The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Kiss me Pappina, kiss me again!

  Thy kisses will become a gage:

  They waken in my heart a hope

  Which was not of my early age …

  No other poem that Davy had ever written has this simple, erotic directness. It is all the more touching, perhaps, because of its clumsy, childlike syntax. It is an open appeal for tenderness and love. Yet Davy does not use the word ‘love’. Instead he repeats the word ‘hope’. In the next stanza he feels the hope ‘a blessed father feels’, the hope ‘a much-loved brother knows’, a hope that ‘heaven reveals’. The little lyric continues:

  But when thy angel form I see

  And gaze upon that bright blue eye

  And watch thy calm [unclouded] smile

  And know thy virgin purity

  Thy lips’ warm pressure wakes no Thought

  Unworthy of the virgin’s name

  But gives me hopes allied to heaven

  Which will preserve thy earthly frame …

  The remaining five lines are largely deleted or corrected, though the meaning is clear. ‘And in thy kiss … And in thy kiss I seem to share … And oft I shed a tear … It is a tear of happiness … Thy innocence I seem to share … And sure I share thy happiness.’

  The second poem consists of only five lines, mostly crossed out and rewritten, and crossed out again. It is titled simply ‘To the Same’. It insists again on the purity of his feelings, and the theme is the ‘Vestal fire’ in Josephine’s eye, a calm, innocent ‘sacred light’ which ‘never glitters through a tear’. It is the ‘source and hope of heavenly bliss’. The last line has only one word: the rhyme for ‘bliss’ — ‘kiss’. Here the draft of the second lyric breaks off. Davy wrote nothing further about Pappina in his notebooks of 1828. Though, judging by his letters, he seems never to have stopped thinking about her, or hoping to get back to Illyria.113

  John Davy, who must have seen both poems subsequently, chose never to publish them. They are after all very slight, unpolished and unfinished. They certainly do not suggest any grand passion. But they do suggest Davy’s longing for tenderness, and a sweet reciprocation on Josephine’s part; and that can take many forms. In Regency slang the name ‘Pappina’ would refer admiringly to her breasts. Perhaps the haunting phrase about Davy’s feeling for her, ‘which was not of my early age’, also suggests something — a desire, a fulfilment — which had been denied him ever since his Cornish childhood.

  In fact it is possible that Davy briefly set up house with Josephine in that last summer. Although to Jane he always speaks of staying at the Laibach inn, he did in reality rent a private lodge at a little village just outside the town, as local enquiries more than a century later revealed: ‘In Podkoren, on the Wurzen Pass, and just into Slovenia, a house that he rented for fishing bears a blue plaque in English and Slovenian. The village is very small; the house is one of the best in it, but it is by no means large — rather like what a country doctor near Penzance might have lived in. In front are the fields, and behind the beech woods and streams where he must have walked. Nearby is the Sava, or Save River, where he loved to fish. The view of the Julian Alps must be still much as he saw it.’114

  Davy never forgot the uplifting view of those life-giving Alps, which brought back so many memories. ‘They surround the village on all sides, and rise with their breast of snow and crests of pointed rock into the middle of the sky. The source of the Save is a clear blue lake surrounded by woods, and the meadows are as green as those of Italy in April, or of England in May.’115

  8

  Meanwhile, Salmonia was published in England in 1828, and favourably reviewed by Walter Scott in the Quarterly, thanks to Lady Davy pulling strings with her cousin. With considerable insight, she understood how much a little literary glory would soothe Davy at this juncture. Indeed, greatly encouraged, he began working on a second expanded edition. He now also embarked on a last work, which was intended as a summation of a lifetime’s thoughts and beliefs, Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher. He planned to dedicate it not to any of his grand aristocratic friends or patrons, but to his old confidant from the West Country days, Tom Poole. To Poole he confided his hopes for the book: ‘I write and philosophize a good deal, and have nearly finished a work with a higher aim than [Salmonia] … which I shall dedicate to you. It contains the essence of my philosophical opinions, and some of my poetical reveries. It is like the Salmonia, an amusement of my sickness; but paulo majora canamus.♣ I sometimes think of the lines of Waller, and seem to feel their truth –

  ‘“The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,

  Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made”’116

  The Consolations is one of the most extraordinary prose books of the late Romantic period. Its title links it to the tradition of Boethius’ medieval Consolation, a form of renouncing the world before death. But Davy mixes philosophy and autobiography with highly original sections of science fiction, some visionary travel writing, various theories of history, race and society, and an important apologia for science. It also contains unexpected speculations about the nature of evolution, and the future of the human species.

  The Consolations is divided into six Dialogues, with the fragment of a seventh, never completed; but the rather stilted exchanges of Salmonia are greatly improved upon. Though still using various semi-fictionalised figures, the whole book is intensely confessional. The early chapters are inspired by memories of Davy’s encounters and reflections during his various visits to Rome, including the Coliseum by moonlight, to Naples and the top of Vesuvius, and to the ruins of Paestum, especially during the two-year tour of 1818-20. The later chapters, which become steadily more intimate, draw on the two long summers spent in Austria and Illyria in 1827-28. The book goes far beyond a travelogue. There is a sense of open, passionate debate of ideas, and the necessity of unveiling the truth, whether in science or religion.

  Davy never forgot that he was dying, and that his time had almost run out. He wrote unguardedly to Jane that he would therefore make it his ‘best work’, and would fearlessly reveal truths vital to the ‘moral and intellectual world’ which could never be recovered if lost by his death: ‘I may be mistaken on this point, yet it is the conviction of a man perfectly sane in all the intellectual faculties, and looking into futurity with prophetic aspirations, belonging to the last moments of existence.’117 The deliberate testamentary phrasing was no coincidence. But behind it lay the poignant anxiety that heavy opium-dosing might have distorted his ‘intellectual faculties’ and his reason.118

  The book includes much strange, visionary material and imaginary voyaging. One chapter starts on planet earth and ends on Saturn. An early draft suggests that Davy wished to establish a spiritual Guide, a beautiful woman who would lead him (as Beatrice led Dante, perhaps) through all his scientific writings and reflections. In the final text he reduced her to a disembodied voice, though she still seems feminine: ‘A low but extremely distinct and sweet voice, which at first makes musical sounds, like those of a harp.’119

  This trope of the beautiful female guide had appeared in several of Davy’s poems of the 1820s, as it had in Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ (1821). It is again curious that Shelley, quartered in Rome in the spring of 1819, had also written a visionary story set in the Coliseum by moonlight. But then, Davy and Shelley were both part of a whole generation of exiled Romantic wanderers in Italy, looking for health, love and imaginative inspiration — including Goethe, Humboldt, Lord Byron, Trelawny, Mary Shelley, Walter Savage Landor and John Keats.

  Dialogue I, subtitled ‘The Vision’, begins with Davy’s moonlit dream in the Coliseum at Rome. Left alone by two companions amidst the ruins, he finds himself addressed by an invisible presence, ‘which I shall call that of Genius’. Davy is told a sort of scientific creation myth, a Promethean version of man’s growing material dominion over the earth. From his primitive tribal beginnings, art and technology lifts man above the wild animals
, until such global developments as chemistry, engineering, medicine and the ‘Faustian’ invention of the printing press bring an advanced Western civilisation.120

  This account by Genius includes some racial theory about the ‘superiority of the Caucasian stock’ of a type familiar to students of Blumenbach. But Genius also makes an uneasy prophecy of colonial persecutions, of the kind that Banks would have recognised. ‘The negro race has always been driven before the conquerors of the world; and the red men, the aborigines of America, are constantly diminishing in number, and it is probable that in a few centuries their pure blood will be entirely extinct.’121

  These increasingly unsettling visions culminate in a visit to a society of extraterrestrial beings on Saturn and Jupiter, by means of a shuttle network of comets. This device of comet-hopping appears in much earlier speculative literature such as Voltaire’s story ‘Micromégas’ (‘The Tiny Huge’, 1752), and it is also reminiscent of Caroline Herschel’s humorous fantasy of comet-travelling. Davy sees the moon and the stars go by ‘as if it were in my power to touch them with my hand … it seemed as if I were on the verge of the solar system’. The double ring of Saturn appears to him as ‘I have heard Herschel often express a wish he could see it’.122

  On Saturn the super-intelligent inhabitants are said to include ‘the monad or spirit of Newton … now in a higher and better state of planetary existence, drinking intellectual light from a purer source and approaching nearer to the infinite and divine Mind’. These intelligences appear to float around Davy rather like enormous angelic seahorses, with wings made of ‘extremely thin membranes … varied and beautiful … azure and blue’. They gently explain that the entire solar system, including Mars and Venus, is full of life forms, and these do not stop at Uranus. After physical death, human beings are transported into ‘higher or lower’ planetary forms, depending on their ‘love of knowledge or intellectual power’.123 Davy, like the reader, is left stunned and disturbed by these revelations.124

  The second Dialogue takes place one evening on the summit of Vesuvius. It moves into a lively discussion of the variety of religious experience on earth, comparing Christian, Jewish and Islamic beliefs. Older theologies are considered as incomparably cruel. ‘To the Supreme Intelligence, the death of a million of human beings, is the mere circumstance of so many spiritual essences changing their habitations, and is analogous to the myriad millions of larvae that leave their coats and shells behind them, and rise into the atmosphere, as flies on a summer day.’125

  But Davy’s own beliefs are more optimistic, and like Naturphilosophie tend to suggest some form of spiritual evolution taking place on earth. They compare human destiny to that of ‘a migratory bird’ looking by instinct for a higher existence. The outlook is hopeful, and mankind is young. ‘We are sure from geological facts, as well as from sacred history, that man is a recent animal on the globe.’126

  Davy’s ‘visionary maiden’ recurs in the second Dialogue, where one character (Philalethes), who is evidently Davy, claims to have first seen her in his feverish dreams two decades before, but denies that she was originally based on any actual woman. Nonetheless, her Illyrian reappearance is clearly based on Josephine Dettela. The others gently tease Philalethes about this angelic apparition, but he insists on her physical reality and importance to him.

  ‘All my feelings and all my conversations with this visionary maiden were of an intellectual and refined nature.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose, as long as you were ill.’

  ‘I will not allow you to treat me with ridicule … to her kindness and care I believe I owe what remains to me of existence … Though my health continued weak, life began to possess charms for me which I thought were for ever gone; and I could not help identifying the living angel with the vision which appeared as my guardian genius during the illness of my youth.’

  ‘I dare say any other handsome young female, who had been your nurse in your last illness, would have coincided with your remembrance of the vision, even though her eyes had been hazel and her hair flaxen …’127

  But, sadly perhaps, no further intimacies appear in this Dialogue.

  The third Dialogue takes place during a dawn visit to the temples of Paestum, and introduces a new figure called The Unknown, who is discovered wandering through the ruins, clad in rough travelling clothes, with a pilgrim’s hat and staff, and a vial of medical chlorine (Davy’s discovery) round his neck to guard against marsh fever. Part man of science and part mystic, The Unknown is yet another projection of Davy’s secret myth of himself, now the pilgrim scientist on his last journey.

  Much of this Dialogue is based on geology and ideas of the earth’s evolution. It is notable that while Davy revels in the idea of Herschel’s ‘deep space’, he finds it difficult to accept the concept of ‘deep time’ that had been argued by Hutton, and would soon be developed by Charles Lyell. Even the sceptical figure (Onuphrio) finds it hard to accept the ‘absurd, vague, atheistical doctrine’ of evolution, though he describes it surprisingly succinctly. ‘That the fish has in millions of generations ripened into the quadruped, and the quadruped into man; and that the system of life by its own inherent powers has fitted itself to the physical changes in the system of the universe.’128

  The talk then drifts intriguingly into a discussion of ghosts, visions and nightmares. Some of these seem to reflect the horrors of Davy’s own illness, such as the dream of a group of murderous robbers breaking silently into his bedroom, and one of them ‘actually putting his hand before my mouth to ascertain if I was sleeping naturally’.129 John Davy would later say that one of his brother’s most painful and irrational obsessions in these last months was the fear of being buried alive.

  The Unknown refers to dreams which bring back the events of a whole life, such as that of Brutus in his tent before battle. ‘I cited the similar vision, recorded of Dion before his death by Plutarch, of a gigantic female, one of the fates or furies, who was supposed to have been seen by him when reposing in the portico of his palace. I referred likewise to my own vision of the beautiful female, the guardian angel of my recovery, who always seemed to be present at my bedside.’130 These are the reflections of a haunted man, whose belief in his own powers of reason is increasingly under siege.

  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. ‘I 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 Chemic
al 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