Apes and angels
Benny Green
That Charles Darwin should nave been so mild-mannered and self-effacing an old gentleman, even when he was a young man, is one of the best jokes of the nineteenth century. The effect of his work, which brought down a Whole cosmology by accident, as it were, was so shattering that its reverberations are still distinctly audible a century later, And yet Darwin himself was a man of such modest decorum that he appears never to have understood what the fuss was about*. Had he not devoted himself ceaselessly and selflessly to the pursuit of a scientific truth so self-evident as to be a truism? Had he not honourably aspired, and contrived, to increase the sum of human knowledge? Could any educated Englishman do more? Why, then, all the vituperation? It was bad enough that the Soapy Sam Fundamentalists should vilify him; even worse that Vitalist thinkers like Samuel Butler Should tremble with rage and contempt at the mere mention of his name.
. The truth was that no more melodramatic idea was ever formulated by a less melodramatic man. Very well, we were all the greatgreat-great grandchildren of some orangutang; very well, the Holy Bible was not after all an eye-witness account of the Creation; very Well, we weren't all going to heaven when we died. But was that any reason for everyone to start shouting and hollering? Listen to the voice of the innocent old gentleman; "Mr Samuel Butler abused me with almost insane virulence. How I offended him so bitterly, I have never been able to understand." In face, how Darwin had offended Butler was that he had, in Butler's own words, "banished Mind from the universe," by suggesting that something called Natural Selection, an arb.itrary process, ensured that the strong survived to the total exclusion of moral, ethical, aesthetic and Philosophic principles. That was all, and it was enough. No wonder Butler fulminated, "My grandfather argued with Darwin's grandfather. I have argued with Darwin. And it is my deep regret that I have no son to argue with * Au tobiograp ies Thiirrias .Henry Huxley and Chorles Darwin (Oxford University Press £3.30)
unlikely places, and never quite appreciates the comedy of his situation. This is an old trick but a good one, and there are some marvellous moments in this anthology. The diplomatic corps are carried by the Serbs on a special "Liberation-Celebration Machine", driven by "some very hairy men in cloth caps who looked like Dostoyevsky's publishers. . . I have never heard diplomats scream like that before — and I never want to again"; a mezzo-soprano turns slowly into a man — an experience which happens very rarely in the Foreign Office, even to the men; Drage the butler has visions during the first course and has to be forcibly baptised; the Grope sisters publish the Central Balkan Herald with an inversion in every line. This is the stuff of broad English comedy, and Mr Durrell has returned to that world in which fat ladies cry "Rape!" more in relief than anger, where foreigners are friendly and willing but Heavy Going, where Naval Attaches develop unaccountable attachments to their chauffeurs, and where the English gentleman emerges from absolutely everything bloody and bowed, but with a motto on his lips as bland and familiar as an old school meal.
Peter Ackroyd is literary editor of The Spectator.
We might be pardoned for assuming that a man as impervious to the ironic delights of philosophic debate as Darwin apparently was, a man who so utterly lacked that comically combative posture which turned Butler and Bernard Shaw into brilliant knockabout metaphysical performers, would be a dry old stick
too boring to read about. It turns out that the fragmented autobiography which Darwin
wrote for private circulation among his family is one of the most charming documents I have read in years. It is brief, candid, modest, all of which we could have guessed. It is also worldly-wise, which somehow surprises me. Above all it is endearing, which for somebody like, myself, who, with regard to Evolution, would much rather be wrong with the Vitalists than right with the Natural Selectors, is a real shock. The most priceless remark in the autobio graphy comes with the final sentence:
With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of scientific men on
some important points.
Some important points. Like the transmutation of Man to ape from angel. "I doubt," says Darwin mildy, while discussing the ethics of bird-nesting, "whether humanity is a natural or innate quality." In recalling his Cambridge days and talk of entering the Church, Darwin says, apparently with a perfectly straight face, "Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the unorthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman." He includes a sober dissertation on the intellectual impossibility of believing the Old Testament, and pointedly remarks, "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true." Having thus arrived at Theism, that halfway house between belief and scepticism, Darwin leaves the dialectics to Thomas Huxley and gets on with the mechanism of climbing plants and coral reefs.
He believes among other things that "to hear of praise from an eminent person, though no doubt apt to excite vanity is, I think, a good thing for a young man, as it helps to keep him in the right course"; he recalls Carlyle, "silencing everyone by haranguing during the whole dinner — on the advantages of silence"; and says of Huxley that "his mind is as quick as a flash of lightning and as sharp as a razor." (A few autobiographical notes by Huxley are also included in the volume.) There is also one tiny point which Sam Butler would surely have ,seized upon as proof that even Darwin was a Nitalist who adapted his own body machinery for the benefit of the climb onward and upward to godhead. After Darwin came home from the 'voyage with The Beagle,' the fundamentals of his life's work already beginning to formulate, 'he says that "my Father on first seeing me after the voyage turned to my sisters and exclaimed. 'Why, the shape of his head is quite altered'."
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