Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 28

  The other children quickly regained their high spirits. Emma’s Aunt Emma Allen wrote in January 1852 that the six-year-old George had “a laugh so hearty, so merry, she would defy anyone not laughing with him.” Emma dwelt on their doings when she wrote to her Aunt Jessie. The letters do not survive, but Aunt Jessie loved them. “You are poetic without knowing it, which is the prettiest poetry of all. The drop of water on the cabbage leaf is delicious.”

  Emma also touched on her lasting grief for Annie, and Aunt Jessie replied that she believed there was “no cloud without a silver lining.” She now set aside the uncertainties she had mentioned after her husband’s death in 1842, and gave Emma what consolation she could. Emma would see the silver lining on her dark cloud “when you rejoin the one lost,” but who was lost only “for so short a time.” Now that Aunt Jessie stood at the end of a long life, “the whole appears to me so short, so fleeting, as if nothing was worth thinking of but the Eternity in which we recover all our earthly loves. Tender and loving mother, what a fountain of love will burst forth there for you, from your many happy loving children.”

  In the years that followed, Emma hardly ever spoke about Annie to her children or anyone else, but when she did, Etty felt that “the sense of loss was always there unhealed.” Emma’s reticence had become ingrained. Aunt Jessie once said: “Why sorrow should make us shy is inexplicable to me, but I am sure it does.”

  Charles would not talk about Annie to the children either. Etty remembered that he mentioned her hardly twice in the rest of his life. She commented: “I should never have ventured to say her name to him.” This was an utter change from his openness when he and Emma were engaged to be married and she felt that his “every word expresses his real thoughts.” Bearing in mind what Emma knew of Etty’s unhappiness after Annie’s death, and how close Etty was to her father, her sense that she could not “venture” to talk with him about Annie was remarkable. He felt deeply for others, but was unable to help them by talking with them about their pain.

  We can only guess at the reasons for Charles’s reticence. Etty was a very different child from Annie, and yet in the years after Annie’s death she became her father’s daily companion, sharing his absorption in their fancy pigeons and hothouse plants.Years later, after she had helped him with the text of The Descent of Man, he called her “my very dear coadjutor and fellow-labourer” and commented to a friend that she was “the deepest critic I know in the world.” She was direct and sharp while Annie had been affectionate and playful, but he loved her for her commitment to the things she cared about, a feeling he knew so well in himself. He may have feared that if they spoke of Annie, she might put the most difficult questions straight to him. Perhaps, as she had asked her mother, “Do you think you shall come to Heaven with me?”

  For the family, avoiding difficult subjects became a way of life, and the children acquired their parents’ reticence. My American great-grandmother, Maud Du Puy, met George in 1883 when she came to Cambridge from her home in Philadelphia to find a husband. She wrote home, “The Darwin family are a nice family together, extremely nice, always cordial and kind together and yet it strikes me that they are like affectionate second cousins more than brothers and sisters. I don’t know why it is, unless that when there is a family gathering there is no family talk, no personal talk, it is more about the world at large and everything in general. Each goes his own way, thinks his own thoughts to himself.” She was struck that there was never any quarrelling, and found them all so reserved that conversation was sometimes difficult. She had discussed the problem with her sister Ella, who was with her. “They do not talk about their own affairs at all. Ella says you feel like telling them the deepest secrets just for the sake of talking.”

  A year after Annie died, Charles and Emma’s cousin Dr. Henry Holland, who had delivered Annie and to whom Emma had taken her twice in the months before her final illness, published a volume of Chapters on Mental Physiology. He was now a leading doctor in London, and had just been appointed Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. He shared Charles’s interest in the natural history of mankind, and found the question whether species changed a matter “of deep interest, carrying us by diverse paths into the midst of the most profound questions which can legitimately exercise our reason.” Like Charles, he believed strongly in “the great law of continuity which equally governs all mental and material phenomena,” and felt that we could gain many insights into human nature by looking at comparable features in animals. He had treated many patients with severe mental disorders, and had seen what we might be able to learn about the workings of the mind in a healthy state from what happened when memory or speech broke down. He saw the brain with its two hemispheres as a double organ and suggested that some forms of derangement of mind were due to a “sort of double dealing with itself.” The healthy mind attained a “singleness in all acts of perception, volition and memory” which marked “the intellectual character of man.” But beyond and below that state of mind stretched “paths too obscure” for human reason to follow.

  Charles found Dr. Holland’s chapter on instincts and habits particularly interesting, as it dwelt on all the difficulties in understanding the parallels and differences between human and animal behaviour. When Dr. Holland treated bodily movements linked with emotions, such as laughing and crying, Charles read carefully, thinking back to his ideas about the connections between body and mind when he had watched Jenny the orang and his own young children. Dr. Holland noted one puzzling feature, that the gestures linked with certain feelings “change at different periods of life.” “The child cries and sobs from fear or pain; the adult more generally from sudden grief, or warm affection or sympathy with the feelings of others.” Charles had known all those feelings with Annie; he marked the passage with a pencil line, and jotted down the page number on the fly-leaf, noting “Sobbing in child.”

  Another writer who had looked into the recesses of his own mind was Wordsworth’s one-time friend, Thomas De Quincey. Charles read his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1854. Opium was freely available from any chemist and the Darwins and Wedgwoods were familiar with its effects. Charles’s grandfather Erasmus had prescribed it to Tom Wedgwood, Charles and Emma’s uncle; he had become addicted and his addiction was almost certainly a factor in his suicide. Robert Darwin prescribed the drug freely to his patients, and was “bitterly reproached” by one who became dependent on it. Charles took it occasionally for his sickness; Emma took it for the migraines which tormented her through her life, and Charles’s brother Erasmus relied on “his opium,” as Charles put it, to help him endure his long-standing depression.

  In his Confessions, De Quincey gave a vivid and painful account of the mental derangement he suffered from the drug, and the nightmares it induced. In his dreams, memories welled up from parts of his mind below the threshold of awareness. He suggested that “there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may, and will, interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil.” In one recurring nightmare, “upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.”

  Of the faces that haunted De Quincey, one meant as much to him as Annie’s meant to Charles. When he had been a young vagrant in London, he had lived for a few weeks in the alleyways of Soho with a fifteen-year-old street-walker called Ann who had a consumptive cough. She once saved him by her compulsive generosity when he collapsed in a doorway from hunger and exhaustion. A short time later
, he left her for a journey of a few days, and when he came back, he could not find her. He searched everywhere but eventually had to give up. Afterwards, whenever he walked in the city and heard the barrel-organ tunes they had listened to together, tears came to his eyes as he thought about “the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so critically separated us for ever.” He “looked into many, many myriads of female faces in the hope of meeting her. I should know her again amongst a thousand if I saw her for a moment; for, though not handsome, she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a peculiar and graceful carriage of the head.” She came to him at last in his dreams. “There sat a woman; and I looked; and it was—Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length: ‘So then I have found you at last.’ I waited: but she answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all other points the same, and not older . . . In a moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was . . . by lamp-light in Oxford-street, walking again with Ann—just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both children.”

  Charles found the book “very poor.” This may have been disquiet and dislike. He may have sensed in his own feelings and memories something of what De Quincey had been through, but found it too painful to follow the young writer in his wild imaginings.

  Betty, Charles and Emma’s youngest daughter, whom Annie had called her “little duck,” was now four. Emma noticed that she had nervous tics and some strange ways of talking. “When telling her a story or if she is observing anything, she has the most curious way of playing with any dangling thing she can get hold of, sometimes twiddling her fingers as Charles used to do.” A few months later, she had acquired “a great habit of abstraction, going by herself and talking to herself for an hour. She does not like to be interrupted.” Charles felt a special closeness to her because he was acutely aware of his own nervous tics. One, which he hid from people, he realised was remarkably like one of hers, and the similarity gave him evidence of a point about the inheritance of instinctive behaviour which was important for his scientific thinking. Many years later he gave a clinical but carefully veiled account of it in his book on the mechanisms of heredity, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. It was essential for his theory of evolution by natural selection to show that traits of instinctive behaviour could vary between creatures of a species just like bodily features, and that special features, some of which might turn out to have adaptive value, could then be passed on from one generation to the next. “One instance . . . has fallen under my own observation, and . . . is curious from being a trick associated with a peculiar state of mind, namely, pleasurable emotion. A boy had the singular habit, when pleased, of rapidly moving his fingers parallel to each other, and, when much excited, of raising both hands, with the fingers still moving, to the sides of his face on a level with the eyes; when this boy was almost an old man, he could still hardly resist this trick when much pleased, but from its absurdity concealed it. He had eight children. Of these, a girl, when pleased, at the age of four and a half years, moved her fingers in exactly the same way, and what is still odder, when much excited, she raised both her hands, with her fingers still moving, to the sides of her face, in exactly the same manner as her father had done, and sometimes even still continued to do so when alone. I never heard of any one, excepting this one man and his little daughter, who had this strange habit; and certainly imitation was in this instance out of the question.” Charles was fifty-nine when the book appeared. “This boy was almost an old man.”

  While Emma would not talk of Annie to anyone, Charles wrote briefly about her to people outside the family when he felt it fitting and helpful to do so. In July 1853, his cousin Fox’s two-year-old daughter Louisa died of scarlet fever. Charles replied to the news: “I thank you sincerely for writing to me so soon, after your most heavy misfortunes. Your letter affected me much. We both most truly sympathise with you and Mrs. Fox. We too lost, as you may remember, not so very long ago, a most dear child, of whom I can hardly yet bear to think tranquilly.” Referring to the death of Fox’s first wife in 1842, Charles wrote: “Yet, as you must know from your own most painful experience, time softens and deadens, in a manner truly wonderful, one’s feelings and regrets. At first it is indeed bitter. I can only hope that your health and that of poor Mrs. Fox may be preserved; and that time may do its work softly.”

  In October 1856, Fox went to Malvern for a time with his family, and mentioned Annie’s grave in a letter to Charles. Charles replied that the thought of that time was still “most painful” to him. “Poor dear happy little thing.” A month before, he had thought of returning for treatment by Dr. Gully, “but I got to feel that old thoughts would revive so vividly that it would not have answered; but I have often wished to see the grave, and I thank you for telling me about it.”

  The difference between Charles’s two letters to Fox is noticeable. In the first, “time softens and deadens,” but in the second over three years later, the memory of Annie’s death was “yet most painful to me” and Charles feared that “old thoughts” of her last days “would revive so vividly.” The comfort he offered in the first letter followed the normal expectation of time’s healing power, but the deep wound of the last days in Malvern would not heal.

  Leonard believed he saw one glimpse of his father’s secret feelings during his childhood in the 1850s. “I went up to my father when strolling about the lawn, and he, after, as I believe, a kindly word or two, turned away as if quite incapable of carrying on any conversation. Then there suddenly shot through my mind the conviction that he wished he was no longer alive.”

  Charles’s feelings about Annie changed gradually as time passed. When his close friend Thomas Huxley’s three-year-old child died of scarlet fever in 1860, Charles wrote as soon as he heard, with characteristic directness and brevity. “I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning. I cannot resist writing, though there is nothing to be said. I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief. Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully. To this day, though so many years have passed away, I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling, with something like pleasure.” When he mentioned that he could now “even call up” Annie’s smile, he was thinking of his special power to make remembered faces “do anything I like.” He was calling up her smile and hoping to find warmth in the recollection.

  After Annie’s death, Charles set the Christian faith firmly behind him. He did not attend church services with the family; he walked with them to the church door, but left them to enter on their own and stood talking with the village constable or walked along the lanes around the parish. He did, though, still firmly believe in a Divine Creator. But while others had faith in God’s infinite goodness, Charles found him a shadowy, inscrutable and ruthless figure. Charles had dealt with the struggle for existence in 1838 and noted the “pain and disease in world” without further comment. When he returned to the theme in his scientific writings during the years after Annie’s death, he wrote about it in a new way. He never referred directly to his personal experience; that would have been quite inappropriate. But he made some new points; there was a darkness in the wording of some passages, and others echoed his feelings about human loss.

  Charles’s first comment was a private and casual aside in 1856. Two months before, Lyell had at last persuaded him to start writing his “big species book,” the work that was to become The Origin of Species. Charles asked Huxley whether a kind of jellyfish could take in sperm by the mouth, and Huxley replied archly, “The indecency of the process is to a cert
ain extent in favour of its probability, nature becoming very low in all senses amongst these creatures.” Reporting Huxley’s comment to Hooker, Charles wrote: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!” His remark had special force because he and Hooker both knew that some would claim the book he was writing was the Devil’s work. A few months later, Charles put what he had in mind into his draft. “Can the instinct, which leads the female spider savagely to attack and devour the male after pairing with him, be of service to the species? The carcase of her husband no doubt nourishes her; and without some better explanation can be given, we are thus reduced to the grossest utilitarianism compatible, it must be confessed, with the theory of natural selection.” This was “low and horridly cruel,” but could perhaps be explained by “the grossest utilitarianism.” “Blundering,” on the other hand, went beyond Huxley’s point. It hinted at careless and pointless destruction. In that sense Annie’s death had been a blunder.

  Charles continued to work on the “laws of life,” but was now sharply aware of the elimination of the weak as the fit survived. He wrote powerfully about Nature’s ruthless culling. “She cares not for mere external appearance; she may be said to scrutinise with a severe eye, every nerve, vessel and muscle; every habit, instinct, shade of constitution—the whole machinery of the organisation. There will be here no caprice, no favouring: the good will be preserved and the bad rigidly destroyed, for good and bad are all exposed during some period of growth or during some generation, to a severe struggle for life . . . Nature is prodigal of time and can act on thousands of thousands generations: she is prodigal of the forms of life; if the right variation does not occur under changing conditions so as to be selected and profit any one being, that form will be utterly exterminated as myriads have been.”