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The book begins with Darwin carefully establishing credentials, alluding to his famous voyage around the world on the Beagle, explaining how he became interested in “that mystery of mysteries,” the “origin of species,” indicating how long he had been working at the mystery, then almost apologizing for writing so soon: “My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract.” So one of the most important books in Western history is merely, on Darwin’s account, an “Abstract,” published at all only because colleagues urged publication. (In fact, Darwin had been at work on what he hoped would be a full exposition of his theory, a book that would certainly have been at least three times the length of Origin; thus it is almost literally true that Origin is an “abstract” of that larger work, which was not published in Darwin’s lifetime and was never finished.) Origin is a work so modest in its rhetoric that one might not notice how bold it is and with what determination, doggedness, and insistence Darwin holds to his murderous argument.

By the time the book is over, even if its theory is anathema to many of its readers, it is hard to imagine not liking and respecting its author. Darwin’s reclusive and respectable family life at Down is the counterpart of the modesty and affability of his masterpiece’s rhetoric. Personal attacks on him would and did seem distinctly ungentlemanly and inappropriate. He concedes that his work is “imperfect,” and he recognizes what he must do to prove his case—and that that is a great deal more than what the book itself might possibly do. What he requires of himself is a “fair result.” And as he labors meticulously over his arguments, he never fails to register how difficult it might seem to accept them. In the long chapter “Difficulties on Theory,” Darwin dramatizes himself as someone who might stand in for his readers, he being even more skeptical than they: “Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered” (p. 145). The murder, then, is perpetrated so gently, by so kind and scrupulous a gentleman, that it becomes possible—and necessary—for opponents to separate the killing argument from the kindly man. In his adopted hometown of Down, the archdemon, who is to this day still condemned by Evangelical Christianity, worked hard for the local church, and when he died he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

It is almost always a mistake to try to dissociate the rhetoric from the argument itself. As Gillian Beer has put it in the preface to the second edition of her groundbreaking work, Darwin’s Plots, “how Darwin said things was a crucial part of his struggle to think things, not a layer that can be skimmed off without loss.”6 Part of what cannot be skimmed off is the passion for nature that marks every ostensibly impersonal analysis of it. Although Darwin’s theory has certainly been enlisted in an austere and materialist reading of the world, and in the work of expelling God and spirit from it, he arrived at his world-historical argument through the sentiments of a romantic writer, steeped in Wordsworth and Milton and in the travel literature to which he himself was to contribute at the start of his career, in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin is a convincing guide through the entanglements of nature because he can represent so brilliantly responses to the wonders of nature that the simplest lay observer might experience.

It is well known, for example, that one of the main reasons the young Darwin wanted to go on what turned out to be that momentous voyage on the Beagle was his romantic fascination with the wonders of tropical nature. On the very first page of his Beagle diary (more formally known as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries