Part 16

I know not whether it be worth relating, that when sent for to a nobleman, at Buxton, who conceived his health to have suffered by the use of tea, to which he was immoderately addicted, Darwin rang the bell, and ordered a pot of strong green tea to be brought up, and, filling both his patient's cup and his own, encouraged him to frequent and lavish draughts. I have heard that he was impatient of inquiries which related to diet; thinking, I suppose, that after the age of childhood, in ordinary cases, each person might regulate it best for himself. But from an almost entire abstinence from fermented liquors, he was, both by precept and example, a strenuous adviser. "He believed," says Miss Edgeworth, in her Memoirs of her Father, "that almost all the distempers of the higher classes of people arise from drinking, in some form or other, too much vinous spirit. To this he attributed the aristocratic disease of gout, the jaundice, and all bilious or liver complaints; in short all the family of pain. This opinion he supported in his writings with the force of his eloquence and reason; and still more in conversation, by all those powers of wit, satire, and peculiar humour, which never appeared fully to the public in his works, but which gained him strong ascendancy in private society. During his lifetime, he almost banished wine from the tables of the rich of his acquaintance; and persuaded most of the gentry in his own and the neighbouring counties to become water-drinkers." Here, I doubt, Miss Edgeworth has a little over-rated the extent of his influence. "Partly in jest, and partly in earnest, he expressed his suspicions, and carried his inferences on this subject, to a preposterous excess. When he heard that my father was bilious, he suspected that this must be the consequence of his having, since his residence in Ireland, and in compliance with the fashion of the country, indulged too freely in drinking. His letter, I remember, concluded with--Farewell, my dear friend. God keep you from whiskey--if he can."

His opinion respecting the safety of inoculating for the small-pox at a proper age, as it was expressed in the following letter to the writer of these pages, will be satisfactory to such parents as are yet unconvinced of the efficacy of vaccination; and his opinion is the more valuable, because it was given at a time when there was neither prejudice nor prepossession on the subject.

_Derby, Oct_. 9, 1797.

Dear Sir,--On the best inquiry I have been able to make to-day, I cannot hear that the small-pox is in Derby. I can only add, that all those who have died by inoculation, whom I have heard of these last twenty years, have been children at the breast; on which account it may be safer to defer inoculation till four or five years old, if there be otherwise no hazard of taking the disease naturally.

I am, &c.

E. DARWIN.

On the accounts which his patients gave him of their own maladies, he placed so little dependence, that he thought it necessary to wring the truth from them as a lawyer would do from an unwilling witness. His general distrust of others, in all that related to themselves, is well exemplified by a casual remark that has been lately repeated to me by a respectable dignitary of the church, to whom when he was apologizing for his want of skill in the game of chess, at which they were going to play, Darwin answered, that he made it a rule, not to believe either the good or the harm that men spoke of themselves.

This want of reliance in the sincerity of those with whom he conversed has been attributed, with some colour of reason, to his habitual scepticism on matters of higher moment. Mr. Fellowes has observed of him, that he dwelt so much and so exclusively on second causes, that he seems to have forgotten that there is a first. There is no solution of natural effects to which he was not ready to listen, provided it would assist him in getting rid of what he considered an unnecessary intervention of the Supreme Being. A fibre capable of irritability was with him enough to account, not only for the origin of animal life, but for its progress through all its stages. He had thus involved himself in the grossest materialism; but, being endued with an active fancy, he engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which they originate. What more prodigious transformation shall we read of in Ovid, than that which he supposes the organs of his strange ens to have undergone during the change of our globe from moist to dry?

As in dry air the sea-born stranger roves, Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves; Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs, And sounds aerial flow from slimy tongues.

_Temple of Nature,_ c. 1.

The peculiarities of the shapes of animals, which distinguished them from each other, he supposes to have been gradually formed by these same irritable fibres, and to have been varied by reproduction. As to the faculties of sensation, volition, and association, they come in afterwards as matters of course, and in a manner so easy and natural, that the only wonder is, what had kept them waiting so long. He mentions, with something like approbation, the hypothesis of Buffon and Helvetius, who, as he tells us, seem to imagine, that mankind arose from one family of monkeys, on the banks of the Mediterranean, who accidentally had learned to use the adductor pollicis, or that strong muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb and draws the point of it to meet the points of the fingers, which common monkeys do not; and that this muscle gradually increased in size, strength and activity, in successive generations; and that, by this improved use of the sense of the touch, monkeys acquired clear ideas, and gradually became men.

To this he gravely adds, that perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of this terraqueous globe, and consonant of the dignity of the Creator.

His description of the way in which clear ideas were acquired is not much improved when he puts it into verse.

Nerved with fine touch above the bestial throngs, The hand, first gift of Heaven! to man belongs: Untipt with claws, the circling fingers close, With rival points the bending thumbs oppose, Trace the nice lines of form with sense refined, And clear ideas charm the thinking mind.

_Temple of Nature_, c. 3.

He tells us of a naturalist who had found out a shorter cut to the production of animal life, who thought it not impossible that the first insects were the anthers and stigmas of flowers, which had by some means loosened themselves, from their parent plant, and that other insects in process of time had been formed from these; some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws, from their ceaseless efforts to procure food, or to secure themselves from injury. What hindered but these insects might have acquired hands, and by those means clear ideas also, is not explained to us.

As great improvements, however, have certainly been made in some way or other, he sees reason to hope that not less important ameliorations may in time succeed. If our improved chemistry (says he,) should ever discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter, without the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as plentiful as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying on each other, as thick as blades of grass, without restraint to their numbers but the want of local room: no very comfortable prospect, it must be owned, especially to those who are aware of the alarming ratio in which, according to later discoveries, population is found to multiply itself; a consummation that would scarcely produce that at which he thought it the chief duty of a philosopher to aim: namely, the greatest possible quantity of human happiness. On being made acquainted with reveries such as these, through the means of the press, we are inclined to doubt the justice of his encomium on the art of printing, since which discovery, he tells us, superstition has been much lessened by the reformation of religion; and necromancy, astrology, chiromancy, witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society; though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism, and of metallic tractors. What then is to be said of the prodigies of spontaneous vitality? To a system which removes the Author of all so far from our contemplation, we might well prefer the faith of

--the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.

The father of English poetry, who well knew what qualities and habits might with most probability be assigned to men of different professions, has made it a trait in the character of his Doctour of Phisike, that

His study was but little in the Bible.

Though there are illustrious examples of the contrary, yet it may sometimes be with the physician as Shakspeare said of himself, when complaining of the influence which the business of a player had on his mind, that

--his nature is subdued To that it works in.

A propensity to materialism had not, however, so subdued the mind of Darwin, as to prevent him from acknowledging the existence of what he terms the Great Cause of Causes, Parent of Parents, Ens Entium. Nay, he went the length of maintaining, that his doctrine of spontaneous vitality was not inconsistent with Scripture.

But whatever may be thought of his creed, it must be recorded of him that he discharged some of the best duties of religion in a manner that would have become its most zealous professors. He was bountiful to the poor, and hospitable to his equals. To the inferior clergy, when he resided at Lichfield, he gave his advice unfeed, and he attended diligently to the health of those who were unable to requite him. Johnson is said, when he visited his native city, to have shunned the society of Darwin: Cowper, who certainly was as firm a believer as Johnson, thought it no disparagement to his orthodoxy, to address some complimentary verses to him on the publication of his Botanic Garden.

This poem ought not to be considered more than as a capriccio, or sport of the fancy, on which he has expended much labour to little purpose. It does not pretend to anything like correctness of design, or continuity of action. It is like a picture of Breughel's, where every thing is highly coloured, and every thing out of order. In the first part, called the Economy of Vegetation, the Goddess of Botany appears with her attendants, the Powers of the Four Elements, for no other purpose than to describe to them their several functions in carrying on the operations of nature. In the second, which has no necessary connection with the first, the Botanic Muse describes the Loves of the Plants. Here the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is done throughout. The second part has been charged with an immoral tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a burlesque upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not in the pages of the poet. For these amours, he might have found a better motto than that which he has prefixed from Claudian, in the following stanza of Marini.

Ne' fior ne' fiori istessi Amor ha loco, Ama il giglio il ligustro e l'amaranto, E Narciso e Giacinto, Ajace e Croco, E con la bella Clitia il vago Acanto; Arde la Rosa di vermiglio foco, L'odor sospiro e la rugiada e pianto: Ride la Calta, e pallida e essangue Vinta d'amor la violetta langue.

_Adone_, Canto 6.

He was apt to confound the odd with the grotesque, and to mistake the absurd for the fanciful. By an excellent landscape-painter now living, I was told that Darwin proposed as a subject for his pencil, a shower, in which there should be represented a red-breast holding up an expanded umbrella in its claws.

An Italian critic, following a division made by Plotinus, has distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical, the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second, such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward appearances of real or fanciful objects; and in the third, those who penetrate to the qualities of things, draw out their hidden beauties, and separate what is really and truly fair from that which has only its exterior semblance. Among the second of these, Darwin might claim for himself no mean station. It was, indeed, a notion he had taken up, that as the ideas derived from visible objects (to use his own words) are more distinct than those derived from any other source, the words expressive of those ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. So entirely was he engrossed by this persuasion, as, too frequently, to forget that the admirers of poetry have not only eyes but ears and hearts also; and that therefore harmony and pathos are required of the poet, no less than a faithful delineation of visible objects.

Yet there is something in his versification also that may be considered as his own. His numbers have less resemblance to Pope's, than Pope's to those of Dryden. Whether the novelty be such as to reflect much credit on the inventor, is another question. His secret, was, I think, to take those lines in Pope which seemed to him the most diligently elaborated, and to model his own upon them. But with those forms of verse which he borrowed more particularly from Pope, in which one part is equally balanced by the other, and of which each is complete in itself without reference to those which precede or follow it, he has mingled one or two others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the beginning of a trochee in the third foot.

And showers | th[)e] st[=i]ll | sn[=o]w fr[)o]m | his hoary urns. _Darwin, Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. 2, 28.

Or dart | th[)e] r[=e]d | fl[=a]sh thr[)o]ugh | the circling band. _Ibid_. 361.

Or rests | h[)e]r fa[=i]r | ch[=e]ek [)o]n | his curled brows. _Ibid_. c. 2, 252.

Deserve | [)a] sw[=e]et | l[=o]ok fr[)o]m | Demetrius' eye. _Shakspeare, Mid. N. D._

Infect | th[)e] so[=u]nd | p[=i]ne [)a]nd | divert his grain. _Shakespeare, Tempest._

Which on | thy s[=o]ft | ch[=e]ek f[)o]r | complexion dwells. _Shakspeare, Sonnet_ 99.

To lay | th[)e]ir j[=u]st | h[=a]nds [)o]n | the golden key. _Milton, Comus_.

Or where they make the end of an iambic in the first, and the beginning of a spondee in the second foot, as

Th[)e] w[=a]n | st[=a]rs gl[=i]m|mering through its silver train. _Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. I, 135.

Th[)e] br[=i]ght | dr[=o]ps r[=o]l|ling from her lifted arms. _Ibid_. c. 2, 59.

Th[)e] p[=a]le | l[=a]mp gl[=i]m|mering through the sculptur'd ice. _Ibid_. 134.

H[)e]r fa[=i]r | ch[=e]ek pr[=e]ss'd | upon her lily hand. _Temple of Nature_, c. I, 436.

Th[)e] fo[=u]l | b[=o]ar's c[=o]n|quest on her fair delight. _Shakspeare, Venus and Adonis_, 1030.

Th[)e] r[=e]d | bl[=o]od r[=o]ck'd | to show the painter's strife. _Ibid._ _Rape of Lucrece_, 1377.

There is so little complexity in the construction of his sentences, that they may generally be reduced to a few of the first and simplest rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following verses from the Temple of Nature:

On rapid feet o'er hills, and plains, and rocks, Speed the sacred leveret and rapacious fox; On rapid pinions cleave the fields above, The hawk descending, and escaping dove; With nicer nostril track the tainted ground, The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound; Converge reflected light with nicer eye, The midnight owl, and microscopic fly;

With finer ear pursue their nightly course, The listening lion, and the alarmed horse.

C. 3, 93.

Sometimes he alternates the forms; as

In Eden's groves, the cradle of the world, Bloom'd a fair tree with mystic flowers unfurl'd; On bending branches, as aloft it sprung, Forbid to taste, the fruit of knowledge hung; Flow'd with sweet innocence the tranquil hours, And love and beauty warm'd the blissful bowers.

_Ibid._ 449.

The last line or the middle of the last line in almost every sentence throughout his poems, begins with a conjunction affirmative or negative, _and_, or _nor_; and this last line is often so weak, that it breaks down under the rest. Thus in this very pretty impression, as it may almost be called, of an ancient gem;

So playful Love on Ida's flowery sides With ribbon-rein the indignant lion guides; Pleased on his brindled back the lyre he rings, And shakes delirious rapture from the strings; Slow as the pausing monarch stalks along, Sheathes his retractile claws, and drinks the song. Soft nymphs on timid step the triumph view, And listening fauns with beating hoofs pursue; With pointed ears the alarmed forest starts, And love and music soften savage hearts.

_Botanic Garden_, c. 4. 252.

And in an exceedingly happy description of what is termed the picturesque:

The rush-thatch'd cottage on the purple moor, Where ruddy children frolic round the door, The moss-grown antlers of the aged oak, The shaggy locks that fringe the colt unbroke, The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare Through the long tissue of his hoary hair, As with quick foot he climbs some ruin'd wall, And crops the ivy which prevents its fall, With rural charms the tranquil mind delight, And form a picture to the admiring sight.

_Temple of Nature_, c. 3, 248.

And in his lines on the Eagle, from another gem:

So when with bristling plumes the bird of Jove, Vindictive leaves the argent fields above, Borne on broad wings the guilty world he awes, And grasps the lightning in his shining claws.

_Botanic Garden_, p. I, c. I, 205.

where I cannot but observe the peculiar beauty of the epithet applied to the plumes of the eagle. It is the right translation of the word by which Pindar has described the ruffling of the wings on the back of Zetes and Calais.

[Greek:--pteroisin naeta pephrikontas ampho porphyreois.]

Pyth. 4, 326.

which an Italian translator has entirely mistaken;

Uomin' ambi, ch'orrore a' risguardanti Facean coi rosseggianti Vanni del tergo.

But Darwin could have known nothing of Pindar; and the word may perhaps he found with a similar application in one of our own poets.

As the singularity of his poems caused them to be too much admired at first, so are they now more neglected than they deserve. There is about as much variety in them as in a bed of tulips, of which the shape is the same in all, except that some are a little more rounded at the points than others; yet they are diversely streaked and freckled, with a profusion of gay tints, in which the bizarre (as it is called by the fanciers of that flower) prevails. They are a sight for one half hour in the spring, and no more; and are utterly devoid of odour.

* * * * *

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE.