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George Eliot, Charles Darwin and the labyrinth of history
George Eliot, Charles Darwin and the labyrinth of history A.J. Lustig Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and George Eliot’s Middlemarch are both concerned with the same question: what makes history happen? To a point, their answers are similar. History for both is nonteleological, contingent and interconnected. If history has no direction and individuals are virtually powerless, what hope of progress is there? Darwin leaves the point unresolved. Eliot finds an answer for human beings alone: while animals, always subject to natural selection, may be incapable of true altruism, human beings, with consciousness and conscience, can choose selflessness, acting contrary to their own instincts in the interest of abstract morality.
George Eliot read On the Origin of Species with her husband-partner George Henry Lewes, within weeks of its publication in late 1859. Her first assessment, in her journal, was superficial: ‘It seems not to be well written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive from want of luminous and orderly presentation’i. The Origin ofspecies, however, is not a book to be digested overnight even by a George Eliot, and its arguments, in fact luminous and orderly, took Eliot much longer to assimilate fully. Eliot and Lewes spent much time in considering its lessons over the next ten years, Lewes, a notable science writer and critic, wrote a fourpart analysis of ‘Mr. Darwin’s Hypothesis’ for the Fortnightly Review at the time Eliot was beginning to shape Middlemarch in her mind2.3. Middlemarch itself, among its many other meanings, is a painstaking analysis of the humanistic implications of Darwin’s new ways of looking at nature and history. My object in this essay is not to argue Eliot’s debt to Darwin in narrative form numerous people have treated thath9. The question that interests me here is historiography and its moral and ethical implications. Darwin in On the Origin of Species and Eliot in Middlemarch are both interested in the same question: what makes history happen? To a point, their answers are similar. History for both is nonteleological, contingent, acMiddlemarch, cidental and interconnected. subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life,’ describes a field slightly smaller than the world, covered by Darwin in the Origin, but its characteristics and its questions are the same.
A.J. Lustig is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, whose current work concerns the history of biological arguments for and against the existence of human altruism. e-mail: IustigQmpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
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If history has no direction, and individuals are virtually powerless in the context of chance and the past, what hope is there for the future? Darwin leaves the point unresolved, or resolves it only intermittently and inconsistently. Eliot, equally troubled by Darwin’s historiographical implications, finds a different escape, one possible for human beings alone: while animals may indeed be incapable of true altruism, subject as they are to the ever-present vengeance of natural selection, human beings, possessed of consciousness and conscience, can in fact choose selflessness, acting contrary to their own instincts in the interest of abstract morality. This is the trapdoor out of the blind labyrinth of history, which allows at least a tentative and occasional step in a direction recognizable as forward. It isn’t much, concludes Eliot, but it’s all we have. It is commonplace to remark that Lydgate and Casaubon are both searching for origins - Lydgate for the primitive tissue, Casaubon for the Key to All Mythologies - and that Eliot shows these hopes to be baseless. How then can the argument be made that Eliot grounded her narrative in yet another Origin? The key lies in the paradox of Darwin’s book itself. Despite its title, it is not a book about beginnings. Indeed, it too is a work only about narrative. The secret of On the Origin of Species is that living organisms have no origin but only history, leading back through infinitely complex interconnections to that ‘primordial form, into which life was first breathed’*O: the point where narrative breaks down and the author retreats into the passive voice, unable any longer to direct our understanding. The rhetorical strategy of the Origin of Species from beginning to end is to lay out general principles, and then fold miniature narratives into the expositions to illustrate their action. Darwin was led to structure the work in this way for two reasons. The first was methodological: the power of the theory of descent with modification, powered by
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natural selection and other subtle movers, is explanatory, rather than predictive. It cannot predict, except perhaps in the grossest of terms. (We will return to the conundrum of possible progress.) The second reason was that Darwin in fact had only illustration, inference and analogy to go on, and no direct proof. Historiographical principle guides Darwin’s view not only of the lengthy phenomena of history, but of nature’s everyday interactions. The principle is always paramount: We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life . .11. And it is only by training the mind to see nature in this way, behind the face of gladness, that we can see the hidden patterns of history develop. To see this takes training of mind and constant vigilance, as Darwin avows: Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so -than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstoodi*. A corollary of this principle is that there is no possible reward in nature for truly unselfish behavior. Any case where one organism appears to be acting for the good of another will be deceptive; on closer examination some degree of self-interest is always involved. Apparent mutual aid among social animals is merely a special case of the whole; in social animals natural selection ‘will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit
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of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change’i3. The hand of natural selection comes down hardest on any character or behavior that impairs survival or reproduction, and Darwin elegantly demonstrates in Chapter 7 of the Origin that behavior and instinct of all kinds are as susceptible to variation and inheritance as any corporeal character. Indeed, the demonstration of natural selection’s action on instinct, temperament and behavior is intricately connected with Darwin’s denial of the possibility of altruism. He asserts: If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selectioni4. In such a world, without volition, can progress in any meaningful sense be possible? In one sense, it certainly is. ‘My theory’ provides for certain epistemologieal progress, not only in terms of concrete fact, but of appreciation of life’s grandeur. Of the three times that Darwin uses the word progress in a teleological sense in On the Origin of Species, one refers to our knowledgeis. But the real question, of course, is whether or not there is any kind of progress in the whole mass of life. Do we have a legitimate claim to being above turnips? Is the course of history teleological; that is, does it tend towards some end? In one sense, the answer is straightforward no. If Darwin’s theory of variation and natural selection is strictly followed through to its logical limits, it is not possible that the history of life can be progressive in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, personified though it is in Darwin’s metaphor, has neither foresight nor hindsight, but operates strictly and solely on individual organisms as they are at the moment, blinder even than justice. What gives an advantage at one moment may be a liability in the next generation, when circumstances have changed. While superiority may temporarily be achieved in local circumstances by local measures, by a global standard there can be noneib. On the one hand, Nature, in this view, is littered with imperfections, with appendices, imperfect corrections, rudimentary organs, stings that kill the bee. These are the traces of history and the mark of natural selection’s blindness. They may be ‘compared with the letters in a word, still retained in its spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation’r7, among the strongest evidence for Darwin’s theory. On the other hand, the eternal striving of the struggle for existence privileges novelty, complexity and innovation. Do these not lead to a general lifting of level? In as many passages as he asserted the impossibility of general perfection, Darwin considers the contrary as well’*.
While Darwin’s statements for and against the possibility of progress are about equal in number, they are not equally distributed in the Origin. Hence, statements affirming an overall direction to history, together with ancillary language such as ‘the higher animals,’ come from the summaries of chapters. Almost no chapter ends without a stirring validation of life’s grand design. Almost without exception statements against the notion of overall progress, however, come from the middles of chapters, embedded in discussion of specific problems. Often the two viewpoints jostle uncomfortably. Which of these views represents Darwin better? Cases either way could be (and often have been) made: that his true views, of a nonteleological and undirected universe, are expressed with the real data, whereas the affirmations of progress represent a sort of public relations ploy, meant to sugar a bitter pill and cover Darwin against attacks on moral and religious grounds; or, conversely, that whatever he may have said in the heat of the moment while looking at barnacle larvae or parasitic wasps, his overall view was more conventional, rooted both in his society and times and in his scientific milieur9. 1 think it is likely that all of these views are true. Darwin’s world is one filled with inconsistencies, relics and imperfect instincts, and there is no reason why Darwin himself should have been any different. Each view was convincing for some part of the whole, in which our and all creatures’ lives can be simultaneously both brutish and grand.
Eliot’s response in Middlemarch The project of exploring Darwinian history through a novel was not present to Eliot from the beginnings of Middlemarch. The novel began as two separate stories, and it was only in their fusion that larger patterns began to develop and for Eliot to see the possibilities for history of the combination and interaction of many disparate, but interrelating, narratives. The historiographical principles she brings to bear are, she tells us in language strikingly similar to Darwin’s own (here italicized), not fictional but historical: Old provincial society had its share of this subtEe movement: had not o&y its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended up by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found
themselves surprisingty grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky&mness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connexion - gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too. came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty ofskill, others with an offensive advantage in cunningzO. Without a doubt this was the language that so distressed Henry James. So successfully is the illusion of the complex, intertwined, nonteleological whole maintained through eight hundred-odd pages, that it is startling to look back at the end and realize how carefully constructed the work has been. This only points up the irony that Middlemarch is like the Origin of Species in that both take dysteleology and contingency as their philosophical premise, but are of necessity themselves tightly constructed artifices designed to illustrate a principle whose real workings, by definition, cannot be fully described. Like Darwin’s avowal of the difficulty of keeping the principle of struggle constantly in mind, Eliot asserts that an objective narrative also lies contrary to our immediate and self-protective understanding of human relations:
. . . we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity21.22. ‘Stupidity’ is a self-protective mechanism. It is necessary for individuals, but it guarantees that the agglomeration of individuals - society - will be no more than an agglomeration of stupidities. Individual selfcenteredness entails, as a result, unhappiness for the group, as we see very clearly in the estrangements between Dorothea and Casaubon, Rosamond and Lydgate, and, on the larger scale, in the mutual incomprehension of county and town. In combining these premises, the historiographical - of a Darwinian nonteleological narrative in which individuals have very
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little power over events, but their actions may, unforeseen, have rippling repercussions throughout - with the Darwinian psychological premise of individual selfcenteredness or ‘moral stupidity,’ Eliot runs into the same conundrum as Darwin. In such a world, is there - can there be - any hope of progress? Darwin finds no resolution in the Origin of Species. The affhmations of order and progress in the Origin are disjunct from the historiographical assertions of nonteleology; while both may indeed be deeply felt, there is no reconciliation. Struggle, competition, mindless procreation, death and the unavoidable rod of selection on the one side, and the scale of nature miraculously surviving on the other. But logic cannot connect them. At least not in the animal world. For Eliot, there is a door out of the labyrinth, For the most part, human life and history may be like Casaubon’s mind, all ‘anterooms and passages which seemed to lead nowhither’z3. But human beings have one characteristic that ants and bees do not: they are conscious and can make conscious choices, including altruistic ones. True, disinterested, altruism is impossible among animals, but humans can perform truly selfless acts. It goes against their nature - against the moral stupidity with which we are all well-wadded - but it can be learned. In this view, much of the framing and action of Middlemarch comes into sharper focus. Several times in the novel, characters act, for reasons of moral conviction, directly against their own self-interest. Among these are Dorothea’s subordination of herself first to an abstract idea of marriage, then, in growing maturity, a sacrifice of herself to the individual, unsatisfactory Mr Casaubon in an act of considered sympathy. The Reverend Farebrother warns Fred Vincy that by dissolute behavior he will lose the affections of the woman with whom Farebrother is also in love, which might cause her to turn rather to him: [My] prompting was to look on and see you take the wrong turning . . . and lose the best opportunity of your life - the opportunity which you made some rather difficult effort to secure. You can guess the feeling which raised that temptation in me - I am sure you know it. I am sure you know that the satisfaction of your affections stands in the way of mine . . . But I had once meant better than that, and I am come back to my old intention”. And Harriet Bulstrode, in an act of considered sympathy parallel to Dorothea’s, decides to remain with her disgraced husband rather than gain the town’s approval by abandoning him. In no case do these characters engage in altruism automatically or instinctively; on the contrary, Eliot is careful to show the intellectual and emotional costs of each decision. Moreover, she contrasts these characters and their decisions
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throughout with characters who are unable to make the imaginative leap beyond animal stupidity, in particular with Bulstrode the banker, whose eventual ruin is entirely a consequence of his inability to transcend self. None of Eliot’s characters, naturally, understands this decision in scientific terms. No altruist in Eliot acts out of Eliot’s own motives; they are moved by religion, out of a diffuse sense of morality, or a feeling of personal responsibility and honor. In this sense they are analogous to Darwin’s ants, which do not know the real reasons for their sacrifices either. But while ants act for the hive, Eliot’s test creatures act for a didactic purpose. That Eliot views the conscious capacity for altruism as the sole meager hope for humanity may be more clearly seen in her treatment of Bulstrode. He is the character whose failures are the most acute, and his ruin is brought about entirely by compounded errors of selfishness and Eliot’s ‘stupidity’ because, when given clear choices between selfish and altruistic action, he chooses selfishness. It is possible to escape history’s trap for the individual, in Eliot’s formulation, but it is not possible to do very much about the larger process. In the last words of the novel she says as much. Dorothea’s life was effaced, like all her characters’ lives; the great deeds for which she had hoped never came to pass, and Dorothea was never a second St Theresa or Antigone in an ‘imperfect social state’. But, she concludes: that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombsz5. Human progress, such as it is, is dependent on those who, like Dorothea, can subordinate innate selfishness to the happiness of others, to that we owe it that ‘things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been’. This is hardly a triumphal summing up of the kind that Darwin achieves in the last passage of the Origin of Species, but it resonates consistently with the course of Eliot’s novel. Eliot’s answer, moreover, to the conundrums of biological determinism and historical indeterminism does not, in itself, give us answers. There are aspects of the question that she leaves untouched. Society and social bonds, particularly marriage, for example, are for her absolutes. There is never a moment’s question that Dorothea and Will’s story will turn into Anna Kurenina; the thought of breaking all social bonds and running away together never for a moment crosses their, or Eliot’s mind. The struggle for Dorothea, and Lydgate, is to map out the meaning of marriage and to comprehend its ‘demand for self-suppression and tolerance’26; presumably it is because marriage requires self-suppression and tolerance of every individual that it is so important to Eliot.
Moreover, Eliot’s strongly-felt morality has no basis stronger than feeling, If no longer rooted - as it no longer could be for Eliot, devout in her youth but agnostic by the time of Middlemarch - in religion, what underlies morality and makes one course better than another? There is as yet no natural or Darwinian solution to this conundrum, nor, I think, is there likely to be. Phenomena such as religion, morality and philosophy are most likely, in most of their manifestations, epiphenomena of human evolution, important to us, but not to our natural history. But Eliot’s grapplings with the dilemmas presented by Darwinian history are exceedingly relevant, if only because they provide a counterpoint in the current fashion for biologizing explanations of human behavior. Darwin reminds us over and over again in the Origin that his views are counterintuitive; they run against all our instinctual ways of seeing the world and interpreting its history. To see history in more appropriate measure takes constant discipline not to underestimate the importance of constant change and struggle and the impersonal hand of selection. Eliot does the same in human terms, constantly forcing the reader to hear the roar on the other side of silence, an act of perspective as difficult as Darwin’s recognition of constant struggle in nature. And she is surely right about one thing. So far as we have the capacity to recognize the impersonal perspective of events, we have to an individual but significant degree the power to choose our responses to them. Much of the recent discussion of the application of evolutionary biology to human beings has run on the acceptance of lhnits, on recognizing the apparently immutable biological underpinnings of many human behaviors. Eliot reminds US that it is part of our nature to be able to choose those limits, as well. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Robert J. Richards, HansJoerg Rheinberger, and Susan Spath for comments and improvements. Notes and references 1 Quoted in Beer, G. (1983) Darwink PZoZs: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, p. 156, Routledge & Kegan Paul 2 Lewes, G.H. (1868) Mr Darwin $ Hypothesis, Fortnightly Review 3, new
series. 3.53-373.611-628,61-80,492-509 3 On the timing of Middlemarch, see the introduction by David Carroll to the Clarendon George Eliot edition of Middlemarch, pp. xiii-lxii (Ref. 2 1) 4 Beer, G. (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, has written on Darwin’sinfluence on 19th~centurynarrative strategy 5 See Shuttleworth,S. (1984)George Eliot and Nineteenth-Cenhq Science: the Make-Believe ofa Beginning, Cambridge University Press, for a broad discussion of Eliot’s uses and understanding of contemporary science
Paxton, N. (1991) George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender, Princeton University Press Levine, G. (1988) Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, Harvard University Press Carroll, J. (1995) Evolution and Liter-q Theo?. University of Missouri Press Young, R.M. (1985) Darwin S Metaphor: Nature S Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge University Press 10 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 484, Harvard University Press, 11 On the Origin of Species, p. 62. On Darwin’s and Eliot’s use of the image of the web, see Beer, G. (1983) Darwin k Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Centq Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul 12 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin ofSpecies, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 62, Harvard University Press. 13 Darwin, C. (1859, reurinted 1964) On the Origin ofSpecies, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 87, Harvard University Press. 14 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin &Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 201, Harvard University Press. 15 ‘We shall never, urobablv. disentanele the inextricable web of afft&ies between the members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress.’ . Darwin, C. (1859. reminted 1964) On the Origin of Species; a facsimile of the first edition, p. 434, Harvard University Press. 16 Darwin asserts the impossibility of general progress in a number of passages in Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin ofspecies, a facsimile of the first edition, Harvard University Press: Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence. And we see that this is the degree of perfection attained under nature. The endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one compared with another; but they are now rapidly yielding before the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe, NaturaI seIection wil1 not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature. If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason tells us, though we may easily
err on both sides, that some other contrivances are less perfect (pp. 201-202). Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found (p. 206). the fact that instincts are not always absolutely perfect and are liable to mistakes; - that no instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others all tend to corroborate the theory of natural selection (p. 243). The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of this want of absolute perfection have not been observed (p. 472). On the view of instincts having been slowly acquired through natural selection we need not marvel at some instincts being apparently not perfect and liable to mistakes, and at many instincts causing other animals to suffer (p. 475). 17 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 455, Harvard University Press. 18 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, Harvard University Press, In considering the geologic question of ‘whether recent forms are more highly developed than ancient,’ for example, he first disavows the question, by noting that ‘naturalists have not as yet defined to each other’s satisfaction what is meant by high and low forms.’ But, he goes on to state. ‘in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancient; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms. I do not doubt that this process of improvement has affected in a marked and sensible manner the organisation of the more recent and victorious forms of life, in comparison with the ancient and beaten forms; but 1 can see no way of testing this sort of progress.’ Even here, however, he backtracks, painstakingly pointing out that even though European imports were driving indigenous New Zealand species to extinction, which might be taken to denote an objective superiority, yet ‘the most skilful naturalist from an examination of the species of the two countries could not have foreseen this result’ (pp. 336338). Darwin reverts to the question in discussing embryology, when examining the often greater kinship between embryonic or larval forms than between adults, even of closely related groups. This he attributes to the inheritance of common descent, which may be obscured whenever
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natural selection comes into play, but where forms are protected to any degree remains unobscured. He generalizes, ‘The embryo in the course of development generally rises in organisation’, but immediately backs away: ‘I use this expression, though I am aware that it is hardly possible to define clearly what is meant by the organisation being higher or lower’. Again the assertion: ‘But no one probably will dispute that the butterfly is higher than the caterpillar’. Again the qualification: ‘In some cases. however, the mature animal ia generally considered as lower in the scale than the larva, as with certain parasitic crustaceans’, followed by a flood of specifics drawn from his beloved barnacles, in which the ‘six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, _. pair of magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae’ of the second larval phase are favorably contrasted with the prehensile legs, missing antennae and ‘very simple’ eye-spots of sessile adults (p. 44 I ). S.J. Gould is the best-known upholder of an antiteleological view of Darwin: Richards, R.J. (1993) in The Meaning of Evolution:the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin :r Theory, Chicago University Press, has made a case based on the embryological reasoning of Agassiz and von Baer that Darwin did believe in an ontogenetic law, and therefore in a directional history, and that subsequent antiteleological interpretations of Darwin have been imposed by the fundamentalist neo-Darwinian evolutionists of our century Eliot, C. (1871-1872) Middlemarch, W. Blackwood. All references are by book, chapter and page number to Carroll, D., ed. (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch, II. XX, 189, Oxford University Press I, xi, 93-94 Eliot. G. (1871-1872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), II. xx, 189, Oxford University Press Gillian Beer has oointed out the likeness of the simile in this passage to one used by T.H. Huxley to illustrate the poverty of the senses. Beer. G. (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionaq Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Centq Fiction. p. 152. Routledge & Kegan Paul Eliot, G. (I 87 l-l 872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), II, xx, 190, Oxford University Press 24 Middlemarch, VII, lxvi, 663-664 Eliot, G. (1871-1872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), Vlll, finale, 825, Oxford University Press Eliot,G. (1871-1872)(1986Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), VIII, lxxv. 742. Oxford University Press
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George Eliot read On the Origin of Species with her husband-partner George Henry Lewes, within weeks of its publication in late 1859. Her first assessment, in her journal, was superficial: ‘It seems not to be well written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive from want of luminous and orderly presentation’i. The Origin ofspecies, however, is not a book to be digested overnight even by a George Eliot, and its arguments, in fact luminous and orderly, took Eliot much longer to assimilate fully. Eliot and Lewes spent much time in considering its lessons over the next ten years, Lewes, a notable science writer and critic, wrote a fourpart analysis of ‘Mr. Darwin’s Hypothesis’ for the Fortnightly Review at the time Eliot was beginning to shape Middlemarch in her mind2.3. Middlemarch itself, among its many other meanings, is a painstaking analysis of the humanistic implications of Darwin’s new ways of looking at nature and history. My object in this essay is not to argue Eliot’s debt to Darwin in narrative form numerous people have treated thath9. The question that interests me here is historiography and its moral and ethical implications. Darwin in On the Origin of Species and Eliot in Middlemarch are both interested in the same question: what makes history happen? To a point, their answers are similar. History for both is nonteleological, contingent, acMiddlemarch, cidental and interconnected. subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life,’ describes a field slightly smaller than the world, covered by Darwin in the Origin, but its characteristics and its questions are the same.
A.J. Lustig is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, whose current work concerns the history of biological arguments for and against the existence of human altruism. e-mail: IustigQmpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
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If history has no direction, and individuals are virtually powerless in the context of chance and the past, what hope is there for the future? Darwin leaves the point unresolved, or resolves it only intermittently and inconsistently. Eliot, equally troubled by Darwin’s historiographical implications, finds a different escape, one possible for human beings alone: while animals may indeed be incapable of true altruism, subject as they are to the ever-present vengeance of natural selection, human beings, possessed of consciousness and conscience, can in fact choose selflessness, acting contrary to their own instincts in the interest of abstract morality. This is the trapdoor out of the blind labyrinth of history, which allows at least a tentative and occasional step in a direction recognizable as forward. It isn’t much, concludes Eliot, but it’s all we have. It is commonplace to remark that Lydgate and Casaubon are both searching for origins - Lydgate for the primitive tissue, Casaubon for the Key to All Mythologies - and that Eliot shows these hopes to be baseless. How then can the argument be made that Eliot grounded her narrative in yet another Origin? The key lies in the paradox of Darwin’s book itself. Despite its title, it is not a book about beginnings. Indeed, it too is a work only about narrative. The secret of On the Origin of Species is that living organisms have no origin but only history, leading back through infinitely complex interconnections to that ‘primordial form, into which life was first breathed’*O: the point where narrative breaks down and the author retreats into the passive voice, unable any longer to direct our understanding. The rhetorical strategy of the Origin of Species from beginning to end is to lay out general principles, and then fold miniature narratives into the expositions to illustrate their action. Darwin was led to structure the work in this way for two reasons. The first was methodological: the power of the theory of descent with modification, powered by
0160-9327/99/$ -see
natural selection and other subtle movers, is explanatory, rather than predictive. It cannot predict, except perhaps in the grossest of terms. (We will return to the conundrum of possible progress.) The second reason was that Darwin in fact had only illustration, inference and analogy to go on, and no direct proof. Historiographical principle guides Darwin’s view not only of the lengthy phenomena of history, but of nature’s everyday interactions. The principle is always paramount: We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life . .11. And it is only by training the mind to see nature in this way, behind the face of gladness, that we can see the hidden patterns of history develop. To see this takes training of mind and constant vigilance, as Darwin avows: Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so -than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstoodi*. A corollary of this principle is that there is no possible reward in nature for truly unselfish behavior. Any case where one organism appears to be acting for the good of another will be deceptive; on closer examination some degree of self-interest is always involved. Apparent mutual aid among social animals is merely a special case of the whole; in social animals natural selection ‘will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit
front matter 0 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: SO160-9327(99)01206-9
of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change’i3. The hand of natural selection comes down hardest on any character or behavior that impairs survival or reproduction, and Darwin elegantly demonstrates in Chapter 7 of the Origin that behavior and instinct of all kinds are as susceptible to variation and inheritance as any corporeal character. Indeed, the demonstration of natural selection’s action on instinct, temperament and behavior is intricately connected with Darwin’s denial of the possibility of altruism. He asserts: If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selectioni4. In such a world, without volition, can progress in any meaningful sense be possible? In one sense, it certainly is. ‘My theory’ provides for certain epistemologieal progress, not only in terms of concrete fact, but of appreciation of life’s grandeur. Of the three times that Darwin uses the word progress in a teleological sense in On the Origin of Species, one refers to our knowledgeis. But the real question, of course, is whether or not there is any kind of progress in the whole mass of life. Do we have a legitimate claim to being above turnips? Is the course of history teleological; that is, does it tend towards some end? In one sense, the answer is straightforward no. If Darwin’s theory of variation and natural selection is strictly followed through to its logical limits, it is not possible that the history of life can be progressive in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, personified though it is in Darwin’s metaphor, has neither foresight nor hindsight, but operates strictly and solely on individual organisms as they are at the moment, blinder even than justice. What gives an advantage at one moment may be a liability in the next generation, when circumstances have changed. While superiority may temporarily be achieved in local circumstances by local measures, by a global standard there can be noneib. On the one hand, Nature, in this view, is littered with imperfections, with appendices, imperfect corrections, rudimentary organs, stings that kill the bee. These are the traces of history and the mark of natural selection’s blindness. They may be ‘compared with the letters in a word, still retained in its spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation’r7, among the strongest evidence for Darwin’s theory. On the other hand, the eternal striving of the struggle for existence privileges novelty, complexity and innovation. Do these not lead to a general lifting of level? In as many passages as he asserted the impossibility of general perfection, Darwin considers the contrary as well’*.
While Darwin’s statements for and against the possibility of progress are about equal in number, they are not equally distributed in the Origin. Hence, statements affirming an overall direction to history, together with ancillary language such as ‘the higher animals,’ come from the summaries of chapters. Almost no chapter ends without a stirring validation of life’s grand design. Almost without exception statements against the notion of overall progress, however, come from the middles of chapters, embedded in discussion of specific problems. Often the two viewpoints jostle uncomfortably. Which of these views represents Darwin better? Cases either way could be (and often have been) made: that his true views, of a nonteleological and undirected universe, are expressed with the real data, whereas the affirmations of progress represent a sort of public relations ploy, meant to sugar a bitter pill and cover Darwin against attacks on moral and religious grounds; or, conversely, that whatever he may have said in the heat of the moment while looking at barnacle larvae or parasitic wasps, his overall view was more conventional, rooted both in his society and times and in his scientific milieur9. 1 think it is likely that all of these views are true. Darwin’s world is one filled with inconsistencies, relics and imperfect instincts, and there is no reason why Darwin himself should have been any different. Each view was convincing for some part of the whole, in which our and all creatures’ lives can be simultaneously both brutish and grand.
Eliot’s response in Middlemarch The project of exploring Darwinian history through a novel was not present to Eliot from the beginnings of Middlemarch. The novel began as two separate stories, and it was only in their fusion that larger patterns began to develop and for Eliot to see the possibilities for history of the combination and interaction of many disparate, but interrelating, narratives. The historiographical principles she brings to bear are, she tells us in language strikingly similar to Darwin’s own (here italicized), not fictional but historical: Old provincial society had its share of this subtEe movement: had not o&y its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended up by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found
themselves surprisingty grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky&mness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connexion - gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too. came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty ofskill, others with an offensive advantage in cunningzO. Without a doubt this was the language that so distressed Henry James. So successfully is the illusion of the complex, intertwined, nonteleological whole maintained through eight hundred-odd pages, that it is startling to look back at the end and realize how carefully constructed the work has been. This only points up the irony that Middlemarch is like the Origin of Species in that both take dysteleology and contingency as their philosophical premise, but are of necessity themselves tightly constructed artifices designed to illustrate a principle whose real workings, by definition, cannot be fully described. Like Darwin’s avowal of the difficulty of keeping the principle of struggle constantly in mind, Eliot asserts that an objective narrative also lies contrary to our immediate and self-protective understanding of human relations:
. . . we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity21.22. ‘Stupidity’ is a self-protective mechanism. It is necessary for individuals, but it guarantees that the agglomeration of individuals - society - will be no more than an agglomeration of stupidities. Individual selfcenteredness entails, as a result, unhappiness for the group, as we see very clearly in the estrangements between Dorothea and Casaubon, Rosamond and Lydgate, and, on the larger scale, in the mutual incomprehension of county and town. In combining these premises, the historiographical - of a Darwinian nonteleological narrative in which individuals have very
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little power over events, but their actions may, unforeseen, have rippling repercussions throughout - with the Darwinian psychological premise of individual selfcenteredness or ‘moral stupidity,’ Eliot runs into the same conundrum as Darwin. In such a world, is there - can there be - any hope of progress? Darwin finds no resolution in the Origin of Species. The affhmations of order and progress in the Origin are disjunct from the historiographical assertions of nonteleology; while both may indeed be deeply felt, there is no reconciliation. Struggle, competition, mindless procreation, death and the unavoidable rod of selection on the one side, and the scale of nature miraculously surviving on the other. But logic cannot connect them. At least not in the animal world. For Eliot, there is a door out of the labyrinth, For the most part, human life and history may be like Casaubon’s mind, all ‘anterooms and passages which seemed to lead nowhither’z3. But human beings have one characteristic that ants and bees do not: they are conscious and can make conscious choices, including altruistic ones. True, disinterested, altruism is impossible among animals, but humans can perform truly selfless acts. It goes against their nature - against the moral stupidity with which we are all well-wadded - but it can be learned. In this view, much of the framing and action of Middlemarch comes into sharper focus. Several times in the novel, characters act, for reasons of moral conviction, directly against their own self-interest. Among these are Dorothea’s subordination of herself first to an abstract idea of marriage, then, in growing maturity, a sacrifice of herself to the individual, unsatisfactory Mr Casaubon in an act of considered sympathy. The Reverend Farebrother warns Fred Vincy that by dissolute behavior he will lose the affections of the woman with whom Farebrother is also in love, which might cause her to turn rather to him: [My] prompting was to look on and see you take the wrong turning . . . and lose the best opportunity of your life - the opportunity which you made some rather difficult effort to secure. You can guess the feeling which raised that temptation in me - I am sure you know it. I am sure you know that the satisfaction of your affections stands in the way of mine . . . But I had once meant better than that, and I am come back to my old intention”. And Harriet Bulstrode, in an act of considered sympathy parallel to Dorothea’s, decides to remain with her disgraced husband rather than gain the town’s approval by abandoning him. In no case do these characters engage in altruism automatically or instinctively; on the contrary, Eliot is careful to show the intellectual and emotional costs of each decision. Moreover, she contrasts these characters and their decisions
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throughout with characters who are unable to make the imaginative leap beyond animal stupidity, in particular with Bulstrode the banker, whose eventual ruin is entirely a consequence of his inability to transcend self. None of Eliot’s characters, naturally, understands this decision in scientific terms. No altruist in Eliot acts out of Eliot’s own motives; they are moved by religion, out of a diffuse sense of morality, or a feeling of personal responsibility and honor. In this sense they are analogous to Darwin’s ants, which do not know the real reasons for their sacrifices either. But while ants act for the hive, Eliot’s test creatures act for a didactic purpose. That Eliot views the conscious capacity for altruism as the sole meager hope for humanity may be more clearly seen in her treatment of Bulstrode. He is the character whose failures are the most acute, and his ruin is brought about entirely by compounded errors of selfishness and Eliot’s ‘stupidity’ because, when given clear choices between selfish and altruistic action, he chooses selfishness. It is possible to escape history’s trap for the individual, in Eliot’s formulation, but it is not possible to do very much about the larger process. In the last words of the novel she says as much. Dorothea’s life was effaced, like all her characters’ lives; the great deeds for which she had hoped never came to pass, and Dorothea was never a second St Theresa or Antigone in an ‘imperfect social state’. But, she concludes: that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombsz5. Human progress, such as it is, is dependent on those who, like Dorothea, can subordinate innate selfishness to the happiness of others, to that we owe it that ‘things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been’. This is hardly a triumphal summing up of the kind that Darwin achieves in the last passage of the Origin of Species, but it resonates consistently with the course of Eliot’s novel. Eliot’s answer, moreover, to the conundrums of biological determinism and historical indeterminism does not, in itself, give us answers. There are aspects of the question that she leaves untouched. Society and social bonds, particularly marriage, for example, are for her absolutes. There is never a moment’s question that Dorothea and Will’s story will turn into Anna Kurenina; the thought of breaking all social bonds and running away together never for a moment crosses their, or Eliot’s mind. The struggle for Dorothea, and Lydgate, is to map out the meaning of marriage and to comprehend its ‘demand for self-suppression and tolerance’26; presumably it is because marriage requires self-suppression and tolerance of every individual that it is so important to Eliot.
Moreover, Eliot’s strongly-felt morality has no basis stronger than feeling, If no longer rooted - as it no longer could be for Eliot, devout in her youth but agnostic by the time of Middlemarch - in religion, what underlies morality and makes one course better than another? There is as yet no natural or Darwinian solution to this conundrum, nor, I think, is there likely to be. Phenomena such as religion, morality and philosophy are most likely, in most of their manifestations, epiphenomena of human evolution, important to us, but not to our natural history. But Eliot’s grapplings with the dilemmas presented by Darwinian history are exceedingly relevant, if only because they provide a counterpoint in the current fashion for biologizing explanations of human behavior. Darwin reminds us over and over again in the Origin that his views are counterintuitive; they run against all our instinctual ways of seeing the world and interpreting its history. To see history in more appropriate measure takes constant discipline not to underestimate the importance of constant change and struggle and the impersonal hand of selection. Eliot does the same in human terms, constantly forcing the reader to hear the roar on the other side of silence, an act of perspective as difficult as Darwin’s recognition of constant struggle in nature. And she is surely right about one thing. So far as we have the capacity to recognize the impersonal perspective of events, we have to an individual but significant degree the power to choose our responses to them. Much of the recent discussion of the application of evolutionary biology to human beings has run on the acceptance of lhnits, on recognizing the apparently immutable biological underpinnings of many human behaviors. Eliot reminds US that it is part of our nature to be able to choose those limits, as well. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Robert J. Richards, HansJoerg Rheinberger, and Susan Spath for comments and improvements. Notes and references 1 Quoted in Beer, G. (1983) Darwink PZoZs: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, p. 156, Routledge & Kegan Paul 2 Lewes, G.H. (1868) Mr Darwin $ Hypothesis, Fortnightly Review 3, new
series. 3.53-373.611-628,61-80,492-509 3 On the timing of Middlemarch, see the introduction by David Carroll to the Clarendon George Eliot edition of Middlemarch, pp. xiii-lxii (Ref. 2 1) 4 Beer, G. (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, has written on Darwin’sinfluence on 19th~centurynarrative strategy 5 See Shuttleworth,S. (1984)George Eliot and Nineteenth-Cenhq Science: the Make-Believe ofa Beginning, Cambridge University Press, for a broad discussion of Eliot’s uses and understanding of contemporary science
Paxton, N. (1991) George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender, Princeton University Press Levine, G. (1988) Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, Harvard University Press Carroll, J. (1995) Evolution and Liter-q Theo?. University of Missouri Press Young, R.M. (1985) Darwin S Metaphor: Nature S Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge University Press 10 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 484, Harvard University Press, 11 On the Origin of Species, p. 62. On Darwin’s and Eliot’s use of the image of the web, see Beer, G. (1983) Darwin k Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Centq Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul 12 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin ofSpecies, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 62, Harvard University Press. 13 Darwin, C. (1859, reurinted 1964) On the Origin ofSpecies, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 87, Harvard University Press. 14 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin &Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 201, Harvard University Press. 15 ‘We shall never, urobablv. disentanele the inextricable web of afft&ies between the members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress.’ . Darwin, C. (1859. reminted 1964) On the Origin of Species; a facsimile of the first edition, p. 434, Harvard University Press. 16 Darwin asserts the impossibility of general progress in a number of passages in Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin ofspecies, a facsimile of the first edition, Harvard University Press: Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence. And we see that this is the degree of perfection attained under nature. The endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one compared with another; but they are now rapidly yielding before the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe, NaturaI seIection wil1 not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature. If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason tells us, though we may easily
err on both sides, that some other contrivances are less perfect (pp. 201-202). Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found (p. 206). the fact that instincts are not always absolutely perfect and are liable to mistakes; - that no instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others all tend to corroborate the theory of natural selection (p. 243). The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of this want of absolute perfection have not been observed (p. 472). On the view of instincts having been slowly acquired through natural selection we need not marvel at some instincts being apparently not perfect and liable to mistakes, and at many instincts causing other animals to suffer (p. 475). 17 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, p. 455, Harvard University Press. 18 Darwin, C. (1859, reprinted 1964) On the Origin of Species, a facsimile of the first edition, Harvard University Press, In considering the geologic question of ‘whether recent forms are more highly developed than ancient,’ for example, he first disavows the question, by noting that ‘naturalists have not as yet defined to each other’s satisfaction what is meant by high and low forms.’ But, he goes on to state. ‘in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancient; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms. I do not doubt that this process of improvement has affected in a marked and sensible manner the organisation of the more recent and victorious forms of life, in comparison with the ancient and beaten forms; but 1 can see no way of testing this sort of progress.’ Even here, however, he backtracks, painstakingly pointing out that even though European imports were driving indigenous New Zealand species to extinction, which might be taken to denote an objective superiority, yet ‘the most skilful naturalist from an examination of the species of the two countries could not have foreseen this result’ (pp. 336338). Darwin reverts to the question in discussing embryology, when examining the often greater kinship between embryonic or larval forms than between adults, even of closely related groups. This he attributes to the inheritance of common descent, which may be obscured whenever
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natural selection comes into play, but where forms are protected to any degree remains unobscured. He generalizes, ‘The embryo in the course of development generally rises in organisation’, but immediately backs away: ‘I use this expression, though I am aware that it is hardly possible to define clearly what is meant by the organisation being higher or lower’. Again the assertion: ‘But no one probably will dispute that the butterfly is higher than the caterpillar’. Again the qualification: ‘In some cases. however, the mature animal ia generally considered as lower in the scale than the larva, as with certain parasitic crustaceans’, followed by a flood of specifics drawn from his beloved barnacles, in which the ‘six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, _. pair of magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae’ of the second larval phase are favorably contrasted with the prehensile legs, missing antennae and ‘very simple’ eye-spots of sessile adults (p. 44 I ). S.J. Gould is the best-known upholder of an antiteleological view of Darwin: Richards, R.J. (1993) in The Meaning of Evolution:the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin :r Theory, Chicago University Press, has made a case based on the embryological reasoning of Agassiz and von Baer that Darwin did believe in an ontogenetic law, and therefore in a directional history, and that subsequent antiteleological interpretations of Darwin have been imposed by the fundamentalist neo-Darwinian evolutionists of our century Eliot, C. (1871-1872) Middlemarch, W. Blackwood. All references are by book, chapter and page number to Carroll, D., ed. (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch, II. XX, 189, Oxford University Press I, xi, 93-94 Eliot. G. (1871-1872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), II. xx, 189, Oxford University Press Gillian Beer has oointed out the likeness of the simile in this passage to one used by T.H. Huxley to illustrate the poverty of the senses. Beer. G. (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionaq Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Centq Fiction. p. 152. Routledge & Kegan Paul Eliot, G. (I 87 l-l 872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), II, xx, 190, Oxford University Press 24 Middlemarch, VII, lxvi, 663-664 Eliot, G. (1871-1872) (1986 Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), Vlll, finale, 825, Oxford University Press Eliot,G. (1871-1872)(1986Clarendon edition) Middlemarch (Carroll, D., ed.), VIII, lxxv. 742. Oxford University Press
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