The Christian type was not
likely to be preserved without the Christian scheme.
Not only the state but the church took notice o Robert Elsmere.
The Pleasant Avocation of War 321
The Church Congress, meeting in the fall of 1888, regarded it as the
latest symptom of a very old disease, and in a special afternoon set
aside for the purpose, rather recklessly applied the modern name
agnosticism. The Bishop of Peterborough, amid wild cheers, de-
nounced "cowardly agnosticism," and Dr. Wace, the Principal of
King's College, exclaimed that an agnostic is a man who, on the plea
that he has no scientific knowledge of the unseen world, refuses to
accept the authority of Jesus Christ. His real name is infidel.
Of course Huxley read the Official Report of this Church Congress.
In The Nineteenth Century for February, 1889, he replied with a
long and somewhat acidly illuminating article on "Agnosticism."
He failed to see that agnostic and infidel were interchangeable words.
Dr. Wace did not accept the authority of Mohammed. Mohammedans
would therefore consider him an infidel, no matter how uncritically
he believed in his own religion. In short, his definition of an agnostic
expressed a prejudice rather than a principle. But was not his loyalty
to Christianity a prejudice also? Rational belief, as the author of
Robert Elsmere had said, depended on the value of testimony. Now
the story of the Gadarene swine rested on very dubious evidence.
Like much else in the New Testament it varied considerably from
one gospel to another. Again, the destruction of valuable livestock
reflected a carelessness unworthy and uncharacteristic of Jesus. The
transference of demons from men to swine involved a superstition
common to all barbarous peoples and productive of the grossest error
and cruelty. Did Jesus believe in such a superstition, and if so, could
he be divine? Finally, Christianity was not even a coherent unity
recognized by all Christians. Not only the Buddhist and the Moham-
medan, but the modern Catholic and the ancient Nazarene would
consider Dr. Wace an infidel.
On the other hand, no one would consider him an agnostic:
Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which
lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of
great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, "Try
all things, hold fast by that which is good"; it is the foundation of the
Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should
be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle
of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively
the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration.
And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions
are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. 22
As Huxley had first used the term in Metaphysical Society days, an
agnostic had indeed followed reason, but he had maintained that
even reason could not carry him very far, that the ultimate reality
behind appearances can never be known. To get Socrates, Luther, and
Descartes all on his side and to underline the ancient lineage of the
free inquiry from which agnosticism grew, Huxley has here plainly
done violence to a valuable word.
His article concluded with a digression on Frederic Harrison's
"The Future of Agnosticism," published in the Fortnightly for
January. Huxley was wonderfully courteous, admiring Harrison's
intelligence in the abstract and reducing it to the wildest insanity in
the concrete. Yet through the polemical skyrockets and Roman can-
dles, one notices again the dark background of sadness.
I know of no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the
evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of
the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly
origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the
other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to
destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence
a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.
He attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and develops a more or
less workable theory of life, in such favourable situations as the plains of
Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of
years, struggles, with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness,
bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at this point against the greed
and ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise
persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he
has moved on a step, foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his
victims. . . . And the best men of the best epochs are simply those who
make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins. 23
In short, history is, for the most part, so much inductive evidence of
original sin. It records the slow retreat of the natural man, the repe-
titious tragedy of the nonconformist and the innovator. The rational-
ist-Protestant view has seldom been more eloquently or gloomily
expressed.
The Pleasant Avocation of War 323
"Agnosticism" produced a double-headed counterattack from Dr.
Wace and the Bishop of Peterborough. 24 The Bishop squared off only
to subside into the most gracious controversial amenities, but Dr.
Wace proved surprisingly firm, both in the head and in the spine.
Not in the least overawed, he calmly explained himself into good
sense and Huxley into something very like nonsense. He was per-
fectly aware that infidel was a relative term and he had used it so.
He knew that Christian testimony presented a complex problem
and that some parts of the New Testament were more suspect than
others. In fact, he corrected Huxley on some finer differences among
the higher critics. The Gadarene story might or might not be true,
but it was not essential to Christian faith. The Passion, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount were essential They consti-
tuted not a scientific but a moral authority which compelled the as-
sent of sensitive and reverent consciences.
Mrs. Ward answered Wace indirectly with a long and very un-
Platonic dialogue called "The New Reformation." 25 What struck
her imagination were the patient, courageous investigations of the
German critics and the splendid drama which emerged so luminously
from the dark wilderness of variant readings. The Germans had
uncovered the human being in the Christ, the human history in the
miracles and the theology. They had shown how history had pre-
pared for Jesus long before he was born so that he could mold it
long after he was dead, how in fact he was a supremely happy combi-
nation of Vhomme, le moment, et le milieu. In short, Mrs. Ward
argued that Dr. Wace's moral authority arises from the historical
process.
Naturally Huxley was enthusiastic about Mrs. Ward's article. She
maintained that "all history is one," as he maintained that all life
is one. 26 She likewise showed that a union of science and religion
had already taken place and she had provided it with the splendid
title of the New Reformation. "If it should be possible for me to give
a little shove to the 'New Reformation,' " he wrote Knowles, "I shall
think the fag end of my life well spent." 2T
His "Agnosticism: A Rejoinder" was something decidedly more
vigorous and less polite than "a little shove." Dr. Wace had asserted
that the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer formed the
center of Christian teaching. Huxley now proceeded to remove that
324 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
center: there is no real agreement among the gospels on the Lord*s
Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. He devoted the latter part of
his article to proving that the "universal Christianity" of Paul dif-
fered widely from the earlier Nazarene Christianity of James and
Peter, inasmuch as it freed Gentiles from the ceremonial and dietary
restrictions of the Jewish law. He concluded by explaining once more
the absurdity of the Gadarene story and the absurdity of Dr. Wace
in believing it.
One cannot but regard this article as an elaborate and mistaken
attempt to make Christianity a needle in a haystack of conflicting
evidence. Huxley kept himself so busy picking at facts and fictions
that he never felt obliged to inquire whether they contained any
truth. His matter was never thinner nor his manner rougher, and
never was he more pleased with himself. "I am possessed by a writing
demon," he declared on beginning the article; and a little later, "You
can't think how I enjoy writing now for the first time in my life." 28
No doubt easy victories were more relaxing. Huxley seems to have
taken Dr. Wace and Christianity as medicine.
In "Christianity and Agnosticism," 29 Wace renewed his accu-
sations of quibbling and evasion, and challenged Huxley to respond
either with an acknowledgment or a refutation.
In "Agnosticism and Christianity" Huxley responded with further
variations on his old arguments. He persisted in seeing contempo-
rary religious controversy entirely as a battle between agnosticism and
ecclesiasticism, between critical honesty and the uncritical accept-
ance of a comforting illusion. To believe in the Passion, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount is simply to believe in angels
and fiends, a savior and a devil, a heaven and a hell in short, in a
great deal of worn-out metaphysical furniture. Cardinal Newman had
shown that the miracles of the Bible rest on no stronger ground than
those of Church history. He inferred that therefore all Christian mir-
acles must be accepted. Huxley inferred that therefore no Christian
miracles need be accepted.
My article, he told Hooker, is "as full of malice as an egg is full
of meat, and my satisfaction in making Newman my accomplice has
been unutterable." 30 He had a scandalized admiration for New-
man's wit and eloquence, his "subtlety and acuteness"; 31 but he
failed to see how so intelligent a man could believe in Catholicism.
The Pleasant Avocation of War
Only one explanation was possible. "I have been reading some of
his works lately, and I understand now why Kingsley accused him of
growing dishonesty. After an hour or two of him I begin to lose sight
of the distinction between truth and falsehood." 32 Huxley's scientific
zeal led him to judge men's morals by their cosmogonies. He did not
see how a churchman could be so devoted to a spiritual truth as to
accept all the dubious metaphysics in which it was wrapped.
Huxley resembled Newman considerably and misunderstood him
almost completely. Both had much in common with Hume. Both
doubted the reality of the physical world Huxley at least theoreti-
cally, Newman instinctively and from earliest childhood. Both also
doubted its rationality and saw that the way of the critical intellect
leads to skepticism, which both used chiefly as a weapon in contro-
versy. Huxley sought truth by reasoning on the evidence of the senses,
Newman, by reasoning on the intimations of conscience; and as New-
man aspired to produce a Novum Organum for religion in terms of
spiritual psychology, so Huxley looked forward to a Novum Or-
ganum for morals in terms of physical science.
Huxley was a Protestant who had long ago ceased to believe in God.
Newman was a Protestant whom the need for more tangible grounds
for hope had made a Catholic. Huxley found temporary exaltation in
man's rapidly growing scientific power and knowledge. Newman
found comfort at last in a universal church which, evolving logically
and authoritatively from a divine mission and a divine revelation,
seemed to represent reason in an unreasonable world.
Whatever he thought of Newman or indeed of contemporary Prot-
estantism, Huxley protested that he did not mean to oppose Chris-
tianity itself: he was attempting only to clear away idolatrous accre-
tions, to uncover truth by removing error. In one passage at least, he
very nearly removes Jesus: Apparently "you conceive," he wrote in
thanking the Reverend Estlin Carpenter for The First Three Gospels,
. . . that the personality of Jesus was the leading cause the conditio
sine qua non of the evolution of Christianity from Judaism.
I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to belittle the heroic
figures of history, I held by the notion as long as I could, but I find it
melting away.
I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early Christianity is
new on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and explicitly
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later Hellenised Judaism.
... It is quite true that the new vitality of the old ideal manifested in
early Christianity demands "an adequate historic cause.*' . . . Platonic
and Stoical philosophy prophetic liberalism the strong democratic
socialism of the Jewish political system the existence of innumerable
sodalities for religious and social purposes had thrown the ancient
world into a state of unstable equilibrium. With such predisposing causes
at work, the exciting cause of enormous changes might be relatively in-
significant. The powder was there & child might throw the match which
should blow up the whole concern.
I do not want to seem irreverent, still less depreciatory, of noble men,
but it strikes me that in the present case the Nazarenes were the match
and Paul the child. 33
In short, here as elsewhere, Huxley shows himself a determinist. The
grandeur of historical forces leaves little room for any humanor
superhuman grandeur.
On the other hand, his growing disgust for sentimentalism in poli-
tics and theology led him to express guarded approval for old-fash-
ioned Calvinism:
The doctrines of predestination; of original sin; of the innate depravity
of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race; of the primacy
of Satan in his world; of the essential vileness of matter; of a malevolent
Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately
revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the
truth than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born good and
that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to re-
main so; that it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if he will
only try; that all partial evil is universal good; and other optimistic fig-
ments, such as that which represents "Providence" under the guise of a
paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything will come
right (according to our notions) at last. 34
This passage indicates the kind of criticism Huxley was capable
of when he could get his mind off Gadarene pigs. His study of
Rousseau at this time had obviously sharpened his eye for contem-
porary romanticism.
In 1890 Huxley was obliged once more to annihilate Canon Liddon,
who had defended the Old Testament as divinely accurate because it
was essential to the Christian system. In "The Lights of the Church
and the Light of Science," Huxley agreed that certain Old Testament
The Pleasant Avocation of War 527
stories were indeed unhappily essential to Christian theology. He
then opened up on the Deluge fabrication first with his old scientific
guns and afterward with a splendid new masked battery assembled
from Babylonian archeology. The latter part of the essay he devoted
to hunting the Deluge, universal or partial, not only out of the pulpit
but out of Christian textbooks and encyclopedias.*
That fall Gladstone gathered his articles on the Bible into a book
which he published as The Impregnable Roc\ of Holy Scripture. He
explained all biblical criticism as irrelevant, reiterated all his former
arguments as unanswerable, predicted the rapid decline of skepticism,
and concluded with a gibe at Huxley, to whom, after two thousand
years of discussion, it was reserved to discover from an analysis of
the incident of the Gadarene swine that our Lord was "no better than
a law-breaker and an evil-doer/' 35 Gladstone explained that Gadara
was a Jewish city. The swineherds should not have been raising pork
any more than they should have eaten it. Jesus was therefore perf ectly
justified in destroying their property. Apparently, no rock was quite
so impregnable as the cranium of the Grand Old Man himself.
Huxley was so delighted at the prospect of further battle with the
G.O.M. that he was almost grateful for being insulted. In "The
Keepers of the Herd of Swine," 36 he was full of gaiety and meta-
phorical scalps, peace pipes, and tomahawks. Only after some pages
did he assume the sternness appropriate to the reprehension of perfidy
and ignorance. Needless to say, he proved that Gadara was an
Hellenic city, and that to question the truth of an incident in the
New Testament was not to impugn the character of Jesus.
But Huxley's strategy of attacking Christianity at its weakest point
had begun to work against him. Demonology in the Gospels is a
fairly important question. The character of Jesus is a very important
one. But two eminent men cannot argue about pigs indefinitely with-
* Another essay, "Hasisadra's Adventure" (1890), tells the ancient Babylonian
version of the Deluge as it appears on the clay tablets of AssurbanipaL Huxley
builds up the relative restraint and probability of this account only to descend
upon it with the combined weight of geology, archeology, and common sense
and so strike a concentrated blow not only at the more exaggerated Hebrew
variant but at the misguided people who deceive themselves into swallowing
such nonsense. None deceives himself more than the modern theological
"reconciler," who feels that a miracle is proved fact when it is proved a bare
possibility.
3*8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
out becoming ridiculous. It was observed in the press that they might
be better occupied at their age. Although Huxley was inclined to
agree, nevertheless the controversy continued. In The Nineteenth
Century for February, 1891, Gladstone apologized so haughtily for
his accusations that, thinking the whole matter over at leisure, Hux-
ley decided he was very angry, and published an indignant article on
"Mr. Gladstone's Controversial Methods." Unfortunately, he could
not get away from pigs. At the very end, he tried desperately to give
them metaphysical significance. Religion, ethics, progress everything
hung on how people felt about the Gadarene pigs. But people were
tired of Gadarene pigs. The controversy died of its own grotesque-
ness.
Apparently, the older and tireder he grew, the harder he fought.
At this time he was also waging voluminous warfare against the
Salvation Army. A lady about to subscribe one thousand pounds to
General Booth's Darkest England scheme had paused to ask Huxley
his opinion. He had taken one look at the Salvation Army, another
at Booth's In Darkest England, and the Way Out and suddenly
realized with horror that he had discovered a grave national danger.
Enthusiastic religion with "corybantic" rites was bad. Religious
fanaticism with military organization was infinitely worse. Huxley
communicated his ideas to The Times in a series of letters eloquent
with warnings against Franciscan corruption and Jesuitical machina-
tion. 37
He was in the habit of taking a rather sentimental view of himself
in such warfare.
Attacking the Salvation Army may look like the advance of a forlorn
hope [he wrote his son Leonard], but this old dog has never yet let go
after fixing his teeth into anything or anybody, and he is not going to
begin now. And it is only a question of holding on. . . .
The Times, too, is behaving like a brick. This world is not a very lovely
place, but down at the bottom, as old Carlyle preached, veracity does
really lie, and will show itself if people won't be impatient. 3 ^
His campaign was neither spectacular nor successful. The letters,
swift and brisk at first with the excitement of denunciation and histor-
ical discovery, soon stagnated among the muddy technicalities of
allegation and counterallegation. Huxley tried several times to bow
himself out, only to discover a new antagonist in the next morning's
The Pleasant Avocation of War 329
issue. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army continued to flourish, and
General Booth lived to be officially invited to the coronation of Ed-
ward VII.
As literature, such essays as "Agnosticism" and "Agnosticism and
Christianity" are less compact, less brilliant, and less permanently
interesting than such earlier, less controversial essays as "A Piece of
Chalk" and "A Liberal Education."
But destruction is always spectacular; and warfare against heaven,
however perfunctorily and hastily waged, always rather satanically
impressive. Therefore Huxley the bishop-eater has tended to be more
famous, though less read, than Huxley the teacher and the statesman
of science.
To be sure, controversy is a highly perishable art. History settles
most disputes with a finality that makes almost any argument seem
unnecessarily long-winded and contentious. Yet some disputes repeat
themselves, and eventually they find a great man to argue them and
a posterity not too wise after the event. Obviously, a controversialist
should be concerned with the truth and understand what he is
arguing against as well as what he is arguing for. But if he cannot
be very just, he should be very partial. He should possess the patient
malice, the hate-sharpened insight, the loving artistry of invective,
the vivid sense of minds and characters in conflict which turn debate
into drama. The most interesting argument is the ad hominem: the
artistic controversialist does not so much annihilate as bring to life.
Hazlitt immortalized Gifford by the sheer intensity and eloquence
of his hatred. Butler created a Darwin whom he could refute and
conquer. To be sure, a few supreme artists, like Burke, possess both
the intellectual and the literary virtues of their craft: they can under-
stand an opponent as profoundly as they hate him, and argue a
great issue with a skill and indignation equal to the justice of their
cause.
Huxley was deficient both in vividness and in openness of mind.
He had too little insight into character to be tempted to personalities
and in any case too much Victorian propriety to be really malev-
olent. He never attacked a foible instead of a fallacy, and of his
opponents only Gladstone emerged as an individual. Again, Huxley's
attitude toward religion and other important questions was often
negative. Basically, he believed that if he could make everybody
33 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
tell the truth about everything, a great many problems would be
solved No doubt the change would be startling. But obviously one
cannot seize truth simply by pursuing error with a police club. One
must pursue the truth itself.
Yet, at his best, he was clear, logical, well-informed, dexterous,
and often brilliant. He had a quick eye for fundamental absurdities,
as when he said that Comteism was "Catholicism minus Christian-
ity." 39 He was admirable when waging terse, clear-cut expository
argument, as in "The Physical Basis of Life," where idealism grows
dim in the clarity of materialism; or when bringing to bear a large
and many-sided knowledge, as in "Mr. Darwin's Critics," where he
quoted Mivart's authority to demolish Mivart's ideas; or when ex-
ploiting complexly the opportunities of a dramatic situation, as in
"Science and Culture," where he contrived to read the same sermon
to all his opponents at once.
XIX
T/ 7aut Cultiver Notre Jar din'
TTUXLEY continued to fight, but now, for a time at least, he
-fJL found something new to fight about. The issue was politics.
In 1886 Gladstone split the Liberal Party in an attempt to carry
Home Rule for Ireland. Revolution began to flow into the vacuum.
A Joshua wrapped in the Mosaic authority of Bentham, John Stuart
Mill had already quietly led the Utilitarians through a wilderness of
compromise, from laissez faire individualism to something like Fa-
bian socialism. The Marxist Democratic Federation had risen to some-
thing more than Hyde Park notoriety, and made a convert of Wil-
liam Morris. Henry George had conducted his fiery campaigns for
the Single Tax, and made a convert of Walkce. In 1889 the Fabians
published their Essays. In 1892 the Labour Party was to be formed.
Huxley was as cautious about politics as he was extreme about
religion. As a thinker in the utilitarian tradition, he was a firm
believer in democratic government, valuing freedom of speech and
conscience above everything else. Yet, admiring Hobbes quite as
much as Locke, he distrusted the masses and abhorred the vague,
emotional oratory that sways them. Above all, he abhorred politicians.
As a scientist, he favored more government because he favored more
sanitation, research, education, more scientific posts for scientific men.
331
33* Apes, Angels, and Victorians
He also remained the exponent of a special knowledge and a special
method, using anthropology to explode social contract and biology
to refute the labor theory of value.
Publicly, Huxley held aloof from partisan politics, feeling that he
thereby spoke more authoritatively for science; but in his private
letters he expressed contempt for Gladstone and despair at Irish
Home Rule, which he thought would critically weaken English
defenses, virtually dispossess English property owners in Ireland,
and launch a poor and ignorant people on a reckless adventure. He
seems to have believed in a strong empire as well as a strong govern-
ment, and sometimes gave cautious and guarded approval to such
Conservatives as Salisbury, Chamberlain, and from an earlier gen-
eration Shaftesbury.
Huxley began his political excursus in 1888, with "The Struggle
for Existence in Human Society," a moral and sociological footnote
to the Origin. Huxley does not see much justice in natural selection.
It means progress and death; but the progress is very remote, and
the death very immediate. "It is not clear what compensation the
Eohippus gets for his sorrows in the fact that some millions of years
afterward, one of his descendants wins the Derby/' 1 Civilization
puts limits to man's struggle for existence, but what those limits
are, and what the relation of Darwinism is to society, Huxley does
not explain, nor does he refer to such books as Bagehot's Physics and
Politics f which deal with the subject.
Nevertheless, he suggests, though in a very practical and restricted
setting, Bagehot's primary concept that there is a natural selection
of societies. In spite of his civilization, man is bound by nature. When
he multiplies beyond the limit of his food supply as he nearly
always does he is exposed to the struggle for existence, and therefore
to poverty. And not only individuals but nations. For England, the
struggle is particularly vital and desperate, because she must undersell
competitors to buy food with which to live. England's problem is to
maintain standards of living and culture without losing the war of
competitive costs. Huxley finds the solution first, as formerly, in
technical education and second, in state services and state aid. "The
Struggle for Existence" clearly looks forward to "Evolution and
Ethics."
This essay led to a quarrel with Spencer, which in turn led, rather
deviously, to Huxley's four political articles of 1890. Despite head
"II Faut Cultiver Notre Jar din" 333
sensations, an attitude of permanent invalidism, and the continued
and evident preparation of social alibis against the descent of sudden
illness Spencer had an extraordinary capacity for enjoyment and
companionship. He had never been young all at once, but he was
permanently young at intervals. "Spencer was here an hour ago as
lively as a cricket," Huxley marveled to Hooker from a convalescent
retreat at Bournemouth. "He is going back to town on Tuesday to
plunge into the dissipations of the metropolis." 2 When the philoso-
pher's head was not full of speculations and polysyllables, it was full
of plans for picnics and excursions. What about a yachting trip?
"With Mrs. Tyndall and your wife, and Beatrice Potter (supposing
that does not entail any danger of domestic perturbation!) we might
form a sufficiently lively party. ... I suppose I should only need to
let the fact leak out, and Valentine Smith would probably lend us
his steam yacht." 3 The friendship between Huxley and Spencer
seems to have been a convivial warfare in which they fought clergy-
men and idealists usually in absentia about fundamentals, and each
other about details.
But warfare cannot always tend to harmony. Reading "The
Struggle for Existence in Human Society," Spencer detected, as he
told his old friend in a letter, both a borrowing and a criticism of his
own ideas. Huxley had not only discovered these ideas late; he had
made poor use of them. In spite of the struggle for existence, Spencer
denied that poverty was any longer a problem for England, or that
such a problem, if it existed, could be solved by state aid. In fact, he
would have liked to write an answer but desisted in order to save
his strength presumably for more important work and to prevent
a coolness between himself and Huxley.
The whole letter was disagreeable and offensive in tone; but with
the discrimination of a controversialist, Huxley lost his temper only
at the implication that he might lose his temper over criticism. "It is
not agreeable to me to be told that criticism is withheld because it
may cause a coolness on my part toward the critic. I do not hold old
friendship quite so lightly, nor would any severity of criticism have
affected me so unpleasantly as the confession of intent to which I
refer." 4 Temporarily cowed, Spencer explained himself in softer
terms, and a fragile peace was made. Within two years, however, it
was shattered when Spencer offered to send the latter half of his
Autobiography manuscript unceremoniously through a stranger.
334 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Huxley took offense at once. There was a curt note from Spencer, a
cold and stately reply from Huxley, and then nothing on either side
for several weeks. Meanwhile, in support of his old friend, Huxley
entered a lengthy debate on the nationalization of land in The Times.
At one point he playfully observed that Spencer would probably try
to cure cholera by deduction. Thereupon, Spencer wrote Hooker
offering to resign from the X Club. "Huxley, besides causing me a
serious relapse," he complained, "has done me irreparable damage by
making me look like a fool to a hundred thousand readers/' 5 After
some mediation from Hooker, Huxley wrote Spencer:
I desire you to understand that when I wrote the letters of which you
complain I had not the slightest intention of holding you up to ridicule
by a repartee no sharper than you have often laughed at or of taking up
a position of greater antagonism to your views, than I have always taken
in private and on at least ten [ ? ] occasions, in public. 6
Even a calm and sensible man might have found it hard to forgive
anyone so righteous. And Spencer as mutual friends reminded
Huxley throughout the quarrel was far from being either calm or
sensible. But apparently he once more bowed before superior moral
force: the correspondence between them continued in a vein of rather
careful cordiality.
Huxley availed himself of the dignified pages of The Nineteenth
Century for a long last word on land nationalization. This, as well
as all forms of socialism, he regarded as Utopian illusion rendered
dangerous by grave and widespread poverty. Apparently he had read
neither Marx nor the Fabians, and saw Henry George as the most
significant contemporary spokesman for revolution. "Did you ever
read Henry George's book 'Progress and Poverty'?" he asked
Knowles. "It is more damneder nonsense than poor Rousseau's
blether. And to think of the popularity of the book," 7 Huxley believed
that by guaranteeing a sound elementary education and perhaps the
opportunity to profit from such education afterwards the state
should help the poor to help themselves. Though he had condemned
extreme laissez faire as nihilism, Huxley now upheld private enter-
prise as essential to real justice and healthy initiative.
In "The Natural Inequality of Men" Huxley explains contemporary
revolutionists by going back to the arch-revolutionary and equalitar-
"II Faut Cultwer Notre Jardin" 335
ian Rousseau. The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality implies
that by abolishing private property, civilized man might regain the
perfect freedom and equality which his primitive ancestors enjoyed
in a state of nature. For "the state of nature," on which Rousseau's
whole argument depends, Huxley had all of a scientist's scorn. Its
author hardly believed in it himself. If it never existed, he observes,
it ought to have existed. Huxley recognizes here, together with a
contemptible intellect, a fumbling attempt at an ideal standard. From
this point, his essay becomes the Discourse on Inequality as it should
have been written. Following Sir Henry Maine, he traces the theory
of a state of nature back to Stoic elements in Roman law, where the
concepts of natural liberty and equality served as convenient legal
fictions. They were never anything more. Newborn children are not
free and only in a negative sense equal. Moreover, all the evidence
indicates that land was at first held in part communally and in part
individually. As societies progressed, private ownership drove com-
munal ownership out, being a better adaptation to civilized en-
vironment and to civilized, industrious human nature. As population
increases, land cannot belong to all because there is not enough for
all. It cannot belong to the human race because it belongs to nations.
Huxley is contemptuous of the qualities that made Rousseau
influential. He feels that he has disposed of Rousseau when he has
refuted him. In fact, he denies not only the competence, but the
importance, of the common people in politics. He is not an optimistic
but a peremptory rationalist. Though politics are not rational at the
moment, they should be made so without delay. But how? Huxley
would not have Comte's priesthood of scientists. He wants the free-
dom of democracy without its folly and stupidity.
When "The Natural Inequality of Men" came out, Huxley was
derided for having slain a dead revolutionary. He determined at once
to kill a live one. His victim was Henry George, who, as Huxley
pointed out, was a Rousseauist in his abstract a priori approach and
in his confusion of natural with political rights. Natural rights permit
a man or an animal to do whatever conduces to individual advantage
or enjoyment. Political rights permit a man to do whatever does not
injure his fellow man in society. Natural rights imply the struggle
for existence; political rights, a polity based on a degree of justice
aad cooperation. Huxley insists on this distinction with great ferocity
of illustration. "It is admitted that a tiger has a natural right to eat
336 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
a man; but if he may eat one man, he may eat another, so that a tiger
has a [natural] right of property in all men, as potential tiger-meat." 8
Through these years Huxley was obviously exploring the iniquity of
nature from many points of view.
His refutation of Henry George's economics is rather facile. Dis-
tinguishing sharply between wealth created by labor and wealth
derived from land or the bounty of nature, George declares that a man
may own as private property only what he actually produces. Hux-
ley replies that a man has only a partial right to the fruits of his own
labor because he did not produce the mental and physical endow-
ments which performed that labor the contribution of nature cannot
be practically separated from the contribution of man. That any case
could be made out for taxing an "unearned increment" in private
property, Huxley is angrily unwilling to grant. Once more he has
attempted to refute revolution rather than to understand it.*
Writing in his next article on "Government: Anarchy or Regi-
mentation" Huxley condemns the two extremes by tracing their
history. Regimentation, identified in modern times with socialism,
begins with Hobbes and finds its most influential and characteristic
expression in Rousseau's Social Contract. (Apparently Huxley finds
nothing really new or significant in socialism after Rousseau.) In-
dividualism begins with Locke, proceeds through the Physiocrats to
the Benthamites and ends in the anarchism of Bakunine. Both schools
of thought are hopelessly a priori, deducing rules for civilized life
from a state of nature which anthropology shows to be utterly unreal*
Both fail to reckon with the infinite reproductive power of man.
Socialists do not see that production can never keep up with popula-
tion; individualists do not see that the pressure of numbers tends
to turn every kind of competition into a ruthless struggle for existence.
Too much regimentation destroys initiative; too much individualism
produces a type of character ill fitted for civilized life. The analogy
of the family shows that governments should regulate neither too
much nor too little. Huxley stood doubtful between the ruthlessness
* "Captial The Mother of Labour" is a further attack on George's labor
theory of value. Labor is inevitably dependent on capital. A laborer cannot
complete any useful product unless he has food to sustain him and materials to
work with. Moreover, food, or vital capital, is produced not only by human
labor applied to land, but by animal and plant labor applied to nature's ac-
cumulated capital.
"II Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 337
of capitalists and the incompetence o politicians. There is no real
solution to the problem of poverty because there is no humane way to
keep population down.
Accompanied by his younger son Harry, who had just finished
medical school and was soon to be married, Huxley visited the Canary
Islands in 1889, repeating the first leg of the voyage which, as a
surgeon's assistant, he had begun in 1846. His letters contain almost
no reflections about early times except an ironic reference to "Portu-
guese progress," inspired by the sight of Madeira after forty-four
years. 9 He rode horseback, walked twelve to fifteen miles a day,
longed for letters, and came home with his skin burned to a deep
sienna and his controversial appetite whetted to a fine edge. The
Linnean medal had been awarded him in his absence.
As a residence, London had now become impossible for the same
reason that it had once been indispensable. It was too much the
exciting, fascinating center of things. After some looking around,
Huxley purchased a plot of land in Eastbourne and built a house, into
which he moved in December, 1890. A fairly restrained example of
the flamboyant contemporary style, it was a large, steep-gabled, red-
brick affair, with a tiny Norman choirhouse for his books at one end,
a white-timbered glasshouse for his gentians at the other, and a
short hexagonal Romanesque tower squatting on the roof. The garden,
coming down from an eminence in a broad, steep terrace, looked
public and rather ill at ease with itself. As Eastbourne houses were
named, he called his Hodeslea, an approximation of the Anglo-Saxon
for Huxley. This word, with its hint at once of modern philology
and of a primitive, rural remoteness, heads most of his final letters.
Gentians had made Huxley a botanist; Hodeslea made him a gar-
dener. Puttering a little each day, he discovered with astonishment
that the mere growth and existence of trees and flowers were strangely
absorbing. He raised saxifrages, rejoiced in a conservatory, looked
forward to flower shows, found new significance in Voltaire's "// jaut
cultiver notre jar din," and argued with his gardener. "Books? They'll
say anything in them books," declared that dignitary, and while
the white-maned sage strode about the garden, hose in hand, con-
tinued to denounce the watering of plants in any weather as a learned
prejudice. 10 Here is a plant, jested Hooker, "which will flourish on
338 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
any dry, neglected bit of wall, so I think it will just suit you." u
Huxley responded with statistics of progress. His flowers and creepers
remained a heart-warming comfort down to the last bleak spring
of his life.
Children and grandchildren were frequent visitors at Hodeslea.
No doubt Huxley had been a rather formidable father. "We felt our
little hypocrisies shrivel before him," writes Leonard; "we felt a
confidence in the infallible rectitude of his moral judgements which
inspired a kind of awe." 12 But in any case they felt confidence. Both
as a father and grandfather, Huxley was touchingly, reassuringly
eager to win affection. Far from requiring children to develop the
virtues convenient to parents, he admired rebellion. "I like that chap!"
he exclaimed of his little grandson Julian. "I like the way he looks
you straight in the face and disobeys you." 13 He attempted to capti-
vate a little granddaughter with such an extraordinary amount of
nonsense that at length she remarked, very deliberately and with
much astonishment, "Well, you are the curious'test old man I ever
seen." 14 When Julian read Kingsley's Water Babies, he found his
grandfather's name listed among the authorities on these fascinating
creatures. He looked into the matter at once.
Dear Grandpater Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a
bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your
loving
Julian 1S
To this he received a prompt reply, neatly printed and blessedly
legible.
My dear Julian I never could make sure about that water baby. I have
seen babies in water and babies in bottles; but the baby in the water was
not in a bottle and the baby in the bottle was not in water.
My friend who wrote the story of the water baby, was a very kind man
and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he
did there arc some people who see a great deal and some who see very
little in the same things.
When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers
and see things more wonderful than water babies where other folks can
see nothing.
Give my best love to Daddy and Mammy and Trevenen Grandmoo is
a little better but not up yet
Ever your loving Grandpater 16
"// Faut Cultiver Notre Jar din" 339
Always the prodigious performer, Huxley fascinated his children
so completely with the illustrated adventures of a bull terrier that
Leonard, falling asleep at the beginning of an afternoon's episode,
regarded the loss as one of the bitter disappointments of his early life.
Huxley drew special pictures and told special stories when children
were ill, and when they sat with glazed eyes and full stomachs after
Christmas dinner, he annually astonished them by carving wonderful
beasts, usually pigs, out of orange peel. Pigs became sacred to the
occasion, and when Jessie was compelled by her marriage to be absent,
her father wrote:
The specimen I enclose, wrapped in a golden cerecloth, and with the
remains of his last dinner in the proper region, will prove to you the
heights to which the creative power of the true artist may soar. I call it a
"Piggurnc, or a Harmony in Orange and White."
Preserve it, my dear child, as evidence of the paternal genius, when
those light and fugitive productions which are buried in the philosophical
transactions and elsewhere are forgotten. 17
Huxley Pater does not seem to differ altogether from Huxley
Iconoclastes and Huxley Episcopophagous: * he must throughout life
have exerted on those more terrible Huxleys a softening and hu-
manizing influence.
In 1892 Huxley published his articles on agnosticism and Christian-
ity as Controverted Questions, later Science and Christian Tradition.
By far the best essay in the volume, both in form and content, is the
"Prologue," which very nearly renders the volume unnecessary. It is
a careful and deliberate attempt, when the heat and hurry of battle
are over, to review and understand at least from his own point of
view what the battle had been about. "It cost me more time and
pains," he wrote a friend, "than any equal number of pages I have
ever written." 18 Science and religion, he declares, have been peren-
nially at war. The one studies nature and produces progress. The
other explores supernature and produces confusion and darkness.
In fact, progress is directly proportionate to the victory of naturalism
over supernaturalism. Huxley then plunges into a brilliant and com-
pact history of Protestantism from the fourteenth to the nineteenth
century. Arguing from the authority of an infallible scripture,
Protestants invoked critical reason to destroy the papacy. But reason,
* "Bishop-eating," an epithet invented by Huxley.
34 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
once invoked, could come to rest neither on an infallible scripture
nor on a selection of infallible scriptures. It could base itself perma-
nently only on the unyielding facts of nature.
What are the facts of nature that scientific reason has discovered?
They form themselves, says Huxley, into the great truth of evolution.
First adumbrated in solar astronomy, then clearly evident in em-
bryology and paleontology, a principle of development now seems
discernible in chemistry and is obviously fundamental to the study
of all terrestrial life, which in many instances has progressed from
very simple to increasingly complex forms, producing consciousness,
intelligence, and morality as emergent values along the way. What
heights development may somewhere have reached, science of course
cannot know. It denies, not that a supernature may exist, but that such
existence has yet been proved.
Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view,
the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through
endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's
as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with powers of
influencing the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is
greater than a snail's, seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. 19
The emphasis on physical space is noteworthy. In effect, Huxley
refuses to recognize the existence of any reality apart from matter, or
the validity of any method apart from the scientific. A Supernature
cannot yet be proved by induction from the phenomena of nature.
Therefore, there is no honest refuge except in agnosticism.
If people frankly admitted their ignorance and became genuinely
truthful in all their relationships, "a reformation would be effected
such as the world has not yet seen, an approximation to the millen-
nium." 20 Apparently, truthtelling would encourage a detached, sci-
entific attitude toward morals. "The rules of conduct ... are dis-
coverablelike the other so-called laws of nature " he wrote in a
private letter at this time, "by observation and experiment, and only
in that way." 21 And in a letter of 1894:
There is much need that somebody should do for what is vaguely
called "Ethics" just what the Political Economists have done. Settle the
question of what will be done under the unchecked action of certain
motives, and leave the problem of "ought" for subsequent considera-
tion. ...
We want a science of "Eubiotics" to tell us exactly what will happen
"II Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 341
if human beings are exclusively actuated by the desire of well-being in
the ordinary sense. Of course the Utilitarians have laid the foundations of
such a science, with the result that the nicknamer of genius called this
branch of science "pig philosophy," making just the same blunder as
when he called political economy "dismal science."
"Moderate well-being" may be no more the worthiest end of life than
wealth. But if it is the best to be had in this queer world it may be
worth trying for. 22
In 1892 Huxley became a president for the last time. Since 1887
there had been strong feeling that the many colleges scattered through
the metropolis should be gathered together in the University of Lon-
don, then merely an examining body. Everybody agreed there should
be unity; the question was what kind? Huxley tried to remain
aloof, but inevitably he had opinions and inevitably people asked
him to express them. He believed that medical schools should not
be domineered over by scientists who wanted to use them as recruit-
ing stations, nor scientific schools domineered over by litterateurs
who had no use for them at all. He believed that there should be
schools of art and literature and that literary professors should teach
literature and not philology. The reform association seemed to have
similar ideas. Therefore he joined it. Therefore it elected him presi-
dent. His leadership was bold and vigorous, but apparently the whole
movement, as so often in academic politics, suffered from too much
light. Too many people had too many ideas, and for the time being
London University continued unreformed.
At this time Huxley also added a modest cupola to the utilitarian
edifice of his career.
I was present at a small party of scientific men [wrote Huxley's im-
mediate chief Donnelly to Lord Spencer] when Huxley . . . was asked
if he had ever heard of Darwin having been offered any honour during
his lifetime by the Crown. Huxley said he was pretty sure no offer of any
kind had been made to him adding that 50 or 100 years hence it would
seem absolutely incredible that the state had in no way recognized his
transcendent services to science. . . .
And after a laugh at the struggle of some, who were known to us, to
secure bits of ribbon, Huxley said, "Well I don't mind saying what is the
only kind of honour I should care about as a Man of Science for there
is not the slightest ]ear of its being offered me and that is a Privy Coun-
cillorship. There is a possible appropriateness in that a kind of fiction
34 2 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
that one was called to the Councils of the State on behalf of Science." Now
the object of my writing is to ask Your Excellency to consider whether
this honour is so entirely out of the question. 23
It proved by no means to be out of the question. Huxley's name duly
appeared on the list of Her Majesty's new appointments. He com-
plained of having to get out his old court dress and make the journey
down to Osborne, but actually he was much pleased. He described the
ceremony of "kissing hands" to his wife with the gusto of rational
superiority:
Then we were shown into the presence chamber where the Queen sat at
a table. We knelt as if we were going to say our prayers, holding a testa-
ment between two, while the Clerk of the Council read an oath of which
I heard not a word. We each advanced to the Queen, knelt and kissed her
hand, retired backwards, and got sworn over again (Lord knows what I
promised and vowed this time also). Then we shook hands with all the
P.C.'s present, including Lord Lome, and so exit backwards. It was all
very curious. 24
While on his knees, he glanced up to have a close look at the Queen.
Her eyes were fixed upon him. She was taking advantage of the same
opportunity.
Meanwhile, the restless traveler in search of health had given place
to a delicate old man much threatened and beleaguered, beyond the
windows of his study, by cold east winds, chill night air, and other
eventualities of weather and season. A dinner at the X was a perilous
and desperate adventure to be undertaken only after much anxious
weighing of the pleasures of conviviality against the dangers of in-
fluenza. His old friendship with Hooker was sometimes reduced to
a few lines about symptoms sent from one invalid bed to the other.
And then there were the funerals of old friends. "Neither you nor I
have any business to commit suicide," he admonished Hooker on the
eve of Hirst's funeral, "for that which after all is a mere sign of the
affection we have no need to prove for our old friend, and the chances
are that half an hour cold chapel and grave-side on a day like this
would finish us." 25
Tennyson's funeral he did attend. Who would miss the Battle of
Waterloo or the surrender at Sedan? Huxley had also admired
Tennyson as the most genuinely scientific poet of the age. The
funeral was a pageant of Victorian history and Tennysonian auto-
"// Faut Cultiver Notre Jar din" 343
biography. The solemn music, the sober grandeur of the Abbey, the
Union Jack upon the coffin, the soldiers of the Light Brigade in the
nave, the scarce departed presence of the Victorian Laureate him-
self stirred Huxley so deeply that he composed the one poem of his
discreeter years. 26 It is not a very good poem. It simply indicates his
patriotism, his moralism, and his -admiration for German literature.
The short lines of the early stanzas suggest Goethe; the repeated line
is paraphrased from Schiller's "Gib diesen Todten mir Heraus":
Bring me my dead!
To me that have grown
Stone laid upon stone t
As the stormy brood
Of English blood
Has waxed and spread
And filled the world,
With sails unfurled;
With men that may not lie
With thoughts that cannot die.
The poem concludes:
and all around
Is silence: and the shadows closer creep
And whisper softly: All must sleep.
Two old friends and one ancient enemy died soon after Tennyson.
The ancient enemy was Sir Richard Owen. But Huxley found he had
long since forgotten all resentment, and at a public meeting actually
seconded the motion for a statue. Characteristically, he was tickled
by the irony of the situation, and spoke so eloquently in Owen's
behalf that the latter's grandson asked him to write an anatomical
chapter for The Life of Richard Owen. Huxley complied. The essay
is a model of tact and magnaminity. "If I mistake not," he wrote, "the
historian of comparative anatomy and palaeontology will always as-
sign to Owen a place next to, and hardly lower than that of Cuvier,
who was practically the creator of those sciences in their modern
shape." 27 And as he toiled away at the essay, he wrote with some
surprise to Hooker, "The thing that strikes me most is, how he and I
and all the things we fought about belong to antiquity. It is almost
impertinent to trouble the modern world with such antiquarian
business." 28
344 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
But much antiquarian business was being wound up. **You see
Jowett is going or gone," he wrote Hooker. 29 Almost to the end the
prophetic schoolmaster had tranquilly continued to influence famous
men, receive old students, pen graceful notes to married ladies, edit
Plato, utter epigrams in a doze, and supervise the building at Balliol.
He became seriously ill just before a much anticipated visit to a
country house. His doctor was reluctant to let him go, but the Master
was not to be denied and passed away with great resignation a few
weeks later, a martyr to the consolations of a bachelor's life, at the
home of Sir Robert Wright. Almost his last coherent words were
encouragement to a favorite pupil. Almost his last bit of wire-pulling
had been an attempt to persuade Tennyson to resolve ail contem-
porary philosophical and religious differences with a universal poetic
prayer.
But Huxley's gravest loss was Tyndall. In 1875, while poised on the
utmost verge of bachelordom, that solemn Irishman had proposed
to the daughter of Lord Claud Hamilton, a charming and intelligent
lady some twenty years his junior. The necessity of taming Tyndall
to an approximation of the reason and sanity of conjugal life filled
his friends with apprehension for the prospective bride. It worried
Tyndall too. "You do not know what a devil's advocate I made of
myself," he told Huxley, "before I permitted a word that could com-
promise her to pass the lips of that brave girl. And one of the many
things she had to face and contemplate was the inexorable fact of my
years." 30 She had resisted his pleas against himself, however, and
they had since lived in strenuous and scientific felicity, traveling,
climbing mountains, and geologizing together. Their American lec-
ture tour had been as brilliant as the Huxleys' own. Quite recently,
Tyndall had been forced by ill-health to retire as Director of the Royal
Institution, and devotedly cared for by his wife, seemed to be declining
into a prosaic and elderly decrepitude. For years he had dosed himself
incessantly for headaches, insomnia, and stomach pains. Late one
December night in 1893, he awoke violently ill and sent his wife for
magnesia. Bewildered with sleep and the midnight crisis, she gave
him chloral by mistake. The mistake was discovered too late, and
some hours later Tyndall died.
The newspapers insisted relentlessly on the circumstances of his
death. Huxley was concerned for Lady Tyndall, "That poor wopaan
"II Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 345
was to my mind in a somewhat dangerous condition the exaltation
of grief which is apt to precede a sudden breakdown." 31 Partly to
exonerate her, he wrote an obituary. It was full of melancholy recol-
lections of the old days. Four survivors Hooker, Huxley, Lubbock,
and Frankland attended the cold December funeral. "It was we
four who stood, pondering over many things, in Haslemere Church-
yard the other day." 32 That was the last meeting of the X Club.
Having spent nearly a lifetime in thinking about the religious
problem, G. J. Romanes established in 1892 an annual lecture at
Oxford encouraging other people to think about everything else
except politics. Rather oddly, under these conditions, Gladstone was
asked to give the first lecture and Huxley, the second. Huxley always
found it difficult to resist an invitation to lecture. He found it impos-
sible to resist an invitation to follow Gladstone. Nor was the G.O.M.
unwilling to precede. Clad in the red magnificence of his doctor's
robe, he spoke on the relatively safe subject of the Odyssey, lunch-
eoned and dined indefatigably, and disappeared in a cloud of his
own splendid and ebullient conversation. Equally high-spirited, Hux-
ley offered to lecture the following year in court dress. He told
Romanes that his title would be "Evolution and Ethics" and though
promising to avoid contemporary religious controversy, must have
hinted with his usual gusto at dire and electrifying overtones, for
Romanes wrote back in great alarm and had to be soothed in haste.
Huxley sent him an advance copy of the lecture. Both Mrs. Romanes
and Mrs. Huxley agreed that it exuded not the slightest whiff of
heresy.
Throughout 1892 Huxley read, meditated, wrote, revised, cut, and
polished. His subject was a bit of unfinished business, a problem old
and familiar to himself and to his century: what is the relation of
nature to morality and justice? In the eighteenth century, nature had
for the most part been an ingenious mechanism devised by a benev-
olent Creator to increase human comfort and self-esteem. For Bishop
Butler indeed, it had been not so much a machine to be understood
as a mystery to be accepted with resignation, embracing much that
seemed cruel and wasteful to merely human comprehension. In the
nineteenth century, it was found to be an endless, divinely inspired
picture gallery and symphony concert in which the lonely enthusiast,
34^ Apes, Angels, and Victorians
escaping from the restraints of city life, might dreamily commune
with God and recover the primitive innocence of freedom and
spontaneity. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Tennyson,
deep in Lyell and personal bereavement, had seen that nature's pic-
tures were hung in a charnel house and that her music was played
in a tomb.
In 1859 Darwin had of course discovered that the charnel house
was a factory of progress. Mid-century optimists were delighted to
learn that nature moved forward on the sound business principles of
laissez faire. The question of justice seemed hardly relevant. To be
sure, it became painfully relevant for Darwin; and even more so for
his pupil Romanes, who, writing in a mood of bitter skepticism, had
not like his master been comforted for the cruelties of nature either
by the excitement of having explained them or the conviction that
they led to genuine progress. After millions of years of evolution
we find that more than half of the species which have survived the cease-
less struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of
life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons
whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment every-
where a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and
quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly
close in deaths of brutal torture! 8S
The impact of Darwinism on the humanitarian conscience had in-
evitably produced pessimism. But Romanes* Candid Examination of
Theism (1876) had also drawn heavily from Mill's posthumous Three
Essays on Religion (1873), which, in oddly un-Darwinian terms,
summed up the case against nature both as a model for morality
and an argument for theism.
In 1860, shortly after a brief and sudden illness had carried away
his eldest son,* Huxley had declared that nature was neatly and
precisely just. He had reiterated that conviction on several later
occasions, but as early as 1871, in "Administrative Nihilism," he had
begun to maintain the opposite, and in this he was doubtless en-
couraged by such works as Tennyson's In Memoriam and Butler's
Analogy, which he admired.
The Romanes lecture represents the culmination of Huxley's
* See p. 127.
"II Faut Cultwer Notre Jardin" 347
pessimism. As usual, he is all courage and decision, and expresses the
new truth, however unwelcome, so starkly that he very nearly pushes
it into falsehood. The cosmic process, he declares, is a welter of in-
cessant change and for sentient beings, a scene of struggle, suffering,
and death. The ethical process, in part at least, substitutes coopera-
tion and curtails suffering, Man has learned to live in comparative
harmony with his fellow man and has thus become the dominant
animal of the planet. Yet he is only partially emancipated from nature.
He still suffers pain, is still struggling against the ape and tiger
within him. Naturally he wonders whether there is any ultimate
justice or reason for suffering. Jewish culture replies with the counsel
of resignation, Greek culture with a moral order administered by
gods and goddesses, Indian culture with the doctrine of Karma, by
which, through the transmigration of souls, every living creature in
one existence or another eventually reaps as he has sown.
Huxley is impressed with the positive and critical character of
Indian thought. He emphasizes that the doctrine of transmigration,
like that of evolution, had
its roots in the world of reality. . . . The sum of tendencies to act in a
certain way, which we call "character," is often to be traced through a
long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this
"character" this moral and intellectual essence of a mandoes veritably
pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another. 8 *
From the Indian system, "the supernatural, in our sense of the term,
was entirely excluded. There was no external power which could
affect the sequence of cause and effect which gives rise to karma;
none but the will of the subject of the karma which could put an end
to it.'* 35 In fact, Buddha perceived possibilities of skeptical economy
of which Berkeley himself was unaware. It cannot be proved that
mind, any more than matter, exists. Therefore Gautama reduced the
cosmos "to a mere flow of sensations, emotions, volitions, and
thoughts," 36 in which karma was the only reality. Though full of
admiration for the almost scientific method with which Buddha
treats moral phenomena, Huxley cannot sympathize with what
seems the ultimately negative character of his system. That lif e is
a dream, that man's object should be to end that dream by deadening
desire and sensation, no sound Victorian could grant. Huxley is
34 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
extremely severe with Indian mysticism as a practical way of life.
"No later monachism has no nearly succeeded in reducing the human
mind to that condition of impassive quasisomnambulism, which, but
for its acknowledged holiness, might run the risk of being confounded
with idiocy." 8T
Continuing with his survey of philosophies, Huxley rejects
Stoicism, and therewith something very like the faith in which he
began his. career. In passages reminiscent of Mill's Three Essays, he
points out that Stoicism simply does not recognize the evil in nature.
That there is a "soul of good in things evil" is unquestionable; nor will
any wise man deny the disciplinary value of pain and sorrow. But these
considerations do not help us to see why the immense multitude of ir-
responsible sentient beings, which cannot profit by such discipline, should
suffer; nor why, among the endless possibilities open to omnipotence
that of sinless, happy existence among the rest the actuality in which
sin and misery abound should be that selected. 38
Man's tragedy is that he must find ethical greatness in negation. "By
the Tiber, as by the Ganges, ethical man admits that the cosmos is too
strong for him; and by destroying every bond which ties him to it by
ascetic discipline, he seeks salvation in absolute renunciation." 39
Huxley's solution involves fresh heroism of the will and the intel-
lect. It is "to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm." 40
Ethical nature may count upon having to reckon with a tenacious
and powerful enemy as long as the world lasts. But, on the other hand, I
see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound
principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify
the conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now covered
by history.* 1
In short, with the aid of science man may hope so to improve his own
nature and his immediate social and physical environment as to create
a friendly, rational world inside the hostile, irrational universe.
What is fundamental in this essay? There is an insistence on change
which, in certain passages, almost reduces nature to an illusion and
which, together with the emphasis on the inwardness of moral experi-
ence, suggests mysticism. There is also despite the rejection of
Stoicism Stoic melancholy about the present and Stoic optimism
about the future. Finally, there is a Hardyesque hostility to the cosmos
"II Faut Cultwer Notre Jardin" 349
as a place of slaughter and suffering. All of these elements, in greater
or less degree, are native to Huxley and to the Zeitgeist. That they
are all present in a single essay may indicate a renewed expansion
or illumination of mind. Old age is sometimes a period of rapid
learning.
Huxley was afraid his lecture might be misunderstood. As a matter
of fact, it was scarcely heard. Shortly before the event he attended
a meeting of doctors which proved to be an even bigger meeting of
influenza microbes. They robbed him of his voice, raised pimples
on his nose, caused it to run furiously, and so inflamed and swelled
his visage that he began to look like a particularly disreputable Cap-
tain Costigan. Captain Costigan gradually subsided into Professor
Huxley, however; and when, before a packed audience in the Shel-
donian Theatre, he rose in his red robes, tall and white-manedhis
square, aggressive features frosted over with the pallor and thought-
fulness of age he seemed no less than the legendary champion who,
thirty-three years before, had won the great victory over Bishop Wil-
berforce at the same university. But alas! he was an orator without a
voice. Through the first half of the discourse his voice was so low that
there were cries of "Speak up!" and the undergraduates began to press
down from the galleries. He finished in stronger tones, but on the
whole, he was an inaudible wonder. There was a wave of somewhat
bewildered applause, and he was carried off to a luncheon.
Huxley described his lecture as an "egg-dance." 42 As a matter of
fact, it was not only an extremely dexterous, but a somewhat
puzzling maneuver among breakables and unmentionables. It was
full of talk about Indian mysticism and of protest against the cruel-
ties of evolution. It set up a sharp antithesis between the ethical and
the cosmic process, yet failed to define very clearly what the ethical
process was. Inevitably, it was much misunderstood. Mivart expected
Huxley to become a Roman Catholic. Spencer did not know what to
expect, but he felt quite sure that Huxley's errors had been invented
by Huxley and that his truths had been discovered some forty years
before by Herbert Spencer. Perhaps he also suspected that Huxley
was simply continuing The Times controversy from the shelter of a
red robe. In a review entitled "Evolutionary Ethics," Spencer quoted
at length from his early works to show how long ago he had empha-
3 jo Apes, Angels, and Victorians
sized that only the ethical process results in progress and a survival
o the "best." On the other hand, the ethical process is part of the
cosmic; and if so, "how can the two be put in opposition?" 43 Some
people think, wrote Spencer in effect, that the professor meant to
read me a lesson, but "it is scarcely supposable that he deliberately
undertook to teach me my own doctrines." In a spirit of particular
cordiality, he sent an autographed copy of the review to his old friend,
and was "quite startled" to recieve a stiff reply in the third person. 44
"As if the fellow had not sucked my brains for thirty years!" snorted
Huxley. 45 He wondered how he had ever put up with such "a long
winded vanitous pedant of a kill-joy." 4G But Spencer answered him
with such pathetic, crestfallen surprise that a few days later Huxley
found himself writing a letter of comfort.
However, the public record must be set straight. He saw that his
lecture needed a preface. The preface, or "Prologmena," turned out
longer than the lecture itself. The ethical process, he declared, was
indubitably part of the cosmic process, but was nonetheless in op-
position to it. He spelled out his point with an elaborate analogy to
gardening. In a state of nature, plants are selected by a competition
of each against all. Those survive which are best adapted to natural
conditions. In a garden, plants many perhaps quite foreign to the
region are chosen by the gardener according to his taste and need.
They flourish because his skill and foresight create conditions favor-
able to them. The horticultural process is part of the cosmic, but runs
counter to it and may be superseded by it whenever the gardener
relaxes his efforts.
The ethical process depends on a victory of "the organized and
personified sympathy we call conscience" 47 over unlimited self-
assertion. Civilized man tends like every kind of organism to over-
populate his environment. He could improve himself as a species only'
by ruthlessly exterminating the socially unfit. But he does not know
who the socially fit are; and even if he did, the practice of extermi-
nating them would corrupt and disintegrate his whole society. As a
matter of fact, he does not compete so much for survival as for
pleasures. He progresses by social rather than biological evolution,
creating, like the gardener, conditions which will facilitate "the free
expansion of the innate faculties of the citizen." 48 Huxley's ultimate
position was thus not very different from Darwin's.
"// Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 351
The "Prologmena" is obviously not a very precise or thorough
analysis of social evolution. Huxley says that civilized men are, and
are not, subject to the struggle for existence. 49 Of course they must
in some manner be subject to it, since their numbers increase more
rapidly than their food supply. But how? In his last years Huxley
seems to have thought a good deal about this problem. After his
death, two series of comments on "Evolution and Ethics" were found
among his papers. In civilized life, he declares, the competition be-
tween individuals is drastically modified -and in large part replaced
by a competition between societies, in which the ethically superior tend
to survive. "The ethical process and the cosmic process work in har-
mony in respect of the external relations of each society." 50 Clearly,
he was thinking along the lines of Bagehot's Physics and Politics.
The influenza microbes had the last word. They once more became
very active, and from his bed Huxley sent cartoons of them to
Hooker. When he recovered he had a last summer stay at Majola in
Switzerland. The mountains, the tiny blue lake of Sils, the narrow
path around it, Herr Walther at the hotel, and the Oxford professor
Campbell and his wife, who came there every summer were all old
friends now. Huxley was once more restored by brisk walks and
Alpine air, but not so wonderfully as before. By the next summer,
Majola had become too distant. "Will you tell Herr Walther," he
wrote Professor Campbell, "we are only waiting for a balloon to visit
the hotel again?" 51
But he didn't need a balloon to reach Oxford for the meeting of
the British Association. Just a third of a century had passed since his
now legendary victory over Bishop Wilberforce. Huxley rightly
guessed that the occasion would be interesting. Once more the Shel-
donian Theatre was packed with an audience on the alert for history.
Once more, white haired and red robed with the insignia of age and
honors, Huxley sat on the platform. The presidential address was
delivered by the Marquis of Salisbury, leader of the Tory Party, a
former Prime Minister, and Chancellor of the University. As a
gentleman-politician habituated to understatement and practical
affairs, Lord Salisbury was not likely to become embroiled in heated
argument on a metaphysical subject. As an enlightened patriot dedi-
cated to the applause of British achievement, he felt obliged to accede
3J2 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
to majority opinion and regard Darwinian evolution as firmly
legislated into the constitution of the universe. As a Tory elegantly
skeptical of the value of all novelty and progress, however, he re-
garded Darwinism as a particularly disagreeable form of liberalism
and therefore still essentially a party question. Expatiating on the
progress of science and ranging gracefully from astronomy to physics
and chemistry, he came at length to biology and evolution, a princi-
ple which was now "disputed by no reasonable man." 52 He dwelt
with delicate irony on "that comforting word, evolution," and then
touched on the current controversy over acquired characteristics in a
way that seemed to put the whole subject in doubt.
The attack was skillfully veiled, and surely a Chancellor, a Marquis,
an ex-Prime Minister could deliver with impunity a parliamentary
thrust against even the constitution of the universe. As Lord Salis-
bury spoke, many a glance fell on Huxley, and none more intently
than that of Henry Osborn, an American professor and former stu-
dent, who had come full of a sense of having moved from the pe-
riphery to the center of history. He noticed that though the venerable
countenance showed no sign of wrath, Huxley sank deeper into his
chair and his foot tapped restlessly on the platform.
As a matter of fact, he was in a difficult position. Entrusted at
his own request for a slight and humble role with seconding the
vote of thanks to the Chancellor, he was condemned to praise. The
problem was how to make praise carry a reprimand. He had read
Lord Salisbury's speech in proof on the previous day and had been
deep in thought ever since. No doubt the tapping of the foot indicated
temptation. "The old Adam, of course, prompted the tearing of the
address to pieces, which would have been a very easy job." 53 The
physicist Lord Kelvin rose amid mild applause and moved the vote of
thanks without a murmur of protest. Apparently he had no wish to
defend the universe against Lord Salisbury.
There was tremendous, and no doubt hopeful, applause when
Huxley rose. In a voice now clear and resonant, he spoke of the
reconcilers of the twenties and thirties who tried "to keep their
scientific and other convictions in two separate logic-tight compart-
ments." 54 Such people wanted to allow science no broad general
concepts but to keep her "grinding at the mill of utility." The "pax
Baconiana" of the reconcilers was ended forever by the publication
"11 Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 353
of The Origin of Species. With dangerously edged reiteration, Huxley
then quoted those passages in the Chancellor's speech that gave full
recognition to the evolutionary principle. He concluded by quoting
very pointedly from a German scientist to show that Darwinian
controversies imply no doubt of essential Darwinism. To be sure,
great evolutionary problems remain to be solved, but no great sub-
ject was ever exhausted in thirty-five years. He sat down amid a
fresh pandemonium of applause. History had repeated itself by
innuendo.
Through 1893 and much of 1894 Huxley was engaged in editing
the nine volumes of his Collected Essays, for each of which he
wrote a brief preface. The prefaces form an interesting commen-
tary on himself and what he stood for. He made no great pre-
tensions to careful craftsmanship. "Written for the most part, in the
scant leisure of pressing preoccupations, or in the intervals of ill-
health, these essays are free neither from superfluities in the way of
repetition, nor from deficiencies which, I doubt not, will be even more
conspicuous to other eyes than they are to my own." 65 His fault
had always been that he did too many things too rapidly. Moreover,
he had never been able to write without the stimulus of an im-
mediate occasion and he had to finish before the occasion had lost its
dramatic effectiveness. He found discipline not in the critical eye of
scholarly posterity but in the somewhat dull ear of the contemporary
workingman or lecture-goer. "The task of putting the truths learned
in the field, the laboratory, and the museum, into language which,
without bating a jot of scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligi-
ble, taxed such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to the
uttermost." 56
Part of this discipline was that he had no illusions about the aver-
age audience. "I venture to doubt if more than one in ten ... carries
away an accurate notion of what the speaker has been driving at." 57
Huxley's strength is that, in the last analysis, he did not level his ideas
down to dullness. He drove a wedge of clarity into it. His concessions
were all in language and form in vivid and dramatic illustration, in
short, simple paragraphs, in direct, familiar, and colloquial phrasing.
The intelligent workingman was very nearly Huxley's ideal audi-
tor. He not only evoked, both early and late, some of Huxley's best
lectures, but was to have been his final court of appeal in scriptural
354 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
controversy. In the last years of his life Huxley was planning to sum
up the results of scientific biblical study in a series of workingmen's
lectures. When lecturing was obviously out of the question, he
thought of a primer or popular history for young people. But the
time was too short.
Some years before, a "Darwin Medal" had been established, to be
awarded biennially for biological research. The first award went very
appropriately to Wallace and the second, to Hooker. Huxley approved
of both choices but felt that in the future the honor should fall to
younger men, on whom it would act as a spur. Instead, it fell to him-
self. He tried to scold the guilty conspirators, but in vain. "One gets
chill [in] old age," he wrote his old student Foster, "and it is very
pleasant to be warmed up unexpectedly even against one's injunc-
tions." 58 The medal was presented at the Royal Society anniversary
dinner, which he attended with trepidation, paid for with illness
and enjoyed thoroughly. In fact, it was the occasion of one of his
wittiest speeches. He protested that he was at a loss to explain why
he had been awarded the medal. His scientific services were in no
way comparable to those of Wallace or Hooker. But "they also serve
who only stand and wait." To be sure, his standing and waiting had
been "of a somewhat peculiar character." 89 He then told the story of
a Quaker passenger on a ship which was attacked by pirates. The
captain put a pike in his hands and bade him take part in the action.
The Quaker replied that he could not fight, but was willing to stand
and wait at the gangway.
He did stand and wait with the pike in his hands, and when the pirates
mounted and showed themselves coming on board he thrust his pike
with the sharp end forward into the persons who were mounting, and
he said, "Friend, keep on board thine own ship." It is in that sense that I
venture to interpret the principle of standing and waiting to which I
have referred. 60
The cold, dreary February of 1895 was enlivened by a remarkable
event. A Tory politician published a book on metaphysics. The
author was A. J. Balfour, an urbane, languid, clever young man
whose habit of sitting on his spine had awakened the permanent
suspicion of Disraeli. A book on metaphysics would have ruined a
politician in Disraeli's day. In Balfour's, it simply caused a sensation*
"II Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 355
To be sure, The Foundations of Belief was a very political work on
metaphysics in fact, like Lord Salisbury's effort at the British
Association, a kind of prolonged speech from the Opposition benches
attacking the fashionable scientific-utilitarian universe and urging the
Tory universe in its stead. The right honorable author did not
openly disparage the critical intellect, but he did exercise his own
intellect with considerable skill to show that intellect should not be
exercised too much or too critically. Too much thinking divides
people in practical affairs and reduces them to absurdity in specula-
tion. Mere mind cannot arrive at its own fundamental data. It
should reason cautiously on data provided by custom and tradition.
The strongest part of the book is the attack on the naturalistic or
agnostic position: naturalism is inconsistent with itself and with
man's practical situation in the universe. The scientific naturalist
declares "we may know only 'phenomena' and the laws by which
they are connected," 61 yet makes such knowledge tenuously depend-
ent on a long sequence of causes extending backward into an essen-
tially unknown outer world on the one hand and forward on the
other to the "dark chasm" 62 which separates neural changes from
intelligent thought. He argues as though he believed in determinism
and behaves like everybody else as though he believed in free will.
He is a zealot for Christian morals, yet builds up a vast, mechanistic,
essentially irrational universe in which the Christian God and the
Christian system cannot live. Without mentioning any names, Bal-
four is particularly acid about such scientific exponents of moral
force as Huxley.
Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong,
not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished
by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions
decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have
maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them. 68
Balfour's prediction was already coming true as he wrote.
As a matter of fact, he had provided Huxley with several shoes
which might have fit remarkably well. Wilfred Ward once Huxley's
pleasant enemy in the Metaphysical Society, now his jolly neighbor
in Eastbourne was quite aware of this, and when, after lunch one
afternoon, Huxley dropped in full of high spirits and eager talk about
Erasmus, insidiously offered to lend him The Foundations of Belief.
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
You need not lend me that [said Huxley, becoming "extremely ani-
mated"]. I have exercised my mind with it a good deal already. Mr. Bal-
four ought to have acquainted himself with the opinions of those he
attacks. An attack on us by some one who understood our position would
do all of us good myself included. No human being holds the opinions
he speaks of as "naturalism." He is a good debater. He knows the value of
a word. The word "Naturalism" has a bad sound and unpleasant associa-
tions. It would tell against us in the House of Commons, and so it will
with his readers. 64
Suspecting a hostile audience, Huxley was reluctant to enter on
particulars, but was encouraged to do so by degrees.
Balfour uses the word phenomena [he declared] as applying simply to the
outer world and not to the inner world. The only people his attack would
hold good of would be the Comtists, who deny that psychology is a
science. . . . All the empiricists, from Locke onwards, make the ob-
servation of the phenomena of the mind itself quite separate from the
study of mere sensation. No man in his senses supposes that the sense of
beauty, or the religious feelings (this with a courteous bow to a priest
who was present), or the sense of moral obligation, are to be accounted
for in terms of sensation, or come to us through sensation.
But no doubt, answered Ward, Mr. Balfour had described not so
much what naturalists thought as what they logically ought to think.
"Mill was almost the only man on their side in this century who had
faced the problem frankly, and he had been driven to say that all
men can know is that there are 'permanent possibilities of sensa-
tion.' " Huxley merely replied that empiricists were not bound by all
of Mill's theories. He thought Balfour's book a brilliant literary
effort, but "as a helpful contribution to the great controversy, the
most disappointing he had ever read."
"There has been no adverse criticism of it yet," ventured Ward
innocently.
"No!" he answered with emphasis. "But there soon will be!'
At Knowles's request, Huxley was already writing a reply. He
seems to have approached the Foundations with some respect,
hoping to prove that the enlightened Tory was an agnostic at heart;
but the more he read, the more fallacies he found. Balfour was
simply another proof that politicians were fundamentally irrational.
"I am inclined to think," Huxley wrote Knowles, "that the practice
"// Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin" 357
of the methods of political leaders destroys their intelligence for all
serious purposes." 65
Meanwhile, the cold weather continued and influenza spread in
Eastbourne. Huxley shivered before his fire, expected influenza, and
detected so many errors in Balfour's book that he had to divide his
reply into two installments. He sent off the first, very nearly finished
the second and then went to bed with influenza.
The first installment of "Mr. Balfour's Attack on Agnosticism,"
was duly published in The Nineteenth Century for March, 1895. It
was essentially an old defense against a rather new attack. Balfour's
naturalism, Huxley insisted, was something very different from
either his own agnosticism or Locke's empiricism. Agnosticism does
not deny that a supernatural world may exist. It simply denies that
verifiable knowledge of such a world has thus far been established.
Empiricism does not restrict itself to material phenomena. It deals
also with mental phenomena, and so one gathers may eventually
discover a scientific basis for the moral life. Attacked for his more dog-
matic position, Huxley once more escaped by defining his more
skeptical position.
He very aptly described his first article as a "cavalry charge." 66
His second was to bring the bayonets and heavy artillery into play.
It was not published until 1932, when still a bare, preliminary draft
it appeared in the Appendix of Houston Peterson's Huxley:
Prophet of Science. One can see what Huxley meant by bayonets and
heavy artillery. He attacked Balfour's summing-up against natural-
ism, proposition by proposition. When he had finished, hardly a
word or an idea was left standing. Huxley denied that the agnostic
regards the universe as irrational. A tadpole is a rationally con-
structed organism, rationally adapted to his environment in the uni-
verse. Therefore, the forces which formed him and the universe are
rational. Again, Huxley insisted that the agnostic believes in a moral
law. That law will not change so long as human nature and so-
cial conditions remain what they are. But social conditions and
men's ideas were even at that moment revolutionizing the moral
law. Huxley had refuted Balfour without entirely understanding
him.
Huxley concludes with one of his few criticisms of Christianity
as a moral ideal:
358 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
To believe against the dictates of the carnal reason; to refuse to listen to
the impulses of affection tainted by sin, and principles, the offspring of
self-righteousness; to withdraw from all human interests, renounce voli-
tion, and sink into a quietistic machine driven by the Spirit these are
the counsels of perfection accepted in theory, though happily more or less
ignored in practice, by the great majority of Christians. 67
And again: "They have recognised in themselves and others only
one object the salvation of their souls; to attain that they have been
as ready to trample down every consideration of patriotism or social
welfare." es He also took the opportunity to sum up his disagreement
with Spencer: he did not approve of Spencer's a priori method, of
his formulation of the evolutionary principle, or of the ethical and
political deductions which he made from that principle.
Huxley's illness grew worse. He watched its progress with wry
amusement, almost with detachment. At the outset, the doctor had
pronounced the influenza "a mild type/' 69 Huxley wondered what a
severe type would be like. "I find coughing continuously for fourteen
hours or so a queer kind of mildness." He survived the influenza, as
well as the bronchitis which accompanied it. But now heart and
kidney disease set in. His doctor became fearful. "I am carried down
to a tent in the garden every day," the invalid wrote Hooker, "and live
in the fresh air all I can." When his son Leonard asked him how he
was, he replied with brisk impatience, "A mere carcass, which has
to be tended by other people." Leonard found him thin, but sun-
burnt, alert, and cheerful. He remained eagerly interested in the
garden to the end, and when he could no longer get out, asked daily
after certain flowers and plants.
Though recognizing the gravity of his case, he was determined to
live. He told his nurse that the doctors could not be right about the
kidney ailment; for if they were right, he ought to be in a state of
coma. As a matter of fact, they were surprised that he was not. In a
very shaky hand, he wrote Hooker that the newspaper reports were
unnecessarily alarming. Three days later his heart began to fail, and
on the same evening June 29, 1895, at && a g e sixtyhe passed
quietly away.
He was buried at Finchley, beside his little son Noel. Both graves
were shaded by a stately young oak. It had been a sapling when,
"// Faut Cultiver Notre Jar din" 359
thirty-five years before, he had stood, heartbroken, over Noel's grave.
By Huxley's own wish, three lines from a poem by his wife were in-
scribed on his tombstone:
Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep;
For still He giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.
Notes
Chapter i. Revolution in a Classroom
Pages 3-8
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), 1, 194; also see 'The British Association,"
The Athenaeum, July 14, 1860, pp. 59-68.
2. See a review of Darwin's Origin of Species, The Edinburgh Review, CXI
(1860), 487-532.
3. "On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals," The
Natural History Review, I (1861), 67-84.
4. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 202.
5. Ibid., p. 195,
6. Loc. cit.
7. Ibid., p. 196.
8. "A Grandmother's Tales," Macmillan's Magazine, LXXVIII (1898), 433.
9. Ibid., p. 434.
10. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 202.
11. Loc. fit.
Chapter ii. A Scientific Odyssey
Pages 9-25
1. Thomas Henry Huxley, Methods and Results, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 4.
2. Huxley, "Autobiography," Methods and Results, p. 5.
3. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), 1, 6.
4. See Sir William Hamilton's review of Cousin's Cours de Philosophic: In-
troduction I'Histoire de la Philosophic, The Edinburgh Review, I (1829),
194-221.
360
Notes 361
5. Houston Peterson, Huxley: Prophet of Science (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., Ltd., 1932), p. 14.
6. "Autobiography," Methods and Results, p. 8.
7. Julian Huxley, ed., T. H. Huxley's Diary of the Voyage of HMS. "Rattle-
sna\e" (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1936), p. 38.
8. Life and Letters of Huxley t I, 237.
9. Ibid., I, 18.
10. "Obituary: Thomas Wharton Jones," The British Medical Journal, II
(1891), 1176.
11. "Autobiography," Methods and Results, p. 9.
12. Loc. cit.
13. Diary of the Rattlesnake Voyage, p. 48.
14. Notebook 13, written in 1899 in Mrs. Huxley's hand, Huxley Papers:
Scientific and General Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science
and Technology), LXII, 4.
15. Loc. cit.
16. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 41.
17. Diary of the Rattlesnake Voyage, pp. 242-243.
1 8. Notebook 13, in Mrs. Huxley's hand, Huxley Papers, LXII, 1-2.
19. Diary of the Rattlesnake Voyage, p. 136.
20. Ibid., p. 135.
21. Ibid., p. 136, n.l.
22. "The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study," Science and
Hebrew Tradition, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc.,
1897), pp. 317^318.
23. T. H. Huxley, "Science at Sea: Narrative of the Voyage of the HMS.
Rattlesnake" The Westminster Review, LXI (1854), 117-118.
24. Diary of the Rattlesnake Voyage, p. 166.
25. Ibid., p. 203.
26. Ibid., p. 208.
27. Ibid., p. 232.
Chapter iii. A Prophet in His Own Country
Pages 26-41
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 74.
2. Ibid., p. 68.
3. Loc. cit.
4. Ibid. t p. 73.
5. Ibid., p. 67.
6. Ibid. f p.6S.
7. Ibid. f p. 75.
8. Ibid., pp. 69, 95.
362 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
9. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton & Com-
pany, Inc., 1904), I, 462.
10. "A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal
Fertility,*' The Westminster Review, n.s. I (1852), 501.
11. Ibid., p. 500.
12. Spencer, Autobiography, I, 467.
13. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 88.
14. Ibid., p. 91.
15. Ibid., p. 129.
16. Ibid., p. 118.
17. Ibid., p. 119.
1 8. Ibid., p. 120.
19. Ibid., p. 138.
20. Notebook 13, written in 1899 in Mrs. Huxley's hand, Huxley Papers:
Scientific and General Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science
and Technology), LXII, 31, 84.
21. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 140.
22. Notebook 13, in Mrs. Huxley's hand, Huxley Papers, LXII, 1-2.
23. Loc. cit.
24. Ibid., p. 86.
25. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 162.
26. Ibid., pp. 106-107.
27. Ibid., pp. 94-95.
28. See "On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences," Science
and Education, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc.,
1897), p. 65.
29. Ibid., p. 63.
30. Ibid., p. 65.
31. Ibid., p. 62.
32. Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester, eds., The Scientific Memoirs of
Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1903), I, 311, 310.
33. Unpublished letter to Edward Forbes, Huxley Papers, XVI, 172.
34. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 105-106.
35. Sir Arthur Keith, "Huxley as Anthropologist/' Supplement to Nature,
May 9, 1925, p. 720.
36. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 102.
37. Ibid., p. 106.
Chapter iv. The Tale of an Unlikely Prince
Pages 42-56
1. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), I, 473.
2. Ibid., p. 484.
Notes 363
3. Ibid., pp. 477-478.
4. Ibid., p. 492.
5. Ibid., p. 495-
6. Ibid., p. 53.
7. From an unpublished portion of Charles Darwin's "Autobiography," Dar-
win Papers (Cambridge: University Library), p. 2.
8. Ufe and Letters of Darwin, I, 30.
9. Ibid., p. 38.
10. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin,
A Record of His Wor%_ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1903), 1, 7.
n. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 44.
12. Ibid., p. 147.
13. Ibid., p. 49.
14. Ibid., p. 50.
15. Ibid. f pp. 53-54.
16. "The Tamworth Reading Room," Discussions and Arguments on Various
Subjects, 3d ed. (London: Pickering & Co., 1878), p. 299.
17. WorJ(s and Ufe (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., Ltd., 1915), II, 191.
1 8. The first edition was published as Vol. Ill of the Narrative of the Survey-
ing Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle. Later editions were
published as Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the
Countries Visited during the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle Round the World,
under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, RJW. f authorized ed. (New York: D.
Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896).
19. More Letters of Darwin, 1, 12.
20. Journal of Researches, pp. 374-375.
21. Nora Barlow, ed., Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle (Lon-
don: Pilot Press, 1945), p. 247.
22. "Autobiography," Ufe and Letters of Darwin, I, 67.
23. Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, p. 66.
24. Ibid., p. 96.
25. lbid. 9 p. 116.
26. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 207.
27. Ibid., p. 55.
28. "Charles Darwin and Psychotherapy," The Lancet, January 30, 1943,
p. 131.
29. Unpublished letter to W. D. Fox, October 5, 1833, Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library).
30. Unpublished letter to W. D. Fox, November 17, 1831, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
31. Unpublished letter to W. D. Fox, February 15, 1836, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
32. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 47.
33. Francis Darwin, "Reminiscences of My Father's Everyday Life," Life
and Letters of Darwin, I, 89-90.
3^4 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
34. "The Life of the Shawl," The Lancet, December 26, 1953, p. 1354.
35. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 275.
36. "The Life of the Shawl," The Lancet, December 26, 1953, p. 1351.
37. W. C. Alvarez, Nervousness, Indigestion, and Pain (New York and Lon-
don: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., Medical Department of Harper & Brothers, 1943),
pp. 240-243.
38. R. B. Litchfield, Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer, etc. (London:
Duckworth, 1903), pp. 21, 23-24; quoted by Alvarez, op. cit., p. 242.
39. Unpublished portion of Darwin's "Autobiography," Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library), p. 78c.
40. Loc. cit.
41. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 63.
42. Loc. cit.
Chapter v. A Premeditated Romance
Pages 57-66
1. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters (London: John Murray, 1915), II, i.
2. Ibid., I, 277.
3. Ibid., p. 278.
4. See p. 106.
5. Emma Darwin, I, 58.
6. Ibid., p. 155.
7. Ibid. ,11, 6.
8. Loc. cit.
9. Ibid., pp. 5, 6.
10. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
ir. Ibid., I, 42. This passage is from an earlier, privately printed edition
(Cambridge: University Press, 1904); hereafter I shall refer to this edition as
the "privately printed edition."
12. Ibid., II, 13.
13. An unpublished portion of Charles Darwin's "Autobiography," Darwin
Papers (Cambridge: University Library), pp. 736-73^
14. Emma Darwin, II, 15.
15. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
16. Ibid., p. 24.
17. Ibid., p. 37.
18. Ibid., p. 34.
19. Ibid., pp. 40-41.
20. Ibid., p. 48.
21. Loc. cit.
22. Unpublished letter of Charles Darwin to Caroline Darwin, 1839, Darwin
Papers (Cambridge: University Library).
"Notes 365
23. Loc. cit.
24. Emma Darwin, II, 65-66.
25. Ibid., p. 76.
26. Unpublished letter to Susan Darwin, April 27 [1842], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
27. Unpublished letter to Catherine Darwin, Saturday [1842], Darwin
Papers (Cambridge: University Library).
28. Unpublished letter to Catherine Darwin, Friday [1842], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
29. Emma Darwin, II, 87.
30. lbid. t p. 119.
31. Ibid., p. 186.
32. "The Life of the Shawl," The Lancet, December 26, 1953, p. 1352.
Chapter vi. Barnacles and Blasphemy
Pages 67-82
1. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), I, 259,
2. Published as Parts I and II respectively of the Geology of the Voyage of the
Beagle.
3. Unpublished letter to Sir Charles Lyell, December 4, 1849, Charles Darwin
Papers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
4. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin, A
Record of His Wor\ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (London:
John Murray, 1903), I, 38.
5. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 317.
6. Ibid., p. 345.
7. Unpublished letter to Joseph Hooker, May ro, 1848, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
8. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 66.
9. Ibid., p. 315.
10. Loc. cit.
11. Ibid., p. 18.
12. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-18$ (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 119-
120.
13. Life and Letters of Darwin, 1, 117.
14. Ibid., p. 131.
15. "On the Reception of the 'Origin of Species/ " Life and Letters of Dar-
win, I, 549-55-
16. More Letters of Darwin, I, 41.
17. Ibid., p. 63.
18. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 368*
$66 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
19. Ibid., p. 126.
20. Ibid., p. 125.
21. Ibid., p. 68.
22. The Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former
Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, ist
ed. (London: John Murray, 1830-1833), II, 132.
23. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 369.
24. Ibid., p. 368.
25. Ibid., p. 68.
26. Ibid., p. 69.
27. See The Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in
2842 and 1844, Francis Darwin, ed. (Cambridge: University Press, 1909) .
28. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 370.
29. Ibid., p. 354.
30. Ibid*, p. 99.
31. I&id., p. 354.
32. Ibid., p. 394.
33. Ibid., p. 461.
34. More Letters of Darwin, I, 199.
35. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 431.
36. Ibid., pp. 501, 502.
37. Ibid., p. 509.
38. Unpublished letter, May 3 [1856], Charles Darwin Papers (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society).
39. Life and Letters of Darwin, 1, 453.
40. Ibid., p. 466.
41. Ibid., p. 474.
42. Ibid., pp. 474, 475-
43. Ibid., p. 476.
44. Ibid., p. 483.
45. Ibid., p. 482.
Chapter vii. The Most Important Boo\ of the Century
Pages 83-100
1. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, A Study of the History
of an Idea, The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University, 1933
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 55.
2. Ibid., pp. 67-99.
3. Charles Darwin, "Historical Sketch," The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for
Life, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), I, xiv.
4. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), 1, 34.
Notes 367
5. Lamarck, Philosophic zoologique, ou expositions des considerations rela-
tives a I'histoire naturelle des animaux a la diversite de leur organisation et des
facultes qu'ils en obtiennent, etc., Nouvelle Edition, Revue et Procedee d'une
Introduction Biographique (Paris: Librairie F. Savy, 1873), I, 233-236.
6. Mrs. Lyell, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart. (Lon-
don: John Murray, 1881), 1, 168.
7. See Ibid., p. 174.
8. A History of the Thirty Years' Peace, AD. 1816-1846 (London: George
Bell & Sons, 1877), II, 334.
9. Life, Letters and Journals of Lyell, I, 328.
10. Quoted by Andre Maurois, Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1928), p. 130.
11. The Origin of Species, 1, 36.
12. Ibid., pp. 77-78.
13. Ibid., p. 136.
14. Ibid., p. 96. 4
15. Ibid., p. 131.
16. Ibid., II, 305-306.
17. Religion and Science, Home University Library (London and New York:
Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 72-73.
1 8. See Erik Nor denskiold, The History of Biology: A Survey, trans, from the
Swedish by L. B. Eyre (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1949), pp. 461-476.
19. See J. H. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science, A Mentor Book (New
York: The New American Library, 1940), p. 187.
20. See George G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the
History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, The Terry Lectures (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949).
21. T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, "The Vindication of Darwinism,"
Touchstone for Ethics, 1893-1943 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 167.
22. The Meaning of Evolution, p. 118.
23. See Julian Huxley, Evolution: A Modern Synthesis (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1943).
Chapter viii. Compulsions of the National Mind
Pages 101-126
1. Life of Charles Darwin, "Great Writers," E. S. Robertson, ed. (London:
Walter Scott, n.d.), p. 102.
2. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 24.
3. Charles Darwin Papers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
4. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 83.
5. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 102.
368 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
6. Mrs. Lyell, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell t Bart.
(London: John Murray, 1881), II, 212.
7. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 171.
8. Ibid., p. 178.
9. Ibid*, p. 183.
10. Ibid., p. 188.
11. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 189.
12. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 23.
13. Ibid., I, 7, 10.
14. Ibid., II, 37.
15. Quoted by Sir Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of
Charles Darwin, a Record of His WorJ^ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished
Letters (London: John Murray, 1893), 1, 190, n.2.
16. "Design versus Necessity," Darwiniana, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1876), pp. 75-76.
17. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 277.
1 8. An unpublished portion of Charles Darwin's "Autobiography," Darwin
Papers (Cambridge: University Library), p. 60.
19. Ibid., pp. 63-64.
20. Ibid., p. 69.
21. More Letters of Darwin, I, 260-261.
22. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 282.
23. More Letters of Darwin, I, 169.
24. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 131.
25. Ibid., p. 39.
26. Mrs. Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His
Life (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1-899).
27. '#tf.,p.44.
28. "Objections to Mr. Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species," The
Spectator, March 24, 1860, p. 285.
29. The Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 44.
30. Ibid., p. 106.
31. Ibid., p. 32.
32. Ibid., p. 155.
33. Ibid., p. 12.
34. Ibid., p. 35-
35. Ibid., p. 38.
36. Ibid., p. 78.
37. Ibid., p. 33.
38. In the London Times, December 26, 1859, pp. 6-7; see Thomas Henry
Huxley, Darwiniana, pp. 1-21.
39. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 47-48.
40. More Letters of Darwin, 1, 140.
41. Quoted by Eric Nordenskiold, The History of Biology, A Survey, trans,
from the Swedish by L. B. Eyre (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1949),
p. 511.
Notes 569
42. Quoted in Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 77.
43. Ibid., p. 78.
44. Ibid., p. 29.
45. Loc. cit.
46. /&*&, p. 158.
47. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896 (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 173.
48. Ibid., p. 174.
49. Ibid., p. 181.
50. Ibid., p. 172.
51. More Letters of Darwin, I, 204-205.
52. Major Leonard Darwin, "Memories of Down House,** The Nineteenth
Century, CVI (1929), 119-120.
53. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 112.
54. Emma Darwin, II, 145.
55. Ibid., p. 157.
56. Unpublished letter to W. E. Darwin, Wednesday [n,d.], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
57. Emma Darwin, II, 167.
58. Ibid., p. 166.
59. Unpublished letter to W. E. Darwin, April 27, Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library).
60. Unpublished letter, October 3, 1851, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library).
61. Emma Darwin, II, 169-170.
62. Life and Letters of Darwin, 1, 113.
63. Major Darwin, "Memories of Down House," The Nineteenth Century,
CVI (1929), 119.
64. Emma Darwin, II, 163.
65. Major Darwin, "Memories of Down House," The Nineteenth Century,
CVI (1929), 120.
66. Unpublished letter to Susan Darwin, March 9, 1849, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
67. Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (London: Faber
& Faber Ltd., 1952), p. 122.
68. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, no,
69. Ibid., p. in.
70. Emma Darwin, II, 136-137.
71. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 61.
72. Ibidv p. 59.
37 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Chapter ix. An Interlude: Huxley, Kingsley, and the
Universe
Pages 127-134
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters oj Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 163.
2. The entire letter is quoted in ibid., pp. 233-239.
3. "The Language of Values in Carlyle and Huxley."
4. "A Liberal Education; And Where to Find It," Science and Education,
authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), P- 82.
5. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 240-241, n.
6. Ibid., I, 259.
7. "Thomas Henry Huxley," The Drift of Romanticism, Shelburne Essays
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), VIII, 210-214.
8. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 261.
9. Ibid., p. 262.
10. Ibid., p. 263.
n. Ibid v I, 264,
Chapter x. Human Skeletons in Geological Closets
Pages 135-150
1. Autobiographic Memoirs (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1911), I, 283.
2. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin,
A Record of His Wor\ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (London:
John Murray, 1903), I, 231.
3. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 223.
4. Ibid., p. 254.
5. Ibid., p. 213.
6. Ibid., p. 255.
7. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 56.
8. Ibid., p. 60.
9. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 184.
10. Ibid., p. 205.
11. See Houston Peterson, Huxley, Prophet of Science (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., Ltd., 1932), p. 145.
12. See Professor Huxley, "On the Zoological Relations of Man with the
Lower Animals," The Natural History Review, n.s. I (1861), 67.
13. "On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals," Evidence as to Man's
No Us 371
Place in Nature, authorized cd. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc.,
1897), p. 155.
14. "On Some Fossil Remains of Man," Man's Place in Nature, p. 199.
15. Mrs. Charles Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: Letters and Memories
of His Life (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899), p. 254.
16. The Athenaeum, February 28, 1863, p. 287.
17. Lady Hooker and Leonard Huxley, eds., Life and Letters of Sir Joseph
Dalton Hooker (London: John Murray, 1918), II, 32.
18. Mrs. Lyell, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart. (Lon-
don: John Murray, 1881), II, 366.
19. More Letters of Darwin, I, 237.
20. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 62.
21. Life, Letters and Journals of Lyell, II, 325.
22. Ibid., II, 361-362.
23. Ibid., p. 361.
24. Unpublished letter to Sir Charles Lyell, April 17, 1862, The Charles
Darwin Papers (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
25. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 130.
26. Ibid., p. 133.
27. More Letters of Darwin, I, 155-156.
28. Ibid., p. 155.
29. Ibid., p. 154.
30. Loc. cit.
31. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 119.
32. Ibid., p. 137.
33. Ibid., p. 157.
34. Ibid., p. 100.
35. Ibid., p. 193.
36. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on
the Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation, 20! ed. (London: John Mur-
ray, 1863), p. 468.
37. Ibid., pp. 494-495-
38. Ibid., p. 506.
39. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 194.
40. Ibid., p. 196.
41. Ibid., p. 198.
42. Ibid., p. 199.
43. Loc. dt.
44. Ibid., p. 218.
45. More Letters of Darwin, I, 243.
46. Ibid., I, 205.
47. Life f Letters and Journals of Lyell, II, 254.
48. More Letters of Darwin, I, 205.
49. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 166-167.
50. More Letters of Darwin, I, 240.
51. Charles Kingsley: Letters and Memories, p. 253.
37 2 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
52. More Letters of Darwin, I, 243,
53. "Criticisms on The Origin of Species/" Darwiniana, authorized ed.
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 98.
54. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 214.
Chapter xi. Orchids, Politics, and Heredity
Pages 151-177
1. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
cd. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 225.
2. Unpublished letter to George Darwin, September 13, 1875, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
3. Unpublished letter to Reginald Darwin, April 8, 1879, Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library) .
4. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 175.
5. Ibid., p. 216.
6. Ibid., pp. 215-216.
7. Ibid., p. 232.
8. Ibid., I, 73.
9. Ibid., p. 95.
10. Ibid., p. 90.
ir. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin,
A Record of His Wor\ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (London:
John Murray, 1903), II, 270-271.
12. Ibid., II, 279.
13. Ibid., p. 278.
14. Unpublished letter, May 17, 1868, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library).
15. More Letters of Darwin, II, 285.
16. Ibid., p. 286.
17. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 175.
18. More Letters of Darwin, I, 202.
19. Ibid., p. 203.
20. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 429.
21. More Letters of Darwin, I, 202.
22. The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects,
2d ed, revised (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1889), pp. 285-286.
23. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 448.
24. Ibid., p. 462.
25. Ibid., p. 213.
26. Mrs. Lyell, ed., Ufa Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart.
(London: John Murray, 1881), II, 384.
27. Unpublished letter, December 4 [1864], Darwin Papers (Cambridge:
University Library).
Notes 373
28. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 219.
29. Ibid., I, 36.
30. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896 (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 185.
31. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 443.
32. Ibid., pp. 443-444-
33. Ibid., pp. 444.
34. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 485.
35. Loc. cit.
36. Ibid., p. 486.
37. Ibid., p. 487.
38. Ibid., p. 488.
39. Ibid., p. 489-
40. Ibid., p. 474.
41. More Letters of Darwin, II, 322-323.
42. Ibid., p. 327.
43. Ibid., p. 328.
44. Loc. cit.
45. Ibid., pp. 33I-332-
46. "Charles Darwin and Psychotherapy," The Lancet, January 30, 1943,
p. 130.
47. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 341.
48. Ibid., II, 238.
49. Loc. cit.
50. Ibid., I, 92.
51. Lor. A
52. Ibid., p. 93.
53. /&#., p. 101.
54. /*<?., p. 8 1.
55. /fotf v II, 219.
56. Ibid., pp. 188-189.
57. Lffc and Letters of Darwin, II, 239.
58. Unpublished letter, October 2, 1866, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library).
59. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 178.
60. Ibid., p. 166.
61. Ibid., p. 169.
62. Jane Loring Gray, ed., Letters of Asa Gray (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1893), II, 474.
63. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 173-174.
64. Ibid., p. 174.
65. Unpublished letter to Asa Gray, January 22, [1862], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
66. More Letters of Darwin, II, 177.
67. Ibid* pp. 476-477-
68. Ibid., p. 183.
374 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
69. Unpublished letter to Asa Gray, January 19 [1863], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
70. Unpublished letter, April 20, 1863, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library),
71. Unpublished letter to Asa Gray, August 4, 1864, Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library).
72. Unpublished letter to Asa Gray, Sept 13, [1864], Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library).
73. Letters, II, 537.
74. Unpublished letter to Asa Gray, August 15 [1870?], Darwin Papers
(Cambridge: University Library).
75. JJje and Letters of Darwin, I, 82.
76. More Letters of Darwin, I, 270.
77. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 255.
78. Ibid., p. 228.
79. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 289.
80. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 228.
81. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 289.
82. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 228-229.
83. Ibid., p. 248.
84. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), I, 456.
85. Ibid., II, 178.
86. Ibid., p. 398.
87. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 256.
88. Ibid., p. 260.
89. Ibid., p. 263.
90. Ibid., p. 266.
91. "Autobiography," Life and Letters of Darwin, I, IO-H.
92. Loc. cit.
93. Ibid., p. 12.
94. I&id., p. 19.
95. Ibid., p. 13.
96. Ibid., p. ii.
Chapter xii. The Subject of Subjects
Pages 178-202
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 386.
2. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
sd. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 278.
3. "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from
Notes 375
the Theory of Natural Selection," The Anthropological Review, II (1864),
clviii-clxx.
4. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 271-272.
5. Ibid., p. 276.
6. Ibid., p. 273.
7. Ibid., p. 274.
8. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896 (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 191.
9. Ibid., p. 192.
10. Uje and Letters of Darwin, II, 274.
n. Unpublished letter, April 27, 1867, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library).
12. Unpublished letter, May 5, 1867, Darwin Papers (Cambridge: University
Library).
13. James Marchant, Alfred Russell Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), p. 131.
14. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin,
A Record of His Wor\ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (New York:
Appleton & Company, Inc., 1903), 1, 304.
15. Marchant, Wallace, p. 152.
16. Ibid., p. 183.
17. Ibid., p. 185.
18. Ibid., p. 186.
19. Ibid., p. 189.
20. M ore Letters of Darwin, II, 39.
21. The Quarterly Review, CXXVI (1869), 391-392.
22. -As quoted in More Letters of Darwin, II, 40.
23. "Sir Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,"
The Quarterly Review, CXXVI (1869), 381.
24. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 296.
25. Ibid., II, 294-295.
26. Uje and Letters of Darwin, II, p. 291.
27. Ibid., II, 298.
28. Ibid., p. 299.
29. Ibid., p. 301.
30. Ibid., pp. 305-306.
31. Ibid., p. 294.
32. Unpublished letter, December ro, 1864, Darwin Papers (Cambridge:
University Library).
33. Walter Bagehot, "Physics -and Politics," Wor%s and Life (London:
Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., 1915), VIII, 34.
34. More Letters of Darwin, II, 41; Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 297-298.
35. Ibid., p. 43.
36. Ibid., p. 30.
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Der Antichrist," WerJ(e: Auswahl in zwei Bande
(Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1938), II, 223.
37^ Apes, Angels, and Victorians
38. Macmillan's Magazine, XXIII (1870-71), p. 353-357, reprinted in Francis
Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Mac-
millan & Company, 1883), pp. 68-82.
39. Prater's Magazine, LXXVIII (1868), 353-362.
40. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, authorized ed.
(New York: Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), p. 133.
41. Emma Darwin, II, 202.
42. Ibid., pp. 196-197.
43. "George Paston" [Emily Morse Symonds], At John Murray's; Records
oj a Literary Circle, with a Preface by the Rt. Hon. Lord Ernie (London: John
Murray, 1932), p. 232.
44. The Descent of Man, p. 70.
45. Ibid., pp. 564-565.
46. Emma Darwin, II, 203.
47. "Mr. Darwin's Critics," Darwiniana, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), pp. 120-121.
48. "Philosophy and Mr. Darwin," The Contemporary Review, XVIII (1871),
281.
49. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 311.
50. "Mr. Darwin's Critics," Darwiniana, p. 122.
51. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 392.
52. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 327.
53. Ibid., p. 329.
54. Life and Letters oj Huxley, I, 458.
55. H. E, Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A Century
of Family Letters, Privately Printed (Cambridge: University Press, 1904), II,
237-238.
56. Emma Darwin (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 203.
57. Ibid., p. 196.
58. Ibid., pp. 247-248.
59. Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (London: Faber
& Faber Ltd., 1952), p. 121.
60. Emma Darwin, II, 208.
61. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 373.
Chapter xiii. "I Am Not the Least Afraid of Death"
Pages 203-230
1. James Marchant, Alfred Russell Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), p. 228.
2. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 494, 495.
3. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin,
A Record of His Wor\ in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., IQOS), II, 381.
377
4. Marchant, Wallace, p. 233.
5. The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, 2d
ed. rev. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1889), p. 351.
6. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 504.
7. lbid. t p. 467.
8. Ibid., p. 507.
9. Life and Letters of Darwin t II, 507.
10. More Letters of Darwin, II, 434.
11. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 25.
12. Loc. cit.
13. Ibid., p. 86.
14. Unpublished passage of the "Autobiography," Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library), p 73b, 2.
15. Life and Letters of Darwin, 1, 71.
16. Unpublished passage of the "Autobiography,** Darwin Papers (Cam-
bridge: University Library), p. 74,
17. Ibid., p. 78!.
18. Ibid., pp. 78M-78N.
19. Ibid., p. 78!.
20. Ibid., p. 78J-
21. Loc. cit.
22. Ibid., p. 78L.
23. Leonard Huxley, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, au-
thorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 388.
24. Life and Letters of Darwin, I, 60.
25. Mrs. Lyell, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart.
(London: John Murray, 1881), II, 436.
26. Life, Letters and Journals of Lyell, II, 459.
27. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 374-375.
28. Loc. cit.
29. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1904), II, 562.
30. Loc. cit.
31. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896 (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 211.
32. Ibid.,, p. 224.
33. Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (London: Fabcr
& Faber Ltd., 1952), p. 187.
34. Ibid., p. 209.
35. Emma Darwin, II, 215.
36. Ibid., p. 218.
37. Ibid., p. 221.
38. Ibid., p. 21 1.
39. Ibid., p. 218.
40. Ibid., p. 216.
41. Ibid., pp. 225-226.
37 8 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
43. Ibid., p. 227.
44. Ibid., p. 225.
45. L*/<? and Letters oj Darwin, I, 112.
46. Emma Darwin, II, 228, n. 3.
47. /#<*., p. 229.
48. Ibid., pp. 236-237.
49. Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, Charles Eliot Norton, ed. (London:
Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1887), p. 173.
50. Emma Darwin, II, 230.
51. Unpublished letter, Sunday [1864], Darwin Papers (Cambridge: Uni-
versity Library).
52. Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon: A Memoir
(London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 1919), I, 157.
53. Samuel Butler, "Unconscious Memory," WorJ(s, Shrewsbury ed., H. F.
Jones and A. T. Bartholomew, eds. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1924), VI, 20.
54. Ernst Ludwig Krause, Erasmus Darwin, trans, from the German by W. S.
Dallas, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin (London: John Murray,
1879), p. 216.
55. Henry Festing Jones, Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler, A Step towards
Reconciliation (London: A. C. Fifield, 1911), p. 14-
56. Life and Letters oj Darwin, II, 527.
57. Ibid., p. 404.
58. M ore Letters oj Darwin, I, 395.
59. Emma Darwin, II, 247.
60. Life and Letters oj Darwin, II, 529.
61. Emma Darwin, II, 251, 253.
62. Ibid., p. 251.
63. Ibid., p. 253.
64. Unpublished letter from Francis Darwin to Thomas Henry Huxley,
Huxley Papers, Scientific and General Correspondence (London: Imperial
College of Science and Technology), XIII, 10.
65. Geoffrey West, Charles Darwin, A Portrait, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1938), p. 316.
66. Life and Letters oj Darwin, II, 531.
67. "Charles Darwin," Darwiniana, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton
& Company, 1897), p. 246.
Chapter xiv. An Eminent Victorian
Pages 233-246
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters oj Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 524.
2. Ibid., p. 328.
Notes 379
3. lUd., p. 237.
4. Ibid., p. 242.
5. Ibid., p. 477.
6. Ibid., p. 324.
7. /#, II, 86.
8. Ibid., p. 83.
9. Herbert Spencer, ^ Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton & Com-
pany, Inc., 1904), II, 9.
10. David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1908), I, 118.
11. 'The Scientific Aspects of Positivism," Lay Sermons, Addresses, and
Reviews (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1870), pp. 168-169.
12. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 272.
13. "Emancipation Black and White," Lay Sermons, p. 22.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. Unpublished letter, March 17, 1860, Charles Darwin Papers (Phil-
adelphia: American Philosophical Society).
16. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 416.
17. Ibid., p. 301.
18. "Professor Tyndall," The Nineteenth Century, XXXV (1894), 4.
19. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 305.
20. "Professor Tyndall," The Nineteenth Century, XXXV (1894), 3.
21. Ibid., pp. 363-364.
22. Ibid., p. 365.
23. The New Republic: or, Culture, Faith and Philosophy in a Country
House, ]. Max Patrick, ed. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1950),
p. 88.
24. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 297.
25. Ibid., p. 452-
26. Francis Darwin, ed,, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1896), II, 364-365.
27. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 455.
28. Life and Letters of Darwin, II, 378.
29. Ibid., p. 380.
30. Life and Letters of Huxley, 1, 473.
31. Loc. at.
32. See Theodore Gill, "Huxley and His Work," Annual Report of the Board
of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute Showing the Operations, Expenditures
of the Institution, 20 July, 1895 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1896), pp. 77>773-
33. Sir Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester, eds., The Scientific Memoirs
of Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1901), II and III,
23^-292.
380 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Chapter xv. The Metaphysical Society
Pages 247-263
1. Discourses Biological and Geological, authorized ed. (New York: D. Ap-
pleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 35.
2. Methods and Results, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company,
Inc., 1897), p. 154.
3. Huxley: Prophet of Science (London: Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd.,
1932), p. 162.
4. Methods and Results, p. 160.
5. Ibid., p. 160.
6. 7zW., p. 163.
7. Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, Wor\s f H. D. Trail, ed. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897), XI, 36.
8. Alan W. Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis,
1869-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 29.
* 9. A.S. and E.M.S., Henry Sidgwicfc A Memoir (London: Macmillan & Co.,
Ltd., 1906), p. 220.
10. Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (New York and
London: Macmillan & Co., 1896), II, 513.
11. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 340-341.
12. "Agnosticism," Science and Christian Tradition, authorized ed. (New
York: D, Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 239.
13. A.S. and E.M.S., Henry Sidgwic^, p. 222.
14. Ibid., p. 221.
15. Ibid., p. 223.
16. Wilfred Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (London:
Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1893), pp. 314-315.
17. Loc. tit.
18. Ibid., p. 317.
19. Ibid., p. 316.
20. The Nineteenth Century, XVIII (1885), 180-181.
21. Loc. cit.
22. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to
His Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 206.
23. Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1911),
p. 301.
24. Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.CSJ., A Judge of the High
Court of Justice (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), P- 375-
25. F. W. Hirst, Early Life and Letters of John Morley (London: Macmillan
& Co., Ltd., 1927), II, 8, 56.
26. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 340.
27. See Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 187,
Notes 381
28. "On Descartes' 'Discourse Touching the Method of Using One's Reason
Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth/ " Methods and Results, pp. 169-191.
29. Ibid., p. 191.
30. Ibid., pp. 192-193.
31. "Science," The Westminster Review, XCIV (1870), 501.
32. H. Calderwood, "Professor Huxley's Lay Sermons," The Contemporary
Review, XV (1870), 205-206.
33. "Science in a Condescending Mood," The Spectator, October i, 1870,
pp. 1170-1171.
34. Ibid., p. 1171.
35. Hume, With Helps to the Study of Berkeley, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), P- 43-
36. 7# v p.8i.
37. Ibid., p. 222.
38. Ibid., p. 235.
Chapter xvi. The Educator
Pages 264-288
1. "The Politics of the War: Bismarck and Louis Napoleon," The Contem-
porary Review, XV (1870), 170.
2. Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New
York: D. Appleton & Company,, Inc., 1901), I, 361.
3. Science and Education, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Com-
pany, Inc., 1897), p. 98.
4. Ibid., p. 86.
5. Ibid., p. 85.
6. Ibid., p. 88.
7. Ibid., p. 89.
8. "Scientific Education: Notes of an After-dinner Speech," Science and
Education, p. 114.
9. 'The School Boards: What They Can Do and What They May Do,"
Science and Education, pp. 394-398.
10. "Scientific Education: Notes of an After-dinner Speech," Science and
Education, pp. 120-121.
u. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 407.
12. Ibid., pp. 378-379-
13. Ibid., pp. 364-365-
14. Ibid., p. 381.
15. Methods and Results, authorized ed. (New York; D. Appleton & Com-
pany, Inc., 1896), p. 256.
16. Ibid., p. 281.
17. Ibid., p. 284,
18. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, p. 412.
382 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
19. Unpublished letter, December 31, 1871, Huxley Papers, Scientific and
General Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science and Technol-
ogy), II, 187.
20. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 395-396.
21. Ibid., p. 398.
22. Ibid., pp. 394-395-
23. Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin, Wife of C harks Darwin: A
Century of Family Letters, 1792-2896 (London: John Murray, 1915), II, 212.
24. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 421.
25. Ibid., pp. 427-428.
26. Ibid., p. 426.
27. Science and Education, p. 210.
28. John Tyndall, "The Belfast Address," Fragments of Science (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1892), II, 201.
29. Houston Peterson, Huxley: Prophet of Science (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., Ltd., 1932), p. 197. See also Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 444,
30. Schools and Universities on the Continent, Wor\s t de luxe ed. (London:
Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1903-1904), XII, 386.
31. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 335.
32. Ibid., p. 353.
33. Unpublished letter, January 13, 1872, Huxley Papers, Scientific and Gen-
eral Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science and Technology),
X, 158.
34. Unpublished letter, October 17, 1880, Huxley Papers, X, 163.
35. Unpublished letter, February 9 [no year], Huxley Papers, X, 165.
36. "Science and Culture," Science and Education, p. 140.
37. "Literature and Science,'* Discourses in America, WorJ(s, IV, 347.
38. "Technical Education," Science and Education, p. 408.
39. "Address on Behalf of the National Association for the Promotion of
Technical Education," Science and Education, pp. 427-451.
Chapter xvii. Triumphal Progress
Pages 289-310
1. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), I, 493.
2. Ibid., p. 495.
3. Ibid., p. 495.
4. Edward S. Dana and others, A Century of Science in America, with Spe-
cial Reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918 (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), p. 233.
5. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 496.
6. Loc. cit.
7. Ibid., p. 495.
Notes 383
8. Ibid., p. 497.
9. Quoted by Houston Peterson, Huxley: Prophet of Science (London: Long-
mans, Green & Co., Ltd., 1932), p. 204.
10. Loc. cit.
11. Loc. cit.
12. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 500.
13. Quoted by Peterson, Huxley, p. 206.
14. "Address on University Education," Science and Education, authorized
ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), pp. 259-260.
15. Ibid., pp. 260-261.
16. Quoted from Abraham Flexner, Daniel Coit Oilman, Creator of the
American Type of University (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc.,
1946), p. 84.
17. "University Education," Science and Education, p. 261.
18. Fabian Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Oilman (New York: Dodd, Mead
& Company, Inc., 1910), p. 221.
19. "Evidence of Evolution," September 19, 1876, p. i.
20. Loc. cit.
21. "Prof. Huxley's Evasion," 'New Yor\ Sun, September 19, 1876, p. i.
22. "Huxley's Second Lecture," New Yor% Sun, September 21, 1876, p. i.
23. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 502.
24. Ibid., II, 3.
25. Ibid., p. 38.
26. Unpublished letter from Oliver Lodge to T. H. Huxley, July 17, 1893,
Huxley Papers, XXII, 2.
27. Unpublished letter, May 5, 1883, Huxley Papers, XIII, 8.
28. Unpublished letter, March n, 1881, Huxley Papers, XVIII, 97.
29. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1926), p. 28.
30. Life and Letters of Huxley, I, 505.
31. Ibid., p. 539.
32. Ibid., pp. 434-435-
33. Ibid., p. 435.
34. Ibid., pp. 436-437-
35. Ibid., p. 439.
36. "Some Reminiscences of Thomas Henry Huxley," The Nineteenth Cen-
tury, XLII (1897), 985-998.
37. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 447.
38. The Hon. Lionel A. Tollemachc, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Battiol
(London: Edward Arnold fc Co. [1895]), pp. 2, 3.
39. Unpublished letter, April 13, 1877, Huxley Papers, Scientific and Gen-
eral Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science and Technology),
VII, 9.
40. About 1882, Huxley Papers, VII, 49-50.
41. Dec. 2, 1885, Huxley Papers, VII, 58.
42. Feb. 26, 1889, Huxley Papers, VII, 66.
3 84 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
43. Feb. 9, 1892, Huxley Papers, VII, 83. .
44. Feb. 9, 1892, Huxley Papers, VII, 83.
45. Life and Letters of Huxley f II, 34.
46. Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
47. Ibid., p. 29.
48. Ibid., p. 53.
49. Ibid., I, 526.
50. Ibid., p. 429.
51. Ibid., II, 67.
52. 7diV7., p. 78.
53. Ibid., p. 80.
54. W, p. 88.
55. Ibid., p. 92.
56. 7&W V pp. 95, 97.
57. 7&&, p. 98.
58. Ibid., p. 108.
59. Ibid., p. in.
60. 7&/W., p. 1 1 8.
Chapter xviii. The Pleasant Avocation of War
Pages 311-330
1. Unpublished letter, Sept. n, 1871, Huxley Papers, Scientific and General
Correspondence (Imperial College of Science and Technology), II, 181.
2. Leonard Huxley, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New
York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), II, 123.
3. Science and Hebrew Tradition, authorized ed. (New York: D. Appleton
& Company, Inc., 1897), pp. 162-163*
4. "The Proem of Genesis."
5. "Mr. Gladstone and Genesis," Science and Hebrew Tradition, p. 164.
6. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 125.
7. Science and Hebrew Tradition, p. 189.
8. Ibid* p. 288.
9. Ibid. f p. 289.
10. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, authorized ed. (New York: D.
Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 146.
11. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 156.
12. Science and Christian Tradition, authorized ed. (New York: D. Ap-
pleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 64.
13. Ibid., p. 140.
14. Ibid., pp. 141-142.
15. Unpublished letter, November 21, 1887, Huxley Papers, II, 299.
1 6. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 209-210.
17. Ibid., p. 210.
Notes 385
18. Unpublished letter, June 30, 1883, Huxley Papers, II, 250.
19. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 203.
20. Ibid., p. 231.
21. W. E. Gladstone, " 'Robert Elsmere* and the Battle d Belief," The Nine-
teenth Century (1888), XXIII, 773.
22. Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism," Science and Christian Tradition,
pp. 245-246.
23. Ibid., pp. 256-257.
24. Henry A. Wace and The Bishop of Peterborough, "Agnosticism, A Reply
to Professor Huxley," The Nineteenth Century, XXV (1889), 351-371.
25. Ibid,, pp. 454-480.
26. Ibid., p. 473.
27. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 237.
28. Ibid., p. 237.
29. The Nineteenth Century, XXV (1889), 700-721.
30. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 240.
31. "Agnosticism and Christianity," Science and Christian Tradition, p. 343.
32. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 240.
33. Ibid., pp. 282-283.
34. "An Apologetic Irenicon," The fortnightly Review, n.s. LVIII (1892),
569.
35. The Impregnable Roc\ of Holy Scripture (Philadelphia: J. D. Wattles,
1896).
36. The Nineteenth Century, XXVIII (1890), 967-979.
37. Republished in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, pp. 237-334.
38. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 289.
39. "The Physical Basis of Life," Methods and Results, authorized ed. (New
York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1893), p. 156.
Chapter xix. "II Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin"
Pages 331-359
1. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 199.
2. Leonard Huxley, ed., Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New
York: D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1901), II, 198.
3. Unpublished letter, March 19, 1886, Huxley Papers, Scientific and General
Correspondence (London: Imperial College of Science and Technology), VII,
172-175.
4. Unpublished letter, February 9, 1888, Huxley Papers, VII, 211.
5. Unpublished letter, December 5, 1889, Huxley Papers, VII, 243.
6. Unpublished letter, December 9, 1889, Huxley Papers, VII, 244.
7. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 261.
8. Methods and Results, ppl 346-347.
386 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
9. Life and Letters oj Huxley, II, 271.
10. Ibid., p. 470.
11. Loc. cit.
12. Ibid., p. 436.
13. Ibid., p. 460.
14. Ibid., pp. 460-461.
15. Ibid., p. 461.
16. /o/ v pp. 462-465.
17. Ibid., pp. 457-458.
18. Ibid., p. 317.
19. "Prologue," Science and Christian Tradition, authorized ed. (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. 39.
20. Ibid., p. 40.
21. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 324.
22. Ibid., pp. 407-408.
23. Unpublished letter of Sir John Donnelly to Lord Spencer, May 15, 1885,
Huxley Papers, XXX, 131-133.
24. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 348.
25. Ibid., p. 353.
26. 'To Tennyson: The Tribute of His Friends,** The Nineteenth. Century,
XXXII (1892), 831-832.
27. Richard Startin Owen, The Life of Richard Owen, with the Scientific
Portions Revised by C. Dat/ies Sherborn and an Essay on Owen's Position in
Anatomical Science by the Right Hon. T. H. Huxley, FJLS. (London: John
Murray, 1894-1895), II, 312.
28. Life and Letters oj Huxley, II, 395.
29. Ibid., p. 387.
30. Unpublished letter, February 20, 1876, Huxley Papers, I, 145.
31. Unpublished letter to Sir Joseph Hooker, December 15, 1893, Huxley
Papers, II, 438.
32. "Professor Tyndall," The Nineteenth Century, CCIII (1894), 6.
33. "Physicus" [G. J. Romanes] , "Supplementary Essay in Reply to a Recent
Work on Theism," A Candid Examination oj Theism (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., 1892), p. 171.
34. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, p. 61.
35. Ibid., p. 64.
36. Ibid., p. 67.
37. Ibid., p. 64.
38. Ibid., p. 72.
39- ##* P- 77-
40. Ibid., p. 83.
41. Ibid., p. 85.
42. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 381.
43. The Athenaeum, August 5, 1893, pp. 193-194.
44. Duncan, Life and Letters oj Spencer, II, 36.
45. Unpublished letter to Hooker, October 20, 1893, Huxley Papers, II, 433.
Notes 387
46. Unpublished letter to Hooker, September 26, 1890, Huxley Papers, II, 365.
47. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, p. 30.
48. Ibid., p. 43.
49. See John Dewey, "Evolution and Ethics/' The Uonist, VIII (1807-1898),
321-341.
50. Huxley Papers, Philosophy and Ethics, XLV, 47.
51. Life and Letters of Huxley f II, 402,
52. Ibid., pp. 397, 399.
53. Ibid,, pp. 401-402.
54. Thomas Henry Huxley, "Past and Present," Nature, LI (1894), 1-3.
Leonard Huxley (Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 400) says that this article
contains the substance of his father's speech of thanks.
55. Preface, Methods and Results, pp. v-vi.
56. Preface, Discourses Biological and Geological, authorized ed, (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, Inc., 1897), p. v.
57. Ibid., p. vi.
58. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 410.
59. Ibid., p. 412.
60. Ibid., p. 412.
61. A. J. Half our, The Foundations of Belief, Being Notes Introductory to
the Study of Theology (New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1895),
pp. 6-7.
62. James Martineau, "The Foundations of Belief/' The Nineteenth Century,
XXXVII (1895), 554.
63. The Foundations of Belief, p. 83.
64. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 410^-420.
65. Ibid., p. 421.
66. Loc. cit.
67. Peterson, Huxley, p. 326.
68. Ibid., p. 327.
69. Life and Letters of Huxley, II, 423-425.
INDEX
Abbeville, finds at, 138, 143
Aberdeen University, 278, 280
Adaptation, Darwin on, 76; of in-
sectivorous plants, 204; Lyell on, 48
Agassiz, Alexander, 113, 114, 183, 236
Agnosticism, 253, 321-323, 329; Bal-
four's attack on, and Huxley's re-
pty 355~357> controversy between
Huxley and Ward on, 321-324;
Huxley on, 340, 357; pragmatism
and, 258
Aivas, David G., 130
Alvarez, Walter C., 54
Animals, automatism in, 281-282;
breeding of, and variations, 74, 76,
90, 92, 173; color in, and sexual
selection, 185, 186; distinction of
plants from, 248; distribution and
classification of, 95, 96; selection
process in, 91
Anthropology, finds of early human
skulls, 138; Huxley's writings on,
23-24, 140-142
Apes, similarities between man and,
140-142
Appendicularius, classification of, 16-
17
Aquinas, Thomas, 198, 315
Argyll, Duke of, 148; controversy
with Huxley, 316-317; on Darwin's
study on orchids, 156-157
Aristotle, 49, 83
Arnold, Matthew, 283-286, 309, 3183
320
Arnold, Thomas, 267
Artificial selection, 90, 106, 191
Australia, Rattlesnake expedition to,
14-25
Automatism, 281-282
Bacon, Francis, 74, 195
Bagehot, Walter, 48, 116, 190-191,
195, 251, 256, 332, 351
Bain, Alexander, 195
Bakunine, Mikhail, 336
Balfour, A. J., 354~356
Balfour, Francis, 308
Bar, Karl Ernst von, 106, 150
Barnacles (Cirripedia), Darwin's
studies on, 68-69, 79
Barzun, Jacques, 71
Bates, H. W., 132, 150
Beagle, Darwin's voyage on, 43, 46-
53, 69
Behavior, variations in, 94
Bentham, George, 14, 148
Bentham, Jeremy, 98
Berkeley, Bishop, 259, 263, 315, 347
Bettany, G. T., 101
Birds, relationship of reptiles with,
246, 298
Bismarck, Otto, Prince von, 266
British Association, 3-8, 28, 30, 64, '
247, 264, 275, 276, 281, 287, 351 '
390 Apes, Angels,
Brown, Robert, 55, 63, 153, 206, 208
Buchner, Ludwig, 315
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 166-167
BufTon, Georges Louis Leclerc, 84-85,
171, 172, 174, 221, 223
Bulwer, Sir E. Lytton, 69
Burke, Edmund, 98, 249, 268, 287, 329
Butler, Joseph, Bishop of Durham,
345> 346
Butler, Samuel, 71, 85*1., 102, 208, 220-
224
Byron, Lord, 180
Calvinism, Huxley on, 326
Cambridge University, 44, 46, 53, 69,
in, 148, 189-190, 218-219, 224, 226,
259-260
Carlyle, Thomas, 132, 147, 180, 261,
328; Darwin on, 56, 218; inaugura-
tion as Rector of Edinburgh Uni-
versity, 242-243?!.; influence on
Huxley, 12, 37, 131; meeting with
Emma Darwin, 61; relations with
Darwin, 217-218; relations with
Huxley, 241-243; on science and
religion, 89
Carpenter, W. B., 114, 236, 253
Cams, Victor, translation of Origin
of Species, 152-153
Catastrophist theory, 48-49, 79
Cellini, Benevcnuto, 309
Chambers, R. W., i, 87, 89, 103, 104
Chance, natural selection and, 108-
110
Chandler, 13
Characteristics, acquired, and hered-
ity, 174; useless, in classification, 93
Cirripedia, 68-69, 79
Clark, Sir Andrew, 162, 204, ^26, 235,
278, 309
Classification of plants and animals,
96
Coelenterates, 16
Colenso, Bishop J. W., 165, 214, 236
Color and sexual selection, 185, 186
Competition, Darwin on nature of,
and Victorians
75, 181; in economic theory, 76,
179-180; natural selection and, 100
Comte, Auguste, 89, 249-250;*., 330
Congreve, Richard, 249-250**.
Convergence, concept of, 96
Cooke, 13
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 106
Coral reefs, Darwin's theory on, 50,
55 67, 317
Creation theory, 49, 50, 88
Cross-fertilization, as invigorating off-
spring, 205; mechanism of, 153,
155; sex and, 91
Cuvier, Georges Leopold, 241, 311,
313; evolution according to, 48-49;
Huxley's attitude toward doctrine
of, 38, 39* *36> 247, 311, 313
Dana, James Dwight, 317
Darwin, Anne Elizabeth, 64, 124-125
Darwin, Caroline, 44, 58
Darwin, Charles: characterization, i-
2, 43-44, 71-72, 77-78, 101-102,
207-208, 319; compared with Hux-
ley, 8, 71, 92, 233-234; courtship
and marriage, 59-63; Cuvier's in-
fluence on, 49; death and burial,
227-229; degrees, membership in
learned societies, decorations and
medals, 46, 157-159, 218-219; early
life, 44-46; family life and children,
64-66, 69-70, 77-78, 118-125, 163-
164, 199-201, 204, 208, 212-220;
health, 46-47, 53-54, 58, 70, 124,
162, 227-228; obituary by Huxley,
319; opinions on American Civil
War, 167-170; opinions on automa-
tism, 283; opinions on ethical prob-
lems, 195; opinions on religion, 45^.
46, 51-52, 61, 109-112; opinions on
spiritualism, 243-244; opinions on
vivisection, 245; relationship with
Butler, 221-223; relationship with
.-Carlylc, 217-218; relationship with
Falconer, 149; relationship with
Gray, 73, in, 155-156, 167-169; re-
Index
391
lationship with Huxley, 39, 72, 73,
105, 137, I43/I54> *9 278-279; re-
lationship with Lyell, 47, 55-56,
74-76, 143-148, 2iY; relationship
with Wallace, 42, 80-8 1, 171, 182,
184-186, 1 88, 189; studies on bar-
nacles, 68-69, 79> studies on climb-
ing plants, 159-160, 204; studies on
earthworms, 215; studies on hered-
ity, 99;*., 153, 171, 173-175; studies
on orchids, 132, 153, 155-157;
theory on coral reefs, 50, 55, 67,
317; theory of pangenesis, 171-172,
174, 175, 188; voyage on the Beagle,
46-53
BOOKS: Coral Reefs, 67, 204; De-
scent of Man, 178, 193-197, 201,
203, 204, 282; automatism in, 282-
283; criticism and comments on,
197^-199; Effects of Cross- and Self-
fertilization, The, 205; Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Ani-
mals, The, 193, 201, 205; Forms of
Flowers, The, 205; Geological Ob-
servations on South America, 68,
204; Geological Observations on the
Volcanic Islands, 67-68, 204; Insec-
tivorous Plants, 204; Journal of Re-
searches . . . during the Voyage of
the HM.S. Beagle, 48, 67; Origin of
Species, The, 47, 48, 73, 74, 77, 80,
83, 90-96, 143, 144, 148, 250, 320,
332, 353; competition in, 181; criti-
cism of, 101-108, 120, 138, 150, 151,
170-171, 189, 198, 221, 223; editions
and translations of, 125, 152-153,
184, 1 88, 203; genetics in, 92; Hux-
ley's impression of, 105-106; influ-
ence of, 83; influences on, 49; re-
action to publication of, 97-99, 101-
102, 108, 112, 118, 119; reception
by clergy, 112; writing of, 79-80;
Power of Movement in Plants, The,
205, 206; Variation of Plants and
Animals under Domestication, 172,
182, 193, 204; Various Contrivances
by which Orchids Are Fertilized by
Insects, The, 155-157
ARTICLES AND SHORTER PIECES!
"Autobiography," 206-208, 216,
319; "Erasmus Darwin," 220;
"Movements and Habits of Climb-
ing Plants, The," 160; Statement of
1844, 77, 78
Darwin, Elizabeth, 69
Darwin, Emma Wedgwood, 279; bio-
graphical notes, 58-59; courtship
and marriage, 60-63; in Darwin's
Autobiography, 208; family life, 64
66, 124, 199, 212, 213, 215, 218-219,
228; religious attitudes and Dar-
win's theories, 119, 120, 199, 214-
215
Darwin, Erasmus (Charles Darwin's
brother), 54, 60, 61, 82, 119, 125,
183, 226, 243
Darwin, Erasmus (Charles Darwin's
grandfather), 50, 54, 85, 220, 221,
223-224
Darwin, Francis, 69, 121, 204, 212,
215, 2l6, 221, 222, 226, 228, 319
Darwin, George, 69, 183, 199, 212,
2i3> 2 43
Darwin, Henrietta, 69, 120, 155, 177,
193, 199, 200-201, 204, 214, 215, 225,
227
Darwin, Horace, 120, 124, 215, 225
Darwin, Leonard, 120, 123-124, 183,
212, 213
Darwin, Mary, 69
Darwin, Robert, 214; in family life,
44, 53, 54, 69-70; relationship with
Charles Darwin, 43, 53, 66, 74, 176
Darwin, Susan, 65-66, 124
Darwin, William Erasmus, 4, 64, 121-
122, 215, 216, 217, 226, 229
Darwin Medal, 354
Daubenny, Charles Giles, 2
De Candolle, Alphonse, 7571., 114, 150
Descartes, Rene, 209, 259-260, 263,
282
Descent, principle of, 96
39* Apes, Angels,
Descent of Man (see under Darwin)
Design, concept of, 109-111, 175
Des Perthes, Boucher, 138, 143
Determinism, 315
De Vries, Hugo, 93, 173, 175
Disraeli, Benjamin, 89, 211, 269, 354
Divergence, concept of, 96
Dohrn, Anton, 277
Domestic animals, breeding of, and
variations, 74, 90, 92, 173; selection
process in, 91 ; and species question,
76
Donnelly, Sir John, 235, 308, 341
Draper, John W., 5
Drosera, Darwin's studies on, 204,
211, 212
Dyer, Thiselton, 206
Earthworms, Darwin's studies on, 215
Edinburgh, University of, 32-33, 44,
339, 242**.
Education, 267-269, 271; controversy
between Huxley and Matthew Ar-
nold on, 283-286; Huxley's activi-
ties in, 269-27*,, 280-281, 286-288;
Huxley's essay "University Educa-
tion," 295-296
Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried, 158
Eliot, George, 29, 243
Elwin, Whitwell, 193
Embryology, 140
Empiricism, 261-262
Engis skulls, 141, 147
Environment, analogical resemblances
as effect of, 96; human mind as
adaptation to, 194; influence of,
174; instinct resulting from, 94;
types differentiated to cope with,
49
Epicurus, 197
Ethics, Darwin on, 195; Huxley on,
347-35>> 430
Eton College, 299, 319
Evolution theory: Darwin's ap-
proaches and explanations, 43, 50,
71-79, 90, 97; history of, 83-86;
Huxley's position on, 30, 103-105,
and Victorians
297-298; LyelPs position on, 48, 55,
74, 86-87, 210; spread and accept-
ance of, 149-150, 181
Extinction, Darwin on, 50, 75
Eyre, Governor, 240-241
Fabian Society, 331, 334
Falconer, Hugh, 43, 114, 148-149, 208
Farrer, T. N., Lord, 154, 225, 226
Ferrar, F. W., 268
Fertility, pressure of, on selection, 91
Fertilization, cross-, 91, 153, 155, 205;
of orchids, 153, 155
Fish, Huxley's studies on, 306-307
Fitzroy, Captain Robert, 46, 51, 52, 67,
68
Flaubert, Gustave, 184
Flourens, M. J. P., 150
Flower, Sir William, 137, 138, 139,
307
Forbes, Edward, 26, 32, 38, 43, 79
Foster, Sir Michael, 235, 310, 354
Fox, W. D., 52, 73
Frankland, Sir Edward, 236, 300
Frere, John, 138
Gallon, Sir Francis, 109^., 191-192,
229, 244
Geology, Darwin's studies on, 47, 50,
51; Huxley on, 298; Lyell's Prin-
ciples of Geology, 47, 48, 55, 74, 75,
86-88, 104, 165; theory of coral is-
lands, 51, 55, 67, 317; Wallace's
paper on Lyell, 187
George, Henry, 185, 331, 334-336
Gilman, Daniel Coit, 290, 297
Gladstone, William Ewart, 87, 102,
269, 274, 331, 332; article on Rob-
ert Elsmere, 320-321; on educa-
tion, 269; member of Metaphysical
Society, 251, 255; theological con-
troversies with Huxley, 311-313,
326-328; visit to Darwin, 211-312
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 40,
106, 267, 343
Gould, George M., I4.
Grant-Duff, Sir Mountstuart, 274, 290
Index
393
Gray, Asa: on climbing plants, 159;
crusade for evolution theory, m-
112; on divine intent in nature, 156;
on natural selection, 108; relation-
ship with Darwin, 43, 73, 146, 159-
160, 161, 167-170, 174, 175, 197, 204,
206, 236
Gray, F. E., 107
Greg, W. R., 192
Grote, George, 56
Gully, Dr., 124, 162
Haeckel, Ernst^ 116-117, 194, 234
Hamilton, Sir William, 10, n, 129,
2420.
Harrison, Frederic, 136, 290, 322
Harvey, William, 106
Heathorn, Henrietta (see Huxley,
Henrietta Heathorn)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 86,
88, 304
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Fer-
dinand von, 88, 236, 238
Hennell, Charles, 88n.
Henslow, J. S., 5, 45, 46, 47, 52, 63,
114, 148, 190
Heredity: cross-fertilization and, 205;
Darwin on, 99*., 153, 171, 173-175;
Gallon on, 191; Huxley on, 106;
Mendel's studies of, 172-173; varia-
tion and, 90, 92
Herschel, Sir John, 107, 108, 229
Hobbes, Thomas, 179, 276, 331, 336
Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 143, 354; bi-
ography of, 28; on pangenesis, 175;
receives Darwin Medal, 354; re-
ceives Royal Medal, 32; relationship
with Darwin, 43, 69, 72, 73, 80, 81,
101-102, 105, 107, 113-115? *47> I 5 2
154, 157, 168, 175, 178, 185, 202, 206,
208-211, 226, 229; relationship with
Huxley, 5, 7, 15, 35, 143, 198, 235,
236, 277, 279-280, 319, 335, 337, 342,
343. 345, 35L 358; speech before
British Association, 7
Hooker, Richard, 98
Horse, evolution of, 292-293, 298
Hubble, Douglas, 52, 54, 162
Humboldt, Alexander von, 15, 46, 55,
147
Hume, David, 195, 248, 249, 253, 260-
263
Hutton, R. H., 251, 252, 255, 267
Huxley, Ethel, 319
Huxley, Harry, 337
Huxley, Henrietta Heathorn, 165,
304, 305; courtship and marriage,
17-19, 31, 33-34; Journal, quota-
tions from, 25, 34; married life, 132,
234-235* 279-280, 310, 346, 359;
Spencer's admiration for, 34-35;
trips to France and United States,
279^-280, 290-298
Huxley, Jessie, 234
Huxley, Julian, 99, 338
Huxley, Leonard, 132, 274, 280, 302,
304. 305. 3o6
Huxley, Marion, 309, 318, 319
Huxley, Noel, 127, 132, 358, 359
Huxley, Thomas Henry: answer to
Mivart's attacks on Darwin, 198,
199; answer to Wilberforce at Brit-
ish Association, 5-7; on automa-
tism, 282; characterization of, 9-10,
13, 7*> 233-234, 238, 300-301, 302,
329-330; compared with Darwin, 8,
71, 233-234; as a controversialist,
312, 329-330, 333; controversies on
agnosticism, 321-324; controversy
with Arnold on scientific education,
283-286; controversy with Con-
greve, 249-250/2.; controversy with
Gladstone, 312-313, 327-328; con-
troversy with Liddon, 315-317,
326-327; controversy with Lilly
and the Duke of Argyll, 314-315;
controversy with Spencer, 332-334;
correspondence with Kingsley, 127-
134; courtship and marriage, 17-
I9> 3*> 33-34J Darwin on, 190,
209; Darwin Medal awarded to,
354; debates in Metaphysical So-
394 Apes, Angels,
and membership in learned socie-
ties, 14, 27-28, 32, 35, 137, 152, 264,
272-275, 280, 299, 300, 308, 310, 319,
341-342; early life, 10-14; educa-
tional activities, 269-275, 280-288,
295-296; family life, 135, 234, 235,
337-339. 34 2 ; ^alth, n, 14*., 21,
277-280, 308-309, 349, 357-358; of-
fers to enter Parliament, 275, 287;
official positions, 14, 33, 272, 276, 278,
280, 287, 299-305, 306, 319, 341;
opinions on American Civil War
and race question, 238-239, 240-
241; opinions on conflict between
science and religion, 7-8, 10-12,
128-134, 260, 262, 272, 298, 314,
325-327, 329-330; opinions on Dar-
winism and campaign for it, 103-
107, 115-116, 135-137, 275; opinions
on Henry George's economics, 335-
336; opinions on politics, 331-332;
opinions on religion, 10-11; opin-
ions on Salvation Army, 328-329;
opinions on social problems, 275-
276, 332-336; opinions on spiritual-
ism, 243-244; opinions on vivisec-
tion, 244-246; opinions on women,
238-240; opposition to theories of,
297; on pangenesis theory, 175;
philosophy of life, 347-349; plan
for future, 35-36; poem on death of
Tennyson, 343; relationship with
Carlyle, 241-243; relationship with
Darwin, 33-34, 69, 73, 137, 175, 198,
208-210, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230,
236, 243-246, 275, 276, 278, 279, 308,
316; relationship with Hooker, 342;
relationship with Jowett, 305-306;
relationship with Owen, 4, 16, 26,
38-41, 175; relationship with Spen-
cer, 29-30, 237-238, 332-334; rela-
tionship with Tyndall, 29, 241; re-
ply to Balfour's foundations of
Belief, 356-357; scientific work, 14,
16-17, 20, 246, 264, 306-308; trans-
mutation hypotheses, 103-106;
and Victorians
travels in Egypt, France, and Italy,
277-280, 309-310; travels in United
States, 289-298; voyage on the
Rattlesnake, 14-25
BOOKS: Collected Essays, 353; Ele-
mentary Physiology, 244; Evidence
of Man's Place in Nature, 41, 135-
140, 142-143, 241, 260, 304, 314;
Hume, 260-263; Lay Sermons, Ad-
dresses, and Reviews, 2497?., 260;
Science and Christian Tradition,
339
ARTICLES AND LECTURES! "Admin-
istrative Nihilism," 272, 275; "Ag-
nosticism," 321-322; "Agnosticism:
A Rejoinder/' 323-324; "Agnosti-
cism and Christianity," 324;
"Bishop Berkeley on the Meta-
physics of Sensation," 263; "Con-
nection of the Biological Sciences
with Medicine,*' 287; "Emancipa-
tionBlack and White," 238;
"Episcopal Trilogy, An," 317;
"Evidence of the Miracle of the
Resurrection," 257; "Evolution and
Ethics," 345-349; "Prolegomena"
to, 350-351; "Evolution of Theol-
ogy, The: An Anthropological
Study," 313-314; "Government:
Anarchy or Regimentation," 336;
"Has the Frog a Soul?," 257;
"Hasisadra's Adventure," 3278. ;
"Interpreters of Genesis and the
Interpreters of Nature, The," 312;
"Keepers of the Herd of Swine,
The," 327; "Lectures on Evolu-
tion," 297-298; "Liberal Education,
A: and Where to Find It," 269;
"Lights of the Church and the
Light of Science, The," 326-327;
"Mr. Balfour's Attack on Agnosti-
cism," 357; "Natural Inequality of
Men, The," 334~335; Obituary of
Charles Darwin, 229-230, 319; "On
a Piece of Chalk," 247-248; "On
the Anatomy and the Affinities of
Index 395
the Family of the Medusae," 20; Jones, Wharton, 14
Jowett, Benjamin, 242, 304-306, 344
"On Descartes* Discourse," 259;
"On the Educational Value of the
Natural History Sciences," 37; "On
the Hypothesis That Animals Are
Automata and Its History," 281-
282; "On Natural History as
Knowledge, Discipline and Power,"
38; "On Our Knowledge of the
Causes of the Phenomena of Or-
ganic Nature," 136; "On Science
and Art in Relation to Education,"
286/2.; "On Sensation and the Unity
of Structure of the Sensiferous Or-
gans," 263; "On the Theory of the
Vertebrate Skull," 40-41; "Phe-
nomena of Organic Nature, The,"
136; "Physical Basis of Life, The,"
248-250; "Pseudo-scientific Real-
ism," 315-316; "Relation of Man to
the Rest of the Animal Kingdom,"
139; "School Board, The: What
They Can Do and What They May
Do," 272; "Science and Culture,"
285; "Science and Morals," 314-315;
"Science and Pseudo-science," 316-
317; "Scientific Education," 271;
"State and the Medical Profession,
The," 287; "Struggle for Existence
in Human Society," 332, 333;
"Technical Education," 286; "Uni-
versities: Actual and Ideal," 280-
281; "University Education," 295-
296
Hybrids, characters in, 174; relative
immutability of, 74
Imperial College of Science in South
Kensington, 35, 274, 299-300, 309
Insectivorous plants, Darwin's studies
on, 204
Jamaica Affair, 240-241
James, William, 259, 282
Jellyfish, Huxley's studies on, 20
Johns Hopkins University, Huxley's
visit to, 234, 294-295, 296
Kant, Emanuel, 86, 253, 259
Keith, Sir Arthur, 140
Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord, no,
212
Kennedy, Edmund, 20
Kingsley, Charles, correspondence
with Huxley, 127-134, 234; on evo-
lution, 112, 338; on similarities be-
tween man and ape, 142
Knowles, James, 251, 252, 257, 258,
272, 356
Kolliker, R. A., 150
Krause, Ernst, 117, 220, 223-224
Laissez faire theory, 179-180
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste P. A., Cheva-
lier de, 30, 49, 85-86, 107, 148, 150,
174, 207, 221, 222, 223, 224
Lankester, E. Ray, 281, 303-304
Lecky, W. E. H., 166
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 84.,
209
Liddon, Canon, 315-316, 326-327
Lilly, W. S, 314-315
Litchfield, R. B., 200, 227
Locke, John, 276, 331, 336, 357
Lodge, Oliver, 300
Lubbock, John, Lord Avebury, 5, 79,
166, 21 r, 212, 228, 229, 236, 251, 345
Luther, Martin, 321
Lyell, Charles, 27, 57, 61, 63, 103, 158,
238; attitude toward religion, 144,
145; biography, 210-211; on evolu-
tion of man, 139, 142-149; on Hux-
ley's Man's Place in Nature, 143; on
invariability of species, 48, 74; on
natural causes and geological evo-
lution, 86-87; relationship with
Darwin and attitude toward evolu-
tion theory, 42, 47, 55-56, 72-76,
79-82, 86-88, 102, 107, in, 115, 143-
148, 165, 187, 210, 21 1 ; Wallace's
paper on, 186, 187
396 Apes, Angels, and Victorians
BOOKS: Antiquity of Man, The,
142, 146, 147; Principles of Geology,
47 48> 55> 74, 86-87
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 9, 56,
248
Macgillivray, John, 15, 19, 23
Mackintosh, Sir James, 45
McLennan, John, 190
Maine, Henry, 182, 190
Mallock, W. H., 242
Malthus, Thomas Robert^ 76, 91, 288,
296
Man, origin and evolution of, 138,
181-182; Darwinian theory and,
179; in Darwin's Descent of Man,
iPS-W. Huxley on, 140-142, 248,
249; Lyell on, 147; and primitive
society, 190-191; Wallace on, 186-
i8 7
Manning, Archbishop, 251-253, 256,
257
Man's Place in Nature (see under
Huxley; Evidence of Man's Place
in Nature)
Marconi, M. G., 265
Marcus Aurelius, 195
Marsh, O. C., 291-292, 298, 299
Mason, Sir Josiah, 285
Martineau, James, 256, 258
Marx, Karl, 180, 331, 334
Matter: Huxley on, 133, 136, 248-
249, 315; Tyndall on, 281
Matthew, Patrick, 87, 151-152
Maurice, F. D., 134, 142
Mayer, J. R., 136
Maxwell, J. C., 265
Mendel, Gregor, 99, 106, 172-173
Medusae, Huxley's studies on, 20
Metaphysical Society, 251-258, 264,
273* 322
Mill, John Stuart, 89, 180-181, 195,
239, 242*., 249-250/1., 251, 255, 276,
332, 346, 348
Milman, H. H., 88
Milton, John, 207, 297
Mimicry, 150
Mines, School of, 32, 33, 39, 299
Miracles, debates on, 256
Mivart, St. George, 197-199, 208, 222,
303
Mollusks, Huxley's studies on, 16
More, P. E., 133
Morley, John, Lord, 211, 212, 236* 249,
258, 260, 308
Murray, John (geologist), 317
Murray, John (publisher), 125, 193,
197
Mutations, 77, 93, 106
Napoleon, Louis, 267
Natchez remains, 147
Natural selection: and competition,
179; Darwin on, 76, 77, 90, 146; and
evolution from general to complex
form, 156; in human evolution,
185, 194, 195; Lyell on, 48, 148; Mal-
thus on, 91; opinions of contempo-
rary scientists on, 100; opposition
to, 108; in plants, 157; priority
question, 151-152; related to varia-
tions, 92, 173; in societies, 332;
Wallace on, 185, 187, 189
Naturalism: Balfour on, 355; Descent
of Man encouraging trend toward,
196; Huxley on natural laws, 316-
317, 356 3 357
Neanderthal man, 138, 141, 147
Newman, Cardinal, i, 86, 87, in,
251, 324-325
Newton, Isaac, 7, 96-98, 106, 121, 229
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 192
Norton, Charles Eliot, 216
Oceans and continents, 95
Orchids, Darwin's studies on, 153-
157
Origin of Species, The (sec under
Darwin)
Osborn, H F., 303, 352
Ouless, W., 202
Index
Owen, Sir Richard, on Darwinism, 4;
on evolution and creationism, 88;
Huxley and, 2, 38-41, 88, 89, 139,
143, 147, 208, 343
Owen's College, 280, 285
Oxford, i, 2, 272, 297, 304-305> 306,
351
Paleontology, 94-95, 99, 141
Paley, William, 45, 146
Pangenesis, theory of, 171-172, 174,
175
Parker, T. Jeffrey, 302, 303
Pasteur, Louis, 136
Peterborough, Bishop of, 251, 321, 323
Peterson, Houston, 11-12, 248, 357
Plants: cross-fertilization in, 153, 205;
Darwin's studies of, 153-157, 159-
160, 173; distinguished from ani-
mals, 248; distribution and classi-
fication of, 95, 96; Mendel's studies
of, 159-160; natural selection in,
157; revolving movements of, 205;
sterility in, 162
Plato, 84, 304, 344
Playfair, Lyon, Lord, 211, 245
Positivism, 24977., 330
Potter, Beatrice (Mrs. Sydney Webb),
301
Pragmatism, 259
Primitive society, books on, 190-191
Principles of Geology (see under
Lydl)
Progress, 265-266, 346
Protestantism, 325-326
Quatrefages, J. L. A. de, 189
Race differentiation, 196-197
Rattlesnake expedition to Australia,
14-17, 19-25, 309
Raverat^ Gwen, 213
Religion, 284, 304, 320, 346, 355, 358;
Darwin's attitude toward, 45-46,
51-52, 109, in; Huxley's attitude
toward, 10-12, 260, 262, 272, 298,
397
314, 325-327* 329-330; Lyell's atti-
tude toward, 144, 145
Religion vs. science: Carlyle on, 89;
Darwin on, 45-46; discussions in
debating societies, 250; in Glad-
stone-Huxley controversy, 312-313;
Huxley on, 128-134, 297, 298, 339-
340; Mrs. Ward on, 323; various
scientists on, 87-89, 108-109
Reptiles, relationship of birds with,
246, 298
Reymond, Du Bois, 136
Rich, Anthony, 224-225, 321
Roman Catholic Church, i, 253, 255,
273, 294; Huxley's attitude toward,
249-2507*., 273
Romanes, G. J., 163, 227, 345-346
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 334-335
Royal College of Science, 299, 300
Royal Institution, 35, 115
Royal Navy, 15, 26, 30-31
Royal Society, 27, 28, 31, 81, I57- I 58>
207, 211, 275, 308, 309, 319, 354
Royal Society of Edinburgh, 158
Royal Zoological Society, 53
Royer, C., 188
Rugby, 267
Ruskin, John, 251, 256, 266
Russell, Bertrand, 98
Sabine, General Sir Edward, 157^-158
Salisbury, Marquis of, 331, 351-352
Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 182
Schaafhausen, H., 138
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von, 97
Schultze, Max, 248
Science, in education,- 268, 285-286;
Huxley's views on, 36-37, 129, 315;
progress of, in England, 265-266
(See also Religion vs. science)
Scott, Elizabeth, 13, 290, 293
Scott, John, 160-162
Scott, Walter, 158
Sedgwick, Adam, 45, 113, 120, 189
Sedgwick, Sara, 216-217
398
Apes, Angels, and Victorians
Seebright, Sir John, 198
Selection, principle of (see Artificial
selection; Natural selection; Sexual
selection)
Self-fertilization, Darwin on, 205
Seward, Anna, 220
Sexual selection, Darwin on, 77, 91,
196-197; in Wallace-Darwin corre-
spondence, 184-185, 1 86, 196-197
Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 195
Shaftesbury, seventh Earl of, 244, 332
Sidgwick, Henry, 254
Simpson, George, 100
Smith, Adam, 98, 179, 195
Social evolution, Bagehot on, 191; and
human evolution, 195-196; Spen-
cer's theory of, 30
Socrates, 230, 283, 304, 321, 322
Species: Darwin's definition of, 90;
diversification of, 91; of domestic
animals, 75-76; Lyell on, 74, 174
Speech, man in relation to, 147
Spencer, Herbert, 83, 86, 171, 185, 190,
194, 195, 229, 251, 252, 265, 300;
Darwin on, 166, 208-209; in educa-
tion controversy, 268; Hutton's
arguments against, 252; relationship
with Huxley, 29-30, 237-238, 314,
332-334? 349-35 ; relationship with
Mrs. Huxley, 34-35; at X Club
meetings, 236-237
WHITINGS: Autobiography, 29-30;
"Development Hypothesis, The,"
30; Psychology, 201, 236, 237; 'The-
ory of Population Deduced from
the General Law of Animal Fertil-
ity, A," 30
Spiritualism, 243-244
Sprengel, C. C., 153
Stanley, Dean, 251
Stanley, Owen, 15, 16, 24, 25
Stephen, Fitziames, 256-258
Stephen, Leslie, 118, 258, 304
Stephen (Woolf), Virginia, 213
Strauss, David, 88
Suarez, Francisco, 198
Survival, struggle for, 76, 171, 179,
270, 275-276, 332, 333, 346-348
Tennyson, Alfred, 64, 165, 183, 214,
234* 239, 251-252, 257, 342-343, 346
Tory party, 313, 351, 354
Transmutation hypothesis, 75, 103*
106
Tunicates, Huxley's studies on, 16
Tylor, E. B., no, 166
Tyndall, John, compared with Hux-
ley, 28-29, 118; marriage and death,
344-345; member of Metaphysical
Society, 256; opening address as
president of British Association,
281; relations with Huxley, 35, 236,
240, 241, 24277., 276, 280, 281, 333
Universe, concept of, no, 127-134
Variations: and external conditions,
77; in natural selection, 173; pos-
sible causes of, 92, 106; selection of,
76, 92-93; small, Darwin's emphasis
on, 99
Victoria, Queen, 342
Victorianism, 264-267
Vivisection question, 244-^246
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouct de,
10
Wace, 321, 323-324
Wagner, Moritz, 202
Wales, Prince of, 158-159, 290
Wallace, Alfred Russell, 15, 331, 354;
Darwin Medal awarded to, 354; on
Darwin's Descent of Man, 197; on
pangenesis theory, 175; priority
question-and paper on evolution, So
82, 208; relations and correspond-
ence with Darwin, 42, 73, 80-8 1,
105, 126, 171, 182, 184, 189, 197-198,
203, 204, 225
ARTICLES: "Malay Archipelago,"
188; "Origin of Human Races,
Index
399
The," 182; "Sir Charles Lyell on
Geological Climates and the Origin
of Species," 186-187
Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 320-321, 323
Ward, Wilfred C., 251, 253-255, 273,
355-356
Watson, H. C., 107, 113
Waugh, Benjamin, 274
Webb, Mrs. Sidney (Beatrice Potter),
301, 333
Wedgwood, Elizabeth, 125, 214
Wedgwood, Emma (see Darwin,
Emma Wedgwood)
Wedgwood, Hensleigh, 206, 243, 244
Wedgwood, Josiah, 45, 46, 52, 58, 214
Wedgwood, Thomas, 55
Weismann, August, 202
Wells, W. C., 152
Westminster Abbey, 228-229
White, Gilbert, 93
Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel, 4, 6, 131,
272
Wild species, variability in, 74
Woolner, T., 184
Wordsworth, 207
X Club, 236, 264, 318-319, 334, 34^
345
Yale University, 291-292
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Irvine writes that he "was born in 1906 into the melodrama of
later mother-lode mining days, but grew up into the laborious quiet of
American academic life." His undergraduate days were spent at Stan-
ford and later he studied in Germany and at Harvard, where "I
learned to write, in so far as it can be said that I have done so, by
revising my doctoral thesis over and over."
Mr. Irvine was a lecturer in English at Mills College in 1934, and
since 1935 he has been at Stanford University as instructor and now
professor of Victorian literature. He has also been a visiting professor at
Northwestern, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard. He has
written extensively on George Bernard Shaw in periodicals and is the
author of a book on the subject, The Universe of G. B. S. f published in
1949. His first book, a biography of Walter Bagehot, was published in
1939-
Mr. Irvine, who lives with his wife and son in Palo Alto, California,
describes the origins of his literary career as follows. "One day, still a
boy, I blundered out of the juvenile section of the public library and
found myself face to face with Dr. Eliot's five-foot shelf. The result was
that I jumped from what was too easy (cowboy stories) to what was
too hard, I read nearly all of Mill's Logic with only the faintest notion
of what it meant." Since that time he has "never attempted to think,
but simply to write about other people thinking."
