Darwin

CHAPTER I. The Observer

THE OBSERVER

Any formal life of Darwin should be written by a thoroughly trained and equipped scientist, and indeed no such life could be better than that written by Darwin’s son forty years ago. But one who, without special scientific qualifications, is profoundly interested in the characters and souls of men, all men, may perhaps be justified in making an intimate study of a man whose influence upon other men, for good and evil both, has been enormous, and who was himself one of the simplest, purest, noblest, most candid, most lovable, most Christian souls that ever lived.

By an extraordinary coincidence Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on the same day, February 12, 1809, on which Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Darwin belonged to an excellent old English family on his father’s side and his mother was one of the Wedgwoods, of ceramic fame. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus, was a physician, a poet, and a scientist. Darwin’s father was an able and successful physician. He would have liked his son to be the same, but the son had not the taste for it. Failing medicine, the church was considered, but seemed equally unpromising. Education at Edinburgh and at Cambridge did not yield very much. In those days the classics were the basis and this boy had little interest in the classics. He liked field sports and outdoor life. Above all, he liked animals and plants, liked to observe and to describe them, and to record his observations, and this interest grew more and more absorbing.

With his sister Catherine]

In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Darwin obtained the position of naturalist on the government ship, Beagle, and for five years he was absent from England, exploring the southern hemisphere and carefully recording his observations on every sort of scientific subject, which were later published in his printed journal. Soon after his return home, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a noble and charming woman, and a little later, in 1842, he settled at the small village of Down, in the county of Kent, and made his home there until his death in 1882. He inherited a considerable property, which was later increased from his books. He had a large family of sons and daughters, ten in all, and his life was half chronic invalidism and half intense devotion to scientific study and thought, or rather, the two elements were inextricably intertwined.

As a result of his observations on the Beagle, Darwin became possessed with the idea, which of course had occurred to various thinkers before him, from the Greeks to Lamarck, that life had not been created in distinct manifold forms, but had developed in all its variety, including even man, from a few forms, or even from one. To entertain the idea in the abstract was comparatively simple; but to explain the process of development was the puzzle, until Darwin hit upon what seemed to him the clue in what he called ‘natural selection,’ or, as Spencer termed it, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ For twenty years Darwin patiently worked out experimental proof of this theory, and then in 1859 he published ‘The Origin of Species,’ a book which is generally admitted to be one of the most important in the whole history of science. During the remaining twenty years of his life he devoted himself to endless further experiment, and the results were embodied in numerous volumes, chief among which was ‘The Descent of Man.’ His views were from the first the subject of fierce controversy, and in many details they are still so, and will continue to be. But it may safely be said that in the scientific world the evolution of life, or more technically, modification by descent, which is so inseparably associated with Darwin’s name, is an accepted principle, and Darwin himself had the great and satisfying triumph of living until this acceptance was perceived to be general, if not universal. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the last resting-place of Newton.

The basis, or at any rate one of the most fundamental elements of Darwin’s character, was the instinct and habit of observing the external world, and we can best approach him by considering this habit in others and in him. It is astonishing how little most of us see. We live in a world of shadows and dream outlines, piecing out reality by convenient abstractions, which pass in memory like worn current counters, with little resemblance to actual fact. A tree to us is vaguely a tree: the structure of its bark, the shape of its leaves do not enter our world. A man and a woman are simply—a man and a woman. Unless we are specially called upon to do so we do not note details of feature or gesture or garment. This vagueness, this abstraction of vision, is what Théophile Gautier referred to in his celebrated phrase, ‘I am a man for whom the visible world exists.’ And he amplified his idea by saying that of twenty-five persons who come into a room, twenty-four will go out and not be able to tell you the color of the wall-paper, whereas he could tell that and pretty much everything else. To such an observing temperament life is a matter of visual detail, of sensuous detail of every kind.

There are people who look out and people who look in, and of course there are all sorts of degrees between the two extremes. Some people are wholly preoccupied with their own inner life, their thoughts, their emotions, their experiences. It is only by the pressure of necessity that they force themselves into connection with the world about them, and then it is under protest, and their thoughts leap back, as by a spring, to internal matters, as soon as the pressure is removed. Others live in the swift, diverting movement of the external world and lose their own destiny and almost their identity in the play of it. ‘Let me alone to observe till I turn myself into nothing but observation,’ says the old poet. The observation may be for a serious scientific purpose. It may be for endless entertainment and pure, inexhaustible delight. As Sterne has it: ‘What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.’

As there are some persons who naturally observe, so there are some who observe certain things, and not others. Women are apt to be more acute observers than men: their senses are more keen and their minds less preoccupied. But their vision is usually limited to the things that interest them. A woman will go into a friend’s house and tell you every detail of furnishing, will describe the friend’s dress with finished minuteness. But she may take a walk through the fields and not be able to remember a single flower or insect. On the other hand, very great scientists will not miss a spider in the grass, but the color of a ribbon may escape them.

From another point of view observation may be deliberately exclusive. A trained observer may find that general vision distracts him, and that to follow up his special object it is necessary to put all other sights and sounds out of consideration entirely. Bradford Torrey used to say, and no doubt it is the experience of all naturalists, that if he went to look for a special flower, he saw flowers only, and was quite oblivious to birds, while on bird days a rare blossom might be passed unnoticed.

Naturally the most common matter of observation, the one which is more or less forced upon the attention of all of us, is humanity. We may be indifferent to trees and stones, but our pleasure, our labor, our existence depend upon a more or less constant study of the human beings whose existence interlocks at every point with ours. Therefore, from the earliest times of record there have been profound observers of humanity, persons who have examined the human aspect and the human heart, as read through that aspect, with the most persistent zeal and the most unwearying delight. In the vivid phrase of one of the most acute of these, ‘I glutted myself with observation.’ And even those of less gormandizing tendency find the analysis of the human subject one of the most inexhaustible pleasures that this world affords. All through the study of Darwin I shall have occasion to refer to one of Darwin’s contemporaries who in a different line of research was an equally brilliant and significant exemplification of the scientific spirit, Sainte-Beuve. As Darwin devoted years upon years to patient investigation of the secrets of the natural world, so Sainte-Beuve with the same patience, the same labor, the same infinite and ever-varied curiosity, probed human hearts, all sorts of human hearts, and portrayed them with unfailing accuracy and sympathy. He said of himself, using the strictly scientific expression: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’

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