'Passion and Meditation and Landscape'

Charles Darwin in his Autobiography (1887) tells us he read poetry with “great pleasure” until around his thirtieth birthday. He mentions Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. "Even as a schoolboy,” he says, “I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially the historical plays.” Then something changed and Darwin spends no time asking himself why. His five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle started in his twenty-second year, suggesting that he was still enjoying poetry at the time of the expedition. 

“But now for many years,” he writes, “I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

 

To his credit, Darwin doesn’t blame Shakespeare & Co. for his loss of interest. He merely observes, without emphasis and rather clinically, that his former reading inclinations have changed. This is where it gets interesting:

  

“Novels, which are works of the imagination [and poetry is not?], though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. . . . I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily – against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

 

So much for Darwin the literary critic. One wishes he would have named names. Who was he reading? The happy-ending qualification suggests Dickens but the Victorians cranked out warehouses of fiction, much of it three-deckers and most with an obligatory happy ending. But Darwin is no abject philistine. He goes on to express puzzlement and regret for this shift in reading tastes:

 

“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they 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.”

 

Now I can sympathize – to a degree. I too have lost some of the omnivorous hunger for fiction I had when young, though I still read Shakespeare and other poets. I’m mercifully free of the drive for “grinding out general laws” –in other words, theory. Nor do I sense “atrophy.” I think of it more as dormancy, still there but largely inactive. Now Darwin grinds out a general law:

 

“A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. 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.”

 

This is touching and sad. I learned of this passage and went on to read the Autobiography years ago when reading A Weakness for Almost Everything (trans. Ann Goldstein, Steerforth, 1999) by the charming and unclassifiable Italian writer Aldo Buzzi (1910-2009). In a self-interview collected in the book, after expressing admiration for Nabokov, he asks himself, “What in your view is the ideal novel?” and responds:

 

“Today, at my age, it seems to me the ideal model for the novel is the one Proust wished to write (and did): ‘A novel full of passion and meditation and landscape.’”

 

Then he quotes a portion of the Darwin text and adds: “No one excommunicated him.”

 

[Two other books by Buzzi are available in English: Journey to the Land of Flies and Others Travels (trans. Ann Goldstein, Random House, 1996) and The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets (trans. Guido Waldman, Bloomsbury, 2005). I recommend all of them.]