by Colin Dickey
Tildesley also weighed in one last time on the question of Browne’s forehead. Since it was very nearly undeniable that this low-sloped head had belonged to Browne, she offered two possible explanations to resolve the discrepancy. First, she noted that phrenologists had connected the forebrain to concentration and discrimination and suggested that “Sir Thomas Browne is undoubtedly a characteristic writer who has charmed many generations of English readers; but after all do his writings suggest great powers of concentration or discrimination? . . . We should rather anticipate that the sense of rhythm, the appreciation of sound and music, the artistic rather than the logical side of mind would be markedly developed in him. Hence it is possibly not reasonable to demand that Sir Thomas Browne must have been ‘high browed.’”
The other solution of the problem she offered was “to take the results of this memoir as confirming earlier investigations which indicate that there is very little correlation between the shape of the head or indeed of the brain cavity and the mentality of the individual. . . . The present investigation seems to indicate that the skull of another man of genius can depart from general mediocrity in a few isolated characters, and in some of these reach a form which current opinion describes as a ‘low type’ of skull.”
Unsurprisingly, she noted that this second possibility was “to us the more reasonable one” and concluded that “Sir Thomas Browne’s skull supports the conclusion that the correlation of superficial head and brain characters with mentality is so low as to provide no basis for any prognosis of value.”230
IT WAS COMMONLY accepted that Tildesley had proved that the skull was indeed Browne’s. When Keith got around to presenting his own findings on Browne two years later, the question he asked—in a speech that bore the oddly anachronistic title “Phrenological Studies of the Skull and Brain Cast of Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich”—was whether one might learn anything else from it beyond merely its provenance.
Keith had been attracted to phrenology as a child and had felt that “Nature had dealt rather meanly by myself as regards to size and form of head.” By the time Keith entered college he had all but abandoned Gall’s science, but he argued that nonetheless phrenology might one day be salvageable. He cited human evolution, with its attendant growth in cranial capacity, as well as the localization of brain functions as indications that someday, “when our knowledge of the human nervous system is perfected, it will be possible by a mere inspection of a brain to assess the mental potentialities of its owner. This is the ultimate goal of a scientific phrenologist.”231 In many ways Keith’s program maps onto much of current psychology and neuroscience, though no one would be so gauche as to use the term “phrenology” anymore. “The goal the phrenologist has in mind is a knowledge which will make it possible for him to examine the head of a living child, by sight, touch, and X-ray transillumination, and to thus form an accurate estimate of the development of its brain as a whole and of its various parts, and from this knowledge of the brain infer the abilities of the child.”232
Drawing of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, by Sir Arthur Keith.
But it was a dream whose time had not yet come. “It was my ambition,” Keith wrote in what had become a well-worn metaphor, particularly since Williams’s photo of Browne on his books, “to make the skull of Sir Thomas Browne a text from which I might preach a sermon concerning the forces which mould the skull and brain into their several forms, and to illustrate the methods I had devised to measure and elucidate the nature of the forces which are involved.”233 Instead his appraisal was notably lacking in anything like a conclusion. After meticulously comparing Browne’s skull and its measurements to those of Robert the Bruce, Jonathan Swift, and Robert Burns, Keith’s report ended on a flat, anticlimactic note: “Even if I had dealt fully with all of these matters, we should not, in our present knowledge of the brain, have been any nearer to an explanation of the peculiar abilities of the author of Religio Medici.”234
So the text of Browne’s skull was to remain undeciphered, leaving us with only his books.
BROWNE’S HEAD WAS already back in the ground by the time Keith delivered his lecture. Whether or not his repatriation had any influence on the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna is hard to say. But not long after Browne’s return to earth, talks began about bringing Haydn home to Eisenstadt. Though Tandler had proven in 1909 that the authentic head of Haydn was with the Society for the Friends of Music and not in his tomb in Eisenstadt, it wasn’t until 1932 that there was serious discussion about its repatriation. The society agreed to the transfer, ready to relinquish this most valuable relic, but as negotiations got under way the municipal authorities of the city of Vienna lodged a protest, claiming that the city had a legal right to the skull that trumped Prince Esterhazy’s claim. Their reasoning was that the city had a clear title to the head, regardless of how Rosenbaum and Peter had come into possession of it, because Rosenbaum and Peter had willed it to the society, which was ultimately a function of Vienna.
It would seem to be a repetition of the same legal battle that had kept Browne’s head out of his tomb for so long. But this dispute was quickly overtaken by other matters—as the 1930s rushed headlong forward, Vienna and the rest of Europe were quickly engulfed in matters much larger than the disposition of a composer’s skull.
AS WORLD WAR II unfolded, it became clear that much of Europe’s vast cultural and artistic heritage was at risk, from centuries-old monasteries to irreplaceable paintings and sculpture. At least Haydn’s head, locked in the society’s archives, appeared to be safe. The same could not be said of Beethoven’s skull fragments. Thomas Browne’s endless saga suggested the dire predicament of a skull in the hands of despotic museum curators, but the story of Beethoven’s fragments suggested the even more tenuous nature of those precious relics that were not protected by some kind of museum.
Romeo Seligmann’s son Albert kept the skull fragments along with his Goethe treasures (his “Goethiana”) until the increasingly dire climate of the 1930s, when he began to ship his prized possessions to his sister Alma Rosenthal in the northern Austrian town of Traunkirchen.235 He gave her instructions on displaying the objects, in the process transforming her home into a veritable Goethe museum; Albert’s remaining collection in Vienna was proclaimed by the Institute for the Preservation of Monuments as having an “artistic and cultural value” that kept it from being requisitioned by the Housing Office during the war.
But because of the Seligmann family’s Jewish heritage, the works in Albert and Alma’s possession could not be considered safe. Alma was traveling in India when Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938; her thoughts immediately turned to her valuable collection and its safety. She had little help from Albert; he had remained in Vienna throughout the war, declaring himself Roman Catholic to escape detection. He was seventy-six when war broke out and left much of the work of safeguarding the family’s collection to his sister.
She immediately wrote her son Tom, then living in Paris, trying to get him to come home and box up the collection— despite the fact that she was worried he did not yet have his French citizenship, and if he didn’t he would surely be conscripted into the German army (“The Germans will not want to do without him as canon-fodder,” she wrote in a letter).236
For the next two years Alma would work frantically to safeguard the collection. At the end of 1938 she learned that her house was to be demolished to make way for a new road, which made the need for relocation acute. But Alma’s worries went beyond getting the treasures out of the house; because of their nature, they were at special risk. Goethe had always been a national icon in Germany, and he had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their nationalist propaganda. The treasure trove of Goethiana that the Seligmanns possessed would prove a temptation to the Nazi authorities, especially because the collection belonged to Jews and could be requisitioned with impunity. “The name of Goethe is on no account to be mentioned,” she told her son Tom, “or it might easily and probably happen th
at the Denkmalschutz would prevent it leaving what they consider God’s own country.”237
The Nazis had appropriated not just Goethe but also Beethoven—Hitler and Goebbels cited him, along with Wagner and Bruckner, as singularly embodying the “heroic German spirit.” They appropriated much of Beethoven’s music, particularly the Ninth Symphony, as part of the aesthetic trappings of the Third Reich. It would seem natural that the notorious art thieves of the Nazi regime would take as much interest in the skull fragments of a great German genius as in the portraits of Goethe. But in all her correspondence, Alma seems never to have mentioned the Beethoven fragments. It is unclear whether they were with Alma or Albert during this time, but it seems that whatever status they had as precious relics had greatly diminished. In an age when Browne’s head had already been returned to the ground and Haydn’s was on its way back, skulls simply had very little of the pull they had once had. This was even more true of these simple fragments, hardly representing anything.
Alma fled to England in June 1939 and continued working from afar to move the collection into friendly hands; she sent a number of important works in the Goethe collection to her son-in-law’s parents and contemplated sending them as far away as Hawaii (where a family friend had offered to take them) in order to safeguard them. But she finally decided against Hawaii out of a fear that the tropical insects would eat through the paintings and drawings; instead she shuffled them endlessly around Germany. But the tropical insects and termites were nothing compared to the Nazis, who eventually seized the paintings and drawings and auctioned them off, breaking up the holdings of the Seligmann collection. By the time the war was over the collection was almost entirely lost, and Alma was distraught. “The last link with the old generation is now gone,” she wrote. “I feel utterly floating, like a bit of torn seaweed in this ocean of life.”238
But not all, it later turned out, had been lost. Albert died on December 13, 1945, and among his possessions was a small box that contained the fragments of Beethoven’s skull. It may be that they had not been mentioned by Albert or Alma through much of the war because their authenticity had only lately been established. In February 1944, sensing the end, Albert had added a codicil to his will that mentioned the small metal box, noting that “proof concerning its provenance and authenticity and thus its not inconsiderable value has only been found very recently.” The box had one word written on it—“Beethoven”—and contained “8 fragments of skull bones, 2 larger and 6 smaller ones.” Seligmann then explained that he had been going through his father’s old letters when he had discovered one from the anthropologist Hermann Welcker that described how Romeo Seligmann had been given the fragments shortly after the 1863 exhumation; he asserted that the contents of the box were “without doubt genuine parts of Beethoven’s skull that were given over to my father for his skull collection that was very well known at that time.”239
Albert Seligmann’s will dictated that the bones, along with much of the rest of his possessions, should be put up for sale, with the proceeds going to his relatives. But Albert’s friend Emma von Mérey, who helped to settle the estate, chose in this instance not to follow her friend’s wishes; she kept the box with the skull fragments and gave them to Alma’s son Tom in 1946.
Though Tom kept the fragments for most of the rest of his life, he was a bit more cavalier in his treatment of them—he reportedly once blew a handful of bone dust into the air, with a quip about “dust to dust,” and gave at least one of the smaller fragments to the pianist Jean-Rodolphe Kars, who kept it as a goodluck charm. Kars mentioned the bit of bone in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 1968 but admitted that while he loved to show off his trophy, he could never convince anyone that this bit of bone had really once been a part of Beethoven.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HOAXES AND RINGERS
With the end of the war came a taking of stock and a settling of accounts. Death had come to Arcadia, and now it was time for reappraisals and reassessments. In the coming years one of the greatest scientific hoaxes ever perpetrated would be uncovered, and a minor correction would be made concerning an old skull.
By the 1950s the Piltdown skull had been perplexing geologists and anthropologists for forty years. The fights over its origins and its meanings had given way slowly to a nagging concern that something more fundamental was wrong. The different elements of the skull—the brain case, jaw, and teeth—seemed too disparate to be reconciled with the same animal. In 1953 three men—Joseph Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Kenneth Oakley— published findings that conclusively proved the skull to be a forgery. The cranium, it turned out, had belonged to a human, probably from the thirteenth century, while the jaw was that of a chimpanzee into which filed-down human teeth had been inserted.
Over the years suspicions turned to Charles Dawson, the original discoverer of the skull, who had died unexpectedly in 1916, just a few years after the Piltdown Affair had begun. The picture of a jovial amateur gradually gave way to that of a compulsive and notorious forger. The mastodon remains that he had presented to the British Museum, and which had been named for him, were revealed to be fake, as was an iron statuette that he claimed had come from the Roman Empire. Even his well-received monograph History of Hastings Castle had been taken almost wholesale from an 1820s manuscript. Ultimately he was responsible for at least thirty-eight archaeological forgeries—it seemed to be something of a hobby of his.240
But why forge a hominoid skull? And had Dawson had help? A great number of hypotheses on the motives of the forgers have been offered. One persistent theory is that the skull was designed to embarrass evolutionary theory—indeed, at least one theory posits that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the culprit, as a spiritualist attempting to slow up the materialists. Another possibility for Dawson’s collaborator is Sir Arthur Keith himself, perhaps in a misguided attempt to win fame and immortality. But this is also speculation.
Kenneth Oakley was only a year old when the Piltdown skull was discovered, and he had spent his whole career believing it to be genuine. Later that decade he would find himself involved in another major skull dispute.
IN 1955 THE anthropologist Folke Henschen had paid a visit to the Swedenborg Society. He had never forgotten the dispute he had read about in the East London Observer and Rutherford’s adamant insistence that he had found the real head of Emanuel Swedenborg. Henschen, now a well-respected anthropologist, was convinced that “it would be worthwhile to analyse the problems involved.”241
The Swedenborg Society was by this time also receptive. In the society there had long persisted a story from an old former secretary named Elliott that the skull that had lain with the remains wasn’t the correct one. In 1930, learning that Rutherford’s skull was now with William Williams, the society had sent a representative to investigate and had found a particular element that was suggestive: a tooth. Late in his life Swedenborg had reported to a friend that his teeth had begun to grow again. In Williams’s skull was what appeared to be a “young tooth, white and bright as a child’s.”242 It was enough of an indication that there might be some value to the Rutherford skull. It was impossible to verify the age of the tooth from the cast Rutherford had sent Hultkrantz, but nevertheless Henschen couldn’t believe that the “mediocre cranium” was really the right one. The Swedenborg Society gave Henschen full access to its files as well as relating its suspicions about the tooth.243
The main problem with Rutherford’s claim, of course, was the cast that had been made in 1823. It was a perfect match to the skull now in Sweden, so the provenance from 1823 onward was clear—the skull Wåhlin and the others had buried was indeed the same skull they had recovered from Tulk. Tulk had been at the reinterment ceremony, so certainly he would have noticed if another skull had been substituted for the one from his phrenological cabinet. Tulk’s skull had come from Wåhlin, who in turn had received it directly from the culprit Granholm; thus, there was a direct chain of succession from Granholm to the Sweden skull, and it seemed highly
unlikely that the skull could somehow have ended up an antiquarian’s cabinet in the 1870s, as Rutherford had claimed.
But Henschen wanted to investigate the possibility anyway. He received permission from the Swedish government to take another look at the skull in Sweden, and he sent a letter to William Williams to see if he could borrow the skull in his possession (now referred to as the “Swansea skull” after the town where Williams lived). Williams, unfortunately, died only a week before the letter arrived, but his daughter managed to recover the skull from his stock and lent it to Henschen for analysis.
HENSCHEN ASSEMBLED TWO teams to work on the skulls— one in Sweden and one in London, at the British Museum. No fewer than fifteen different specialists worked on the specimens, including forensic scientists, anthropologists, a mining engineer, a dentist, and an antiquarian. Henschen headed the Swedish team, while the group in England was headed by his friend and colleague Kenneth Oakley.
It quickly became apparent that, whatever else one might think, the Swedish skull had not belonged to Swedenborg. For all Hultkrantz’s rigor, Henschen began to see that his predecessor’s process had had numerous problems and that Hultkrantz had introduced his own set of biases even as he was dispelling others’. Fluorescence analysis revealed distinctly different colors between the head and the rest of the bone, and other forensic evidence strongly suggested that the head had come from a different set of remains altogether.