The Age of Tennyson

CHAPTER VIII

SCIENCE

The achievements of science as a rule hardly come within the purview of the critic of literature, for language is commonly used by science for a purpose other than that of literary expression, and even when science is popularised by writers like Mary Somerville the result is apt to be something not very valuable for its substance nor yet for its style. Nevertheless, all science may indirectly, and some of it does directly, influence literature. In point of fact, this influence has been one of the great features of the present century. We see it on the one hand as a force of attraction, on the other as a force of repulsion; for while some have been fired with the hope of human progress, others have been chilled by the fear of its materialising tendency. Both classes have been prone to exaggerate the mere mechanical results of science and to forget that its true aim is knowledge, not machines. It is however in the sphere of ideas that we must look for its effect upon literature. Whether we travel by railways or by stage-coaches, whether we transmit our messages by letter or by telegraph, matters little; but it matters much whether we are hopeful or despondent, whether we feel that there is no new thing under the sun, or are inspired by ideas that seem to open new worlds to our intellect. We must ask then, in the first place, what is the effect of science on the spirit of men and their view of life; and in the second place, what are the scientific ideas which directly and in themselves influence popular thought and colour literature.

It is obvious that there are certain departments of science which from their very nature can have little or no direct influence. The mathematical researches of men like Sir William Rowan Hamilton are far too technical, too difficult and too abstruse for popular apprehension. They remain a mere name, and not even their general import is understood. The same remark applies to the mathematical work of Augustus de Morgan, who, by the way, gave valuable hints for Hamilton’s great work on quaternions. But De Morgan was a logician as well, and the author of the Budget of Paradoxes is worthy of remembrance in literature. In physics the case is somewhat different. The processes by which physicists like Joule and Faraday attain their results remain mysterious, but the general character of the results becomes known, their great importance is obvious, and they generate a confidence in the powers of man which in the present day goes far towards counteracting tendencies to pessimism.

There are however certain sciences whose influence upon life and thought is direct, because their results bear upon man’s own position in the universe. Astronomy, through its relation to the Mosaic cosmogony, belongs to this class; but its force had been felt long before the opening of the period. It is especially the sciences of geology and biology that have changed men’s minds, and it is they that have produced the most books which, apart from the scientific value of their contents, might claim to rank as literature.

Geology was at the opening of the period practically a new science. What had previously been done in it was trifling compared with what has been accomplished since, and its bearing upon questions of universal interest was not even suspected by the multitude. Darwin in his brief autobiography relates an anecdote illustrative of the primitive state of the science in his youth. ‘I,’ says he, ‘though now only sixty-seven years old, heard the Professor [of Geology in Edinburgh], in a field lecture at Salisbury Crags, discoursing on a trap-dyke, with amygdaloidal margins and the strata indurated on each side, with volcanic rocks all around us, say that it was a fissure filled with sediment from above, adding with a sneer that there were men who maintained that it had been injected from beneath in a molten condition.’ Even more striking than any aberration of an individual is the general fact that the prevailing theory at that time in geology was the ‘catastrophic,’ and a science with an unlimited command of catastrophes is no more scientific in spirit than a theology with an unlimited command of miracles.

Sir Charles Lyell

(1797-1875).

The first need of a science in this state is the accumulation of facts, and most of the older geologists of the time, like Sedgwick, Murchison and Buckland, bent themselves to this task. But the man who dealt the death-blow to the old uncritical view of geology was Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (1830-1833) marks an epoch in the science. Lyell’s central doctrine is that the past history of the earth must be inferred by ordinary processes of observation and reasoning from the present, and that it is possible to interpret ‘the testimony of the rocks’ by means of principles which we still see at work. In other words, he was a ‘uniformitarian.’ The victory of his view established ‘the reign of law’ over the field of geology, and went far towards convincing men of its universality. Assuming no causes except such as he could point to in experience, Lyell showed how the geological formations of the earth arose. According to Darwin, the effect of Lyell’s work could formerly be seen in the much more rapid progress of geology in England than in France; and the Principles of Geology was most helpful to Darwin himself.

In his Antiquity of Man (1863) Lyell touched the verge of the problem of organic life. He did so in a spirit of open-minded conservatism. He had now to guide him the great light of the Origin of Species, and even before its publication he had had glimmerings of evolution. He saw that Darwin only extended to the animal and vegetable world his own central principle. But he felt a deep objection to tracing the descent of man through some ape-like creature, and hence, while The Antiquity of Man recognises the long history of the race upon earth, it contains no avowal of belief in his descent from inferior forms of life.

Hugh Miller

(1802-1856).

Another geologist, who was rather a popular expositor than a profound man of science, was Hugh Miller. Miller was bred as a mason, and it was in the quarries where he pursued his trade (quarrying being in his time and district associated with stone-cutting) that he laid the foundation of his geological knowledge. But Miller was more than a geologist. He threw himself energetically into the contest which culminated in the Scottish Disruption of 1843; and for the last sixteen years of his life he was editor of the bi-weekly paper, The Witness, which had been established by the leaders of the Free Church movement as the organ of their opinions. The sad close of Miller’s life by suicide is well known. His health had been undermined by early hardships and by subsequent overwork, and an examination after death proved that the brain was diseased.

A great deal of Miller’s work was done for The Witness. He was a most conscientious as well as a most able journalist, and he brought to his occupation a rare literary power. There was an imaginative and poetic strain in his nature which sometimes showed itself in the weaker form of fine writing, but often gave eloquence to his descriptions and fervour to his argument. This is the living part of him; for it is certainly not their scientific value that causes Hugh Miller’s books to be still read.

Miller’s most important works are The Old Red Sandstone (1841), Footprints of the Creator (1847), My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854), and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857). In their geological aspect they merely supply the raw material of science. Miller had not the previous training requisite to give his work the highest value. He knew little or nothing about comparative anatomy, and therefore could not himself deal with the fossils he discovered. In the view of modern experts his scientific value lies in his strong common sense and his keen powers of observation amounting almost to genius. His function is to stimulate others rather than to sway thought by great discoveries. A liberal in politics, he was something of a conservative in science. The Footprints of the Creator was written in answer to the Vestiges of Creation, and its author figures as one of the numerous reconcilers of the text of Genesis with the discoveries of geology. His value in literature is higher than in science, for he wrote a style always pleasant, and sometimes eloquent. My Schools and Schoolmasters, a volume of autobiography, is one of the best of its class in the language, and is the work by which Miller will be longest remembered.

Related to geology, and even more influential upon modern thought, has been the theory of biological evolution, represented within the present period by Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Thomas Huxley too, though so much of his work is of a later date, demands mention for his long polemic on behalf of evolution, begun immediately after the publication of The Origin of Species and continued till his death. The work of Sir Richard Owen the great anatomist had an important bearing upon this theory, but he was neither a Darwinian nor are his scientific writings literature.

Robert Chambers

(1802-1871).

Robert Chambers stands by himself. He was of the best class of self-made men, and as a publisher perhaps even more than as a writer did service to literature. He had great talent for not only acquiring information but making it popular. His most remarkable book, the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), was published anonymously, and, in fear of the outcry of orthodoxy, extraordinary precautions were taken to guard the secret of the authorship. For a long time the efforts were successful, and, though the secret gradually became an open one, it was not till 1884 that his responsibility for the book was authoritatively avowed. The Vestiges of Creation has been unduly depreciated since the time of Darwin. The gaps in the argument, and still more perhaps the untenable assumptions and mistaken assertions, are easy to detect now; but it is at least ungracious to insist upon them. Chambers was not an accomplished naturalist; on the contrary, Huxley charges him with ‘prodigious ignorance.’ He had not laboured as long, as patiently or as strenuously at the subject as Darwin; but at the same time his book is in an uncommon degree bold and suggestive. The best minds were already dallying with the idea of evolution, but in 1844 there nowhere existed in English such a concrete and clear presentation of it as Chambers gave. Judged in relation to what was known and thought then, his work was a memorable, though, from lack of a sufficiently firm foundation, hardly a great one.

Charles Robert Darwin

(1809-1882).

Charles Robert Darwin is the true father of evolution as applied in modern science, and of all the men of science of the century he most demands and deserves attention in connexion with literature. No recent doctrine, either in science or philosophy, has produced anything comparable to the revolution in thought caused by The Origin of Species. Its central ideas have been applied not merely in the department of biology, but everywhere in the world of thought,—in philosophy, in religion, in literature and literary criticism. We cannot refer all this to Darwin alone, for the conception of evolution can be traced for two thousand years or more; but it was Darwin who first planted it firmly in the human mind, and consequently he is the chief though not the sole cause of the revolution. Another element of his greatness, important in a criticism of literature, is that his works are themselves literature. Writing a perfectly plain style, he yet succeeds in so expressing his meaning that the manner is no inconsiderable part of his charm. Some of the less compressed works, like the Naturalist’s Voyage round the World and the monograph on earthworms, are as fascinating and as difficult to relinquish as a skilful story of adventure; and if this cannot be said of The Origin of Species itself, the reason is that it is so packed with thought that the reader is compelled to pause over it.

Darwin, the son of a physician, was originally destined to follow his father’s profession, and went to study in Edinburgh; but he liked neither the teaching nor the profession. In 1828 he went to Cambridge, and though he derived no great benefit from the regular studies of the place, the connexions he formed influenced the course of his life. He began the study of geology under Sedgwick, and he was on very intimate terms with Professor Henslow, through whom he became naturalist of the ‘Beagle.’ The voyage of this ship laid the foundations of his fame but permanently injured his health. In 1839 Darwin married, and in 1842 he settled at Down in Kent, where he lived an exceptionally retired and quiet life, compulsorily sequestered from society because of his health.

Darwin’s literary life had begun before this. In 1839 his Journal of Researches (better known as A Naturalist’s Voyage round the World) was printed as part of the narrative of the voyage of the ‘Beagle,’ and in 1845 a second edition was called for. It is full to overflowing of the results of observation set down in a delightfully easy narrative style. Darwin was not yet an evolutionist, though the materials are there out of which the evolutionist grew, and occasional remarks indicate that the subject was not foreign to his mind. The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842) was another product of this memorable voyage. The theory maintained is that the reefs are the result of gradual subsidence, and form the last relics of submerged continents. Geologists were impressed by the boldness and originality of the speculation and by the great mass of facts with which, in Darwin’s invariable way, it was supported. This was followed by two other publications on volcanic islands, and on the geology of South America. These writings won for Darwin a high position among men of science; but it was not until the appearance of the second edition of the Naturalist’s Voyage that he became widely known.

The highly characteristic and instructive story of the incubation and writing of The Origin of Species has been told by Darwin himself. He had been long haunted by the idea of a possible modification of species; and shortly after his return in the ‘Beagle’ he began to collect all facts bearing on the variation of animals and plants. His first note-book was opened in July, 1837. He read widely, conversed with breeders and gardeners, and addressed printed enquiries to such as seemed likely to give him information. He was led to the conclusion that ‘selection was the keystone of man’s success in making useful races of animals and plants;’ but he could not understand how selection could be applied in a state of nature. The reading for amusement of Malthus on Population gave him the clue. In the fierce competition for life among animals and plants, favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. He read Malthus in October, 1838. But, to avoid prejudice, for three years and a half, till June, 1842, he refrained from writing even the briefest sketch of his theory. In 1844 the first sketch was enlarged. In 1856 he began to write out his views on a scale much more extensive than that finally adopted; and yet, even so, it was only an abstract of the materials collected. In 1858 Mr. Wallace, then in the Malay Archipelago, sent Darwin an essay which proved to contain exactly his own theory. On the advice of Lyell and the great botanist Hooker an abstract from Darwin’s manuscript was published in 1858, simultaneously with Mr. Wallace’s essay. The concurrence of ideas between Mr. Wallace and himself set Darwin vigorously to work. He undertook once more to make an abstract of the manuscript begun in 1856, and in 1859 published the celebrated Origin of Species.

The book owes much of its effect to this process of gradual expansion and gradual contraction. The reader is struck with three things in it: first, the great range, combined with sobriety, of speculation; secondly, the wonderful mastery of detail; and thirdly, the beautiful balance and proportion, the sufficiency without undue length of the arguments. Hardly any other pioneer in untravelled realms of thought has left such an impression of wholeness.⁴ Neither could Darwin have done so without the long preliminary training. The Origin bears on almost every page the marks that it too is a product of selection. Darwin sifts his mass of examples and chooses those best suited for his purpose. The completeness of the book moreover is largely owing to the fact, noted by Darwin himself, that for many years he had made a memorandum, at the moment, of every fact, observation or thought opposed to his results; because he had found that such facts and thoughts were more apt to be forgotten than favourable ones. ‘Owing to this habit,’ he says, with truth, ‘very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.’

No book of this century has roused such a tempest as The Origin of Species. A number of the younger men of science hailed the theory with eagerness, and one or two of the older were extremely friendly; but many were startled and were unprepared to accept views so novel. Still more, the exponents of orthodox religion were wild against the theory; and in the British Association meeting in 1860, at Oxford, Bishop Wilberforce, by an unmannerly attack, drew down upon himself a crushing rebuke from Huxley. Gradually a calmer temper prevailed, and the problems were discussed fairly on both sides, as questions of science, not matters of faith to be determined by an appeal to Genesis.

The time has not yet come for a final verdict upon The Origin of Species; but even if Darwin’s theory should in the end prove to need great modification, his book will still be one of first-rate importance. It has proved itself already the most stimulating book of the century. Those who oppose Darwin oppose him now with his own weapons: they are evolutionists, though they think some other scheme of evolution the true one. The change is vast from the almost universally prevalent belief in special acts of creation and fixed types to a belief, nearly as widespread, in the gradual development of all the variety of life from at most a few primordial forms. And this result has been, more than almost any result equally great, the work of one man.

This great book was followed by some of those special studies which Darwin had the gift of making almost as interesting as his discussions of central principles. This is partly because he makes all his work illustrative of those principles. No one was ever more steadfastly guided by a single idea; and hence his works have an unusually intimate connexion with one another. Thus, The Fertilisation of Orchids (1862) is a detailed study of a subject which occupies one or two paragraphs in the Origin. In The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1865) Darwin broke new ground; for it was after the publication of The Origin of Species that he was led to notice these phenomena. The new material however served the purpose of the theory, and the author was ‘pleased to find what a capital guide for observations a full conviction of the change of species is.’ The book on climbing plants was the outcome of observations carried on in broken health. ‘All this work about climbers,’ says Darwin, ‘would hurt my conscience, did I think I could do harder work.’ In The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), on the other hand, he was reverting to that department of investigation in which he had first seen clear light on the question of species. The most debated point in this book is the celebrated speculation of Pangenesis. Darwin advanced it, not as something proved, but because ‘it is a relief to have some feasible explanation of the facts, which can be given up as soon as any better hypothesis is formed.’ It throws light however on the essentially speculative character of his intellect to find that this admittedly doubtful hypothesis of Pangenesis is the part of the book on which he looks with the greatest affection,—‘my beloved child,’ as he phrases it.

The Descent of Man (1871) ranks next in wide importance to The Origin of Species. It is the application in detail of the same principles to the human race. That the application was inevitable was already evident in the earlier book; and it was this that brought upon the Origin the most virulent abuse. Just because it is so inevitable, The Descent of Man has not the unique interest of The Origin of Species. Once we are familiar with the view that all the species of animals have been produced by the accumulation of minute variations, there is no surprise in the idea that man and all his powers may have been so produced likewise. Nevertheless, Darwin differs on this point from the man who shares with him the honour of discovering the theory of evolution. Mr. Wallace, while arguing with Darwin that man has been evolved out of some lower form, holds that ‘natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape,’ and that in the higher human faculties there is evidence of the working of a supernatural power. The position is a strange one. If the whole creation moves harmoniously through all its grades by the action of one law, it will need overwhelming evidence to show that just at the end this law is superseded by another altogether unlike it. Either the supernatural governs the whole of life, or its introduction to explain one stage is gratuitous.

After The Descent of Man came The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872); and that again was followed by Insectivorous Plants (1875). The former was originally intended merely to form a chapter in the Descent; but the materials grew, and the result is one of the most readable of books. The Insectivorous Plants embodies one of the most remarkable of Darwin’s discoveries. Its richness is due to the patience and skill with which the facts were accumulated. Sixteen years passed between the time when Darwin first noticed that plants lived on insects and the appearance of the book. In the interval he had done many things; but, whenever he had leisure, he was always adding to his store of facts relating to this class of plants; and, as he justly says, ‘a man after a long interval can criticise his own work, almost as well as if it were that of another person.’

Later, Darwin wrote on the fertilisation of plants, in order to demonstrate the importance of cross-fertilisation; on the forms of flowers; and on the movements of plants,—the last a kind of extension and generalisation of the book on climbing plants, endeavouring to co-ordinate all the movements of plants as variations of an inherent tendency of the parts to a revolving motion. The theory has not been accepted by botanists. Last of all, in 1881, appeared the monograph on The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. This book is just the expansion and completion of a paper read by Darwin to a scientific society as far back as 1837. All that time the subject dwelt in his mind; and when at last leisure permitted, he developed it into what is perhaps the most purely delightful of all his books. In greatness it does not come into competition with some of them at all; but the familiarity of the phenomena, the care with which they are examined, the skill of the arrangement and the charm of finding meaning in what had been so meaningless, have made the volume one of the most widely read of all Darwin’s works.

That which distinguishes Darwin from other naturalists is the combination of extraordinary speculative power with great knowledge of detail and unlimited patience. These qualities have been combined in others as well, but never, within the field of natural history, in the same degree. More commonly they are found separate. The ordinary type of naturalist is the man who knows an immense number of facts about plants and animals, and who rests content with that knowledge. He may be master of everything about the great subject of scarabees, but it scarcely occurs to him to explain the scarabees themselves, still less to use them in explaining other creatures. On the other hand, the opposite type, the type which speculates only without first laying the foundation of fact, is likewise common enough. How ineffectual this is may be seen from the history of earlier speculations on evolution. The Vestiges of Creation and the theory of Lamarck are superseded, not so much because of deficiency in speculative power, as because the theories are not sufficiently buttressed by facts. Even though Darwin’s own theory should ultimately be, in one sense, as dead as that of Chambers, it will always remain one of the landmarks of thought.

Undoubtedly Darwin’s intellect was fundamentally speculative. We have seen how in the book on Variation under Domestication his affection clung to Pangenesis, perhaps the most questionable part of its contents. He was restless under the sense of an unexplained fact, and thankful for even a provisional explanation. He notes the effect upon him of the discovery that science cannot remain content with facts alone. Geologising with Sedgwick in North Wales, he heard about a tropical shell which had been picked up in a neighbouring quarry. ‘I told Sedgwick of the fact, and he at once said (no doubt truly) that it must have been thrown away by some one into the pit; but then added, if really embedded there it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it would overthrow all that we know about the superficial deposits of the Midland Counties.... I was then utterly astonished at Sedgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions can be drawn from them.’ It is this conception that he kept steadily before his eyes, and his glory lies in his success in drawing general laws from his facts.

Alfred Russel Wallace

(1822).

The work of the other evolutionists, so far as it is not technical rather than literary, is almost accounted for when Darwin’s is described. With respect to one indeed, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, an inevitable injustice is done whatever course be pursued. He is the co-discoverer with Darwin of the scheme of evolution associated with the name of the latter; and though the fame has gone to the elder man, it seems clear that if not Darwin then Mr. Wallace was destined to stir the mind of the age with this great conception. Mr. Wallace has been an extensive traveller; he published, in 1853, a volume of Travels on the Amazon, giving an account of journeys in that region during part of which he was the companion of Mr. Henry Walter Bates, whose Naturalist on the Amazon (1863) is well known as one of the most interesting and valuable books of travel and natural history in the language. It was however his observations in the Malay Archipelago that led Mr. Wallace to the theory of evolution, and perhaps he is best known by his book, The Malay Archipelago (1869).