44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



together, if anything more than superficial interest is to result. Now 

 Darwin's temperament was scientific : " My love of natural science," 

 he writes, " has been steady and ardent." I suggest that the combina- 

 tion in a single individual of the scientific and the poetic tempera- 

 ments is and must be rare. And I suggest, further, that, where it 

 occurs, the temperament will almost inevitably develop one-sidedly, so 

 that poetry outtops science, or science poetry. 



In Goethe's case, poetry was in the ascendent. As I said above, 

 I do not think that Darwin had any large admixture of the poet in his 

 make-up; certainly not so large an admixture of poetry as Goethe had 

 of science. But I believe that he had something of the poet in him; 

 I believe that the atrophy of this something went less far than he him- 

 self imagined; and I believe that science is not specially responsible 

 for its partial loss. 



Every normal man is a poet for a few years of his life. With 

 most of us, the poetic interest and inspiration die out, as naturally and 

 almost as suddenly as they came, somewhere about the age of twenty- 

 five, and usually sooner rather than later. Darwin was a man of 

 genius, and like many other men of genius he came late to maturity; 

 his plastic period extended, as he himself declares, "up to the age of 

 thirty or beyond it ;" and the " Origin of Species " was published in 

 1859, when he was fifty years old. Perhaps as a result of this pro- 

 longation of adolescence, perhaps as a coordinate feature of his ex- 

 traordinary endowment, Darwin possessed the poetic gift, the gift of 

 creative imagination, in a marked degree. He writes: 



I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any 

 hypothesis, however much beloved (and I can not resist forming one on every 

 subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. . . . On the other hand, 

 I am not very sceptical — a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the 

 progress of science. 



Here is the poetic temper showing, quite unconsciously to its possessor, 

 through the overlay of scientific training; here we get a glimpse, not 

 of " a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collec- 

 tions of facts," but of the credulous and imaginative attitude of 

 the poet. 



If I am right in my interpretation, and if Darwin, while never 

 profoundly poetical, still had more than the common share of poetic in- 

 sight, then we ought to find traces of this character in his books. We 

 must not expect too much, for Darwin pruned his manuscripts to the 

 quick. His son tells us : 



He had a horror of being lengthy, and seems to have been really much 

 annoyed and distressed when he found how the " Variation of Animals and 

 Plants " was growing under his hands. I remember his cordially agreeing with 

 Tristram Shandy's words, " Let no man say, Come, I'll write a duodecimo." 



