His middle period (1820–33) began with a sun-pursuing trip to Italy. During those six months he made fifteen hundred drawings; after his return to England he turned some of them into new essays in color, light, and shade, like The Bay of Baiae (1823), where even the shadows speak. Again in France (1821), he made illuminating watercolors of the Seine. In 1825–26 he wandered through Belgium and Holland and brought home sketches, some of which became the paintings Cologne and Dieppe, now in the Frick Collection in New York. Occasionally, in the 1830s, he enjoyed the hospitality of Lord Egremont at Petworth; as usual he hid himself with his work, but he gave his host a moment’s immortality with The Lake at Sunset.
In the final period (1834–45) of his fertility he surrendered more and more to the lure of light; recognizable objects almost disappeared; what remained was a fascinated study of color, radiance, and shade. Occasionally he let objects play a leading role, as in The Fighting Téméraire Towed to Her Last Berth (1839) after many a blast for Britain; or the proud locomotive announcing a century of iron horses in Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844). When the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834 Turner sat nearby, making sketches for his later painting of the spectacle. Crossing from Harwich his ship ran into a madness of wind and snow; the aging artist had himself lashed to the mast for four hours that he might burn into his memory the details and terror of the scene;13 later he fused the confusion into a fury of white paint called The Snowstorm (1842). Then (1843), as a final triumph, he pictured The Sun of Venice Going Out to Sea.
His last years were darkened by a mounting consensus of condemnation, mitigated by a paean of praise from a master of English prose. One critic dismissed The Snowstorm as “soapsuds and whitewash”;14 another summed up the artist’s final period as the work of “a diseased eye and reckless hand”; and Punch proposed a general title for any picture by Turner: “A Typhoon Bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway, with a Ship on Fire, an Eclipse, and the Effect of a Lunar Rainbow.”15 After half a century of labor, the grand and brilliant oeuvre seemed to be despised and rejected by the merciless judgment of conservative taste.
Then, in May, 1843, John Ruskin, aged twenty-four, issued the first volume of Modern Painters, whose persistent and enthusiastic themes were the superiority of William Turner over all other modern landscape painters, and the complete veracity of Turner’s pictures as a report on the external world. Turner was not offended to find himself exalted above Claude Lorrain, who had been the inspiration of his youth; but as he read on he began to wonder would not this eulogy harm him by its elongation and excess. For a time it did; critics lauded Ruskin’s prose but questioned his judgment and counseled a more balanced view. Ruskin was not to be restrained; he returned again and again, in volume after volume, to the enterprise of defending and expounding Turner, until he had given the artist almost a third of the book’s two thousand pages. In the end he won his battle, and lived to see his idol acclaimed as one of the creative enlargers of modern art.
Meanwhile Turner died, December 19, 1851, and was buried in St. Paul’s. His will left his artistic remains to the nation—three hundred paintings, three hundred watercolors, nineteen thousand drawings—and left his unspent earnings, £140,000, to a fund for needy artists. (His surviving relatives obtained annulment of the will, and divided the money among themselves and their lawyers.)
Perhaps his greatest legacy was his pictorial discovery of light. In that same generation that heard Thomas Young formulate his wave theory of light, Turner spread over Europe luminescent paintings and watercolors proclaiming that light is an object as well as a medium, and that it deserves representation in its diverse forms, colors, components, and effects. This was impressionism before the Impressionists; and perhaps Manet and Pissarro, when they visited London in 1870, saw some of Turner’s spectacular illuminations.16 Seven years later Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir sent to a London art dealer a letter saying that in their studies of “the fugitive phenomena of light” they did not forget that they had been “preceded in this path by a great master of the English School, the illustrious Turner.”17
CHAPTER XVIII
Science in England
I. AVENUES OF PROGRESS
IT was natural that England, having led the way from agriculture to industry, should favor those sciences that offered practical possibilities, leaving theoretical studies to the French; and it was to be expected that her philosophers in this period—Burke, Malthus, Godwin, Bentham, Paine—should be men of the world, facing the living problems of morality, religion, population, revolution, and government, and abandoning to German professors the airy flights into logic, metaphysics, and the “phenomenology of mind.”
“The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” as organized in 1660, had announced its “designs of founding a Colledge for the promotion of Physico-Mathematical Experimentall Learning.” But it had not become a college in the sense of an organization of teachers for the secondary education of youth; it had developed into a restricted club of fifty-five gentlemen scientists, periodically meeting for consultation, gathering a library of science and philosophy, providing a special audience for addresses and experiments, awarding medals for contributions to science, and occasionally publishing its Philosophical Transactions. “Philosophy” still included the sciences, which were budding from it one by one as they replaced logic and theory with quantitative formulations and verifiable experiments. The Royal Society arranged, usually with governmental subsidies, various scientific undertakings or expeditions. In 1780 the government assigned to it elegant quarters in Somerset House, where it remained till 1857, when it moved to its present home in Burlington House, on Piccadilly. Its president from 1778 to 1820, Sir Joseph Banks, spent much of his fortune in the promotion of science and the patronage of scientists.
Only less famous than the Royal Society, and more designed for education, was the Royal Institution of London, established in 1800 by Count Rumford, “for directing, by regular courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of the new discoveries in science to the improvements of arts and manufactures.” It provided, in Albemarle Street, a spacious auditorium where John Dalton and Sir Humphry Davy gave lectures in chemistry, Thomas Young on the nature and propagation of light, Coleridge on literature, Sir Edwin Landseer on art… More specific were the Linnaean Society, incorporated in 1802 for botany, the Geographical Society (1807), and soon thereafter societies for zoology, horticulture, animal chemistry, and astronomy. Manchester and Birmingham, happy to apply science to their industries, established their own “philosophical” societies, and Bristol set up a “Pneumatic Institute” for the study of gases. Academies were formed to expound science to general audiences; to one of these Michael Faraday, aged twenty-five (1816), gave a course of lectures that shared for half a century in stimulating electrical research. Generally, in scientific education, the business community was ahead of the universities, and many epochal advances in science were made by independent individuals self-supported or financed by friends.
Surrendering mathematics to the French, British science concentrated on astronomy, geology, geography, physics, and chemistry. Astronomy was placed under royal protection and subsidies, as vital to navigation and control of the seas. Greenwich Observatory, with the finest equipment that the money of Parliament could buy, was generally recognized as at the top of its class. James Hutton, two years before his death, published in 1795 Theory of the Earth, a classic in geology: it summarized our planet’s public life as a uniform cyclical process by which rains erode the surface of the land, rivers rise with erosions or bear them to the sea, the waters and moisture of the earth evaporate into clouds, these condense into rain… At the other end of this age (1815) William Smith—nicknamed “Strata Smith”—won fame with the fifteen immense sheets of his Geological Map of England and Wales. They showed that strata regularly slant eastward in a slight ascending grade until they end at the earth’s surface; and they advanced pal
eontology by identifying strata according to their organic deposits. For revealing such subterranean secrets the British government, in 1831, awarded him a life annuity of £100. He died in 1839.
British navigators continued to explain the nooks and crannies of lands and seas. In the years 1791–94 George Vancouver charted the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest of America; there he circumnavigated the enchanting island that bears his name.
II. PHYSICS: RUMFORD AND YOUNG
It is difficult to place nationally the Benjamin Thompson who was born (1753) and reared in America, knighted in England, and made Count Rumford in Bavaria, and who died in France (1814). In the War of American Independence he sided with Britain, and moved to London (1776). Sent back to serve as British secretary in the colony of Georgia, his interest overflowed from politics to science, and he made researches which won him a fellowship in the Royal Society. In 1784, with the permission of the British government, he entered the service of Bavaria under Prince Maximilian Joseph. In the next eleven years, as Bavarian minister of war and police, he reorganized the Army, improved the condition of the working class, ended mendicancy, and found time to contribute papers for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The grateful Maximilian made him (1791) a count of the Holy Roman Empire; he took for his title the name of his wife’s birthplace (now Concord) in Massachusetts. During a year in Britain (1795) he labored to better the heating and cooking arrangements of the people, with a view to reducing domestic pollution of the air. After another year of service in Bavaria, he returned to England, and, with Sir Joseph Banks, established the Royal Institution. He founded—and was the first to receive—the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. He provided funds for the award of a similar medal by academies of arts and sciences in Bavaria and America, and for the Rumford professorship in Harvard University. After the death of his wife he moved to Paris (1802), took a house in Auteuil, married the widow of Lavoisier, and remained in France despite the renewal of war with England. Active to the end, he labored, in his final year, to feed with “Rumford soup” the French populace nearing destitution as Napoleon, taking all available sons, marched to his doom.
Rumford’s contributions to science were too varied and incidental to be spectacular, but, taken altogether, they formed a remarkable counterpoint to a busy administrative life. While watching the boring of cannon in Munich he was struck by the heat which the operation produced. To measure this he arranged to have a solid metal cylinder rotate with its head against a steel borer, all in a watertight box containing eighteen and three-quarter pounds of water. In two and three-quarter hours the temperature of the water rose from 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 212 degrees—the boiling point. “It would be difficult,” Rumford later recalled, “to describe the astonishment expressed in the countenances of the bystanders on seeing so large a quantity of water heated, and actually made to boil, without any fire.”1 This experiment proved that heat was not a substance but a mode of molecular motion roughly proportioned in degree to the amount of work done to produce it. This belief had been held long before, but Rumford’s device provided its first experimental proof, and a method of measuring the mechanical equivalent of heat—i.e., the amount of work required to heat one pound of water one degree.
Thomas Young was almost as “undulant and diverse” as Rumford and Montaigne. Born (1773) of Quaker parentage in Somerset, he began with religion, and then passed, with undiminished devotion, to science. At the age of four, we are assured, he had read the Bible through twice, and at fourteen he could write in fourteen languages.2 At twenty-one he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; at twenty-six he was an established physician in London; at twenty-eight he was teaching physics in the Royal Institution; and in 1801 he began there the experiments that confirmed and developed Huyghens’ conception of light as undulations of a hypothetical ether. After much debate this view generally—not universally—displaced Newton’s theory of light as the emanation of material corpuscles. Young also offered the hypothesis, later developed by Helmholtz, that the perception of color depends upon the presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibers, respectively responsive to red, violet, and green. For good measure he gave the first descriptions of astigmatism, blood pressure, capillary attraction, and tides, and shared actively (1814) in the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone. He was, said a learned historian of medicine, “the most highly educated physician of his time,” and, added Helmholtz, “one of the most clear-sighted men who ever lived.”3
III. CHEMISTRY: DALTON AND DAVY
In that same decade, and also at the Royal Institution, John Dalton revolutionized chemistry with his atomic theory (1804). Son of a Quaker weaver, he was born (1766) at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, at the northern end of that misty magnificent Lake District which was soon to harbor Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Later, writing in the third person, he summarized his early career in a bald chronology that does not quite hide the hot ambition that burns a path to accomplishment:
The writer of this… attended the village school… till 11 years of age, at which period he had gone through a course of Mensuration, Surveying, Navigation, etc.; began about 12 to teach the village school;… was occasionally employed in husbandry for a year or more; removed to Kendal at 15 years of age as assistant in a boarding school, remained in that capacity for 3 or 4 years, then undertook the same school as a principal, and continued for 8 years, and while at Kendal employed his leisure in studying Latin, Greek, French, and the Mathematics with Natural Philosophy, removed thence to Manchester in 1793 as Tutor in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the New College.4
Whenever time and funds permitted he carried on observations and experiments, despite color blindness and crude instruments, many of them made by himself. Amid his many interests he found time to keep a meteorological record from his twenty-first year to a day before his death.5 His vacations were usually spent foraging for facts in those same mountains where Wordsworth would roam a few years later; however, while Wordsworth was looking and listening for God, Dalton was, for example, measuring atmospheric conditions at different altitudes—much as Pascal had done a century and a half before.
In his experiments he accepted the theory of Leucippus (c. 450 B.C.) and Democritus (c. 400 B.C.) that all matter consists of indivisible atoms; and he proceeded on the assumption of Robert Boyle (1627–91) that all atoms belong to one or another of certain ultimate indecomposable elements—hydrogen, oxygen, calcium… In A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808) Dalton argued that the weight of any atom of an element, as compared with any atom of another element, must be the same as the weight of a mass of the first element as compared with an equal mass of the other. Taking the weight of a hydrogen atom as one, Dalton, after many experiments and calculations, ranged each of the other elements by the relative weight of any one of its atoms with an atom of hydrogen; and so he drew up, for the thirty elements known to him, a table of their atomic weights. In 1967 chemists recognized ninety-six elements. Dalton’s conclusions had to be corrected by later research, but they—and his complex “law of multiple proportions” in all combinations of elements—proved of immense help in the progress of the science in the nineteenth century.
More varied and exciting were the life, education, and discoveries of Sir Humphry Davy. Born in Penzance (1778) of a well-to-do middle-class family, he received a good education, and supplemented it with expeditions that combined geology, fishing, sketching, and poetry. His happy nature won him a miscellany of friends, from Coleridge, Southey, and Dr. Peter Roget—the ingenious and indefatigable compiler of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852)—to Napoleon. Another friend allowed him free use of a chemical laboratory, whose bubbling retorts charmed Davy into dedication. He organized his own laboratory, sampled diverse gases by inhaling them, persuaded Coleridge and Southey to join his inhaling squad, and almost killed himself by breathing water gas, a powerful poison.
At the age of twenty-two
he published an account of his experiments as Researches Chemical and Philosophical (1800). Invited to London by Count Rumford and Joseph Banks, he gave lectures and demonstrations on the wonders of the storage battery (Volta’s “pile”), bringing new fame to the Royal Institution. Using a battery of 250 pairs of metal plates as an agent of electrolysis, he decomposed various substances into their elements; so he discovered and isolated sodium and potassium; soon he went on to isolate barium, boron, strontium, calcium, and magnesium, and add them to the list of elements. His achievements established electrochemistry as a science endless in its theoretical and practical possibilities. The news of his work reached Napoleon, who sent him in 1806, across the frontiers of war, a prize awarded by the Institut National. Berthollet in 1786 had explained to James Watt the bleaching power of chlorine; England had been slow to use the suggestion; Davy renewed it effectively. In him science and industry developed that mutual stimulation which was to play a leading role in the economic transformation of Great Britain.