Chapter 2

Victorian Biology and Victorian Letters: An Overview

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1783)

Such accounts of their interaction are therefore rather prone to take on a certain fuzziness, since it requires less hard thought to permit science and literature to merge into a single identity -- two modes of reaching after the 'truth' at a specific point in history -- than it does to insist on the manifest differences between them. Still, it is an attractive theory in the hands of a skilled exponent like Alex Comfort, as when he tells us that 'when a Darwin or a Freud produces a large change in the human self-estimate, the fact that he is able to do so shows that it was already changing, and reflecting the change simultaneously in art'.¹ By setting up a tandem model as a replacement for the tug-of-war model the dignity of both parties is elevated; and, moreover, such a conceptualisation helps any investigation such as the present one with its tricky problems of influence. For instance, as we shall see in a later chapter, the purely literary concern for the manifold problems of heredity certainly antedated the eventual resolution of these problems; and yet that layman's interest was at its peak when Mendel's paper of 1865 was rediscovered by three researchers in three countries simultaneously. In such cases it is good sense to speak of such upsurges of interest as arising from a common substrate than it is to speak of the concern in one part of a culture stimulating attention and investigation in another part -- whether the flow is taken to be from science to literature or vice versa.

Such recent treatments of the problem are of course a continuation of a strain of thought which runs back to the Huxley-Arnold debate of a century ago and farther back still to the distrust of science among certain influential Romantic theorists. The later Victorian scientists, as the fairly amicable tone of the Huxley-Arnold debate testifies, believed (not unjustifiably) that their relations with the world of letters was a good healthy one and mutually very supportive. It is, indeed, with the consequences of such a belief that we are at present concerned. We must more or less take for granted the complex pattern of changes which temporarily pushed to one side the Romantics' fears of (in I. A. Richards' happy phrase) the 'neutralisation of nature' by scientific inquiry. Yet we must clarify just what these changes amounted to. To take any particular thinkers as representative of earlier nineteenth-century beliefs about the eventual consequences for the literary sensibility of scientific habits of thought must be a dangerous and arbitrary decision; but of the many who addressed themselves to these subjects Macaulay and John Henry Newman were among the most influential and widely discussed spokesmen. Now, at first sight Macaulay's expression of his conviction, in his famous 'Milton' of 1825, that science must soon become the factor most to be reckoned with in the evolution of poetic language is a good deal more generous than the Newtonian-Benthamite devaluation of poetry as a kind of ingenious nonsense. But as the essay gets under way it begins to emerge that Macaulay agrees about the erosive effect of scientific apprehension on literature. This is the charge of his potent metaphor of poetry as a magic lantern which operates most effectively in the gloom of ignorance and superstition. Such a theory of interaction (if obliteration may be called interaction) is really a prognosis of the gradual dominance of science over art. The contrast between these two ways of knowing, and the superiority of the former, is pointed up with the illustration of the tyro mathematician who 'by resolutely applying himself for a few years' can readily 'learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation'² Macaulay works hard at persuading us, and perhaps himself too, that any notions the artist may form 'respecting the lacrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood' should not cast too much of a shadow over 'the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora'. But only by placing a quite disproportionate weight on furor poeticus, the artist's 'certain unsoundness of mind', is he able to do this; and when he comes to speak at last of the truths of poetry being the truths of madness we cannot but feel things have been brought to a desperate pass; that the rainbow is being unwoven once and for all and that literary perception is in headlong retreat. Nor are we much reassured by Macaulay's promise that in the future Scientific State there will be an 'abundance of verses, and even of good ones'. Beside such a prospect Newton's ingenious nonsense sounds quite appealing! Macaulay's unquestioned assumption that the two kinds of creativity are at war -- which he took to be an obvious and inevitable consequence of the rise of Baconian empiricism -- was restated time and again in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a proposition of stylistics it was still circulating in 1852, the year of Newman's Idea of a University. For him the facts of nature turned up by empiricism are anti-poetic, but so intrinsically is the terminology of science. As the terms of any of the exacter sciences approach the symbology of mathematics and thereby retreat from the warm equivocalities of the language of men, it is inevitable that 'however many we use, and however we may perpetuate them by writing, we never could make any kind of literature out of them'.³ This assertion of the complete antipathy between objective and subjective knowing is as uncompromising as anything earlier. It amounts to the crudity of seeing the province of literature as thought, and that of science as things. Newman's account rejects the possibility of introducing ideas into literature at all until they have been thoroughly transformed into symbolic or even mythic material. And at that stage, should it ever be reached, the utilisation of those ideas will not be according to any rational principle; having been torn from their original context, they will be set in place as the underpropping to some imaginative ideal.

Theory and practice in literature tend to march in step, however, and by the 1850s a movement towards detente may be discerned which within ten years had grown to dominance. The major note for the rest of the century may be sounded by putting alongside each other a higher Victorian, post-Darwinian view of the fertilising powers of science on the literary imagination -- Herbert Spencer's -- and Wordsworth's of sixty years earlier.

In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads the latter had persuasively argued for a new alliance between poet and scientist for the new century. For the young Wordsworth the poet (and as he is the highest form of literary enterpriser, the poet alone) had in his bones that unitive vision which the scientist works so hard to attain. The poet's response to scientific endeavour therefore is, or should be, eager participation and close attention to the challenge of 'carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.⁴ In the famous words of the manifesto we are asked to look forward to a time when 'The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed'. These words are usually quoted as Wordsworth's plea for an immediate rapprochement but, if we give the right stress to the proviso which at once follows, perhaps they should be taken as a boast for the powerful digestion of the poetic apprehension. Poetry can in principle swallow down and assimilate chemistry, botany and the rest, but not yet: discoveries in these fields will become 'proper objects' only when they 'shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings'. That this might be a postponement sine die is argued by Wordsworth's reworking of Descartes' dream in the fifth book of The Prelude, where Euclid's geometry, the prototype and queen of the sciences, is symbolised as a Stone, whereas an Ode is a resplendent Shell; the two, moreover, are held by the knight in separate hands. Their distinctive roles could hardly be more dramatically expressed.

But if Wordsworth had his reservations, biological theory half a century later certainly became 'palpably material' to the literary mind. (Though it needs to be borne in mind that Darwin's researches into speciation were effectively complete long before Wordsworth died.) Post-Wordsworthian literary aestheticians found no reason for delaying to take the Stone and the Shell into one inclusive grasp. The hesitancies of Wordsworth vanish in the stridencies of Spencer:

Science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realise not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. . . Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches, calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits are blind to most of the poetry by which they are surrounded.⁵

Spencer's claims here for what has since become the cliche of 'the poetry of science' are at once more exaggerated than Wordsworth's and far less rigorous in their logic. He equates poetry and poetical musings in a way which, if they were in fact identical, would make a poet of Everyman. Possibly there are poetic subjects to be found in the geological relics of the Ice Ages (though few good poets to date have found inspiration there) but to realise that, and to realise a poem, are two very different activities. He is failing to observe the distinction between the poet's turning his interests into poetry, and merely meditating upon them poetically. Yet this confusion (shared also by several poets of evolution) is the very core to Spencer's argument, and he persists in the assertion that science -- and he did in practice largely mean geology and the sciences of life -- had in his day reached the point of tossing out prefabricated poetic notions for anyone to grab. Inevitably, then, the poetic experience is demeaned by the new relationship, for it is no longer, as Wordsworth would have it, 'the breath and fmer spirit of all knowledge'. For Spencer the very act of hunting fossils serves to open one up to their poetical associations, while to pedantise over a Greek ode is to close oneself off from the grand epic of the organic world's development -- and Spencer is in no doubt that it is an epic. Now, in an odd reversal of Newman, it is poetry that is lacking, that is suffering etiolation from its unwillingness to engage in scientific discourse.

The significance of Spencer's new way of marking out the respective territories of science and literary art rests, not in his particular formulation gaining assent, but in such a fresh attempt being thought necessary. Naturally enough, his call for a poeticised geology fell on deaf ears; for then as now literary artists concentrated their attention on the themes which have always most interested them -- and these as a rule did not include theoretical biology. There is no occasion, and one would need a strong stomach, to spend much time assessing the merits of panegyrics to Darwinism. But if the details of Spencer's proposals may safely be forgotten, we must give ear to his confident tone; to the brashness with which he annexes the poetic impulse and attaches it to humdrum scientific inquiry. These bold claims for the real poetry in science must stem from a new appreciation, even a new reverence, for empiricism. Reverence is an apposite enough term to describe the wide following for what was a true cult, that of scientism -- a cult which rounded itself out with dogma and doctrinaire intolerance of other philosophies. In its most organised form, positivism, it moved steadily towards sacerdotalism from 1878 onwards, the year in which Richard Congreve broke with the Continental parent body to found his Church of Humanity. Positivism in England was never more than an extreme fringe movement, but the flood of scientifico-moral essays, of what H.G. Wells called 'pulpit biology' and other uplift literature, testifies to the expectations society had of the Victorian scientific sage. His responsibilities were shouldered willingly enough; sometimes so willingly, indeed, that through pressure of time his speciality had to be abandoned altogether. No harm was seen in sugaring edification with entertainment and, thanks to the new media of the lyceum and soon afterwards the commercial lecture-circuit (an institution which supported Wallace in his improvident old age), public scientific discourse gained a mass appeal it had never had before and was soon to lose again. It was an age when (one observer noted) the middle classes tore from the hands of Mudie's librarians books by Darwin, Huxley and LyeIl as though they were novels. Geology and palaeontology, the crazes of the 1840s, were succeeded by crazes for natural history and anthropology. Scientists themselves were the objects of acute public interest. The lady who in the 1890s found Huxley on the lecture platform 'faded but still fascinating' was displaying a last flicker of the response, half reverence and half fan-worship, which was specially reserved for certain star scientists who were also folk-heroes. Familiarity with the age blunts us to it, but there is after all something odd about a man like Huxley, who initially made his name working in the recesses of marine biology, in later years becoming accepted and even nationally famous as a voice of conscience on such issues as racism and female emancipation; becoming the spokesman, in fact, for a reasonable humanism. The specialist's promotion to the rank of social moralist is no doubt something familiar in every age. The promotion of the scientist is, however, a feature of the waxing faith through the seventh and eighth decades that science could tackle all problems -- not merely technological problems (that was mostly taken for granted) but social and political problems as well. Even, indeed, epistemological problems: scientism, for its really bold proponents like G.H. Lewes, was a cut above all other philosophical schools in that it could make 'linear progress' and not wander for ever in the labyrinths of subjectivity. Despite the fulminations of Morris, Carlyle and Ruskin among many others, and before disillusionment set in among their own ranks in the late 1890s, it is a fact of social history that the leading British intellectuals in influence and prestige, if not in direct power, were the pure scientists. Beatrice Webb's memories of childhood in that period tell how in a certain circle everything was thought available to scientific scrutiny; for, rightly or wrongly,

it was they who were routing the theologians, confounding the mystics, imposing their theories on philosophers, their inventions on capitalists, and their discoveries on medical men; whilst they were at the same time snubbing the artists, ignoring the poets and even casting doubts on the capacity of the politicians.⁶

In this extensive programme the biologists were well to the fore -- so much so that the vulgar idea of how science itself operated was based on the passionate scepticism of a Huxley essay. It is well worth noticing that Webb's remark above forms part of her appraisal of the writings of Winwood Reade (the explorer, novelist and anthropologist who hoped for a while to supplement Darwin with a treatise on the origin of mind), and her conviction that his writings were vital to her own awakening intelligence in the 1870s. Reade was a belligerent polemicist, and the biologists were typically the most belligerent of all the prophets of scientism. Even when they had their radical disagreements within their own ranks they presented as united a front to the outsider as any social clique. The conspiracy of silence which denied Samuel Butler one jot of satisfaction from his critique of Darwinism was directed more against Butler personally as an ungentlemanly controversialist than against his biological opinions, which read rather modestly when set against, say, Wallace's or even Mivart's.

More reasoned defences of scientism by biologists were rare, and therefore Huxley's address of October 1880, 'Science and culture', is notable among his prolific writings in that it marks one of the very few occasions in the period when a biologist made a critical foray into the literary culture. Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) and its central double proposition that culture means an unending criticism of life, and that literature suffices to construct such a criticism -- gives focus to Huxley's claim that science, and especially the life sciences, are essential extra ingredients in the recipe for culture. It is a little remarkable just how much ground Huxley was on that occasion willing to surrender to Arnold. He not only pays tribute to Arnold's 'general catholicity of spirit' and his 'true sympathy with scientific thought',⁷ but also concedes that culture must be marked out as quite different in kind from training and technical skills in that culture must 'supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations' (p.143). He does not baulk until he comes to Arnold's claim for literature as the truly nourishing cultural medium. At this point scientism breaks through, as with his usual vigour and broad sweep Huxley sketches an unremittingly rationalistic resume of Western intellectual history. Literature deals in dreams, in sweet illusion. Its dealing with fact has ever been tenuous and even, when under imaginative pressure, quite dishonest. Only with Bacon and the rise of the empirical method did a new way of interacting with the world become important and at last preponderant in human affairs. Only science has the unique merit of being an incontrovertible lawgiver:

This scientific 'criticism of life' presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, not to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It ... bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime. (p.150)

Such is the central statement of 'Science and culture', and whatever our final judgement may be we must concede that sincerity vibrates through it. Huxley indeed built his life on the axiom that sorrow gravitates to sin just as surely as an apple to the earth because both are rooted in observable and quantifiable physical law. By making empirical deduction his ultimate court of appeal Huxley expected that the verdicts of that court would eventually come to express immutable moral and physical laws against which there could be no protest. Despite his habitual and famous scepticism Huxley was in reality at one here -- though how outraged he would have been to hear it said so -- with theologians like Henry Drummond, who was inspired by his reading of the phenomena of parasitism and devolution to see in the occupants of lunatic asylums and prisons the inevitable byproducts of the working of natural selection. And although it is a perfect expression of Victorian scientism at its most high-minded, how inadequate is Huxley's 'criticism of life' both as philosophy of science and as an account of the relations between science and letters! Huxley is unable, or unwilling, to consider that 'evidence' may be labile or may be distorted by the mere pressure of observing it; or that it may be selected to fit a moral predisposition, as with those case-histories of reputable doctors of the period who, to approving nods, claimed in print that they had observed insanity to follow from working on the Sabbath. The very decision as to whether an assertion 'outstrips evidence' can be a value judgement; and it verges on arrogance to claim that one never goes beyond the facts while simultaneously reserving the absolute right to determine what the significance of those facts might be. So, when Huxley attended to the questions of women's emancipation or the political and ethical consequences of Darwinism, he did so unmistakably as a moralist and social critic while all the time adopting the lofty pose of the disinterested research biologist. Of his later famous 'Evolution and ethics' it has rightly been said that it is 'a masterpiece of concealed debate'.⁸ This is no less true of 'Science and culture' and many another essay besides: in them all Huxley assumes without qualification that his biology is value-free, while demonstrating beyond question that his biology certainly is not. If he ranks high in Victorian polemical prose, it is not essentially because of the irrefutability of his logic, or the clarity and expressiveness of his style, or even the accuracy of his facts (unimpeachable though these usually are); he ranks high because his audience held their scientific intelligentsia in esteem.

These same strictures may be applied to Darwin also, and if in his case the relations between himself, his extra-professional public and his medium of communication are more problematic they are more illuminating, too. Darwin's medium was, with the exception of what are by present standards a minute number of technicalities, very much the language of educated common men. Certainly the Origin and the Descent comprise (as Darwin said) 'one long argument' for a naturalistic explanation of the organic world, and in so far as they are such an argument they are addressed to Darwin's fellow-workers in evolutionary biology. And yet the Origin, and far more so the Descent, are continually bumping against matters of theology and ethics for the discussion of which Darwin could not preserve a determinedly judicial tone. On occasion, when particularly moved, he adopts a style of dramatic plainness which has been alleged to be quite unlike the style used in typical scientific monographs of the day. Walter Cannon has spoken of the latter as being 'about as complex and incomprehensible to the layman then as they are now';⁹ and Richard Grove, in his attempt to describe the Origin as a formal rhetorical structure, has called it 'neither a bold popularisation nor a scientific treatise'.¹⁰ Cannon by implication and Grove expressly argue that Darwin cultivated a style that would reach, in its clarity and convincingness, right into the sphere of interest of the educated layman; Grove further maintains that Darwin adopted this strategy not to widen his audience but to deruse the reaction he expected from his compeers when his theory was formally offered to them. Certainly Darwin sweated over his style; harder, in his own comparison, than any 'nigger with lash over him'. Darwin's work wrestles continually with the inadequacies of language and he is well aware that language is itself an evolutionary product and perhaps cannot fully articulate its own deficiencies. He was closely attentive to the problem of constructing a reasoned and courteous discourse that could adjust itself patiently to the most sceptical and abrasive of implied readers. In that sense Darwin conceded to the demands of rhetoric just as Huxley did. But the further suggestion that Darwin deliberately sought a large lay public cannot be substantiated. He himself declared that he would be satisfied with an attentive audience made up of only three persons: LyeIl, Hooker and Huxley. He never set himself the task, as Huxley did, of commanding an audience of 'open-minded and impartial laymen'; on the contrary, on one occasion he expressed scorn at courting such an audience: 'I hope I do not care very much for the approbation of the non-scientific readers'.¹¹ This is supported by Darwin's concern for his publisher, Murray, that the print order for the first edition of The Origin of Species (not indeed a large one) was too great for the small select readership he was anticipating. The evidence really suggests that Darwin thought he was writing in the standard scientific prose of the day, fitted nicely to his subject and containing the kind of extrapolations from the facts that would be found acceptable. It may be that the terminology of the exacter sciences was already serving to push their key issues beyond the ken of the curious general reader, but this was assuredly not so in biology. Comparison of the Origin or Descent with other contemporary texts such as Mivart's Genesis of Species (1871), Haeckel's General Morphology (1866), or Wallace's Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870) shows Darwin's work is about in the middle rank of technicality. At times his prose is clear and fresh, at times tinged with humorous irony, at times impeccably obscure. Such variations in tone surely do not arise, as one might suspect, from any uncertainty about the audience he is addressing. Darwin is not anxious in the sense that he cannot decide whether to speak to the professional or to the layman, because in biology our present distinction between 'technical' and 'routine educated' prose did not then exist. The homely metaphors, the cool assumption of shared values, the introduction without preamble of personal tastes: all these attest to Darwin's unquestioned assumption of a homogenous audience. The anxious movement of his prose comes rather from his training within the same positivist intellectual tradition as that of Hobbes, Locke and Newton. For the mid-Victorian Darwin and his predecessors shared the supposition that science is a unity, so that investigation into any branch should render up general laws applicable everywhere. If each new formulation did not seem readily available for social, religious or philosophical extension, then there were many interpreters -- poets, historians, intellectual middlemen of all calibres -- to press it into service. And Darwin, like his fellows, took his obligations here very seriously. He moves, and he expects his reader to move with him, from the strictest cataloguing of experimental results to the purest armchair speculation. He does not have to resist the temptation to pontificate. His only concern is to do it well; and here he fails. As an argumentative edifice, the Origin lives up to Darwin's proud boast that for years he read only documents that might refute his hypothesis in order to anticipate every possible objection; but as the expansive meditation of a scientist-sage it is muddled. Darwin's awareness of his failure in the role of sage which his culture demanded of him surely stands behind the erratic oscillation between passages of cautious description and passages of conscientiously spiritual uplift which comprise the last section of the Origin. If we take the sad remarks of Darwin in his Autobiography (1876) to heart, concerning his having lost in his mature years 'all pleasure from poetry of any kind' as well as the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone,¹² we can reasonably surmise that the struggle to force some kind of reconciliation between the various parts of his being eventually proved too much. 'Anaesthetic' is one label that has been affixed to Darwin to describe his entry into the emotional vacuum; its intent is to suggest that he was rendered senseless to art by the numbing power of his theory, which finally dissociated fact from affect.¹³ Another biographer has selected the adjective 'fragmentary' for Darwin's progressive failure to achieve the unity of expression demanded by his culture. The imaginative part of his being was, in these terms, so shattered by his discoveries that in time 'he ceased to have any vital life outside his work at all, was just a nice, a very nice, old man'.¹⁴ These explanations may help us set Darwin's undoubted neuroses into a cultural and psychological context, but they certainly have no validity as a general theory of biologico-literary interaction -- any theory, that is to say, which stresses the destructive consequences of taking an empirical, biological or utilitarian (the terms tend to run together in this context) stance to nature. T.H. Huxley, exposed to the same disquieting revelations as his friend, and with much the same sort of basic training, did not react by forming callouses over his emotions. Quite the contrary: he remained alive to the merits of every form of artistic expression, delighted in them all and practised several of them himself. He suffered no dryness of the spirit (though indeed prone to depression) possibly because, unlike Darwin, he was temperamentally fitted to that kind of philosophical analysis which interpreting the biology of his day so required, and which his colleague said he found so uncongenial. Huxley's sensitivity to literary expression and his determination to master it arose directly from his studies in classification, and especially his early reorganisation of the Linnean system. These had made him highly aware that all conceptual frameworks are man made; that the categories of science are far from immutable; even that those of biology are particularly prone to conceal value judgements within them (but, as we have seen, this awareness was intermittent and tended to vanish when the stakes were high). We recall his own prescription for a good style -- simply 'clear and forcible expression' -- and his stylistic masters: Hobbes for dignity, Swift for concision and clearness, Goldsmith and Defoe for simplicity. It is not accidental that, with the exception of Goldsmith, Huxley was invoking here the great controversialists, and this reminds us, too, of how important an ability to manipulate rhetoric counted in Victorian science. Every biologist with a hypothesis to be tested or forceful theoretical point to make had to come to some rough working knowledge of the skill. Huxley himself said that he hated oratory, but his distaste should never conceal the fact that he and others -- Romanes is the name that most readily comes to mind -- argued hard and argued to win. Huxley tried to claim that his technical writing was a strict presentation of the facts and that it was only his public lectures that made use of rhetoric to offer personal convictions which were clearly labelled as being such, but it may be doubted whether this distinction is really worth anything. On examination Huxley's mastery of rhetoric may be found in all his writings to include a very sophisticated grasp of stylistics.¹⁵ The very definition of biology offered in 'On the study of biology' (1876) -- that is to say, the study of all phenomena exhibited by living things -- was chosen so as to license the biologist's exploration of politics, philosophy or education.

If Huxley did his best to exploit the temporary convergence between the 'two cultures' by trading on his professional reputation, he was followed by others; and it was not only popularisers like Grant Allen who were able and willing, because of the lucrative rewards involved, to stand astride the straits separating biology and letters. The energetic anti-Darwinian St George Jackson Mivart turned out a number of sentimental romances, presumably for diversion. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote not only a full biography of the other major critic of Darwinism, Fleeming Jenkin, but also a fictional sketch based on him, 'Cockshot' in Talk and Talkers (1910). Even poetry, most demanding of the literary muses, was a channel of expression for at least three of the dominant names in the life sciences. The emotions unleashed by the funeral of Tennyson flowed, for Huxley, through the unaccustomed medium of verse: braving the competition of, among others, F.W.H. Myers and Francis Palgrave, Huxley added his own workmanlike threnody, 'Westminster Abbey: October 12, 1892', to a tribute published in Nineteenth Century. Two more pleasant lyrics appeared posthumously in a collection of his wife's poems.¹⁶ The stern Romanes, in public a relentless and unforgiving controversialist, relieved the tensions of his professional life by producing a good deal of verse from 1878 until his death in 1894. Technically, his posthumous collection Poems (1896) is capable enough. Their depth of sensibility, though, may be judged from his wife's innocent appraisal that 'he shared Mr Darwin's tastes for simple, pure, love stories . . . The Heir of Redclyffe brought tears to his eyes.'¹⁷ In the opposite camp George Douglas Campbell, eighth Duke of Argyll (1823-1900), did not expend all his energies studying geology and ornithology so as to damn the materialism of Darwin in his The Reign of Law (1867) and The Unity of Nature (1884). He bolstered the struggle against natural selection with the versified propaganda of his Burdens of Belief (1894). The title poem, for instance, an outpouring of faith in divinely directed evolution, refers to the difficult case of the electric organs of some fish as being (to the teleologist) 'the secret weapons of design'. The Duke does not entirely trust in his poem to bring out all the significance of this case: he devotes one of the many elaborate notes appended to the title poem to telling us that Darwinism is powerless here, because selection could not have been applied until the organs had, in all their complexity, achieved full functioning -- a commonplace but potent objection. Still, as a minor 'In Memoriam' Argyll's poem is even less effective than its famous predecessor in reconciling the demands of reason and emotion. It impresses less as a joyful hymn to evolutionism than as a warning about the perils of using poetry for scientific disputation.

Biology and Letters: Some Specific Linkages

In the preceding discussion of the factors which governed the relations between science and literature in the later Victorian period, much of what has been said was true equally of all the sciences, not just of biology. We have mentioned the prevailing scientism and the literary qualities of the scientific prose of the day; we have seen how the responsibilities freely assumed by the scientific sage controlled his use of language and brought him continually before the public as a polemicist or, occasionally, as a literary artist. But the physicists William Thomson and John Tyndall and the statistician Karl Pearson conformed to these pressures no less than did G.J. Romanes and T.H. Huxley. Is it possible to isolate any specific ways in which biology and letters were drawn together -- of more import, say, than the bizarre fact that, early in the year of the Origin, the eccentric naturalist Frank Buckland rifled Ben Jonson's tomb of his heel bone as a memento?

There were several ways in which the life sciences were unusually accessible to the literary mind during the late nineteenth century; more accessible than the physical sciences. To begin with, since much of the endeavour in biology was still being channelled into systematics, there was a great reliance on the contributions of people who were very far from being professional, full-time researchers. There were indeed very few paid researchers. Pure physics was a handmaid of engineering and to that extent subsidised, but in pure biology an almost indispensable prerequisite for doing elaborate research was a substantial private income: Darwin, Romanes, LyeIl and Hooker were all in that fortunate position. T.H. Huxley, upstart from the class of the landless gentry, was the exception proving the rule and, as he himself recognised, was the first major biologist to make a living wholly from lecturing, writing and research. This unsatisfactory state of affairs had one valuable consequence. Those who moved on the fringes of the science (and this especially applied to those who collected under the banner of 'field naturalists') could, and very frequently did, contribute in a meaningful way to technical debates which were readily comprehensible to them. For even the most complex debates were conducted in a language which was a shared heritage. This was a time when Herbert Spencer, without any formal training whatsoever, without even the rudiments of laboratory practice, could feel competent to express an opinion on the most subtle problems arising from the study of inheritance in the pages of the Nineteenth Century and gain a respectful ear though having no new facts whatever at his disposal; when Grant Alien could draw applause from Huxley himself for his little observational essays, and a promise from Wallace to cite one of Allen's essays as a reference in his next book; when even Darwin was not too proud to take a fact or two from any man of letters with some informative anecdote to retail. He engaged in courteous disagreement with the fiery and rather insulting W.H. Hudson; he cited the essayist and political theorist Waiter Bagehot approvingly five times in the second edition of The Descent of Man and a note of Charles Kingsley's on the mating noises of fishes once.¹⁸ The Descent itself turned out to be the last major original work of theoretical science able to be grasped in its entirety by the average educated reader, though for about another three decades the layman needed nothing more than a subscription to one of the great general periodicals like the Fortnightly Review to avoid the alienation from current science that is part and parcel of the interaction between science and the humanities in our own day. Though the Fortnightly and its great companions were media of popularisation, too, they did open their columns to the serious interchange of new information or the considered rejection of a hypothesis. A glance through the files of one of the very few specialist journals, Nature, definitely reinforces the impression that not it, but the more general periodicals, had at this time the more vital role to play in disseminating scientific inquiry. For many years after Nature was rounded in 1869 the readers were regaled with nothing more solid than topographical descriptions, ornithological observations and suchlike; its format was very much that of a magazine for bug-hunting vicars with time on their hands, like the Rev. Camden Farebrother in Middlemarch. Biology's raw facts are to be found there, to be sure, but nothing is digested; there is little or no attempt at articles condensing 'the present state of knowledge' into a dozen or so taut pages -- a job performed so admirably in issue after issue of the Fortnightly and elsewhere. Further, the readership of Nature was very small; not more, according to the best estimates we have, than between two or three thousand up to 1872.¹⁹ The Fortnightly alone had this circulation, and for the reader who disliked the Fortnightly's politics there was a choice to be made among the Athenaeum, the Academy, the Quarterly, the Contemporary and others. All these carried a good load of biological debate. For a few years the main organ of the younger generation of biologists was the Natural History Review. T.H. Huxley, ably assisted by several other 'plastically minded young men', rounded this and helped maintain its fierce 'bishop-eating' tone; but he ceased to contribute to it after July 1863 (it folded in 1865), choosing instead to write for a journal of more varied appeal, the Reader, for a few years and afterwards for a variety of outlets. Nature did not start to come into its own until the late 1890s, when articles of some substance and later of major importance began to appear, by which time the pattern of modern scientific journalism was becoming recognisable. In the meantime, such matters as the attempted hammering-out of the exact role of Lamarckian factors in inheritance were to be found between the pages of the Contemporary. It is hard to believe that some, even most, readers were not bored by this apparently endless debate, but the fact remains that a general periodical was thought by all the participants -- Spencer, Romanes and Weismann -- to be a perfectly appropriate forum for resolving problems which were the lifework of all three.²⁰

Possibly even more surprising and significant is that this editorial assumption of a high level of tolerance of and interest in biology among the public at large was by no means restricted to the highbrow organs. The same assumption is to be found in many burlesque pamphlets and other fugitive productions for unsophisticated readers. Very little of this extensive sub-literature has been described. One amusing and quite well-informed example must suffice here: Charles William Grant's Our Blood Relations, or The Darwinian Theory (1872). Published anonymously, this verse tract offers in its first part a highly critical summary of the Descent, making many shrewd hits. In the second part Grant sets out his fundamentalist faith with a special emphasis on the regulative aspect of creationism. He thereby makes it plain that his fear is of the onset of civil and moral chaos, which he suspects will follow hard on any acceptance of Darwin's theory of human evolution. The verse form throughout is rough rhyming couplets which occasionally achieve a memorable vigour, as when Grant lambasts Kingsley's Broad Church liberalism on biological issues (not an easy target to miss, admittedly). Another anonymous squib of 1863 in Punch raises the issue, via a Welsh correspondent, of blending inheritance. He supposes innocently that the immediate progenitors of humanity must have been ape infant prodigies, and so back down the evolutionary scale with 'every new species of at least all the higher animals involved in the nearly coincident birth of two infant prodigies which were not hybrids'.²¹ The correspondent goes on to ask dubiously whether even all the resources of geological time could have served to bring together two such unlikely variations; for how could such variations have perpetuated themselves otherwise? Behind the vulgarity of dubbing a Welshman a 'semi-ape' for a cheap laugh there is active that very important and serious 'swamping' objection to Darwinism which was not given full expression by Fleeming Jenkin for another four years.

This popular interest and involvement in the technicalities of biological debate was reinforced by the fact that, considered historically and socially, biology at this time was in a somewhat anomalous position with respect to the exact sciences. The physicists and chemists, thanks to their superficially more amenable subject-matters, had confronted and overwhelmed their heterodoxies years, or even centuries, earlier. No serious supporters of phlogiston, or of the music of the spheres, or of angels in the driving-seats, lingered on even as stimulating and thought-provoking eccentrics. The contrast with Victorian biology could hardly be more acute: there, to the community at large (and even to some members of their own ranks) scientists' pronouncements were still in serious contention with the systems of Moses, of the Greeks, of eighteenth-century divines. What one chemist maintained would, after experimental checking, be assented to by his fellow-workers or else be rejected on clearly articulated grounds; but the biologists were riven by schism even over fundamentals. Now, the argument here is that the literary utility of a science is at its highest when its central axioms retain sufficient ambiguity to make their exact bearing on the human condition uncertain but interesting. In the period in question basic research in the exacter sciences led in due course to the submarine telegraph cable, electric light and electromagnetic communication. But the workers who stood behind all this astonishing technology -- men of the stamp of Clark Maxwell, Thomson, Crookes -- were never more than dull figures in the public imagination. It is hard to imagine anyone bothering to dub Maxwell 'Faraday's bulldog'. By contrast Darwinian biology, though at first sight seeming to promise the same kind of lawful regularity that Mendeleyev brought to chemistry in 1869, soon subsided into a soft-textured subject where imagination could run riot. We will be tracing some of the consequences of this in the following five chapters.