The Age of Wonder (56 page)

The nature of ‘consciousness’ remains a major challenge to modern neuroscience, and one of the great abiding scientific mysteries. The French physiologist Pierre Cabanis, much admired by Lawrence and deprecated by Abernethy, suggested that ‘just as the stomach, liver, and other glandular organs produced their typical secretions, so also did the healthy brain secrete moral thought’.
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Coleridge dismissed such suggestions as mechanistic, and his ‘Theory of Life’ is also interesting because it represents the nearest he came to suggesting the evolution of human intelligence, an argument that he was otherwise inclined to dismiss as the ‘absurd orang-utang theory’.

Indeed, it is still sobering to read Coleridge-one of the outstanding minds of his generation-on the subject of evolution. As he wrote to Wordsworth: ‘I understood you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope’s Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless believers-even (strange to say) among Christians-of Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.’
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Keats’s two years of medical training at Guy’s (1816-17) under Astley Cooper and J.H. Green are recorded in his extensive Anatomical and Physiological Notebook, together it must be said with many doodlings of flowers and faces in the margins. So he undoubtedly knew more about medical, chemical and dissection procedures-as well as the Vitalism debate itself-than anyone else at Haydon’s dinner party. His witticism at Newton’s expense could be seen as the typical knowing humour of a clever medical student.

Yet Keats did appear to make a later attack on the cruel and ‘demystifying’ aspects of science in his ornate narrative poem ‘Lamia’, written in 1820. This poem appears to be very different in spirit from his earlier sonnet praising Herschel, the inspired scientific ‘watcher of the skies’. It was based on a strange misogynist medical ‘case history’ he had found in Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy,
in which a beautiful, seductive woman is revealed by a wise physician-philosopher, one Apollonius, to be a terrifying snake, or ‘lamia’. In Burton’s version, Apollonius’s ‘diagnosis’ saves Lamia’s infatuated young bridegroom Lycius, just in time, on his wedding night, ‘although Lamia wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent’.
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Keats changed many of the details of Burton’s story, not least that his Lycius is so heartbroken at the loss of his lovely Lamia-whether she be a serpent or not-that far from thanking the scientific Apollonius, he retreats to his bed in misery and dies at the end of the poem. Keats prepares for this dénouement in a striking passage in which he refers to the icy touch and ‘cold philosophy’ of science, which destroys the beautiful mystery of all natural objects, like the rainbow-or, indeed, like the serpent-woman.

…Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings…
Unweave a rainbow, as it erstwhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.
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But
is
the serpent-woman a natural object? Or is she something artificial and lethal, an alien life force which will prove fatal to man, and particularly to her naïve young bridegroom, who is innocently besotted with her? This is the question that Keats seems to pose by the end of his poem. What is the role of science (represented by the fierce old sage Apollonius) in protecting man from seductive but destructive delusions?

The Lamia poem is the one in which Keats himself said he had made ‘more use of my judgement’-meaning his powers of intellectual analysis-than any other. It is in fact full of intellectual provocations-not least about the nature of sexual attraction, and the indiscriminate drive of the life force-and is replete with chemical and surgical imagery. There is another passage, far less known, in which Keats describes the Lamia herself, before she is transformed into a woman. Here she is presented not as some conventional erotic anaconda (as Humboldt might have encountered in the Amazon forest), but as if she were the result of some astonishing new chemical or biological combination, producing a gleaming, seductive but utterly alien new life form.

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barred;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries-
So rainbow-sided, touched with miseries
She seemed…
Her head was serpent, but, ah bitter-sweet!
She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.
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This extraordinary creation is both sexually alluring and yet clearly menacing and ‘demonic’. By using the term ‘rainbow-sided’ of her body, Keats even seems to be recalling his old Newtonian joke, and inventing his own mysterious
biological
rainbow, a living creature who is both a spectre and a spectrum. There are many other passages which play with medical and scientific imagery in the poem-for example Hunter’s theory of ‘inflammation’ as proof of vitality. When Lycius desperately grasps Lamia’s
chilly
hand, ‘all the pains/Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart’.
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But most memorable and disturbing is the passage in which Lamia the snake changes into Lamia the woman, ‘a full-born beauty new and exquisite!’ This new birth is described in semi-scientific terms, as if Keats were observing a violent chemical experiment in a laboratory, or a surgical procedure (like Fanny Burney’s), or one of Aldini’s electrical trials. It is agonising. Lamia’s serpentine body begins to convulse, her blood ‘in madness’ runs through her length; she foams at the mouth, and her saliva ‘so sweet and virulent’ burns and ‘withers’ the ground where it spatters. Her eyes ‘in torture fixed’ become glazed and wide. The ‘lid-lashes’ are seared, and the pupils flash ‘phosphor and sharp sparks’.

The colours all inflamed throughout her train,
She writhed about convulsed in scarlet pain:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of her milder-moonèd body’s grace;
And as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars…
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Keats never lets his reader forget this traumatic birth, and what it has cost the serpent to become a human being. His extraordinary invention, perhaps the most brilliant and thought-provoking of all his narrative poems, engages many of the moral issues surrounding Vitalism, the nature of life, and the notion of human consciousness. Above all, perhaps, it asks if the beautiful Lamia has a soul.

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But the most singular literary response to the Vitalism debate was Mary Shelley’s cult novel
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
(1818). In this story, originally thought to have been written by a male author-either Walter Scott, William Godwin or Percy Shelley-a sort of human life is physically created, or rather reconstructed. But the soul or spirit is irretrievably damaged.

Mary Shelley’s preliminary ideas for the novel can be dated back remarkably early, to the year 1812, when her father William Godwin took her to hear Humphry Davy give his public lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution. She was then only fourteen. Her young Victor Frankenstein would also begin as an idealistic and dedicated medical student, inspired by the lectures of the visionary Professor Waldman at Ingolstadt. Mary Shelley would eventually draw directly on the published text of Davy’s famous ‘Introductory Discourse’, in which he spoke of those future experiments in which man would ‘interrogate Nature with Power…as a master, active, with his own instruments’.
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Waldman’s lecture on chemistry expands Davy’s claims, and has an electric effect on the young Victor Frankenstein.

‘The ancient teachers of this science,’ said he, ‘promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of Nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow.’

Such were the Professor’s words-rather let me say such the words of Fate-enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being. Chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done!-exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein: more, far more will I achieve! Treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown Powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of Creation.
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When Mary eloped with Shelley to France and Switzerland in 1814, their shared journal indicates that they were already discussing notions of creating artificial life. As they returned penniless, by public riverboat down the Rhine, they remarked on the monstrous, inhuman appearance of several of the huge German labourers on board, and noticed that they sailed beneath a lowering
schloss
known as ‘Castle Frankenstein’.
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On their return Shelley began writing the first of his series of speculative and autobiographical essays, mixing scientific ideas with psychology, under such titles as ‘On the Science of Mind’, ‘On a Catalogue of the Phenomenon of Dreams’ and ‘On Life’. He evidently discussed these disturbing ideas with Mary, for she remembered on one occasion how he broke off from writing one of them, ‘overcome by thrilling horror’.
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Mary’s brilliance was to see that these weighty and often alarming ideas could be given highly suggestive, imaginative and even playful form. In a sense, she would treat male concepts in a female style. She would develop exactly what William Lawrence had dismissed in his lectures as a ‘hypothesis or fiction’. Indeed, it was to be an utterly new form of fiction-the science fiction novel. Mary plunged instinctively into the most extreme implications of Vitalism. In effect, she would take up where Aldini had been forced to leave off. She would pursue the controversial-and possibly blasphemous-idea that vitality, like electricity, might be used to reanimate a dead human being. But she would go further, much further. She would imagine an experiment in which an entirely new human being was ‘created’ from dead matter.
She would imagine a surgical operation, a corpse dissection, in reverse.
She would invent a laboratory in which limbs, organs, assorted body parts were not separated and removed and thrown away, but assembled and sewn together and ‘reanimated’ by a ‘powerful machine’, presumably a voltaic battery.
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Thus they would be given organic life and vitality. But whether they would be given a soul as well was another question.

This extraordinary fiction was begun at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, in a holiday atmosphere of dinner parties and late-night talk, but very different from that at Haydon’s ‘Immortal Dinner’. The talk was quick, clever, sceptical, teasing and flirtatious. Mary Shelley records that she, Shelley and Byron, inspired by Dr Polidori (himself only twenty-two), discussed the galvanic experiments of Aldini, and various speculations about the artificial generation of life by Erasmus Darwin. They then, famously, set themselves a ghost-story-writing competition.

Byron scrawled a fragment about a dying explorer, ‘Augustus Darvell’ (dated 17 June 1816); Shelley composed his atheist poem ‘Mont Blanc’; Polidori dashed off a brief gothic bagatelle, ‘The Vampyre’, which he later tried to pretend was actually Byron’s (so he could sell it), while Mary Shelley wrote-but very slowly, over the next fourteen months-an intricately constructed 90,000-word fiction, which gradually became, draft crafted upon draft,
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
She handed in the completed manuscript to Lackington, Allen & Co. in August 1817, just three weeks before her baby Clara was born on 2 September.

The actual writing of Mary’s novel can be followed fairly closely from her journal in Switzerland, and then back in England at Great Marlow on the Thames. What is less clear is where she gathered her ideas and materials from, and how she created her two unforgettable protagonists: Dr Frankenstein and his Creature. One is tempted to say that the Creature-who is paradoxically the most articulate person in the whole novel-was a pure invention of Mary’s genius. But in Victor Frankenstein of Ingolstadt she had created a composite figure who in many ways was typical of a whole generation of scientific men. The shades of ‘inflammable’ Priestley, the deeply eccentric Cavendish, the ambitious young Davy, the sinister Aldini and the glamorous, iconoclastic William Lawrence may all have contributed something to the portrait.

Yet Frankenstein is essentially a European figure, a Genevan-perhaps of German Jewish ancestry-studying and working at Ingolstadt in Germany.
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The importance of the German connection, and the experiments already done there, was pointed out by Percy Shelley in the very first sentence of his anonymous ‘Preface’ to the original 1818 edition of the novel. ‘The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not impossible of occurrence.’