This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss

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      A cardinal perception dawned: that the rocks of old Earth, or the coral islands of the new oceans, were petrified Time. It was almost but not quite what Burnet meant when he said: ‘We have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins.’ Embalmed in gritty streets lay secrets of past history just as urgent as a journey from Birmingham to Liverpool. Understanding lent a window on epochs long past and on times to come.

      Geology was in many ways the giant, the Prometheus, of nineteenth-century science, bursting open the other doors of the cultural gallery. It is a curious linkage of the physical and the metaphysical to think of the poor stonemason, Hugh Miller, chopping away in the dust of the red sandstones of Scotland, and thereby helping to sketch that teeming pageant of organic life we now accept without blinking: that pageant which belongs with amino acids in a nameless ocean, and the first single-celled creatures, and which swells in grandeur and colour and possibly hideousness through the ages of amphibians and rampant trees and great dinosaurs that walked like men, on to the dodo and to Us, going about our archaic rituals. That pageant is among the most permanent to emerge from the permanent ways of the Railway Age.

      Almost all that we can learn or imagine is inherited, the produce of the labours of others. So it always was. Aided by the work of Miller, and of Lyell and James Hutton and Wallace and others, Charles Darwin pieced together the jigsaw of facts which form evolutionary theory. Darwin’s researches took him many years; they began when Captain Fitzroy, a godfearing sailor, had the misfortune to take Darwin aboard the Beagle.

      The voyage of the Beagle was almost as momentous as that of the Endeavour; its findings concluded part of the debate opened up by Cook. No longer ‘in doubt to deem himself a God or Beast’, man now saw himself ranged with the animals rather than the angels. Theology was never to be as popular again; but zoology won many adherents.

      The early geologists learnt to distinguish between rocks of a sedimentary character and rocks formed by what Darwin calls plutonian processes. One wonders how far this dramatic inorganic model of rock-formation influenced that other great iconoclast of last century’s thought, Sigmund Freud, when formulating his theories of conscious and unconscious, from which latter well up the raw lavas of the personality’s core.

      Whilst new cosmologies were discovered in the heavens – the first star photographs were taken in the 1850s – the earth yielded immense troves of dinosaur bones, notably in North America, like strange stations on the route of the railroad. Students of both Earth and sky helped roll back the carpet of the globe’s prehistory. The consequent development of scientific understanding, which takes in first one discipline and then another, creating channels of fresh thought like a flood inundating a parched land, has structured our mental frontiers; we abandon its watchtowers for superstitious faiths at our peril. Yet ours is an age easily tempted towards the mysticism of drugs and the bending of spoons by telepathy – not least because last century’s advances opened the doors of lunatic asylums as the complex nature of human mentality was unlocked, leaving us heir to a lessened fear of madness.

      Whichever way we go, we see strange panoramas. As far as we can know, our vision is unique in the universe. And mankind is at present only at the beginning of its corporate lifetime.

      Decade by decade, more time was needed in which to contain scientific findings related to the age of the Earth, and to cosmology. The good Bishop Ussher’s estimate that God created the world one morning in 4004 BC was laughable by Lyell’s time – the iguanodon upset that tea party. Just as men looked back to a truer perspective, other findings encouraged them to look forward. That was a new thing, too.

      Not all that was new was of a sort to induce optimism. Though evolution could be made to stand as a justification for ruthless economic oppression or empire-building, it does not, on a proper evaluation, encourage any permanent feeling of security. The same might be said of Lord Kelvin’s reformulation of the second Law of Thermodynamics, which carried with it intimations of the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism was a bleak enough creed for men; how much worse to find it written in the stars themselves.

      As for a work designed to counterbalance the optimism of the Enlightenment, Malthus’s influential Essay on Population, its message that poverty and starvation, and more poverty and starvation, was mankind’s lot, added little to the gaiety of nations. Fortunately, in the New World, the wide prairies of the Mid-West seemed to give the lie to Malthus; in many ways, the United States could escape from the gloomy prognostications of Europe.

      In Europe, the century culminated in a general pessimism (brought on, it must be added, by a series of dire events, revolutions and wars, as much as by depressing books). Great inventions, too, brought inventive whispers of mortality. I mentioned photography in my introduction. Photography brings us news of distant places; it sometimes appears, through the medium of the cinema screen, to bring us light itself, clothed in images of majestic beauty. Yet its primary use – at least among ordinary people – is to record ourselves and our families, and thus to expose as never before the ageing process, the heat death of the individual, to the very generations who have lost belief in the consolations of the Hereafter.

      Photography is comfortless (Susan Sontag has recently made perceptive remarks on this score). It gives a twist to the Enlightenment philosopher Berkeley’s new theory of vision. ‘The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived,’ said Berkeley. Now we have become so enslaved by our cameras that we hardly exist unless we have been perceived by the lens; I have known functions to be called off because the television cameras were not coming – therefore the event was not important enough, even in the eyes of its participants, and ceased to exist.

      In the nineteenth century, as now, the sketchy frameworks of possibility expanded at exhilarating speed. Yet the new light fell only on the old darkness of the human condition. The physical laws of the universe were disclosed as conveying less warmth than a kindly Providence.

      In the autocratic societies of Enlightenment Europe, it mattered not what the common people thought. They had their own hand-down folk culture; new things were for the learned, the élite, whose opinions both had influence and could be influenced. After the American and French revolutions, that situation changed. Nineteenth-century Europe seethed with populist movements. In democratic societies, the people have influence, and so must be influenced. It was necessary to disseminate the grand gloomy ideas which had originated through science (science itself had suddenly become democratic, not to mention riddled with socialists). The people must learn to rule as well as being ruled.

      Means of dissemination of ideas were provided by technological developments. All things conspired to the swifter propagation of information, from mechanical inventions such as the development of the rotary press, to repeals of newspaper tax and the abolition of excise duty on paper, to the establishment of municipal libraries and public museums. The Victorian Age spawned penny encyclopaedias and many factual publications, whilst nourishing the growth of the novel which – in England at least – had appeared defunct in the decade when Queen Victoria came to the throne.

      Grand gloomy ideas do not necessarily make headway in a period of euphoric advancement such as the early Victorians enjoyed. ‘We are on the side of Progress,’ said Macaulay. The novelists, chasing other goals than philosophy, established the novel as a great social force and as a social form. The forte of the novel was the portrayal of character striving with character within society. Balzac or Zola, Mrs Gaskell or Trollope, Dostoevsky or Turgenev, this was the novelist’s territory. And this, by the way, was the territory on which the newly arrived literary critics based their activities.

      Complacency is always on the side of Progress. William Morris, near the end of the century, talks of ‘the Whig frame of mind, natural to the modern prosperous middle-class men, who, in fact, so far as mechanical progress is concerned, have nothing to ask for’. The first novelists to attempt evolutionary СКАЧАТЬ