Resolution

by A. N. Wilson

  —George, you wrote that?

  —And then Wales – you know, the astronomer – wrote another pamphlet, attacking Vati – and, really, I think, making everyone hate us.

  —What happened to Mr Wales?

  —What happens to anyone? He became a teacher.

  The little two-wheeler had crossed the river once more and was making its way to Plumtree Street, Newgate, where Humboldt was lodging with a German wigmaker. There wasn’t room for him at Bloomsbury, where George was staying with his sister Victoria, whom he scarcely knew, who was married to a tedious clergyman.

  —I can walk to my sister’s from here, he said, as the barouche came to a halt at the little wigmaker’s establishment near Newgate Prison. We could dine together?

  —Or, my friend, you have had enough of me, perhaps, for one day?

  —I could never have enough of you.

  —Barty might show me the sights a little. We thought we might see the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

  —Watch out for the women there! They are after your purse more than your . . .

  Even as he heard himself looking, first at Alexander’s mildly blushing face, and then at the much more knowing smile of Barty, the coachman, George felt foolish. Barty was a thin man in his twenties, with laughing blue eyes and mousy hair tied back with a black ribbon. Perhaps the women were not to be a temptation.

  —Thought I’d show Mr ’Umboldt the docks – go down to Wapping, meet some of the men coming off the big ships – coming in from the Indies.

  There was slightly too much hesitation – was he catching the habit from Mrs Cook and the late Captain? – before George answered,

  —A very good idea.

  —If ’e wants to be a great traveller, he’s going to want to meet some sailors, said Barty with a proprietorial finality.

  Walking back to Bloomsbury alone, more and more of those final weeks in London, with Reinhold and the family in ’78, returned to him, and, inevitably, he thought of poor Nally.

  So they saw England as strangers see it. Before their arrival, his mind having mysteriously blotted out the Letter to Lord Sandwich and its impassioned, intemperate words, George had supposed that it would be a month of glad reunions. The frostiness of Mrs Cook was, however, a harbinger of cold weather to come. An audience between Forster the world-encircler and the Prince of Wales had been petitioned for, pre-booked and arranged. When George and Humboldt arrived at St James’s Palace at the appointed hour, however, they were told that His Royal Highness was not, after all, available. They did visit Mr Dalrymple at the Admiralty – Mr Alexander Dalrymple, the hydrographer who had accompanied Cook on the first voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus in ’69, and who was an employee of the East India Company much of his life, an organization with which he had a stormy relationship. In a breezy way, Dalrymple was friendly enough, gave the two men dinner and spoke incessantly, in part, which was of absorbing interest to them both, of astronomy, and in part, which was a little baffling to them, of the trial of Warren Hastings which had been taking place, with long intervals, over the last couple of years in Westminster Hall. Hastings, the Governor General of India, had been brought home and impeached, subjected to furious denunciations by Edmund Burke, accused of personal corruption and maladministration. Dalrymple, a plump fifty-something man whose tongue and teeth appeared too large for his mouth, poured out scorn for the Council of the East India Company, recounted how badly they had behaved towards himself ever since he’d arrived in Madras in ’52. Neither Forster nor Humboldt could fathom the interstices of legal argument; nor, next day, when they went to Westminster Hall to witness the cross-examination of ‘Lord’ Hastings as they wrongly supposed him to be named, did they feel much the wiser, though the spectacle was an absorbing one – the Lord Chancellor in his wig and robes, the Speaker of the Lower House, also in a wig, the heralds in bright tabards, emblazoned with heraldic arms, resembling the Knave of Hearts on playing cards. A ruddy-faced man with sharp nose, ironical mouth and dark eyes was addressing the assembled Parliamentarians on the cruelties perpetrated upon the natives of Bengal. It was Burke himself, the famous radical orator, who had called for the abolition of slavery, defended the American colonists’ right to independence, and now denounced the cruelties and corruptions of the English in India. Alexander, who could read English with fluency, could not really understand it when spoken, and it was faith alone rather than judgement which acceded to George’s excited assurance that Burke was the great orator of the age.

  —The accent I could detect – is that Cockney? Scottish?

  —He is an Irishman – ah, Nally! – which is what gives him his total independence of outlook! How I long to hear him speak on the French Revolution! What prose poems would pour forth on the destruction of the Bastille!

  They were thorough in what they sought out, and saw, but they could only do so as tourists. They went to the theatre and saw Mrs Siddons in a play called The Crusade. They went to Mr Townley’s Museum of Classical Sculptures and gasped at his busts of Emperors, his mutilated marble bearded Bacchuses and chipped Apollos. They saw the Castle at Windsor. More excitingly, they saw Herschel’s telescope at Slough. They journeyed to Bath and saw the Roman spa and the beautiful new Crescents and Circus. They went to Birmingham and saw Matthew Boulton’s factory – and a farce at the theatre called The Romp. (Humboldt, who did not really understand it, laughed because he thought it was called The Rump.) They went to Buxton Spa, swooned at the Peak District, exclaimed at the palatial Chatsworth, visited Oxford and dined with the Keeper of the Botanic Garden, but never once felt they had completely understood the country through which they had passed. In London, particularly – where Banks was eventually gracious enough to give them dinner and to show Humboldt a multitude of botanical specimens – they were fascinated by the freedom: while, for example, in coffee shops, the French Revolution was ecstatically celebrated, this did not prevent them from politely serving French refugees.

  George was more saddened than dispirited by the English journey, although he was delighted by so much of the landscape and architecture. He had never before seen so clearly how badly ‘the tactless philosopher’ had blundered, when the Resolution had come home and Cook had been celebrated as a National Hero. Never before did he see how close they had been to acceptance by the British, but how capriciously they had thrown all that away: as though there was some compulsion to make them queer their own pitch: as though they were natural nomads, never destined to grow roots. Reinhold probably felt, in each of the quarrels he picked, that right was on his side, and perhaps it was. Perhaps another truth was that they were all the products of Great Creating Nature and must behave as She dictates; that the Forsters, father and son, were no more destined to stay in one place than migrant birds.

  So they left England – Humboldt had chiefly enjoyed the Herschel telescope and the Botanic Garden. He also appeared excessively to have enjoyed his visits to Wapping to sit in taverns with sailors and hear of their adventures and travels. George felt an instinctive unwillingness to inquire too closely about Humboldt and the sailors. There was quite enough, without this, to remind him of poor Nally. So forcefully did the English tour remind him of the Nally débâcle, that when Humboldt one day said —Show me the house where you lived – it was near the British Museum, no? – George pretended he could not remember its exact location, and, even when he had engineered one of their walks so that they walked down Percy Street, and looked across from what had been their front door to the open rolling country to the north, and the hills of Hampstead a few miles distant, he could not bring himself to share with Humboldt even the most trivial of the memories which overpowered him. Poor Nally. Poor, poor Nally. That was worse than any of the other memories, worse than Reinhold’s nearly being arrested for debt, worse than George realizing, by writing his popular Voyage, that he had made his hero, Captain Cook, into an enemy, worse than the realization – some of which was invisible to his twenty-year-old self and had only beco
me clear to the thirty-five-year-old tourist – that his clever father was a fool.

  They spent their last night in England at a Dover inn and George’s description of the moonlight on ‘Shakespeare’s Cliff’, on 28th June 1790, was destined to become one of the set-pieces of German Romantic prose, anthologized to this day. Looking back at the huge chalk cliffs next morning, from the deck of the Channel ferry, George found himself weeping uncontrollably. Humboldt either did not notice, or politely pretended not to notice. He smiled sweetly, girlishly, at George. Then, the strange smile faltered and he began to point at the sea. Five miles out from England, the ship of human beings was joined by other creatures, and Humboldt was not alone in his excitement. Men clutching their round-brimmed straw hats, women in tied bonnets ran to the railings to see the shoal of dolphins which surrounded the boat, leaping from the water with apparently smiling faces. Normally, the appearance of dolphins like this heralded a storm – or so said the sailors aboard. But there was no storm as they sailed towards France on a blue sea, and the dolphins seemed, rather, to be harbingers of euphoria.

  Humboldt was not really a political man and, in so far as he was political, he was one of Nature’s conservatives. Even he, however, could not but respond to the atmosphere of France on that bright June day. In the inn at Calais, in the coach to Paris, in the streets of the capital, there existed an atmosphere of rapture. The weather turned. George recognized in himself the symptoms which led him to become a devotee of the Rosicrucian enthusiasm. Even before they witnessed the celebrations for the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, he knew that his enthusiasm for the Revolution had moved far from that liberal sympathy, expressed in some of the London coffee shops, for the ending of old hierarchies and the extension of privilege. He was tingling. The excitement was uncontrollable, beyond reason.

  They were up early, determined to find a place in the Field of Mars, but already, when they arrived there after a hasty breakfast, thousands had gathered in the rain. Once wedged there, there would be no escape: and as the hours passed by, the free citizens of France were in no mood to lose their places in the giant amphitheatre merely to answer the calls of nature. By midday, with the rain still pelting down, it was difficult, in their particular patch, to distinguish between the mud and the shit on their boots. Some said there were as many as a hundred and fifty thousand people there, to see the hastily constructed wooden Triumphal Arches, and the great amphitheatre which had been dug out by ‘volunteers’. Duchesses, abbots, even the King himself, had been along in the previous week, to advertise their enthusiasm for the new ways by digging for an hour or so in the mud. The result resembled a sodden farmyard of puddles. Humboldt just saw mud, but all George saw were Fields of Glory. He saw the huge military procession which squelched into this rain-soaked scene, fifty thousand National Guard, as an angelic host, and the procession which followed as an epiphany of freedom and light: the ancient bearded regular veterans, greeted by workers holding aloft pickaxes, and banners proclaiming the King to be their ‘father, their brother, their friend’. Women with trays of pies and sweetmeats slithered through the mud to offer the old soldiers food. Below, the towering wooden arches swayed slightly in the wind and reminded dispassionate observers of those ‘flats’ in the theatre which represent woodland or castle wall but without conviction, as though on the verge of collapse. In the centre of the Field was the Altar of the Fatherland, again wooden, but painted to resemble marble and adorned with symbols – a female figure representing the Constitution and then came the procession – the Estates, the clergy, the King, and taking up the rear, flanked by the revolutionaries who had stormed the Bastille – now clad in the helmets and togas of ancient Roman republicans – was the cynical old fraud Talleyrand, in mitre and cope, the Archbishop who proceeded to celebrate a High Mass, as the crowd applauded, and as the driving rain put out his altar-candles and made the burning incense fizzle and hiss. The ceremony ended with a pledge that the Revolution would bring ‘Peace to the World’. Alexander looked at his companion’s face. Tears rolled down George’s pock-marked cheeks. His eyes glowed with zany fervour.

  Three days later, he found that the little Rosebud, his Rosechen, had grown several inches. She clung to the doll on which he’d spent his last few Thaler, coming home through Strassburg.

  —He’s such a fool, a china doll, can you imagine! And in two minutes she’ll have smashed its face.

  Caroline met his gaze; saw these words of Therese’s lacerate him, while the little group – Therese’s ‘admirers’ – clustered around her. Rosechen pulled at his dark blue coat.

  —But what shall we call her, Daddy?

  Homecoming made him shy. He was stepping from the freedoms of the road, of meals at inns where no one noticed his mood (for Humboldt cared little for this) to an atmosphere where all his statements seemed to be blunders, and were put on trial, all his reactions were agreed to be laughable. Therese held Wilhelm von Humboldt’s arm while she emphasized the absurdity of the doll-purchase.

  —And all this revolutionary fervour? My dear – she stroked Alexander’s upper arm – when the Bastille was stormed we were dancing for joy – you remember. What did Schiller do?

  This last question was shouted across the room to young Huber, to whom George was showing a number of English books.

  —I thought we might make an attempt to translate some of these together, George was saying.

  —Schiller wrote an Ode to the Revolution, didn’t he? persisted Therese’s voice.

  —I’m not sure about this.

  Huber’s high colour deepened. He was now the lodger, occupying a room next to the nursery. He looked even younger than five months ago when George had last seen him. His formal manners had become stiffer, even a little pompous.

  —George, if I remember, he said, was of the view that the Revolution in German lands will come about by the rulers reforming themselves: and we surely have an example of this in our Archbishop Elector. After all – Huber bowed, as if about to present George with a medal at a public dinner – he has appointed a Protestant librarian. He drove out the monks and nuns to provide buildings for the new University. He is, so to say, an Enlightenment man!

  —At Tübingen they planted a Liberty Tree – Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, Therese called.

  —I . . .

  —You were too busy to notice the Revolution. Too busy writing books about the world to see it!

  This made the roomful of guests laugh, while Huber said,

  —Some of these English books, they look really interesting . . .

  and Rosechen said,

  —Papa, Vati, tell me a name to give her!

  —Call her Freedom! said the father.

  —You see! said his wife. He has gone mad.

  Caroline, her dark curls on her shoulders, her eyes glossy, her breath carrying on it a mixture of the gravy and dumplings they’d eaten for dinner – this smell being by no means disagreeable, actually quickening his sense of her physicality, her sexual being – came close to him, with her back to her best friend Therese, and said,

  —I want to know more of the ceremony in Paris. I want every detail.

  Later, in bed, Therese amazed him by allowing him to make love. By their perfunctory standards, it was even halfway towards being a decent fuck. After it, lying back in the darkness, she said what she rightly calculated to be the kindest thing she could say.

  —Rosechen really missed you.

  In the dark, holding her hand, he squeezed it gently.

  —And she loves her doll.

  He squeezed her fingers again and stroked her hand.

  —It’s good to be home, he said. A little speech came to his lips. Let us learn to love one another, let us be kind, let us cherish our children – but the speech died, and instead, they lay there in silence.

  Some weeks later, when she had again allowed him to make love – but once, and with no repeats – they were lying once again in the dark, and she was continuing to let him h
old her hand.

  —Listen, George. There’s something you must know. I am pregnant.

  He withdrew his hand from hers and placed it on her shoulder, trying to enfold her.

  —Oh but this is wonderful.

  —I’m going to have a child.

  —Oh, darling Therese.

  There followed a very long silence. Before it, when an upsurge of love for her made him try to hug her, there had been a moment of post-coital irrationality. The silence brought thoughts which caused stabs of pain.

  —It is my baby, he said aloud to the darkness. As far as I am concerned, as far as the world will be concerned, it is my baby . . . we . . .

  Again he’d hoped for a few sentences in which he said, it is more important to hold our family together, to learn to love one another, than to cause scandal. But these words died. Instead, he said,

  —After all these months with Alexander, our friendship with the Humboldts has become . . . very dear . . . perhaps . . . to us both.

  It was difficult to say these words but he felt rather grand saying them.

  —Wilhelm will go on being a friend, he said, and wondered, as thirty seconds became two minutes, and then a quarter of an hour of silence. Is anything stiller or darker than a man and a woman, lying together in the dark, unable to speak, having made love, but not being in love?

  —Wilhelm, said Therese’s voice into the darkness, is not the father of the child.

  PART FOUR

  Devouring

  Are those her ribs through which the Sun

  Did peer, as through a grate?

  And is that Woman all her crew?

  Is that a DEATH? and are there two?

  Is DEATH that woman’s mate?

  I

  1773

  OEDIDDEE, OR ODIDDY, AS THE CAPTAIN CALLED HIM, WAS a South Sea Islander taken on board at Raiatea in September. ‘He may be of use to us if we should fall in with and touch at any isles in our rout to the west which was my only montive [sic] for takeing him on board,’ as Cook wrote in his Journal. He was an amiable young man, perhaps a little younger than George – eighteen, say. (He didn’t, probably couldn’t, say.) He replaced a Tahitian (Porio) who had gone ashore in pursuit of girls.