The Age of Wonder

  Here Thelwall raised the Vitalist question which haunted a whole generation of Romantic writers. ‘What is this something — this vivifying principle? – Is it atmospheric air itself? Certainly not … It has been proved by experiment, that in the arteries of the living body there is no air. Something, however, it must be, that is contained in the atmosphere, and something of a powerful and exquisitely subtle nature.’27

  Attempts to define this exquisite but powerful ‘something’ deeply concerned the young poets Thelwall came to meet after his release from prison, when he fled with his wife to the West Country in 1797. But for them it still seemed more a psychological than a physiological question. Coleridge in his conversation poems was exploring the metaphysical notion of a ‘one Life’ that unified all living forms; while Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ wrote tentatively and beautifully of ‘a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’. Both writers, at this most radical point in their lives, were trying to avoid an explicit reference to God, while retaining their intuitions of a ‘spiritual’ power — whatever that might be — both within man and within the natural universe. It was a balancing act that, perhaps, could only be performed in poetry.

  All these Vitalist speculations were dramatically brought back to life, ten years after Thelwall’s lecture, by an astonishing and brutal series of public experiments performed in London on 17 January 1803. The perpetrator, as Banks noted grimly, was another Italian, the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna, Giovanni Aldini. Banks had received earlier reports from Charles Blagden in Paris of Aldini ‘experimenting on animals’ with voltaic batteries the previous year, but remained dubious about his authenticity. There were unconfirmed rumours of Aldini dazzling the Galvanic Society with his ‘re-animation’ exhibitions, but also of what Blagden called his ‘excessive puffings and pretensions’.28 In London, surrounded by eager publicity, Aldini attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged at Newgate.

  His demonstrations were graphically and melodramatically reported in the press: ‘On the first application of the [electrical] arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened … The conductors being applied to the ear, and to the rectum, excited muscular contractions much stronger … The arms alternately rose and fell … the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration was artificially established … A lighted candle placed before the mouth was several times extinguished … Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances, had not rendered this — inappropriate.’29

  That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist’s imagination. Later experiments involved oxen’s heads, dogs’ bodies, and another human corpse which was said to have laughed and walked. The reports eventually caused such a public outcry that the experiments were banned, and Aldini forced to leave the country in 1805.

  3

  So when Abernethy and Lawrence began to clash in 1816, it was not entirely surprising that their angry exchanges quickly revived the old Vitalism debate in renewed form. For all its misgivings, the Royal College of Surgeons must have been glad to have raised a subject which brought such publicity. The exchanges were now closely followed by such serious literary journals as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. At its base there lay a theological question: whether the ‘super-added’ force, if it existed, was the same as a spirit or soul, or some ‘intermediary’ element between body and spirit, or some form of ‘vital’ electrical fluid? By 1819, and the publication of both Abernethy’s original lectures and Lawrence’s Natural History of Man, the issues had also become heavily politicised. Here was humane, pious English science fighting against cruel, reductive, atheistical French science.

  The conservative Quarterly Review found a more personal line of attack: ‘We at the Quarterly Review, would ask what is it that Mr Lawrence, who is generally in the habit of smiling at the credulity of the world, modestly requires us all to believe? That there is no difference between a man and an oyster, other than that one possesses bodily organs more fully developed than the other! That all the eminent powers of reason, reflexion, imagination, and memory — the powers which distinguish a Milton, a Newton, and a Locke, — are merely the function of a few ounces of organized matter called the brain! … Mr Lawrence considers that man, in the most important characteristics of his nature, is nothing more than an orang-outang or an ape, with “more ample cerebral hemispheres”! … Mr Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls! … Mr Lawrence has the sublime confidence to tell us that it is only “the medullary matter of the brain” that thinks or has spiritual consciousness!’30

  As such questions caught the public imagination, they also spread among writers and artists. The influential idea that the group of writers first known as the ‘Lake Poets’ (with the later addition of the ‘Cockney School’) were particularly opposed to all scientific advance seems to have begun at precisely this time. This gradually hardened into the dogma that the ‘Romantic poets’ (as they eventually became known) were fundamentally anti-scientific. The myth can be observed forming on one signal occasion at a dinner party hosted in his north London studio in December 1817 by the painter and diarist Benjamin Hay don. This subsequently became known as the ‘Immortal Dinner’ (though it was in fact an extended, rather drunken luncheon). Indeed, it has been thought to exemplify the permanent, instinctive, deep-seated antagonism between Romantic poetry and science. But the truth seems rather different.

  The poets present included Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats (but not, significantly, Coleridge, Byron or Shelley). Its aim was to celebrate the first stage of Haydon’s enormous oil painting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, upon which he had been labouring for three years, and which would take him another three to complete. His subject was the dominion of religion over the arts and sciences. Haydon had laid his dinner table directly beneath the huge rectangular canvas. A triumphant, youthful, bearded Christ rides at evening through the ancient city of Jerusalem, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic disciples. The whole crowd sweeps downwards towards the viewer. But in one remote corner, set apart at the right of the picture, appear unmistakeable portraits of Wordsworth, Newton and Voltaire. Newton here represents analytic science, Voltaire godless French philosophical scepticism, and Wordsworth natural English piety. Haydon, perhaps provokingly, had dressed his old friend in a kind of monkish robe. There is one other striking figure just behind them. The young John Keats, his mouth wide open with a kind of shout of wonder, appears in animated profile from behind a pillar.

  During the increasingly rowdy dinner-table discussion that developed, the painting provoked a debate about the powers of Reason versus the Imagination. The destructive and reductive effects of the scientific outlook were mocked. Warming to the theme, Lamb mischievously described Newton as ‘a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle’. Keats joined in, agreeing that Newton had ‘destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’. Haydon jovially records: ‘It was impossible to resist them, and we drank “Newton’s health, and confusion to Mathematics.”’31

  Keats was wittily referring to the classic experiment in Newton’s Optics, already much criticised in an essay by Goethe, in which a shaft of sunlight was passed through a prism, and separated out into the rainbow light of the spectrum. In fact the point of the experiment was that when the separated rainbow colours were individually passed through a second prism, they did not revert to white sunlight, but remained true colours (that is, in modern terms, they remained at the same wavelength). The rainbow was not a mere scientific trick of the glass prism. It genuinely and beautifully existed in nature, through the natural prism of raindrops, although paradoxically it took a human eye to see it, and every human eye saw it diffe
rently. It seems unlikely that Keats did not know this; but perhaps he did not wish to admit (in that company) that Newton had actually increased the potential ‘poetry of the rainbow’, by showing it was not merely some supernatural sky-writing, as asserted in Genesis: ‘I do set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth.’

  This playful and eventually drunken attack on the reductive effects of science was orchestrated and eagerly recorded by Haydon in his diary. Unlike the others, he was a passionate fundamentalist Christian, and believed that most science was inevitably godless, and probably blasphemous. His view is often linked with what Wordsworth wrote in his poem ‘The Tables Turned’:

  Sweet is the lore which Nature brings:

  Our meddling intellect

  Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: –

  We murder to dissect.

  ‘Murder to dissect’ was certainly already a poets’ rallying cry. It was exactly this poem that was quoted by Southey in his 1801 letter to Coleridge about Davy’s apparent rejection of poetry. Here the attack moved from physics to medicine. Yet there was evidently much popular misunderstanding of what anatomical ‘dissection’ actually involved, equating it more with Aldini than with Hunter. Although it necessarily began with the opening up of a corpse (an act still surrounded by many unconscious taboos), it was not in fact mainly a procedure of ‘cutting up’ with scalpels. The important instruments were forceps, rounded metal probes, and the surgeon’s own fingers. The essential process was one of separating out tissue and organs, and laying bare the various independent systems, such as the heart, the lactating breast, or the reproductive system, for meticulous study. These were often the object of the most exquisitely refined and delicate anatomical drawings (though these too could arouse horror).

  Yet the act of dissection could also be seen as one of profound attention and reverence for nature. This is how John Abernethy described his teacher John Hunter at work: ‘He would stand for hours motionless as a statue, except that with a pair of forceps in either hand he was picking asunder the connecting fibres of some structure … patient and watchful as a prophet, sure that the truth would come: it might be as in a flash, in which, as with inspiration, intellectual darkness became light.’32

  Wordsworth’s brief poem had been written nearly twenty years earlier, and does not really express his considered view of Newton, the heroic, voyaging figure of the later Prelude. If either Coleridge or Shelley had been present at the dinner (they were both in London), one imagines the conversation would have taken a rather different tack. Shelley had already baited Haydon for his ‘religious superstitions’ on an earlier occasion, remarking on ‘that most detestable religion, the Christian’, and always defended progressive science,33 while Coleridge had made his own experiments with prisms in the Lake District, and really did understand the formation of the rainbow, both poetically and scientifically. He knew it was a refraction of light through a fleeting curtain of raindrops, but also saw it was a powerful mythological symbol.

  Like one of his literary heroes, the great seventeenth-century physician and essayist Sir Thomas Browne, Coleridge did not accept any contradiction between the two modes of vision. He wrote in his Notebooks: ‘The Steadfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist. What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic Permanence amidst the rapid change of a Tempest — quietness the Daughter of Storm.’ Coleridge accepted that the rainbow was produced by refraction through the ‘hail-mist’, but also that its paradoxical effect on the observer of beautiful steadiness amidst terrifying chaos had a powerful psychological and poetic symbolism. The ‘quiet Daughter’ is perhaps a reference to Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Cordelia could even be understood as Lear’s rainbow during the storm on the wild heath, the steadfast and reassuring symbol of love seen through the prism of tears.♣

  At Highgate, Coleridge and his doctor and confidant James Gillman had decided to intervene actively in the Vitalism debate, and collaborated on a paper, ‘Notes Towards a New Theory of Life’, which tried to steer a metaphysical path between the two extreme positions. Coleridge, anxious to reconcile science with a sacred concept of life, argued that the soul existed, but had no analogy with ‘electricity’. While denying that life was purely physical organisation, he rejected the idea of some mystical life force with dry humour. ‘I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble-distilled and (as it were) super-substantiated!’34

  He also discussed the question with his learned friend J.H. Green, who was a member of the Royal College. Green’s speciality was eye diseases, and he was a Demonstrator at Guy’s Hospital while Keats was training there. It was Green who made the historic introduction between his young student and the ageing Coleridge on one of their walks across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood, ‘in the lane that winds by Lord Mansfield’s park’, in spring 1819. One of the many subjects that Keats remembered from this long, oracular perambulation — besides ‘Nightingales’ — was ‘First and Second Consciousness’.35

  Green later became Coleridge’s full-time amanuensis at Highgate, and continued adding to the ‘Theory of Life’ and discussing the implications of the Vitalism debate over several years, though nothing was ever published in his lifetime. Coleridge’s position remained that the ‘life principle’ certainly did exist, but had nothing to do with physiology. It consisted in an inherent drive towards ‘individuation’, which moved up the chain of creation, and finally manifested itself in the unique form of human ‘self-consciousness’, which included the moral conscience and the spiritual identity or ‘soul’.

  This of course was a metaphysical, not a medical explanation. It was clearly an adaptation of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But it did have the crucial effect of suggesting that the real subject of the Vitalism debate was the mysterious nature of this ‘consciousness’ itself: how it began, how it grew, to what degree it was shared with animals, and what happened to it when the body died. How exactly the physical brain itself ‘generated’ this consciousness Coleridge did not presume to say. Green pursued the problem long after Coleridge’s death, and after he became President of the Royal College of Surgeons he published some of Coleridge’s speculations as Spiritual Philosophy (1865).

  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’.36 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.’37

  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 attac
k 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’.38

  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.39

  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?