The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  From this time Davy began to suffer from feelings of exhaustion, pains in his shoulder and right arm which he attributed to rheumatism, and palpitations in his throat. In fact he was suffering from progressive heart disease, which had prematurely killed many on the male side of his family. In October, during his final Bakerian Lecture, he had to admit that his work on the copper sheathing of ships had not been immediately successful.91 At the annual general meeting of the Royal Society he barely got through his official address, sweating profusely, and returned home to Park Street without attending the official dinner.

  In December 1826, while on a shooting party in Sussex with Lord Gale, Davy suffered a series of strokes, and to his horror found himself partially paralysed down his right side. He was taken back to Park Street, where Jane (who had as usual spent Christmas in London) proved herself efficient and kindly in organising nurses and doctors. Davy was only forty-eight, and could not forget his father’s premature death at the same age. His friend and physician Dr Babington recommended exercise and diet, and gradually he began to recover the use of his arm, and some rather stiff movement in his leg. By January 1827 he was able to write again, and he found to his immense relief that he could still cast a fishing line and shoot tolerably well. But he tired easily, and became deeply depressed and irritable. Babington suggested a long holiday on the Continent.

  Fitting out his carriage with books and hunting gear, Davy set out with his dogs and his brother John in January. For Jane this must have been a decisive moment, but the old intimacies of the Highlands could not be recovered on either side, even in this extremity. She decided she could not travel happily with her husband, and so would remain in London, looking after his affairs at Park Street, entertaining the more sympathetic Royal Society Fellows, and keeping up her wide circle of aristocratic correspondence. It was John alone who travelled with him over the snowbound Alps, and remained with him at Ravenna until recalled to his post as military doctor on Corfu in late spring. It was a painful farewell for both of them.

  From now on the whole tenor of Davy’s life would profoundly and permanently change. He became much more like the solitary boy who had roamed the wilds of Cornwall in his youth. He was aware of his fatal illness, and knew that he could drop dead at any moment, and that no medication existed that could help him: a terrifying prospect. He was also aware of insidious psychological enemies: chronic depression, alcoholism, morphine addiction, or simply spiritual despair. He had little to cling to but his belief in science.

  John later wrote movingly of his brother’s predicament: ‘The natural strength of his mind was very clearly manifested under these circumstances. Dependent entirely on his own resources; no friend to converse with; no one with him to rely on for aid, and in a foreign country, without even a medical advisor; destitute of all the amusements of society; without any of the comforts of home — month after month, he kept his course, wandering from river to river, from one mountain lake and valley to another, in search of favourable climate; amusing himself with gun and rod, when sufficiently strong to use them, with “speranza” [hope] for his rallying word.’92

  In July Davy wrote stoically from the shores of Lake Constance: ‘My only chance of recovery is in entire repose, and I have even given up angling, and amuse myself by dreaming and writing a very little, and studying the natural history of fishes. Though alone, I am not melancholy … I now use green spectacles, and have given up my glass of wine per day.’93

  At Ravenna he wrote a series of short meditative poems, simply entitled ‘Thoughts’. He was anxious not to fall into easy, consoling delusions; and in this the man of science came to the aid of the poet. Often the literary effect is severe, sceptical and coldly metaphysical. There is none of the showy confidence, or the assertive music, of his earlier hymn ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth’. Yet Davy’s own voice remains clear.

  We trace analogies; as if it were

  A joy to blend all contrarieties,

  And to discover

  In things the most unlike some qualities

  Having relationship and family ties.

  Thus life we term a spark, a fire, a flame;

  And then we call that fire, that flame, immortal,

  Although the nature of all fiery things

  Belonging to the earth is perishable.

  But sometimes he allowed himself a great outburst of feeling, an uprush of longing for survival and consolation and love.

  Oh couldst thou be with me, daughter of heaven,

  Urania! I have no other love;

  For time has withered all the beauteous flowers

  That once adorned my youthful coronet.

  With thee I still may live a little space,

  And hope for better, intellectual light;

  With thee I may e’en still in vernal times

  Look upon nature with a poet’s eye,

  Nursing those lofty thoughts that in the mind

  Spontaneous rise, blending their sacred powers

  With images from mountain and from flood,

  From chestnut groves amid the broken rocks

  Where the blue Lima pours to meet the wave

  Of foaming Serchio … 94

  Many of these poems led him back to one of his consoling rivers. As a distraction in the evenings, Davy decided to begin writing a book about fishing. It would recount a series of piscatorial adventures and conversations, in the spirit of Izaak Walton, but adding a good deal of natural history and fishing folklore. He entitled it Salmonia, or Days of Fly-Fishing.

  Davy’s scientific writing had always been admirably plain, factual and direct, though in his lectures he prided himself on being able to produce the clever analogy or the uplifting overview. He now tried something quite different, the play of dialogue and contrasting viewpoints. For this he invented four fictional fishermen, amalgamating elements of himself and several of his friends, including his faithful doctor Babington, Professor Wollaston from the Royal Society, and a composite literary figure who might have been part Coleridge and part Walter Scott. These he compounded into four allegorical figures: ‘Ornither’, an expert on birds and field sports; ‘Poietes’, the literary man who is also ‘an enthusiastic lover of nature’; ‘Physicus’, who is ‘uninitiated’ as an angler, but who has a shrewd scientific approach to natural history, and a taste for metaphysics; and ‘Halieus’, a fully accomplished fly-fisherman.

  Davy’s first attempt at fiction was not entirely successful. The first three of his fishermen are not easily distinguished from each other, and their role seems largely to give the fourth, Halieus, a chance to show off his knowledge of natural history — at stunning length. Halieus is a convincing, if unintentional, portrait of a scientific pedant. Yet on close examination, the book is full of intriguing and unexpected digressions, especially when Halieus is unexpectedly contradicted. In an early section (‘Day One’) Davy investigates the mysterious memories of fish, which he regarded as quite as interesting a phenomenon as those of human beings. For example, once a trout was caught and thrown back into the river, could it remember being hooked? Could it remember the pain of being hooked? Could it feel — or remember — pain at all? And if so, was trout fishing inherently cruel? This is an astonishingly modern question, and one which hauntingly recalls Davy and Coleridge’s forgotten speculations about pain and anaesthetics.

  Halieus, the self-confident and assertive fisherman, tries to dismiss the question as essentially absurd. ‘If all men were Pythagoreans, and professed the Brahmin’s creed, it would undoubtedly be cruel to destroy any form of animated life; but if fish are to be eaten …’ This would appear to be Davy’s own dismissal of the issue, until the metaphysical Physicus intervenes. ‘But do you think nothing of the torture of the hook, and the fear of capture, and the misery of struggling against the powerful rod?’ Halieus tries to dismiss this on anatomical grounds. Fish do not have feeling in the gristle of the mouth. But again Physicus returns to the charge, from another angle: ‘Fishes are mute,
and cannot plead, even in the way that birds and quadrupeds do, their own cause …’95 Here Davy gives a surprising picture of two different kinds of sensibility in debate. Many other philosophical questions are raised in this indirect manner, and Davy slowly began to expand the work.

  The idea of being useful, and leaving a scientific inheritance, came increasingly to preoccupy him. He describes in Salmonia (‘Day 4’) an incident that had occurred years before during a day’s fishing at Loch Maree in the Highlands. Two adult eagles were teaching their young to fly above the loch, climbing in ever widening circles ‘into the eye of the sun’.96 He expanded this into one of his most striking and symbolic poems, ‘The Eagles’. Coleridge had often talked to Poole of the natural symbolism of eagles (images of pride, power and independence), and described himself as an eagle who could not soar. Davy’s poem moves in a different direction, towards the idea of eagles representing initiation and apprenticeship.

  He depicts himself watching in rapture the two adult grey-tailed eagles in the bright sunlight, followed by their young offspring. This moment is transformed into an image of Davy the man of science, hoping to inspire his young scientific protégés to ever greater discoveries.

  The mighty birds still upward rose

  In slow but constant and most steady flight.

  The young ones following; and they would pause,

  As if to teach them how to bear the light

  And keep the solar glory full in sight.

  So went they on till, from excess of pain,

  I could no longer bear the scorching rays;

  And when I looked again they were not seen,

  Lost in the brightness of the solar blaze.

  Their memory left a type and a desire:

  So should I wish towards the light to rise

  Instructing younger spirits to aspire

  Where I could never reach amidst the skies,

  And joy below to see them lifted higher,

  Seeking the light of purest glory’s prize.97

  Of course, the poem has a certain irony. Davy’s greatest protégé, his young eagle Michael Faraday, had not flourished under his patronage and now flew increasingly on his own. Yet perhaps Davy acknowledged the necessity of this, for in Salmonia the all-knowing Halieus comments: ‘Of these species [of eagle] I have seen but these two, and I believe the young ones migrate as soon as they can provide for themselves; for this solitary bird requires a large space to move and feed in, and does not allow its offspring to partake its reign, or to live near it.’98

  Writing the book was not easy going. ‘This paper is stained by a leach which has fallen from my temples whilst I am writing,’ he noted.99 The work went better when he took rooms at Herr Dettela’s inn at Laibach in Illyria. He hardly recognised Josephine, now a young woman of twenty-five, but with the same bright blue eyes and nut-brown hair. ‘I hope it is a good omen that my paper by accident is couleur de rose,’ he joked.100

  7

  In November 1827 Davy returned briefly to London to resign his presidency of the Royal Society. He later gave a moving glimpse of his disillusion with his own scientific career on this sad return: ‘In my youth, and through the prime of manhood, I never entered London without feelings of pleasure and hope. It was to me as the grand theatre of intellectual activity, the field of every species of enterprise and exertion, the metropolis of the world of business, thought, and action. … I now entered the great city in a very different tone of mind, one of settled melancholy … My health was gone, my ambition was satisfied, I was no longer excited by the desire of distinction; what I regarded most tenderly [my mother], was in the grave … My cup of life was no longer sparkling, sweet, and effervescent … it had become bitter.’

  In a wonderfully sardonic aside, Davy added that his metaphor of the ‘cup of life’ was scientifically derived from the chemical fermentation of ‘the juice of the grape’, and then after a certain lapse of time, its oxidisation and acidification.101

  Rather than remaining with Jane, he spent Christmas with his old friend Tom Poole at Nether Stowey As Davy clambered painfully out of his carriage in Lime Street he greeted Poole with a weary smile: ‘Here I am, the ruin of what I was.’102 But soon memories of the happy Bristol days — with Beddoes, Southey, Gregory Watt and Coleridge — were revived, and Davy considered taking a large country house in the Quantocks for his retirement. With this in mind they rode over to visit Andrew Crosse at Fyne Court, near Broomstreet, on the eastern escarpment of the hills. Crosse was a wealthy and eccentric bachelor who had spent most of his fortune on installing ‘an extensive philosophical apparatus’ with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms. It was later suggested that he was another ‘original’ of Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein.

  Crosse’s huge, chaotic laboratory was installed on the ground floor, in what had originally been the ballroom of Fyne Court. It contained large, gleaming electrical condensers, which were linked to a network of copper wires strung through the trees round the whole estate. These were designed to pick up massive charges of static or ‘atmospheric’ electricity. The largest condenser was marked with a blasphemous warning notice: ‘Noli Me Tangere’ – that is, ‘Do not Touch Me’ — because of the possible electric shock. The phrase is famous from the Gospels: the risen Christ’s first words to Mary Magdalene.

  Poole noticed that Davy, for the first time, became animated and cheerful. ‘As we were walking round the house very languidly, a door opened and we were in the laboratory. He threw a glance around the room, his eyes brightened in the action, a glow came over his countenance, and he looked like himself, as he was accustomed to appear twenty years ago.’103 Davy did not take the house, but put the finishing touches to Salmonia, and told Poole: ‘I do not wish to live as far as I am personally concerned, but I have views which I could develop, if it pleased God to save my life, which would be useful to science and mankind.’104

  In spring 1828 Davy departed once more for the Alps and lower Austria, again leaving Lady Davy behind, according to their agreement. He was writing, fishing and taking morphine. Throughout this summer and autumn he wrote a series of enigmatic letters to his wife, discussing his health and his scientific researches, but always making vague references to Josephine Dettela, the innkeeper’s daughter.105 In June he wrote from Laibach: ‘The first time since my illness, I have found a month pass too quickly here. The weather has been delightful, and I have had enough shooting … and my pursuits in natural history respecting the migration of birds, have given me some new and curious results. I must not forget the constant attention and kindness of my “Illyrian maid,” I mean poetically and really. The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth.’106

  In July he went down to the coast to collect some specimens of the electrical eel or torpedo fish at Trieste. He had renewed his interest in Vitalism and the mysteries of animal electricity. But he hurried back to Laibach, again writing to Jane almost teasingly: ‘I am just returned to my old quarters & my pretty Illyrian nurse, after an excursion of a fortnight to Trieste … I succeeded in my projected experiment on the Torpedo and I have I think been able to establish a new principle with respect to the species of Electricity which will be a [gain] in Nat Science.’107

  He worked on throughout the summer, trying to believe he was convalescing, and remained at Laibach as long as possible, until the autumn weather broke and the snowclouds began to gather in the mountains. In November, forced to go to Rome for the winter, he was already looking back wistfully. He confessed to Jane: ‘I remained at Laybach till October 30. I left that place with regret, kindness makes the sunshine of life in a sick man & that kindness is not less agreeable because it is given by a blooming and amiable maiden — I shall ever be grateful to my charming Illyrian nurse.’108 He now admitted that he was suffering from low spirits, ‘too
feeble to bear general society’, and greatly missing Josephine. ‘I fear I shall find no Illyrian nurse here, such as the spirit that dispelled my melancholy at Laybach.’109 In December he wrote more hopefully, and a little more explicitly, to his brother John in Corfu. ‘Perhaps in the spring you could come to me at Trieste & see me in Illyria. I would then show you my dear little nurse, to whom I owe most of the little happiness I have enjoyed since my illness.’110

  It is strange that Jane did not react to all these hints, but in the New Year she eventually responded with a light-hearted question about the identity — real or imagined — of the mountain ‘nymph’ who danced attendance on him so charmingly in Illyria. She noted, without irony, that she had seen that the ageing Goethe had his youthful female followers too. Davy seemed pleased to answer. ‘If you mean my little nurse and friend of Laybach, I shall be very glad to make you acquainted with her. She has made some days of my life more agreeable than I had any right to hope. Her name is Josephine or Pappina.’111 John later tactfully recalled: ‘Laybach, which had peculiar attractions for him … might be considered his headquarters in this region. The attractions were, its situation near a fine river … and, not least … a kind little nurse, the daughter of the innkeeper.’112

  Was this all the fantasy of a dying man? At Laibach sometime in that summer of 1828 Davy wrote rough drafts of two short love poems to Josephine. They occupy three pages of his scientific notebook, and are much crossed out and difficult to read. They reveal a little more about their relationship. He nicknamed her ‘Pappina’, a tender diminutive he used in the first poem, which is headed ‘Laybach August 16 1828. To Josephine Dettela’. It begins: