`The Elegance of Things Seen'

I stumbled on these thoughts from Basil Bunting:

“…[Hugh] MacDiarmid sees things washed clean of irrelavancies as Darwin did. Suckling poets should be fed on Darwin till they are filled with the elegance of things seen or heard or touched. Words cannot come near it, though they name things. Their elegance is part precision, more music….”

half an hour before finding, at the Poetry magazine site, a poem about Charles Darwin, “Consolation,” written by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska. Her Darwin, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, finds solace in novels of the Dickensian sort, with their tidy resolutions:

“He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.”

In his review of John Bowlby’s Charles Darwin: A Life (1991), Guy Davenport describes Darwin, reclining on a sofa in the midst of his notebooks, scientific journals and microscope, reading an unidentified novel by George Eliot (though one suspects it is Middlemarch):

“He is the preeminent scientist of his century and ours. The great theory that he began to suspect as a young naturalist on the long voyage of The Beagle (1832-36) was one in which chance opened possibility after possibility over millions of years, so that the offspring of creatures now known only by fossils worked out a genetic fate. The bear, the wolf, and the dog are children of the same mother. Gratuitous modifications nudged each other toward divergent fates. George Eliot wrote about such things as they modified human lives in a few years; Darwin, as all of creation is modified over eons.”

Accompanying the Szymborska poem is a useful note from Cavanagh, one of the translators, on Szymborska’s reading and writing habits:

“Darwin, she suggests, used Dickens, Trollope, and their lesser-known contemporaries to compensate for the great evolutionary master plot that apparently did away with the notion of a single, all-encompassing story with a preordained happy ending that invariably placed human beings, Man as Such, in the starring role.”

This is well said. Too often, Darwin is portrayed as an iconoclast, a gleeful world-destroyer, who relished the offense his work inspired. Such an interpretation is a trivializing attempt to make Darwin conform to our era’s romanticizing of outsiders and rebels. He was nothing of the sort, as readers of Janet Browne’s masterful, two-volume biography know. He was a scientist and his loyalty was to facts, and this is a rare human proclivity. Consider Bunting seeing “things washed clean of irrelavancies.” Gifted scientists and artists come equipped with filters for dross removal. Darwin evaluated evidence, not sentiment, dogma or wishful thinking. At the end of day, even he needed the solace of virtue rewarded and justice affirmed, even if only “in fiction/with its diminutions.”

It’s Bunting’s Darwin I most admire, the disciplined observer “filled with the elegance of things seen or heard or touched.” This is the Darwin of Nabokov and Davenport – the poets of perception. Later in his review of the Darwin biography (collected in The Hunter Gracchus), Davenport writes:

“There is no event without a past. Once geology began to uncover the fossil record, a rational account of it was inevitable. Darwin was an orchestrator of evidence and created a moment in knowledge when all the right questions began to find a plausible answer. The turbulence around Darwin is intellectual theater, still going strong. Not only theater but a kind of myth – the Victorian debates between rhetorical giants, the almost instant abuse of the theory for ulterior motives, the invention of `social Darwinism’ by Herbert Spencer, the Molieresque comedy in Dayton, Tennessee, the fundamentalist creationists and flat-earthers whose real motive is to keep their hapless children from knowing about sex until the marriage night, the embarrassment of both Protestants and Catholics, the rifiuto of Islam.”