The Age of Wonder (73 page)

The fourth Dialogue contains more thinly veiled autobiography, referring to Davy’s own illness and his mother’s recent death in Cornwall. It draws on his more recent travels in the Austrian Alps and Illyria.
¹³¹
There is a dramatic account of being swept away in a fishing coracle down the river Traun, being carried through boiling passages of white water, and finally being hurled over the great Traun waterfall itself and losing consciousness. ‘I was immediately stunned by the thunder of the fall and my eyes were closed in darkness.’ He wakes to find himself being mysteriously pulled to safety. ‘ was desirous of reasoning…upon the state of annihilation of power and
transient death
which I had suffered when in the water.’
¹³²
Whether this terrifying accident actually occurred to Davy is never made clear, but the entire episode seems symbolic of his whole life being swept away towards death.

Appropriately, the scientific theme of this Dialogue is the nature of the Life Principle, its analogies with electricity, and the whole Vitalism debate. Davy also puts forward the sustaining idea that men of science like Archimedes, Bacon and Galileo had actually advanced human civilisation far more than statesmen, religious leaders or artists. This is a position that he had frequently argued in his later lectures, deliberately contradicting Coleridge, who had said that the ‘souls of 500 Newtons’ had gone into the making of a single Shakespeare. Davy said emphatically that as benefactors of mankind, he held Bacon far above Shakespeare, and Newton far above Milton. ‘At that time, when Bacon created a new world of intellect, and Shakespeare a new world of imagination, it is not a question to me which has produced the greatest effect upon the progress of society-Shakespeare or Bacon; Milton or Newton.’
^133
♣

In the fifth Dialogue, which he entitled ‘The Chemical Philosopher’, Davy set out his hopes for the future of chemistry. It embodied all his passionate belief in science as a progressive force for good, both in its practical results and its impact on the mind. This would be widely accepted as a credo by the next generation of young scientists: ‘Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feeling; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they like wise extend its analogies; and, though conversant with the minute forms of things, they have for their ultimate end the great and magnificent objects of Nature…And hence they are wonderfully suited to the progressive nature of the human intellect…It may be said of modern chemistry, that its beginning is pleasure, its progress knowledge, and its objects truth and utility.’
¹³⁴

Davy claimed chemistry as the crown of a ‘liberal education’, and assumed that a serious chemist would begin with an elementary knowledge of mathematics, general physics, languages (it is interesting that he included Latin, Greek and French), natural history and literature. He should write up his experiments in ‘the simplest style and manner’. But his imagination ‘must be active and brilliant in seeking analogies…The memory must be extensive and profound.’
¹³⁵
He was not above adding a little perilous glamour to the pursuit: ‘The business of the laboratory is often a service of danger, and the elements, like the refractory spirits of romance, though the obedient slave of the Magician, yet sometimes escape the influence of his talisman, and endanger his person.’
¹³⁶

The sixth and last Dialogue (‘Pola, or Time’) ends on a mystical note, with an almost Blakean speculation about angelic intelligences. This bursts out on the final pages with a salute to Herschel’s views of a dynamic and ever-evolving universe: ‘There is much reason to infer, from astronomical observations, that great changes take place in the system of the fixed stars; Sir William Herschel, indeed, seems to have believed that he saw nebulous or luminous matter in the process of forming suns…It is, perhaps, rather a poetical than a philosophical idea, yet I cannot help forming the opinion, that genii or seraphic intelligences may inhabit these systems, and may be the ministers of the eternal mind.’
¹³⁷
With characteristic precision, Davy refused to add capital letters to those last two words.

This strange book, part philosophy and part science fiction, was to have a surprising hold on the younger generation of Victorian scientists. What it suggested was that chemistry was the most awe-inspiring and visionary of the sciences, and that ‘to study it was to catch the ultimate forces of nature itself’ at work.
¹³⁸
It was frequently referred to by Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Charles Darwin. Though clearly fitting into a recognisable pattern, in which a highly rational man develops intense mystical longings towards the end of his life, it carried a true sense of humanity and hope. In a later
éloge,
Georges Cuvier called it, with pardonable exaggeration, ‘in some respects the last words of a dying Plato’.
¹³⁹

Consolations in Travel
was timely in emphasising the progressive nature of science as an expression of man’s ‘immortal’ spirit, and the particular qualities required by a scientist, both by training and by temperament. It did not reveal much about Davy’s personal relations-there is nothing specifically about his childhood, his family, his wife, or the problematic subject of Michael Faraday. But it carried a haunting sense of his career, so marked by both exceptional achievement and bitter disappointment. It could perhaps claim to be the first ever scientific autobiography in English. It certainly belongs to the new Romantic genre of memoir, that includes in various ways Wordsworth’s
Prelude
(1805-50), Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria
(1816) and Thomas De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821).

Though he was solitary during this whole period (apart from his dogs), Davy had the support of a servant, whom he refers to with mournful humour as his Caliban. There was also his godson, a young medical student, John Tobin, son of his Bristol friend James Tobin, who had once tried laughing gas. Young Tobin’s main employment seems to have been reading to the great man in the evenings. These could be demanding sessions, covering contemporary novels, much poetry (especially Byron), the
Arabian Nights,
and on one occasion a Shakespeare reading that Tobin claimed lasted for nine hours on end.

Though he was useful for valeting and taking dictation, young Tobin was no Faraday; though like Faraday he found it difficult to maintain equable relations with his moody, reclusive employer: ‘Sir Humphry…frequently preferred being left alone at his meals; and in his rides, or fishing and shooting excursions, to be attended only by his servant. Sometimes he would pass hours together, when travelling, without exchanging a word, and often appeared exhausted by his mental exertions.’
¹⁴⁰

It is noticeable that in Lady Davy’s absence, Davy gradually seemed much softened towards her, and began writing a stream of increasingly tender letters, of which she kept at least forty-eight carefully done up in ribbons.
¹⁴¹
In one he writes: ‘I think you will find me altered in many things-with a heart still alive to value and reply to kindness, and a disposition to recur to the brighter moments of my existence of fifteen years ago, and with a feeling that though the burnt-out flame can never be rekindled, a smothered one may be. God bless you! From your affectionate, H Davy.’
¹⁴²

Davy was now less inclined to boast of his achievements, but sadly lamented how little they had been recognised: ‘I have been used so ill by the public when I have laboured most to serve them, and injured my body and mind in exertions for their good (witness safety lamp, copper bottoms, Royal Society…).’
¹⁴³

Vitalism still held his intense interest. He stubbornly sent off another scientific paper to the Royal Society, on the ‘animal battery’ contained in the body of the torpedo or electric eel. It was published on 20 November 1828. He had now submitted forty-six papers to the Society, his first on the voltaic battery long ago in June 1801, and his most famous one on the safety lamp in 1816. He did not want the torpedo to be his last, and he continued to investigate the mystery of ‘animal electricity’ and its possible connection with the universal principle of life. John Herschel would be particularly struck by this paper, which compared the electric eel to a voltaic battery, asked whether the eel could exert this ‘most wonderful power’ at will, and speculated whether the human brain itself might be ‘an electric pile, constantly in action’.
¹⁴⁴

Nature held other analogies, too. A late autumn 1828 entry in Davy’s private journals reads: ‘Bees, wasps and various winged insects, which appeared to me to be of the
Vesper
or
Apes
families were feeding in almost every flower, their tongues searching the honey. They were all languid, it was a cold evening though the sun was bright, and some of them appeared to me actually to die whilst in the act of feeding on their last meal of ambrosia! Happy beings…‘
¹⁴⁵
Perhaps he had hoped that something like that might have happened to him at Laibach.

At last Davy reluctantly left the enchantments of Pappina and Illyria, and went to winter in Rome. He felt increasingly weak and ill, but continued to work spasmodically on the final sections of
Consolations.
In February 1829 he suffered another devastating stroke, and summoned his brother John. John was now working as a military surgeon in Malta, but instantly talked himself aboard a Royal Navy frigate, and rapidly made his way to Naples, and then by horse to Rome.

Convinced that he was dying, Davy had also begged Jane to join him from London. She finally agreed to do so, hoping ‘to arrive not quite useless’, and having been detained for several days by her own doctors. She sent ahead a curiously formal letter, pledging to Davy ‘all the faith and love I have ever borne to you’, but searching in vain for that touch of intimacy or tenderness that had long eluded them both. Its last sentence read: ‘I cannot add more than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a glory, your life still a hope.’
¹⁴⁶

But when Jane finally arrived in Rome in early April, she did something which gave Davy immense pleasure. From her chaotic suite of trunks, bags and hatboxes she produced with a flourish the second, expanded and corrected, edition of
Salmonia,
hot off the press, and with beautiful new steel engravings added throughout. Nothing could have pleased him more, a sort of proof of his literary immortality. He immediately began rereading it.
¹⁴⁷

Davy continued gallantly to dictate sections of the
Consolations
to John. Sometimes he was feverish, his pulse rate rising to 150. As in the old days, John took over the dissection of the torpedo fish, and they gently debated whether ‘animal electricity’ was the intrinsic source of its life, or a mere physiological mechanism for paralysing prey or for self-protection. ‘The greater part of the day I sat by his bedside, reading the “Dialogues”, stopping occasionally to discuss particular parts. His mind was wonderfully cheerful and tranquil, and clear, and in a very affectionate and most amiable disposition…He had lost all the irritable feeling to which he was very liable before…It was difficult to conceive such power of mind, when the body was near dissolution: medically it seemed incompatible.’
¹⁴⁸

At the end of April Davy smelt the spring blowing in over the
campagna.
He announced that he wished to travel again before he died. John arranged for a slow coach journey northwards towards Switzerland, with many stops to admire the spring countryside and gaze at the rivers and waterfalls. Jane tactfully went ahead to arrange for accommodation in Geneva. On 28 May 1829 Davy arrived at the Hôtel de la Couronne, overlooking the tranquil lake where Byron and Shelley and young Dr Frankenstein had once sailed. He took tea, and gazed down from his window at the sunset. He carefully questioned the Swiss waiter about the varied species of fish that the lake contained. To John, with a wistful smile, ‘he expressed a longing wish to throw a fly’. He took his evening dose of morphine, and John read him to sleep. That night at 3 a.m., Sir Humphry Davy had another stroke and died.

Davy had no children, and left considerable wealth to a nephew, his sister’s boy, Humphry Millett, whom he barely knew. All his scientific papers went to his faithful brother John, though Lady Davy retained family letters and journals. John did not see eye to eye with his sister-in-law, and quickly disappeared back to his adventurous medical career with the army, which took him to the Ionian isles, Ceylon and the West Indies. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, married, and eventually settled at Ambleside in the Lake District, where he became the Wordsworths’ family doctor.

Jane made no attempt to publish anything of Davy’s, or about him, though she dined out for the next twenty years on her amusing tales of ‘dear, great Sir Humphry’. But John, partly encouraged by Wordsworth, worked doggedly on his brother’s papers for more than twenty-five years. He first published a two-volume
Life
in 1836, hurried out in reply to a hostile anecdotal biography assembled by the voluble J.A. Paris of the Penzance Geological Society (2 vols, 1831). Later John produced a ninevolume
Collected Works
in 1839-40, with a carefully rewritten
Memoir
of his brother’s life, attached as a Preface to Volume I. Finally, when settled in the Lakes, he issued a slim but revealing volume of
Fragmentary Remains
in 1858, which contains much of Davy’s poetry. No other major edition of his papers, letters or journals has so far been produced. Perhaps John’s most intimate tribute was his own book about fishing in the Lake District,
The Angler and his Friend
(1855).