The work of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell was, as both men knew, inextricably linked. Lyell, who published first, provided, with his geological account of an immensely old earth, the necessary chronology for Darwin’s immensely slow evolution of living beings. Conversely, even though Lyell initially resisted Darwin’s theory, his chronology of the inorganic required filling out with Darwin’s history of plants and animals. Together Lyell and Darwin shattered once and for all the vision of the world’s present state as the stable product of a brief creative moment. Instead they portrayed an unending process, unfolding at a pace so slow and on a scale so vast as to be almost impossible to grasp for what the Greek poets called ephēmeroi, “creatures of a day”.
So Lyell’s work and Darwin’s cannot be separated, and while neither was the sole originator of their paradigms, both are justly considered to have been their most masterful and victorious architects. Yet today, Darwin is vastly more famous than Lyell. Darwin occupies the place of a patron saint or tutelary demon within the mythology of secular modernity, whereas Lyell is little known outside the domains of historians of science and students of nineteenth-century Anglophone intellectual life. Why this contrast?
Today Darwin is vastly more famous than Lyell. Why this constrast?
The obvious answer is the theological one. From the start, the impression made by Lyell and Darwin’s work was due at least as much to its putative theological implications as to its explanatory power as natural history. Between them, Lyell’s old earth and Darwin’s evolving species signed the death sentence of any literalist reading of the Creation account in Genesis. This established, at the very least, a painful divorce between the authority of Scripture and that of science, and was—and still is—very widely seen to fatally undermine the former.
Yet, of the two new natural histories, it was Darwin’s that was by far the more troubling to the believer in the Old and New Testaments. The Church Fathers had already speculated that Genesis’ seven days of Creation might not be “days” in anything like our ordinary twenty-four hour sense, but some other sort of time. From there to an immensely long pre-history was not too frightening a chasm. Nor did the new geology, on its own, carry any immediate implication for man himself: it was after all only about rocks and water. Darwin, in contrast—and to Lyell’s initial revulsion—first implied, and then spelled out, that men and women themselves were part of the great, unmanaged chain of descent from the primordial slime. This put into doubt not just the specific narrative details of God’s formation of Adam and Eve, but the still deeper belief that we are, as that narrative states, in “the image and likeness of God”. Now, it seemed, we were to be the barely altered image and likeness of some extinct form of monkey.
All of the above can be gleaned from any popular account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates between science and religion. Yet, if one actually moves past the textbooks and epitomes, and reads some of Darwin and Lyell’s own work, another, quite different, factor emerges as one of the plausible causes of Lyell’s eclipse before Darwin. Darwin is simply a much better writer.
Not that Lyell is not an utterly bad writer. He has a happy gift for analogy; deploys classical and English poetry to illuminating effect; is business-like and genial in tone. But he is also diffuse, inelegant and, above all, hard to follow. His general arguments are always clear, but less so are the details of a description or analysis—one frequently struggles to work out what exactly he is saying about some rocks’ or rivers’ action. Lyell also tended to plagiarism and constant re-working: he published eleven separate editions of his masterwork, The Principles of Geology. The book was a hit, but one suspects that—as with that other interminable, Christianity-shaking best-seller from later in the century, Frazer’s Golden Bough—the Principles were more purchased than read. Carlyle called Lyell an “ill-writing man”, and that verdict stands.
Carlyle called Lyell an “ill-writing man”, and that verdict stands.
Darwin, in contrast, belongs to that select group of English writers, including Hobbes, Gibbon and Gilbert White, whose prose, while ostensibly didactic, is also a formal masterpiece. Just as one need not be a Hobbesian to admire Hobbes, repugnance towards Darwin’s ideas, or at least their interpretation, is not enough to make one deaf to the power of his writing.
Darwin is not, to be sure, an aesthete, like Gibbon. His prose is not orotund or sententious: one does not even immediately think of him as a stylist at all. But to read Darwin is to be slowly overwhelmed by the unfailing, patient clarity of his every description of plant, rock or animal, and by the chain of arguments woven in with those descriptions. Darwin convinces not through hectoring or pleading, but through the limpid and quietly beautiful presentation of his case, and dispatching of every objection. The keenness of eye and mind with which he watched and pondered every fern and beetle is perfectly rendered on the page.
The question of scientists’ eloquence in writing is, alas, now largely obsolete. Lyell and Darwin wrote when their disciplines were so young as to not yet require that volume of technical jargon that renders good writing all but impossible. Today, any science writer whose prose might be worthy of attention in its own right is, almost by definition, a popularizer. And even Darwin is probably not much read, by either scientists or lovers of letters. But Darwin worked when the English-speaking public was at its historical pinnacle of literacy, and he would doubtless have had far less effect on that public, and by extension on us, had he not been almost as fine a writer as a scientist.
