'He Loved What He Was Doing'

"Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future, were, that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.” 

Charles Darwin reflecting on his childhood reminds me of my middle son, now twenty-four and a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, who underwent a successive wave of enthusiasms as a boy – geodes, carnivorous plants, coins, quadratic equations, chemistry (he revised Mendeleev’s periodic table), Dante and computers, among other things. Each fancy prompted research and study. Nearly everything seemed eventually to interest him, a quality he retains. Such a relief and a blessing for his parents. We known so many slugs among children – dull, incurious, lazy.  

 

Darwin (1809-82) wrote his Autobiography for his children in 1876, and it was posthumously published by his son Francis Darwin in 1887. An unexpurgated edition came out in 1958. Darwin belongs with those other industriously prolific Victorians – Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Macaulay, George Eliot, Browning and others. Though nominally a scientist, Darwin was often a gifted writer of prose. His most influential works – On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871) -- remain enjoyably readable today. I marked this passage during an earlier reading of the Autobiography:

 

“[A]nd 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.”

 

One hears preached with increasing regularity the naïve notion that literature is “good for us,” like spinach. It probably can’t hurt but it’s not therapeutic. Focused attention paid to any subject, whether Euclid or Laurence Sterne, can only sharpen our wits. Darwin recalls:

 

“[W]ith respect to diversified tastes, independently of science, I was fond of reading various books, and I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school. I read also other poetry, such as Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ and the recently published poems of Byron and Scott. I mention this because later in life I wholly lost, to my great regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare.”

 

That’s a familiar and unfortunate complaint, one I have thus far avoided. Darwin’s mature reactions to poetry seem exaggerated or nearly pathological. There’s something sad about Darwin’s loss of interest in the writers who moved him as a boy and young man:

 

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. . . . But now for many years 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. . . . On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and 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.”

 

Reviewing John Bowlby’s biographyof Darwin in 1991, Guy Davenport writes: “He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”