Charles Darwin had a dangerous idea. Some people even speculate that it made him ill. Ever since he wrote the quiet confession, in Notebook M, that his theory might lead to materialism—the idea that the world is entirely physical, with no God, no spiritual element at all—he had been cautious about how to express himself. If the issue of materialism got in the way, it would prevent people from reading and understanding him. He wanted to introduce evolution, not kill God.
Darwin used literary techniques to resolve this problem. Not only had he drafted versions of his argument twice before by the time he sat down to write Origin, but he was, in his youth, a deep reader of literature. His published version of Origin is full of the careful use of rhetoric to make his argument as persuasive as it could be. In his own way, Darwin is an accomplished literary writer.
The whole model for Origin is to harness the reader’s natural sense of wonder at Nature, and to redirect it to wonder at the hidden process Darwin had uncovered. It is not dogmatic, it carefully avoids inflammatory assertions about materialism, and it deals with dozens of anticipated objections. To express his idea of gradualism—that species are modified over geologically long time periods, through thousands of small changes—Darwin used a gradualist prose style.
The first important technique is personification. He talks of Nature as “she” and “her”. This helps the reader to concentrate on the claim being made about descent by modification through natural selection, and puts aside the looming question of an impersonal universe. Later on, Darwin had to stress that this was a metaphor, and that no intentional agency was implied, a confusion that still sometimes dogs his work today.
The most common structure for his paragraphs is to contrast the idea that all species were created, with the confusing facts thrown up by his research. Must we not wonder, Darwin asks, why these facts don’t fit the theory? He leads us to the conclusion, setting out facts, considering both sides, showing that there is one more piece of the puzzle we have to accept, even though it contradicts our instincts. The ultimate aim, as he writes, is to conquer the imagination with reason.
Many times, Darwin makes his case slowly, repetitively, using multiple adjectives and verbs, stressing similar points in different ways, so that what could be short, declarative sentences, written with what David Ogilvy called “the dogmatism of brevity”, become sensible, moderate paragraphs, that inveigle more than they denounce, shrugging at the inevitability of their conclusion more than insisting on the only true way to think, even though it is clear that, to Darwin, there is only one true way.
The main technique for his gradualism is called parallelism, the balancing of ideas. This is a classical way of writing, much used in the eighteenth century, especially by Johnson, but is also the basis of the poetry of the Bible, especially the Psalms. (More detail in the video.) Look at this paragraph, as an example:
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.
You see the personification, as nature is scrutinising, working. You see the gradualism when he reiterates the point, emphasising first the choice between variations, then the fact that we can only see them in the geological record, but doing all this with sub-clauses and repetitions; he goes through the process: scrutinising, rejecting, preserving, adding up. And you see parallelism in the balancing of what is seen and unseen, and in the balancing of phrases like slow changes and long ages, and the antithesis of rejecting and preserving. All of this comes together so Darwin can persuade rather than exhort.
So deep do Darwin’s literary roots run, that he sometimes quotes the Bible. In one section, he bursts into a flurry of poetic writing:
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
This expresses a thought found in Ecclesiastes, and uses the parallelism of Ecclesiastes’ rhetoric.
For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who can tell a man what will happen after him under the sun? (6:12)
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. (1:4)
Darwin was not just a scientific theorist, but a literary writer, capable of drawing on reserves of literary knowledge to make Origin persuasive, not just polemical. The more gradually he expressed his idea, the less dangerous it could seem, even though its consequences were far-reaching and radical, as he knew and worried they would be.
