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The Vital Science

Biology and the Literary Imagination,1860-1900

(originally published 1984; copyright Peter Morton)

The argument of this book is that in late Victorian England a group of novelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that were peculiarly susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period 1860-1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionary theory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts. Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to their own artistic or polemic ends.

The core of The Vital Science is four interlocking chapters which examine certain ideas emerging from the new biology which particularly appealed to literary minds: evolutionism - the philosophy that organic adaptation is progressive in a human sense; degeneration - the belief that parasitism and retrogression are as applicable in the human sphere as in accounts of the extinction of species; eugenics - progress can be assured by aping nature's methods; and theories of heredity - read variously as encouraging or denying attempts to escape one's genetic destiny. Such ideas were used by many novelists, belles lettristes and journalists to warn, abuse, encourage or inspire, and the discussion ranges widely from minor utopian fiction to major novels by H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. The Vital Science is designed to interest historians and readers who will enjoy approaching the Victorian era from an unfamiliar angle as well as historians of biological theory between The Origin of Species and Mendel.

Parts of the book have been anthologised in textbooks and along with Gillian Beer's Darwin's plots it has become a standard text in its field.

Chapter 4

Laying the Ghost of the Brute: The Fear of Degeneration

when shall we lay

The Ghost of the Brute that is walking and haunting us yet, and be free?

In a hundred, a thousand winters? Ah, what will our children be,

The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?

ALFRED TENNYSON (c.1892)

I will tell you this much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or could have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was rounded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long. . . That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round. . . month by month the darkness gains upon the day. (The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 137-8)

The five volumes of Modern Painters were published between 1843 and 1860. The sublime responsiveness to every mood of nature embodied in the first two volumes (1843, 1846) contrasts violently with the expressive disgust of rural and urban life alike to be found in the final volume of 1860. The Storm Cloud lectures more than twenty years later were disastrous to Ruskin's reputation because they, along with others given around the same time during his tenure of the Slade Professorship at Oxford, forced his mental instability into full public awareness. But Ruskin had already suffered three prolonged manic episodes before these lectures, and even in his letters of the early 1870s the same half-crazed illogical linkages are made over and over between the terrible weather, the degeneracy of the natural order and the betrayal of the Wordsworthian vision. . . . In its confusion of objective and subjective, in its obsessive dwelling on decay and gloom, and in the vague imputation of these to some moral decline it threatens terribly the descent of its author's mind into yet another bout of insanity - realised in the following year. The Storm Cloud is one gigantic pathetic fallacy, which, ironically, Ruskin himself coined as a phrase and which he defined as 'a falseness in all our impressions of external things' (Works, 5: 205). . . . Rather than to his isolated bizarre notions we should give ear to the associative connections he forges; for with these he succeeds in contracting into a very small compass a whole cultural response which in better-aligned minds remained fragmented. The contraction is most evident in The Storm Cloud when we examine the movement from 'blanched Sun, - blighted grass'; past the further insistence that harmony is 'broken the world round' and all nature in decay; and finally to-the shuddering simile of the whole universe as a candle guttering into extinction. These constantly recurring metaphorical patterns owe little to Darwin directly, though they may perhaps be comprehended as a response to the idea of degeneration within the larger frame of post-Darwinian biology. Instead of nature red in tooth and claw, we have Ruskin's own blighted garden as a concentrated image of the corruption of nature:

looking over my kitchen garden yesterday, I found it one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, the roses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feeling like dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten at the stalks. (The Storm Cloud, 58)

It is both endearing and pathetic that, for Ruskin, personally experiencing a garden gone to seed was so alarming in its cosmic suggestiveness as to require an immediate public statement. But even for saner writers the same image, when transformed into an impersonal metaphor, was a favourite device for making concrete a group of connected biological abstractions. It was used thus quite consciously by writers as diverse as Mill, Hardy, Gissing and, above all, by T.H. Huxley.⁵ As Oma Stanley has shown in detail, the young Huxley tended romantically to personify nature and to come perilously close to a teleological reading of it.⁶ . . . ten years after Ruskin's Storm Cloud lectures Huxley may be discovered in his 'Prolegomena' (1894) to his Romanes Lecture of 1893 seeking a metaphorical structure which describes possible responses to the inevitable decay of the universe towards maximum disorder. (The concept of entropy was first presented by Clausius in the mid-1860s.) . . . the parable of the weeded garden - that is to say, a carefully maintained artificiality carved from a wilderness to which it will rapidly revert unless attention is unremitting - is a vivid expression not so much of Huxley's belief that man should combat the natural order but, rather, of his fear of degeneration transformed into a homely image. For Huxley's weeded garden soon gets overrun by Ruskin's unweeded one.

. . .

Ruskin's [theme] that of a sunken and immobilised despair of the artist before a nature turned treacherous. Huxley's is the noble and actively stoical pessimism of a biologist with no romantic illusions about nature left to be shattered. Both do agree that in the very long term man's future is finite. Ruskin allowed this knowledge to poison his present. Huxley was content to clarify the issues and to offer the temporary consolation (borrowing some lines from Tennyson's 'Ulysses') that before the end 'some work of noble note' could well be done. We shall find that the imaginative response to these unsettling truths about a nature on the wane followed the pattern laid down by these two preliminary examples.

Meanwhile, our central concern is to bring into exact focus the vague connotations hovering around the late-Victorian understanding of biological degeneration (otherwise retrogression, or devolution). For a simple concern with moral or social degeneration is a perennial cultural need, feeding off different evidence at different times. For Western pre-scientific cultures a belief in the progressive decline of man and nature found its explanation in the Genesis myths. Even earlier, the Greek legendary history retailed by Hesiod and others already told of an ideal Golden Age in even remoter antiquity which had long since relapsed into the contemporary Age of Iron. And much later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary battle over the respective virtues of ancient and modern writers raised some quasi-biological issues. Are nature's powers limited or infinite? Has she exhausted her powers with the passing of the classical age? Defeated spirits agreed with Sir Thomas Browne that ' 'tis too late to be ambitious, the great mutations of the world are over', and resigned themselves to rapid universal decay. Others of more elastic temperament preferred to believe that nature is elastic too, and capable of regeneration and renewed creativity. Whatever course such speculations followed they were inevitably amorphous and a matter of blind prejudice or temperament, as when Dr Johnson mocked Milton's proud boast of being a giant in a degenerate age when not even the trees grew as high as they were wont to do. They took on a sharper outline only when it seemed to become clear, as the first enthusiasm for the new biology subsided, that certain established assumptions about man as a species (and not simply about certain races, nations or cultures) might need to be abandoned. The warning came most distinctly from the direction of astrophysics, but that in turn was a direct reaction to a specially bold claim by the biologists. In short, certain writers had to face up to the frightening prospect of degeneration in the future because we are already living in the bright noon, and not the dawn, of man's day. These fears co-existed uneasily with the progressivism inspired by another selection of evolutionary facts.

The Victorians' Parochial Future

When he came to write on 'The scientific movement and literature' in 1877, the critic Edward Dowden felt a need to distinguish carefully between the literary possibilities of the ideas of Progress among the Romantic poets and in Tennyson. The difference - Dowden finds it obvious - is the new post-Lyell, post-Darwinian attitude to time. His metaphor is not perhaps the freshest he could have chosen, but it serves:

We ascertain that the waters have come from some mysterious source among strange mountains a thousand leagues away, and we are well assured that they will descend a thousand miles before they hear the voice of that mysterious sea in which they must be lost.⁸

Perhaps it is taking Dowden rather too literally to press heavily on his ratio of three to one between the availabilities of past and future time for man. Nevertheless, his general proportions are clear. Writing in the late 1870s, Dowden could readily have known that, according to the best estimates of his contemporary palaeontologists, Homo sapiens and his related but now extinct species had been active for at least a million years; that is, if one were to accept the persuasive calculations of William Thomson discussed in an earlier chapter, as much as one-tenth of the whole span of the past. A by-product of Thomson's attempt to fix quantitatively the age of the sun was that it also placed a very restricted limit on its future output of energy. That limit came farther down to the present and encroached more and more upon Darwin's early confident expectation of 'a secure future of . . . inappreciable length' (Origin, XIV:265 - and in the sixth and last edition Darwin changed the last phrase, in deference to Thomson, to 'great length'). Thomson's supposition that the sun's heat is produced by chemical reactions alone led inevitably to his warning that Time must have a stop; that even if the sun were made of a solid lump of high-grade coal it could not be expected to burn for a million or so years longer. Taking all other possible factors into account and interpreting the evidence as generously as possible, Thomson still placed his absolute upper limit at 'five or six million years of sunlight'.⁹

These now thoroughly outmoded opinions help us towards two important generalisations about the Victorian image of the future. First, that future was a relatively parochial affair. The geology of Hutton and Lyell had already broken through Archbishop Ussher's temporal boundary (in 1658 biblical chronology had enabled him to date the universe's age to 5662 years, plus or minus one year); but even these Uniformitarians, teaching that no radical change in the nature, only in the degree, of geological processes had ever happened, were, thanks to Thomson, Balfour and others, able to form no real conception of the enormity of time. With a very few exceptions, such as Darwin's own quickly retracted figure of 300 million, they measured the age of the earth itself and therefore of the life upon it only in scant millions of years. To conceive of a past thousands and a probable future tens of thousands of times longer than this was, between about 1865 and 1890, outside the imaginative range of even the most astute intelligence. Second, this prospect of a limited future had great human immediacy, for when the sun flickered out a few million years hence man, given the slowness of biological change, might still be recognisably man. So Darwinian evolution offered the almost unendurable prediction, after the passage of some millions of years, 'with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men', of everything having to be forfeited at the very acme of achievement. Darwin himself felt that the humiliating slowness of natural selection in bringing about improvement added to the horror of this vision of heat-death.¹⁰

The Thomsonian future, therefore, if his calculations were to be accepted (and there were few to question them: given the premiss of molecular energy transformations alone, they are mathematically impeccable), was one of continuous degradation, failing light, of gloom descending over the whole of creation like a storm-cloud over central London. . . .Astrophysics and biology united in recognising waste as inherent in the natural order. Degeneration out in the organic world is equatable with degeneration in the organic world: that is the implication of what Ruskin saw in his rotting garden.

The Darwinists and Degeneration

Are all species (including man) perpetually either evolving or devolving? Few biologists of the day felt impelled to seek a tertium quid on this emotive issue. One or two argued that, under certain very rare conditions, perfect adaptation to a static environment can result in permanent equilibrium: what ecologists now call the 'climax' condition. They believed that there is no inner force making species evolve; that they do so only when new niches in the environment are opened up, into which the selection mechanism can force the 'thousand wedges' (Darwin's own metaphor) of genetic variations. Several such 'living fossil' species were known to the Victorians which have continued since the very earliest times without manifest change in either direction. But what exactly these examples might mean for the human future was strongly disputed.¹² Herbert Spencer took them at face value. Arguing from economics back to biology as was his wont, he taught that when laissez-faire conditions prevail more generally the human population will eventually stabilise, since the more highly organised the intelligence (a trend which he took to be inevitable with freerunning natural selection in society), the lower the fecundity. He anticipated a general uneventful harmony where quiet philosophical men like himself might flourish; when 'pressure of population and its accompanying evils will disappear; and will leave a state of things requiring from each individual no more than a normal and pleasurable activity'.¹³

This dream of an Eden where the only remaining serpent might be yawning boredom certainly had its literary adherents, as we shall see; but it had far more, and more persuasive, scientific critics. Evolutionary stasis as a permanent feature in nature fell from notice when the neo-Darwinians tried with some success to show not only that natural selection alone can make for advance, but also that any tampering with its policing power would mean instant decline. To survive unaltered, to avoid the effects of Weismann's 'panmixia' (his term to describe degenerative change consequent on disuse had a brief general currency after 1890), a species must be kept well chiselled to shape. But even those who were stoic enough to be transformed because only struggle and competition bring progress were nonplussed to find that degenerative adaptation can produce the most dramatic and ugly results. . . . for the liberal Darwin, belief in the goodness of his principle collided with his data . . . He admitted in 1854 that even the useful guide of morphological differentiation fails 20 work in every tricky case of degeneracy; that 'my ideas are no clearer than those of my brethren'. Even four years later with the Origin nearly completed, all he is clear about is that 'highness' in the special biological sense is 'different from highness in the common acceptation of the word.

But despite his hesitancies and semantic caution, in the less meticulous hands of Darwin's 'brethren' his work eventually gave a very fine edge to the broader concept of degeneration. Inevitably so; for any layman of imagination could perceive that devolution was but the dark reverse of a coin whose bright obverse was biologically endorsed progress. A man who does not believe that the working of some natural law may underwrite human advancement can hardly be troubled by fears that nature may be planning man's obsolescence, too. Only a culture which has implicitly accepted evolutionary theory can find troubling the warning that 'in no case does the record of the fossils show a really dominant species succeeded by its own descendants'.¹⁵ It was those very writers most anxious to promote the tenets of evolutionism who were most troubled by warnings of decay and who were the most eager to respond with moral exhortation.

Only some of the manifestations of Victorian pessimism about the future, may be found to have a biological base, but those that did are certainly incomprehensible in any other terms. One of the earliest explicit formulations, which later served many more writers as a convenient mine of examples, was Ray Lankester's Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880). For most of this short book Lankester dutifully recites the evidence for believing that evolution does not always run in the direction of greater heterogeneity. Only in the last chapters does he turn to the wider issues: the relevance of these examples to the individual's and nation's moral life. His conclusions are restrained but decisive. Collapse into 'a contented life of material enjoyment accompanied by ignorance and superstition' (p. 61) must be the fate of anyone of any race who refuses to heed the dreadful lesson of the tapeworm. Nature is not mocked. If in our idleness and stupidity we do not obey her dictates of enterprise and aggressive puritanism, then we shall soon be at one with the dinosaurs.

Such extensions from certain indubitable facts - extensions which in Lankester's monograph form no more than an afterthought - became, as the 1880s passed by, the issues at the centre rather than on the periphery of the debate on retrogressive evolution. It followed inevitably that the conclusions of scientists with various moral axes to grind became more and more detached from the hard core of evidence. Andrew Wilson, lecturer in zoology at the Edinburgh Medical School, pressed forward in an essay written in the wake of Lankester's book with the concept of degeneration as a veritable skeleton key to history, able to penetrate

fields of thought often widely removed from the original topic which interests the reader. The present subject of degenerative changes, regarded as part and parcel of the living constitution, can readily be shown to possess applications far removed from zoology and botany, and extending into the most intimate spheres and phases of human history itself.¹⁶

. . . Wilson marches from the habits of the male rotifer and the linguatulina which in adulthood lose their limbs to become little more than digestive tracts, to sonorous philosophising on the decay of civilisations. . . the awareness that he is employing a dubious figure of speech does not restrain Wilson from his foregone conclusion that retrogression is immutable law, to be numbered among the sternest realities of organic existence.

. . .

As we saw in the previous chapter, Drummond's textbooks of imitation biology are just manuals serving up the morality of evangelism in the guise of so-called 'laws' extracted from the world of life. The method is hardly more sophisticated than in a medieval bestiary. . . . When Drummond pointed an accusing finger at the decadent social morality of animal parasitism, and drew the human lesson that 'beggars of the market-place. . . are living and unlying witnesses to the unalterable retributions of the law of parasitism' (p. 350), he was touching a very responsive chord. His use of 'unalterable' suggests, perhaps, something of the deeper logic at work. If the laws of biology could be granted the universal applicability and inevitability of physical law, then so many social sores could be sterilised without resorting to the surgery of economic reform. The easiest way to deal with an uncomfortable problem is to conceptualise it afresh in a more appealing form. If beggars, instead of being the casualties of an inadequate man-made system, could be seen instead as domestic pigs reverted to a worthless feral form by their own built-in retrogressive tendencies, then this identification removed much perplexity.

. . .

Is Degeneration Really Perfection?

It takes very little reflection to appreciate just how superficial were Victorian biology's deductions from parasitology. . . . Devolution in form should properly be seen, not as backsliding, but as a new and successful adaptation to a fresh ecological challenge. There is a spectrum of achievement even among parasites; and, though there may seem to us to be an undeniable element of progress in the evolutionary movement from amoeba to philosopher, would the amoeba, if consulted, agree? This is to put facetiously a profound difficulty which remains after more than a century to vex the theoretician. As one of the most thoughtful of these has put it:

one hardly knows where to begin, in ranking such widely divergent organisms as butterflies and orchids. The perfection, even in the sense of engineering criteria, differs from one structure to another ... An attempt to create a calculus or scale of perfection must be rounded upon the assumption that perfection in one structure is equivalent to perfection in another. But this is absurd.¹⁸

Absurd, but difficult to resist, as Darwin himself found, despite having made much the same point about the perfections of cuttlefish and bees. Where he erred was not in failing to limit his use of such labels as 'perfect' and 'degenerate' to precise contexts, but in being insufficiently sensitive to the nuances of language and the auras of meaning which surround these terms. It is not that Darwin was unwilling to examine his assumptions about progress. He was well aware, as his letters if not the Origin tell us, that 'perfection' might mean one thing in a biological context and quite another in a social. Rather, he too ingenuously believed that people would let him speak out as a biologist only. But of course they did not.

. . .

The retrogressionists, then, took human societies to be inherently and naturally unstable, requiring only the jolt of some disaster to make them collapse back into simpler autonomous units. Richard Jefferies presents such a retrogressed future in After London (1885), where a feudal system is shown as arising with internecine strife and slavery from the ruins of the devastated metropolis. Or, alternatively, the future society could be imagined as being in the iron grip of its institutions, hopelessly inflexible in a changed environment, dwindling down into senescence and final dissolution. Either way there was the suspicion that certain insensate forces in life have the future well programmed ahead of time; or at least that our destiny may be roughly predetermined. Amor fati at all times has a strong appeal to the literary imagination; nowhere more so than in the 'tale of the future' - the medium which carried most plausibly the Victorian devolutionary eschatology.

Degeneration and the Utopia

To arrive at a satisfactory estimate of the quality of the interaction between retrogressionist biology and speculative fiction, it is convenient first to establish some definitions and distinctions. The 'tale of the future' (I. F. Clarke's handy phrase) may best be classified as a sub-genre of Utopian fiction generally. Like other literary Utopias, the tale of the future offers us an imaginary world created for the purpose of exhibiting a writer's schemes for an improved society or else for satirising existing trends in society. But this definition is altogether too broad a one, although it does permit some useful generalisations. Clarke's demonstration that there was after 1872 an unprecedented flood of Utopian fiction, including futuristic Utopias, leads on to his important formulation that in any period the number of such fictions published is inversely proportional to the acceptance of the prevailing order. He notes further that 'the seventies mark the beginning of a crisis in the nation's way of life':¹⁹ presumably he would have this judgement understood as a wide comment on the social and intellectual ferment of that decade and its immediate successors. Nevertheless, Clarke's reference to the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) does tend to concentrate attention on the political and economic elements of the Utopia at the expense of its scientific and technological content. One needs to read only a few of the Utopias written between 1870 and 1900 to appreciate that the major recurring themes - female emancipation (pro and contra), religious toleration, state-manipulated breeding and child-rearing, a broad-based judicial system and 'rational' town-planning - are merely variants on their Greek and Roman prototypes. Here there is nothing really new.

Let us introduce some further distinctions.

We will first distinguish between 'geographical' and 'temporal' Utopias: between those imaginary societies detached from the locations of the writer in space, and those detached in time. We may further notice at once that both spatial and temporal Utopias may be written either in the dystopic mode (concerned, that is, with offering a critical or condemnatory reflection of the real-life order of things) or in the eutopic mode (the imaginary paradise of social and personal contentment). This gives a suitable two-dimensional scale which will accommodate most late-Victorian examples, and is adequate for the purposes of the present discussion. On such a scale, extreme examples might be: of the geographical eutopia, Ellis Davis's Pyrna: A Commune (1875); of the geographical dystopia, Butler's Erewhon (1871); of the temporal eutopia, A Thousand Years Hence (1882) by 'Nunsowe Green'; and of the temporal dystopia, Wells's The Time Machine (1895). Once this rather mechanical scale has been drawn up, there is one very clear development to be accounted for: the progressive displacement, as the century went on, of the Utopia in space by the Utopia in time. Thus Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871)is set in gloomy underground caverns; Erewhon is not precisely located in space; the anonymous Etymonia (1875) is set on an island in the North Sea; Pyrna, somewhere under an Alpine glacier; A Thousand Years Hence is a series of vignettes reaching that far into the future; A Crystal Age (1887) is set at a very distant but vague period; Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) in the opening years of the twenty-first century; and The Time Machine in the exact year AD 802, 701. At the same time the ratio between eutopias and dystopias remained fairly constant, though it became progressively unbalanced in favour of the latter after 1900. If we again turn to Clarke for an explanation (this time to his exhaustive bibliography of temporal Utopias), he suggests that this sub-genre arose from the older tradition of placing fictional speculation in a remote but identifiable part of the globe.²⁰ By the early 1870s, therefore, Butlet's use of the hinterland of New Zealand represents a geographical scraping of the barrel, and The Gaming Race an intermediate phase in the progress of Utopian fiction. All the concerns of the futuristic Utopia are present in the latter fantasy. The Vril-ya are evolutionary supermen, destined to conquer the world as the title suggests; yet by siting their world in deep caverns Bulwer-Lytton does not have to cope with the artistically tricky leap into the future. But there is another way of looking at this; for, as F.L. Polak puts it, placing a Utopia spatially - for example, in the middle of the Indian Ocean (Etienne Cabet's Voyage en Icarie, 1840) - is to admit at least the possibility, in an age clearing up the odd unexplored corner, of accessibility and hence of discovery.²¹ Psychologically, the shift into the future would appear to satisfy either the need to distance the fear of current trends or else a hopeless yearning for perfection which the present cannot satisfy. This sounds persuasive in that the indeterminacy of time as well as the conscious revocation of the past in A Crystal Age did indeed help Hudson to realise his obvious wish fulfilment. Yet when Edward Bellamy placed the Boston of the twentyfirst century in painful juxtaposition with that of the nineteenth in his eutopian Looking Backward he did so in a deliberate attempt to make the future seem as accessible as possible and so worth striving for. Yet both these Utopias were published in the same year!

An alternative partial explanation is that the temporal Utopia, whether eutopic or dystopic, may readily have incorporated in it biological processes which can be shown as coming to fruition only in the long term. After all, it is one of the charms of the Utopian literary genre as a whole that it is able imaginatively to digest and synthesise a whole sweep of information. It is almost unnecessary to remark that post-Darwinian biology entered in some form into the fabric of practically every one of the temporal Utopias written after 1870. In fact, the specific tags of 'evolutionary' or 'physiological' have been attached to some Utopias of this class.²² But one finds almost everywhere the dominant motif of biological change - change much more radical than the minor shifts in technology or in political institutions which bounded the imaginary horizons of the earlier Utopias. More in Utopia (1516) and Bacon in The New Atlantis (1626) introduced the benefits of selective breeding; but only of breeding directed towards the clearly limited end of improving the proportion of 'worthy' men already making up the ruling clique. To select artificially for a being who existed only as an ideal would have been viewed, to say the least, as impious.

Biological plasticity, infinite in extent and incessantly working, spewing out bizarre and unprecedented forms; change through the whole organic world, completely overthrowing the established order: this, for the Utopian, was the vital message of the new biology. Certainly the latter did not just suddenly intrude 'bloody images' which made it that much more difficult to write a convincing temporal eutopia - at least, not universally.²³ The paradisal futures of William Morris and of Edward Bellamy are quite innocent of any biologically inspired dark vision. Though it would hardly be possible to exaggerate the differences in orientation of News from Nowhere and Looking Backward, both of these eutopias share a comfortable attunement to man's new status. The citizens of London and Boston around the year 2000 seem as little troubled by their simian ancestry as by the prospect of undergoing physical and mental disruption, and perhaps decay, in the yet remoter future. Even a futurist like Edward Maitland (1824-97), who looked to human engineering to solve social problems, went out of his way to dissociate himself from any dystopian 'literature of despair',²⁴ even though he relied heavily in his following pages on a eugenic programme and on relocating nuclear families in state phalanxes.

It might be argued that if News from Nowhere is free from all qualms about biological degeneration it is equally free from the taint of evolutionism. Yet part of its sub-title is 'an epoch of rest' and that does closely define its mood, which is one of a yearning for uneventfulness. The events are locked into a tight frame of a succession of sunny and placid days. Morris's didacticism is essentially eliminative, in that his lesson is that men can be happy by doing without, and that they can gain in freedom by refusing to be hag-ridden by progress. This very concern with fixity and stability may be regarded, then, as a perverse response to the new Darwinian fluidity. It is as though certain sensibilities had frozen into one posture. The same response takes on another aspect in the nostalgic juvenility, the 'prostration before the child',²⁵ which is so dominant a note in all these late-Victorian fantasies. In A Crystal Age and The Time Machine the heroines Yoletta and Weena are both mature women but appear as sexless children; in the former Utopia, as we have seen, there is a more definite shuddering away from sexuality, with the hero, Smith, unmanned before the eunuchoid Crystallites. Similarly, in The Coming Race, where there is a more explicit debunking of feminist ideals, the hero's masculinity is defeated by the predatory Amazonian Vril-ya women. What we have here is the objectification of a wish for a society and a species insulated from all the Darwinian pressures and frozen for ever in one crystalline form.

. . .

Those who, unlike Davis, chose to confront the new reality of perpetual change found themselves forced to wrestle at some level with several related questions. Are the consequences of evolution likely to be 'progressive' in the human sense, or even pro-human at all? Does Darwinism indefinitely extended, with its disquieting licence of slavery and cannibalism, supply an emotionally pleasing version of the future? If not, what more tolerable alternatives are available, and how can they be made persuasive? . . . H.G. Wells, backed by an elaborate formal training in biology and filled with concern about the effects on humanity of degenerative change, put into The Time Machine (1895) his version of Homo inferior amid an Arcadian landscape, the better to contemplate his deterioration; the artistic product which results is a satirical, even a tragic, evolutionary dystopia. Later on in the decade, this Homo inferior appears again and again in a variety of disguises before being decisively banished with Wells's advocacy of a wide-ranging programme of eugenics. In the rest of this chapter and the next we shall survey this development and try to estimate at each stage what was the imaginative effect of this biological solution to a biological problem.

The Biological Vision of H.G. Wells

Unlike the other authors discussed in these pages, H.G. Wells was a member of the first post-Darwinian generation. As he was not born until 1866, The Origin of Species was simply for Wells an immutable fact of existence and the evolutionary hypothesis just another unquestioned item in his intellectual baggage. . . .Darwin was an indistinct, barely human figure who for the public at large had long since dissolved into his reputation. But T.H. Huxley, infinitely the most romantic member of the Darwinian circle, lived to see Wells firmly established as a successful novelist; and, at the age of 59, was at the pinnacle of his fame when Wells came under his tuition at the Normal School of Science in the academic year 1884-5. He, the man who coined the word 'agnostic' as a label for himself; he who had harnessed together uncompromising free thought and moral rectitude so cleverly that even his mortal enemies could not prise them apart; he who had engaged in almost lengendary combat with Owen and Wilberforce before Wells was even born: Huxley, it almost goes without saying, was the only fitting deity for his young and often poverty-stricken students.

In their excellent biography The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. WeIls Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie have pointed to the close similarities of background and temperament of the great biologist and the future novelist and prophet - similarities which, they suggest, made Huxley even more the object of adulation for Wells. They point particularly to the ambivalent attitudes of master and pupil alike to the demands of pure biology as a full-time research occupation, and the allure for both of the role of sage social commentator.²⁷ The strong egoism of both men accorded badly with the modest reputation which might be earned in the relative anonymity of the laboratory. One wonders, however, just how far these similarities were apparent to the young Wells. He and his teacher achieved no personal relationship whatever, and Wells probably knew little of Huxley's earlier private life, comparable though it was in its first years with his own. It is perhaps more fruitful to see Wells's idolisation of Huxley as being the reverence due to a living and successful symbol of a professional scientist whose views were respected in the worlds of letters and politics because he was a scientist. That was a cultural novelty. And a scientific education generally, and a biological training in particular, had powerful emotional overtones for Wells. Such a training was a synonym, to his mind, for freedom - freedom not only intellectual but social; freedom from the sordid restraints of the genteel poverty of his youth and the middle-class morality that went with it. In these terms, Huxley may have appealed to Wells as the first model for his Samurai, the detached overlords of A Modern Utopia (1905) who practise plain living and high thinking as they exercise their benevolent dictatorship.

Despite the expansion of his mental horizons which was induced by the zealous study of zoology, Wells proved in the following year that he did not have sufficient capacity for sustained work in the physical sciences, and he eventually withdrew from his course. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that his permanent association of the life sciences with social reform was to some degree adventitious. It is somewhat misleading that, looking back on his annus mirabilis half a century later, Wells should have referred to his studies at this time quite uncompromisingly as organising a 'vision of life that was growing in my mind'.²⁸ For that carries the implication that biology supplied him with a dogma or self-contained structure of belief to substitute for the ingrained evangelicalism of his upbringing. In truth, Huxley's presentation of zoology must have had the effect of smashing certainty, not of creating it; of forcing Wells to recognise the multiplicity and uncertainty of the prospect opened up by the Darwinian vision. Geoffrey Wells, whom Wells supplied with much unpublished material for his study, gives us an admirable corrective which was almost certainly written closer to the events than the Autobiography's account. Here Wells muses on his education in these rather different terms:

I had man definitely placed in the great scheme of space and time. I knew him incurably for what he was, finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I had traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix of to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilized to eke out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural water.²⁹

'I knew him incurably for what he was, finite and not final ...' More than any other this sentence captures the essence of Wells's reading of man's fundamental condition in his scientific romances, and it surely is the essence, too, of that hard biological vision which Wells so thoroughly absorbed from Huxley's lectures . . .he especially took to heart Huxley's careful and much-elaborated disarticulation of progress from evolution.

At the same time Wells's passionate determination to make the evolutionary process yield its last dregs of human significance did not extend to speculation on the evolutionary mechanism itself. There he was quite unquestioning, perfectly content to follow his teacher's overt acceptance of classical Darwinism. It is true that Wells, unlike that other literary pure Darwinian Thomas Hardy, was later drawn to eugenics; but eugenics, at least on the Galton-Pearson model, was nothing more than applied Social Darwinism. In fact its main appeal was to those, like Wells, who sought an escape from the impasse of Darwinism but who never felt the pull of romantic Lamarckism or any other teleological brand of evolutionism.

. . .

The Time Machine: Social or Biological Allegory?

. . . The Time Machine is a key document in the fin de siecle history of scientific ideas. Not only does it condense and exploit many of the gloomy attitudes towards a degenerated future charted earlier; it also, when set alongside Wells's other writings of its decade, shows a way forward without violating its key premiss of Huxley's and Thomson's ultimate cosmic despair. Second, internal references prove The Time Machine to have been written with the playful yet quite deliberate aim of overarching and assimilating other fiction in the same genre, including A Crystal Age, by showing up the inadequacies of such temporal eutopias

. . .

Wells was no congenital novelist. His own judgement on himself as an advanced journalist is, in the whole context of his career, substantially correct. Wells the romancer soon gave way to Wells the reformer of society - in his early days a less than adequate role because of his irresolute political sympathies. Nominally a socialist in the early 1890s (although his stormy interlude with the Fabians did not begin until 1902), Wells's romances are paradoxically riddled with what A.L. Morton with his Marxist perspective has called 'an active, if half-suppressed, fear and hatred which assumes curious forms'.³⁷ The suppression is indeed better than half-effective in the social comedies like Kipps (1905), but in The Time Machine and elsewhere the result is more than curious if we try to read these romances as mordant critiques of trends in late-Victorian unbridled capitalism; as being about an economic system in degeneration rather than a species. If we glance briefly at a short story Wells wrote in 1897, 'A Story of the Days to Come', we find that there Wells has attempted to fill in imaginatively one of the possible ways in which the transition from England of the nineteenth century to the world of AD 802,701 might come about. 'A Story' is set in a garishly mechanised London a few centuries hence, when an uninhibited, laissez-faire economy is already producing symptoms of the Eloi-Morlocks syndrome. 'The new society', we are told, 'was divided into three main classes. At the summit slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than design. . . Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the dwindling middle class.'³⁸ The aristocratic and proletarian languages are already beginning to diverge. (Dramatising this allows an unusual blending of Wells's powers as a comic novelist of manners and scientific romancer.) Soon their tongues will have become mutually incomprehensible. The action of the story describes Denton and Elizabeth, a well-born couple, toppling from the ladder of status into the toils of the Labour Company, a monolithic private enterprise which already has a full third of the population as its serfs and debtors. The couple are forced into the workers' army and set to labour in subterranean factories, tending giant machinery and other mindless tasks of mass production. The contempt and disgust felt by hero and heroine for their stunted and semi-moronic workmates are hardly less than the Traveller feels for the Morlocks in the earlier novel. Like him, they recoil with horror from the 'offensive inferior animals' (p.773). Though they come at last to an uneasy truce with the proletarians, the story ends, significantly, with their miraculous return to the class of their birth, shaken by their descent into the underworld. We are reminded of that briefer scene in The Time Machine where the Traveller descends the Morlocks' ventilation shafts, with its active imagery of detestation, blood-lust, noisome darkness and carnivorousness. It is most tempting to read this, as Morton insists that it should be read, as an expression of Wells's own class hatred (he was, after all, born the son of a struggling petty bourgeois); of his own, and therefore his characters', fear of dropping through the bottom of their class or (worse) having to beat offa proletarian invasion. But this is not the pattern of The Time Machine, where we are not permitted to side with the Eloi, the effete aristocracy, in any way at all. For, if the Morlocks are the proletariat grown bestial, the Eloi are the haute bourgeoisie gone to seed. With its final revelation of the inverted master-slave relationship, the novel is an ironic and masterly treatment of a possible outcome of the class struggle; except that in Wells's version every class is vanquished by biology's blind workings, which have so totally endorsed the exigencies of economic structures that behaviour has set into an unbreakable mould. When compared to the power with which Wells realises that vision, the novel as a sociological allegory or an existential tract is as nothing.

The point of this digression is to insist that in his appreciation of degenerative change Wells has his imaginative focus set on a biological phenomenon which only at a subordinate level has cultural overtones. Perhaps there is something to be gained from reading The Time Machine as a product of the 'yellow nineties' but it is not, on inspection, very much. There is a world of difference between the fashionable lethargy of the literary decadence and Wells's essentially constructive pessimism. . . . 'The Coming Beast', Wells tells his readers, reminding them of Bulwer-Lytton's evolutionistic fantasy, 'must certainly be reckoned in any anticipatory calculations regarding the Coming Man.'⁴⁰ It is not the tone of the hedonic aesthete which dominates either here or in The Time Machine, nor that of the prophet of incipient cultural collapse, but rather the anxiety-making tone of the speculative biologist and moralist. Wells and Henry Drummond, miles apart in their creeds, nevertheless were exploiting the same public sensitivities. 'Zoological retrogression', like many of his pot-boiling articles and stories of the very early 1890s, displays Wells's scientific imagination working at low ebb and exercising itself solely in producing fear, awe, or thrilling amusement. In the short story 'The Empire of the Ants' of this same period, a community of intelligent ants have in some way, which Wells wisely leaves vague, evolved a culture aggressive to humans. Nothing of substance happens in this tale at all: it simply creates a vague atmosphere of menace to convey the message that natural history can indeed be very frightening.

The Time Machine also conveys fear and awe, but Wells's handling of the theme of retrogression there is stopped from being crudely hectoring by the presence of his spokesman, the Traveller. The longer the hero stays in what he assumes is a new Eden, the more the air of decay forces itself on him. . . . the continuous regression of life is the only uniting theme. . . . Life is running downhill all the way into extinction.

. . .

[T]he perfection of natural selection is not what had traditionally been understood to be the perfection of form and function: it is the minimum refinement compatible with survival. All the ills that flesh is heir to are not divine punishment inflicted on a fundamentally balanced frame, but the consequences of imperfect adaptation. There were two ways of escape from this uncomfortable recognition. For the optimistic Lamarckian, there was no real difficulty. Richard Jefferies, the naturalist and mystic, having pointed to the body's 'unsuspected flaws, handed down it may be for thousands of years', could still hope that physical immortality might one day be realised, by means of the human will itself repairing the defects of its cage. . . . But those who denied the infinite power of the will to perfect the body internally had more of a problem than Jefferies. They had rather to fall back on the practically infinite possibilities of biological engineering. . . no longer a sophisticated product of engineering design by a Divine Craftsman, the body had to be viewed instead as a ramshackle structure where make do and mend is the only guiding inspiration; a body tacked together, like Frankenstein's monster, from a variety of iII-fitting animal parts.

Wells, too, 'had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear'. He shares the odd blend of repulsion and attraction for this process, and it informs his handling of the same theme, 'The man of the year million. A scientific forecast' (1893). . .he insists that our animal inheritance is steadily being eroded. . . . annexing of organic tasks by artificial aids, must continue indefinitely, for that is the evolutionary logic. . . . What will be the end of this assisted evolution? It is hard to know whether Wells finds his conclusion tragic or comic as he proffers a large, smooth hairless globe supplied with a single pair of giant hands for manipulation and transport; a creature without intestines which will feed by bathing itself in a tub of nutritive fluid. Though Wells is determined to astonish and to evoke the cosmic shudder, he retains the measured periods that he had learnt from Huxley to be appropriate to biological discourse. Further, the Olympian stance is striking: the careful balancing of judgement and the refusal to see this outrageous transformation either as inevitable progress or as an obscene degeneration of humanity. Wells is capable of a relativism on this issue akin to that of Darwin himself, and quite foreign to the biological moralists of a decade earlier. His purpose is the final deflation of Paley's evidences for divine mechanism, and indeed the final abolition of the Divine Watchmaker himself.

. . .

Having established his image of the degenerated man, Wells returned to it over and over again. In The War of the Worlds (1898) the planet Mars suggested itself to him as an ancient and exhausted earth.⁴⁵ The distance of Mars from the sun; the far-advanced cooling of its core; its mostly evaporated oceans; its frigid climate even at the equator: these facts and suppositions supplied Wells with the opportunity of imagining a native race so toughened by the savage environment of a dying planet that 'the immediate pressure of necessity had brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts'.⁴⁶ Yet the Martians, no matter how loathsome and alien their appearance, are presented quite explicitly as having already run the same course of evolution as that destined for man.

. . .

The Time Machine and the Garden Metaphor

. . . .

The Traveller, in finally arriving at a true conclusion about the relations between the Eloi and the Morlocks, takes up in turn no less than four partial explanations. Moreover, he does not reject the first three, but absorbs them each in turn into a more inclusive supposed explanation. At each stage we can see (even if Wells himself in every case did not) that a parallel may be drawn with earlier speculation. . . . The Time Machine deals harshly with the parallel dream of attaining equilibrium with the natural world by ecological engineering. Superficially the Eloi's world might be interchanged with that of Hudson's Crystallites. Huxley's 'weeded garden' has become a universal condition - 'The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither' (p. 47) - but it is a sinister Elysium to the Traveller, who puts together this equation as his first hypothesis to explain what he sees: that monotony of environment plus a stabilised population equals cessation of competition, panmixia, and stagnation of body and mind. Apparently as well read in Drummond and Reade as in Bulwer-Lytton and Hudson, the Traveller draws the same conclusions as they: that 'we are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!' (p. 49). Above ground the Darwinian law has ceased to run, and all the steam has gone out of the race.

But, by introducing the troglodytic Morlocks, Wells pushes the dialectic of the biological Utopia forward to a second stage: that humanity has become separated, not merely into the Two Nations of the rich and the poor, but into two distinct species. Now he takes the common fear of the time, given forcible expression in the writings of W.R. Greg and others, that human institutions may in certain phases of their development mirror morally objectionable relationships in nature - parasitism, slavery, cannibalism - and further proposes that, if such a relationship is not to be found now, then human greed and laziness may well permit it to emerge in the future. In this second phase of its argument, The Time Machine rests on the analogy of two species in symbiosis . . .But a continued and bitter acquaintance with the stupidity of the Eloi leads on to a third, modified hypothesis: that, while the Eloi have subsided into a beautiful futility, the roles have become so instinctive that the Morlocks continue to serve them out of irresistible habit . . .The biological model changes from the mutually beneficial association ofsymbiosis to that of frank parasitism - a common one in other Utopias.⁴⁸ In time that model fails, too, and the Traveller comes to his final monstrous conclusion: that it is the Morlocks who are the real masters, and their way of living a selective cropping of their herds of Eloi. Here that ubiquitous image of the cultivated garden, the product of a cautious and enlightened husbandry, is given a conclusively ironical twist. . . . All of these early, highly contrived parables force home to us just how strong Wells's rejection of evolutionism was. He is, in this phase, as pessimistic as Hardy. Unlike Hardy, however, he found too much strain in his vision long to tolerate it; and it is at exactly this point that he parted company with his mentor. If he went back to Huxley, searching for a more apposite image than the weeded garden, he must have been disappointed. About the time that his student was working on the earliest draft of the novel which effectively writes finis to a fifty year sequence of evolutionary Utopias, Huxley was comparing human evolutionary 'progression' to the trajectory of a mortar shell which must turn eventually downwards; and was driving home this analogy by telling his contemporaries that 'the sinking half of that course is as much a part of the general process of evolution as the rising'.⁴⁹ Against this, even the pessimism of The Time Machine sounds positively constructive. It is at least the pessimism of someone who has soberly weighed the odds against longterm survival and found them great, but who nevertheless sees a slim but real chance. That chance is for man to seize conscious and far-sighted control over his own evolutionary potential. The lesson of The Time Machine is, in the context of Wells's later career, a demonstration of what will inevitably be the consequence of a failure of nerve in this high task.

Wells's Controlled 'Inductive Future'

In artistic terms it may well be that Wells travelled farther and farther away from that wellspring of his inspiration, his biological training, as he became more interested in radical social reforms. Given his ebullient personality, it was inevitable that he could not be weighed down for long with the ballast of his Huxleyan 'cosmic pessimism'.⁵⁰ It was equally inevitable that his optimistic solution for preventing the world of The Time Machine ever being realised should be based on applied biology, just as his gloom was based on 'natural' biology unimpeded by human controls.

. . .

The new trend in Wells's thought which set in right at the end of our period is best considered from the vantage-point of an important lecture which he delivered before the Royal Institution in February 1902, 'The discovery of the future'. By the time of this lecture, in which Wells reflects upon some of the techniques available to the would-be student of the future in the last decade of the century, his reputation as a prophet was already secure. He takes, therefore, this highly public occasion - it marked Wells's entrance into the Establishment⁵¹ to review the attitudes behind all his creative work in the 1890s. He reflects on the two possible ways of visualising the future. One way is to see it as a kind of 'black non-existence' on which the present writes as it advances. Or - and this is of course the tenor of his own writing - one can see that 'the present is no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be' (p. 326). Is it possible, he goes on to inquire, to induce the future from the present, just as we infer the past from geology? He is in no doubt that it is possible: and one of his inductions, as we might guess, is that the future cannot possibly come into one condition and rest there. He now explicitly mocks the stable Comtian state and the static eutopias of his youth, plagued by Darwinian fears. We must abandon, he says, 'any thought of finality, any millennial settlement of cultured persons' (p. 330) - and therefore, by implication, a whole Utopian tradition. By this time even the cosmic heatdeath itself, which he says 'of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing', has no paralysing effect on Wells's imagination: he suddenly reverses with a brisk 'and yet one doesn't believe it' (p. 331). He refuses to speculate beyond the human future; he will work only for the birth of those beings who 'shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars' (p. 331).

These proposals - Wells's whole stance, even - are revolutionary in the context of the preceding discussion. It is as though Wells had turned again to his mentor for encouragement and taken to heart the words from Tennyson's 'Ulysses' which close with some dignity the sad arguments of 'Evolution and ethics':

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.⁵²

They suggest that we can rescue ourselves from the earlier need to rationalise away the disagreeableness of the biological future if we become aware that the image we form of that future creates the present. None of the earlier speculative writers living that much closer to the origin of their difficulties could release their future from the shackles of the evolutionary past. It is no wonder, then, that they tended to be deterministic even in their optimism; and no wonder that the best they could offer was different modes of accepting an unpalatable truth, ranging from the stoical to the defiant.

But in Wells's talk of an 'inductive future' it becomes evident that to think in this new way is itself evolutionary. It expresses a determination to confront a self-chosen future rather than the one nature will otherwise foist on us. In concrete terms (though this does not emerge in the lecture) Wells had eugenics in mind as offering the best chance of enlightened control. It was only to certain jaundiced eyes much later that his remedy for degeneration started to look just like Control.

[Wells' contributions to the eugenics movement are discussed in the following chapter,
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/PeterMorton/vs5_eugenics.htm]