Note 80 — Chapter VIII · THE ENGLISHMAN

It is perhaps not only by good fortune that among us should have arisen Charles Darwin. Those who study his early work, the Voyage of the Beagle, when as yet he was only perceiving faintly the relation of things which he afterwards so clearly grasped, will see, curiously manifest in almost every page of that work, those great English qualities of love and freedom and human equality in freedom. Neither does it seem anything but fitting and natural that the man who first brought evidence to convince the world of the identity of all life, seen and vaguely indicated by the world's poets, from Lucretius to Goethe and Shelley, should have been an Englishman. It is not wonderful that the man who, in his youth, felt so keenly the pain of seeing the savage ill-treated or the coloured man slighted, should have been he to whom the mystery and meanings of the humblest forms of life should have been made clear and that, from the stripes on the wing of the bird and the life and motions of the worm, he should have read the open lessons that others had overlooked. Foreign peoples often wonder that he should have appeared among us, but he appeared in our own line of growth; he is an efflorescence that naturally and rightly belongs to us. He was our Englishman at his highest.