REWRITING NATURE.

Darwin's Delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet's, and involves a similar cast of characters: a family ghost, an unhappy lover, and a lot of men digging up old bones. Although it ends with vindication and fame, rather than with slaughter and self-knowledge, it was resolved by language, too--by inner soliloquy forcing itself out into the world, except that in this case the inner voice had the certainties and the outer one the hesitations.

The delay set in between Darwin's first intimations of his Great Idea, the idea of evolution by natural selection, in the eighteen-thirties (he was already toying with it during his famous voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle), and the publication of "On the Origin of Species," in 1859. By legend, the two events were in the long run one: Darwin saw the adapted beaks of his many finches, brooded on what they meant, came up with a theory, sought evidence for it, and was prodded into print at last by an unwelcome letter from an obscure naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who had managed to arrive at the same idea.

It seems to have been more complicated than that. One reason Darwin spent so long getting ready to write his masterpiece without getting it written was that he knew what it would mean for faith and life, and, as Janet Browne's now standard biography makes plain, he was frightened about being attacked by the powerful and the bigoted. Darwin was not a brave man--had the Inquisition been in place in Britain, he never would have published--but he wasn't a humble man or a cautious thinker, either. He sensed that his account would end any intellectually credible idea of divine creation, and he wanted to break belief without harming the believer, particularly his wife, Emma, whom he loved devotedly and with whom he had shared, before he sat down to write, a private tragedy that seemed tolerable to her only through faith. The problem he faced was also a rhetorical one: how to say something that had never been said before in a way that made it sound like something everybody had always known--how to make an idea potentially scary and subversive sound as sane and straightforward as he believed it to be.

He did it, and doing it was, in some part, a triumph of style. Darwin is the one indisputably great scientist whose scientific work is still read by amateurs. As Edward O. Wilson points out in his introduction to "From So Simple a Beginning," a new, single-volume edition of four essential Darwin volumes--"The Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle" (1845), "On the Origin of Species" (1859), "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871), and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872)--we still read Darwin to get a sense of what Darwinism is all about, in a way that we cannot read, say, Newton or Galileo to understand physics. (Wilson also supplies annotation to the texts, and an afterword that argues eloquently for "scientific humanism" as an alternative to religious dogma.) Of course, the theory of evolution by natural selection would have been true even if it had been scratched in Morse code on the head of a needle. But it would not then be Darwinism: a "view of life," in its author's words, not an ideology. (An ideology has axioms and algorithms; a view of life has approaches and approximations.)

Darwin was not a writer just by inclination; he was, uniquely among the great scientists, an author by trade. His books, even some of the most technical ones, were published by a commercial publisher, and he was subject to the same trials as other writers: editors who cut too much, royalty statements that show too little. And Wilson's collection, read right through, shows that Darwin really was one of the great natural English prose stylists. He wasn't a "poet" in that vaguely humane sense of someone who has a nice way with an image; he was a man who knew how to cast his thesis into a succession of incidents, so that action and argument become one. And, as with all good writing, the traces of a lifetime's struggles for sense and sanity remain on the page. Reading Darwin as a writer shows us a craftsman of enormous resource and a lot of quiet mischief. But it can also remind us that recent efforts to humanize him--to assure readers that the truth is not so hard to take; that Darwinism does not expel us into a void of cold chance--are unnecessary. The most humane and poetic side of Darwinism is already there, because he put it there when he wrote it down.

Charles Darwin was a conventional man from an unconventional background. His grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, were, as Jenny Uglow shows in her beautiful book "The Lunar Men" (2002), close to the beating heart of the North of England Enlightenment in its most progressive phase. In the reaction that overwhelmed the country after the French Revolution, their circles were persecuted, but the family tradition remained one of plain speech and free thinking.

Yet Darwin also went to some lengths to make himself seem just another Victorian gentleman-naturalist, ear pressed to the ground for the rumble of obedient earthworms. He lived in the country on an independent income, like Jane Austen gentry, surrounded by loyal servants and faithful gardeners. ("I have always felt it to be a curious fact," his son Francis wrote later, that "the chief of the moderns, should have written and worked in so essentially a non-modern spirit and manner.") He was an extremely English Englishman, with an Englishman's desire never to sound like a know-it-all coupled with the Englishman's conviction that he alone knows it all.