CHAPTER 5: Remember, Beethoven's Father Was a Drunkard: The Dubious Appeal of Eugenics

If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare would take us in hand, well and good; but I would not trust even Shakespeares, meeting as a committee. Let us remember that Beethoven's father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother died of consumption.

WILLIAM BATESON (1914)

For the Greeks' eugenic schemes to succeed, no more understanding of the machinery of heredity and evolution was demanded than the rule-of-thumb expertise of the stock-breeder. Plato introduces his prescripts for the conception and rearing of children with allusions to the most advantageous ways of breeding hunting-dogs, game birds and racehorses, plainly regarding the problem and the technique as being much the same in both cases. We notice, too, that the Greek ideal was to produce more of the same, or a constant supply of an already known and tested item. The Spartans selected for military prowess on the pattern of the heroes of the past, and Plato's imaginary Athenians for more wise and Socratic Guardians. There was little or no awareness among the Greeks that improvement, or at least change, might be continuous and the base stock moulded beyond recognition. With very few exceptions, this notion of human eugenics being no more than a complicated form of animal husbandry (complicated not biologically but through the obstinacy of the subjects) was the one that persisted right up to the 1860s. It is true that by the later eighteenth century a few rationalists like Condorcet and Godwin were already giving the doctrine of perfectibility a biological dimension; and at least two of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists mentioned earlier, William Lawrence and William Wells, had noticed the great power of artificial selection. They perceived that new varieties of fruits and vegetables, obtained by nothing more complicated (in principle) than the continued selection of the desired quality, seemed to move away without obvious bounds from the character of the parent stock. They, and certain other perfectionists of the Enlightenment, suspected that such a process of variation and selection under pressure might proceed endlessly. It was left to Malthus, in the course of his Essay on Population at the end of the century (1798), to do his best to scotch such metaphysical and certainly doctrinally dangerous speculation. He used a very homely example in the course of a short digression from the main argument of the Essay. Suppose we compare in imagination a brilliant garden flower with the drab wild ancestor from which it has been bred. As we do so we may well be impressed by the apparent degree of malleability that exists in natural forms. Can any limit be set on this malleability? In Malthus' opinion, there can. He appeals to good sense. Whatever breeding techniques are applied, Malthus is clear that 'no carnation or anemone could ever by cultivation be increased to the size of a large cabbage . . . a careful distinction should be made, etween an unlimited progress, and a progress where the limit is merely undefined'² Therefore, Malthus concludes, every species has a built-in resilience. Forced selection may for some generations pull a species out of the shape which the Creator has ordained that it should have. But when left alone such deviant forms will spring back: the phenomena of reversion prove as much. If we assume that what is true of carnations is true of men, then this line of argument has an important consequence. There is no advantage in condemning the 'unfit' to celibacy. Men also bring forth after their own kind. Reversion to type - the type of Adam - will quickly obliterate any temporarily damaging influence of hereditary disease or asocial behaviour. Since for Malthus humanity had not evolved, he could see no dangers in devolution and therefore no need to combat it with eugenic measures.

Malthus' sober argument recommends itself to biblical scholar and grower of prize-winning marrows alike. It sounds right and it appeals to one's feeling for natural harmony and regulation; but it is, of course, wrong. The evolutionist reading the Essay on Population at any date after 1860 could at once see the force of taking Malthus' 'careful distinction', excising the word 'progress' and substituting 'change' of a Darwinian kind. If change is endless, if there are no limits whether defined or not to the plasticity of the stock, then the distinction Malthus insisted upon fades away. The Darwinian evolutionist was required to swallow the transformation of a bear-like mammal, swimming with its mouth open to gather food, into a whale.³ He was not likely to strain at the improbability of Malthus' anemone attaining the dimensions of a cabbage. Darwin himself, while absorbing from Malthus the vital concept of a population pressing always against the barrier of limited resources, also saw in the nearly magical improvements wrought by professional breeders like Robert Bakewell (1725-95) something more than an analogy between selections artificial and natural. Rather, it was because 'we know what artificial selection can do'⁴ that Darwin was led to place the significance he did in natural selection's power to shift successive generations so far away from a root stock that they might eventually cease to be identifiable with it. These two concepts go hand in hand so fittingly that it required only one further argumentative step by those Darwinians who were interested in eugenics. If natural selection was the true cause of evolution, then it must be possible for it to induce limitless, consistent and persistent change. But what natural selection does blindly and slowly, man can do consciously and very rapidly. He can initiate limitless, consistent and persistent improvements. Post-Darwinian (or, as we should more correctly call it, Galtonian⁵) eugenics therefore is fundamentally different from the classical version because it rests on a new appreciation of nature's flexibility. With a few changes of emphasis it lasted from the mid-1860s to just beyond the end of our period. As late as 1909 it was still just within possibility that Darwinism might yet form the sub-structure to an applied science of human breeding. But even before the First World War a reaction was setting in, and G.K. Chesterton's castigation of all advocacy of eugenics as a 'crown of crime and folly'⁶ was certainly the most appropriate comment on brutal sterilisation programmes in America before, and in Europe during, the Second World War.
 

Late-Victorian Eugenics: An Overview

In his careful history of the involvement of eugenics in Utopian speculation, J.M. Smith distinguishes three phases of complexity in such proposals, which he calls 'selectionist eugenics', 'transformationist eugenics' and 'biological engineering'. In the first category he places such measures as the destruction or segregation of undesired variations from the base stock, the storage and later use of reproductive materials, and the imposition of various social and legal controls over mating; in the second, the direct manipulation of genetic material by tampering with the inheritance code or with the embryo; and, in the third, surgical interference with individuals, fitting artificial organs, transplantation and the like.⁷ Smith's phases correspond roughly to the skills of medical technology available or imaginable at a particular time. It is true that some Victorian imaginations reached even as far as biological engineering. Samuel Butler made a leap in this direction in his essay 'The mechanical creation' of 1865, where he suggests quite casually and humorously that different varieties of men will develop (more, be developed deliberately) to cope with different kinds of machines. But the main concern was with theoretical selectionist eugenics only. 'Theoretical' because in England, unlike America, eugenics remained a matter for discussion only. There was, as far as is known, nothing to correspond to J.H. Noyes's voluntary programme within the Oneida Community of 'stirpiculture' which resulted in the birth of fifty-eight children from carefully selected matings - the most determined and best planned attempt in a free group in modern times.⁸

In England, then, discussion ranged very widely but inconclusively over the virtues and limitations of, at one extreme, the direct and allegedly positive procedures at Oneida and, at the other, the negative ones of sterilisation and restraint legislated for and practised in several American states. This distinction between 'positive' and 'negative' eugenics was one the English theorists were very fond of. In their writings, however, a case was usually made for working at both ends; and since they were more impelled by the fear of social degeneration than by any genuine hope of improvement the most common mood was one of despondency appropriate to those who believe themselves to be fighting a rearguard action. At the same time they were united by the rather paradoxical optimism that man, that product of blind forces, has been supplied by those forces with enough intelligent insight into his condition to remedy or at least to reduce the consequences of his own deficiencies. This was certainly not a conclusion that every Darwinian was brought to by the inner logic of his position. For a purist among the Darwinians like Hardy, who apparently believed that all prospects of human felicity were lost for ever about the time that nature crossed the border from invertebrates to vertebrates, and that misery and an advanced nervous system are simply conterminous, eugenics, either positive or negative, held nothing whatever. Even T.H. Huxley, very well aware of what degeneration could do to a species, would have no truck with the crudities and vulgarities of eugenics. At the end of his Romanes Lecture of 1893 there is indeed a brief attempt to moderate the argument by the expression of the flimsy hope that some such transformation as has been worked on the dog, 'the brother of the wolf, to convert him into 'the faithful guardian of the flock' might be worked, too, on man, to make him into a truly social being?⁹ In the more considered Prolegomena, however, even this thin canine analogy is forgotten as Huxley penetrates deeper into his distaste for what he mocks as the 'pigeon-fancier's polity' - a kingdom where, by some miraculous attainment of wisdom, the pigeons can get to be 'their own Sir John Sebright'.¹⁰ (Sebright published The Art of Improving the Breed of Domestic Animals in 1809.) The breeder, Huxley claims on two rather muddled grounds, should play no important part in the evolution of society. The social and biologic worlds must stay autonomous because we are simply too ignorant to merge them. We can, with some difficulty and disagreement, discern the good points in a puppy, but how are we to tell the good points of a new born citizen? This is a task of quite a different order of complexity, and not an order where utilitarian and aesthetic considerations can be dovetailed neatly with physical appearance. It may be noticed that Huxley does not say eugenic breeding will not work, given the right technique and a general agreement about values and qualities. On the contrary, he is well aware that any real objection to eugenics must be on ethical rather than on biological grounds. It emerges that Huxley most greatly fears that inflammatory climate of opinion where there exists the importunate urge to do something dramatic simply because a powerful tool is available. The ones who most attract his ire are those who 'rank medicine among the black arts', who 'contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous' and who would refer sexual relationships to 'the principles of the stud'.¹¹ Huxley's concern does not centre on the biology of eugenics at all; nor, despite surface appearances, on eugenics as a potent instrument of practical totalitarianism. He is most fearful of eugenics as a disruptive social force which must (most offensively) loosen the bonds of the family. For him and for those who shared the sympathies of his class and the prejudices of his politics, eugenics by the 1890s had become simply a synonym for sexual radicalism.

If Huxley detested the main trend of eugenic speculation - what might be called the neo-Darwinian, Galtonian trend - he equally detested the teachings of the schismatic, social reformist eugenicists. He casts both aside with their cases almost unheard. And yet that schism is crucial: it is only possible to understand how eugenic ideals were assimilated into literary culture by taking note of the division which first became manifest in the middle 1880s and was completed by the end of the century. Let us first pursue the main stream of eugenic controversy, which flows smoothly through the decades from its spring in the rock of natural selection as this was understood in the early 1860s. We will then return to pick up the branching tributary which is formed by the thought of Allen, Wallace and Wells.

Long before Galton coined the word 'eugenics' and put it into general circulation, it had become plain to some of those who accepted the Darwinian principles as the sole, or main, agency which has raised our species to its present eminence that those civilisations highly valuing their individual members are the ones most prone to internal decay because they remove the selectionist pressure, letting the 'unfit' multiply. Many orthodox Darwinians after Darwin - they included Francis Galton and Karl Pearson - therefore saw the imposition of selective breeding as civilisation's remedy to civilisation's own problems. As early as 1868 the oligarchist writer W. R. Greg (1801-81) brought together into a single polemical essay what he conceived to be the antitheses of desirable social progress and humanitarianism. In dilating 'On the failure of "natural selection" in the case of man',¹² a short but rhetorical piece which circulated very widely, Greg supplies not a whit of really new information, but his attitude is the very quintessence of those fears which later, ordered and refined, produced what its apologists thought to be the regrettable necessity of introducing negative eugenics.

Greg entertains no doubts about 'the great wise, righteous and beneficent principle' (p. 356) of natural selection, which Western society had recently thrown so troublesomely out of gear. For individuals and races alike, the best are those who have survived the brutal conflicts of population pressure and food shortages: Greg trots out the ubiquitous examples of Roman succeeding Greek; of barbarian succeeding Roman. Curiously, he claims to have no illusions about the excesses of British colonialism. He takes it for granted that the imperial pageant conceals naked power and even corruption and injustice. But to place against that he has the comfortable assurance that 'in the counsels of the Most High' (a fine orotund phrase for what Greg takes to be biological necessity) 'a commanding will, at least in this stage of our progress, [ is] a more essential endowment than an amiable temper or a good heart' (p. 358). Having thus trumpeted the cause of the STRONGEST (that superlative is always worth capitalisation for Greg), and having well flexed his simple Darwinian values, he is ready to confront his own effete civilisation. Again, targets which became irritatingly familiar later on in the century are picked out. The hereditary carriers of disease; the subnormal; the delinquent; the merely incapable and improvident: all these types which a truly kind nature would want to see extinguished are, thanks to the almost criminal liberalism of the social reformists, allowed to pass on their taint. Although he does not lay the charge specifically, the reforms of Edward Chadwick would appear for Greg to be hardly preferable to the depredations of Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God. Greg's not inconsiderable pride in sanitary conveniences and epidemiological death control is quite offset by his vision of pullulating millions with 'subtle and hereditary mischief in their recesses' (p. 359) breeding, not with the blind vigour of rabbits, but with the slack irresponsibility of men.

It is interesting to notice that Greg's alarm at dysgenic disorder cuts squarely across the social fabric. He is as ready to curse the inheriting rich who 'hand down their vapid incapacities to numerous offspring' (p. 359) as the poor with 'tainted constitutions' (p. 358). The offence of the former is, if anything, the greater: flushed with the insolence of wealth and rank they carry away healthy brides and reduce them to 'mothers of a degenerating, instead of an ever improving race' (p. 361). He is abler, however, at apportioning blame than he is at suggesting remedies. Possibly given a government of unremitting paternal despotism, the present stunted and dissolute population might be turned into (Greg does not question the advisability of doing so) 'one glorious congregation of saints, sages, and athletes' (p. 361). But, miserably, a country gets the government it deserves, and Greg knows that his eugenic paradise with its collection of such oddly assorted vocations will never escape from the pages of Fraser's. Mournfully he lists the factors which together must help to speed us on the way to biological perdition: the growth and expectations of individual freedom; our mad determination to thwart the wise economy of nature in letting the unfit die; the advancement of democracy, which is to say the mob rule of precisely those least acquainted with the implacably rigid laws of hereditary transmission. Despairingly, Greg ends with a token gesture to the need for more education in the principles he has drawn out. He sounds less than confident; and the title of one of his last books, Rocks Ahead, or The Warnings of Cassandra (1874), stands as testimony to the deep pessimism so often induced in those who set out on the quest for eugenic perfection armed only with the inadequate, and even fallacious, formulations of later Victorian inheritance theory. The further crucial significance of Greg's essay is not only that it is quoted approvingly in The Descent of Man, but also that the actual course of its argument is followed unremittingly, as though Darwin had nothing to add to Greg's case. Certainly Greg's deep pessimism was found congenial enough; not only in 1871 but right to the end of Darwin's life, if Wallace's evidence is to be trusted. Writing in 1890, Wallace claimed that eight years before Darwin had given vent to the darkest admonitions about those societies where the Darwinian law had ceased to run.¹³

It is usually taken for granted that Herbert Spencer's socio-political theories best define the amalgamation of Darwinian biology and the social sciences. Spencer certainly clung to the principle that whatever increases a conflict of interest helps to resolve the struggle for existence and therefore to maintain the selectionist pressure at a maximum. Open warfare between the classes and sectional interests are, for Spencer, the most effective way of diminishing the dysgenic effects of civilisation. In this reading Social Darwinism means, simply, the carrying-over of Darwinism into social life; and it is the offensive implications of this that Darwin's defendants have in mind when they assert that Social Darwinism is 'no necessary inference from any principle of Darwin's' or, more strongly, that it is 'an utterly erroneous concept ... which he would have been the first to disavow'.¹⁴ There is indeed much evidence that the humanitarian Darwin was repelled by the spasmodic identification of might with right made in his day. Suppose, however, that we reject this anarchic, freewheeling version of Social Darwinism and substitute a version that insists on more social controls, not less; that sees a carefully managed eugenic programme as a saner way of benefiting from the casual violence of nature?¹⁵ Certain passages in the Descent which adopt a strong tone towards the 'inferior stock' thereby become clearer in their implications, as does the fact that the eugenics movement in this period was truly derived from a reading of Darwinian biology - a crude reading, to be sure, and one full of internal inconsistencies, but one to which Darwin himself, despite some protestations, gave the support of his immense reputation. He may, as we have seen in the previous chapter, have been confused about the precise connections between evolutionary change and progress, about the semantics of 'higher' and 'lower' species, but his few remarks in the Descent about altruistic behaviour in primitive communities are swamped by the constant reiteration that struggle lies behind social advancement, and that struggle does and should squeeze out the weak, the poor, the malformed. At a key point, having spoken of the great effectiveness of the social controls over the natural eliminative checks, he continues, exactly in Greg's vein:

Thus the weaker members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

And a little later, so that no reader could miss the implications of the phrase 'a want of care, or care wrongly directed', in words that are practically a paraphrase of Greg's:

[if we] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no inevitable rule.¹⁶

The final correspondence with Greg (and this more than anything else captures Darwin's reliance on and sensitivity to social attitudes in general circulation, right down to his reading the standard lesson from the fate of the Hellenic and Roman civilisations) is the realistic caution he maintains with respect to the imposition of any eugenic solution. As a biologist Darwin entertained no doubt that the techniques of the stud could be just as effectively applied in the marriage bed, to the intellectual and moral advantage of our race. The first passage quoted demands such an interpretation. So does his refusal to give any support to the defence of Charles Bradlaugh, who had been arrested for publishing a handbook on contraception. Darwin was against this on the grounds that it would encourage profligacy among women and because more people were needed to fill up the Empire; but chiefly because he felt that a vigorous multiplication of the human stock should be encouraged in order to permit the fittest to be selected out. As a social philosopher, however, Darwin at the same time recognised that the chances of any number of people refraining from marriage and children because they knew themselves to be unfit were zero, or, as he cannily put it, 'more to be hoped for than expected'.¹⁷ And, though he concludes his discussion in the second edition of the Descent (1874) with an impressive tribute to his cousin Galton's work on inheritance as bringing forward the day when eugenics might be practised (or imposed?) with real wisdom, it may be doubted whether this really reflected his private opinion. Only four years later he is found being as contemptuous as it was in his nature to be about Galton's scheme for issuing breeding certificates.¹⁸ (Unfortunately Darwin's exact opinion of this cannot be known because of his editors' excisions in the letter in question. Probably they wished to prevent Galton's learning his real attitude to this absurd scheme.)

If, leaping for the time being over Galton's practically single-handed creation of Darwinian eugenics, we move on to the end of our period and the philosophy of his disciple and biographer Karl Pearson (1857-1936), who originally trained as a statistician, we may observe the extreme inflexibility of Darwinian eugenics. Nothing was learnt in forty years. The targets of hatred, the neuroses, the naive reliance on natural selection are all just the same. For Pearson, who was one of the sternest of all the eugenicists, it was indeed the slow grinding sureness of selection that made him especially zealous in offering this method of improvement to the public. As he told a Newcastle audience in 1900: 'I want to justify natural selection to you. I want you to see selection as something which renders the inexorable law of heredity a source of progress which produces the good through suffering, an infinitely greater good which far out balances the very obvious pain and evil.'¹⁹ This is familiar enough, for it is only the creed of Self-Help (and it is curious that Samuel Smiles's famous handbook appeared in 1859) dressed up as biological edict. Selection is being offered as the fiery crucible out of which can come only a finer metal. It is the same imagery of stoicism with which we have already become acquainted, calling for the joyful embracement of suffering - especially for the non-European races. Here there is the paradox of Darwinian eugenics that, first presented as a human alternative to blind force, it eventually itself lapsed into mindless cruelty. In the ideal community, according to Pearson, the public weal would best be served by statesmen capable of guaranteeing and insisting that 'the fertility of the inferior stocks is checked, and that of the superior stocks encouraged'; statesmen who, as eugenic busybodies, would 'regard with suspicion anything that tempts the physically and mentally fitter men and women to remain childless'.²⁰ While they remain on the rarefied heights of theory these prescriptions of Pearson's for the ideal eugenic society may sound innocuous enough. Only when they are brought down to the plains of social practice, of humans living together within a code of justice, can we understand the true import of this area of biological speculation. In reality it is only the briefest step from Pearson to the Third Reich's Lebensborn foundation, which promised any unwed German girl a child in financial security and which employed coyly named 'procreation helpers' (Zeugungshelfer), usually SS officers, to act as studs. The literary imagination, rooted as it is in the concrete personal situation, can help to make this clear.
 

Literature and Galtonian Eugenics

The eugenic beliefs of Francis Galton (1822-1911) comprised more than a philosophy: they were the dogma of a religion which he spent the greater part of his immensely productive mature years evolving and which claimed his emotional being totally. On much the same grounds as Greg and Darwin, he took the need to introduce a eugenic programme into society to be self-evident. For Galton was a good Darwinian. The impact of his half first cousin's book was, as he recognised at the time, 'a real crisis in my life'²¹ Later he tested with an elegant experiment Darwin's theory of heredity - pangenesis - and his negative results made him yet more resistant to any environmentally modifiable theory of inheritance. His admiration for the principle of natural selection, and for what a simulated version of it might accomplish for humanity, was practically unbounded. It was for him practically a moral obligation to seize hold of the evolutionary tiller and make that which had been for infinite generations semi-random, egotistical and mostly ineffective, deliberate and systematic and altruistic. Altruistic, because Galton for all his life was that rather rare creature, an optimistic, hard-line Darwinian. He fervently believed that artificial selection, aping natural selection, could generate the highest moral values as well as the mere instruments of survival. Further than this, Galton actually aligned the social virtues with sharp teeth and high intelligence, and claimed that, because it guaranteed a deep unity of purpose and allowed some sympathy with deviant behaviour, altruism had always been a powerful factor in human evolution. By thus giving natural selection such a high moral tone, Galton sidestepped the eugenicists' usual difficulty of first having to define the desired characteristics of the 'fit' who are going to be bred for. Breed for what the highest societies most revere, said Galton, and we will therefore be following the logic of evolution, only we will be substituting a 'more merciful and not less effective'²² technique for something mostly destructive and always wasteful.

What is basically a religious tenor in Galton's eugenic proposals is obvious at an early stage - long before, in fact, he had come to propose any special avenue of reform. In the course of a long article on inherited abilities, we find him manoeuvring into a position where he can offer, almost casually, a biological substitute for the doctrine of original sin. The image of man in the Descent and in Lyell's Antiquity of Man is of a creature not fallen from high estate, but rising up from a lowly one of barbarity and, earlier, brutishness; a creature whose moral nature has yet to catch up with his material prosperity. Not too much should be expected, Galton tells us with his curious and rather typical mixture of complacency and humility, of a recently uplifted savage. His immediate argument, and the normative anthropology of the 1860s, leads him on from there to organise a ranking of racial abilities, according to each race's distance from its bestial origins: from the 'jabbering, quarrelling, tom-tom-ing, or dancing' negroids, to the 'self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman'.²³ But, anticipating the later trend of his thought, Galton is already betraying a certain impatience with the natural forces which after long years may, optimistically, shift the qualities of the human races in his spectrum from the black towards the yellow end. He is already hankering after a bolder vision: of a race to whom our present peoples will seem to be 'what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties'.²⁴ Galton, as early as 1865, is already turning from the ideal of a Victorian anthropologist to that of a dog-fancier. He has already caught on to the frightening yet piquant notion that within a reasonable, human time-scale man can remake himself in his own image. It is in this respect that Galton's eugenics was unique, though in other respects the ways Galton proposed for reaching his grand objectives were of no greater refinement than the Spartans'. He, like them, believed implicitly that by blending 'advantageous' characteristics of the parents the children must exhibit them doubly enforced. Even after the Mendelian, particulate theory of inheritance moved into the region of repeatable, experimental fact after 1900, Galton took no special notice. When he delivered the Second T.H. Huxley Lecture in October 1901, for instance, on the topic of 'The possible improvement of the human breed, under the existing conditions of law and sentiment', Galton showed himself to be much more diverted with the problems of the second half of his subject than with those of the first. In his last decade he refused to acknowledge that the biology of eugenics had any further mysteries to explore. He felt that the implementation of a eugenics programme was simply a question of effective public relations work. He was finally persuaded that the information already available to the biometricians about the inheritance of wanted and unwanted traits was already complete enough to pursue what he calls 'the grandest of all objects'.²⁵ In this lecture his confidence reached so far as a proposal for the immediate and resolute segregation of habitual criminals under whatever conditions of surveillance are necessary absolutely to prevent them from reproducing. Galton leaves it vague whether this virtual blanket sentence of life imprisonment (he does not mention sterilisation) for every recidivist should appeal more to the nation's parsimonious instincts or its concern for moral improvement: he carefully mentions both.

To express his eugenic convictions Galton turned, at the end of his life, almost instinctively to the Utopian romance; for as a medium of propaganda for lofty but impracticable causes nothing better had yet been devised for reaching the audience most responsible for the 'existing conditions of law and sentiment'. Eugenics was indeed a component in most of the Utopian writing after 1870, though the concern with raising a better stock only rarely went so far as to consider what we would now call 'genetic engineering': that is, the direct interference in the process of inheritance. Those writers who espoused eugenics normally added little to the classical arguments for the state's involvement in, and supervision of, the selection of parents for the next generation. In a typical example, A Thousand Years Hence (1882) by 'Nunsowe Green', the narrator describes his long prophetic dream reaching that far forward into the future. Even before the dream begins Green looks forward to a time when the state will participate directly in the rearing of children, particularly street orphans. At a time three hundred years in the future, the benevolent government makes no secret that it is 'primarily interested in suitable marriages, and in the highest health, moral as well as physical, of family life'²⁶ -- an interest not diminished by the expressed belief (perhaps derived direct from Galton?) that moral health is no less inheritable, and therefore modifiable, than physical. No restraints, however, are placed on free unions, other than those vetoed by public opinion. National selections are made: and, if mating follows by free will of the parties, the children become the special beneficiaries of the state. Another hundred years farther on, and Green's dream of 'social resanitation' is seen as coming true. In a kind of eugenic Dr Barnardo's Home orphans are to be raised up as a new aristocracy. 'They were to be specially brought up in separate institutions, where they might be duly educated so as to complete all the rudimentary advantages nature had given them, and thus be sent forth into the world as a kind of superior race - a national nobility - to take, by force of pure personal quality, their natural lead in society' (p. 225). It will readily be seen that in this transformation of the orphanage and workhouse into a greenhouse where Homo superior might be forced like exotic orchids there is more assuagement of social guilt going on than any pursuance of the hard-headed methods of the stockman. There is also a rather pathetic belief in the power of education to correct innate defects, and the usual anti-hereditarian bias which, a century ago as today, went along with environmentalism and behaviourism. The message of A Thousand Years Hence, then, is that among novelists as among theorists eugenic ideals could exist without reference to considerations brought into notice by the new biology. In Galton's Utopia Kantsaywhere of twenty years later, by contrast, these considerations are paramount. The Darwinian facts of variation and selection (positive selection to deflect the current of variation into desirable channels; negative selection to prevent degenerative collapse) push the didactic part of Galton's fiction right out of the tradition of Plato and More.

Galton began to write Kantsaywhere in May or June 1910, in his 88th year. By 23 October he had it finished in rough draft, at which time it was evidently the length of a long short story.²⁷ By 29 October it had been fully revised and typed and, on 4 December, Galton offered it to Algernon Methuen for submission to his reader. Galton was not sanguine about its chances of acceptance for, as he wrote, 'at first sight he [Methuen] was very dubious. He takes no interest in Eugenics.'²⁸ Methuen did decline to take it, and Galton, the most sensitive of authors, cast it aside. 'Kantsaywhere must be smothered or be superseded. It has been an amusement and has cleared my thoughts to write it. So now let it go "Wontsay-where".'²⁹ After Galton's death the next month one of his nieces, finding the plot absurd, destroyed a large part of the typescript including all the fictional episodes. The fragments which survived this rather arbitrary and ruthless critical judgement are no more than flat descriptive pieces of the hero's experiences in the imaginary eugenic state. They passed eventually into the hands of Karl Pearson, who printed some (or possibly all: he is not clear on this point) in his biography of Galton.³⁰ This partial destruction of Kantsaywhere makes it impossible to pass any comment on the literary merits of the Utopia, but the surviving sections are the clear lineal descendants of Galton's earlier essays both in clarity of exposition and in content. Kantsaywhere was not the product of any new line of thought, but rather that of leisure and mature reflection; it is practically the summary of nearly half a century's pondering on the structure of a workable genetic eutopia. Even in the 'Hereditary talent' essay, from which we have already quoted, Galton muses (in the protective first-person plural) that we should 'give reins to our fancy, and imagine a Utopia - or a Laputa, if you will - in which a system of competitive examination for girls, as well as for youths, had been so developed as to embrace every important quality of mind and body'.³¹ In every important sense, then, the fragmented Kantsaywhere is a product of the biology of our period and will be considered in that light.

Pearson's comments, which were based in turn on the memory of one who read the complete story, suggest that Galton adhered carefully to the traditional formula for his plot. To the shores of Kantsaywhere he brings an intelligent and curious visitor; he makes that visitor, Professor I. Donoghue, fail in love with a girl of the community, Augusta Allfancy; and Galton enlightens the reader and his hero simultaneously by having the latter guided about the Utopia by voluble cicerones. Other complexities, which certainly existed, have vanished altogether. Donoghue finds that the colony of Kantsaywhere is ruled by the Trustees of the College of Eugenics, the College having been rounded in 1820 thanks to the munificence of a citizen who left money for granting diplomas to those future citizens who were judged to possess valuable inheritable qualities, and for the nurture and education of children born to highly diploma'd parents. Galton tells with obvious approval of the benefactor's firm condition that under no circumstances should any part of his gift go to charity, to the poor, or to the naturally feeble. His interest reached only to sponsoring the multiplication and nourishment of those 'who were strong by nature' (p. 414). Kantsaywhere at the time of writing is held to contain 10,000 inhabitants, acquired by natural increase and immigration; the College has become the supreme arbiter without the bother of any democratic paraphernalia, and it levies a rate to finance its selectionist activities.

As an immigrant Donoghue is required to take the Pass Examination to become a citizen: a Pass in Genetics gives him the right, depending on the combined marks of himself and his marriage partner, to produce a certain number of children. The caste system is unbreakable. At the bottom are the Untouchables, here defined as the eugenically Unclassed. A special Bureau tries to make the lot of these Unclassed 'as pleasant as might be, so long as they propagated no children'; but the chances of happiness seem to be reduced by the imposed need to 'work hard and live in celibacy' and by the fact that in the event of any resistance 'kindness was changed into sharp severity' (p. 416: Galton's italics). In Kantsaywhere the ends justify the means, as they have a habit of doing in other Utopias; and for Galton the end is the creation of overlords racially and perhaps even specifically distinct from ordinary humanity. A tentative move towards this still-distant end is another hurdle which Donoghue tries to leap and which he describes extensively: the Honours examination, taken by only eighty candidates a year. Success here bestows special privileges if the graduates marry within their own ranks. Any resultant children are adopted by the College and so perpetuate an elite.

The detailed series of tests which form the eugenic heart of Kantsaywhere are of quite extraordinary crudity. The first group of tests ascertain the candidate's physical prowess, by ranking on a simple scale the acuity of his senses, his stature, power of grip, and so on. In the second group he is tested for aesthetic sensibility by being required to read poetry and prose, to sing, and finally 'a few athletic poses were gone through as well as some marching past' (p. 417). In the third group he is medically examined with a simple external inspection, and in the fourth information is gathered about his heredity. By aggregating the scores thus obtained, so the authorities of the Eugenic College believe, everything necessary to establish human superiority might be deduced. Their views definitely reflect Galton's own: as Pearson himself attests, the procedures described very closely parallel the ones used in Galton's first eugenics laboratory in South Kensington.

In reading through the remnants of Kantsaywhere it is difficult to know whether to be amused by Galton's arrogance or alarmed by his dangerous naivete. We are told that in this eugenic paradise 'the 'arry and 'arriet class is wholly unknown' (p. 417), and that the Honours examination is at some point divided to accommodate the people 'intended for the more cultural class' on the one hand and 'the hard workers, whether on farms or in town', on the other (p. 418), so even eugenics quails before the class structure; but these are merely the habits of thought of the English upper classes of the time and specifically of an influential segment of the intelligentsia, and as such excusable. More frightening is Galton's readiness to view the breeding of the unfit person as a crime to be punished by compulsory emigration (with 'surveillance and annoyance' ordered for those who defiantly remain) or, in extreme cases, by imprisoning the transgressor in 'a Labour Colony with hard work and hard fare until it is considered that he has purged his debt' (p. 420). How this Draconian legislation to thwart the reproductive impulse can be squared with Galton's reputation as a humane and compassionate man, it is difficult to say.³² Certainly C.P. Blacker, an apologist for Galton and for eugenics generally, does not impress when he defines the political structure of this outrageous 'pigeon-fancier's polity' as 'amiably paternalistic'.³³ Galton, he insists, disliked tyranny: he quotes a passage where Galton denies the value of allowing a Spartan dictator to exercise absolute eugenic power. But the polity of Kantsaywhere is, if not a tyranny, an oligarchy which is supposed capable of making fearful decisions - decisions which Galton himself must have been ready to endorse, or why base a Utopian fiction on them? Of the eugenic examination system Blocker comments: 'the man who is ploughed may be disappointed; he may even feel bitterly aggrieved; but he does not, if he is sane, regard himself as a victim of fascism' (p. 123). Discounting the point about the mental condition of the Unfit (which is irrelevant), we may protest on their behalf that their attitude will be formed by their perception of the fairness and the reliability of tests - including 'marching past' - which according to Galton's own dispensation of eugenic justice may be about to condemn them to permanent involuntary celibacy. It is a measure of the absurd ingenuousness of the Victorian eugenicists that they could seriously hope to dam off the sexual instinct by exhortation coupled with a little genteel force. By 1905 eugenics, resting on a base of unproven but tenaciously held assumptions, was the sector of biology most heavily charged with blind emotion. For this condition the biometricians were solely responsible; and Kantsaywhere, most ignominious of Utopias, stands testament to it. As for the gifted Galton himself, if he were indeed the epitome of the ideal eugenic type (he learnt his capital letters at 1 year old; could read at 21/2; could read fluently in English, some French and Latin by the age of 5), then he is the best possible argument against a eugenic policy!

A disgust of and a disbelief in Galtonian eugenics began to set in by the early 1880s and flourished as the appeal of 'hard' Darwinism waned. By the later 1890s the schismatic social reformist eugenic party led by Wells, Wallace and Grant Allen had become strong enough to dominate the thinking of the Fabians and other socialist theoreticians on eugenics generally, and therefore to produce the decisive rejection of real-life eugenic legislation in favour of liberal reform. Wells's imaginative and didactic prose exhibits this shift most interestingly.

At the end of the last chapter we saw how Wells's first decade of literary activity pointed more and more conclusively to a programme of eugenics to solve the difficulties which, he believed, would quickly obliterate the human species if its evolution were not taken in hand. Wells's successive models for the future of humanity left to the mercy of a Darwinian universe - the Man of the Year Million, the Morlocks, the Martians - culminate in the grotesque Grand Lunar of his last romance The First Men in the Moon (1901). Significantly the society of the Selenites, being carefully modelled on that of the anthill, is a far cry indeed from the brutal free-for-all of the Martian society or that of the future earth revealed to the Time Traveller. Instead the Selenites have a rigid caste system with every worker knowing and being fitted for his place. But, again significantly, Wells imagines a caste system which is not a product of natural evolution like the caste system in The Time Machine but one that is the result of conscious Galtonian experiment and enforcement by the Selenites themselves. They have chosen to live this way. They have chosen to break down their once homomorphous species into a multitude of specialised anatomical forms, all ideally suited to their various tasks. 'Quite recently,' the stranded Cavor informs his audience on earth by radio,

I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the fore-limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended 'hand' in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is starved ... It is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.³⁴

The charged phrases - 'highly developed system', 'quite unreasonable', 'lost possibilities', 'humane proceeding' - in this quite remarkable passage must serve to reinforce our uncertainty about the exact limits to Wells's irony. On a first reading it is a sick jest based on Cavor's difficulty in accepting the reality of a really thorough eugenic programme. But on looking over it again one's second thoughts are that the reader is being directed away from the ant-like Selenites and towards the human advantages of such an educative system. Covertly Wells seems to be asking us to try the effect of regarding that helpless hand sticking out of its constraining vessel as a vain symbolic appeal and one to which we might feel justified in hardening our hearts. Certainly the Selenite mathematician, with his attenuated frame, his voice a mere squeak for stating formulae and his mind furnished with no ideas beyond those required by his discipline, is a bizarre advertisement for the eugenic society. The Selenites are far from being an ideal; but somewhere in the strange melange of surgery and brainwashing which his imagination has conjured up, Wells seemingly suspected that there might lie the only solution to human decay.

For what, after all, is the alternative? Wells's fears, as expressed with painful clarity in a collection of forecasts of social change which won him the respect of the Fabians, Anticipations (1902), align him on much the same axis as Greg, Galton and Pearson. Like them, Wells places the causes of degeneration firmly in the differing reproductive rates of the social classes. Like them, he reacts almost with nausea to the dysgenic spectacle of 'a meanspirited, under-sized, diseased little man, quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married to some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman, and guilty of the lives often or twelve ugly ailing children'.³⁵ We notice that the vocabulary of distaste here ('mean-spirited', 'under-sized', 'ignorant', 'plain', 'ugly') has completely lost connection with the Darwinian definition of the Unfit in terms of one particular environment. Wells's Unfit, those whom he believed had already spawned so unremittingly that 'in the more civilised states of the world, the average of humanity has positively fallen' (p. 307), are so only in respect of some nebulously conceived Efficient State run by eugenically superior men belonging to what he is pleased to call the New Republic. Wisely, Wells attempts no ostensive definition of the 'average' which has fallen, and it would hardly be appropriate to expect him to do so in this kind of discourse. Without pause, then, Wells moves forward to the expected prescription: the euthanasia of the weak, silly and fecund, coupled with 'good scientifically caused pain that will leave nothing but a memory' (p. 301) in order to quieten (one supposes) any recalcitrant survivors of the eugenic purge. Certainly it is surprising to find this kind of rhetoric spilling out of highminded Fabianism. It is something which the political historians have been happy to gloss over. Yet, as in the case of the biometricians, it is not difficult to appreciate why, in laying down eugenics as a stout bridge between what is and what ought to be, Wells's political liberality should suffer. For when one is forced by the pressure of accepted inheritance theory to view the spring of human potentiality for excellence - excellence expressed more and more in terms of hard genetic laws - as being constantly unwound by random mutations and weakened by the undesirables' procreation the shift to authoritarianism and to talk about the need for 'social surgery' becomes almost irresistible.

Nevertheless, The First Men in the Moon, as well as being his last romance, effectively marks the conclusion to Wells's fifteen-year-long meditation on the human meaning of Darwinian biology. As we concluded after surveying his response to the powerful anti-Darwinian coterie, Wells found nothing crucial to quarrel with in natural selection. Most probably his ambivalent feelings about repressive eugenics owed something to that capable Darwinian publicist Grant Allen, to whom he gave generous praise.³⁶ But Alien died in 1899, and soon afterwards Wells was obliged to recognise that Darwin's equation of the fecund and the fit simply would not do. Early in the new century, then, in his heavily didactic 'novel' A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells begins the attempt to put his public on its guard against 'all nonsense of the sort one hears in certain quarters about the human stud farm... from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous'.³⁷ The nonsensicality he alludes to is not that of oversimplifying the Mendelian laws in applying them so crudely to breeding superior men. His outburst is more the cry of a man finding his principles clashing with natural law. Struggle is good: Wells was enough of a Victorian to credit that as axiomatic. But, though he saw no place in any desirable human future for the ventral dream of peace, Wells shrank from the Meredithian approval of permanent and unresting combat. Caught in this dilemma Wells and some other eugenicists began to turn to such nostrums as the emancipation of women, the separation of sexuality and reproduction, sanitary reforms and other general euthenic measures. Among these thinkers socially undistorted biological process gradually became emptied of all the rich human significance which the Darwinian moralists had once found in it, and did indeed become no more than a backdrop to mundane concerns.
 

Reformist Eugenics: Wallace and Grant Allen

Eugenics by social reform, though it gained a certain political currency that was never granted to the biometricians, was predominantly the creation of the brisk and practically minded biologist with a social conscience. Such men - Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Alien may serve as worthy representatives of the type - were in one sense or another Darwinians, believing in the efficacy of Darwin's mechanisms. What they could not stomach was the inevitable cruelty and illiberality that must result from allowing nature free play. They were united in being disdainfully impatient of the old romantic stoical pessimism. They were inclined to turn their backs on a far-distant New Jerusalem which was going to be brought into being by means neither speedy, sure, nor flexible enough for their taste. And yet the Utopian sentiment was as strong in them as in the Galtonians. Their response was to turn, not to the Origin, but to the Descent: not to natural selection, but to Darwin's subsidiary hypothesis of sexual selection, first offered in detail in 1871.

To see how this worked in practice, and to sample the arguments of the reformist eugenicists, we shall conflate two essays by Wallace, 'Human selection' and 'Human progress', published in 1890 and 1892 respectively. The opening premiss of the second paper in fact is antecedent to everything in the first, because it supposes that, in respect of intellectual and moral advance, the 'high water level' of ability (Wallace has in mind the few supreme donors - Jesus, Buddha, Confucius - of complete ethical systems) has subsided over the last two millennia. The mean level of ethical sensibility, however, Wallace takes to have been continually elevated, thanks to the purely Darwinian factor of intraracial conflict - conflict which, Wallace rather curiously assumes, has tended to favour the survival of the offspring of the sober, virtuous and healthy sectors of a populace. Wallace was no retrogressionist, and he abominated the kind of mentality which was nostalgic for more harshly natural days. He opts without hesitation for the 'decided gain' of an increased sympathy with suffering as 'the most marked and most cheering of the characteristics of our age'.³⁸ Yet Wallace still exercises himself over the problem of increasing the proportion of the most capable intelligences and the most subtle moral natures - and, what is more, within the Darwinian limits. (For Wallace spends time in both essays disabusing the reader about Lamarckian philosophies of education. He takes all talent, even up to the level of genius, to be a spontaneous genetic endowment; successive generations of a capable family do not rise 'progressively to loftier heights of genius and fame': p. 155.) He shares Galton's biological presuppositions but is highly critical of his eugenics, which he correctly asserts to be elitist in conception and effect. He will have nothing to do with compulsion.

Wallace's grand solution for increasing the selectionist pressures in a well-regulated but open society is, quite simply, to improve the freedom of choice for women by removing the economic incentives to marriage. When women are no longer legalised prostitutes but independent, the number unmarried will rapidly increase since relatively few seek marriage for 'personal affection or sexual emotion'. Since these clear-eyed business-girls will be trained from their cradles to look with contempt on 'all men who in any way wilfully fail in their duty to society - on idlers and malingerers, on drunkards and liars, on the selfish, the cruel, or the vicious',³⁹ and since they will be able to decline, and certainly will not tolerate, any unions other than marriage, all will receive many offers which they can afford to reject. These latter-day Lysistratas will blackmail some of the sexually impetuous males into good conduct, and the residue they will scornfully leave to celibacy and oblivion:

In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of degraded taste or of feeble intellect, will have little chance of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with himself.⁴⁰

So there will be no need after all for Galton's eugenic concentration-camps. It is women who will act as eugenic police, and their soft yea or nay will be much more effective and civilised than any sterilising scalpel. As the agents of sexual selection, Wallace's women are supposed to be able to choose the 'best' males by unalloyed reason; they are of course conformist enough to equate society's 'best' with their own tastes, and apparently are so devoid of viciousness, unseemly appetites, or stupidity themselves that they needs must love the highest when they see it. The point is hardly worth making that the Victorian stereotypes of women are here operating in a pseudo-biological context. So manifestly blind is Wallace's idealisation that he can conclude, without a trace of irony, that 'we may safely leave the far greater and deeper problem of the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the Woman of the Future' ('Human selection', 337).

The last catchphrase is an echo of the title of a series of essays in the Universal Review, where Grant Allen's contribution to this engaging debate appeared only four months before 'Human selection'. Allen had his own distinctive line on reformist eugenics, and a more radical one. The mature life of Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-99) covers almost the whole of this study, and his hybrid career as a writer is almost a stereotype of those literary interests that we are most concerned to trace. For Allen was a man of very many parts - a journalist in the style of Jasper Milvain in Gissing's New Grub Street; a poetaster; a scientific populariser in many diverse fields; a social commentator; a controversial novelist - but his most lasting interests revolved round the triple poles of speculative biology, natural history and middlebrow fiction. There are two reasons why his attitude to eugenics is important here. Although a great deal of his writing was done under financial pressure and displays the weaknesses of a fertile but undisciplined mind, this very fact of his being by necessity a thinker with no time to glance up from the immediacies of the hour gives his ideas (and his writings always illustrate some scientific, often biological, or else moral, speculation) a peculiar relevance. A second reason is Allen's presence within both the literary and scientific fraternities of the 1880s and 1890s and the extraordinary freedom with which he was able to move from one to the other without invoking antagonism. How he managed this is something of a mystery. He had none of Thomas Hardy's deference to scientists; none of his patience for picking up stray crumbs of information tossed his way at polite evening parties. And he was quite unlike W.H. Hudson, content to be an honest hodman for the theoreticians. His approach to delicate points at issue was not dissimilar to Samuel Butler's, except that unlike Butler he retained a measure of respect, or at least tolerance, from most quarters. This was made easier, too, by his ability (which Butler signally lacked) for picking up a heresy at just the right point along its journey into orthodoxy. This gift may be seen at work no less in his biology than in his handling of tricky social issues, and it certainly helped in preserving his image as a daring but never an anti-Establishment writer. The forbearance he enjoyed of scientists and literary men both cleverer and more successful than himself also derived from, we must recognise, his reputation as a maker or breaker of writers. Richard Le Gallienne, writing after Allen's death, alludes to that uncomfortable talent in his ironically patronising way:

Grant Allen always had this happy knack, by the sheer innocence of his almost childlike sincerity, of attracting, or shall I say, repelling, immediate attention for any cause he cared to espouse... He could not avoid making the poster phrase, the poster word.⁴¹

And we may well suppose he was feared for it. Again, his almost precognitive capacity for spotting and vigorously promoting the next cultural trend worked over an astonishingly wide spectrum of intellectual and creative activity: all the way from Weismann's important essays on inheritance theory (which he boosted) to William Watson's first significant volume of verse, Wordsworth's Grave, the review of which practically handed over to Watson his volatile fame as the last traditional Victorian poet.⁴² Grant Allen's own more substantial work rather modifies any impression of a readiness to compromise to any degree with the market. His bibliography shows very well that he expanded himself over a number of genres for no other reason than that his interests were wide-ranging. It was his good fortune that, whether composing light verse (The Lower Slopes, 1894) or dilating on The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897) from the 'shocking' anthropological standpoint made fashionable by Spencer and the Descent, he managed to appeal to readers who must otherwise have been miles apart in taste and sensibility.

Allen has been the subject of no important biography since Edward Clodd's Grant Allen: A Memoir (1900) and therefore the shifts in his involvement with the life sciences must be extracted entirely from his published work and from outside references to him. From these sources a coherent picture emerges which is strikingly in tune with the introductory remarks on the biologico-literary interaction with which this study opened. Allen's career is, so to speak, a lodestone against which the deviations from the main trends of thought of other and greater creative writers may be measured.

Allen's important intellectual life began in the late 1860s at an Oxford still reverberating with the Owen-Huxley confrontation, and the residuum of the Spencerian evolutionism which he imbibed there is apparent in all his purely scientific books, especially in Physiological Aesthetics (1877), which won more than a token approval from both Spencer and Wallace, and also in its later expansion The Colour Sense: Its Origin and Development (1879). The latter, since it traces the evolution of colour vision over geological aeons, naturally met with approval from the evolutionists. (It contradicted those philologists and critics who believed that there had been an actual growth in the eye's sensitivity to colour 'within a period of which we possess literary memorials'⁴³ because of the alleged lack of colour words in ancient Greek poetry.) So did Allen's two later series of essays on natural history topics, The Evolutionist at Large (1881) and Vignettes from Nature (1881). Of the latter T.H. Huxley wrote that he had no fault to find on the score of accuracy; that 'on the contrary, I find much to admire in the way you conjoin precision with popularity - a very difficult art'.⁴⁴ So far as one can gather, Alien gave complete satisfaction to the inner Darwinian circle for the rest of his productive life, attracted by neither the excesses of neo-Lamarckism nor those of neo-Darwinism; and, as the pressure against Darwinism mounted, Allen was there with facts gleaned from the field naturalists like W.H. Hudson in support of such subsidiary explanations as sexual selection. He was such an excellent propagandist that this alone might account for his high regard among the Darwinists. Huxley, at least, was astute enough to realise that Allen could command the ear of a wide, profoundly non-intellectual, fickle, middle-class audience: that stratum of English society which was, and remains, most impermeable to abstract theories. Huxley in his own lectures to working men was preaching to the converted; to a group of radical and lively intelligences who were hungry for facts and speculation and had no time for spoon-feeding. But spoon-feeding was Allen's forte. Even Darwin recognised it in his pleasantly enthusiastic way; in an undated letter he told Allen: 'who can tell how many young persons your chapters may bring up to be good working evolutionists!' (quoted in Clodd, Grant Allen, 111).

Since we are most interested in the position of equilibrium which Grant Alien finally attained, we will sketch in only lightly the modulations in his biological opinions. We have already mentioned that Allen's biology typifies the period, and it is therefore only natural that he should have been attracted to purposive, goal-directed evolutionary systems. This is clear from his review of Butler's Evolution, Old and New,⁴⁵ and may profitably be contrasted with George Romanes' scarifying review of another Butler book nearly two years later,⁴⁶ and Allen's own views four years later still in his Charles Darwin (1885). Both Allen and Romanes consider Butler's brand of evolutionism to be important as a monitor of quasi-scientific trends, but they differ absolutely as to their evaluation of Butlerism itself. For Romanes, speaking ex cathedra from the heart of Victorian scientific professionalism, Butler is quite simply a charlatan - an arrogant, vain, stupid and even mildly insane charlatan. While Butler restricted himself to 'entertainments' (so Romanes contemptuously terms Life and Habit) he may have been occasionally amusing; but Romanes' response to his daring to enter 'the arena of philosophical discussion' is one of simple outrage. Grant Allen takes a notably more pacific line. He prefers to talk about the confusions inherent in Butler's brand of irony than to confront his teleology head-on. On the whole he reacts mildly to Butler's aggressive relocation of Darwin himself as merely the last in a long line of evolutionists. While he cannot agree about the otiosity of Darwinism itself, he is nevertheless guardedly interested. Six years later his attitude is slightly more positive. The preface to his short critical biography of Darwin pays Butler a generous compliment: of Allen's having extracted from Evolution, Old and New 'many pregnant suggestions with regard to the true position and meaning of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and the early essentially teleological evolutionists' (Charles Darwin, v). But he still dissents from Butler's acrimonious and iII-judged verdict on Darwin himself. So far as one can discover, Allen expressed no more positive interest in the teleological case than this. But, equally, he objected to any theoretical extremism of an opposing brand. His presentation of Weismann's Essays upon Heredity another five years on in 1890 is a model of defensiveness. He discerns the 'almost classical authority' of the Essays, but shies at their insistence that we are to 'give up at once the whole remaining Lamarckian element in evolutionary biology, and to hand over everything to the arbitrament of natural selection . . . If Weismann is right, we shall have to begin all over again.'⁴⁷ These are the words of no neo-Darwinian, but of a publicist protective of the revised and augmented 'soft' Darwinism of the decades after Darwin's death. Allen takes what comfort he can in noting that just one single case of somatogenic inheritance would be instantly fatal to Weismannism, and he speaks vaguely of psychology providing that case.

Grant Allen's intellectual career, then, is not a complicated one and his attitude to Galtonian eugenics is just what might be expected. As a Darwinian body, Allen moved in a highly predictable orbit. In the 1860s and early 1870s he was pulled irresistibly into the powerful gravitational field of those central luminaries the Origin and the Descent of Man. In the early 1880s he came like many others under the influence of a rival field of force, that of teleological evolutionism, as his attitude to Butlerism suggests; but this was amply balanced out by Weismannism at the end of the decade. Before he died, Allen achieved some sort of equilibrium by publishing his reformist eugenic programme which, like Wallace, he hoped to see realised by emancipating women. But, as his 1890 essay and still more his succes de scandale, The Woman Who Did (1895) make amply clear, his definition of emancipation is a good deal more permissive than Wallace's. Before thrusting the whole burden of eugenic responsibility on to the one sex Allen wants to empower women with real control over their own fertility as well as untying them financially; he would have maternity made a responsibility of the state and (most daringly) allow the choice of a mating partner to be unhampered by any consideration other than that of fitness for paternity. At the heart of Allen's eugenic millennium, in short, would rest an Amazonian cult among whose members motherhood 'would soon crystallize into a religious duty... The Free woman will choose which lord she shall serve. And do you think her choice will be for the colonial broker?'⁴⁸ His fantasy, obnoxious for obvious reasons to Huxley and Wallace alike, is when considered coolly no less absurdly sentimental than Wallace's modification of it. Biologically speaking, both proposals rest on the transposition into civilised life of the theory that in nature all sexual distinctions have arisen from an attempt to attract, or fight for, the opposite sex - that 'the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny' (Origin, IV:67-71; my italics). Since Darwin had here no more sophisticated distinctions in mind than the stag's antlers, cock's spurs, or beetle's mandibles both proposals are open to precisely the same accusations we have already levelled against the Galtonian eugenicists. Such devices evolved for survival or ostentation relate in no meaningful way to human goals. One might as well expatiate on the valuable eugenic potential of fancy dress for men, on the evidence of the attraction of the peacock's plumage to the peahen - providing one is content with a peahen's instinctive values. Equally, only someone already predisposed to prize women's powers of selection could expect them to serve as eugenic referees.

Blind though Allen may have been to the blemishes of his own eugenic proposals, no one made crueller fun of the Galtonians than he; for no one else, it seems, bothered to inquire imaginatively into what a practical scheme of negative eugenics might signify at the level of personal relationships. Ten years before 'The girl of the future' Alien had first turned his hand to the short story, allowing his gift for scientific exposition to spill over freely into the new medium. One of the most successful results was 'The Child of the Phalanstery', which Allen thought highly enough of to include in an anthology nearly twenty years later.⁴⁹ According to its headnote, the story was built around the experience of seeing a child with a club foot and listening to a friend advocate socially licensed infanticide for such cases, to curtail the transmission of inheritable defects. 'The Child' is set in some indeterminate future when the population has been regrouped into Fourierian phalanxes. In Charles Fourier's (1772--1837) scheme, the phalanxes were designed to guarantee harmony: each one was to occupy three square miles, made up of the main building of the phalanstery itself housing 160 people and a surrounding park. Alien strips away all this detail to leave the pleasantly vague outline of a pastoral community ordering itself according to the unwritten rules of an anonymous Founder - who, one suspects, is probably meant to be Galton himself. The plot is elementary: Olive and Clarence, two young lovers, wish to marry despite Olive's slight physical weakness. They put this proposal as custom dictates to the hierarch and council of the phalanstery. Since there is no real impediment on eugenic grounds the marriage is permitted; but a child is born slightly deformed. After a statutory period the child is killed, again according to custom, whereupon the mother dies heartbroken. The real appeal of the story lies in the irony with which Allen develops his friend's serious proposal of eugenic infanticide, not in the trivial plot. It may possibly be objected that in any Western community, no matter how Utopian, the taboos against infanticide are so strong that no ironically rational defence of it can possibly rise above the level of farce - at least, in any less masterly hands than Swift's. But this is not so in the Utopian fiction of this time, where quite serious defences of infanticide and abortion on biological grounds are commonplace (as of course both were in real life, and were even covertly licensed in the institution of baby farms). Galton in Kantsaywhere stops short of it, probably believing that his elaborate Pass and Honours examinations for parental fitness could eliminate nearly all genetic abnormalities. Begetting an abnormal child in Kantsaywhere does not attract disapproval for the parents, but the unfortunate offspring is of course prohibited from mating, classified as Unfit, and removed to a Labour Camp if he dares to disobey.⁵⁰

Elsewhere, though, there was no flinching from making the ultimate alliance with the observable law of nature. Among the icy, passionless people of Davis's Pyrna (1875) arrangements are Spartan but within their limits effective. Each baby is examined at birth and at once killed 'if not perfectly sound and healthy, or if it was monstrous or deformed in any way'. This procedure is held to be automatically beneficial - just as in Kantsaywhere or in Allen's phalanstery, the consequence is that no inhabitant grows up with 'a shattered frame, with a feeble pulse, with an aching head, or with that worst of all evils that is bred in a decaying civilisation, a nervously diseased constitution'. The anonymous visitor to Pyrna has, to be sure, a few residual moral qualms; but on hearing that infants have in fact to be put down in a ratio of less than one per thousand he is persuaded that 'like most terrors, this disappeared when it was approached'. In case we fail to appreciate the elevated principles governing the communards, the guide offers an elaborate appeal to natural law. Davis has nothing new to say about this flexible doctrine, but his vigorous defence of it binds him closely to the compact body of thought of the hard Darwinians:

Everything that hath existence obeys one law - a law which has no limit, and knows no mercy. While nature lasts, while the world exists as it does now, that law will bind in its rigid clasp all created things · . . What has the neglect of obedience to this law entailed on you and your race over and over again? The decay of every system of civilisation ... a system that preserves and breeds what nature requires should be exterminated.⁵¹

Those unimpressed by this fervent appeal could be solicited from another angle. The author of the anonymous Etymonia (1875), in describing life on a North Sea island - an idealised England - considers, only boldly to dismiss, Malthusian restraint as an answer to the twin evils of overpopulation and degenerating stock. Only selective child murder will work; and man's law is so much more humane than nature's:

The sacrifice [of children], if but dispassionately, philosophically, aye, and charitably considered, would, in this form, be far less painful than hunger, - far more advantageous than a universal and constant struggle, - far less injurious than vice, - far more effective than chance, - far more limited in its operations than the innumerable aggregated evils attending upon the haphazard system of checks now in force.⁵²

These attitudes, whose connection with those of Greg, Galton and even Darwin are self-evident, were certainly current; and there was no extravagance in Allen's satirising them. By making the people of his phalanstery disciples of Congreve and Harrison, like his young heroine Olive who tries to feel 'first and foremost of the progressive evolution of universal humanity' (p. 168), Allen is able to attack both the camp of the appealers to nature and of the 'humanitarians'. While no one in the community believes that the birth of a baby with distorted feet is anything other than a random stroke of fate and meaningless in itself, two sets of responses are possible, and Allen dramatises both of them. For Eustace, the phalanstery's physiologist, the pointless accident serves to reinforce his determination to follow through the methods of Darwinian nature to the end. As a stoic and spokesman for natural law, he welcomes the internal struggles which must go on for generations 'before the higher and more abstract pity conquers the lower and more concrete one' (p. 168). Like Davis's hero surveying Pyrna's society, Eustace sees the feelings of distaste for infanticide as nothing more than atavistic scruples outdated by a sounder biological ethic. Every victory of rationality in the community paves the way to the time when it will react against weakness and disease in the newborn as instinctively as a sow devours her runt. Cyriac the old hierarch, of more thoughtful temper, confesses to there being 'a great deal of the old Adam lingering wrongfully in me yet' (p. 168) - he knows he will never consent without inner conflict to the extinction of unhappy and imperfect lives. Between Eustace and Cyriac, and to a lesser degree between the earnest Clarence and Olive with her stirrings of idolatrous love, Allen builds up the same tensions which he also projects on to the world beyond the phalanstery. The mother's love for the afflicted child versus the higher ethics of the Founder are reflected in the eugenism of 'the highly civilised Euramerican countries' versus 'the old colonial societies' where cripples are suffered to live; and most concretely in 'the hearty, healthy, soundlimbed useful persons' (p. 169) versus the useless cripples, twisted also by the awareness of their misfortune. In the final scene, however, Allen relies completely on satire. After eighty days, after the opinions of three other physiologists have been secured and all hope of surgery abandoned, the child Rosebud is sorrowfully put to death - on the day renamed Darwin! - with the final invocation 'I release you, Rosebud, from a life for which you are naturally unfitted' (p. 175)· After chloroform has come to the aid of nature, the drama ends with the death of Olive and ritual chanting to the name of Supreme Humanity.

'The Child of the Phalanstery' exists to show the true colours of biological utilitarianism by inverting the present conventions of behaviour towards the handicapped. We can only release the spring that Allen's story has wound up by reaching after the 'common sense' interpretation: that regenerate humanity will continue to cherish the Unfit even when applying the felicific calculus leaves no doubt as to where the greater happiness lies. Unfortunately Alien does not make his behavioural norm, 'the old antisocial prephalansteric days' (p. 163), sound sufficiently attractive to be a norm. To set up a clash between maternal emotion and the principles of a rational society is too easy; it does not help towards resolving the problems that crop up once eugenics is taken seriously. Alien wants to take eugenics very seriously, and thus we have the wavering of his ironic tone and the eventual collapse into melodrama.
 

Eugenics and Prevailing Theories of Inheritance

Allen's most inclusive target in 'The Child of the Phalanstery' is that most vulnerable part of the Galtonian eugenics, on which it was rounded: the conviction that the mysteries of heredity had been thoroughly sounded. The birth of a pathetic cripple among a people who forbid marriage on such tenuous grounds as one of the partners having 'a distinctly bad or insubordinate temper' (p. 165) is the greatest ironic gloss of all on the footling activities of the biometric school. Yet when he writes positively Alien is prone, like the other reformist eugenicists, to many of the Galtonians' misconceptions. He takes for granted, because Darwin supported it, the dysgenic effect of different reproductive rates in the different social classes. He assumes that recklessness and improvidence are inheritable. He is prepared to fling away as useless the operational definition of the 'Fit' but he is less than honest in refusing to redefine the 'Fit' clearly enough to permit debate about it. The Galtonians did at least see dimly that there was a teasing value judgement to be made; and according to taste they asserted the socially fittest to be the best intelligences, or the physically perfect, or those of the most approved beliefs, or those who measured up to any of a dozen other parameters. Though they did not openly call for clones of Lycurgus, Socrates or Galton, they could put out the call at once for the segregation and the purification of the model Fit, whatever the model was. Alien and Wallace shorted out the whole issue by reinstating sexual selection as the omnipotent eugenic agent. Hence the Fit became the descendants of those males taken as sexual partners by the mysterious Free Womankind. The whole subject thereby becomes esoteric.

The reformists and the Galtonians may also be linked by their totally incorrect theory of heredity. Properly, this is a matter for the following chapter; but one may anticipate just a little by noting that the very superficial view of heredity current at the end of the 1890s was far from being a minor academic confusion restricted to the lecture-hail and the technical journals. The rediscovery of Mendel's particulate theory still lay a decade in the future; and meanwhile prevailing opinion had it that, genetically, the child was a smoothly blended mixture of the inheritable characteristics of his parents. The appeal of this ancient idea was strong enough to secure the unquestioning acceptance of nearly all biologists, not just eugenicists, from 1859 onwards. The mistake that heredity is essentially qualitative surely arose from the custom of describing the various observable degrees of inheritance in terms of blood-lines, consanguinity and such related concepts. Since blood is a fluid, and given its primitive status as the very essence of life, it becomes a reasonable proposition that 'blood' may be diluted or blended, fortified or polluted. When Galton, in assessing the dysgenic effect of centuries of sacerdotal celibacy on the intellectual community, speaks of a diminished stream of virtue 'flowing in the veins of Europeans',⁵³ his metaphor of intermingling streams of good and evil, capability and stupidity, reveals how effectively language had him in thrall. But the reformists, as good applied Darwinians, had no more adequate a basis to their daring proposals; and they, too, made some wholly unrealistic statements about society's failure to preserve its pool of excellence. Alien, bewailing the restrictions imposed on the endowed individual by the need to conform to monogamy, finds that in consequence his offspring must be 'a single stream of diluted and homogenous children, in whom his native excellencies are masked and marred' ('Girl of the future', 53; my italics). We are supposed, in our mind's eye, to see the various colours of inheritable skills mingled together on some microscopic artist's palette, with the distinct bright hues of talent muddled together into some grey mediocrity. In this respect as in others, Victorian eugenics as a whole may have been post-Darwinian in origin but it was pre-scientific in its conceptual equipment. Neither biologist nor man of letters realised this until well into the present century.