by A. N. Wilson
Perhaps George’s dire financial difficulties (he’d inherited Reinhold’s inability to manage money) predisposed him to believe Price’s absurd theories. Not content, however, to read Price’s literature, George had introduced his name into his University lectures at Kassel – and had even made public attempts, by a combination of bogus chemistry and mumbo-jumbo formulae, to turn quicksilver to gold in the University demonstration room. The laughter of his students saved him. He had seen at once that he had been duped, that the whole Rosicrucian episode had been a species of brain-fever. It had also left him with a hangover of shame, which was why he’d accepted the King of Poland’s offer of the Chair at Vilnius. Time to move on.
Now he was in the audience to hear Samuel Sömmerring addressing not only a hundred young students, but as many again grown-ups – distinguished academics and members of society. Sömmerring’s career did not appear to have been damaged by his dalliance with the Rosy Cross. He had left Kassel for the Chair of Medicine at Mainz and was now regarded as the leading German anatomist.
Sömmerring’s lecture was a masterpiece, not only of scientific exactitude but of humanism. He described to his audience the theories of human origin, and of the differences between human races, which had been current when he began to study medicine. Many people supposed that savages, in Africa, or in the South Seas, were of a different species from Europeans, perhaps that they had smaller brains, or different hearts, lungs, livers – which made them more ‘backward’ than, say, Frenchmen or Russians. At Kassel, Sömmerring had been privileged to work in a University town sponsored by a Landgrave who not only had an extensive menagerie, containing baboons and chimpanzees, but also employed as servants many former African slaves who had worked in the plantations of the American Republic. As these slaves and apes died, it was possible to dissect their cadavers in scientific conditions and to compare them with the corpses of Germans.
—Gentlemen, I can tell you this after several years of research. There is a kinship – you cannot deny this kinship – between human beings and the apes. The hands, the facial expressions, in many areas, the cousinship, so to say, is visible. The differences, however, are greater than the similarities. Can an ape talk? Can an ape form grammatical sentences? Does an ape possess what we could recognize as a moral sense? Now let us turn to our African brethren – for that, gentlemen is what they are. Beneath the brown skin, and beneath the frizzier hair there is a human being who cannot be distinguished from a German. No difference in brain, or heart or in any other anatomical particular. Consider, gentlemen, the implications for this in our day when, for all our claims to be enlightened human beings, we take poor men and women, and their children, and, merely because we are rich and they are poor, we allow them to be purchased as if they were chattels. Gentlemen, when I showed this paper on anatomy to my friend the English chemist Mr Priestley, he showed it in turn to his friend Mr Wedgwood. And he made these . . .
Sömmerring held up a medallion showing a kneeling African in chains. Around the rim of the medallion were the words, AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?
—Gentlemen, those words are not the words of sentiment. The world will change when it realizes the scientific truth that we are all indeed brothers, identical in physical composition, equal, surely, in the eyes of Our Creator.
The words brought the entire audience to their feet in an ecstasy of applause. Naturally, afterwards, audience members clustered around the speaker. As George pressed forward, he found himself looking at a familiar shoulder, the unmistakeable slope; the hair on the back of the neck a little greyer now, but not white. He was a few months short of sixty. The coat was not the very one in which its wearer had sailed to New Zealand and back but it was of exactly the same homespun light brown cloth which he had worn since early manhood and which George, more sensitive in these matters, had always felt a little too countrified for meetings of the Royal Society in London, or for academic assemblies in the Prussian capital. Tapping the shoulder, George said,
—Vati.
The elder Forster covered his surprise with bonhomie.
—A change, eh? Ja ja! To hear the German language spoken here? The new King brought in the reform at once, of course.
There was something in his bustling, pompous manner which almost suggested – not quite – that the new Prussian sovereign, who had in fact never met Reinhold, had overturned Frederick the Great’s ban on the German language upon his personal recommendation. Until Frederick’s death all lectures in the University and indeed all public discourse, in the Reichstag, and among departments of the civil service and the military, had been conducted in French.
—It was moving, the ending.
—How do you mean?
—I found Sömmerring’s conclusion very affecting.
His father gave him a sharp look, as if to check a display of emotion.
—I was pleased he mentioned Mr Priestley and Mr Wedgwood.
—Well, I mean – if ever there was a stunt! The brotherhood of mankind.
George felt it all, all over again. His father’s refusal to be impressed by another’s achievement. His (surely deliberate, for he was an intelligent man) inability to remember the slogan correctly, and his apparent inability to see how nearly, and with what inspiring optimism, it expressed both moral aspiration and scientific fact.
—There’s Sternfeld!
And for a moment the father left his son in the crowd, elbowing his way towards the elderly academic in a powdered wig who was standing near the lectern.
When he eventually got to speak to Sömmerring, all embarrassing recollections of their Rosicrucian adventures fell away.
—My dear George, what brings you to Berlin?
—Your brilliant lecture?
—No, but seriously.
—This and that.
Sömmerring was being ‘dined’ by the University, but they agreed to meet after dinner. George ate at his inn with his father. Reinhold, who must have felt hurt by his son’s failure to keep in touch over the previous few years, determinedly showed no such emotion. His talk was of generalities. He alluded to his publisher son. George wondered whether to tell his father that he had written Cook the Discoverer. Reinhold, either truthfully, or with a very good air of bluff said,
—I’d heard. It could be successful.
He sniffed.
—All the same, some original scientific research might have been more to the point. Whatever became of that paper you were going to write on Meiner’s Anthropology?
Gnawing on a rib-bone of pork, later in the meal, George asked his father, who was attacking a third dumpling,
—How’s Mother?
Reinhold continued to eat, giving a sly look, as though the inquiry were some kind of trick question. The thought crossed George’s mind that his mother might actually be dead and that his father, in order to avoid seeming an object of pity, had paused before answering. Later, George came to a different conclusion, believing that his father’s hesitation had been caused by reluctance, perhaps by actual inability, to shift the subject of talk away from himself or his own opinions.
—Only, he said at last, she has always known Berlin is my great love. Here I studied. Here I hoped to devote myself to scientific research for the rest of my life had not poverty forced me into the ministry and that hellish little parish at Nassenhuben. A man of my interests and abilities at Nassenhuben! Of course when we heard that Goldhagen was dead and the Chair of Natural Sciences at Berlin was vacant . . . well, she has established herself in Halle now with her little circle of knitters and chocolate-drinkers, but she understands. It would be more fitting for us to be here. The Chair . . .
—They’ve offered it! Vati, this is wonderful news.
—Not in so many words. But Sternfeld this afternoon . . . Put it this way, I came away optimistic from the fellow’s lecture. But I ask you – lecturing on niggers! The brotherhood of man!
He laughed and drank his beer.
—If your friend had met th
e savages of New Zealand, as we have, he’d have told a different tale.
Sometimes with his father, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sömmerring, George paced the streets. It was not a city he could love; more barracks than city, with uniformed soldiers everywhere.
—They seem to have a soft spot for the new King.
—Well, he’s rebuilding – it’ll be a fine thing, the new Brandenburg Gate – and they love him for lifting the State monopoly on tobacco. But – well, we’ve been down that road, eh, George?
Friedrich Wilhelm was a mystic, a devotee of Rosicrucianism – appointed Johann Christoph von Wöllner, his fellow Rosicrucian, Minister of Finance.
—And I don’t like this edict he’s just promulgated against the ‘Enlightenment’, forbidding preachers from enlightened interpretations of the Bible. Kant has been silenced – isn’t allowed to lecture at Königsberg.
—Only forbidden to lecture on religion.
—It’s a bad principle, said Sömmerring, we can’t have kings telling us what to think. Only the truth is worthy of homage.
After ten days, Reinhold went back to Halle. George kissed his father. He had heard from Sömmerring that ‘the tactless philosopher’ had been as good as his name, telling Sternfeld, who chaired the selection committee for choosing the new Professor, that he would be a ‘fool’ not to choose him, and accosting a Professor of Natural History in order to inform him that the mistakes in his last paper could be blamed on his ignorance of A Catalogue of British Insects (Warrington, 1770) by J. R. Forster.
—This came, were almost the last words his father spoke to him. Reinhold produced a letter for him from his pocket – it was forwarded from Halle.
It was a letter from George’s friend Zimmerman, informing him that the Empress Catherine deeply regretted the cancellation of the expedition. She could not reconcile the expenditure on such an enterprise in time of war, but she would like Herr George Forster to come to St Petersburg and be part of her intellectual entourage. He would be a Professor at the University, have his own secretary, be free to pursue his research.
It was an agonizing letter to receive. On the one hand, it solved his two most urgent problems: absence of income, and the need to get away from his marriage. On the other hand, St Petersburg was not Germany. It was far away – from his child, his friends, his roots. His childhood memories of the place were not of the beauty he knew it possessed, but of intolerable cold, of long dark winters, of drunks in the street, of smelly, bearded priests. Therese wrote to him every other day, hysterical letters, letters which were trying to turn themselves into a novel. Her heart was broken by their quarrel. Why did they quarrel? Why could they not start again? Her father, who had taken her side, was now angry with her again. By the same post came a letter from Professor Heyne saying that he regretted asking his son-in-law to leave Göttingen. Therese, it stated, had not been honest with her father. She had concealed from him the reason for her husband’s anger. Heyne had convinced himself that the flirtation between Therese and Meyer was in essence childish, innocent, but no husband could be expected to endure it. Now, Meyer was the one who was banished. He had gone to England: hoped for a librarianship somewhere.
Both Heyne and Therese urged George to ‘come home’, but he was ill. He lay up for two weeks in his inn with jaundice. Sömmerring, a qualified doctor as well as a professor, made assiduous visits. George’s brother, the bookseller, tried to cheer him up by saying that Cook the Discoverer was selling briskly. Reinhold wrote, failing to take in the fact of his illness, asking him to go to the University and inform them that their letter, offering him the Chair, had seemingly gone astray since no word had come and he needed to make plans, to resign his Chair at Halle, to find a house in Berlin commensurate with his new status (or maybe a house came with the post?). It truly was unaccountable that no word had come.
Prostrate with jaundice, George could not go to the University. He already knew, from Sömmerring, that Reinhold had not even been considered for the post. It was a difficult letter to write to his father, informing him of this. When Reinhold replied he made no allusion to the dashing of his hopes. Rather, he reminded his son that, among the distinguished guests at their house in Percy Street, when he was waiting to take up his duties as the Director of the British Museum, had been the Prince Duke of Anhalt-Dessau. His house and estate at Wörlitz were more or less on George’s way home to Göttingen. Wörlitz was an ideal place for convalescence.
Strangely enough, George did remember Prince Franz very fondly, and he wrote proposing himself for a few days. He did not regret this. His strength began to return as, on legs still wobbly after a month in bed, he walked with the Prince in his well-planted park, took in the lake, constructed to resemble the Bay of Naples, with a miniature Vesuvius which, by means of fireworks, could be made to ‘erupt’. The new, classical palace of this whimsical potentate contained, together with the somehow surprising presence of a wife, an enormous collection of Wedgwood. There was a Wedgwood chimney piece depicting the hunting of Calydon the boar, there were Wedgwood medallions, Wedgwood busts, and in almost every room a naked Ganymede wiggling his buttocks.
The Prince was a sympathetic man, fourteen years George’s senior. George found himself able to talk to ‘Father Franz’, as the tenants on the estate at Wörlitz called him, in a way he could never talk to his own father. Reinhold gave out every indication that he did not want to carry even the smallest part of George’s burden of unhappiness. Not being told about his son’s marriage problems he conspicuously failed to ask a single question either about his daughter-in-law, or about his grand-daughter Rose. Whereas Franz –
—She’s very clever, your wife. Met her when she was growing up – met her when I’ve been to Göttingen. My word! The Universitätsmamsellen they called them – she and Fräulein Michaelis and their friends. Nothing they couldn’t talk about. She must be pleased she married an intellectual!
George reflected sheepishly that they seldom talked.
—She must be lonely, said the Prince.
When George came home he resolved to try to woo his wife all over again, to make things right with her, to respect her, to try to talk to her of his intellectual interests. He now regretted the thought that poverty would force him to Petersburg. He need not have done so. In his absence in Berlin, Professor Heyne had secured a post for him, as the University librarian at Mainz. Therese was momentarily able to enter into his feelings, his relief at not going to Russia, his determination to save the marriage. She became pregnant again. Clara, their second daughter, was born a few months after they had been installed in their new life in Mainz.
PART THREE
Affinities
O Wedding-Guest! This soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
I
1773
THE CAPTAIN WAS THE FIRST TO BE EXAMINED, BY MR Patten. Every man on board submitted, even Reinhold, who, having engaged Dr Sparrman at his own expense in Cape Town, elected to be seen by the South African doctor. To kill his embarrassment, as Sparrman peered between his legs, Reinhold talked.
—Can we say the Europeans brought any benefit to the Americas which could possibly compensate them for this Columbus-borne scourge? And again here. The Kapitän was right to insist on our all – all – undergoing . . . when he was first here – with the Endeavour – he believes one of his own officers took the plague, the filthy disease.
—Ay, sir, to the North Island.
They had all heard the Captain’s speech that morning.
—We’ve been six months at sea. No point in being mealy mouthed about it.
As if to emphasize his bluntness of approach, here the Captain’s Yorkshire accent had been especially strong. Maily mouth dbah teet.
—One of the worst things on my conscience is that when we first came to New Zealand five years since in t’ Endeavour one of my own officers – so it w
ould seem – infected a woman on the North Island. There’s no cure for this disease – you all know that. You know, ’n’ all, what it’ll do t’ ye – the nose on your face collapsing and turning to jelly, the pain of it – terrible – your wits and your eyesight gone. But I’m not judging any man. You’ve been away from shore a long time . . .
The Captain had been reluctant to judge, Reinhold rather less so.
—It is hard, impossible, not to detest the memory of that man who first disseminated this venom among these brave, spirited people.
The doctor was fond of Reinhold but he could not resist asking,
—There’s a certain redness about your balls. You have not had unwise dealings with a woman since leaving England?
—You know that could not be the case.
—As the Captain said, we are all human. It is the strongest impulse in a man.
—It would have been better to stab the object of his lust than to . . . poison her in this way. The man, the man who – and you think I could do a thing like this?
When it was George’s turn to be examined, he chose to be seen by Mr Patten. It was an ordeal, lowering his breeches.
—Is that a bit of a spot you have there? A blemish?
No words would come in reply to this inquiry.
—Would you mind lifting it up a bit so I can see the other side of it?
Terrified that this action would lead to the onset of an erection, George obeyed.
—Probably just been a bit rough with yourself when you last saw that Master all lads are so fond of.
Momentarily George felt himself accused of unnatural vice with Mr Gilbert, the ship’s master.
—I would . . . never—
—All boys are friends with Master Bates, just don’t overdo it, eh? Saps your strength. Pull your breeches up.
How did Patten know? George wished he had joined the queue for Dr Sparrman who had a comforting lack of comedy in his nature and would surely not have descended into banter. And what was overdoing it? There were some days when desire was so overpowering that doing it, far from dispelling lust, stimulated desire more painfully, as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. Then – inseparable as father and son were during the days at sea – his father would say —That is your fourth visit to the privy since breakfast? You have the squits?