CHAPTER XVIII—­Per Contra

“’The evil that men do lives after them” {239a} is happily not so true as that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones, and to no one does this correction of Shakespeare’s unwonted spleen apply more fully than to Mr. Darwin.  Indeed it was somewhat thus that we treated his books even while he was alive; the good, descent, remained with us, while the ill, the deification of luck, was forgotten as soon as we put down his work.  Let me now, therefore, as far as possible, quit the ungrateful task of dwelling on the defects of Mr. Darwin’s work and character, for the more pleasant one of insisting upon their better side, and of explaining how he came to be betrayed into publishing the “Origin of Species” without reference to the works of his predecessors.

In the outset I would urge that it is not by any single book that Mr. Darwin should be judged.  I do not believe that any one of the three principal works on which his reputation is founded will maintain with the next generation the place it has acquired with ourselves; nevertheless, if asked to say who was the man of our own times whose work had produced the most important, and, on the whole, beneficial effect, I should perhaps wrongly, but still both instinctively and on reflection, name him to whom I have, unfortunately, found myself in more bitter opposition than to any other in the whole course of my life.  I refer, of course, to Mr. Darwin.

His claim upon us lies not so much in what is actually found within the four corners of any one of his books, as in the fact of his having written them at all—­in the fact of his having brought out one after another, with descent always for its keynote, until the lesson was learned too thoroughly to make it at all likely that it will be forgotten.  Mr. Darwin wanted to move his generation, and had the penetration to see that this is not done by saying a thing once for all and leaving it.  It almost seems as though it matters less what a man says than the number of times he repeats it, in a more or less varied form.  It was here the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” made his most serious mistake.  He relied on new editions, and no one pays much attention to new editions—­the mark a book makes is almost always made by its first edition.  If, instead of bringing out a series of amended editions during the fifteen years’ law which Mr. Darwin gave him, Mr. Chambers had followed up the “Vestiges” with new book upon new book, he would have learned much more, and, by consequence, not have been snuffed out so easily once for all as he was in 1859 when the “Origin of Species” appeared.