The Ecotone of Science and Literature:
Evolution and the Poetic Vision
By Steve Gardiner
Copyright 2005
This isolated, unnamed peak on the northern coast of Greenland was climbed in July, 1996, by Gardiner as a solo first ascent. He climbed the rock rib on the left skyline.
“A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.” Charles Darwin
An ecotone is the overlapping area between two ecological communities. It is a treasure chest opened wide for the observing naturalist, a place where, for example, the animals and plants of the meadow intermix with those of the forest. It is an area of competition, of diversity, or confrontation. Life forms cross paths there and learn the necessaries of survival. They adapt and grow stronger or they cease to be.
In education, we continue to divide ideas into the separate packages of biology, geology, literature, history, philosophy, religion and others. Yet it is the area where these subjects overlap, the academic ecotone, where some of the most interesting ideas are tested. Like their ecological counterparts, some are forced out of existence, but others come through stronger and better suited to survive.
In the mid-19th century, when Charles Darwin was formulating his theory of natural selection and writing his seminal text Origin of Species, other writers were discovering similar ideas and expressing them in forms other than scientific discourse. It was Darwin's job as naturalist to describe his theory of evolution and show how he believed entire populations of species were affected by the process, but it was left to the poets and novelists to explore what the theory meant to an individual.
Even before publication of Origin of Species, writers were working with the idea of mutability of species. In fact, in 1798, Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, wrote a book called Zoonomia in which he supported spontaneous generation and doubted the fixity of species, but his thinking was not as developed as his grandson's and he proposed no formal theory.
However, the idea was in the air and more writers soon followed. The romantic poet William Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) noted a need for the scientist and poet to come closer together, to unite in an effort of human understanding. He wrote, "The knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings. The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science."
Wordsworth continued, "If the labors of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself."
His vision was prophetic and in his long work Excursion (1814), Wordsworth expressed ideas about nature showing stages of progress. Although this was not evolution as such, it was a questioning of commonly held beliefs and a step toward much of the writing that would follow.
Four years later, Mary Shelley explored the imaginative power of science to actually create life in her classic work Frankenstein and by 1835, Robert Browning published a verse-play called Paraceisus which revealed life as a universal unfolding which climbed toward the level of man who was viewed as the meeting of heaven and earth.
At this same time, Darwin was in the final year of his five-year voyage around South America on The Beagle, collecting the samples and making the observations that would occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson was in the early states of work on a lengthy poem titled "In Memorium."
Tennyson started the poem after the death, at age 22, of his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hallam. Tennyson was overcome with grief and became filled with doubt about life and man's place in the universe. Through the sections of the poem, he explored the depths of this doubt and arrived at the end with a sense of hope.
In section 2 1, he speculated that science may be going too far. "A time to sicken and to swoon,/ When Science reaches forth her arms/ To feel from world to world, and charms/ Her secret from the latest moon." Like many of his contemporaries, Tennyson was feeling the loss of true belief, wondering how much science could explain and how much mankind would lose because of the explanation.
His doubt grew until in section 56, he wrote the oft-quoted lines
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.
"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more." And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law-
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed--
Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills?
The last two lines reflect Tennyson's doubt about Man's significance. He asks, if Man is really the pinnacle of the universe, would he end up as blowing dust or fossils in the hills? The line "Nature, red in tooth and claw" could almost pass for a summary of the struggle for survival that Darwin saw. However, "In Memorium" was published in 1850, nine years before Origin of Species. Tennyson worked on "In Memorium" over a period of 17 years, and it is interesting that Darwin spent 23 years after returning from The Beagle journey collecting data and thinking about the concepts which would become his theory.
By 1852, Tennyson published his poem "De Profundis" which was addressed to his new-born son as a welcome to the world. It is presented in two forms representing the two major factions of thought at the time. The first form is a materialistic view of life and the second, a separate but parallel greeting, is a spiritual one.
When Origin of Species was published in 1859, it drew both interest and criticism from scientific, literary and religious writers, but in any case, it was not ignored.
George Meredith, in "Ode to the spirit of Earth in Autumn" (I 862) developed the power of Mother Earth and eased the fear of her cruelty, expressed by Tennyson and others, with the idea that immortality comes through the survival of the entire race, rather than the individual.
A year later, Charles Kingsley published "Water Babies," in which a chimney sweep drowns and lives on as a water baby with gills, as if his death had moved him lower on the ladder of development. Kingsley saw Darwin's work as a key to understanding and said, "Darwin is conquering everywhere and rushing in like a flood by the mere force of truth and fact."
In 1864, Jules Verne published one of the first works which could be called science fiction, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. In it, he combined not only concepts of Darwinian evolution, but included the work of Charles Lyell, the geologist whose Principles of Geology (1830) had given Darwin the solution he needed regarding how minute changes in individuals could eventually result in significant changes in species.
Verne used geological time by having his characters enter the earth's crust through a volcano in Iceland and travel downward through the layers of time.
Thomas Hardy, both poet and novelist, was 19 years old when Origin of Species was published. Throughout his career as a writer, evolution was a subject of much discussion and concern and it became a frequent topic of his work. In 1866, he published his poem "Hap" in which he mourned the loss of belief in a divine direction. He wrote that he would gladly accept his suffering if "a Powerfuller than I/ Had willed and meted me the tears I shed./ But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain./ And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?"
Then in 1872, a year after Darwin's Descent of Man was published, Samuel Butler published Erewhon (Nowhere spelled backwards). In Erewhon, machines began a process of evolution (an interesting and somewhat eerie prediction of today's computer revolution) and the society eventually rejects them.
Butler wrote,
"There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical conscienceness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A molusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and not how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years; see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
"But who can say that the vapor engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line" Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?"
One of the most famous Victorian writers, George Eliot (Mary Ann
Evans) was friends with T.H. Huxley, who defended Darwin in the debate
with Bishop Wilberforce, and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase
survival of the fittest." Eliot was keenly aware of the importance of science
in her society and she often chose scientific words and metaphors to describe her characters. In Middlemarch (1872) she included a character named Lydgate who was a scientist and explained several scientific concepts. Eliot read Origin of Species immediately after it was published in 1859 and was strongly influenced by it. In fact, Darwin said her novels captured scientific thinking so well that he found them too painful to read because of his own sense of loss over his earlier religious beliefs.
After struggling with his sadness in "Hap" Hardy returned again to science in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes (I 873). The character Henry Knight walked with his girlfriend Elfride to a hill overlooking a cliff. Following an accidental slip, he is left stranded in the side of the cliff, his strength running out.
Hardy wrote,
"By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were
even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
"The creature represented but a low type of animal existence for never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name. Zoophytes, molluscan shellfish, were the highest developments of those ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death.
"Knight was a fair geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between this creatures epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.
"Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the mylodon--all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the collossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things."
But not everyone used evolution to understand the natural world. The Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins in "The Starlight Night" (written in 1877, but not published until 1918) looked up at the stars and sought not scientific answers but metaphorical ones and determined that prayer was the means by which man would come to understand nature.
Still, by 1885, the influence of science in British society in particular was becoming so widely acknowledged that Matthew Arnold, in his essay Literature and Science, warned against forsaking letters in favor of a scientific education. He believed that a strictly scientific education would not fully develop the human mind and wrote, "Following our instinct for intellect and knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently, in the generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty--and there is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is balked. Now in this desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon us."
Tennyson's earlier struggle with the cruelty of nature seemed to resolve itself in 1892 with his poem "The Dawn." After listing a series of human cruelties, he gives a look to the future of mankind.
"Dawn not Day!
Is it Shame, so few should have climbed from the dens in
the level below,
Men, with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a four-footed
will?
But if twenty million of summers are stored in the
sunlight still,
We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the
race to grow.
Red of the Dawn!
Is it turning a fainter red? So be it, but 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?
Then, in 1896, H.G. Wells published The Island of Dr. Moreau in which society accelerated evolution by surgery. He followed this in 1905 with A Modern Utol2ia, a place where society evolved through will and effort. Wells utopia was a society which was not static, but ever-changing and gave an early view of eugenics.
The theory of natural selection crossed the Atlantic Ocean and found asupporter in Jack London. His arctic stories and novels are filled with“survival of the fittest” incidents. His autobiographical novel Martin Eden(1909), although not his most popular work, was one of his best.
By the middle of the novel, the main character Martin Eden has developed a hateful relationship with a ruffian named Cheese Face. They had faced each other in several street fights with Cheese Face giving Martin a beating each time. Finally Martin has had enough and challenges Cheese Face to a "grudge fight to the finish." Cheese Face agrees and, as London describes it,
"Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to destroy. All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in his upward climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a milestone on the path of the great human adventure. Martin and Cheese Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge. They sank lower and lower into the muddy abyss, back into the dregs of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives, colliding, recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again."
The fight was a long one and, in the end, Martin, in spite of a brokenarm, finally succeeded in whipping Cheese Face. It was a powerful experience for him and, later in the story, he described himself by saying, "As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong."
Martin later explained,
"It seems to me that knowledge of the land question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life. How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs, without understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made? Is literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution?--Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human himself is left out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and which I call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects."
Wordsworth called for a closing of the gap between science and literature and many writers responded. Tennyson, Eliot, Hardy, London and others found a sense of truth in scientific ideas and applied them to their poems and novels. Darwin read Wordsworth, Tennyson, Eliot and more and came to see how evolution affected individual man. This exchange of ideas, this ecotone of science and literature, helped these thinkers establish a better understanding of the world, of man, of life.