Luck or Cunning?

“’The evil that men do lives after them” {239a} is happily not so true as that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones, and to no one does this correction of Shakespeare’s unwonted spleen apply more fully than to Mr. Darwin.  Indeed it was somewhat thus that we treated his books even while he was alive; the good, descent, remained with us, while the ill, the deification of luck, was forgotten as soon as we put down his work.  Let me now, therefore, as far as possible, quit the ungrateful task of dwelling on the defects of Mr. Darwin’s work and character, for the more pleasant one of insisting upon their better side, and of explaining how he came to be betrayed into publishing the “Origin of Species” without reference to the works of his predecessors.

In the outset I would urge that it is not by any single book that Mr. Darwin should be judged.  I do not believe that any one of the three principal works on which his reputation is founded will maintain with the next generation the place it has acquired with ourselves; nevertheless, if asked to say who was the man of our own times whose work had produced the most important, and, on the whole, beneficial effect, I should perhaps wrongly, but still both instinctively and on reflection, name him to whom I have, unfortunately, found myself in more bitter opposition than to any other in the whole course of my life.  I refer, of course, to Mr. Darwin.

His claim upon us lies not so much in what is actually found within the four corners of any one of his books, as in the fact of his having written them at all—­in the fact of his having brought out one after another, with descent always for its keynote, until the lesson was learned too thoroughly to make it at all likely that it will be forgotten.  Mr. Darwin wanted to move his generation, and had the penetration to see that this is not done by saying a thing once for all and leaving it.  It almost seems as though it matters less what a man says than the number of times he repeats it, in a more or less varied form.  It was here the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” made his most serious mistake.  He relied on new editions, and no one pays much attention to new editions—­the mark a book makes is almost always made by its first edition.  If, instead of bringing out a series of amended editions during the fifteen years’ law which Mr. Darwin gave him, Mr. Chambers had followed up the “Vestiges” with new book upon new book, he would have learned much more, and, by consequence, not have been snuffed out so easily once for all as he was in 1859 when the “Origin of Species” appeared.

The tenacity of purpose which appears to have been one of Mr. Darwin’s most remarkable characteristics was visible even in his outward appearance.  He always reminded me of Raffaelle’s portrait of Pope Julius the Second, which, indeed, would almost do for a portrait of Mr. Darwin himself.  I imagine that these two men, widely as the sphere of their action differed, must have been like each other in more respects than looks alone.  Each, certainly, had a hand of iron; whether Pope Julius wore a velvet glove or no, I do not know; I rather think not, for, if I remember rightly, he boxed Michael Angelo’s ears for giving him a saucy answer.  We cannot fancy Mr. Darwin boxing any one’s ears; indeed there can be no doubt he wore a very thick velvet glove, but the hand underneath it was none the less of iron.  It was to his tenacity of purpose, doubtless, that his success was mainly due; but for this he must inevitably have fallen before the many inducements to desist from the pursuit of his main object, which beset him in the shape of ill health, advancing years, ample private means, large demands upon his time, and a reputation already great enough to satisfy the ambition of any ordinary man.

I do not gather from those who remember Mr. Darwin as a boy, and as a young man, that he gave early signs of being likely to achieve greatness; nor, as it seems to me, is there any sign of unusual intellectual power to be detected in his earliest book.  Opening this “almost” at random I read—­“Earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any country.  If, for instance, beneath England the now inert subterraneous forces should exert those powers which most assuredly in former geological ages they have exerted, how completely would the entire condition of the country be changed!  What would become of the lofty houses, thickly-packed cities, great manufacturies (sic), the beautiful public and private edifices?  If the new period of disturbance were to commence by some great earthquake in the dead of night, how terrific would be the carnage!  England would be at once bankrupt; all papers, records, and accounts would from that moment be lost.  Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled.  In every large town famine would be proclaimed, pestilence and death following in its train.” {240a} Great allowance should be made for a first work, and I admit that much interesting matter is found in Mr. Darwin’s journal; still, it was hardly to be expected that the writer who at the age of thirty-three could publish the foregoing passage should twenty years later achieve the reputation of being the profoundest philosopher of his time.

I have not sufficient technical knowledge to enable me to speak certainly, but I question his having been the great observer and master of experiment which he is generally believed to have been.  His accuracy was, I imagine, generally to be relied upon as long as accuracy did not come into conflict with his interests as a leader in the scientific world; when these were at stake he was not to be trusted for a moment.  Unfortunately they were directly or indirectly at stake more often than one could wish.  His book on the action of worms, however, was shown by Professor Paley and other writers {242a} to contain many serious errors and omissions, though it involved no personal question; but I imagine him to have been more or less hebete when he wrote this book.  On the whole I should doubt his having been a better observer of nature than nine country gentlemen out of ten who have a taste for natural history.

Presumptuous as I am aware it must appear to say so, I am unable to see more than average intellectual power even in Mr. Darwin’s later books.  His great contribution to science is supposed to have been the theory of natural selection, but enough has been said to show that this, if understood as he ought to have meant it to be understood, cannot be rated highly as an intellectual achievement.  His other most important contribution was his provisional theory of pan-genesis, which is admitted on all hands to have been a failure.  Though, however, it is not likely that posterity will consider him as a man of transcendent intellectual power, he must be admitted to have been richly endowed with a much more valuable quality than either originality or literary power—­I mean with savoir faire.  The cards he held—­and, on the whole, his hand was a good one—­he played with judgment; and though not one of those who would have achieved greatness under any circumstances, he nevertheless did achieve greatness of no mean order.  Greatness, indeed, of the highest kind—that of one who is without fear and without reproach—­will not ultimately be allowed him, but greatness of a rare kind can only be denied him by those whose judgment is perverted by temper or personal ill-will.  He found the world believing in fixity of species, and left it believing—­in spite of his own doctrine—­in descent with modification.

I have said on an earlier page that Mr. Darwin was heir to a discredited truth, and left behind him an accredited fallacy.  This is true as regards men of science and cultured classes who understood his distinctive feature, or thought they did, and so long as Mr. Darwin lived accepted it with very rare exceptions; but it is not true as regards the unreading, unreflecting public, who seized the salient point of descent with modification only, and troubled themselves little about the distinctive feature.  It would almost seem as if Mr. Darwin had reversed the usual practice of philosophers and given his esoteric doctrine to the world, while reserving the exoteric for his most intimate and faithful adherents.  This, however, is a detail; the main fact is, that Mr. Darwin brought us all round to evolution.  True, it was Mr. Darwin backed by the Times and the other most influential organs of science and culture, but it was one of Mr. Darwin’s great merits to have developed and organised this backing, as part of the work which he knew was essential if so great a revolution was to be effected.

This is an exceedingly difficult and delicate thing to do.  If people think they need only write striking and well-considered books, and that then the Times will immediately set to work to call attention to them, I should advise them not to be too hasty in basing action upon this hypothesis.  I should advise them to be even less hasty in basing it upon the assumption that to secure a powerful literary backing is a matter within the compass of any one who chooses to undertake it.  No one who has not a strong social position should ever advance a new theory, unless a life of hard fighting is part of what he lays himself out for.  It was one of Mr. Darwin’s great merits that he had a strong social position, and had the good sense to know how to profit by it.  The magnificent feat which he eventually achieved was unhappily tarnished by much that detracts from the splendour that ought to have attended it, but a magnificent feat it must remain.

Whose work in this imperfect world is not tarred and tarnished by something that detracts from its ideal character?  It is enough that a man should be the right man in the right place, and this Mr. Darwin pre-eminently was.  If he had been more like the ideal character which Mr. Allen endeavours to represent him, it is not likely that he would have been able to do as much, or nearly as much, as he actually did; he would have been too wide a cross with his generation to produce much effect upon it.  Original thought is much more common than is generally believed.  Most people, if they only knew it, could write a good book or play, paint a good picture, compose a fine oratorio; but it takes an unusually able person to get the book well reviewed, persuade a manager to bring the play out, sell the picture, or compass the performance of the oratorio; indeed, the more vigorous and original any one of these things may be, the more difficult will it prove to even bring it before the notice of the public.  The error of most original people is in being just a trifle too original.  It was in his business qualities—­and these, after all, are the most essential to success, that Mr. Darwin showed himself so superlative.  These are not only the most essential to success, but it is only by blaspheming the world in a way which no good citizen of the world will do, that we can deny them to be the ones which should most command our admiration.  We are in the world; surely so long as we are in it we should be of it, and not give ourselves airs as though we were too good for our generation, and would lay ourselves out to please any other by preference.  Mr. Darwin played for his own generation, and he got in the very amplest measure the recognition which he endeavoured, as we all do, to obtain.

His success was, no doubt, in great measure due to the fact that he knew our little ways, and humoured them; but if he had not had little ways of his own, he never could have been so much au fait with ours.  He knew, for example, we should be pleased to hear that he had taken his boots off so as not to disturb his worms when watching them by night, so he told us of this, and we were delighted.  He knew we should like his using the word “sag,” so he used it, {245a} and we said it was beautiful.  True, he used it wrongly, for he was writing about tesselated pavement, and builders assure me that “sag” is a word which applies to timber only, but this is not to the point; the point was, that Mr. Darwin should have used a word that we did not understand; this showed that he had a vast fund of knowledge at his command about all sorts of practical details with which he might have well been unacquainted.  We do not deal the same measure to man and to the lower animals in the matter of intelligence; the less we understand these last, the less, we say, not we, but they can understand; whereas the less we can understand a man, the more intelligent we are apt to think him.  No one should neglect by-play of this description; if I live to be strong enough to carry it through, I mean to play “cambre,” and I shall spell it “camber.”  I wonder Mr. Darwin never abused this word.  Laugh at him, however, as we may for having said “sag,” if he had not been the kind of man to know the value of these little hits, neither would he have been the kind of man to persuade us into first tolerating, and then cordially accepting, descent with modification.  There is a correlation of mental as well as of physical growth, and we could not probably have had one set of Mr. Darwin’s qualities without the other.  If he had been more faultless, he might have written better books, but we should have listened worse.  A book’s prosperity is like a jest’s—­in the ear of him that hears it.

Mr. Spencer would not—­at least one cannot think he would—­have been able to effect the revolution which will henceforth doubtless be connected with Mr. Darwin’s name.  He had been insisting on evolution for some years before the “Origin of Species” came out, but he might as well have preached to the winds, for all the visible effect that had been produced.  On the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s book the effect was instantaneous; it was like the change in the condition of a patient when the right medicine has been hit on after all sorts of things have been tried and failed.  Granted that it was comparatively easy for Mr. Darwin, as having been born into the household of one of the prophets of evolution, to arrive at conclusions about the fixity of species which, if not so born, he might never have reached at all; this does not make it any easier for him to have got others to agree with him.  Any one, again, may have money left him, or run up against it, or have it run up against him, as it does against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not lose it.  Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an end of everything.  Did the world give much heed to or believe in evolution before Mr. Darwin’s time?  Certainly not.  Did we begin to attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write?  Certainly yes.  Did we ere long go over en masse?  Assuredly.  If, as I said in “Life and Habit,” any one asks who taught the world to believe in evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin.  And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous does its success become.  It seems as if some organisms can do anything with anything.  Beethoven picked his teeth with the snuffers, and seems to have picked them sufficiently to his satisfaction.  So Mr. Darwin with one of the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, tersest writer could have done.  Strange, that such a master of cunning (in the sense of my title) should have been the apostle of luck, and one so terribly unlucky as Lamarck, of cunning, but such is the irony of nature.  Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said, “That fruit is ripe,” and shook it into his lap.

With this Mr. Darwin’s best friends ought to be content; his admirers are not well advised in representing him as endowed with all sorts of qualities which he was very far from possessing.  Thus it is pretended that he was one of those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands.  No conception can be more wantonly inexact.  I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was “ever ready,” &c.  So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people’s feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in the habit of washing poor people’s feet.  I can understand Mr. Darwin’s not having taken any public notice, for example, of “Life and Habit,” for though I did not attack him in force in that book, it was abundantly clear that an attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be pardoned for not doing anything to advertise the works of his opponents; but there is no excuse for his never having referred to Professor Hering’s work either in “Nature,” when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it (July 13, 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books.  If his attitude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering’s theory, but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.

His not having done so is of a piece with his silence about Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck in the early editions of the “Origin of Species,” and with the meagre reference to them which is alone found in the later ones.  It is of a piece also with the silence which Mr. Darwin invariably maintained when he saw his position irretrievably damaged, as, for example, by Mr. Spencer’s objection already referred to, and by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin in the North British Review (June 1867).  Science, after all, should form a kingdom which is more or less not of this world.  The ideal scientist should know neither self nor friend nor foe—­he should be able to hob-nob with those whom he most vehemently attacks, and to fly at the scientific throat of those to whom he is personally most attached; he should be neither grateful for a favourable review nor displeased at a hostile one; his literary and scientific life should be something as far apart as possible from his social; it is thus, at least, alone that any one will be able to keep his eye single for facts, and their legitimate inferences.  We have seen Professor Mivart lately taken to task by Mr. Romanes for having said {248a} that Mr. Darwin was singularly sensitive to criticism, and made it impossible for Professor Mivart to continue friendly personal relations with him after he had ventured to maintain his own opinion.  I see no reason to question Professor Mivart’s accuracy, and find what he has said to agree alike with my own personal experience of Mr. Darwin, and with all the light that his works throw upon his character.

The most substantial apology that can be made for his attempt to claim the theory of descent with modification is to be found in the practice of Lamarck, Mr. Patrick Matthew, the author of the “Vestiges of Creation,” and Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, again, in the total absence of complaint which this practice met with.  If Lamarck might write the “Philosophie Zoologique” without, so far as I remember, one word of reference to Buffon, and without being complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write the “Origin of Species” without more than a passing allusion to Lamarck?  Mr. Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a resume of the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon.  I have not the original edition of the “Vestiges of Creation” before me, but feel sure I am justified in saying that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that sprang full armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself.  This at least is how it was received by the public; and, however violent the opposition it met with, I cannot find that its author was blamed for not having made adequate mention of Lamarck.  When Mr. Spencer wrote his first essay on evolution in the Leader (March 20, 1852) he did indeed begin his argument, “Those who cavalierly reject the doctrine of Lamarck,” &c., so that his essay purports to be written in support of Lamarck; but when he republished his article in 1858, the reference to Lamarck was cut out.

I make no doubt that it was the bad example set him by the writers named in the preceding paragraph which betrayed Mr. Darwin into doing as they did, but being more conscientious than they, he could not bring himself to do it without having satisfied himself that he had got hold of a more or less distinctive feature, and this, of course, made matters worse.  The distinctive feature was not due to any deep-laid plan for pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as part of a scheme of materialistic philosophy, though it has since been made to play an important part in the attempt to further this; Mr. Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct with mind or no—­what he did care about was carrying off the palm in the matter of descent with modification, and the distinctive feature was an adjunct with which his nervous, sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him to dispense.

And why, it may be asked, should not the palm be given to Mr. Darwin if he wanted it, and was at so much pains to get it?  Why, if science is a kingdom not of this world, make so much fuss about settling who is entitled to what?  At best such questions are of a sorry personal nature, that can have little bearing upon facts, and it is these that alone should concern us.  The answer is, that if the question is so merely personal and unimportant, Mr. Darwin may as well yield as Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck; Mr. Darwin’s admirers find no difficulty in appreciating the importance of a personal element as far as he is concerned; let them not wonder, then, if others, while anxious to give him the laurels to which he is entitled, are somewhat indignant at the attempt to crown him with leaves that have been filched from the brows of the great dead who went before him.  Palmam qui meruit ferat.  The instinct which tells us that no man in the scientific or literary world should claim more than his due is an old and, I imagine, a wholesome one, and if a scientific self-denying ordinance is demanded, we may reply with justice, Que messieurs les Charles-Darwinies commencent.  Mr. Darwin will have a crown sufficient for any ordinary brow remaining in the achievement of having done more than any other writer, living or dead, to popularise evolution.  This much may be ungrudgingly conceded to him, but more than this those who have his scientific position most at heart will be well advised if they cease henceforth to demand.