It may be said of Mandelstam too that after the visit to Armenia, the spring of his being leapt ‘into its true position’, since he had recovered the assurance he needed to write poetry; and that he had now taken on with his perceptions of Armenia a ballast that would steady him through every trial.

There are, indisputably, wide differences in manner and substance between Goethe’s narrative and Mandelstam’s. The Journey to Armenia, for a start, is much briefer, with hardly a tenth of the other’s pages. Its arrangement is not linear in the methodical German way of Goethe’s book. The thought is elliptical, with certain implications that are obvious perhaps only to readers familiar with Mandelstam’s outlook – even, one may say at times, with his code. Always, whether in verse or prose, he expects to be met with the ready perceptiveness that Dante, as Mandelstam points out, so greatly valued. ‘You grasp things, on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions – this is Dante’s favorite form of praise.’ Mandelstam in the Journey to Armenia is always on the wing.

Among his other speculations in Italy, Goethe was preoccupied with ideas on morphology (so named first by him) and on the appreciation of art and music. His was a genius that excelled in finding out analogies and in ordering its manifold impressions of the world in a sure and harmonious system. It will be seen that Mandelstam’s thought runs very much on the same lines. He was to perfect his esthetic in the ‘Conversation about Dante’, where he has a good deal to say about the morphology of poetry. In the Journey to Armenia his concern is with the development of species, and the vision of particular naturalists – Buffon, Pallas, Darwin and especially Lamarck; and it is also with problems of esthetics – the vision of the French Impressionists, and the right way to look at pictures; and further with the ‘physiology of reading’. Like Goethe, he aspires continually to wholeness. His perceptions in one field are related to those in another; and what he has discovered in a prose treatise will serve later to propel his poetry towards new combinations.

VI

Mandelstam had been encouraged in his reading of the naturalists by a new friend, the biologist B. S. Kuzin, who held Lamarckian views. (As Akhmatova reports, there was a time when the only people who visited Mandelstam in Moscow were a few young scientists.) Among the notes for the Journey to Armenia far more is to be found on the naturalists than he would use in his sixth chapter, including what looks like the sketch for a separate article on Pallas. This might have corresponded to another article, ‘Around the Naturalists’, which he had published in the journal For a Communist Education to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Darwin’s death in 1932. He was interested in the relation of a scientist’s method to his vision. The article ‘Around the Naturalists’ opens with these words:

The naturalist-writer does not choose his style and does not receive it ready-made. Every scientific method presupposes a particular organization of scientific material: the form serves a world-outlook and its tasks.

Rather more fully in the article than in the Journey itself Mandelstam accounts for the style of the naturalists he has been reading by the experience of their times. Linnaeus, as we know from the Journey, resembles the ‘barker’ at a small-town menagerie, he is ‘a public demonstrator of new and interesting species’. Buffon ‘in his scientific works takes on the role of a revolutionary orator’. Lamarck too in the Journey calls the citizens to action: ‘Forward! Aux armes!’ In Mandelstam’s notes reference is made to the Convention, and to the elements of Saint-Just and Robespierre in Lamarck: ‘He does not so much demonstrate as decree nature.’ But also Lamarck had a predecessor in the fabulist La Fontaine, while Pallas, so the notes say, ‘whistles from Mozart’ and ‘hums from Gluck’. Darwin is ranged with Dickens and Pickwick – as Mandelstam declares in his article, ‘Darwin and Dickens were read by one and the same public’. Hence the geniality and ease of his writing, addressed to the amateur naturalists of his own class. Mandelstam made the note: ‘Imagine a learned horticulturist who is taking visitors round his property, and, pausing among borders and flower-beds, gives them an explanation; or an amateur zoologist in his nursery, receiving good friends.’ But Mandelstam also sees Darwin as ‘a war correspondent’, an ‘interviewer’ of nature; he had played with the notion that ‘Darwin organizes his material [in The Origin of Species] like the editor and publisher of a great and influential, let us say bluntly – a political, organ’, with its correspondents ‘in all the counties, colonies and dominions of the United Kingdom, in all countries of the globe’.

Lamarck is admired by Mandelstam because he ‘fought sword in hand for the honor of living nature’, an idea that recurs in a poem about him of 1932:

There was an old man, shy as a boy,

An awkward, timid patriarch.

Who for the honor of nature is a fencer?

Why of course, fiery Lamarck.

Though Goethe, it appears, had not heard of Lamarck, as Sherrington has said he ‘dissented from the Linnean “frozen” view of species’ in the same fashion, and ‘sang aloud’ what was really Lamarck’s thesis too. The ideas of Lamarck have held a special appeal for writers opposed to the mechanist view, like Samuel Butler, protesting that Darwin had ‘banished mind from the universe’, or more recently Bernard Shaw. It is necessary to note the comment made by Julian Huxley a quarter of a century ago: ‘All the theories lumped together under the heads of orthogenesis and Lamarckism are invalidated … They are out: they are no longer consistent with the facts.’

The scientist is prevented by the discipline of his profession from heatedly doing battle for the ‘honor’ of nature. But there is no difficulty in understanding why writers concerned with ‘the desire in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty’, as Matthew Arnold puts it in his discourse ‘Literature and Science’, should find themselves up in arms against Darwinism. Arnold reports that Darwin ‘did not experience the necessity for two things which most men find so necessary to them, – religion and poetry’. The poet, according to Wordsworth, will want to be at the side of the man of science, ‘carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of … science itself’.