xxiv CHARLES DARWIN 391 



The brevity with which I will speak will therefore be not 

 a measure of our appreciation of the subject or of the man, 

 but of a conviction that few words are needed to express what 

 we all know and all feel. 



The recently published Life and Letters has brought before 

 a wide circle of readers a most vivid presentiment of what 

 Darwin really was. 



A character so simple, so transparent, so unaffected, duly 

 recognising its own strength, and at the same time fully 

 conscious of its own imperfections, a life so singularly 

 consistent, so steadily uniform throughout in its aims, and so 

 undeviatingly honest to all its convictions : such a character 

 and such a life, already well known to his intimate friends, is 

 now before the whole world revealed, as one may say, to its 

 very depths. 



Nothing more of any importance, either of character or 

 life, will ever be known. Any additional detail of incident or 

 adventure that can ever be brought to light, any further 

 publication of his voluminous correspondence, would only fill 

 in little vacuities that may be left in the picture, but will 

 never alter the outlines, or the colour, or the tone. The 

 picture, as already drawn in that book, will remain, substantially, 

 the same, for it is that of the man himself, and, as I have 

 said, of a man singularly free from the complexities and 

 contradictions which make up the composite character of 

 many whose names have risen conspicuous above those of 

 their fellow-men. To the admirable qualities of his domestic 

 life, his modesty, his graciousness, his geniality, his generous 

 appreciation of the work and opinions of others, justice has 

 been fully rendered, even by the least sympathetic critics of 

 his scientific work. One of the most recent of these is 

 constrained to say, " To know Darwin was to feel attracted to 

 him, to know much of him was to love him." 1 



It concerns us here to speak rather of the one great 

 characteristic which, throughout the whole of his lengthened 

 career, dominated all others, and made him what he was, 

 the consuming, irrepressible longing to unravel the mysteries 

 of living nature, to penetrate the shroud which conceals the 



1 The Duke of Argyll. 



