Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 8

  Emma became aware of Charles’s interest in facial expressions and how he was keeping a notebook for points that struck him. He explained his ideas to her, and she joked in a letter that this might affect the way he treated her. “I believe from your account of your own mind that you will only consider me a specimen of the genus (I don’t know what, simia I believe). You will be forming theories about me, and if I am cross or out of temper, you will only consider ‘What does that prove?’ Which will be a very grand and philosophical way of considering it.” The simia were the apes. Her joking made light of her anxiety about her differences with Charles.

  Meanwhile, in his last weeks on his own in London, Charles made jottings in his metaphysical notebook about blushing, human, chameleon and octopus. He thought about the affections. “Why does joy and other emotion make grown up people cry? What is emotion?” And “What passes in a man’s mind when he says he loves a person? Do not the features pass before him marked with the habitual express emotions which make us love him or her? It is blind feeling, something like sexual feelings. Love being an emotion, does it regard—is it influenced by—other emotions?”

  Three months after the marriage, Emma and Charles returned to Maer for a three-week stay. While they were there, he wrote a long note on the moral sense. He traced its development from three essentials : sympathy, memory and reflection. David Hume had put sympathy at the centre of his thinking about the natural sources of moral principles. He saw it as a natural feeling rather than an attitude based on reasoning from some abstract notion. “There is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the element of the wolf and the serpent.” Charles now developed this idea and speculated how our moral sense might also grow naturally from that feeling. “Looking at Man, as a Naturalist would at any other mammiferous animal, it may be concluded that he has parental, conjugal and social instincts, and perhaps others . . . These instincts consist of a feeling of love or benevolence to the object in question. Without regarding their origin, we see in other animals they consist in such active sympathy that the individual forgets itself, and aids and defends and acts for others at its own expense.”

  Charles believed that any action in accordance with the social instincts would give great pleasure, and any action that interfered with them would involve pain. He saw the genesis of sympathy in “a very slight change in association” whereby a person observing another’s action would feel part of that pleasure or pain. Moral approval and disapproval would then develop from that feeling whenever man, “from his memory and mental capacity of calling up past sensations,” reflected on the choice between following a social instinct which would give lasting pleasure, and yielding to a personal appetite, the pleasure of satisfying which would fade. The strength of our feeling that a social instinct ought to be followed showed that it was part of our nature, while selfish emotions, although equally natural, did not have lasting effects. In this way, Charles saw memories, both of pleasure and pain, as things of value, to nurture and cherish.

  Sometime during the year, perhaps when Emma realised she was pregnant and had to think of the possibility that she might die in childbirth as Fox’s wife had done, she was troubled again by her worries about Charles’s faith, and wrote a note to him about a difficult matter she found she could not discuss with him face to face. Having to write in that way even though they were now living together was a painful admission of her difficulty. It is not known precisely what had happened between them because she chose her words with discretion, but he had apparently explained to her that he was carrying on with what she called his “discoveries”; he was still uncertain about the Christian Revelation, but his opinion was not formed. He had suggested to her that “luckily there were no doubts as to how one ought to act.” He had claimed that some important point of Christian faith was unprov able and she felt that he was disregarding the essential point that if it was not provable in the scientific way he was familiar with, that was likely to be because it was “above our comprehension.” Emma believed he was “acting conscientiously, and sincerely wishing and trying to learn the truth,” and she wanted to feel he could not be wrong, but she was afraid that he might indeed be. She revealed a deep concern; there were dangers in “giving up revelation,” that is Christ’s offer of eternal life, and also in the sin of ingratitude for his suffering, “casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world.”

  Emma explained: “I do not wish for any answer to all this—it is a satisfaction to me to write it, and when I talk to you about it I cannot say exactly what I wish to say, and I know you will have patience with your own dear wife.” Her fear was again for the afterlife. “Everything that concerns you concerns me and I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other for ever.” She declared that she could not tell him how happy he made her and how dearly she loved him, and she thanked him for all his affection “which makes the happiness of my life more and more every day.” But her fear that they might not “belong to each other for ever” reached beyond the happiness of her life into eternity.

  Emma’s reference to Charles’s “discoveries” and his comment that “there were no doubts as to how one ought to act” strongly suggest that he had told her about his theory of the natural origin of our moral sense. But, as a devout Christian, she could not accept his ideas. Forty-five years later, after his death, she made the point firmly to their son Francis. “Your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me.”

  Charles kept her note for the rest of his life. At some point, perhaps many years later, he wrote to her on the outer fold: “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this. C. D.” He felt deeply for her, but could only think of breaking his silence to her after his death. The “painful void” between them was there before they married, and despite their deep devotion to each other, could never be bridged. From their shared family background in the Unitarian faith, Charles knew full well what rejection of Christian salvation would mean to Emma in her hope for eternal life with him after death.

  They could, though, joke about other people’s religion. On one occasion after a railway journey, Charles wrote to Emma: “In my carriage there was rather an elegant female . . . so virtuous that I did not venture to open my mouth to her. She came with some female friend, also a lady, and talked at the door of the carriage in so loud a voice that we all listened with silent admiration. It was chiefly about family prayers, and how she always had them at half past ten, [so as] not to keep the servants up. She then charged her friend to write to her either on Saturday night or Monday morning, Sunday being omitted in the most marked manner. Our companion answered in the most pious tone, ‘Yes, Eliza, I will write either on Saturday night or Monday morning.’ As soon as we started, our virtuous female pulled out of her pocket a religious tract in a black cover and a very thick pencil. She then took off her gloves and commenced reading with great earnestness, and marking the best passages with the aforesaid thick lead-pencil. Her next neighbour was an old gentleman with a portentously purple nose, who was studying a number of the Christian Herald, and his next neighbour was the primmest she-Quaker I have ever seen. Was not I in good company? I never opened my mouth and therefore enjoyed my journey.”

  Charles was able to start his “natural history of babies” when his own son Willy was born at the end of the year. Charles took a used notebook with a white vellum cover and wrote his observations on the blank pages. “W. Erasmus Darwin born Dec 27th 1839. During first week yawned, stretched himself just like old person—chiefly upper extremities; hiccupped, sneezes, sucked. Surface of warm hand placed to face seemed immediately to give wish of sucking, either instinctive or associated knowledge of warm smooth surface of bosom. Cried and squalled, but no tears. Touching sole of foot with spill of paper (when exactly one week old), it jerked it away very suddenl
y and curled its toes, like person tickled, evidently subject to tickling. I think also body under arms more sensitive than other parts of surface. What can be origin of movement from tickling?”

  Charles tried to maintain his analytical detachment, and was, for example, always “anxious to observe accurately the expression of a crying child,” but he found often that “his sympathy with the grief spoiled his observation.”

  In the first months, Charles was interested in Willy’s senses and his responses to sights, sounds and sensations. “At his eighth day he frowned much . . . At his ninth day . . . he appeared to follow a candle with his eyes . . . When one month and one day old, perceived bosom when three or four inches from it, as was shown by protrusion of lips and eyes becoming fixed. Was it by smell or sight? It was not, certainly, by touch.” Charles believed that he had observed Willy’s first reasoned action, noting that in his fourth month he “took my finger to his mouth, and as usual could not get it in, on account of his own hand being in the way; then slipped his own back and so got my finger in.”

  Charles watched for the earliest signs of each emotion. Fear came first with the child starting and crying at any sudden sound. In Willy’s fifth month, “I had been accustomed to make close to him many strange and loud noises, which were all taken as excellent jokes, but at this period I one day made a loud snoring noise which I had never done before; he instantly looked grave and then burst out crying. Two or three days afterwards, I made through forgetfulness the same noise with the same result.” Pleasure and affection followed, and then anger. “During last week has got several times in passion with his playthings . . . When in a passion he beats and pushes away the offending object.”

  Around the same time, Charles showed Willy a looking glass to see himself in, just as he had given the pocket mirror to Jenny the orang. Charles wrote that Willy “smiled at himself in glass.” “How does he know his reflection is that of [a] human being? That he smiles with this idea, I feel pretty sure.” In the seventh month, when Willy was looking in the mirror, he “was aware that the image of the person behind was not real, and therefore when any odd motion or face was made, turned round to look at the person behind.”

  Following his experiment with Jenny and the mouth organ, Charles watched carefully for Willy’s first signs of musical taste. At four months he believed he had “shown decided pleasure in music—his whole expression appearing pleased.” But Charles was not sure. Six months later he was still watching. Willy “cried when Emma left off playing the pianoforte.” He cried so often and showed “such decided pleasure as soon as she turned round to go back” to the piano, that Charles was “certain there was no mistake.”

  Charles was also eager to see when and how Willy picked up the sense of right and wrong. When Willy was just over a year old, “I repeated several times in reproving voice, ‘Doddy won’t give poor Papa a kiss,—naughty Doddy.’ He unquestionably was made slightly uncomfortable by this.” Charles felt that this “showed something like first shade of moral sense.” As for the dark feelings, “Jealousy was plainly exhibited when I fondled a large doll, and when I weighed his infant sister, he being then fifteen and a half months old.” Charles must have been in the children’s room on this occasion, helping to look after the month-old Annie.

  In August 1842, when Willy was two and a half, Charles met him coming out of the dining room, “with an unnatural brightness of eye and an odd affected manner, so odd that I turned back to see if any one was hiding behind the door. I then found out by marks that he had been taking the powdered sugar which he had once or twice been told he ought not to do.” A fortnight later Charles met him again “with his pinafore folded up carefully and he eyeing it. I asked him what he had got there. He said ‘Nothing,’ looking all the while to see that his pinafore was well folded, and as I came nearer he cried ‘Go away; Doddy going to send; go away.’ From his odd manner I determined to see what was concealed, when I found he had stained with yellow pickle his pinafore when taking pickle, like he had done sugar. Here was natural acting and deceit.”

  Around the time when Annie was born in March 1841, Charles bought a set of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works in six small volumes. In the two weeks after her birth, he read the first volume, which opened with a section of “poems referring to the period of childhood,” and the second, which included a poem Wordsworth had written about his daughter Dora when she was a month old. On her face smiles were beginning. . . like the beams of dawn,

  To shoot and circulate; smiles have there been seen,

  Tranquil assurances that Heaven supports

  The feeble motions of thy life, and cheers

  Thy loneliness: or shall those smiles be called

  Feelers of love, put forth as if to explore

  This untried world, and to prepare thy way

  Through a strait passage intricate and dim?

  Such are they; and the same are tokens, signs,

  Which, when the appointed season hath arrived,

  Joy, as her holiest language, shall adopt;

  And Reason’s godlike power be proud to own.

  In Annie’s first weeks, Charles watched for the points he had observed in Willy, to see whether they emerged in a regular sequence during the infant’s growth, according to a law of nature. Annie’s first smile, “as if to explore this untried world,” came on her forty-sixth day.

  Whenever Charles was struck by a similarity with Willy, a difference or some other feature, he wrote it down. When Annie was almost a year old, she was “rather amused, at a wafer sticking first to one hand and then to the other as she tried to disengage it.” He remembered how Willy at about the same age “grew frantic with passion at a bit of wet paper thus sticking to his fingers.” He found that Annie had “infinitely less observation and animation” than Willy at the same age. He showed her the reflection of her face in the polished case of his watch, but “She now hardly understands a person coming up behind her when she is standing in front of the glass and looking at her image.”

  A fortnight after her first birthday, Annie “walked loose about four feet, walked well and says ‘Goat.’ ” Charles watched her first simple reasoning by association of ideas. She was “accustomed to see the keys taken out to go to cupboard and tea-chest for good things, and the keys being given her today to play with in farther part of room, she immediately led Emma by the hand towards the tea-chest.” Another observation bore on the philosophical puzzle of awareness of self and others and its link with consciousness. “Younger children, such as Annie, now a year old, look at people with a degree of fixedness which always strikes me as odd. It is like the manner older people only look at inanimate objects. I believe it is because there is no trace of consciousness in very young children—they do not think whether the person they are looking at is thinking of them.” Charles watched Annie’s expressions carefully, and wrote: “I have some months remarked how much Annie wrinkles up her nose in smiling or half laughing. This she did very early, more so than Doddy, and certainly with her is a more essential part of a smile than the play of the muscles round the corners of her mouth.” When she was fourteen months old, it was “curious to see how neatly Annie takes hold in proper way of pens, pencils and keys. Willy to present time with equal or greater practice cannot handle anything so neatly as Annie does, often in exact manner of grown up person.”

  One day Willy “was running to give Annie a punch with a little wooden candlestick, when I called sharply to him and he wheeled round and instantly sent the candlestick whirling over my head. He then stood resolute in the middle of the room as if ready to oppose the whole world.” He “peremptorily refused to kiss Annie, but in short time, when I said ‘Doddy won’t throw a candlestick at Papa’s head.’ He said ‘No, won’t; kiss Papa.’ ” Charles commented: “I shall be curious to observe whether our little girls take so kindly to throwing things when so very young. If they do not, I shall believe it is hereditary in male sex, in the same manner as the S. American colts naturally am
ble from their parents having been trained.” A day before Annie’s second birthday, Charles noticed that she showed “no signs of skill in throwing things either as an amusement, or as an offensive act, in [the] same ready way as Willy did: nor does she so readily give slaps.” He watched her as she grew, by inheritance of a difference between the sexes, into a little girl.

  Many parents wanted “likenesses” of their children in infancy, to remember them by when they grew older or if they died young. In 1841, Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood had commissioned the artist George Richmond to do a watercolour of their three-year-old son Ernie. Charles and Emma had sat for Richmond in 1840, but they did not ask him to paint their children. Instead they had “sun pictures” made by the new method of photography which was the latest wonder of technical progress.

  The first portrait studio for daguerreotypes in London had been opened in 1841 by Richard Beard on the roof of the Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street, in order to catch the sunlight; Paul Claudet followed suit with a studio above the Adelaide Gallery off the Strand later in the year. The Polytechnic and the Adelaide were both exhibition halls for popular science; they were locked in competition through the 1840s with ever-varying displays and entertainments. Each had working models, lectures and a “gas microscope” projecting images of minute objects onto a large screen. The Polytechnic had magical “dissolving views” which children loved, but the Adelaide Gallery had a steam cannon and was just next to the Lowther Arcade, where every kind of cheap toy could be bought.