shaken out an already heavy array of hammers,
wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else.
Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the
Victorians; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so
liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedeker.
Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case
of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been
more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed
boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?
Well, we laugh. But
perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between
what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here,
once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is
duty* to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing
the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere
stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave--or
rather a frivolous--mistake about our ancestors; because it was men
not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was
that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. Their
folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their
seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current
accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their
windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social
stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover,
and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of
man. We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have
nothing to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to
us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps.
But we are not the ones who will finally judge.
[*
I had better here, as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern)
agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma,
quote George Eliot's famous epigram: "God is inconceivable,
immortality is unbelievable, but duty is peremptory and absolute."
And all the more peremptory, one might add, in the presence of such a
terrible dual lapse of faith.]
So I should not have
been too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and
bent and examined his way along the shore, tried for the tenth time
to span too wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on
his back. Not that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was
beautiful, the liassic fossils were plentiful and he soon found
himself completely alone.
The sea sparkled,
curlews cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and
coral-red, flew on ahead of him, harbingers of his passage. Here
there came seductive rock pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across
the poor fellow's brain-- would it not be more fun, no, no, more
scientifically valuable, to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give
up London, to live in Lyme ... but Ernestina would never allow that.
There even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human moment in
which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude
and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A
schoolboy moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that
would make it a classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity
of catching a small crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous
shadow fell on its vigilant stalked eyes.
Just as you may despise
Charles for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for
his lack of specialization. But you must remember that natural
history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight
from reality-- and only too often into sentiment. Charles was a quite
competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. It might
perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes to all but the fossil
sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribution of algae, if
scientific progress is
wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else.
Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the
Victorians; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so
liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedeker.
Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case
of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been
more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed
boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?
Well, we laugh. But
perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between
what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here,
once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is
duty* to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing
the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere
stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave--or
rather a frivolous--mistake about our ancestors; because it was men
not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was
that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. Their
folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their
seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current
accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their
windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social
stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover,
and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of
man. We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have
nothing to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to
us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps.
But we are not the ones who will finally judge.
[*
I had better here, as a reminder that mid-Victorian (unlike modern)
agnosticism and atheism were related strictly to theological dogma,
quote George Eliot's famous epigram: "God is inconceivable,
immortality is unbelievable, but duty is peremptory and absolute."
And all the more peremptory, one might add, in the presence of such a
terrible dual lapse of faith.]
So I should not have
been too inclined to laugh that day when Charles, as he hammered and
bent and examined his way along the shore, tried for the tenth time
to span too wide a gap between boulders and slipped ignominiously on
his back. Not that Charles much minded slipping, for the day was
beautiful, the liassic fossils were plentiful and he soon found
himself completely alone.
The sea sparkled,
curlews cried. A flock of oyster catchers, black and white and
coral-red, flew on ahead of him, harbingers of his passage. Here
there came seductive rock pools, and dreadful heresies drifted across
the poor fellow's brain-- would it not be more fun, no, no, more
scientifically valuable, to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give
up London, to live in Lyme ... but Ernestina would never allow that.
There even came, I am happy to record, a thoroughly human moment in
which Charles looked cautiously round, assured his complete solitude
and then carefully removed his stout boots, gaiters and stockings. A
schoolboy moment, and he tried to remember a line from Homer that
would make it a classical moment, but was distracted by the necessity
of catching a small crab that scuttled where the gigantic subaqueous
shadow fell on its vigilant stalked eyes.
Just as you may despise
Charles for his overburden of apparatus, you perhaps despise him for
his lack of specialization. But you must remember that natural
history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight
from reality-- and only too often into sentiment. Charles was a quite
competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. It might
perhaps have been better had he shut his eyes to all but the fossil
sea urchins or devoted his life to the distribution of algae, if
scientific progress is
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