Lure of the Modern

In this volume I continue to further the standpoint that a particularly choice focus is that upon the sub-set of actors in the Science and Literature drama who have revealed a personal commitment to both Science and Literature, and in notable cases made significant contributions to each within their own creative lives. Hence my favouring the biographie raisonnée as the format of choice. This is not to say that a more thematic approach might not be attractive in editorial terms, though I sense that it would inevitably lack the element of humanity of an exposé that reveals the often troubled and sometimes even tortured life histories of our subjects.

Once again, I must express eternal gratitude to the pillars of secondary literature in all the languages treated. With the one exception of the Russian, where my confidence fails somewhat beyond a ‘smattering’, I have benefited greatly from both originals and secondary-lit across the languages, while admiring the scholarship that underlies many outstanding translations to English both of primary and secondary courses.

A different register of admiration is that due to scholars with Humanities background, lacking ‘hands-on’ experience of science, who have nevertheless invested great effort to study in detail the Science relevant to their human subjects. Given the risk of embarrassing mistakes and out-of-hand dismissal by scientific professionals, this integrity on their part borders on intellectual heroism.

As this study progresses into the nineteenth century, the links between scientific research and its social environment change in crucial respects, with Literature reacting accordingly. If there is an animating factor beyond the appearance of remarkable works, it is the emergence of ‘movements’ of various complexion. These taking their cue from Naturphilosophie and remaining Continental European in character, would eventually solidify around two or three dominant areas: Positivism, Monism and Naturalism.

The details of this evolution and its political under-pinning will become clearer in the opening chapter, where the arrival of Georg Büchner in the dual roles of Nature Philosopher and Political Revolutionary will strike a plangent note across the literary establishment of the day, setting the stage for the new century. Meanwhile, if a more orderly transition were required, it would be provided by Goethe and Coleridge, who managed to live and work into the 1830s. Thus it is the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ that stands out in the face of those who strain to see the year 1800 as a turning point, with the convenient chronology of Lichtenberg dying in 1799.

Arriving at the final stage of our trajectory I should excuse myself for once again finessing the ordinance of centuries by dwelling on the two colossi – Robert Musil and Paul Valéry – who claim celebration as supreme twentieth-century exemplars, while each having, as it were, ‘one foot in the nineteenth’.

In the previous volume I acknowledged the invaluable help from various academic friends and colleagues and it goes without saying that their influence carries over into the present one. However, one further name needs to be mentioned at this point, that of Frederick Peters of Michigan State University. Fred has been of invaluable help and encouragement in bringing this study to light as well as providing just the right in-depth expertise in the areas of Germanistik most needed here.

Needless to add, members of my far-flung family, both European and Asian, have been an inestimable presence, too numerous individually to be listed, with the one exception of my wife, the writer Lin Man-Chiu, who has been steadfastly at my side throughout the crucial years during which this work was completed.

In the matter of Institutions, there were a number of important démarches. One of the earliest was the foundation of the Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtzte in 1822, on the initiative of the biologist Lorenz Oken, who presided over it until 1830. From the outset, the Society suffered from attempts to censor its proceedings, while, under the Metternich regime, its Austrian members had to appear semi-incognito until as late as the 1860s. The foundation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) followed in September 1831, with somewhat different make-up and programme, its first meeting in York in part stimulated by Charles Babbage’s recent publication of his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and some of its causes (1830) and initiated a vigorous ongoing debate.

By 1830 there was a gathering awareness of the advances in technical education in France and Germany in the Napoleonic years. With this very much in mind, the BAAS brought together practitioners and teachers of all kinds, from ivory-tower dwellers to the would-be ‘captains of industry’, and simple amateurs, a significant number of these in Holy Orders. And it will bear repetition that it was at the BAAS meeting in 1832 that the word ‘scientist’ was introduced by William Whewall to a lukewarm reception. The British Association like its German counterpart represented a break with the traditional dominance of Science discourse by the Royal Societies of London and Paris. While beyond them lay the more informal local philosophical societies, exemplified as we have seen by the Lunar Society of Birmingham, though extending to numerous local and less distinguished bodies in many towns.

In listing the European literary-scientific Societies that sprung up in the nineteenth century, Spain should not be forgotten. The post-Napoleonic period also gave rise to the Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid, founded in 1835 and still in existence. This would be the scene of intense debates on the subject of evolution and naturalist literature later in the century, which I shall treat later in more detail. The Ateneu Barcelonès carried the same spirit to Barcelona where, following its foundation in 1860, it formed an important focus in the Catalán Renaixença. Both societies suffered repeated political interference from their foundation up to the Franco dictatorship of the twentieth century.

At the same time, philanthropy began to exert an influence in several countries. In England the wealthy industrialist Josiah Mason opened his College of Science with a curriculum of natural sciences and medicine, from which Literature and Theology were deliberately excluded. The college, which opened in 1880, would prove to be the nucleus for the University of Birmingham, into which it was integrated in 1900.

In post-Napoleonic France a critical evolution of rational-materialistic literary thought followed the irruption of Auguste Comte’s Positivism in the 1830s, and this would have multiple implications for Literary Science throughout the rest of the century. The appearance of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positiviste in 1832 followed outbreaks of controversy in the biological field, notably that between Geoffroy de St. Hilaire and Cuvier over the existence of a grand template for natural beings. Though most remembered for Comte’s enunciation of the Loi des trois états, it is often forgotten that the first four volumes of the Cours are in effect a detailed textbook of contemporary science, physical and biological. Along with Comte’s credit as the first sociologist, Cuvier is often presented as the first Philosopher of Science, a title that might be disputed by d’Alembert in the previous century, as well as Comte’s near-contemporary William Whewell in Cambridge. The considerable ramifications of Positivism in literary and philosophical thought on both sides of the Channel will be examined in due course.

Coinciding with the challenge of Positivism, the troubled frontier between Science and Religion would show important developments. Prominent among these were the works of English ‘enthusiasts’ contributing to the Bridgewater Treatises, the series of tracts in which popular religion took up defensive positions against rapidly developing Science, to an extent facing back towards the naïve Deism of the previous century.

This following account of developments that come to fruition in the nineteenth century promises a rich texture of science-literature interplay, in many ways distinct from that in the previous one. Lacking giants of the stature of Voltaire and Goethe, the list of those selected will be less familiar to general English readers, though some appearing will have reputations for outstanding works, while lacking wider recognition of their connection with Science.

I have chosen to begin this volume with the outstanding example of Georg Büchner (1813–1837) Büchner, who with his tragically short life is often cited as a key to the transition between Romantic Naturphilosophie and a rational positivistic science, might also be held up as the most accomplished literary figure ever to have worked with his feet firmly planted in the scientific world. His life story certainly bears this out, while introducing a new element into our histories, that of a political revolutionary.

The exposition continues with accounts of a central European writer enjoying minimal recognition in the Anglophone world: Adalbert Stifter. Following this line of advance we approach what may be considered the historical high point in the engagement of Literature and Science: the emergence of Naturalism. Though initially focused around the person of Émile Zola, this supralinguistic movement would embrace a variety of thinkers and critics, some enthusiastic such as Hyppolyte Taine, Francesco de Sanctis and the Goncourt brothers, others such as Brunetière, Lanson, Sainte-Beuve offering qualified support; others, the likes of Croce and Lukács, tending to alienation. Nevertheless, the spread of Naturalism would prove a remarkable phenomenon in literary history, for all that it was somewhat cold-shouldered English circles.

This is no discredit to English writers of the period who, as I shall show, were well able to hold their own and were often well-versed in the other European languages and literatures. Given the already powerful momentum generated across international borders as the nineteenth century developed – the eminence of the Brontës, Balzac, Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoyevski, Manzoni, Turgenev – Naturalism was liable to be seen by some, as more like a doctrinaire incursion. Yet Naturalism undoubtedly took on a life of its own, had its own eminent supporters, such as De Sanctis, the doyen of critics, and was received with notable enthusiasm in the Romance Languages of Southern Europe and Latin America.

Strindberg’s near-contemporaries Charles Cros and Alfred Jarry, join him in this act of kicking over the traces, and generally acting the giddy goat in fin de siècle Paris. Yet for all this Cros could claim to be an accomplished physical chemist who staked his intellectual fortune on the pursuit of colour photography and sound recording, while writing sublime poetry in parallel. Jarry’s public high-jinks and ‘theatre of the absurd’ were also better known than his scientific interests, the latter refracted through his outlandish personality to become the dubiously celebrated Pataphysics.

The inclusion of Émile Zola as a central figure cannot but celebrate his achievement as a novelist, but no less stands in recognition of his catalytic effect in promoting Naturalism, the only literary movement which proclaimed a scientistic dimension to literary methodology, this in complete contrast to its forerunner Naturphilosophie with its metaphysical sanctions imposed top-down upon a reluctant Science.

What now of the English contribution? We may ask whether the no less monumental British figures of the period were so easily upstaged by their Continental contemporaries, and whether the sole contenders this far treated – Erasmus Darwin and Coleridge should carry the banner for them into the nineteenth century. To deny figures such as George Eliot, Herbert Spencer and Samuel Butler their rightful place here would have been to distort perspective as well as failing properly to illuminate the ferment surrounding of Darwin’s Origin of Species, arguably the dominant scientific event in the mid-century.

Though Charles Darwin himself contributed rather little to the secondary polemic around him. Others such as Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer and John Tyndall were less inhibited in the ongoing rough-house which developed around Evolution towards the end of the century. While on the conservative side Matthew Arnold was forced, reluctantly, if not quite kicking and screaming, to face up to the developments that threatened his comfortable world of classical education. Though some individuals proved stand-offish, a significant part of the English literary world was intensively engaged, word and print, while maintaining an acute interest in persons and movements on the other side of the Channel.

As befits the general register of this study, the concluding chapters settle on two major Continental writers having involvement in Science of a quite disparate order: Robert Musil and Paul Valéry. Both can be said to have risen from the nineteenth to greatness in the mid-twentieth century. In in the light of these two, other possible contenders of the period, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, for example, struggle to ‘make the cut’ when faced with such eminence. Valéry tends to dominate at the philosophical pole, by virtue of his obsessive persistence in subjecting Science to the lens of his, arguably pathological, degree of subjective contemplation. The result is unlike any other excursion of a literary person into the twentieth-century world just when Science seemed to be carrying all before it. Musil, by contrast had a professional training in engineering and experimental psychology while writing a scholarly Doktorarbeit on the scientific philosophy of Ernst Mach. Thereafter he embarked on one of the most profound novels of the twentieth century the Mann ohne Eigenschaften (‘The Man without Qualities’), a fictional attempt to integrate Science and Mysticism through the life of a troubled scientist in pre-WWI Vienna.

In the course of this, in a more thematic move, I shall explore the role of scientism as it developed in the nineteenth century, indeed as it manifests itself to this day. This will be one measure of the way diverse European cultures faced the increasing interplay of Scientific ideas, and responded each to their own ideological reflexes.

* * * * *

That so much could have been accomplished by a man scarcely out of his teens who had, by all the evidence, thrown in his lot with Science and was on the threshold of a brilliant research career as a biologist is striking enough; that this should all have been achieved on the run from the secret police of Metternich’s New European Order, alongside an underground political career – which gave us, from his pen, one of the finest pieces of political polemic written in the early century – provides a personal drama to match the tragedies of his stage-victims. None of our other personalities in this collection can compare with Büchner in terms of versatility and youthful éclat; even the literary bravado of a Voltaire or a Lomonosov scarcely bears comparison. Voltaire had not even adopted his glorious pen-name at the age of 23.

Early life

Medicine in Strasbourg

And he adds, interestingly:

The relative calm of 1832 was broken in the spring of the next year by distressing news from Germany. On the 3rd of April a group of revolutionaries, mostly students from the proscribed Burschenschaften stormed the Police Commissariat (the Hauptwache) in Frankfurt and called for a general insurrection. The action proved to be a farce; they were overwhelmed by the first brigade of troops to arrive and arrested after a brief fusillade without the slightest sign of the general population coming to their aid.

The result was an even more severe crackdown on student activists and a wave of arrests, made easier by the many informers and infiltrators that came forward. Büchner wrote an anguished letter to the family at once distancing himself from the plotters and the whole idea of a putsch by liberal amateurs, while at the same time insisting that only force would in the end solve the nationality problem and ease the lot of the common folk – when the time is ripe. In a much-quoted passage he writes: