Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1Darwin, Charles
History
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Darwin, Charles
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Correspondence
Perhaps the commonest corrections needed were of obscurities due to the
omission of a necessary link in the reasoning, something which he had
evidently omitted through familiarity with the subject. Not that there
was any fault in the sequence of the thoughts, but that from familiarity
with his argument he did not notice when the words failed to reproduce
his thought. He also frequently put too much matter into one sentence,
so that it had to be cut up into two.
On the whole, I think the pains which my father took over the literary
part of the work was very remarkable. He often laughed or grumbled at
himself for the difficulty which he found in writing English, saying,
for instance, that if a bad arrangement of a sentence was possible, he
should be sure to adopt it. He once got much amusement and satisfaction
out of the difficulty which one of the family found in writing a short
circular. He had the pleasure of correcting and laughing at obscurities,
involved sentences, and other defects, and thus took his revenge for
all the criticism he had himself to bear with. He used to quote with
astonishment Miss Martineau's advice to young authors, to write straight
off and send the MS. to the printer without correction. But in some
cases he acted in a somewhat similar manner. When a sentence got
hopelessly involved, he would ask himself, "now what DO you want
to say?" and his answer written down, would often disentangle the
confusion.
His style has been much praised; on the other hand, at least one good
judge has remarked to me that it is not a good style. It is, above all
things, direct and clear; and it is characteristic of himself in its
simplicity, bordering on naivete, and in its absence of pretence. He had
the strongest disbelief in the common idea that a classical scholar must
write good English; indeed, he thought that the contrary was the case.
In writing, he sometimes showed the same tendency to strong expressions
as he did in conversation. Thus in the 'Origin,' page 440, there is
a description of a larval cirripede, "with six pairs of beautifully
constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes, and
extremely complex antennae." We used to laugh at him for this sentence,
which we compared to an advertisement. This tendency to give himself
up to the enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of being
ludicrous, appears elsewhere in his writings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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