Darwin, Lincoln share big ideas, simple style

Angels and Ages
A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life
By Adam Gopnik
Knopf, 211 pages, $28

Feb. 12, 1809, was a red-letter day for liberal thought.

It is the birthdate of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin and the approach of their shared bicentennial has inspired Canadian-born writer Adam Gopnik, along with many others, to think hard about the lives and the legacies of these two men.

Gopnik, the author of several collections of essays, including Through the Children's Gate, is best known for his work as a writer at The New Yorker.

In his latest book, Angels and Ages, Gopnik revisits two essays from The New Yorker, one about Darwin and the other about Lincoln.

Giving these essays not only room to breathe and to stretch but also new meaning in a new context, Gopnik asks his readers to think about modern thought in terms of the connections, both coincidental and profound, that bind an American president and a British naturalist.

Gopnik takes his title from a debated statement made by Lincoln's secretary of state, Edwin Stanton, on the occasion of Lincoln's death.

While some accounts assert that the grief-stricken Stanton announced Lincoln's passing with the words "Now he belongs to the ages," others claim that he said instead "Now he belongs to the angels."

Struck by this neat encapsulation of two very different views of human life, of an investment in either heaven or human history, Gopnik makes much of what might otherwise have remained a minor debate for Lincoln biographers.

His careful consideration of the shift from angels to ages, from faith to reason, is a compelling, challenging and at times charming discussion not only of the lives of two men but of the history of liberal thought.

Moving quickly away from the coincidence of a shared birth date, Gopnik draws our attention to far more consequential connections between their private lives, including their loss of beloved children. He also draws connections between the readily named legacies of Lincoln and Darwin, emancipation and evolution.

Gopnik is interested in the transformative ideas these men promulgated but he is equally interested in the ways in which they expressed them -- the words they chose, the evidence they selected, the tone they adopted.

In a book about the inextricability of good writing and clear thinking, Gopnik analyses the persuasive powers of the two men: the careful, modest words that Darwin favoured, Lincoln's plainspoken but potent style.

Seeing their shared legacy as not merely political or scientific but stylistic, he attributes to them a "revolution in rhetoric" and argues convincingly that "New ways of thinking demand new kinds of eloquence."

Of particular interest is his attribution of the success of Darwin's books and Lincoln's speeches to their respect for the amateur reader and the everyman in the audience.

The same can be said of Gopnik. Given that this is a book about style, it's not at all surprising that Gopnik himself has a distinctively poetic and consistently compelling style.

More surprising is the fact that he has managed to write a book that draws expertly on a taxingly large body of scholarship, both biographical and critical, but never leaves his almost certainly less well-read reader behind.

He also has a gift for pithy statements, noting for instance that "[Darwin] lived in a society of seeing, as Lincoln lived in a society of speaking."

More than a neat turn of phrase, this claim is an insightful analysis of the cultural contexts that the two men negotiated and, in turn, shaped. It typifies Gopnik's insight and his ability to express the complex ideas he deals in clearly and compactly.

Angels and Ages is much more than a double biography and, in the first weeks of an American presidency already noted for the eloquence of its rhetoric, the book's engaging discussion of the relationship between great ideas and great language, between leaders and the words they use, is timely to say the least.

Vanessa Warne teaches 19th-century literature in the department of English, theatre and film at the University of Manitoba.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2009 D5