Charles and Emma (26 page)

For his part, Charles admitted that Emma had been right when she said that his looking at the world in a scientific way probably precluded him from looking at it in a religious way. Perhaps to do the great science he did, he had to focus entirely that way—to let religion in would have diluted his effort. That did not mean he would deny Emma—or any-one—their beliefs. But for him, science was the way to get answers.

Perhaps in reaction to doubts about traditional religion, various kinds of spirituality had become popular in England, even among some of Charles and Emma's intellectual friends and family, including Hensleigh Wedgwood. Emma's smart and widely read brother attended séances, communed with spirit guides, and collected photographs that seemed to show ghosts and spirits. Both Emma and Charles were upset by Hensleigh's obsession. He wanted to talk about little else, and he urged Charles and Emma, and even Thomas Henry Huxley, to get involved. Hensleigh sent Huxley a photograph he thought showed a ghost. When Huxley told him that the photographer had superimposed an image on the plate, and it could not be real, Hensleigh did not believe him. Hensleigh was not the only one in their circle captivated by spirits and ghosts. All over London, séances were being held in parlors and living rooms and at dining tables. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who had also come up with the theory of natural selection, was a spiritualist, now working on a book that would be published soon—
Miracles and Modern Spiritualism.

It was only a matter of time before the Darwins would find themselves in one of those darkened rooms. It was intriguing even for the skeptical.

 

In January 1874, Emma and Charles headed to London. Emma was sixty-five, Charles was about to turn sixty-five. Charles
now had a long white beard, which he had started growing in 1863 because eczema made it uncomfortable for him to shave. He was thinner than ever, and frail. He looked like the wise old sage he was now considered to be. For even with the controversy—and there was still some—evolution had become more or less accepted as fact.

It was, in all ways but one, a typical trip to London. They were going to visit Erasmus. They would see their grown children who lived in London. Charles would see his publisher and also some doctors. But Charles and Emma also were going to attend a séance—in Erasmus's house. Eras, like many people who held séances, was a skeptic, but intrigued. If they held the séance in his house, he could try to make sure there was nothing done beforehand to fake the results.

One cold winter afternoon, Erasmus gathered some friends and family around his dining room table. It was a close and cozy crowd. Etty was there with her husband, Richard, as was Hensleigh, of course, with his wife, Fanny, and their daughter Snow. Emma was thrilled by the presence of one of the guests—the novelist known as George Eliot, author of one of Emma's favorite books,
Middlemarch.
Her real name was Mary Ann Evans, and she had come with her longtime companion, George Lewes, who wrote about natural history and was an advocate of Darwinism. Emma and Charles's son George came; he had hired the medium, a Mr. Williams. Charles wanted Huxley to come, and he may have been there—but anonymously. Huxley was evolution's public champion, still fighting for Darwinism. He coined the term
agnostic
to mean one who believes you cannot know whether God exists because you cannot prove God's existence. He did not want to be recognized by a medium who could claim later that Huxley believed in conjuring up the dead. Huxley, if
he
was
there, showed up for the fun of it, as did most of the attendants.

They darkened the room, closing the curtains and shutting the doors. The group sat down around the table. George and Hensleigh sat next to Mr. Williams on either side, holding down his hands and feet so he couldn't make anything happen. No one wanted this to be an ordinary séance, meaning one that was contrived by the medium. It was more of a test. The rest of the group joined hands and they all sat quietly—or tried to. Lewes could not help making jokes. Etty found him troublesome; they were supposed to “play the game fairly.”

Etty later wrote that “The usual manifestations occurred, sparks, wind-blowing, and some rappings and movings of furniture.”

Charles Darwin was not in the room to see what happened. He had gone upstairs to lie down, as he reported later, “before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place.” He said he was too hot and tired to stay. Lewes later wrote that he and Mary Ann Evans left, too, in disgust, when the medium demanded that the room be totally dark.

When it was over, Charles came downstairs. Upon seeing all the chairs disarranged, he was mystified. He knew that what had happened—Emma reported that the chairs had been lifted up high over their heads—was a result of trickery, not spirits from the other world. But “how the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding,” Charles said. He did not doubt that it was all a hoax. He declared, “The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish.” He thought it was too bad that people spent so much time and energy investigating the supernatural when there was so much to figure out about reality.

Yet, after this séance, Thomas Henry Huxley definitely did go to another séance, and reported about it to Charles. Huxley used diagrams to explain how Williams must have produced various effects. Charles wrote back, “To my mind an enourmous weight of evidence would be requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery…”

Not long afterward, Williams was proved to be a fraud. But that didn't mean to everyone that
all
spiritualism was false. Many people still believed.

Emma was not convinced one way or the other, though she remained cynical and thought it was almost certainly trickery. Still, according to Etty, Emma, as always, kept an open mind.

 

Chapter 31

Warmth to the End

 

I cannot bear her notion that God took him away because
she was so deeply attached to him. Not that I think a person
cannot be selfish in their love; but it is not the strength
of the love that is the sin, but the selfishness.

—E
MMA, WRITING TO AN AUNT ABOUT A MEMOIR THEY BOTH READ

 

C
harles and Emma played backgammon every night, and they kept track of who won and who lost. They took it all very seriously. When Charles wasn't winning, he would yell, “Bang your bones!” He was quoting Jonathan Swift's
Journal to Stella.

In a letter to Professor Asa Gray on January 28, 1876, he wrote:

 

Pray give our very kind remembrances to Mrs. Gray. I know that she likes to hear men boasting, it refreshes them so much. Now the tally with my wife in backgammon stands thus: she, poor creature, has won only 2490 games, whilst I have won, hurrah, hurrah,

2795 games!

 

Charles could brag about winning more games, but Emma won more gammons, which meant that when she won, Charles still had all his pieces on the board. That doubled the number of points he lost. They played doggedly on, battling on the backgammon board.

In 1876, Emma and Charles looked forward to the birth of their first grandchild. Frank was married to a woman named Amy, whom they loved; they could not wait for the baby. In September, Bernard Darwin was born. But Emma and Charles's happiness was short-lived. Amy became ill, and with Frank and Charles by her side, died a few days later. Another life cut too short. Frank, of course, was devastated. Charles told a friend that his son walked around bewildered and dazed. Looking at Frank's suffering, Charles knew for sure that he did not want to outlive Emma. He couldn't take it.

Emma was distraught as well, and, unusual for her, had become so undone that it was Charles who took over and gave all of them the emotional support they needed. But she soon rallied, and it was decided that Frank, who was working as Charles's secretary, would live at Down with Bernard.

Emma took charge of the nursery, and Bernard became, in a very real way, Emma's last baby. She devoted herself to him and his care as if she were a young woman. Although Amy's death had filled Emma with anxiety, Bernard was a happy, easy, and healthy baby, which eased Emma's anxiety quite a bit. Both of his grandparents doted on him. “Your father is taking a good deal to the Baby,” Emma wrote to Etty. “We think he (the Baby) is a sort of Grand Lama, he is so solemn.”

Frank helped his father with a collection of letters that he wanted to publish, and with an autobiography that Charles was preparing for his children and grandchildren. Frank had also become fascinated by plants. At Down, he and Charles
worked together studying the movement of plants in relation to light and gravity. They also looked at the evolution of plants.

And Charles had a new obsession. He had had so many in his life—beetles, barnacles, orchids, and now worms. Years ago, Uncle Josiah had suggested to Charles that worms moved the dirt around; it looked as though that movement made rocks sink into the ground. Charles now had time to test out the theory. He put chalk and small pieces of wood on the ground and noted how deeply rocks sank over time. In his twenties now, Horace made a mechanical instrument that helped his father study how far a stone moved vertically. He carried out many of the experiments and observations.

Charles decided to study worms more closely—their behavior and how their movements affected the ground. Once again, he thought that tiny actions brought about cumulative effects and great change. Most of his studies he conducted at home, but he looked at worms wherever he went. In June 1877, he and Emma, along with Frank, Bernard, and the baby's nursemaid, made a pilgrimage to the great prehistoric monument Stonehenge. Emma wrote to Etty before they left that she was afraid it would “half kill” Charles. She wrote to Etty almost every day now.

It would be a two-hour train ride and a twenty-four-mile drive in a coach. Emma was eager to see the stone monuments and the Cathedral Church at nearby Salisbury. But Charles was “bent on going, chiefly for the worms.” He liked to look at the action of worms in different types of soil. When they arrived at Stonehenge, the guard allowed him to dig as much as he wanted. Charles is probably the only tourist (adult, anyway) ever to pay more attention to the ground at Stonehenge than to the huge stone monoliths.

Back at Down, Charles involved the whole family in his worm obsession. One day, he decided to see if he could figure out what worms hear. They gathered in the drawing room around the piano. Emma played the piano, Frank the bassoon, and Elizabeth, who was unmarried and also lived at home, shouted. Even little Bernard joined in on the metal whistle. The worms did not react to the noise at all. But when he placed the worms on Emma's piano—in flower pots—then the worms responded to the vibrations they felt. If Emma struck a single note, high or low, the worms retreated into the soil.

Charles kept to his routine as much as possible, with Frank by his side. The routine was the same as when Frank had been a child, though now his father walked stooped over when he took his turns around the Sandwalk.

Frank and Charles worked hard together on the collection of letters, which would focus mostly on the scientific ones, especially his correspondence with his closest associates: Hooker, Henslow, Huxley, Gray, and his dear friend Charles Lyell, who had died in 1875 and been buried in Westminster Abbey.

Frank relished the time with his father. He later said, “How often, when a man, I have wished my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my hair, as he used to do when I was a boy. He allowed his grown-up children to laugh with and at him, and was, generally speaking, on terms of perfect equality with us.”

As the children grew up, they all remained close to Emma and Charles and with each other. It is often the case that with a great father the sons feel they cannot fill his shoes; the Darwin boys did not try. There were no hard feelings in the Darwin family. Charles and Emma had always loved their
children for who they were. And they were proud parents. In a letter to George, Charles wrote, “Oh Lord, what a set of sons I have, all doing wonders.”

Charles and Emma rarely parted from each other. He hated to be away from her for even one night. She was his “constant companion (& friend in old age)” as he had hoped his wife would be. In 1877 when he was awarded an honorary degree at his old university, Cambridge, Emma went with him and wrote to William how proud she was. “I felt very grand walking about with my LL.D. in his silk gown.”

And together they had gone on the journey of faith. In a letter in 1879, Charles wrote what he now believed about science and faith and how he had gotten there. He said that it was absurd to doubt that a man could be a theist and an evolutionist, as someone had said. Charles pointed to his friend Asa Gray, who was both. As for his own views, he said they were of “no consequence to any one except myself.” Knowing, certainly, that his views were indeed important to other people, he answered the question—in part. He said, “My judgment often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note.”

In his autobiography, which he intended just for his family, he wrote that although he was “very unwilling to give up my belief…disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.” But in the 1879 letter, which was to a member of the public, he wrote that even at his most “extreme fluctuations,” he was never an atheist “in the sense of denying the existence of a God.—I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” Whether he wrote that because he knew the letter
would likely become public and that is how he wanted to be known, or whether that was an accurate appraisal of his beliefs, we'll never be certain. But it does seem as though with age came acceptance of his own ignorance. As Emma had told him, he could not prove or disprove the existence of God. Religion was not a science.