Those eventful five years are recounted in Darwin's first popular book, The Voyage of the Beagle, a marvelous blend of scientific reporting and travei writing; the energy, curiosity, and sheer love of life that Darwin experienced during his for- mative voyage shines through on every page. It is a book to be read with pleasure by anyone who has the slightest interest either in the natural world or in world travei, and with pure delight by those who love both.
Darwin returned to England in 1836, and never set foot abroad again. He married his cousin Emma, started a family (touched by the characteristic Victorian tragedy of the death of a favorite child), settled in a big, comfortable house in Kent, and devoted himself with single-minded energy to the work of making sense of the great fabric of life. As early as 1837, his journals show, he was beginning to formulate a theory of evo- lution by natural selection. But time and again he would work on his theoretical material and then put it aside. He was often ill with mysterious maladies, which in retrospect surely look stress-related; he knew very well that his evolving theory of evolution posed a direct challenge to the Biblical doctrine of divine creation, and he agonized at the pain this would cause many people whose affection and good opinion he cherished— beginning with his beloved wife, whose religious views were far more conventional than his own. In the meantime he worked on his Beagle specimens, published an exhaustive scientific study of barnacles, and cultivated an acquaintance among dog breeders, horse trainers, and pigeon fanciers (raff- ish folk not ordinarily sought out by solid upper-middle-class people like the Darwins), looking for clues to natural selection in the artificial selection practiced by breeders of domestic animais.
In the end, an unexpected externai pressure forced his hand. In 1858 he received from Alfred Russel Wallace, a natu- ralist and professional museum specimen collector living in the East Indies, a paper outlining a theory of evolution by natural selection—exactly what Darwin had been struggling toward for twenty years. Darwin wrote back asking that they present joint papers to the Linnaean Society, and Wallace graciously agreed. Evolution by natural selection was now out in the open, and the debate was on—a debate that continues to rage to the present day. (Wallace had neither Darwin^ class advantages nor his scientific training; his theory of evolution came through intelligent insight, not deep scientific investigation. Still, Wallace^ contribution deserves more acknowledgment than it usually gets. And his own book of scientific travei writing, The Malay Archipelago, is a gem, well worth reading alongside The Voyage of the Beagle.)
The initial papers by Darwin and Wallace were followed in 1859 by On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Darwin^ full explication of his theory. It is not a particularly easy book to read, but it offers rewards to compensate for its difficulty. Darwin knew full well that his theory was not seam- less; there were gaps in the fуssil record, no one had ever observed the emergence of a new species through evolution (an impossible requirement, because it occurs over many gen- erations), and, most crucially, the mechanisms of genetic inheritance were a complete mystery to Darwin and most of his contemporaries. (Gregor Mendel, the discoverer of the principies of genetics, had sent Darwin a copy of his paper describing his famous experiments, but Darwin either didn't read it or didn't appreciate its significance. MendePs work, published in a very obscure journal, remained essentially unknown until the early twentieth century.) And so Darwin's strategy in Origin is to persuade by brute force, adducing a huge mass of solid evidence and overcoming objections, when the evidence does not suffice, by evoking analogies and plausi- ble guesses. It relies more on brazenness than subtlety; yet at the same time the keenness of Darwin^ insights—looking where others had looked before, and seeing what they had never seen—fills the book with intellectual excitement.
Darwin's theory did not take the world by storm; on the contrary, it was opposed immediately by many scientists as well as by the religious establishment, and it won general accep- tance only gradually. But from the moment the Origin was published, opposition to Darwin^ theory of evolution was, in a sense, a rear-guard action; it might take awhile, but Darwin had already won. To read On the Origin of Species is to observe a scientific revolution in progress, and to make the acquaintance of one of mankmd's most powerful minds.
J.S.M.
74
NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH GOGOL
1809-1852 Dead Souls
This does not seem like a particularly appealing title. Actually the term refers, as you will discover, to Russian serfs who had died but were still carried, until the next census, on the tax rolls. The book is not as morbid as it sounds.
Gogol is not a particularly appealing figure either. His family heritage was a poor one; he had an unbalanced youth; he failed at the law, as a government clerk, as an actor, as a teacher. To the end of his short life he remained a virgin, and in his latter years religious mania clouded his mind. As a writer he enjoyed a number of triumphs, but at bottom he was appalled by the electrifying reaction to his books and plays. He wandered aimlessly over Europe and made a pointless pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During his last days he burned his man- uscripts, so that we possess only a fragment of the second part of Dead Souls, which when completed was to show good victo- rious over evil. He died in what seems to have been delirium.
Yet this queer duck, who surely cannot be said to possess a powerful mind, virtually founded Russian prose and gave Rъssia a masterpiece that became a part of world literature. Speaking of GogoPs most famous short story, Dostoyevsky [87] said, "We ali come out of The Overcoat.,,> Compare Hemingway^ remark [119] about Huckleberry Finn [92]. GogoPs untraditional genius apparently led him to break with the formalism and rigidity that marked much previous Russian writing, just as Mark Twain did in our own country. The giants who followed him benefited from this liberation.
I once wrote an Introduction to Dead Souls that the bril- liant author of Lolita termed "ridiculous." I think Nabokov [122] must have felt queasy over my notion (shared by many) that Dead Souls is a great comic novel. He must surely have
objected also to my other notion (also not uniquely held) that Gogol in one of his moods—for he did not have a coherent system even of prejudices—was in this book expressing a certain dissatisfaction with the Russian feudal system. But it is also true—this is Nabokov's emphasis—that Dead Souls is a demonic book, as well as a funny one. It does have a night- mare, almost a surrealist, tone. Usually likened to Dickens [77], Gogol is even more akin to Poe [75]. That Dead Souls can please me as well as Nabokov may have exasperated Nabokov, but furnishes at least some slight evidence of the variety of GogoPs appeal.
At any rate, this is a fascinating, almost madly vivid, loosely composed yarn about a great, bland rogue and his traveis through what seems, to a mere American, a real, if heavily cari- catured, early-nineteenth-century Rъssia. Its laughter is min- gled with melancholy—the poet Pushkin, after listening to GogoPs reading of the first chapter, sighed, "Lord, how sad is our Rъssia."
I cannot command the original, but nonetheless dare to recommend one translation, and one only. It is by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. It just sounds right. The others have a stiff- ness foreign, I am told, to GogoPs spirit.