Weighing Fire

Within this enlarged perspective one is struck first by the eminence of some of the leading actors, that is to say the major poets, novelists and dramatists who prove to have had a little-known, even unsuspected, scientific side. Hardly less striking is the astonishing variety of the modes in which Science and Literature have in fact corresponded, a variety matched only by that of the personalities responsible. Whether this variance signals a lack of mutual profundity or whether it marks, to the contrary, an overarching creative fellowship of deep significance are two sides of a leading question among many that can be posed.

To attempt an exposé of this kind, even within a single literary tradition, is to run certain risks. The task becomes less daunting, however, if restricted to a particular dimension of the problem and to a manageable time-span. The dimension I shall consider comprises the histories of a subset of writers and writer-scientists of distinction who can claim to have practised, or at any rate been deeply concerned with, both Science and Literature, if not simultaneously, then at some stage in their creative lives. Such men may be rare, but their study can repay no less insight than the eminent but single-minded provide.

The present volume is the first of a projected two-part account of Literature and Science centred on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. I am well aware that, while such periodization may be conceptually and editorially convenient, it is in danger of inhibiting a global view of the subject as it evolved discontinuously, erratically, with its peculiar dynamic structured through the lives and works of individuals, the latter, it is clear, not liable to suffer birth and death at convenient points in the passage of centuries. Thus, although remaining focussed within the eighteenth century in the present volume, I shall claim licence on occasions to reach back here and there into the seventeenth and on into the nineteenth in the interests of both biography and the proper treatment of social and philosophical factors.

Thus, in terms of literary typology, I shall embrace the transition from Classical to Romantic, while featuring crucial episodes such as the foundation of the Royal Academies, the major altercations such as those of Voltaire with Descartes and Goethe with Newton, not to forget the ongoing polemic of the ‘Ancients and Moderns’ dispute in Paris and London. In the course of this, I shall seek to preserve throughout awareness of the radication of early-modern Science and strive to prevent this being overshadowed by the dramatic impertinence of a few individuals who might be said to have ‘kick-started’ what we have come to know as The Enlightenment.

It is against such strenuous interplay of iconoclasm and restraint that literature takes on an importance transcending its time-honoured role in mediating ideological change. There are, of course, larger and inseparable forces in play during such a process, but the peculiar nexus where Science and Literature meet offers a wealth of insight into that special tension which, it is not unreasonable to suggest, has led to one of the most challenging fault-lines in our cultural identity.

It is not too soon to stress the point that attitudes towards the division of intellectual labour vary considerably across the cultures of Europe, to say nothing of those more remote. We have only to savour the shades of difference between such partial equivalents as: ‘philosopher’/‘philosophe’, ‘scientist’/‘savant’, ‘Science’/‘Wissenschaft’/‘ciencia’ and so on, to see that more is involved than semantic convention. Such nuances can be useful in drawing distinction, but if not approached with care also can lead to a false heightening of national characteristics. Where a perception of ‘Science’ is not linguistically eccentric, there can still be latitude in making free with its conceptual boundaries. Santayana, as we shall see later, consistently brought ‘Science’ under the umbrella of ‘philosophy’, evoking with knowing innocence, the overtones of an earlier age. Matthew Arnold, in the face of Victorian tensions, expanded his concept of science to embrace rational theology and criticism, purchasing amity through confusion.

Even the most cursory account of the Science and Literature in Europe will show that their influence has been mutual, though by no means balanced. The Romantic Movement had profound consequences for the development of nineteenth-century German science; the Theory of Evolution sent tremors through the worlds of Literature and Philosophy in the reverse direction. Such episodes are of immense interest, but the leap from particulars to a convincing global account remains immense. Not least of the problems for any theory of the Science-Literature interaction is the need to recover a stable image of each before a realistic account of their interface can be achieved. Understandably, authors approaching from one side or the other face immense difficulties of perspective. On the one hand, it must be admitted that the disciplines of History and Philosophy of Science have shown little response to literary sensibility, at least in the English-speaking world. On the other, the feuds of ‘critical theory’ in recent decades have made it difficult to distinguish genuine illumination from what too often appears as skirmishing over territory the title to which is at the same time despised. It is hoped that the present work will do something to moderate these tensions, without doing injustice to theoretical issues in the process.

One essential for a balanced view of both worlds must surely be the renouncing of what might be called the ‘monumental’ account of scientific history, a view which, though longer-established, often seems to go hand in hand with the ‘revolutionary’ one. While working historians have long been at pains to stress the nebulous antecedence of modern science – its erratic course though stillborn and misconceived variants, the doubts and trepidations of its heroes – nevertheless we find the ‘monumental’ view subscribed to on all sides. All too often the Science of the lecture theatre leaps from one heroic focus to another as it depicts an inexorable rise towards revelation. Galileo and Newton gave the world the analytic method; Darwin brought light into the darkness of the fossil-record and the profusion of species; Faraday passed on the torch of electromagnetism to Maxwell, and Einstein gathered it to his body with an assortment of other batons proffered in the nineteenth-century relay-race.

As a result of this kind of teaching, it is a rare science student who graduates with any awareness of the tortuous evolution of ‘his’ or ‘her’ subject; fewer still, can give a sensible account of the uncertainties that still prevail. Worse than this is the feeling generated among students that there is something faintly risible about the stumbling attempts of the pioneers to arrive at what now seems blindingly obvious. While I am not setting out here to counter such simplistics head-on, it is to be hoped that some of our case-histories, situated as chance will have it in the eddies around the scientific mainstream, will play their part in undermining the ‘monumentalist’ view.

The present work is in no sense an attempt to engage in a broad literary history of Science. On the contrary, what I shall present is rather a study of particulars, focused on the shorter-term responses of a set of actors who have played notable parts in the assimilation of science to literature or, as the case may be, the moderation of science by literary ideas. Such case-histories, episodic, localized and coloured by personality as they are, offer no simple correlations, yet their combined effect can at least be seen as focusing crucial singularities in the tension that marks the interface of Science with its cultural environment.

Given the enormous explosion of activity in the last hundred years and the corresponding professionalization of Science in almost every aspect, it is difficult to resist the view that a qualitative and not simply a quantitative change has taken place in its communication with the non-scientific world. The effect of this on long-standing affinities with Literature has in turn been dramatic, to a degree it is still difficult to assess; media coverage can be as misleading as it is informative; the burgeoning of Science Fiction is in many ways a regrettable distraction. Optimistic predictions for a unified culture to be heard a century ago have not been fulfilled and seem unlikely to be in our lifetimes. The cautious moves towards balanced education urged by Victorian reformers have been honoured largely in the breach. The 1960s’ ‘Two Cultures’ debate addressed only the most obvious symptoms of this failure in a single country. Since then vague hostilities to Science on the part of the general and intellectual public have been reinforced through an impassioned coalition ranging from the retrograde exuberance of ‘New Age’ thinking, to the hygienics of ‘Critical Theory’.

At the time of writing, convincing signs of a Millennial renaissance of Scientific Humanism have yet to appear – all the more reason, it might be argued, for a reappraisal of an era when communication across such boundaries was still possible, in a climate where Science and Literature had come into their own, and sought novelty with a confidence that, on the whole, furthered curiosity and esteem over antipathy and defensiveness.

I shall take care to see that these precious examples are indeed not overwhelmed by the prodigious reputations of Voltaire and Goethe, resplendent against the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement, respectively. Having said this, an intention to start with the early eighteenth century draws us inevitably to France and the first stirrings of the Enlightenment, thence to Voltaire and his extraordinary excursions into the science of the day.

Such a choice of starting point implies a certain complicity with the view, by no means universally accepted, that science in the modern sense originated in the seventeenth century and represented a decisive break with its more remote origins. To hold that Science as we know it should have begun in a degree of cultural alienation is to reject the appealing, but ultimately questionable view that modern science is a product of the Renaissance, an era when, supposedly, the worlds of Science, Technology and Art formed a glorious Trinity within which remarkable men could exercise a breadth of talent unthinkable in any later epoch.

The Renaissance undoubtedly has enormous appeal. Since the publication of his notebooks in the 1880s, the emblem of Leonardo da Vinci has inspired, one might almost say overwhelmed, his admirers with a vision of spiritual universality almost inconceivable in our age of expertise. As an inspirational model, Leonardo may well be the outstanding example of all time, but he is hardly one we can emulate if we wish to come to terms with Science as it is, rather than some utopian might-have-been. The Renaissance as source of an almost Edenesque philosophical bounty may have its charm, but the world of the laboratory, the field-station, the theoretician’s note-pad, is not simply more humdrum than the Leonardian mind; it is differently structured and dimensioned, and makes altogether incommensurate demands.

An instructive focus, balancing to some extent the heroics of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement, can be found in the Naturalist school, most provocatively, as we shall see, in the literary theories of Émile Zola. By the mid-nineteenth century the romantic counter-revolution had run its course and a latter-day heritage of the Enlightenment had taken root in the form of Positivism, the brainchild of Auguste Comte. Positivism, though undoubtedly influential in both literary and scientific worlds, was not altogether the catalyst of literary science it is sometimes considered to be. It was in many respects a mixed inheritance. While its emphasis on scepticism recalled Descartes, its initially stern anti-metaphysics brought it closer to Voltaire; its insistence on proximate causes a decisive break with Leibniz, but in its disdain for the microscopic it leaned towards a conservatism shared with the Romantics. In the end it failed to achieve the dimension of moral fervour that characterized the Enlightenment, and would be compromised by Comte’s pseudo-religious leanings later in life.

Others, such as Flaubert, took a more quizzical view of Science, at once fascinated by the precision and elegance of scientific work, admiring of Goethe, conscious very much of the human implications of Darwinism, yet ultimately suspicious of any system which sought a privileged position in the mediation of human knowledge. The outcome in his unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet is one of the most effective satires ever on Science, all the more powerful for its restrained and yet acid tone. This did not prevent its author writing:

A comment like this from a writer of Flaubert’s discrimination would have seemed far less strange a hundred years ago than it does today. Many writers in the nineteenth century were moved to speak in this vein, and, though their remarks were frequently inconsistent, they were often equally forthright. It is a peculiarly twentieth-century inhibition that makes such commentary seem out of turn and at the same time causes working scientists to draw back from any suggestion that their work may have literary interest.

None of those just named was a Leonardo da Vinci even in the echo, and it would be perverse to measure them against his scarcely human scale. Much lamentation has been expended on the impossibility of a modern uomo universale, and this is at times coupled with the somewhat tedious regret that so-and-so of the writer’s choice was, they assert, the ‘last great polymath’.

I shall not seek to cast any of my subjects in this way, if only because I have reservations about polymathy as a sufficient condition for acting with conviction in the roles of most interest here. That Leonardo is more a state of mind and an ideal than an heroic individual is a theme that several authors have developed, most notably Paul Valéry in his Introduction à la Methode de Léonard de Vinci. We would better lament constructively the loss of that blessed state than simply throw up our hands in complicit horror at the burden of general knowledge. Leonardo’s super-human qualities are apt material for debate, yet the casual acceptance of the impossibility of a modern Renaissance-man simply on the grounds of the sheer bulk of knowledge, conceals a variety of non-sequiturs. Perhaps the most vicious of these is the assumption, tacitly approved in the discourse of high-tables and Faculty clubs, the apparatus of Cultural Foundations and, often enough in the architecture of libraries – namely that, since one cannot be the accomplished Leonardo of the twentieth century, just as little can one afford to be even as much as interested in the whole spectrum of human creativity. The results of this are everywhere to be seen in the contemporary academic world.

If this book succeeds in generating an awareness of the rich tradition of cultural interplay that once invigorated the several provinces of ideas, it will have done something to repair the misconceptions that have so damaged the appreciation of Science, and indeed Literature itself, in recent decades. Whether there is cause for optimism now that we have passed into the new millennium is a matter for personal disposition. It may be hazarded that any reconvergence of Science and the Humanities and its acceptance in the educational system will be a sluggish one, and that present signs are not encouraging. Perhaps only when Science has accommodated itself better to the everyday; when it is no longer so easy for the alternative Grubb Street to raise it as scapegoat for the latest malfeasance; when it is seen as ally rather than enemy in the rescue of the Environment; and when in more intellectual circles the ‘last post’ has finally come and gone, will a sober evaluation of its future role be possible. Until then a more modest programme seems in order, that of restoring to general awareness what might have been called the cultural fertility of Science, the absence of which it is our misfortune to have taken almost for granted.