Chapter 3: Better, Wiser, and More Beautiful Beings: The Cheerful Doctrine of Evolutionism

For, judging by analogy, better, wiser, and more beautiful beings will inhabit this planet in the ages to come, according to the law of evolution, than we can now have any conception of.

MATHILDE BLIND (1886)

The source of this emotional defence of teleology in evolutionary biology might well be judged, in the lack of other evidence, to be some eminent divine's cri de coeur against agnosticism in a number of the Quarterly Review of the early 1860s, or perhaps part of an attempt to paraphrase Pope's Essay on Man. It is in fact taken from the concluding pages of Alfred Russel Wallace's Darwinism (1889).1 By what was after the events of 1858 a characteristic expression of magnanimity, Wallace was one of the first to use the term 'Darwinism', not simply as a synonym for the work of Darwin, but in its modern, restricted sense. Wallace limited the meaning of the word as he did because by the 1880s he had become convinced that no subsidiary hypotheses whatever, including those offered by Darwin himself, were necessary to an inclusive theory of evolution. He did not believe in the inheritance of acquired characters. Sexual selection he held to be a superfluity in biological explanation to be shorn away by applying Occam's razor. 'Natural Selection is supreme,' he insisted, 'to an extent which even Darwin himself hesitated to claim for it' (p. 441). Supreme: but supreme only in the animal kingdom below the level of Homo sapiens. For, as the leading quotation insists so forcibly, Wallace exempted man's past and future history from the natural conflict. Natural selection had not produced man. Though a hard Darwinian in every other respect, Wallace was, for his own species, an uncompromising teleological evolutionist.

That Wallace deserted the inner Darwinian circle over the issue of the origin of man is a fact; and it has been substantiated that that desertion occurred soon after Wallace had become convinced, late in 1866, that his observations in the seance-room were not due to hallucination or trickery.2 The cause of Wallace's desertion is, however, less important than the need to understand, before we go on to consider some of the cultural and specifically literary manifestations of evolutionism, the reasons for this post-Darwinian resurgence of biological entelechy and the wide range of options this made available to men inclined to appeal to that science for human guidance. Wallace was far from being alone in constructing a complete anti-Darwinian philosophical system out of the new anthropological and palaeontological facts as he saw them. St George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900), a Catholic who in the 1860s was a Darwinian and an intimate of Huxley, trod much the same path as Wallace and to the consternation of the Darwinian circle had also reneged completely by 1869. His Genesis of Species (1871) is a formidable work indeed, collecting and deploying all the most stringent arguments ever to be levelled against Victorian Darwinism. Mivart did not bother to conceal the religious prejudices which chiefly motivated him, but his trained legal faculty probed and probed away at the weak points in the Origin's argument to deadly effect. His criticism had a constructive side, too, in that it tried to remedy Darwinism's failings; but it cannot be said that his remedy was one palatable to Darwin's faction. Mivart argues in the Genesis for a Christian version of Wallace's interventionism; for there being a continuous manipulation of the stream of inheritable variations by various agencies both terrestrial and what he called 'cosmical'. The high status in the ranks of Victorian science of Wallace and Mivart should therefore make us cast a more sympathetic eye on other, less august exponents of evolutionism; for if such men as these could be persuaded that evolution is really a metaphor for design, then there must have been compelling reasons to make them believe so. The case of Wallace is the more fully documented one.

When we examine Wallace's papers of the 1860s in their original form (for several were later revised to accord with his later views), his last full endorsement of natural selection as the universal mechanism of evolutionary change -- even, by implication, reaching as far as man -- is found to come in 1867, after Wallace had been 'convinced' by the evidence for the paranormal he had encountered at seances.3 Less than two years after this date we find Wallace reviewing two new editions of works by LyeIl and making for the first time a tentative statement that, in his opinion, certain specifically human faculties just could not have arisen through any natural process at all (not even use-inheritance, which Wallace in any case rejected as unproven) but were instead imposed upon man's immediate ancestors by incorporeal intelligences benevolently involved in his destiny.4 This was indeed an extraordinary line to take in that since Darwin had yet to publish his Descent of Man Wallace could not know in detail how forcible a completely naturalistic explanation might be; nevertheless Wallace was convinced that only his astonishing hypothesis was adequate to explain certain crucial facts. Among these, and the ones that Wallace found totally inexplicable without positing supernatural intervention, were: that the size of the brain-pan is very similar in all known true men of the past and present, yet huge compared with that of even the highest apes; that the complex structure of the hand and foot which permits man's unique use of tools is fully perfected in even the most primitive races; that the larynx is physiologically far more complex than could ever be demanded by the language and song repertoires of savages; that the loss of body hair confers no breeding advantage and therefore could not have been brought about by natural selection; that, finally and most dauntingly, inside the skull of a cave-dweller exists a brain potentially capable of differential calculus. This last point of the 'surplus cortex', though very telling (and indeed puzzling enough to have been revived periodically ever since), is to our present understanding a fairly shaky one. It makes large assumptions about the limited degree of intelligence demanded at the hunting-and-gathering stage of human evolution, and about the correlation between abstract reasoning power and the brain's physical size. Since substantive information was lacking on both these points a century ago, the argument could sway this way and that between authorities without moving forward an inch. Huxley defied Wallace by saying (in his turn, without any strong evidence) that 'the intellectual labour of a "good hunter or warrior" considerably exceeds that of the ordinary Englishman'5 but, despite him, Wallace -- and Argyll and Mivart, too -- continued to press hard on their point. How overwhelmingly, they argued, does the intelligence of a contemporary primitive living under palaeolithic conditions exceed his daily opportunities! How could natural selection possibly pick out unerringly on the test of fitness to survive alone individuals of superior abstract reasoning capacities, when the most complex mental challenge the environment could set them might be how to trap a small mammal? Wallace found this quite inconceivable. He entirely rejected Darwin's plea for the qualitative similarity of the intelligence of beasts and men. As he put it mockingly in his review of 1869, 'natural selection could only have evolved the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies'.6 He felt that the same strictures applied to the evolution of language. The average British rustic, someone had calculated, could live out his life on a total vocabulary of three hundred words without being incommoded to any degree. This probably apocryphal calculation crops up in several contemporary discussions on the genesis of language. The witty Grant Allen once debunked it by acting out in pantomime the activities of Hodge's day, thereby indicating all the objects, relationships and concepts he would have to name. But the precise size of the basic English vocabulary is less important than the puzzling superfluity Wallace mentions: why have the blind evolutionary forces acting solely by selectionist pressure gratuitously given that labourer a cortex able to accumulate the word-store of a Shakespeare? These questions struck Wallace with enormous force and his response was effectively to reinstate Paley's evidences and indeed the whole argumentative structure of natural theology. In order for the physiological apparatus of speech to have been evolved in advance of the requirements of its owners, he thought there must be some external power guiding the flow of variations in the desired direction. If variations are subtly directed by our mentors, insisted Wallace, we would never come to know of it directly. The products of human artificial selection - the bigger and juicier peach, the seedless banana -- are indistinguishable botanically from the naturally occurring inedible varieties. An alien observing the earth miraculously stripped of mankind could only, by indirect inference from the presence in nature of very unlikely variations, reason that a conscious adaptive force had been at work. In the same way man's most distinctively human qualities -- complete luxuries from the Darwinian standpoint must be the net result of deliberate selection, just as much so as any cultivated vegetable which left to itself would never survive, let alone have evolved, under the conditions of the wild. Particularly in the case of the higher aesthetic capabilities Wallace thought he could catch tantalising glimpses of an imperial order of supernatural manipulation by which, as a disciple of his put it in memorable phrasing,

So, for the energetic but random fecundity of the 'tangled bank' -- a metaphor carefully chosen by Darwin to oppose the instances Paley cited of divine organic engineering -- Wallace once more brought back the ingenious regulation of nursery and breeding-pen. It might not be very soothing to human pride to be obliged to accept the status of some cosmic gardener's hot-house bloom, but there is after all more dignity in it than the Descent allowed. And these appealing and well-argued views were no temporary quirks of Wallace's. Having quite melted away all the conceptual core of Darwinism, Wallace went on to accumulate by the century's end a huge range of material to support the simple but staggering thesis of the last strange mystical book of his extreme old age: that all evolution has laboured towards 'the development of mankind for an enduring spiritual existence'.8 The phanerogams (the flowering plants, i.e. those of decorative appeal) have, he suggests in The World of Life, evolved -- or, more correctly, have been evolved -- for the express and foreseen purpose of improving the charm, delicacy and refinement of life. And not only that. By this means our aesthetic sense was stimulated and sharpened, our wonder and curiosity enlarged -- necessary preludes to the rise of the empirical investigation of nature. Appreciation of the rose helped prepare the way for a Newton. The horse, too, was brought to its highest perfection at just the right moment when man could best make use of it as a beast of transport. Everywhere his naturalist's eye roams, Wallace spots examples of some omniscient, non-human mind ordering these valuable collocations in time. The reptiles of the Mesozoic era were granted no more than a small ration of 'intelligent vitality' in order that they might not impede the spreading abroad of higher forms; likewise, small and primitive mammals served the 'temporary purpose' of keeping down the vegetation and of serving as food for the carnivora of that epoch, freeing by their sacrifice the unspecialised and unprotected orders to begin their wonderful diverging lines of advance which led inexorably to man. The endless varieties of species and their range of products so useful to man prove in themselves, to Wailace's eyes, that they were developed expressly for his sustenance and comfort. On the question of the mosquito and housefly he is silent.

Though it is quite true that Wallace's later strange theories are infused with his possibly naive belief in spiritualism and the occult generally, he did not dismiss all naturalistic accounts of human evolution because he was a spiritualist or because, as one historian has said, he was 'unable to endure the tension caused by the emergence of certain problems as evolutionary theory developed'9 Rather, it makes more sense to see it the other way round. Wallace detected certain technical inadequacies in Darwinism's handling of man (and who was better qualified to do so than the joint discoverer of natural selection?) and concluded that so radical were those inadequacies that the minimum hypothesis commensurate with the facts required the introduction of the supernatural to remove them. In the unseen world, impalpable to physical instruments, he supposed there to exist superior forces capable and desirous of helping us to ascend the ranks of conscious existence. Wallace remained vague about the precise nature of these forces: they are just 'higher intelligences or. . .one Supreme Intelligence' in 1870; but by 1891 he was insisting that there are supernatural beings between man and God -- beings he personifies as 'angels and archangels, spirits and demons'10 -- and it is these beings which have their hands on the evolutionary switches. Within such a cosmology Wallace was readily able to incorporate all the velleities of the biological teleologists back to Aristotle. His ultimate view of evolution was that it is not an impersonal process working on species alone, but something which affects each individual and to which everyone continues subject after death. Further, for Wallace spiritual evolution is progressive in the moral sense, since there exists in some higher region of nature an external value system against which all evolutionary attainment might be measured. Evolution, then, is not only guided; it is guided along the lines which (contrary to most appearances) best support the personal aspirations of human beings alive now. Wallace's creed, in short, is a pure variety of evolutionism: a metaphysical position supported, with variations, by his fellow-theorists Spencer, Mivart, Romanes and the Duke of Argyll; and by other writers as diverse as W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Charles Kingsley, Winwood Reade and Henry Drummond. This chapter will trace out some of these variations with a view to demonstrating that the notion of biologically guaranteed progress certainly survived Darwinism and certainly did not lose its force (or did not do so universally) with that 'fading out of the religious assumptions of purposiveness and benevolence'11 which a hundred times has been asserted to be the natural sequel to the acceptance of Darwinism. It will try to show that the influence of Comtean positivism from the 1830s, and behind it that of German romanticism, was still strong enough in the 1860s to ride right over the negativism of the new biology; and further, that by the 1860s it was open to the anti-Darwinians not only to insist on the readmission of teleology to remedy the failings of Darwinism, but also for them to advance much farther than that into frankly theistic evolutionism while preserving a front of objectivity.12 By this means evolutionism and Darwinism itself could be forcibly yoked together into an intellectually respectable unity and used as the basis for at least warily optimistic speculative fictions like W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887).

Evolutionism as Credo: Spencer, Reade and Drummond

The philosophy of evolutionism may be defined in various ways, for it is at best no more than a loose conglomeration of beliefs. An additional confusion arises from the fact that in the common usage of the day -- T. H. Huxley's, for instance -- the word often meant nothing more than any theory of evolutionary development. But in the most characteristic form which evolutionism took among the post-Darwinian generation there are to be found the following dominant elements: that change is the most fundamental law of organic life and that change is always in the direction of greater complexity; that biological evolution is but a sub-division, and a small one, of a cosmic evolutionary process which, beginning with an amorphous gas-cloud, ends in the creation of planetary systems; that nature is in some deep and vaguely comprehended way in alliance with nineteenth century Western man's deepest needs and most noble goals; that, despite all appearances to the contrary, inevitable progress is built into the fabric of the universe and by all clear minds can be recognised as such. For the proponent of evolutionism, recognising the sequence from simplicity to complexity, whether this be called progress, advancement, development or what you will, is an intuition logically prior to grasping any specific law. For this sequence, it was claimed, lies at the very root of nature and is a phenomenon undercutting all others. From the macroscopic world to the microscopic, from the spiral nebula down to the bacterium, everything was seen to display a frantic and gorgeous urge to build, ramify, release every iota of its potential. Such an Urge to Become even the most rigorously temporalistic theist could without strain identify with the divine; and in our period this identification was indeed commonplace. Evolutionism was a persuasive doctrine for those unwilling to look too deeply into the raw facts alleged to support it. There was above all its emotional appeal, and the way it dovetailed so neatly with those other strands of Victorian thought which were prone to see all temporal events as coalescing into a single progressive stream. Further, it had the advantage over mere Utopian speculation in its insistence that history does have a meaning, and a meaning to be discovered within the phenomena of biology and hence empirically verifiable.

It is beyond our present scope to offer a detailed account of the ways in which the transition was made from evolutionary theory to evolutionism, for that is something which took place at a conceptual level where (as a philosopher writing on the subject has concluded despairingly) 'full attention is not paid to questions of method, theory-construction, and the validity of appeals to analogy'.13 Evolutionism was one of those doctrines that mesh so closely with widespread assumptions of the day that they are felt on the pulses and are rarely subjected to any fierce critical analysis. And it could also exist quite separately from any biological considerations at all; for it pre-dates not only Darwinism itself but systematic research into the life sciences altogether. It has formed a coherent body of opinion as long as there have been theories of progress at all, which in modern European terms means from the time of Condorcet's (d. 1794) division of all human history into ten stages reaching from barbarism to perfection. Even after 1860 evolutionism may be found being preached with only the most cursory side-glance at Darwinian biology. 'Progressive improvement inevitable': this, the title of the last chapter of William Ellis's Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race (1866), by itself expresses the simple and confident faith that the cornucopia of the future must pour forth the benison which some Victorians believed the-y had the right to expect of it. Not only economists and social theorists like Ellis (he was a disciple of Mill) but also the more radical theologians pandered to this mood. A contributor to Essays and Reviews (1860) spoke up for the Origin as 'a masterly volume' (Baden Powell, in 'On the study of the Evidences of Christianity'), and several of these famous essays show traces of what might be termed subbiological evolutionary suppositions. Frederick Temple, for instance, in 'The education of the world' divided the cultural history of mankind into arbitrary phases corresponding to those in the life-cycle of a single man -- each successive culture contributing certain skills and items of knowledge to an expanding collective mentality. The purpose of this extended analogy is to convey the thought that each phase advances the race towards a quasi-biological maturity. But Temple's cultural life-cycle is arrested in its prime, which is Temple's own age. He does not allow it to turn onwards into senility and death. His analogy, superficially evolutionistic, is thwarted by the implications of the biological frame of reference from which he has extracted it. Other philosophical evolutionists with fuller training were better able to choose their data and to construct metaphorical systems buttressing their determination to see an idealised version of their own age as the evolutional peak of organic history; though in the following chapter we shall see that the cast of mind which declined to accept the millennial anticipations of evolutionary theory was never in danger of being eclipsed. Prime among these optimistic philosophers was Herbert Spencer. His Synthetic Philosophy is, in one of its aspects, the most coherent expression of an evolutionism developed in full cognisance of Darwinism.

In an essay written in 1899 at the close of his career and unpublished in his lifetime Spencer, in course of reflecting on the chain of thought which led him to evolutionism, incidentally confirms the essential maturity of evolutionary thought before 1859. To him it seemed that the tentative dismissal of Mosaic creationism by Chambers and LyeIl left a vacuum to be filled with, among other things, inductive systems 'derived from the general aspects of organic nature',14 rather than from deduction from wholesale collections of facts -- which was the image of Darwin's methodology sedulously promoted by Darwin himself. Though this may give rise to the reasonable suspicion that the aged Spencer, in allegedly giving a synoptic history of a group of connected unit-ideas, is actually only allowing us his own narrow perspective on that history, direct reference to Spencer's earliest papers does reveal the acumen with which he converted the hypothesis of evolution into a metaphysic of unbridled optimism. His evolutionism may have originated in the cosmological theory expressed in 'The development hypothesis' of 1852, and not in biology at all; but when it came to the test he had no trouble in absorbing the immediately post-Darwinian Principles of Biology (1864-7) into the plan of the Synthetic Philosophy, even though the outline of this had been laid down in the prospectus which he issued in the 1850s. Another article of those years, 'Progress: its law and cause' (1857), foreshadows the reliance Spencer was later to place on data taken somewhat uncritically from many branches of the life sciences, and it also summarises the trend of thought to which he held, despite others' pessimistic readings of Darwinism, with fierce tenacity for nearly another forty years.15 It contains, in small, nearly all of his key evolutionistic beliefs; and it has as its largest aim the revelation of the natural transition of all natural processes towards greater heterogeneity, whether the processes belong to sociology or to cosmology. Now, whether this transition is goal-orientated, governed by one increasing purpose, is not an issue which touches Spencer deeply. He is almost uninterested in it. He is content to rest in the simple conviction 'that the increase of heterogeneity so brought about is still going on, and must continue to go on; and that thus Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity' (p. 484) -- a simple conviction that all, in the last analysis, must be for the best in this best of evolutional worlds. Though he does not address himself to the final end of evolution, it is noteworthy that in order to explore the inner nature of his benevolent juggernaut Spencer draws heavily on just those disciplines whose very pith is increasing complexity over time: palaeontology, anthropology, and especially embryology; for the embryologist, his attention fixed on the biological events lying between conception and cradle, ought to find it easier than most biologists to believe in nature's one increasing purpose. In the process of trying to explain why organic development happens at all, Spencer toys for a while with a selectionist theory which is accidentally but strikingly similar to Darwin's. While speaking of geological upheavals as being the cause of the extinction of some species and the proliferation of others, Spencer describes clearly the likelihood of change coming out of the struggle as one species battles another for survival. But he fails to follow up this insight with the further crucial point of the reproductive advantage that would then be given to certain favourable variations; instead, he soon surrenders to Lamarckism and begins to stress the modifying effects on species of diet, habit and climate. Much later on in the perplexed 1890s Spencer on many occasions defended Lamarckism with some skill and with all the assiduity of one who sees a fundamental, optimistic principle of education and moral training under challenge. The biological foundation of this form ofevolutionism, therefore, is a little different from Wallace's. For Spencer, purposiveness is an emerging quality, and it ought to be investigated down among the minutiae of cellular division, not looked for beyond nature entirely. He sees life as purposive, not as having purpose imposed upon it. Otherwise there is little to distinguish the biological philosophies of Spencer and Wallace. The point is that the evolutionism of both was resilient enough to absorb Darwinism and yet remain unashamedly teleological.

So far we have considered evolutionism as it appeared among antiDarwinian biologists; for, as we have seen, Wallace's neo-Paleyism was the outcome of carefully articulated reservations about natural selection, and Spencer's Lamarckism a product of inductive reasoning. Neither had properly to confront the difficulties of holding to an optimistic evolutional metaphysic in the very teeth of Darwinism. Yet others did just this, insisting that they were both optimistic about evolution and true Darwinians to boot. The contradictions which are apparently inherent in such an extravagant claim have been too much for a number of those who have studied the use of Darwinian concepts by important late-Victorian poets. Their discomfiture arises from the fact that, say, Swinburne's 'Hertha' and Hardy's 'The Mother Mourns' both owe their inspiration in a pivotal way to one and the same biological theory -- at least, their creators thought so. Puzzlement and disbelief, however, are not unreasonable critical reactions to readings of Darwinism so diametrically opposed that they could inspire simultaneously the ebullience and the gloom of, respectively, Swinburne and Hardy. The question at once presents itself whether any account of nature rooted in empirical observation could really permit this range of interpretation and retain its integrity. Is it not much more likely that, quite simply, we have here an inaccurate, a bad, reading of Darwin? That either Swinburne or Hardy read him inattentively? Morse Peckham has argued unequivocally that 'Hertha' is the consequence of

The nub of Peckham's careful argument is that Darwinism may not legitimately be viewed as potentially generating an open-ended series of cultural responses. Whatever Swinburne himself may have believed he was about, he did not discover anywhere in the Origin the conceptual universe of Songs before Sunrise. The two are just incommensurable: Swinburne's pantheistic, inspirational verse may be 'Darwinistic' but it cannot possibly be called 'Darwinian'. It is not an authentic response to the Darwinian revolution at all.

Peckham's analysis is bold and has the virture of straightforwardness. Merely by tidily classifying the frequently erratic and excessive claims made by uninformed critics on behalf of their subjects he brings order and the prospect of objective evaluation. For him the work of Hardy, Meredith and Nietzsche is imbued with Darwinism because it rejects teleology; whereas Tennyson's and Browning's poetry is only Darwinistic. And so on. Yet when applied to specific texts Peckham's simple bipartite division gives rise to some disappointingly insubstantial literary judgements. He praises, for instance, The Return of the Native as a profoundly Darwinian novel; one that relates so truly to the insights of the Origin that it even contains 'the implication that we can never fully understand the world in which we live, and our relation to it' (p. 38). One would question whether Hardy's perceptions, Darwinian or not, are ever quite that bathetic. If that is the deepest insight into the nature of the world that Darwin can suply the writer with, is there any literary advantage in being a Darwinian at all? Is it not, rather, a liability? And 'Darwinisticism', too, tends to deteriorate in Peckham's usage into mere derogation: in such a terminology a good proportion of Darwin's own work (including his entire theory of pangenesis) would have to be condemned as Darwinistic rather than Darwinian. This is likely to prove more confusing than helpful. As was suggested earlier, the source of these difficulties lies in giving way to the temptation to read intellectual history backwards. To the disinterested eye which can avert its gaze from the further developments over a century of post-Darwinism it is evident that throughout our period every scrap of evidence which could be forced to yield up the implication that evolution does indeed bear an optimistic meaning for humanity (which is one definition of evolutionism) was so forced; and not only by literate laymen but by philosophically inclined biologists, too. It must be conceded at once that some of the biologists' support of evolutionism arose not so much from utter commitment to the facts but from what Charles Gillispie has called the 'semantic starvation' of Victorian science generally.17 Lacking a truly technical, unambiguous lexicon Darwin was forced into annexing a vocabulary much of which had already a vivid connotative aura: selection, favoured races, fitness and fittest, progress. We can see with hindsight that these were barely adequate counters for biology to work with, and they were all too easily mistaken for the real currency of thought. It is true also that it was easy enough to produce a damning indictment against any Darwinian evolutionism which relied on natural selection as its modus operandi, as both Darwin and Wallace were made painfully aware. Nevertheless, it is worth resisting the simplification that Darwinism, in so far as it supported evolutionism, gave a culturally tolerable face to the biology of the day and, in so far as it promoted natural selection, gave an intolerable one. That seems explicit in Peckham's concept of 'covert culture', which he uses to pin down the perversion of Darwinism by self-deluding writers who (Peckham assumes) refused to accept what he takes to be the unavoidable concomitant of being a Darwinian: 'a willingness to endure considerable loss of energy' -- by which he means creative energy. But do the intellectual histories of all affected writers prove this 'loss of energy' to have been inevitable or -- more -- ineluctable? For the ambivalence of nature was recognised and, further, recognised in biological terms well before Darwin, though the question was at that early date typically posed in the conventional theological form of whether the 'Devil's meaning' or 'God's meaning' predominates in the world. In the era of Vestiges of Creation, as in the era of the Origin, cosmic optimism was a quite deliberate choice. Charles Kingsley, in his account of a tour of the Devon coast in 1849, almost instinctively chose a biological analogy to express his evolutionism. Nature may present a chaotic front but 'the great organic world is still living, and growing, and feeding, unseen by us, all the black night through'. In the Spencerian manner, Kingsley finds this pullulating activity reassuring precisely because it is going on independently of man. Though we may be ignorant of all the living energies fermenting about us, that microscopic world is still there and is (comforting thought!) 'multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man'.18 Since Kingsley became an enthusiastic Darwinian some ten years later, it is undeniable that for at least this philosopher-novelist the alienating concept of natural selection could well be absorbed into evolutionism. Far from weakening the creative drive of the artist there could be something exhilarating in the very impersonality of the process. For a few years after 1859, no doubt, the publicists of Darwinian evolutionism were quiescent, with a few of their number reduced to scepticism or even despair. But when conditions became more propitious they became as vigorous as ever, sometimes reshaping their creed into a form Darwin himself would not have blushed to own. For there is the fact (which W.H. Hudson seized upon) that evolutionism is far from extinct in Darwin's own major works -- even though Darwin used the word 'evolution' most cautiously in the Origin lest his whole argument be contaminated by so dubious a term. But his nicety was in vain, and not really wholehearted. For the layman as for the informed essayist, evolutionism proved for the remainder of the century to be a source of spiritual uplift comforting equally to the most hedonistic and most puritan of temperaments. And it may be demonstrated that this was true even of rigidly Darwinian evolutionism. No failure of energy is perceptible in the writings of William Winwood Reade ( 1838-7 5). No feebleness of spirit was induced by the impossibility of remaining spiritually buoyant and an avid reader of Darwin too. Rather, there is the fierce exultation (reflected in the idiosyncratic style) of one rejoicing at the harshness of a natural law which guarantees that only the very best are not found wanting.

The Darwinian evolutionism of Winwood Reade finds a specially pure expression in his The Martyrdom of Man (1872), which is an impressionistic survey of 'universal' history by a freethinker contemptuous of all politically pigmented readings of history but respectful almost to excess of the biological vision of the past -- and promise for the future. The Martyrdom has an extremely simple structure. Three long chapters, entitled successively 'War', 'Religion' and 'Liberty', paint the history of civilisation from the first Egyptian dynasties in slapdash but vivid colours. The fourth and last chapter, 'Intellect', is something of a mishmash. 'Finding that my outline of Universal History was almost complete,' Reade tells us in his preface, '1 determined in the last chapter to give a brief summary of the whole. . .adding to it the materials of another work suggested several years ago by the Origin of Species.'19 The work to which he refers, to have been called 'The Origin of Mind', was to have been based on material Reade accumulated during the second of the two expeditions into central Africa (1868-70), on the subject of what he calls 'the phenomena of savage life'. As the publication of The Descent of Man rendered this project superfluous, Reade added the material to the 'Intellect' chapter of the Martyrdom and in so doing packed into a small space the outline of a cosmology, a geological history, an etiology of morals, and a vision of the future. The whole chapter is saturated through and through with evolutionism, presenting in essence every last one of the optimistic deductions which could be made out of the Darwinism contemporary with Darwin himself.

The Martyrdom is one of those histories in the line which runs from Vico to Toynbee: the line which claims to display some pattern in the inscrutable passage of events. The pattern Reade reveals is that the story of man's social existence has unfolded according to the same natural law which governed his ascent from the inorganic world. The law he has in mind is undoubtedly natural selection, though in his interpretation of it he is closer to the mood of Spencer's Principles of Biology than of most of the Origin. Nature does not recognise the needs of individuals, he tells us, any more than we recognise each cell of our bodies. But when he considers the destiny of all mankind as one creature in the Spencerian manner he is left in no doubt that the One is 'becoming more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly ripening towards perfection' (p. 429).20 Such expansive but imprecise quotations could be multiplied, without much profit accruing, almost indefinitely from the Martyrdom. Within thirteen years of the Origin's appearance, and without traversing any of its key axiom, Reade's evolutionism stands revealed as an important buttress of Victorian illiberalism, fluidly adaptable to establishing the natural role of women, the necessity of empire, the biological superiority of the European races, and to a worship of technology so extravagant that he can forecast aeroplanes, new energy sources and even interstellar migration. Buoyed up by a very strict Darwinism which intrudes into every corner of life, Reade can without strain denounce the 'sickly school of politicians who declare that all countries belong to their inhabitants, and that to take them is a crime' (p. 415); he can term the conquest of Asia as being 'in reality Emancipation' (p. 415); war as the means by which 'men were first brought into amicable relations with one another' (p. 413); and Christianity, though a lie, a convenient brainwashing technique with which to 'Europeanise the barbarous nations' (p. 415). On even more dubious grounds, where other naturalists and anthropologists contemporary with Reade were loath to tread, he feels able to surmise wildly that all animals 'deficient in conjugal desire or parental love. . .are blotted out of the book of Nature' (p. 365); or that such traits as the human females' 'refined sentiments, their native modesty, their sublime unselfishness' (p. 373) -- and even their flowing tresses -- are the consequence of long-continued sexual selection. Darwinian evolutionism offered Reade the most transparent window on the world; but more interesting than his crude optimism and cosmic Whiggery is his free and almost joyful acquiescence in the indefinitely prolonged suffering which his version of a progressive philosophy necessarily entailed. As a Darwinian moralist Reade is prepared to point without flinching to pain and waste as the ultimate driving forces in history, not excepting the organic history of the last ten thousand years that we call civilisation:

Reason enough here, one would think, for the utter decay of the spirit; for those fearsome dreams of Arthur Elliott, the central character of Reade's last novel The Outcast (1875), who smells from far out in space the carrion stench of the earth. But the fact is that Elliott is a hopeless neurotic and Reade condemns him as such. For Reade himself the observable criminality of nature certainly does not license the crimes of men. When we examine Reade's evolutionism from other directions he is found to be triply protected. First, by his deification of humanity and by his exclusion of a supernatural drive in evolution, whereby he is able to dispense with the problem of evil and is freed from the strain of finding a solution acceptable to biology and theology together. This was a considerable achievement when one considers that even Darwin, despite his studied pose of indifference to philosophical and theological puzzles, was subject to some strain in this matter. His letters to his intimate friends Hooker and LyeIl are full of remarks on the inexplicable evil in nature. It was to Hooker, on 13 July 1856, that he expressed the much-quoted sentiment 'what a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!'21 Confronting the same problem, Wallace, who of course went much farther than Darwin by imagining a benevolent power using natural selection as its agent, devoted an entire chapter of The World of Life to the topic 'Is nature cruel? The purpose and limitations of pain', where his method is to advance various ad hoc arguments for supposing that as the less fit are eliminated the victims, far from suffering, may actually enjoy being devoured in a way 'not only absolutely painless but slightly pleasurable' (p. 375). Reade's solution got him out of Darwin's impasse, and makes rather more sense than that of Wallace, who was of course caught up in the same difficulty as any Christian theologian in his assumption that the benevolence of the 'angels' who are flicking open and closed the tap of desirable variation is absolute.

Second, Reade is protected by his strong sentiment that to resist nature would be quite wrong. He will tolerate no discord between evolution and ethics. Evolution is, must be, ethical in itself; for it is evolution that applies the most telling sanction of all -- the only one that counts in the long run -- that of progress or eclipse. Against this great judgement, for Reade as for Spencer, no merely human system of ethics could hope to prevail.

Third, and finally, Reade shelters behind the grand organising metaphor of his book: that the men of all generations must in the light of biology be ready to bleed to redeem the future. Our own prosperity has been rounded on the agonies of the past; on the brutalities of class and war and religion. 'Is it therefore unjust,' he demands on his last page, 'that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come?' (p. 447) We will of course be martyred to the future, like it or not, for such is nature's logic; Reade only asks us to bear it with conscious joy. But in thus appealing to the masochism of his readers Reade is careful not to demand too much. What he asks his contemporaries to contribute to the misery of the ages is not dreadfully painful; it is not in fact a corporal pain at all, but a spiritual one: the abandonment, in the face of science, of the sweet delusions of religion. So much is asked, but no more. By comparison with the past, the debt due to nature by the people of the nineteenth century seems, happily, to be a modest one.

Reade gauged his audience's mood so well that the Martyrdom ran to eight large editions in twelve years, despite attracting reviews that were uniformly hostile and often virulent. Some of his popularity, no doubt, was due to the new demand for potted histories from the self-educated and to his infamously anti-Christian sentiments, but there are also his purely literary qualities to be reckoned with. His fluent and hypnotic style filled with Swinburnian rhythms is adjusted more to the creation of a national epic than to the writing of a global history. And the Martyrdom does constantly strive towards the status of epic, with Reade's unquestioning faith in Darwinian evolutionism supplying the underswell of emotional conviction. His role as prophet is a little weakened, we may feel, by his failure to cry doom to the unbelievers as actively as he might have done later. Dying in 1875, he was unable to benefit from the influence of the retrogressionists of the 1880s who, with their warnings about laxity and surrender, would surely have been congenial to Reade; especially as they too were prone to draw on classical history and the lesson of the fate of empires to give another twist to the analogy between evolutionary biology and that minuscule fraction of it we call history.

Reade was far from being the only exponent of 'hard' evolutionism working through natural selection. 'From In Memoriam to The Woods of Westermain,' says the historian G.M. Young, 'from The Woods of Westermain to the Choruses of The Dynasts, we can follow the secular intellect seeking its way to such an apprehension of Being as Process as might hereafter reconcile the spiritual demands of humanity with the rapt and cosmic indifference of Evolution.'22 Despite Peckham's animadversions, Young is correct in the claim he makes for Tennyson, Meredith and the later Hardy. These do have in common a version of evolutionary theory which is true to the evidence as presented by the Darwinism of the day (that is, their version makes no teleological extension) and yet is simultaneously progressive and stoical. There was no general expression of incredulity when these three prescribed, as Reade did, endurance for the present in the hope that the slow permeation of Spirit (the highest term of Meredith's triad) might after long ages work a transformation; or when they all mentioned Darwinism as a potent inspiration for literary art; or when all gave expression to a guarded optimism deriving from their reading in the biologists. Their audience was not outraged when told that such a series of deductions could with perfect propriety be made from the axioms at the heart of the Origin. The Darwinism of a century ago was thought to be able to bear such an interpretation, even if today we know that it cannot.

We have seen in the thought of Wallace that this kind of long-term evolutionism, though of great appeal, was not the only channel of response open to the 'secular intellect' after 1859. Quite a different reaction was the one that confronted directly and rejected as scientifically unsound the evolutionary 'rapt and cosmic indifference'. For Charles Kingsley, naturalist, liberal divine and novelist, the cosmos was far from indifferent. He found no, or little, difficulty in absorbing the new image of a God who creates a single primeval form capable of endless proliferation and variation. He even insisted that the new image was more intellectually satisfying than Milton's God in the seventh book of Paradise Lost, who creates by making the grassy clods calve. We notice, however, that Kingsley fits evolutionary theory into his theology, not by importing the supernatural into biology as Wallace did, but by making natural selection itself an agent of divine power. The moral imperative, in the thought of the professional atheist Reade, is very strong; but it is essentially the imperative which orders passivity before the overwhelming force of nature. That is the significance of his structural metaphor of martyrdom. Reade asks us to trust nature, but he is silent as to what is concealed behind nature. Frankly, he knows no more than that natural selection is working in our collective, though not individual, interests. Kingsley, by contrast, finds a very active moral imperative in natural selection. It looms so large in his thought, and in such imaginative products of his thought as The Water-Babies, that it is frequently difficult to recall that Darwinism is for Kingsley no more an instrument of the Almighty's will than is, say, gravitation. It took Henry Drummond (1851-97), with his background of Scottish Dissent and agronomics -- his father was a ferocious fundamentalist, but also director of a firm of seedsmen -- to take the final step. This was the effective deification of natural selection.

Drummond's career was an even odder hybrid than his father's. He mixed active assistance in the Moody and Sankey evangelical revival of 1874-5 with a lectureship in natural science at Free Church College, Glasgow; and he alternated writing inspirational sermons with making a comprehensive and accurate geological survey of the Rocky Mountains in 1879. His evolutionary philosophy is an elaborate and diffuse one, but in so far as it has any central tenets these are to be found in a series of lectures delivered with enormous popular success in Boston in 1894, and published the same year as The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. The pressure for seats at these lectures was so great, records Drummond's biographer, that a flourishing black market in the tickets formed. But apparently the fortunate audience was discriminating. They praised the lectures' lucidity and style, but retained some doubts about the validity of the contents. In their printed form, though, the lectures had a very great sale because they were a relatively sophisticated attempt to mediate between theology and the new biology without denying any of the conclusions of the latter. In process of acting as a mediator Drummond draws heavily if somewhat ingenuously on his considerable fund of information about natural history to piece together his evolutionary history. Like Reade, Drummond travelled in tropical Africa (between June 1883 and April 1884); and, like Wallace decades before, he found the tropics to be an unending source of inspiration about the workings of nature in the violently active raw. Again like Reade, Drummond is anxious, even determined, to insist on that inescapable cruelty of nature before which 'humanity was dumb, morality mystified, natural theology stultified'.23 Yet he sees no need for a precipitate retreat into the Church of Humanity. God, for Drummond, has not after all absconded. Of even more sanguine temperament than Reade, Drummond did his best to persuade his Boston audience that no excessive price in pain had been paid for progress. His stoicism -- he would call it Christian fortitude -- is very much in evidence, as it is not relieved by the special comfort which Reade took in man's future ascendancy over the forces of nature, when humanity collectively may become 'what the vulgar worship as a God'.24 But they do share a Panglossian attitude towards natural selection. For Drummond it 'so discourages imperfection as practically to eliminate it from the world ... Natural Selection is the means employed in Nature to bring about perfect health, perfect wholeness, perfect adaptation, and in the long run the Ascent of all living things' (pp. 265-6). His refusal to relegate this vision of perfection to some indeterminate but certainly distant future has an odd consequence. Drummond plumps for his own age as exhibiting the fulfilment of guided evolution; and, within his own age, for the domestic cosiness of middle-class English life. At the centre of the family rests the mother, and Drummond conceives nature to be a production line turning out ever more perfected models of mothers: 'the Pisces, then the Amphibia, then the Reptilia, then the Aves, then -- What? The Mammalia, THE MOTHERS. There the series stops. Nature has never made anything since' (p. 343).

And never will, is his implication. Again we should notice, not so much the profound dubiety of the biological and anthropological facts Drummond is drawing upon, but how these data, whether true or not, are shaped to fit the conclusion he longs to reach. Beginning with the raw material of the behaviour of lowly organisms, he ends with an amalgam of Marian iconography and sentimental sociology. When he treats of sexuality, the mating habits of tadpoles, aphids and bees all help him to establish his position -- so clearly foreshadowed! -- that 'maleness is one thing and femaleness another' (p. 328). As he works towards an elucidation of the ethical significance of maternity, seemingly hard biological facts are forced to generate a new natural law, with the very pattern of nature being the Victorian fireside. Of the evolution of the family unit, he concedes that in the state of nature (perhaps he has in mind the tribes of tropical Africa?) the family circle is 'incomplete' -- by which he means polygamous, or at least not nucleated. But Drummond's evolutionism encompasses more than the crude accomplishments of nature, even a nature under divine guidance. Social evolution, which for him is merely another name for the linear advancement of civilisation, comes in to seal the leak: 'with the Christian era the machinery was complete; the circle finally closed in, and became a secluded shrine where the culture of everything holy and beautiful was carried on' (p. 404). The religious imagery is not, of course, a mere peculiarity of Drummond's decorated style. Implicit throughout this deification of the family circle at its most suffocatingly claustrophobic ('a secluded shrine') is Drummond's chiliasm. As his lectures end so does history, in those endlessly repeated images of the domestic hearth. The ascent of man and evolution itself close like a three-volume romance with that self-same vision which Orwell humorously evokes in his essay on Dickens: 'a huge, loving Family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters'.25

W.H. Hudson and A Crystal Age

We have now surveyed Victorian evolutionism as it was developed by four thinkers -- Wallace, Spencer, Reade and Drummond -- who were keenly aware of the new dimension given to their philosophies by the unavoidable need to accommodate inside these Darwinian biology. All four managed at the same time to retain their optimism, their essential faith in the rightness of the evolutionary process; though it might well be thought that they are linked by little else. Is there any common ground between the animistic teleology of Wallace and the divinely guided natural selection of Drummond? Between Spencer's highly developed Lamarckism and Reade's total reliance on Darwinism to fashion the future world of his heart's desire? Not at first sight. But the imaginative work may sometimes attain the synthesis denied the purely ratiocinative; and we will continue the discussion ofevolutionism with close reference to William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), his novel A Crystal Age (1887), and the effect on this novel of his tacit recognition of the advantages and difficulties of all four approaches to evolutionism mentioned above.

'Science and Art to my thinking,' wrote Hudson near the end of his life to a friend, 'are mutually exclusive: and novels may be or not be art or science pure and simple but a sort of oil and water mixture.' Looking back on a long and varied career (his first novel was published in 1885; his last in 1920), he must have felt with some satisfaction that he at least had never written any of those 'semi-pathological treatises, with a story about people's domestic affairs and emotions thrown in to make it a novel'.26 Perhaps we should be grateful he did not; but in fact few authors were better equipped than he to whip up that elusive emulsion of art and science. On the one side he was a competent and productive light essayist and romantic novelist, though only one of his novels, Green Mansions (1904), has indisputably survived the taste of the age. On the other, he earned a reputation after several years of struggle as an accurate and charming natural historian today we should call him an ethologist -- specialising in ornithology. Like Thomas Hardy, who was almost exactly his contemporary, Hudson passed through the whole length of our period as a mature intelligence sensitively alive to the biological debates of the day. Unlike Hardy, though, Hudson, if not quite a professional of the calibre of Wallace or Romanes or Lankester, at least met those doyens of Victorian science on something approaching an equal footing. And, unlike Samuel Butler, Hudson was always felt to be respectable. He refrained from entering public quarrels on technical issues once his writing career had properly begun, preferring to keep his scientific enmities to his private letters. Though strongly inclined to evolutionism he was never (so far as one can judge from his slim literary remains) a Darwinian; and indeed he became in his old age one of the warmest supporters of Butler, that Ishmael of biological speculation. Yet he was singularly discreet about making public his change in allegiance -- at least until the time came when the expression of doubts about natural selection could not be construed as an attack on Darwin personally. His long life offered him the advantage of witnessing the total disintegration of Darwin's intimate circle; for, though he was already adult when the Origin broke upon the world, he outlived Darwin, Huxley, Romanes, Spencer and Bates. The reward for his discretion was palpable. His field observations were treated with respect and he remained in the confidence of all the greater luminaries of the day. He was never tainted, as was his fellow naturalist-novelist Grant Allen, with accusations of pandering to the non-scientific laity with a slipshod generalisation or a dubious extrapolation. Nevertheless, in spite of all these considerable advantages Hudson's career must remain a disappointment to the student of allied scientific and artistic creativity. He practised very much what he preached about the mutual exclusiveness of science and art. In his novels little enough of his considerable learning manages to penetrate their fictional worlds. Even in the Utopian A Crystal Age far too much is left unexplained, and too few of the lengthy digressions on such matters as vivisection and the developmental significance of pain are brought into any organic relation with the tale itself. The 'oil' of the romances and the 'water' of the standard textbook Argentine Ornithology (to which Hudson made extensive contributions in 1888-9) remain obstinately differentiated. Yet A Crystal Age is still recognisably a future envisioned by a Victorian naturalist steeped in evolutionism: we shall see the truth of that.

Despite Hudson's mania for self-concealment (he systematically falsified many details of his life and destroyed thousands of his personal letters and memorabilia) the various biographical reconstructions present us with a life lived for the most part in obscurity and poverty. His isolated childhood on the Argentinian pampas is poignantly evoked in his Far Away and Long Ago (1918) -- a highly poeticised autobiography which ends by marking what was clearly the most decisive event of his reading the Origin at the age of 19 or 20. (It may have been a little later than that: several details of Hudson's life are still vague.) As Robert Hamilton has shown,27 there do exist two mildly contradictory accounts of the impact on him of the Origin; but the first is the more detailed, rings truer and accords better with the fragments of information available elsewhere. After his first impassioned rejection of Darwinism, he tells us, he tried to look at it again in the light of his own experience as a budding naturalist. For some time Darwinism 'went to bed and got up with me, and was with me the day long' and for several years 'my mind, or subconscious mind. . .went on revolving it', until at last he became convinced of the truth of the broad evolutionary proposition.

The precise extent of Hudson's knowledge of the finer points of the later biological controversies of his day -- and we must remember that his day stretched all the way from the first appearance of the Origin to the solidification of mathematical, post-Mendelian genetics -- is, thanks to his secretiveness, beyond detailed reconstruction. His first biographer laboured under a double difficulty of little real information at his disposal and a lack of sympathy with his subject's angle of vision. He tells us rather condescendingly that his friend had 'no knowledge of physiology',28 while only a few pages later he is recording Hudson's stimulating and technical conversation with Arthur Keith (1866-1955), the physiologist, cardiologist and populariser of neo-Darwinism. The sole verifiable comment Morley Roberts offers is the truism, apparent to any reader of Hudson's surviving letters, that he was no pure Darwinian. In fact, those letters also give us glimpses of an exceptionally well-read mind which had, in the province of biology, absorbed all of Darwin's major works, Wallace, Vries, Bates, Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Butler. He learnt from all these. His own retrospection is, on the evidence of his later writing, accurate enough: 'insensibly and inevitably I had become an evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as the only and sufficient explanation of the change in the forms of life'.29 Thanks to his temperament Hudson was free to walk in the broad middle of the road, making himself invulnerable to extremist criticism. Reasonable though this self-analysis appears, we must remember that it is Hudson in extreme old age reflecting on what had been highly emotional responses to the discoveries of a science half a century less developed. Who in such circumstances could pledge himself free of distortion? And in fact the sentiments of his first published work, unearthed thirty years ago by David Dewar, do not square too well with Hudson's recollected genial tolerance of Darwinism. Practically nothing is known directly of Hudson's biological (or indeed any other) interests between the end of Far Away and Long Ago in the first years of the 1860s and the time when his literary career began in earnest in 1885, long after he had become a permanent expatriate in England. A good slice of his last years in South America was spent collecting ornithological specimens for the Smithsonian, and it was from Buenos Aires that he contributed a series of letters on recondite points of ornithology to the Zoological Society of London. In the third of these, the only one of present interest, on the habits of the pampas woodpecker (Colaptes campestris), he takes up the cudgels against Darwin personally:

The aggressive tenor of this pompous letter marks out its animus against Darwinism clearly enough; after all, Hudson, even in this toned-down version, is practically accusing Darwin of perverting the evidence to suit his theoretical convenience. Nor can we suppose Hudson placated by Darwin's customarily polite but evasive reply printed later in the same year.31 This whole episode is a most noteworthy one. It warns us that in the stimulating decade or two after 1860 commitments ran deeper and emotional temperatures higher than the later recollections in tranquillity (which so often must serve as the only primary material) might suggest.

Hudson's metamorphosis from a doubtful Darwinian to a frank and outspoken Lamarckian in his old age was, if the surviving letters tell the full story, in large part a consequence of the reading of Butler. At first it was Butler's satire which attracted his attention. He read Erewhon (1871) and plagiarised one of its amusing inversions by making his hero Smith in A Crystal Age attract the punishment of thirteen days' solitary confinement for making himself ill by not eating regularly. Much later he also read Evolution, Old and New (1880), in which Butler exercises his powers as a scientific historian by proving to his own satisfaction that Darwinism was anticipated by naturalists of the previous century. The book drew Hudson on to investigate Butlerism as a philosophy and to find it at last almost perfectly congenial. His admiration for Butler was real enough, but slow in evolving; for as late as 1918 we find him making perceptive thumbnail sketches of Butler's many deficiencies: 'it was an age of giants; Darwin and so on: their facts were too much for him: drove him into a clever perversity ofhumour... I suppose there is a grain of truth in [his writings].' He came to find rather more than that, for just a year later he is commenting on Butler's 'acute reasoning and splendid independence'.32

Hudson's indebtedness to Butler comprises only a small part of his total receptivity to non-Darwinian biology after 1900. In fact there was little real common ground between them. Butler was entranced by theory, the more abstract the better -- especially theories of heredity, as a future chapter will show -- but he is impatient of the painstaking, descriptive work of the naturalist; whereas Hudson found in the end all abstractions tiresome unless they enlarged on and formalised his strong pantheistic feelings. In this respect his evolutionism is comparable with Wallace's, though he had a far more powerful intuitive grasp of the problem of evil than did Wallace and refused to settle for any easy solution to it. Certainly his objections to the natural selection hypothesis followed the well-worn emotional grooves. Hudson hated his beloved world of nature being transformed into a collection of essentially random events and processes of which the by-products are endless wastage and endless suffering. His hatred of these was so strong that it made him indecisive for many years about the inevitability, or even the likelihood, of biological progress. As an ethologist Hudson's contact with the prolonged and irremediable pain inherent in nature was as observationally direct, as little moulded by the conventional religious pieties, as Darwin's own. Interestingly, in an essay written towards the end of his life, 'Wasps', built around the single incident of watching a swarm of wasps devour a rotting pear, Hudson recalls to mind the habits of the Ichneumonidae, an order of wasps which lay their eggs in the bodies of living but paralysed caterpillars. He reminisces about the 'old days when my mind was clouded with doubts, and the ways of certain insects, especially of wasps, were much in my thoughts. For we live through and forget many a tempest that shakes us; but afterwards a very little thing -- the scent of a flower, the cry of a wild bird, even the sight of an insect -- may serve to bring it vividly back and to revive a feeling that seemed dead and gone.'33 The description of the wasps' exploiting a singularly unattractive ecological niche is the very one alluded to earlier as causing the normally unemotional Darwin to react with a paroxysm of resentment and horror because it made only too obvious how easily a 'devil's chaplain' could make out a telling case against nature.

Hudson is hardly a devil's chaplain, though the wasps' gorging themselves does thrust forward yet again 'the old vexed question -- How reconcile these facts with the idea of a beneficent Being who designed it all?' (pp. 201-2) Instead of launching into abuse against nature Hudson restricts himself here to a gentle debunking of the palliatives invented by Darwin to explain away such disturbing evidences of nature. He finds unpersuasive both the argument that the new concept of the deity who can make new organisms appear consecutively according to natural law is a more noble one than the old, and the further apology that such repulsive instincts are not specially designed but merely a part of a great impersonal law of variation and survival. Such attempted consolations did not appeal to the author of 'Wasps' in 1919 any more than they had appealed to his earlier self of 1900, who at Wallace's request made minutely detailed observations into the power of the cuckoo fledgling to eject robins' eggs from a nest. (The findings were published in Hampshire Days, 1903.) In this earlier account he speaks of a 'devilish intelligence' at work and in the later essay he echoes this by finding the most apposite word to describe the adaptations displayed by slave-making ants and the Ichneumonidae, as well as by cuckoos, to be, simply, 'diabolical'. This would appear to leave Hudson a long way indeed from any sympathy with the school of evolutionism which linked continued selection and the final attainment of perfection. And yet at the same time there is another side to the detestation so mournfully expressed in 'Wasps', for one can find in Hudson's musings a certain fascination with nature's eternal war for Lebensraum. Kindly and pacific in his own nature, Hudson still shares with Reade and Drummond the awareness that there is a certain stimulating quality in pain -- for the species as a whole no less than for the individual. Whatever it does or does not mean for the 'goal' (if any) of evolution, pain may be seen at present as a knife carving the rude mass of life into shapes of ever greater significance. For, whatever civilised man makes of it, suffering is there, irreducibly, in wild nature. Much the greater majority of birds starve to death every winter, and every night in the fields multitudes of the higher mammals, no less sensitive than we, die lingering deaths. Hudson agonised over this: few men of his generation, probably, had observed the weaker animal going under at such close quarters. So perhaps it is understandable that he should wish periodically to shift his eyes away from the brutal present of natural history and to let them settle on the distant prospect of fully evolved life when the perfected and vegetarian lion might lie down with a lamb not destined for the butcher's knife. On other more theoretical matters Hudson displays very little consistency, wobbling through the years between the hardest Darwinism and various forms of teleology. His 'mighty scorn of the Neo-Mendelian-Darwinians' with which he is credited by his biographer Morley Roberts was only one of his stances.

These vacillations, though indeed very characteristic of Hudson's thought in his last years, also give his novel A CrystalAge its special quality. Though the inventiveness there does exist within a Darwinian framework, and even expressly within the terms of the promised perfection held out at the end of the Origin, Hudson's story is ambivalent about that perfection. He allows his hero to develop a deep and personal resentment over the price that the Crystallites have paid for stability; to make in fact his tedium and frustration the indirect cause of his death. When we look closer, however, we see that this is not a deep-rooted rebellion. While it is rather easy for the reader to reject the delicate Crystallites as a degenerate stock in a garden setting devoid of all biological pressure, he cannot read A Crystal Age with due attention and find it a dystopia. Hudson is aware that the promise of biological perfection has retreated to the horizon. But it has not yet disappeared over the edge.

A Crystal Age was first published anonymously in 1887. It was only Hudson's second novel, and like its predecessor it proved a complete failure in terms of sales. Indeed, like its successors, too; for not one of Hudson's seventeen books up to 1910 sold over a thousand copies. Seven out of these were works of fiction and five are now utterly forgotten. A Crystal Age is still known to the critic of genre precisely because it is so entirely representative of the type of Utopian fiction being written in the 1870s and 1880s. Aldous Huxley once remarked that, to posterity, prophecies are most useful as comments on the age in which they were uttered: Louis Mercier's L'An 2240, for instance, shows us 'the ideals of an earnest and rather stupid Frenchman in the year 1770'.34 As the equally earnest but intelligent Hudson himself noted in the preface to the second and revised edition of his novel in 1906, A Crystal Age is riddled with the small concerns, the momentary crazes and the characteristic myopias of its period, and its residual value is exactly that of a period piece. If it was already obsolete in expression and as prophecy by the late 1890s, this is certainly because of the rapidly increasing sophistication in the way its basic assumptions were then being handled. Even for a professed Darwinian, the gesture of using a paragraph from the Origin as epigraph to a novel was to invite a very different response in 1860, 1880 and 1900 -- especially when that paragraph touched on the biological perfectibility of organic beings and hence by implication of man.35

Hudson's own attitude to his creation is hard to fathom. He is selfdeprecating to a fault in the 1906 preface and was thoroughly disapproving in his remarks to Edward Garnett thirty years after the first writing, yet at the same time he must have thought it worth revising and reprinting. Presumably he did so with the hope that the ideas of the romance would compensate for its artistic defects. In truth these defects are many, but quickly told. As a description of the far future, A CrystalAge has neither the sharp but battling quality of a dream nor the amassing of enough pedestrian detail to bring the Crystallite society thoroughly down to earth. Too much is left vague, and the first-person narrative makes it difficult for Hudson to knit into the action the long explanations and justifications which any Utopian novel must somehow accommodate. Indeed, he wilfully chooses the clumsiest possible device of having the Crystallites read aloud from books of history whenever they are not haranguing the excusably ignorant Smith in their inexplicably fluent English. The awkwardness of the opening, with the hero preserved by the roots of a tree to awake in the far future as a kind of Rip Van Winkle, and the ending, which has the hapless Smith recording minutely his own sensations of approaching death from poison, are alike absurd. Hudson, like many a science fiction writer since, has no idea what to do with the ingenious world he has spun. The dialogue, particularly that between Smith and the girl of the House, Yoletta, is wooden in the extreme. Smith himself, an impetuous and rather thickheaded youth, is a rather too viscous medium for transmitting the author's philosophical and biological speculations. Fortunately these profound defects need not trouble us. A Crystal Age is a feeble novel, but it is admirable primary material for displaying the considerable imaginative potential of evolutionism in the 1880s.

The Cost of Evolutionary Perfection

'As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch,' says Darwin in his recapitulative chapter immediately before the passage which Hudson chose as epigraph, 'we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length' (Origin, XIV:265). Hudson's reading in the palaeontology of his day supplied him with exactly this same sense of the immense antiquity of life, of the slowness of change; and an awareness, too, that in humanity's extensive future change might be as far-reaching as in its long past. Having awkwardly transported his hero to that future by burying him beneath a landslide and putting him into suspended animation, Hudson spares no pains to create a world as remote from our present as the Palaeolithic. He wisely leaves the exact chronology vague, but we are asked to believe that enough time has elapsed for the most sanguine evolutionist's hopes to have been fulfilled. Natural selection has done its work and a state of equilibrium has been reached which is much the same as the one Wallace liked to describe in his essays and much like Drummond's static dream at the end of The Ascent of Man. The world into which Smith wakes is magical, prelapsarian. No species has finally dominated, not even man: all evidence of his dominion has shrunk to a single house, with 'no town, nor village even, and not one solitary spire' (p. 5). This pleasant sunlit landscape which so puzzles Smith is Hudson's carefully deliberated gloss on Darwinian 'perfection'. As an ethologist, conservationist and nature mystic his ideal future is not Reade's technological wonderland but a natural harmonious balance. In fact it is the same harmony which his natural history essays celebrate (not without some inner questioning) raised to a higher power. The Crystallite flora exist only as aesthetic triumphs, as do the wild fauna. The domesticated animals -- sheep, horses, dogs -- have evolved in intelligence to a point where they work freely unsupervised. (Darwin had spoken in the Descent of the mental powers of animals being 'capable of advancement' but he had not predicted their use as unpaid servants and labourers.) The benign influence of natural selection has made the earth over into a garden and a garden devoid of temptations, for the human inhabitants of this paradise have voluntarily turned their backs on pure knowledge, while their morality has contracted into sedulously observed ritual. The evocative power of Hudson's Crystallite landscape, its half-familiarity, is a product of its sources. These are biblical and mythological, obviously; but also literary (Tennyson's Lotos-land 'In which it seemed always afternoon'?); from Hudson's Pampas childhood, later to be offered up with visionary intensity in Far Away and Long Ago, which has much the same mood; and certainly from some geological reading. For Hudson's remote future is, thanks to his wide biological grasp, in some respects a mirror image of the equally remote past. After revising his Utopia, Hudson spoke of it as 'a dream and picture of the human race in its forest period'36 and the nostalgia is indeed strong for a golden age when nursling humanity roamed the woods and savannahs untroubled by the products, abstract and concrete, of thought. In the Crystallite future the nightmare of history is abolished by having a massive portion of all human culture 'politics, religions, systems of philosophy, isms and ologies of all description' consumed, at some time in the very remote past, in a 'mighty Savonarola bonfire' (p. 266). Hudson, who uses this disaster dramatically merely as a way of cursorily whitewashing his canvas before sketching in the new design, fails to gratify our curiosity about it. All we come to know is that man's Faustian side has nearly destroyed him, especially his 'seeking in the living tissues of animals for the hidden springs of life' (p. 70) a mingled echo of Frankenstein and the anti-vivisection legislation of the previous decade.

The Crystallites, then, are the remote descendants of an obscure wandering people who controlled their curiosity about dark biological secrets and diverted their sexuality into the channels of song and dance. Their economic unit is the subsistence farm with a little additional trade; the social unit is the House, which is a mansion, Smith is informed, whose age is believed to be coeval with the earth's. This shelters a single family of twenty to thirty persons in a pattern reproduced everywhere. Hudson allows no larger political grouping, for he despised the socialist Utopias of his time with all the contempt of a naturalist who thinks he can see past the trivialities of temporary human groupings. His sour comment on News from Nowhere brings out his distrust of forced change according to a social theory. It is, he told Garnett, a strange delusion to suppose that 'new social laws concerning the price of food and clothes' could possibly bring about the millennium.37 (Nevertheless he is conventional enough in his own vision to have money abolished, though he adds the sardonic touch that the effect of this is to turn his hero into a serf bound to the House, rather than the happy anarchic spirit the Guest becomes in Morris's later Utopia.) Hudson's strongly patrician tastes, coupled with his genuinely new contribution of having biological forces utterly transforming a species, led him to a much more drastic vision than any earlier Utopianist. His Crystallite society has the nature of crystal itself: it is rigidly patterned and totally ordered along every plane of social interaction. Presumably this rigour is the outcome of free choices made in the past, but if so those choices have become so fully endorsed by biology that in the fictional present even the possibility of acting differently does not arise.

In his description of the physiological changes which have overtaken the Crvstallites, Hudson prefers to leave muted the question of whether this is due to natural or artificial agencies; whether these distant representatives of humanity have been made over solely by time and natural process, or whether this has been supplemented by eugenic edict. But real physical changes have occurred. The sexes have moved towards hermaphroditism, resembling each other 'in their height, in their smooth faces, and in the length of their hair' (pp. 13-14), with only the uniquely potent Father, the patriarch of the House, retaining his secondary sexual characteristics. Physical beauty and extreme longevity have become the norm. The daily round of the Crystallites is social and inconsequential, as it tends to be in all Victorian Utopias where human diversity has been filed down into bland equality. I.F. Clarke has commented on the 'curiously juvenile streak'38 in Richard Jefferies' after London (1885), as well as in Hudson's and Edward Bellamy's romances of the same half-decade. Clarke's explanation for this is cultural-psychological: that these writers, more sensitive than most to the perplexities of their age, tried to ally themselves vicariously with the simple values of childhood. With Hudson, however, it would seem more convincing to suppose he knew that biological specialisation, including sexual differences, is the result of selectionist pressures. Remove those pressures and the sexes will drift towards resemblance.

But the real originality of A Crystal Age rests in its divergence from the pattern of Arcadian myth; and this divergence is most telling in Hudson's handling of the final evolutionary outcome of sexuality. Here personal wishfulfilment and shrewd naturalist's common sense play an equal part in formulating one set of conditions whereby permanent strife might be set to one side. The exact nature of the reproductive arrangements within the House of the Harvest Melody is shrouded in Victorian reticence but there is no doubt that they accord well enough with Hudson's own beliefs about sexuality: 'the idea that there is no millennium, no rest, no perpetual peace till that fury has burnt itself out'.39 In this respect his Utopia (which he is identifying with quietude) is a fantasy solution, but it is still securely rounded in his study of natural history. He is perceiving unbridled sexual energy almost as a physical force, a driving head of steam impelling along the whole Darwinian mechanism. For natural selection works by population pressure (Darwin imagined this as driving the wedges of species into every vacant corner of the environment) which in turn is fed by the reproductive capacity. Allow that fearsome reservoir to leak away, to dissipate harmlessly into aesthetic expression, and the restless remoulding of life and endless competition between and within the species might slowly come to rest. Such at any rate is the logic of Hudson's dream solution: to debilitate sexuality by restructuring society after that most stable of all life patterns, the insectile. He imagines his House to be a single reproductive unit, with a fertile queen at its centre to regulate the rate of population increase within the human hive and to prevent the Darwinian order from gaining the upper hand. It is in dramatising these curious arrangements that the novel has its only vivid scenes. When the impulsive Smith with his unregenerate sexual habits from the remote past confronts with baffled ardour his love, the passionless drone Yoletta, his mystification is well conveyed. We share it, even if we guess how the Darwinian law has been repealed long before Smith is enlightened by the mortally ill queen, Chastel. She reacts thus to his description of a lowlier stage of evolution when all women might be mothers:

The Malthusian threat is familiar enough. What is surprising is the angry energy with which Hudson proposes his solution of making reproduction a highly specialised role. He was sufficiently attached to it to refute indignantly Edward Garnett's impression that he had taken it over from the naturalist and sociologist Benjamin Kidd.40

Hudson's evolutionism of the late 1880s, then, could be maintained only at the tremendous cost of tampering irreversibly with the fundamentals of human nature. Indeed, Smith wonders whether the Crystallites are human still. Even as the realisation of the true price to be paid for working out the beast dawns on him, there comes, too, the suspicion -- it never amounts to anything more -- that perfection might not be worth the candle. As he confronts the wreck of civilisations, Smith tries to comfort himself with the thought of the great contrast between fragile human striving and the sempiternal natural order. He tries to be a Spencerian, an evolutionary Pangloss. ' "Passing away" is not written on the earth,' he assures himself. 'It is vain to ask myself now whether the vanished past, with its manifold troubles and transitory delights, was preferable to this unchanging, peaceful present' (p. 268). Vain, perhaps, for Smith to ask it, trapped in the remote future, but not vain for Hudson -- still less for his reader. Certainly Hudson stacks the cards heavily against the nineteenth century, and as the idyll proceeds he grants us little opportunity to object to paying the tax of curiosity and creativity. If the denaturing of man is the price to be paid for entering Elysium to ride a superbly responsive horse through a long golden afternoon, then so be it! Such is the mood of the novel. But what if golden afternoons cannot be indefinitely extended for the race? What if biological theory should come to teach that nature cannot hold on to its precarious perfection but must move onward into a phase of decay? Even the posing of such questions was well beyond Hudson's scope in the 1880s. Much later on he came to recognise that 'the ending of passions and strife is the beginning of decay', as he put it in his 1906 preface; but to make imaginative use of the emerging facts of biological degeneration was a task which passed to other hands. Among these retrogressionists evolutionism ceased to exist in its naive form after a run of about one hundred years. As we have seen, Darwinism as such was powerless against it, but the post-Darwinian revelations eventually did destroy it for some. The manner of evolutionism's death and the nature of its antithesis will be the subject of the next chapter.