Introduction
Introductory Chapter of The Vital Science
Definitions and Perspectives
In the book of nature are written . . . the triumphs of survival, the tragedy of death and extinction, the tragi-comedy of degradation and inheritance, the gruesome lesson of parasitism, and the political satire of colonial organisms. Zoology is, indeed, a philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols.
H.G. WELLS (1893)
'The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it... Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian.' So runs the glittering epigram which opens Eminent Victorians, and it supplied Lytton Strachey with all the justification he needed to abandon historiography for iconoclasm -- with what successful result, everyone knows. Strachey's method, however, is a distinctly limited one; for our urge to understand that period, so close in time to us yet so remote in mood, cannot be fully assuaged by detached irony. And yet the historian of ideas, and especially the historian interested in the infiltration of scientific ideas into the wider cultural life, soon comes up against that shrewd paradox of Strachey's. There is a real sense in which we do know too much for comfort. The Darwinian revolution is an excellent case in point. About its transcendent importance no one today is likely to quarrel: Darwin has speedily taken his place alongside Copernicus and Newton in that small pantheon of scientists whose work has totally disrupted long-established habits of mind. But while the bones of Newton have been resting in Westminster Abbey for two and a half centuries, Darwin's neighbouring remains were placed there barely one long lifetime ago. The profound revelations he supplied are simply too close for us to get any real perspective on them in order to assess their permanent significance.
Let us suppose some historian were reckless enough to try to write a comprehensive account of the cultural impact of Darwinian biology just as far as the beginning of this century. At once Strachey's complaint would obtrude itself. Such a monumental project would have to range freely over the surrounding sciences, but it would also have to take notice of the contemporary theology, social theory, economics and various turn-of-the-century metaphysical systems like theosophy, Christian Science and spiritualism. Our historian would be obliged to investigate Henry Maine on the 'evolution' of the law, Walter Bagehot on sociology, and W.H. Mallock on conservative political theory. He would have to trace the strong influence of evolutionary notions on Victorian literary history and criticism. J.A. Symonds found in the central concepts of The Origin of Species usable analogies, a handy vocabulary and a typology for his critical essays; Walter Pater found biological relativism could be pleasingly extended to justify cultural and aesthetic relativism, too; Leslie Stephen found that natural selection could also make comprehensible the rise and fall of literary genres. Then, delving down into popular culture, our historian would be obliged to scrabble through the numerous ephemeral squibs and lampoons which were commonplace in the first post-Origin decades; he would have to look at dull set-speeches on evolution in forgotten novels of weakly satirical cast; he would assess the accuracy of pedagogical novels like Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) where the professor-hero and his nephew read off the story of life from the layers of rock as they descend into the earth.
Above all, he would not be able to refrain from a prolonged discussion of Social Darwinism. This politico-philosophical movement, a powerful though vague undercurrent in late-Victorian thought, is usually thought to have been a strong prop of the forces of reaction. Certainly on the extreme Right, as this found expression in certain of Nietzsche's dicta or in the violent doctrines of William Sumner (1840-1910), natural selection was indeed used to justify the gross inequalities of early industrial society. And yet at the same time certain other aggressively illiberal Social Darwinists professed themselves committed socialists, as did Karl Pearson (1857-1936). Even more taxing is the problem of accommodating the conservative Liberalism of Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics, or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection' and 'Inheritance' to Political Society (1872); or the attempted merging of Darwinism and utilitarianism in Leslie Stephen's The Science of Ethics (1882); or of Darwinism and social democracy in Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution (1894); or of Darwinism and anarchism in Petr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). As the very titles of these books suggest, Bagehot and Kropotkin, as well as many others of intermediate shades of opinion, all insisted vociferously that their extrapolation of Darwinism was the legitimate one. All of them were anxious to assert that only their political prejudices were the ones licensed by the Origin. Those on the moderate Left who were interested in biologically justified social theory were slower to assert themselves, but when they did so one result was an invigorated denial of man's right to his dominion over all living things. The Humanitarian League, which was founded by Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939) and other Fabians and which was active from 1891 until 1920, supported its twin causes of vegetarianism and anti-vivisection with quotations from The Descent of Man. Vegetarianism was defended with new anthropological data on the diet of primitive man and new physiological findings about the human digestive tract. In the more emotional utterances of the time, the carnivore is practically identified with the cannibal; and in some speculative fiction like H.G. Wells's 'A Story of the Days to Come' (1897) the dietary habits of the remote past (our present) are closely linked to implications of savagery and bestial conflict. We are told with some gusto that bland jellies and lucent curds have replaced 'the still recognisable fragments of recently killed animals, hideously charred and hacked' -- though it is stressed that in more subtle ways the reformed future society is no less Darwinian for all its dainty eating. In a Utopia of 1882, A Thousand Years Hence by 'Nunsowe Green', natural agriculture has been replaced by 'laboratorial organic production' whereby human corpses are decomposed and converted directly to food. The question here about what the most 'natural' method might be of responding to population pressure, and hence to the pressures of Darwinian selection (should it be by technologically assisted food-cycles, or by a return to the alleged nut and fruit diet of our pre-human ancestors?) is a trivial example of the fluid interpretation of biological information at the time. How can one judge between these competing Social Darwinisms? Our historian would not be able to evade this difficult question. Indeed, even before he could start work with a clear conscience on his main task he would have to explain how it happened that even the pre-Darwinian biology of the 1850s had already begun to influence distant areas of thought. To affect historical studies, for instance: the first volume of Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilisation in England (1857) displays its author's fascination with the part played by the forces of inheritance in the evolving pattern of events; and though the general conclusion Buckle reaches is that such speculations are premature and that historians will have to wait on the biologists' uncovering of general laws, he did not doubt that this would be accomplished within a few generations. The Origin gave focus to these tentative ambitions and, less than twenty years after Buckle, the naturalist, explorer and novelist William Winwood Reade tried his hand at a fully fledged and widely read Darwinian 'biohistory', The Martyrdom of Man (1872).
The present book has a rather limited ambition compared to the grand imaginary opus magnum sketched above. Its aim is much more modest: simply to detail the impact of certain selected topics within post-Darwinian biology on the late-Victorian literary imagination. Surprisingly, perhaps, these interrelationships have not yet attracted the detailed attention they deserve. One indicator of this emerged from the centenary celebrations of the publication of the Origin in 1959, a year seeing the appearance of work which does go some way towards giving a comprehensive overview of Darwin's cultural impact. We were told much of Darwin's place in philosophy, in Christianity, ecology and genetics; but his effect on the literary imagination received the sparsest treatment. Two years later, a series of lectures with claimed to give 'the range and general tendency of Darwin's intellectual influence' took as its headings Darwinism and the Bible, and natural theology, and social science -- not literature.1 To be sure, it was Darwin himself who set something of a precedent here, for when at the end of the Origin he gave a list of those disciplines he thought most likely to be affected by his theory he did not mention the humanities at all. Ever since, critics and historians have been fundamentally divided in their interpretation of Darwinism vis-Ă -vis the literary milieu. Do, for instance, Darwin's own writings have any claim on our attention as literature in their own right? Judgements here have ranged all the way from dismissive to adulatory. Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose much-criticised Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution was published in the centennial year, has hammered away at Darwin's sloppy semantics and the ineptitude of his style -- which criticisms were indeed commonplace among Darwin's contemporary supporters, notably T.H. Huxley. Yet, only ten years after Himmelfarb, Michael Ghiselin in his The Triumph of the Darwinian Method may be found urging that Darwin in his book on the fertilisation of orchids composed nothing less than a 'metaphysical satire' or a 'biological Candide' which is both a literary masterpiece and a century ahead of its time in its philosophical handling of the 'semantics of design'. So was Darwin a clumsy stylist hardly capable of a clear sentence or a witty satirical essayist, the Victorian Voltaire? He could not have been both. The difficulty comes in knowing what kind of evidence in proof would be acceptable to both sides.
As for Darwin's broader influence on the literary imagination, there has been no agreement at all -- neither about the nature of that influence nor even (in the extreme view) whether it is to be found at all. Some have asserted that Darwin's self-recognised plight of being jammed between his personal liberal optimism and the ferocious logic of Darwinism generated in others a sort of rueful mirth. Dwight Culler has claimed comedy to be the literary form which most vividly reflects the reversals in evolutionary thought, since randomness is as vital a constituent of comedy as determinism is of tragedy. 'Some found this tragic and moaned about "nature red in tooth and claw",' he has written, 'but the younger generation found it funny and breathed a sigh of relief.'2 For Culler the most Darwinian literature of all is that work by Lear, Wilde and Carroll -- and especially the Alice stories of 1865 and 1871 -- which dissolves away nearly all formal artistic structure, leaving the crazy disorder of pure farce. It goes without saying that this is totally opposed to the more traditional view that the most relevant literary genre, the one most fitted in its conception of human destiny to transform into art the biologists' new image of man, is tragedy. In this view the malignancies of nature revealed in King Lear are just what might be expected of an organic universe which, as James Sully put it in 1881 in a Nineteenth Century article, is 'always and everywhere the worst possible -- meaning that it contains as much of weakly suffering life as the conditions allow of'. Over the intervening century there has been no lack of proponents of Sully's mournful view. Ifor Evans, in Literature and Science (1954), took the position that no honest writer since the Origin has been able to read that work aright and find it funny; that a Darwinian blight has spread up to our own day and has indeed become endemic, with the consequence that 'from this sense of fear and depression in relationship to biological science the imaginative artist has never fully recovered'.3 In recent years Stanley Hyman has gone even farther than this. In studying Darwin's own writings 'as imaginative organisations, as though they were poems', he finds that the Origin's deep structure is itself that of dramatic tragedy, and that it is relevant to apply the Aristotelian definitions of agon and sparagmos, anagnorisis and epiphany to the driving logic of its argument. And the tragedy enacted in the Origin is said to be Darwin's own: the Oedipal fantasy or 'compensatory mother worship' of a man who, too civilised to murder his own hated father, by a cathartic act drove the Heavenly Father from the sphere of natural history.4 (As is usual in this kind of analysis, the fact that Darwin's writings express nothing but admiration tinged with awe for his father is conclusive evidence that he was repressing his loathing of him.) For those who find this psychoanalytic ingenuity forced, there is as an alternative the brisk scepticism of the historian Waiter Cannon. He adamantly refuses to see the Origin, or even biological prose generally, as having any rhetorical structure worth noticing or using figurative language at all creatively. For him the Origin is a dull monograph whose amateurish metaphors (a tree, a bank, a struggle, a chain, a beehive) are superfluous decoration on a structure built out of the massive freestone blocks of documented fact. These figures of speech, he says, are no more than 'available verbalisms' and Darwinism itself profoundly anti-literary because it proves conclusively in its style and its freedom from moralistic assumptions that science has outgrown all the ancient resources of myth, ritual and drama. No single artist, either contemporary or modern, can hope to master its complex vision, even though misguided writers have done their best to deal with the irritant of Darwin's elegant demonstration by coating it with a pearly and spurious optimistic evolutionism.
Important though the endeavour is, it is hard to imagine how such yawning gulfs between interpretations could ever be bridged. It is worth stressing, however, the strongly historical perspective of Cannon and those who likewise offer us Darwin the plain-speaking, mundane scientist. It just will not do to take insufficient notice, or no notice at all, of the powerful mythopoeic capacities of the nineteenth-century biologists themselves, or of the imaginative suggestiveness of issues within biology apart from the central evolutionary debate. Indeed, since Walter Myers's unhappily forgotten The Later Realism (1927) was written, it has hardly been recognised that there were any such issues coming within writers' purview. In his book, by striking out along a most original path of argument, Myers tried to explain how shifts in the technique of characterisation in the novel may to some extent be accounted for by the emergence of new problems in biology -- and certainly not only in evolutionary biology. He found connections, for instance, between the attitude to eccentric personality in the great Victorian novelists (deviations from the social norm are, in Meredith and Eliot, said to be treated as amusing or bizarre) and the Darwinian insistence that conformity in a static environment has survival value. By the end of the century, Myers recognises, accounting for mutation and variation has become the crucial biological problem -- a problem which, he says, 'enlarged the conception of heredity to a roominess which includes and accounts for wide deviations from the type'5 The effect on novelists' technique was to make a more diffuse presentation acceptable. In support of this thesis Myers goes on to propose that Meredith's The Egoist (1879) and Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) belong to one distinct phase in the history of ideas, and D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl (1920) and Hugo de Vries's lectures on Species and Varieties (1905) to quite another. While interesting enough, the tracing of such obscure connections places great pressure on the assumption that there is an unavoidable pool of scientific notions into which a novelist is, willy nilly, plunged; for how else can any systematic parallel be drawn between the severely technical Vries and the avowedly anti-scientific Lawrence? Possibly there is such a shared milieu, but this study does not attempt to explore it: while readily accepting Myers's conviction that quite complex biological ideas were of literary significance in this period, its concern is restricted to those writers who came to grips consciously and deliberately with such ideas. Our argument will be that in late-Victorian Britain a group of novelists and essayists (not poets: the part played by Darwinism in Victorian poetry poses different questions which have been answered in different ways in several extensive studies) thoroughly searched among the data of the life sciences and found there material peculiarly susceptible to imaginative transformation. They were led to make this search, and were demonstrably successful in it, because during the few decades which elapsed between the publication of the Origin and the foundation of Mendelian genetics around the turn of the century evolutionary biology was in a state of extraordinary confusion and ambiguity, and a wide range of writers were able to exploit the science for their own aesthetic or polemic ends. We will expand, define and illustrate this claim by looking in successive chapters at certain biological 'unit-ideas' (in A.O. Lovejoy's phrase) which in this span of forty years were of extreme interest to the theoretical scientist and man of letters alike.
Darwin's Literary Impact: the Dominant View
One of the most thoughtful contributions to the celebration of the Origin's centenary was Morse Peckham's tightly knit essay 'Darwinism and Darwinisticism'. The problem Peckham addresses springs from his warning that 'the locus of cultural history is covert behaviour' and that our understanding of the way in which any new idea is assimilated into society is woefully limited. But Peckham certainly intended his essay to sound more than a monitory note. He was calling for action:
when one tries to tally up the writers affected and to list the books and make an inventory of passages showing Darwinian influence and Darwinian assumptions in novels, poems, and essays, a fog seems to arise in one's mind, through which are discernible twinkles of what may or may not be bits of genuine Darwinism.6
We can assuredly sympathise with Peckham's difficulties of recognition, but for present purposes it is important to notice the assumption that real Darwinism is, or should be, a clearly discernible entity: something which is 'genuine'; which can have an unequivocal 'influence' and give rise to 'assumptions'. Peckham's argument moves forward from the position that 'Darwinism' is a clear-cut term in the history of biology and was so from the beginning, and that 'Darwinisticism' is related to this in much the same way that phrenology is related to neurology -- or a fake science to a real one. In principle it is possible -- and ought to be so in practice -- to disperse the metaphorical fog and reveal the actual, precise quantity of Darwinism utilised in any given sample of Victorian prose; to dismiss the 'Darwinistic' or quasi-biological as merely spurious; to explain how (to come down to particulars) Thomas Hardy read Darwin properly and is therefore a Darwinian writer while Samuel Butler did not and is not. In this respect Peckham draws together and makes quite explicit the presumption of earlier historians -- the studies by Lionel Stevenson (1932), Leo Henkin (1940) and Georg Roppen (1956) being paramount -- that there need be little difficulty in making clear the relevant intellectual background. The nature of Darwin's achievement has seemed unambiguous enough, and the range of possible literary reactions which are true to its spirit quite circumscribed. Without, one hopes, doing too much violence to what are very different books, the consensus among literary historians may perhaps be described in the following terms.
There has been a very general recognition that evolution as such was an ancient doctrine, teaching the essential continuity of all life and the hierarchical relation (or, as some pre-Darwinian speculators had even insisted, the transformation) of lowlier forms to higher. Darwin's achievement was to fit out this venerable doctrine with the new motor of natural selection which, when rigorously considered -- as it rarely was, in practice -- dispensed with the need to hypothesise any kind of supernatural creative Power. The rise of observational astronomy had already brought home painfully the loneliness of the earth and the minuteness of the habitual human sphere of action. But Darwinian biology went much further in lowering man's prestige. Was it not therefore inevitable that its only emotional effect must be to humble his pride almost unbearably? For the Origin tore away man's image of himself as a creature of divine fiat, set by God's deliberate choice on a rung of the ladder of organic being -- a little below the angels, to be sure, but many rungs above the beasts. But man now stood revealed as the latest and temporary product of nature's assembly-line, a line which ran all the way back to the primordial ooze, and beyond that to a condensing gas-cloud on the rim of an insignificant galaxy. Nowhere, except in his own imperfect and presumably still evolving brain, could post-Darwinian man discover any evidence of mind at work, of goal-directed processes. In the face of this discovery there was, as the nineteenth century ran towards its close, a flight, best demonstrated and documented by literary writers, into an annihilating scepticism based not on the superficial and easily detected untrustworthiness of the senses, but on that of the brain itself. Darwin himself was affected to some degree, for in certain black moods he was struck by the appalling thought that even the thesis of the Origin -- rock-solid though it seemed to be -- was surely undercut by being the dubious product of an upstart monkey's brain. Why should a brain evolved by blind forces for the purpose of gathering fruit more efficiently be able to demonstrate the grandest law of organic nature? Such a degree of cynicism even Diogenes might have flinched from.
Turning now to the impact of Darwinism on the creative imagination, there can in this reading be only one truly informed response. It is that to be found in the novels and stories written after 1859 where those who are pleased to think themselves free from self-delusion strike the appropriate if rather self-conscious pose:
From that time be began to show symptoms of insanity... He dressed always in black, and said that he was in mourning for mankind. The works of Malthus and Darwin, bound in sombre covers, were placed on a table in his room; the first was lettered outside The Book of Doubt and the second The Book of Despair. He took long solitary walks in the most secluded parts of the estate, and was sometimes seen gesticulating to the heavens, sometimes seated by the wayside plucking grass and casting it from him with a strange, tremulous movement of the hands.
Arthur Elliott, hero of The Outcast (1875) by the fervent Darwinian Winwood Reade, hangs himself after his eccentric bibliographical exercise because he is unwilling to live with his nightmare vision of the world as a botched dramatic production by a young and inexperienced playwright, which has been created with a 'want of symmetry in form and of finish in detail, a prodigal waste of raw material, a roughness of style and execution which bear the stamp of inexperience'. Three years later in 1878 one of the members of Robert Louis Stevenson's Suicide Club wants to die as quickly as possible not because of remorse over some vile crime, but just because he had been 'induced to believe in Mr. Darwin'. One may concede that these fictional melancholiacs took an extreme, even a histrionic, line; but, by any honest reading of the inescapable human import of Darwinism, should not their response be considered logical enough -- even as being inevitable when the argument is stripped down to its core? For the Origin's message is surely that the greater number of organisms is not destined to survive long and is of no intrinsic value. Suicide or at least the blackest depression might well be thought to be the only rational response, anything less being the futile gesture of the ostrich. And yet, even if the fullest weight is given to the biological pessimism of Hardy and Tennyson and Reade, it can hardly be claimed that the self-proclaimed Darwinians of the later Victorian literary world were remarkable for their Origin-induced despair. On the contrary: those who were accepted most readily as expressing the spirit of the age -- Meredith, Swinburne, Browning and Kingsley come to mind at once -- certainly believed, each in his own fashion, that he could be an individualist, a strenuous optimist and a Darwinian simultaneously. Were they mistaken? Surely, the argument runs, they were. To revert to Morse Peckham's terminology, the literary employment of biology by this majority should be termed 'Darwinistic' (or, crudely, erroneous) and not 'Darwinian' at all in the strict sense so clearly established, allegedly, by Darwin himself. There is simply no optimism to be sucked out of the Origin when read attentively. Any claim to the contrary, no matter how ingenious, is merely individual and cultural self-delusion, and could have been exposed as such in its own day.
Such, stated as baldly as possible, is the argument of the most elaborate accounts of the literary response to biological controversy in the post-Darwinian period. None considers it plausible that any writer of this generation might have been influenced decisively by the minutiae of biological investigation. Where praise is given to a writer for his biological insight, it is likely to be because he anticipated and exploited those lines of thought that have since proven to be conceptually fruitful. Thus Conway Zirkle, a historian of biology, dislikes the work of Butler and Shaw because it is avowedly anti-Darwinian propaganda; on the other hand, he admires Kipling's Just So Stories (1902) because he finds them demonstrating with excellent humour that Lamarckian inheritance 'really belongs in the entertaining myths of childhood' and therefore neither on aesthetic nor scientific grounds need be taken seriously by adult sensibilities.7 He does not for a moment find it relevant to inquire into Kipling's detailed knowledge, if any, of the pre-Mendelian theories of inheritance of his day. The same attitude pervades the structure of two standard works treating of the literary effects of the Darwinian revolution: Stevenson and Henkin share a simple model of the response to Darwinism which is one of martial conflict; that it was a question of a long-fought struggle extending over several decades but ending with the decisive triumph of reason. They take it for granted that what they are doing is exhuming a short-lived and even a rather insignificant episode in literary history in which the dominant movement is that of writers coming to terms with certain uncongenial facts whose status as facts was not to be questioned. And, the battle being won, there was a very rapid erosion of literary interest. Henkin writes:
by 1910 the great controversy which had raged around the name of Darwin had long subsided. Evolution, then, had invaded every branch of science, ethics, philosophy, and sociology. As such it had entered so generally into the warp and woof of modern thought as to be indistinguishable as an independent factor.8
This has the same tone of one conducting an autopsy employed by Stevenson eight years earlier:
by the nineties the period of evolutionary excitement in English poetry was at an end... the theory of evolution had ceased to be an intellectual cataclysm and had assumed its place in the general perspective of knowledge, taken for granted as the prevalent hypothesis, and not of sufficient importance to worry the non-scientific mind.9
Here the assumption is explicit that there is literature only in confrontation and conflict, in 'worrying' hypotheses. Henkin identifies this scientific battle with 'evolution' tout court, and likewise presupposes the Darwinian debate to have been a single entity waxing and then slowly waning in its power to inspire the literary mind. In Henkin's case the martial model then controls the literary judgements (or, more precisely, the selection of texts) because he places his emphasis on what he takes to be the increasing impurity, with the passage of time, of the literary response to the substantive scientific issues. He goes on to describe the concomitant growth of merely distorted, weird and even preposterous uses of 'evolution' in a string of mediocre novels and, eventually, in comic strips, where the last echoes of controversy at last faded into silence. But Darwinism is not of course a synonym for evolution but one explanation (out of several, readily defensible, current at the time) for it; and no notice at all is taken of the fact that, for instance, the concern of the Naturalistic school with heredity and environment all initially stemmed from Darwin's work but that each quickly branched off with a life -- a literary life -- of its own.
Setting for a moment our width of focus to its maximum, we seem to find here a belief that the Victorian life sciences and the contemporary literature occupied quite separate spheres. Sometimes this leads on to a demonstration of imaginative writers' intellectual inadequacies, and sometimes into the opposite defiant assertion of the primacy of literary values. Constant, however, is the assumption that the two spheres could communicate only in the very crudest terms; by means, in fact, of a set of cliches. What is more, this assertion tends to reinforce itself. Henkin, when he comes to deal with Thomas Hardy, whose imaginative response to certain quite technical problems of inheritance and variation was (as we shall see in a later chapter) really extraordinarily complex, limits himself to a few brief comments on the romances A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Two on a Tower (1882). These novels are far from being Hardy's best work; as usually happened when he was not on form he laid the scientific interest over a feeble story and failed to integrate the two. Henkin, by choosing to discuss the mediocre, inevitably concludes that the quality of response to biology, even with a master like Hardy, was mediocre too. We must give full weight to the difficulty of Henkin's task. In our own day we have seen the triumph of Darwinism in its most pristine form, thanks to that 'modern synthesis' (Julian Huxley's phrase) which has gradually emerged from a further century of work by geneticists, morphologists and palaeontologists. It is most difficult to recreate a period when the evidence was shifting, uncertain, and -- a most crucial point this, one which will be constantly in view in the succeeding pages -- the emotional pressure of speculation very much higher than today.
Only a much closer reading into the strong Victorian tradition of haute vulgarisation in biology can begin to open up the curious territory of what might be called the cultural history of a science as opposed to its technical history -- a territory where the real data are not the ideas constantly under discussion but the unquestioned assumptions and modes of thought. In particular, some interesting and subtle connections begin to be revealed between the creative writer and the biologist. To trace these connections it is necessary to turn away from Peckham's division -- how much Darwinism? how much Darwinisticism? -- to focus instead on the degree of creative usefulness of various plausible theories as these appeared to the writer and his contemporaries scientific and literary. Thinking in this direction begins to give us some purchase on such apparently intractable questions as the absolute neglect of the sensational claims of post-Darwinian biology by certain thinkers who were in an excellent position to appreciate their significance. We need to keep constantly before us the fact that even the new biology had no inescapable message for every literate Victorian. For very many of the most eminent and most aware there was no message at all. There had in every case to be some predisposition, some preliminary awareness that it was the data of this science that could be a critical component in the formation of his personal vision. If that awareness was missing -- and it is to be found in relatively few writers of that fertile time -- the literary artist was no less likely than any of his semi-literate brethren to be quite-satisfied with the vulgar classification of Darwin's work as 'the ape theory' and Huxley's essays as 'Huxley on Atheism'. Unless the writer could see exciting implications cached within his biological reading he would not respond; or perhaps that reading would simply become one prop of many to broad feelings of hope or despair, and appeal be made to it without real understanding and often only for dramatic effect. But, given that all-important predisposition (and it is to be found most typically where there was a close interconnection of literary and scientific interests and often emerged from some training, formal or informal, in biology), then the uses to which biological information might be put were very various indeed, for ambiguities lay at the heart of most of the problems which the biologists were then grappling with. For the predisposed there was available a great jumbled repository of fact and speculation to inspire the artist.
In some cases the liaison was not made directly between the creative writer and the biologist. The flow of information went first through an interpretative middleman, a populariser, who was indeed sometimes one or other of the parties in a slightly different role. The part played by such middlemen has been much neglected in the past, for it requires an investigation of the wide and vague region of expository and polemic prose in the often uncharted wilderness of the Victorian periodicals. As Alvar Ellegard has shown in great detail, it was in the review article that the most important responses to Darwinism were first made explicit, and these articles collectively constitute the best index of the shifts in educated public opinion on this subject. Indeed, Ellegard has expressed his suspicions of more directly literary responses to biological controversy -- those of, say, novelists, essayists, reviewers -- in no uncertain terms, on the ground that the mirror they hold up to scientific history is bound to be a distorting one. Such responses are not to be trusted, he feels, because 'most of these people have no means of finding out the opinion of more than a small circle, and they are seldom aware of the danger of generalising from their limited experience. In the second place, they are seldom disinterested seekers after truth.'10 Ellegard is writing as a scientific historiographer, and his strictures are right and proper. A study of the fate of ideas in literary hands must, however, investigate long-exploded error just as reverently as the truth, and take as its texts those writings which lie well on the subjective side of the relatively public knowledge that is science. Huxley's 'lay sermons' and the close-knit articles directed at the concerned layman by Alfred Russel Wallace and H.G. Wells; the 'popular essays and addresses' of a dozen scientific sages; the lesser productions of popularisers now utterly forgotten: all of these helped to establish the human interest of the new biology in a way not markedly different from the fictional writers, and are just as legitimate objects of historical scrutiny. Such publicists were often researchers or novelists (or both) in their own right. They took most seriously, though never heavily, their obligation -- and it was in tune with the times that they often perceived it to be their moral obligation -- to offer the public at large their interpretation of biological research. To do so effectively, these higher journalists mastered all the skills of literature. At their best they not only impinged upon the literary culture but were also integral with it.
Final Definitions and Limitations
Any study dealing with the cultural impact of biology in the nineteenth century cannot but reckon with the fact that in this period the life sciences were much more loosely organised than they are today. The very word 'biology' went through several shades of meaning after being coined at the beginning of the century by Gottfried Reinhold. In its English form the word first meant the study of human life exclusively and its modern meaning did not gain general currency until the 1850s. As for its subject matter, information which would now be firmly classified as being within the province of the animal psychologist or ethologist tended to find its way into morphological or entomological texts -- and much of it would be rejected altogether today as a mishmash of anecdote and sentimental observation. Should, for example, anthropology be regarded as a discipline distinct from biology when it comes to making out its uses in literature? Certainly in some of its sub-disciplines (physical anthropology, anthropometry) Victorian anthropology is hardly to be distinguished from pseudo-biological systems like phrenology, and even at its most lucid it tended to be used as an adjunct to evolutionary speculation. Darwin himself drew on a massive array of evidence supplied by field anthropologists in The Descent of Man, and he was largely uncritical of those workers' penchant for manufacturing whole series of normative judgements based on such data as the cranial capacities of different races. Victorian sociology drew heavily on biology and anthropology, too, as John C. Greene has demonstrated, though these three disciplines were rendered at least formally distinct with the foundation of the Anthropological Society of London in 1863.11 The appeal of anthropology for the lay writer and reader is well marked in the attention given to it by popular novelists. The pioneering studies of alien cultures gave rise almost at once to what has been called the romance of the clash of races -- such romances typically offering the reader a protagonist who reverts dramatically to neanderthalism or displays unexpected atavistic tendencies. An example of the genre is Grant Allen's story 'The Reverend John Creery' (c. 1880). An African savage, brought to England and educated at Oxford, returns to his homeland as a missionary accompanied by his English wife. As time passes she has to endure his horrifying relapse into savagery, the message being that acquired habits of mind must break down before the urgent impulses of the blood. Actually, Grant Allen's handling of the familiar theme is a little more subtle than that, because although he is generally confident in his placement of the lower races he does oscillate somewhat in his convictions about which conditioning is best for a given environment. This very awareness that even the most mundane habits of life are cultural conditioning derives from the relativism which anthropology fostered in the 1870s and later. Fortunately, Brian Street's The Savage in Literature (1975), which covers the period 1858-1920, is thorough enough for the literary concern with anthropology to be set on one side here. Certainly biology, anthropology and sociology were recognised as entirely distinct disciplines by the chosen terminal date.
Though the opening and closing dates of this study may seem a little arbitrary -- is there, after all, any such thing as 'late-Victorian' biology? does progress in a science obey the limits of a reign? -- they are not actually so. Since the immediately preceding ground has been well mapped out,12 the natural starting-point is the publication of The Origin of Species on 26 November 1859 -- the event which we will assume to have been the most divisive one in 'Victorian' cultural history. And, oddly enough, at the other end of our period the years 1900 and 1901, though not indeed the end of an era, did see biology move into a new phase of growth after a time of stagnation. Two of the foremost and most persuasive of the anti-Darwinians, St George Mivart and George Douglas Campbell, eighth Duke of Argyll, both died in 1900 -- which was also the year of the rediscovery of Mendel's crucial work on the laws of inheritance by Vries, Correns and Tschermak von Seysenegg and their rapid confirmation of those laws. Though not himself an evolutionist, Mendel established experimentally the exact nature of the raw material on which natural selection worked, thereby removing at a stroke the overwhelming chief technical objection to orthodox Darwinism. Even with our rather short perspective on these events, we can see clearly enough that Mendelism in the long run closed down the enduring controversy about the purposive versus the non-purposive nature of the evolutionary process. In 1901 the rounding of the journal Biometrika under the editorship of Karl Pearson and Francis Gaiton began the empirical study of human variation. This was the very first methodical -- and certainly long overdue -- attempt to gather a wide range of data from the population at large, and was supposed to bring some rigour to ex cathedra pronouncements on eugenics -- something which will be considered, in relation to the parallel imaginative products, in the fifth chapter. In fact, the net effect of the long-term investigations of the biometricians eventually spelled out the finish to Victorian eugenics as first established by Galton, by demonstrating just how naive his attitude had been to the inheritance of variations and the possible human interference in these processes.
Though it is not so clearly marked, the few years around 1900 also form a natural divide as far as the imaginative response is concerned. The latest work to be considered in detail in these pages is Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, published in 1903. About this time (it is impossible to date it precisely) the increased complexity of biological research at last dissolved the very strong sentiment that the life sciences were too important to be left to the professionals. Butler, during the years that he wrote The Way of All Flesh (1873-84), really believed, and with some substance, that what he had to say could materially affect the direction of biological inquiry. But after 1903 the only literary figure still engaging in controversy with this supposition in mind was Bernard Shaw; and Shaw had nothing to add until he came to write Back to Methuselah in 1921 that had not already been expressed more succinctly by Butler before 1885.
Only in one respect has it proven necessary to make the closing date an elastic one. In the case of those biologists and naturalists whose most original contribution to their science was made before 1900 but who survived well into the new century, their later work has been treated in the appropriate detail to give a rounded account of their thought. Thus Wallace's drift towards supernatural evolutionism was completed well before 1900 but his definitive exposition of it, The World of Life, did not come until 1910.13 Galton's eugenic Utopia Kantsaywhere (1910) was similarly the product of his extreme old age, but it completes the pattern of his thinking and it would be impossible to omit this fiction without seriously warping an account of the literary response to eugenics. Something similar is also true of W.H. Hudson. After writing his Utopian romance A Crystal Age in 1887, Hudson altered his mind radically about the capacity of natural selection to produce organic perfection. In the light of this change much later on in his life, the variety of evolutionism to which Hudson held in the late 1880s stands revealed as much less secure than it would otherwise seem to be.
One final consequence of adhering to the chosen limits fairly closely is worth mentioning, with respect to Middlemarch (1871-2). George Eliot there draws many elaborate parallels between her organically structured novel and the society it mirrors on the one hand, and the researches of Tertius Lydgate into the structure of protoplasm on the other. But the action of the novel is in the early 1830s: Eliot very carefully makes Lydgate unaware of the real structure of the cell. For ironic reasons, so that the futility of the direction of his chosen research may be formally related to Casaubon's absurd mythography, she has Lydgate perplexed by difficulties that in real life were not resolved until the years 1838-9 by Schleiden and Schwann. Eliot took infinite pains to tie biological speculation into the great pattern of her novel, but the biology she is using is pre-Darwinian (as J.M. Forrester has shown, much of it was drawn from G.H. Lewes's pre-Origin study, The Physiology of Common Life of 1859) and therefore Middlemarch remains outside the scope of the present study.
It would be improper to end these preliminary remarks without formally recording the debt, obvious on every page, owed to A.O. Lovejoy. The methodology is a simplification of the one perfected by him to examine the concepts of plenitude, continuity and gradation in The Great Chain of Being (1936). Lovejoy's theme does not overlap much with the one treated here. The 'chain of being' metaphor, which refers to a hierarchy of living forms, may be found in conjunction with many varied beliefs: for instance, in the transmutation of species by natural agency (by Lamarckian besoin or Darwinian natural selection, or by unknown natural causes as in Robert Chambers); with a belief in the sequential creation of distinct species (by divine fiat or as in Genesis); or simply with a belief in a unity of design throughout and beyond nature (as we find in Pope's earlier poetry or the later Alfred Russel Wallace). The chain of being does not have to be a biological hypothesis at all, though in certain hands it tended to become one.
In The Great Chain of Being Lovejoy's range is vast: he covers centuries and tirelessly encompasses all kinds of written records from volumes of sermons to gardening manuals. In the rather smaller span of forty years the central chapters of what follows will take up in turn some of the expressly biological 'unit-ideas' which were of use to late-Victorian novelists, belles-lettristes, scientific journalists and others whose writings had, in the broadest sense, some pretensions to literature. Only that writing is included which attempted to rise above the level of mere conveyance of information to cajole, warn, abuse, encourage or inspire the reader. The selection of writers is limited to those who had a firm background in biology, no matter how grotesque their extrapolations from the limited and self-selected facts available to them -- and certainly to modern eyes some of those extrapolations appear very grotesque indeed. The test for inclusion applied throughout is that these writers' use of biological concepts should have been deliberate and imaginatively vital. All the writers considered could have explained in some detail where they stood with respect to the key controversies of their day; and it is for this ability, rather than for the absolute extent of their literary talents, that they are treated here. The first two chapters are given up to an interpretation of the history of Darwinism and extra-Darwinian biology up to the year 1900, from the viewpoint that, despite the great enlargement of systematic inquiry, these decades were, paradoxically, a time when the line separating biology from metaphysics became steadily harder to draw. The cultural interaction between biology and English letters over these years will be investigated in terms of the theory inherited from the Romantics which supposedly explains such interactions, and also by surveying the lines of communication open to the biologist and the use he made of them. After these preliminaries the remaining chapters are devoted to four large 'unit-ideas': namely evolutionism, or a theory of progress based on biology; degeneration; eugenics; and heredity. The first two of these central chapters, by setting two possible and quite self-consistent responses to selected biological information in direct opposition, will try to show the inherent difficulties in insisting on either consonance or dissonance with humanity's wishes as being the 'proper' interpretation of Darwinism, or comedy or tragedy as the genre most appropriate to absorb the new lessons. The third of these chapters, on eugenics, will examine popular rationalisations for interfering in the natural evolutionary processes, while the fourth and fifth will take up certain strands of the debate on heredity, elaborate them, and display their great literary fertility. All five chapters interlock conceptually and all are keyed to a discussion of at least two central texts. These texts are merely representative for the first three unit-ideas, but for the last the texts chosen are supreme products of the imaginative interest aroused by inheritance theory.
A supporter of Lovejoy's approach to the history of ideas has mentioned the accusation that anyone following it could well be led to 'read the third rate works under the impression that they are literary masterpieces'.14 In the following pages few purely aesthetic judgements will be made. Rather, it is hoped that they will communicate some sense of how the bare threads of biological inquiry might be woven up into a fabric sometimes dull, sometimes bright, but always at least humanly significant. The weaving of this new design, a metaphor for the integration into a culture, after much self-deception, grand posturing and anxious meditation, of a science's new paradigm, does not cease on any given date -- it continues endlessly. This book traces the vagaries of that extension over a curious forty-year spell.
Notes: Introduction
1 John C. Greene, Darwin and the Modern World View.
2 A. Dwight Culler, 'The Darwinian revolution and literary form', in George Lewis Levine and William Anthony Madden (eds), The Art of Victorian Prose, pp. 238-9.
3 B. Ifor Evans, Literature and Science, p. 75.
4 Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer, Freud as Imaginative Writers.
5 Walter Lawrence Myers, The Later Realism: A Study of Characterisation in the British Novel, p. 29.
6 Morse Peckham, 'Darwinism and Darwinisticism', Victorian Studies, vol. 3 (September 1959), p. 19.
7 Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, p. 348.
8 Leo Henkin, Darwinism in the English Novel, 1860-1910: The Impact of Evolution on Victorian Fiction, p.9.
9 Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets, pp. 53, 298.
10 Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872, p. 23.
11 John Wyan Burrow studies Darwin's reliance on data from all three disciplines in his 'Evolution and Anthropology in the 1860s: the Anthropological Society of London, 1863-71', Victorian Studies, 7 (December 1963), 137-54.
12 By Milton Millhauser in 'The Literary Impact of Vestiges of Creation', Modern Language Quarterly, 17 (September 1956), 213-26; and more fully in his Just before Darwin: Robert Chambers and 'Vestiges'.
13 Of The World of Life, Malcolm J. Kottler has said that 'coming so late in Wallace's life -- past his prime -- it was not influential'. ('Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism', Isis, 65 (1974), 184.) Wallace was 87 when he wrote this final statement of his evolutionism and, though its views are extreme, they certainly do not run counter to those Wallace had formed as much as forty years earlier. It merely elaborates them and in a sense makes them more self-consistent. And it was influential enough to attract more than one studied rebuttal.
14 Margaret M. Starkey, 'The History of Ideas and Literary Studies', Modern Language Quarterly, 13 (September 1952), 265.