RECENT POETRY AND EMOTIONALIZING OF EVOLUTION ^ 



How most of the Victorian poets — Swinburne is hardly a Victorian 

 — treated the hypothesis of evolution, we all remember. In the writ- 

 ings of Tennyson, for instance, which offer the most familiar example, 

 there is abundant recognition of the doctrine. Frequently the Laure- 

 ate shows his formal acceptance of the new order of things, albeit 

 he will always reconcile the new and the old; occasionally he really 

 grasps some phase of the theory and gives it back to us in melodious 

 lines of graceful truth. On the whole, however, I have never been 

 able to escape the conviction that as a poet he admitted the scientifi- 

 cally inevitable with more than half reluctance. ''Science grows and 

 Beauty dwindles" probably had a wider meaning for him than it 

 carries in its place in the later "Locksley Hall." But in the younger 

 generation of English poets I seem to find that the doctrine and its 

 corollaries have become a part of the heart and imagination, and 

 occupy a perfectly natural place in their metrical outpourings. 



Nor is it strange that the new material was slowly assimilated. At 

 first blush there could be nothing more unpromising for the votaries 

 of the Muse than the theory that has revolutionized our conception 

 of man and his place in the universe. My patient reader will produce 

 in himself the psychological attitude I am groping after, if he will 

 accompany me through the following clear and striking tabulation 

 from that fiercest of militant evolutionists. Professor Ernst Haeckel.^ 



1. This perishable body, our earth, had gone through a long pro- 

 cess of cooling before water in liquid form (the first condition of 

 organic Hfe) could settle thereon. 



2. The ensuing biogenetic process, the slow development and 

 transformation of countless organic forms, must have taken many 

 milHons of years — considerably over a hundred. 



3. Among the different kinds of animals which arose in the later 

 stages of the biogenetic process on earth the vertebrates have far 

 outstripped all others in the competition in the evolutionary race. 



4. Of the invertebrates the most important branch was formed by 

 the mammalia. 



5. Of the mammalia the most highly developed are the primates. 



» The Riddle oj the Universe, English ed., pp. 13-14. lOOS- 



