The Kingdom of Speech (4 page)

Only his atrial-fluttering fear of Wallace somehow
smashing
his
whole life
by producing a book of his own, once again forestalling
me
and establishing
my
own
priority,
this time beyond the reach of any more monkey business by my Gentleman sidekicks—only this kept him out of Ilkley's sopping cemetery long enough to write his hard-shelled claim to priority. The flycatcher was still in Malay, so far as Darwin knew. But that hadn't kept him from being the actual creator of the Theory of Evolution the first time around. So who knew what he was concocting right now?

Darwin gave his book a twenty-one-word academic title, but common usage would quickly pare it down to four:
The Origin of Species
. Late September of 1859…and Darwin was going over the last details for publication, set to take place in two months, which would be late November—and no sign of Wallace anywhere, so far. He began to let his breath out slowly and slowly let his hopes rise. But he remained at Ilkley still, wrapped up in the spa's wet mummy sheets, still enduring a raging case of eczema and still trembling…for a reason that had nothing to do with Wallace. He hadn't dared push his theory all the way to its shocking conclusion, which would be the news, the revelation, that man did not come into this world in the image of God but out of the loins of an orangutan or some other big ape. Man was an animal and nothing but an animal. If he took it that far, all the way at once…he shuddered to think of how violent the reaction would be—the rage! the fury!—from the Church and the clueless Christian middle classes. He could see all his honors and medals and elite memberships crashing to earth amid the ruins of the reputation he had so single-mindedly aspired to ever since the
Beagle
returned home twenty-two years ago. So in
The Origin of Species
he drove the Theory of Evolution right up to
Homo sapiens'
s front door but not one inch closer…unless you counted a single, soft, one-knuckle tap two pages from the end of the book, offering a cryptic hint as to where he might be heading in a sequel, if he should he ever write one.

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity of gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
36

One faint cryptic hint too many, old chap! On November 19, five days before publication, an anonymous reviewer in the prestigious journal
Athenaeum
eviscerated the book and fried the entrails. A single sentence in the piece leaped out at Darwin: “If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?”
A man!
says his nameless assailant! At the time virtually all book reviews were unsigned, the theory being that anonymity gave the reviewer the freedom to be frank. But it wasn't supposed to give him carte blanche to make vicious distortions! This one had gone straight to that short obiter dictum two pages from the end and made it seem like the whole book is about man thrashing and splashing and gibbering away in some primordial muddy puddle somewhere. The message was: Don't risk your sanity trying to read it! Leave that to the philosophers and divines who enjoy dog-paddling around in such slop.

“If a monkey has become a man!”
…and Darwin thought he had so cleverly kept man hidden in the wings…So much for that delusion. Right away this bastard spots man peeking out from behind a curtain.
This bastard
—Darwin was never one to resort to off-color language, but then no one had ever hurt and humiliated him and dashed his hopes this thoroughly, either.
The first review!

On November 21, 1859, Hooker writes Darwin to say that he and Lyell think the asinine anonymous
Athenaeum
reviewer must be a geologist named Samuel Pickworth Woodward. Forever after, Woodward, hopelessly baffled, flinched whenever he found himself in the same room with Darwin. Darwin cut him dead every time or else gave him an iceberg. One-eighth of an iceberg's mass sticks up above the frigid surface with a tip of thirty-three-degree civility. The other seven-eighths is hidden under water…a gigantic ice boulder of frozen loathing and resentment, hard as a rock. In fact, the nameless hugger-mugger was another naturalist entirely, an Anglican priest named John Leifchild.

The
Athenaeum
blast so tenderized Darwin that he failed to understand what was happening when a regular storm of reviews and commentaries erupted during December and the first six months of 1860. Even mildly negative reviews hit him like body blows. The fierce ones cut him clear through to the gizzard. The
Edinburgh Review
ridiculed not only his theory but also his prose style, his scientific ignorance, his scholarly incompetence, all of it lazily afloat in his shallow brain. One had only to compare Darwin, the piece went on, with someone like, say, Britain's preeminent naturalist and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Owen.
37
Now,
there
we're talking about a deep thinker, a real scientist: Richard Owen, Richard Owen, Richard Owen. Owen's name kept coming up. Darwin went over the review repeatedly. He couldn't believe what he was looking at: as usual, it was unsigned…but the man's finicky rhetoric and would-be-cosmopolitan displays of how much French he knew gave the game away. It was his longtime friend-he-had-always-assumed…Richard Owen. He never spoke to Owen again.

By then he was in such a wary, defensive state of mind that even the positive reviews struck him as tepid or tentative—with one exception: an absolute rave in the very voice of the British upper orders, the London
Times
. The
Times
ran only one or two book reviews per month. Like the others, this review was published anonymously. But Darwin soon learned it was written by one of his younger adherents, the anatomist Thomas Huxley.
38
In a piece of dumb luck, Huxley had happened to run into the writer the
Times
had assigned to do the review. The man was moaning that he wasn't even remotely familiar with the subject. Huxley came up with the bright idea of writing the piece for him—anonymously, needless to say. Darwin wound up with an astounding boost in the mighty
Times
. Huxley became the best public relations wizard any scientist had ever had.

Huxley's background was similar to Alfred Wallace's, although their personalities could scarcely have been more different. Huxley's father was an up-against-it mathematics teacher who couldn't pay for his son's education beyond two years of grade school. The boy became a scientific prodigy all the same, a largely self-taught anatomist. At nineteen he discovered an internal component of hair no biologist had ever dreamed existed. By age twenty he had the pleasure of seeing it referred to in scientific journals as “Huxley's sheath.” It was the first of a series of anatomical discoveries he would make. He was only twenty-five when he was elected a member of the Royal Society.

The boy wonder was such a hot number in scientific circles that Darwin courted him as an acolyte, and the boy came through for him in a big way. He wrote five long, enthusiastic reviews of
The Origin of Species
in major journals in the space of four months, the two longest conveniently anonymous, and that was the least of it.
i
In person he was a good-enough-looking man, but with a bulldog's build, a bulldog's neck, and a bulldog's prognathous jaw when he was angry, which was often, since he loved a good fight. He was aware of all that and enjoyed being called “Darwin's bulldog.” In June of 1860, he starred in a much-written-about British Association for the Advancement of Science debate over Evolution against the Church of England's most renowned public speaker, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. He went on to create the X Club, a group of nine prominent naturalists, including Hooker, who met every month at some restaurant or a club and set about—very successfully—stacking influential university science faculties with Darwinists. The X Clubbers had a big hand in creating the pro-Darwinist journal
Nature
(which thrives to this day).
39
They attacked every Darwin doubter the moment he dared raise his voice. That mode of intimidation only intensified over time, leading to what is still known today as “the Neo-Darwinist Inquisition.”
40

Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin's theory of natural selection—he never did—but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was. No one dared flaunt such a loaded term, of course. Huxley said he was not an atheist but an agnostic. He made up the word. An agnostic, he said, was the opposite of a
gnostic
.
41
Gnostics held an early Christian and even pre-Christian belief that people should separate knowledge of the material world from the only true knowledge: the spiritual. An
agnostic
like him wasn't even sure there was a God. This newest Huxleyism entered the language the way “Huxley's sheath” had.

Huxley's great PR campaign happened to coincide with two sweeping mid-nineteenth-century developments in western Europe—Britain, especially—creating, as the phrase goes, a perfect storm. One was the sudden proliferation of magazines and newspapers, whipping up a competition not only for hard news but also for stories of every sort of social and intellectual trend…such as the Theory of Evolution. The second was what the German sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” Well-educated, would-be-sophisticated people all over Europe had begun to reject the magical, miraculous, superstitious, logically implausible doctrines of religion, such as the Virgin Birth of Christ, the Creation (of the world in seven days), Christ's Resurrection, the power of prayer, the omnipotence of God, and a thousand other notions that were irrational by their very nature. Three decades earlier, Coleridge had concluded that the influence of the clergy was fading so rapidly that he revived the by-now-obsolete term “clerisy.” The clerisy, he said, were the secular thinkers who had replaced the clergy here in the nineteenth century…in matters spiritual as well as philosophical.
j
Near the end of the century, while the Dreyfus case raged in France, the country's off-and-on president, Clemenceau, would call them (with a nod toward Anatole France and Émile Zola) “the intellectuals,” and that was the name that stuck, in England as well as France.

The Theory of Evolution eliminated all such mystification. At the higher altitudes of society, as well as in academia, people began to judge one another socially according to their belief, or not, in Darwin's great discovery. Practically all Church of England clergymen were well educated and well connected socially, and by 1859 the demystification of the world had extinguished whatever fire and brimstone they might have had left. The sheerly social lure of the theory, the status urge to be fashionable, was too much for them. Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below. There were plenty of clerical attacks on
The Origin of Species,
but they were so civil and rhetorically well mannered that the new agnostics didn't cringe in fear of an angry God, much less a vengeful one. The theory and the atheistic bias that came with it spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even though the great mass of the population kept on mooing and made sure America remained the most religious country on earth outside of the nations of Islam (and it remains so today).

Only in France was Darwin written off as just another little man with a big theory. It took three years for
The Origin of Species
to find a French publisher. France had gone through its own Evolution debate—the French term was “transformism”—thirty years earlier, mainly thanks to Lamarck's influence. But the leading French spokesman for transformism, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, made the mistake of taking on Georges Cuvier in debate. Cuvier, a zoologist, paleontologist, anatomist, politician, and aristocrat, was like Huxley in his aggressiveness. But he was classier, so to speak.
Baron
Cuvier was a fashion plate and a speaker who could switch from soft-voiced, lacerating wit to overpowering thunder in a blink. He found the transformist concept of gradual Evolution ludicrous. The much simpler truth was that species were constantly dying out and new ones were taking their place. French naturalists so feared Cuvier's brilliant fury that the Theory of Evolution—like the name Charles Darwin and the ism-magnifying term “Darwinism”—seldom saw print in France…and seldom does, to this day.

In Germany, on the other hand,
The Origin of Species
was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: “God is dead.” Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the “doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal” will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods”—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in “wars such as never have been fought before.” If we take one generation to be thirty years, that would have meant by 1904. In fact, the First World War broke out in 1914. This latter-day barbarism, he went on to say, will in the twenty-first century lead to something worse than the great wars: the total eclipse of all values.
42

It was not so much the book
The Origin of Species
as the talk about it that created such a stir. The book never came close to becoming a bestseller. Darwin was an engaging writer, but the science was too hard to comprehend. The first printing was only 1,250 copies.
k
Robert Chambers, still anonymous, reissued
Vestiges
to take advantage of the excitement…and outsold
The Origin of Species
by four or five to one. But Darwin's theory came up with dizzying frequency in newspaper and magazine articles and cartoons—the cartoonists delighted in depicting Darwin with an ape's body—in public debates high (Huxley versus Wilberforce) and low, in doggerel, and, of course, in sermons. No new idea had ever generated so much controversy, gossip, and befuddlement or so many heavy-laden books. By 1863 Darwin's own collection of clippings contained 347 reviews and 1,571 commentaries plus 336 pieces that were never sorted out by category.
43