Victorian poetry and scienceWhereas in Lamarck's schemes the engine of biological evolution is the
will of the organism, for Darwin the evolutionary process occurs as
organisms act involuntarily because of the imperative of species survival.
Darwin explains the phenomena of evolution through his principle of
natural selection. This theory maintains that heritable variations within
species, coupled with keen competition for material sustenance, will ensure
that those individuals with advantageous variations will survive and breed,
and so come to prevail over those members of their species (and of other
species) that are less well adapted to their environment. Darwin's principle
makes atoms of individual organisms, which clash with one another to
form and maintain the tentative dynamic equilibrium that constitutes the
survival of a species within its habitat. The doctrine is consistent with that
of physiological reductionism, which was available to Arnold and his peers
from the 1840s. The poem's "confused alarms" can be understood in
reductionist terms as neurological vibrations that sweep through organisms
to issue in the audible actions of "struggle and flight": an energy like that of
the tides which sets bodily matter in motion. A raised beach occupied by
clashing mechanistic organisms, Arnold's "darkling plain" is both literally
and figuratively a higher plane of atomism.
As evolution shifted from being a speculative hypothesis to a scientific
doctrine, the natural world became for many Victorian poets a correspond-
ingly more disturbing place. Thomas Hardy consolidates and expands
upon Arnold's vision of the "darkling plain." His poem "In a Wood"
(composed 1887, published 1896) begins with its Wordsworthian persona,
"Heart-halt and spirit-lame, / City-opprest" (TH 9-10) hoping to find in
"Nature a soft release / From men's unrest" (15-16). What he discovers in
practice, however, is a reality similar to the one that concludes "Dover
Beach": the Darwinian "war of nature" 14 mentioned at the end of Origin of
Species where a belligerence once identified only with humanity now
characterizes all vegetable life:
Great growths and small
Show them to men akin -
Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,
Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters choke
Elms stout and tall. (18-24)Hardy's poem exploits the pared-down syntax of newspaper headlines to
represent the Darwinian characterization of nature. Here Darwinism is
news. It is a new paradigm that strips nature of romantic lushness and