The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #296 April 2013

by Kevin J Maroney

  Paradoxical as it may seem, that tendency coexists with a strong desire on the part of scholars to pose as hard-headed skeptics, partly out of sincerity but partly because of the necessity to establish and conserve their own rhetorical effect. Scholars are inherently far more likely to fall prey to their own patter than inventors of romance; indeed, it is a rare scholar who does not. There is no fantasy that tries harder to pretend to be fact than scholarly fantasy.

  There is too much that is obviously fantastic in the substance of medieval romance for it ever to have been taken at face value by scholars, but that never prevented scholars from looking for “the truth behind the fiction.” In the British context, that has included searching for the “real” King Arthur and the “real” Merlin behind the myths—or, at least, for “authentic” Celtic myths and legends underlying the supposedly bastardized Norman inventions.

  Such are the fashions of scholarship that quests for those particular unholy grails were largely conducted in terms of arguments from authority for centuries after the initial documentation had taken place. As the perceived weight of arguments from authority began to decline by comparison with the perceived force of arguments based on objective evidence—scientific arguments—thus bringing about “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment,” the manner in which scholars interested in romance conducted their research, interpreted their findings, and reported their conclusions inevitably shifted.

  Some scholars of the Enlightenment took up the position that, because there was not an atom of worthwhile objective evidence, the rational conclusion was that the substance of romance was unworthy of scholarly attention. But some did not, preferring to recruit scientific—or, at least, seemingly scientific—methods and theories to the analysis of their data, in the hope of teasing out whatever precious grains of insight were lurking within it, whether ethnographic, psychological, or linguistic in character.

  The latter tendency became intricately involved with a spectacular resurgence in the latter part of the eighteenth century of a new kind of self-declared and unrepentant Romanticism, which deliberately took up an ideological position opposed to “Classicism” in art and scholarship alike. It was doubtless the awareness of the existence and ambition of that movement that prompted James Ibbetson to refer in his footnote to scholarship willing to entertain the thesis that British law had Trojan foundations not simply as “romance” but as “scientific romance.” Had he had the concept of “pseudoscience” available in his vocabulary, he might have used that instead, but in 1780, science was not sufficiently advanced for its practitioners to be able to detach its reality from its appearance in any convincing manner. At any rate, Ibbetson was not simply dismissing the idea of Brutus the Trojan lawgiver as a fantasy but as a scholarly fantasy—which he doubtless considered, as a hard-headed lawyer, to be a uniquely silly kind of fantasy.

  Just as the meaning of the word “romance” had, the meaning of the word “science” had shifted over time. The concept moved from being generally synonymous with “knowledge” to being associated with a particular theory of knowledge: the notion that only convictions based on rigorous empirical observation and tested, if possible, by experimental proof could qualify as reliable knowledge rather than mere opinion.

  It may be worth noting here that one important new concept that was coming into prominence at the end of the eighteenth century was that of the “scientist.” The word was not formally coined until the 1830s by William Whewell while he was laying the groundwork for his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), but Whewell was right to observe that it was a term whose time had come. There was already an abundance of people to whom it could and ought to be fitted: people who were making a profession, a career, and a vocation out of the pursuit of new truths by means of the scientific method of enquiry. Key exemplars of that phenomenon were provided in Britain by the members of Erasmus Darwin’s Lunar Society—including Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton—who were heavily committed to both the vocational practice of science and to its popularization via education.

  Although it might seem that there was a fundamental opposition between the interests of that profession on the one hand and the resurgence of a new Romantic movement in literature and art on the other, sufficient to make the concept of “scientific romance” intrinsically oxymoronic, the matter was not so simple. In the same way that literature and art seemed to some observers to have become hidebound and stultified by the presumptions of “Classicism,” so it seemed that philosophy in general and “natural philosophy” in particular were also being held back in their progress by ancient arguments whose weight—ultimately based on Classical authority—no longer ought to be credited. There was a revolutionary spirit extending across all the fields of human endeavor, crying out for a sweeping transformation of the so-called Age of Enlightenment and establishing a kinship between all intellectual sorts of rebels against perceived tradition, reflected not merely in communication and friendship but in a certain overlap of endeavor.

  Beginning in Germany and spreading to France and thus being considered doubly foreign by its opponents when it began to become manifest in England, the “Romantic Movement” produced philosophers interested in art and artists interested in philosophy, encouraging philosophers to use literary methods of analysis and artists to adopt and explore philosophical themes. While artists became interested in the brutal and the reckless—“the sublime” as well as or even rather than “the beautiful”—and hence in the archaic and the supernatural, scholars affiliated to the cause began to take a renewed interest in folklore in terms of its connections with linguistics and national consciousness. That helped to make the artists more attentive to the philosophical connotations of their materials and encouraged scholars to dabble in the production of Romantic fiction.

  Because of this tendency, a number of writers did indeed begin to produce works—sometimes influential and popular works—that might warrant retrospective description and consideration as “scientific romances,” many of which rejoiced in their own seemingly chimerical character. Erasmus Darwin produced two key examples in The Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Such works began to appear with increasing frequency in the eighteenth century in Germany and France and began to appear in Britain in modest profusion in the early nineteenth century.

  The phrase “scientific romance” crops up infrequently but repeatedly in documents indexed by the Hathi Trust and Google Books published throughout the first six decades of the nineteenth century, used in the same way that Ibbetson had used it—which is to say, deploring any tendency of scientists to make fanciful claims and any tendency on the part of people making fanciful claims to sanctify them as “scientific.” The phrase seems to have been particularly common, as might be expected, in works dealing with the perceived ideological conflict between science and religion, religion’s defenders routinely wanting to write off scientific ideas that challenged dogmatic belief as illegitimate “romances.”

  There are, however, two significant British literary works published early in the century that employ the term in their supplementary material in a revealing manner, given their fictional contents, and which therefore warrant more detailed consideration: the satirical novel Flim-Flams! Or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and the Amours of my Aunt, first published in 1805 under the by-line “Messieurs Tag, Rag and Bobtail,” written by Isaac D’Israeli, and a story series by the Irish Catholic writer Gerald Griffin published in volumes with various different titles, including The Christian Physiologist (1830) and The Offering of Friendship (1854).

  Although Isaac D’Israeli was widely read in philosophy, including natural philosophy, it was literature that was his primary interest, and the developments of modern science lay somewhat beyond his expertise. Although that did not stop him from poking fun at science, he does appear to have been a trifle tentative in his approach and a trifle embarrassed by his achievement. When Benjamin Disraeli wrote a mem
oir of his father’s life for inclusion in later editions of The Curiosities of Literature, he does not even mention his father’s satirical novel, which was not only issued under a preposterous pseudonym but was revised in between its two editions of 1805 and 1806, the second being retitled Flim-Flams! or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and His Friends.

  The phrase “scientific romance” crops up in the elaborate introductory material to the text when the author introduces the protagonist, sarcastically, as “the Sir Charles Grandison, or the Amadis de Gaul of the world of scientific romance” (D’Israeli vol. 1, 2). Sir Charles Grandison is the eponymous hero of Samuel Richardson’s 1753 response to Henry Fielding’s parodies of his previous novels, and was designed as a paragon of virtue, although D’Israeli, who appreciated Fielding far more than Richardson did, probably thought him sufficiently absurd as to need no further parody. Amadis de Gaul is the hero of the archetype of the sixteenth-century Iberian romances that took over and revitalized the defunct tradition of French romance and which enjoyed a tremendous vogue before being outclassed and outshone, in the eyes of subsequent commentators by Miguel de Cervantes’s devastating parody of their conventions and artifices, Don Quixote (1607). Amadis of Gaul had been translated into English in 1803 by Robert Southey; D’Israeli presumably thought that it had arrived in nineteenth-century England also without any need of further parody, given that Don Quixote was already well-known there.

  D’Israeli uses the phrase “scientific romance” in much the same way as James Ibbetson, and the purpose of the text’s account of the fictitious uncle’s eccentricities is to poke fun at many ideas that D’Israeli had found in contemporary scientific texts in the course of his reading. The uncle is a chemist whose reputation is said to rest on his enormous patience in repeating experiments hundreds of times and always getting the same result. He is said to have “a particular genius [for the] anti-sublime in science,” that being “the science of turning the big into the little” (vol. 1, 74).

  In the course of the narrative, which mostly deals with the uncle’s relationships with other members of a scientific club known as the Constellation or the Pleiades—reflective of the Lunar Society—scathing accounts are offered of craniognomy (what later became known as phrenology), the meteorology of Luke Howard, geological accounts of the shaping of the Earth by volcanic or hydrologic action, recent conflicting accounts of the properties of nitrous oxide—“philosophical brandy”—and so on, in company with abusive dismissals of theorists in general as builders of “magicians’ bridges” that only they can cross. Mockery is also directed at female scientists in the account of the protagonist’s wooing of and marriage to a female astronomer who subsequently cuckolds him. The most elaborate and extensive satirical assault is, however, on proto-evolutionism, in the course of which the novel’s footnotes—which are even more elaborate than those attached to the poem in Darwin’s The Temple of Nature—cite Benoît de Maillet, Lord Monboddo, and Delisle de Sales, as well as Darwin himself.

  In the course of the serial demolition carried out by Flim-Flams!, D’Israeli offers a much fuller account of the range of varieties of “scientific romance” than can be found elsewhere in the period, but there was probably no one else in England during the period who read as voluminously and as omnivorously as D’Israeli, at least with such a caustic eye. Because he is attempting to emphasize the absurdities of “scientific romance,” D’Israeli is reluctant to indulge in it himself, but he simply cannot resist the temptation to indulge in a little philosophical speculation of his own. In comparison with the substance of generic scientific romance, the most interesting passage in the story is one in which the uncle actually encounters a homunculus: a “miserable fruit of experimental philosophy” (vol. 3, 11) grown artificially from a microscopic seed, who has recapitulated in his development the kind of evolutionary sequence described by Darwin in the embryological development and subsequent growth of a single individual. The homunculus constitutes an anticipatory literalization of what subsequently came to be known as Haeckel’s Law: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Alas, the finished homunculus is a dwarf, stigmatized by a tail, like the primitive humans envisaged by Lord Monboddo. Partly in consequence, he enjoys no Darwinian “happiness of life” but is a wretched individual regretful of his own perverse existence.

  The elaborate introductory material to Flim-Flams! begins with a series of fictitious “anticipatory reviews,” including one from the Anti-Jacobin, a Tory periodical set up by George Canning and others to fight back against the satirical radical press which attacked both “Jacobin poetry” (especially Southey and Coleridge) and “Jacobin science” (especially Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley). The “review” in question does not express any hostility to the book’s assaults on science but does dismiss the entire exercise as trivial and protests its deceptiveness, evidently but absurdly failing to appreciate its sarcasm—and, indeed, D’Israeli had no real reason to think that the editors of the Anti-Jacobin would approve of him. They had no way to know, of course, that he was the father of a future Tory prime minister, but even if they had been able to know that, it is by no means obvious that Canning would have approved of Benjamin Disraeli in that capacity, all the more so because the younger Disraeli became a novelist and satirist himself, by no means reluctant to use Romantic methods and themes.

  Isaac D’Israeli would surely have been regarded from the Anti-Jacobin viewpoint as warranting a certain amount of guilt by association with the Romantic movement despite having no hint of the “Jacobin” about his politics. He was personally acquainted with several Romantic poets and at least one of Britain’s “Jacobin scientists” (Humphry Davy). One of the longer journalistic essays collected in Curiosities of Literature praises “Romances” as a form of artistic endeavor and contrasts modern exemplars with “Novels” in a fashion that is not entirely to the advantage of the latter.

  D’Israeli had practiced what he preached in this regard, publishing a collection of his own Romances (1799), which was perhaps enough in itself to identify him as a significant contributor to the British Romantic movement. It would have been surprising, therefore, if he had not had a little sympathy for “scientific romance,” and Flim-Flams! is, in fact, a very mild satire which often betrays an obvious fascination with the ideas that the author cannot quite bring himself to take seriously—and which Tag, Rag, and Bobtail do, after all, attribute to an uncle for whom they clearly have a family affection in spite of his eccentricities.

  That kind of wry sympathy was not a problem for the author of the other early literary work indexed by the Hathi Trust that embraced the term “scientific romance”: the Irish Catholic writer Gerald Griffin. Griffin’s dogmatically based opposition to “scientific romance” was far more earnest. His “Tales Illustrative of the Five Senses,” first appeared in the Christian Apologist in 1830. The series was evidently conceived as an ideological reply to attempts by proto-psychologists to co-opt the human soul into a mere mechanical adjunct of the senses. Although Griffin makes no specific reference to Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794) or The Temple of Nature, the theses set out in those two books are, at the very least, significant specimens of the position that Griffin attacks; his method is only dissimilar in that he uses prose fiction in preference to poetry to illustrate his own ideas, and places his nonfictional commentaries before the stories rather than alongside or after them.

  Griffin’s specific use of the term “scientific romance” is to declare, pompously, and rather optimistically, that “the day of scientific romance is past” (149). However, as with “The Loves of the Triangles” (the Anti-Jacobin’s famous parody of Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of the Plants”) and D’Israeli’s satire, the narrative method of Griffin’s opposition becomes itself a wry foreshadowing of what would later become the literary genre of “scientific romance.”

  The first section of the text begins with an account of the anatomy of the eye and the physiology of sight as known at the time and then procee
ds to an account of “the uses and government of sight” crediting it as the principal agent of the imagination. Griffin compliments the sense of sight on permitting literature and then invites the reader who wants to “appreciate the excellence of this wonderful organ” simply to look up at the night sky and remember the true size, distance and number of the stars, concluding that it is hardly possible after having done so to imagine an impious astronomer or anatomist. The story illustrating the sense in question is “The Kelp-Gatherer,” a brief, sentimental account of the restoration of a blind mother’s sight by surgery on her cataracts.

  In the same way, the second story features the restoration of a young deaf-mute’s hearing and voice. The third part features “the sense of feeling” and the illustrative story, “The Voluptuary Cured” maintains the pattern of sensation lost and found. The author has little to say about the physiology of smell, and “The Self-Consumed” is a very peculiar illustration thereof, being a strange tale whose protagonist encounters a victim of “lycanthropia”—the insanity of believing oneself to be a werewolf—apparently induced by having witnessed a case of spontaneous human combustion in stressful circumstances. The latter phenomenon is explained hypothetically in a footnote by the highly implausible suggestion that it might result from bathing with the aid of ill-chosen cosmetics. Consideration of the sense of taste inevitably brings the censorious Griffin back to consideration of the vices of “voluptuaries,” but “The Selfish Crotarie” (a crotarie is a harper) is a historical tale of the ancient Irish fighting against Danish colonists, the relevance of which is distinctly dubious.

  The frame-text goes on, however, to discuss the intellect—consciousness and its attributes—in order to conclude that truth must ultimately be obtained by something beyond the scope of the five senses combined with the application of reason. The narrative voice complains about those who claim otherwise, naming no scientists but only “infidel poets” whom he affects to pity: Shelley and Byron. In this section too there is an exemplary tale, and the author abandons naturalism altogether to turn to fantastic allegory in a manner reminiscent of Erasmus Darwin, although inclining toward a very different moral.