Part 12

I gave Darwin full credit for having discovered and popularised this new “category of thought,” but the constant hallelujahs that were raised over the discovery of Evolution showed surely an extraordinary ignorance of the history of philosophical thought in Europe. Darwin himself was the very last person to claim evolution as a discovery of his own; but is there a single paper that has not called him the discoverer of Evolution? He knew too well how, particularly in his own special field of study, the controversy whether each so-called genus or species had required a separate act of creation, had been raging for centuries. He remembered the famous controversy in 1830 at the French Institute, between Cuvier and Geoffray Saint-Hilaire, and Goethe’s equally famous remarks on the subject. It would seem as if Darwin himself had originally been under the spell of the old idea that every species, if not every individual, required a special act of creation, and he describes, if I remember rightly, the shock it gave him when he saw for the first time that this idea had to be surrendered. It was evidently considered to be the orthodox view of creation, though I do not know why; nay, it seems to be so still, if we remember how the present Archbishop of Canterbury was represented as unfit to wear a mitre because he believed in evolution; that is, as I should say, in his senses. I myself, on the contrary, was given to understand at the time by my unorthodox friends that my want of belief in evolution was but a survival of my orthodox opinions. I was much puzzled before I could understand why I was looked at askance, till in one of the reviews I was told in so many words that if I did not believe in evolution, I must believe in the theory of special creations, or in nothing at all. Even Tyndall, dear honest Tyndall, told me one day at the Royal Institution that it was no use my kicking against the pricks, and I then had an opportunity of telling him my mind. “When some substance is brought you,” I said, “don’t you first of all analyse it to find out what it consists of, before you use it for any further experiments? Well, that is really what a student of language does. When you bring him a word like evolution, the first thing he asks for is an analysis or definition. That may often seem very discourteous, but it cannot be otherwise in any decent laboratory of chemistry or thought. Now if evolution is meant for an action, you cannot have an action without an actor, whether his action is direct or indirect. Of course you will say that we all know that, that it is mere childish logic; but, if so, we should not imagine that we can neglect this childish logic with impunity, that we can have a successful experiment without first wiping our crucibles clean. If, on the contrary, evolution is to be taken in the sense of a process excluding an actor or evolver, this should be clearly stated, and in that case the more familiar word ‘growth’ would have been far preferable, because it would not have raised unfounded expectations. But even growth means very little unless it is authenticated by history step by step.

“If then you tell me that there is growth, not only from the sperm to men like you and me, not only from an egg to a caterpillar, from a caterpillar to a chrysalis, and from a chrysalis to a butterfly, but likewise from inorganic to organised matter, from plants to animals, from reptiles to birds, from apes to men, I have not a word to say against it. I know you to be an honest man, and if you can assure me that there are historical facts, real, visible facts, to support this transition from one species to another, or even from one genus to another, I trust you. It would be simple arrogance were I to doubt your word, within your own special sphere of study. You have seen the transition or connecting links, you know that it is not only possible, but real, and there is an end of it. Only allow me to say that from a philosophical point of view there is nothing new in this concept of growth, or, as you call it, evolution. You would never say that Lamarck had been the discoverer of growth in nature, neither has it any definite meaning to me when you say that Darwin was the discoverer of evolution. I can understand enough of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ to enable me to admire his power of observation and his true genius of combination. I can see how he has reduced the number of unnecessary species, and of unnecessary acts of so-called special creation; and that possibly he has traced back the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to four beginnings, and in the end to one Creator. Darwin did not go beyond this, he required four beginnings and one Creator. It was left to his followers to carry out his principles, as they thought, by eliminating the Creator, and reducing the four beginnings to one. If you think that all this rests on well ascertained facts, I have nothing to say except to express my surprise that some men of great learning and undoubted honesty are not so positive as to these facts as you are. But with the exception of a Creator, that is, a subjective Author of the universe, all this is really outside my special province, and I could afford to be silent. Only when Darwin maintains the transition from some highly developed animal into a human being, I say, Stop! Here the student of language has a word to say, and I say that language is something that, even in its most rudimentary form, puts an impassable barrier between beast and man.”

Soon after, when I had been asked to give a new course of lectures at the Royal Institution, I had selected this very point, the barrier which language forms between man and brute, for my subject, and as Darwin’s “Descent of Man” was then occupying the thoughts of philosophers, I promised to give a course of lectures on “Darwin’s Philosophy of Language.” Entertaining, as I did, a sincere admiration for Darwin, I felt that it would have been even discourteous to attempt to be courteous to such a man by passing over in silence what he had said on language. This kind of courtesy is most offensive to a true man of science. Otherwise nothing would have been easier than to find antagonists for my purpose, beginning with Epicurus and ending with Mr. H. Wedgwood’s “Etymological Dictionary of the English Language” (second edition, 1872). It so happened that the author of that dictionary was a friend of Darwin’s, and had easily persuaded him that interjections and imitations of natural sounds formed the material elements of all human speech, and that, as certain animals barked, and mocking birds and parrots imitated sounds which they heard, there seemed to be no reason whatever why animals in a few millions of years should not have invented a language of their own. This naturally fell in with Darwin’s own views and wishes, and though he always spoke with great reserve on the subject of language, yet he would have been more than human if he had surrendered his conviction of the descent of man from some kind of animal on account of this, as his friend had assured him, so easily removable barrier of language. Given a sufficient number of years, he thought, and why should not bow-wow and pooh-pooh have evolved into “I bark” and “I despise”? The fact that no animal had ever evolved such words could not be denied, but it could be ignored, or explained away by evidence clearly showing that animals communicated with each other; as if to communicate were the same as to speak. My object in my lectures (published at the time in _Longman’s Magazine_) was to show that no such transition from _pooh-pooh_ to _I despise_ is possible; nay, that even the first step, the formation of roots, that is, of general concepts out of single sounds, that is, single percepts, is beyond the power of any animal, except the human animal. Even now it is only the human baby or puppy that can learn to imitate human language, and what is the mere learning of a language, compared with the creation of language, which was the real task of those human animals that became men? In all the arguments which I used in support of my theory—a theory no longer controverted, I believe, by any competent and independent scholar and thinker—I never used a single disrespectful word about Mr. Darwin. But for all that I was supposed to have blasphemed, again not by Mr. Darwin himself, but by those who called themselves his bulldogs. I was actually suspected of having written that notorious article in _The Quarterly Review_ which gave such just offence to Darwin. Darwin himself was above all this, and I have his letter in which he writes, 5th January, 1875:—

I have just read the few first pages of your article in _The Contemporary Review_, and I hope that you will permit me to say that neither I, nor my son, ever supposed that you were the author of the review in the Quarterly. You are about the last man in England to whom I should have attributed such a review. I know it was written by Mr. M., and the utterly false and base statements contained in it are worthy of the man.

But what was better still, Mr. Darwin gave me an opportunity of discussing the facts and arguments which stood between him and me in a personal interview. Sir John Lubbock took me to see the old philosopher at his place, Down, Beckenham, Kent, and there are few episodes in my life which I value more. I need not describe the simplicity of his house, and the grandeur of the man who had lived and worked in it for so many years. Darwin gave me a hearty welcome, showed me his garden and his flowers, and then took me into his study, and standing leaning against his desk began to examine me. He said at once that personally he was quite ignorant of the science of language, and had taken his facts and opinions chiefly from his friend, Mr. Wedgwood. I had been warned that Darwin could not carry on a serious discussion for more than about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, as it always brought on his life-long complaint of sickness. I therefore put before him in the shortest way possible the difficulties which prevented me from accepting the theory of animals forming a language out of interjections and sounds of nature. I laid stress on the fact that no animal, except the human animal, had ever made a step towards generalisation of percepts, and towards roots, the real elements of all languages, as signs of such generalised percepts, and I gave him a few illustrations of how our words for one to ten, for father, mother, sun and moon had really and historically been evolved. That man thus formed a real anomaly in the growth of the animal kingdom, as conceived by him, I fully admitted; but it was impossible for me to ignore facts, and language in its true meaning has always been to my mind a fact that could not be wiped away by argument, as little as the Himalayas could be wiped away with a silk handkerchief even in millions of years. He listened most attentively without making any objections, but before he shook hands and left me, he said in the kindest way, “You are a dangerous man.” I ventured to reply, “There can be no danger in our search for truth,” and he left the room.

He was exactly the man I had imagined, massive in his forehead, kind in his smile, and hardly bent under the burden of his knowledge or the burden of his years. I must give one more of his letters, because my late friend Romanes, who saw it in my album, seems to have entirely misapprehended its meaning. He saw in it a proof of Mr. Darwin’s extraordinary humility. I do not deny his humility, it was extraordinary, and, what is more, it was genuine. All great men know how little they know in comparison with what they do not know. They are humble, they do not only wish to appear so. But I see in Darwin’s letter far more of humour than of humility. I see him chuckling while he wrote it, and though I value it as a treasure, I never looked upon it as a trophy.

DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT, _15th Oct., 1875_.

MY DEAR SIR,

I am greatly obliged to you for so kindly sending me your essay, which I am sure will interest me much. With respect to our differences, though some of your remarks have been rather stinging, they have all been made so gracefully, I declare that I am like the man in the story who boasted that he had been soundly horsewhipped by a Duke.

Pray believe me, Yours very sincerely, CHARLES DARWIN.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ROYALTIES I

By royal I do not mean kings and emperors only, or queens and empresses. I should have very little to tell of them. But royal, as is well known, has a wider meaning. The families of all reigning sovereigns, whether grand dukes, dukes, princes, landgraves, electors, etc., are royalty, nay even certain mediatised families, families that have ceased to be reigning, and which are very numerous on the continent, claim the same status, and may therefore intermarry with royal princes and princesses. Princes and princesses may also marry persons who are not royalty, but in that case the marriage is morganatic—a perfectly good and legal form of marriage both from an ecclesiastical and civil point of view, only that the children of such marriages, though perfectly legitimate, cannot succeed to the throne: in many cases no great loss to them. It has been my good fortune to see a good deal of royalty during the whole of my life. I say good fortune on purpose, for, with all the drawbacks inherent in Court life, royal persons enjoy some great advantages. Their position is assured and well defined. It requires no kind of self-assertion, and wherever they appear, they have no equals, no rivals, and hardly any enviers. They know that their presence always gives pleasure, and that every kind word or look from them is highly appreciated. They seldom have any inducement to try to appear different from what they are, or to disguise what they think or feel. What is the use of being a bishop, Stanley used to say, except that you can speak your own mind! The same applies to crowned heads, and if some of them, and it may be some bishops also, do not avail themselves of this privilege, it is surely their own fault. No doubt, if a bishop wants to become an archbishop, he has to think twice about what he may and what he may not say. But a king or a prince does not generally want to become anything else, and as they want nothing from anybody, they are not likely to scheme, to flatter, or to deceive. Whatever people may say of the atmosphere of courts and the insincerity of courtiers, the sovereign himself, if only left to himself, if only seen in his own private cabinet, is generally above the vitiated atmosphere that pervades his palace, nor does he, as a rule, while speaking with perfect freedom himself, dislike perfect freedom in others.

Of course there are differences among royalty as well as among commonalty. Some sovereigns have become so accustomed to the daily supply of the very cheapest flattery, that the slightest divergence from the tone of their courtiers is apt to startle or to offend them. Still most human beings like fresh air.

And have we not known persons who display their mitres and shake their crosiers before our faces, far more than kings their crowns and their sceptres? There is a whole class of people in ordinary life who have _become_ something, and who seem always to be thanking God that they are not as other men are. They have ceased to be what they were, quite unaware that even in becoming something, there ought always to be or to remain something that becomes or has become. They seem to have been created afresh when they were created peers, temporal or spiritual.

But we must not be unfair to these new creations or creatures. I have known bishops, and archbishops too, in England, who, to their friends, always remained Thirlwalls or Thomsons, and in the second place only Bishops of St. David’s or Archbishops of York. My friend Arthur Stanley never became a dean. He was always Stanley; Dean of Westminster, if necessary. If he had been what he ought to have been, Archbishop of Canterbury, he would never have ceased to be A. P. Stanley, his chuckle would always have been just the same, and if his admirers had presented him with a mitre and crosier, he would probably have put the mitre on his head sideways, and said to his friends what another bishop is reported to have said on a similar occasion: “Thank you, my friends, but a new hat and an alpaca umbrella would have been far more useful than a mitre and a crosier.” With regard to royal personages, they have the great advantage that they are to their business born. They have not become, they were born royal. I was much struck by the extraordinary power of observation of a French friend of mine, who, when in 1855 the Queen and the Empress Eugénie entered the Grand Opera at Paris together, and were received with immense applause, turned to his neighbour, an Englishman, and said: “Look at the difference between your Queen and our Empress.” They had both bowed most graciously, and then sat down. “Did you not observe,” he continued, “how the Empress looked round to see if there was a chair for her before she sat down. But your Queen, a born Queen, sat down without looking. She knew a chair _must_ be there, as surely as she is Queen of England.”

There must be something to hedge a king. While most people have to move in a crowd, and hold their own even in a mob—and it is difficult to move with ease when you are hustled and pushed—royal persons are never in a crowd, and have never to adopt a position of self-defence or self-assertion. Still there is a difference between royal persons also. Some of them with all their dignity manage to hide their crown in everyday life; others seem always conscious that it is there, and that they must not condescend too low, lest it should tumble from their head.

My first acquaintance with royalty was at Dessau, my native town. Much has been written to ridicule the small German princes and their small Courts. And it cannot be denied that the etiquette kept up by the courtiers, and the nobility, in some of the small capitals of Germany is ludicrous in the extreme. But there is in the sovereigns themselves an inherited dignity, a sentiment of _noblesse oblige_, which demands respect. The reigning Duke of Anhalt-Dessau was to us boys a being by himself, and no wonder. Though the Duchy was so small that on one occasion a troublesome political agitator, who had been expelled from the Duchy, threatened to throw stones and break the Duke’s windows as soon as he had crossed the frontier, to us children Dessau was our world. When I was a child, the town of Dessau, the capital of the Duchy, contained not more than 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants, but the Duke, Leopold Friedrich (1817–1871), was really the most independent sovereign in Europe. He was perfectly irresponsible, a constitution did not exist, and was never allowed to be mentioned. All appointments were made by the Duke, all salaries and pensions were paid from the Ducal chest, whatever existed in the whole Duchy belonged, or seemed to belong, to him. There was no appeal from him, at least not in practice, whatever it may have been in theory. If more money was wanted, the Dukes, I believe, had only to issue a new tax, and the money was forthcoming. And with all that one never, or hardly ever, heard of any act of injustice. The Duke was rich, nearly the whole of the Duchy belonged to him, and he had large landed property elsewhere also. Taxation was low, and during years of war and distress, taxes were actually remitted by the Dukes. The only public opinion there was, was represented by the Duke’s own permanent civil service, and certainly in it tradition was so strong that even the Duke, independent as he was, would have hesitated before going against it.

But the Duke himself was a splendid example of uprightness, fairness, and justice. He belonged to one of the oldest reigning families in Europe. The Hohenzollern, and even the Hohenstaufen, were but of yesterday compared with the glorious ancestors of the Ascanian princes. They did not actually claim descent from Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, nor from Askenas, the grandson of Japhet, though some crazy genealogists may have done so; but there is no flaw in their pedigree from the present Duke to Albrecht the Bear, Markgrave of Brandenburg in 1134. Some people would probably say that he belonged to a _totemistic_ age. The Duke whom I knew, and who died in 1871, was the eighteenth successor of this Albrecht the Bear, and though his possessions had been much reduced in the course of centuries, he knew what was due from him to his name, and to the blood of his ancestors. He never forgot it. He was a tall and very handsome man, very quiet, very self-contained, particularly during the later part of his life, when his increasing deafness made any free intercourse between him and his friends and officials extremely difficult. He worked as hard as any of his ministers, and no wonder, considering that everything, whether important or not, had finally to be decided by him. As he had been much attached to my father, and as my grandfather was his president or prime minister, he took some interest in me when I was a boy at school in Dessau, and I can remember standing before him and looking up to him in his cabinet with fear and trembling, although nothing could be kinder than the handsome tall man with his deep voice and his slowly uttered words; he seemed to move in an atmosphere of his own, far removed from the life of his subjects. The ducal castle at Dessau was a grand old building, a quadrangle open in front, with turrets that held the staircases leading up to the reception rooms. Some of his ancestors had been highly cultivated men, who had travelled in Italy, France, and England, and had collected treasures of art, which were afterwards stored up in the old Palace (Schloss) at Dessau, and in several beautiful parks in the neighbourhood that had been laid out a hundred years ago after the model of English parks. The orange trees (Orangerie) in those parks and gardens were magnificent, and I do not remember having seen such an abundance of them anywhere else; but they suddenly began to wither and die, and even replanting them by their heads and letting the roots grow as new branches does not seem to have saved them.

The Duke and his highly cultivated Duchess were the little gods of Dessau. They seemed to live on their own Olympus. Everything depended on them; everything, such as theatre, concerts, or any public amusements, had to be provided out of their private purse. No wonder that the people looked up to them, and that whatever they did was considered right, whatever they said was repeated as gospel.