No Rime for the Ancient Naturalist

Why did Darwin lose his taste for poetry late in life?

That may seem like a strange question in our day when, for many of us, the chief experience of poetry was memorizing Paul Revere's Ride and reciting it in grade school. Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago, grew up in a culture where daily exposure to the poetic cadences of the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was standard, where acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare and Dryden was expected of any educated man and the poetry of Lord Byron was fashionable. Former President John Adams, in his 80s when Darwin was a child, reread the complete works of Shakespeare every year; just 35 years ago, veteran journalist Arthur Krock recited Thackeray's whimsical Ballad of Buillabaisse for a young visitor, having read it once 50 years previously.

One expects the senses and appetites to diminish with age, but hopefully, never the taste for art, music, or poetry. One need not argue that Darwin's scientific interests were a bar to appreciation of the Muse; it was on the voyage of the Beagle that he took along a volume of Milton and read through Paradise Lost.

Yet in his old age, Darwin penned this forlorn confession in a letter to his wife, Emma:

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Of course he was 30 when he made his voyage. This loss of aesthetic enjoyment apparently became part of the Darwin legend, especially after the publication of some of his private correspondence, to the point where his son, William, felt compelled to deny it at a Darwin Centennial gathering in 1909.

Unacquainted with any but the bare outline of Darwin's life and career, I knew none of this—the early appreciation of poetry and its subsequent loss—until I read today that Darwin's great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, had published a poetic biography of her distinguished ancestor; the review, in that noted journal of the arts, The Economist, was favorable, though I was keeping my fingers crossed, imagining filiopietistic hagiography buttressed with bad verse (how many rhymes are there for fossil?).

Fortunately, it seems I was wrong, if this excerpt from her book is typical:

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he's better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.

Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
'So low in the scale of nature, so exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty - created,
apparently, for such little purpose!' They lower his creel

to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash, over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.

Whatever her other accomplishments, Padel is certainly a poet.

But what of her poor great-great grandfather? The religious critic has no trouble seeing, in Darwin's loss, a just requital of his supposed offense against faith; the man whose works imply denial of Divine creation ends by seeing part of his own humanity wither away.

Even in a less orthodox context, I can imagine Coleridge casting a Darwin-like figure as a ruthless hunter whose scientific inquiry, like a crossbow, transfixes and kills the creatures he studies, making everything dead and dry in proportion to his knowledge.

I don't know what happened. I would like to think that, like the man utterly convinced of a fact that consumes and shapes his entire being, as described in Emerson's essay on Character, he came to need nothing else but this knowledge that changed everything—yet he describes himself as having suffered a loss. I would like to think that, like the yogis who achieve the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, described as an entrance into unitary consciousness from which the adept never returns, he reached a point where any works of the imagination seemed feeble and derivative compared to the reality that he had come to know intimately through his studies.

But Darwin himself describes his state as unhappy, and in any case, all this is uninformed speculation on my part.

I am certain that if rejection of religious faith leads to desertion by the Muse, we would have a hard time accounting for the poetic power of A.E. Housman, whose unbelief was, if anything, even more definite than Darwin's own. I have read no biographies of Darwin and have nothing but the evidence of his own words; if we must take them at face value, I am sorry for what happened to him but grateful for the unrelenting pursuit of the truth; as Dobzhanksy said of natural selection, "Nothing in biology makes sense without it."

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

The last shall be first

No doubt Axl Rose thought he was scoring a point with irony when he named his long-gestating album Chinese Democracy, but the Chinese could as readily turn the tables by releasing one called, with equal justice, "American Solvency." China is devoting $586 billion, or 18% of its GDP, to stimulate its own economy; to reach an equivalent level of expenditure, our government would have to shell out $2.4 trillion, and by the time we finish rescuing enterprises "too big to fail," we may have spent not much less than that!

We are still the world's premier military power, but as Fareed Zakaria points out, in this week's Newsweek, economic growth is bestowing power of a different kind:

...the Obama administration should study the National Intelligence Council's newly published forecast, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World." "The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025," the document says, owing to the rise of emerging nations, a globalizing economy and a dramatic power shift. "In terms of size, speed and directional flow, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now underway—roughly from West to East—is without precedent in modern history." Some have seized on the fact that emerging markets are slumping to argue that the era of Western dominance isn't over yet. But the rise of the non-Western world—which began with Japan in the 1950s, then continued with the Asian tigers in the 1960s, China in the 1980s and India and Brazil in the 1990s—is a broad and deep trend that is likely to endure.

For some countries, the current economic crisis could actually accelerate the process. For the past two decades, for example, China has grown at approximately 9 percent a year and the United States at 3 percent. For the next few years, American growth will likely be 1 percent and China's, by the most conservative estimates, 5 percent. So, China was growing three times as fast as the United States but will now grow five times as fast, which only brings closer the date when the Chinese economy will equal in size that of the United States. [Emphasis added.] Then contrast China's enormous surplus reserves to America's massive debt burden: the picture does not suggest a return to American unipolarity.

The "rise of the rest," as I have termed it, is an economic phenomenon, but it has political, military and cultural consequences. In one month this past summer, India was willing to frontally defy the United States at the Doha trade talks, Russia attacked and occupied parts of Georgia, and China hosted the most spectacular and expensive Olympic Games in history (costing more than $40 billion). Ten years ago, not one of the three would have been powerful or confident enough to act as it did. Even if their growth rates decline, these countries will not return quietly to the back of the bus.

The President-elect has certainly given economic issues their due, with the appointment of a team of major players to address the crisis, but Steve Fraser argues in Salon that Obama's group of former Clinton appointees comprises "change only the brainiacs from Hyde Park and Harvard Square could believe in." To be so fond of invoking FDR and the crisis of 1932, Fraser writes, the new group seems to have forgotten the extent to which the members of Roosevelt's team of rivals were sometimes ideological opponents of each other:

Roosevelt was no radical; indeed, he shared many of the conservative convictions of his class and times. He believed deeply in both balanced budgets and the demoralizing effects of relief on the poor. He tried mightily to rally the business community to his side. For him, the labor movement was terra incognita and—though it may be hard to believe today—played no role in his initial policy and political calculations. Nonetheless, right from the beginning, Roosevelt cobbled together a Cabinet and circle of advisors strikingly heterogeneous in its views, one that, by comparison, makes Obama's inner sanctum, as it is developing today, look like a sectarian cult.

Heterogeneous does not mean radical. Some of FDR's early appointments—as at the Treasury Department—were die-hard conservatives. Jesse Jones, who ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Hoover administration creation, retained by FDR, that had been designed to rescue tottering banks, railroads and other enterprises too big to fail, was a practitioner of business-friendly bailout capitalism before present Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was even born.

But there was also Henry Wallace as secretary of agriculture, a Midwestern progressive who would become the standard bearer for the most left-leaning segments of the New Deal coalition. He was joined at the Agriculture Department—far more important then than now—by men like Mordecai Ezekiel, who was prepared to challenge the power of the country's landed oligarchs.

That's all very well, and it's a safe bet that Obama could certainly have added variety to his Cabinet by summoning Phil Gramm to renew his warning about a nation of whiners, but I think Fraser is missing at least part of the point. A Cabinet-level rivalry of the Hamilton-Jefferson type no doubt shows opposing ideas in their most striking light, as they strive for dominance, but would hardly suit the professed "no drama" operating principle of the new President. Besides, without at all detracting from the place of Roosevelt among the great men of history, the new Administration need not relearn the lessons of 1932 (or at least, the rest of us fervently hope not). Just as it wasn't necessary for Stephen Jay Gould to travel to the Galapagos Islands to follow in Darwin's footsteps and verify natural selection anew, one hopes the new Administration can discover and apply sound solutions without having to learn the remedies for recession all over again.

Whatever may be said about Obama's economic team, one hopes that in implementing his announced goal of "greening the White House," either the President-elect or his wife selects a better team of interior decorators than the group invited by Tampa Bay Online to submit proposed redesigns of famous White House Rooms; the sketch for a new Green Room, by Kemble Interiors, seems to have been commissioned to reflect the esthetic of McDonald's and might be labeled "Change I Can't Conceive of."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.