Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter [1st ed.] 9783030314408, 9783030314415

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences Poetical Matter

Gregory Tate

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Catherine Belling Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial Board Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Gregory Tate

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences Poetical Matter

Gregory Tate School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-31440-8    ISBN 978-3-030-31441-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: John Tyndall, Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (Longmans, Green), Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, r QC225.T9 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents, who taught me to appreciate both poetry and science

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of a number of people and institutions. I am grateful to the Universities of Surrey and St Andrews for giving me the time and the means to think and to work. I am grateful too to the British Academy for awarding me a Mid-Career Fellowship in 2017–18, which provided me with a much-needed boost in the closing stages of my research. I am also indebted to staff in several libraries and archives for their generous and expert assistance: I would like to thank the staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester, and the University of St Andrews Library’s Special Collections; Jane Harrison, Frank James, and Charlotte New at the Royal Institution; and Grace Timmins at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. The arguments that comprise the book have been informed and refined by discussions with students, especially those on the Victorian Literature and Science module at St Andrews, and with other scholars at conferences, especially the annual conferences of the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS). I owe a particular debt to those colleagues who took time, over the course of my research, to offer me advice, information, conversation, and encouragement: my thanks to James Diedrick, Sam Illingworth, Roland Jackson, Adeline Johns-Putra, Ewan Jones, Sharon Ruston, Patrick Scott, Jane Stabler, and Martin Willis. This book would not exist in its final form were it not for the support of the editors of the

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Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series, and the patient guidance of Milly Davies at Palgrave Macmillan. The book is dedicated to my parents, Andy and Esme Tate. My greatest debt is to Rosey, William, and Felicity, who, every day, make my life better in innumerable ways.

Praise for Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

“A stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this groundbreaking study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that ‘the processes of the universe’ were themselves ‘rhythmic,’ he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the immaterial met. ‘The motion of waves,’ Tate demonstrates, was ‘the exemplary form in the physical sciences.’ Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each characterized by a ‘process of undulation,’ that could be understood as both a physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic patterning that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel’s words) not ‘things, but forms.’” —Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA “This impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scientist poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were understood variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessible, a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field.” —Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature 23 3 Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment 65 4 Words and Things in the Periodical Press105 5 Tennyson’s Sounds145 6 Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution185 7 Hardy’s Measures225 Index265

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the early 1920s Thomas Hardy started using a notebook which he titled “Poetical Matter I (That has not been experimented on).” The notebook consisted of transcriptions and cuttings of various “old notes of many years ago”: lists of possible titles for volumes of verse; discussions of metre and rhyme; detailed drafts of some poems; and a range of fragmentary observations and scenarios presumably intended to form the basis of others.1 There were also enough references to science to suggest that the notebook’s title, with its identification of poetry as a process of experimentation on physical matter, was not a dead metaphor. One of Hardy’s notes describes a “Poetry of the Microscope—in which minute things are regarded as vast”; another proposes a “charming set of Poems” based on a “microscopic view of Nature.” Hardy speculates that the microscopic precision of scientific observation might demonstrate the materiality of spirit (“A View. Souls, being the essence of beings, are as small as pins’ heads, & are in shoals around us”) but he also expresses “a dread—not of the old spectres, but of those science reveals.”2 The title and contents of the “Poetical Matter” notebook indicate that Hardy, at the end of his career, considered the instruments and methods of science, and the

1  Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 2  Ibid., 46, 53, 38, and 27.

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_1

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questions they raised about the relation between the material and the immaterial, to be of central importance to his poetry. This book borrows part of its title from Hardy, and it argues that his poems represent the culmination of a nineteenth-century tradition that identified poetry as (among other things) an experimental investigation of the materiality of nature. It aims to show that the language and methods of the physical sciences (primarily physics, but also the related fields of chemistry, geology, and astronomy) made a significant contribution to Romantic and Victorian understandings of poetry. And, as a book that unequivocally endorses the “two-way” model of literature and science studies first elaborated by Gillian Beer, it also argues that the influence was reciprocal.3 Nineteenth-century science writers frequently wrote verse and quoted the verse of others, using the cultural authority of poetry to validate their observations, to summarise and communicate their theories, and to legitimise their developing and sometimes controversial disciplines. As I intend to demonstrate, the reciprocal exchange of language and ideas between poetry and the physical sciences was made possible by a widespread belief in the similarity of their methods. Both poetry and science were understood to be inductive: founded on the observation, description, and interpretation of material things and empirical phenomena, they also claimed the right to use their considerations of matter as the basis of theoretical and non-empirical conclusions. Inductive poetics in nineteenth-century Britain was based primarily on the theory and practice of Romantic lyric; the structured eloquence of lyric verse was widely viewed as the most culturally respectable expression of inductive thought’s movement from the material to the theoretical. This was one of the reasons why scientists persistently wrote and quoted lyric poetry. But the inductive model also informed definitions of epic, and writers of epic poems frequently deployed their reconstructions of the past (whether personal, political, or cosmological) as the foundations both of transhistorical explanations of nature and of speculative predictions about the future of the universe. Induction was not without its detractors; doubts were voiced throughout the century about whether the transition from the concrete to the 3  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.

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abstract was methodologically and epistemologically valid. The rhetoric of experimentation, a concept that was not exclusively linked to the natural sciences but that derived more and more of its credibility from their growing prominence in British culture, was frequently deployed by science writers and by poets in an effort to resolve those doubts.4 The repetition and comparison of observations, they claimed, justified the construction of theoretical conclusions on the basis of material evidence. This book argues that nineteenth-century poetry was experimental in the broad sense implied by John Herschel’s definition of experiment, in his 1830 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, as an “active observation” of nature, in which: we cross-examine our witness, and by comparing one part of his evidence with the other, while he is yet before us, and reasoning upon it in his presence, are enabled to put pointed and searching questions, the answer to which may at once enable us to make up our minds.5

Few poets seconded Herschel’s confidence in the capacity of experimentation “to make up our minds”; in fact, both poets and science writers more often than not emphasised the baffling intractability of nature’s materiality. But the two sets of writers shared the conviction that their studies of matter were of necessity active, involving to some extent the manipulation—whether physical, imaginative, or linguistic—as well as the observation of material things. Nineteenth-century poetry and science were linked by a preoccupation with the relations between matter and mind. Different writers put forward competing and often antagonistic answers to a question that was central to the physical sciences and to poetry: was the inductive interpretation of nature a creative act of the interpreting mind or an objective and realist reconstruction of external processes? This question also informed debates about poetic form, specifically the ongoing disagreements between poets, critics, and theorists about whether poetic rhythm was a material phenomenon or an abstract pattern imposed on language by the mind. The disputants often invoked theories and evidence from the physical sciences in support of their claims, and science 4  For a discussion of literary and scientific definitions of experiment at the start of the nineteenth century, see Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 14–42. 5  John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 77.

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writers incorporated discussions of verse into their accounts of the universe. The main reason for this surprising overlap between poetry and science was that, whichever side they took, writers on poetry rarely limited the scope of their theories to verse itself. Instead they proposed, with varying degrees of assurance, that poetic rhythms, whether ideal or material, were expressive and representative of the essential structure of reality. The rhythms of verse, these writers argued, were exemplary instances either of the activity of human and divine minds, or of the rhythmic and material processes that constituted nature.6 This was an ambitious claim for poetic form, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the intellectual, cultural, and political contexts that helped to validate and sustain it, in various iterations put forward by poets and by science writers, throughout the long nineteenth century. Scholarship on literature and science has typically identified nineteenth-­ century physics as a science of immateriality rather than of matter. Perhaps the most influential example of this argument is Alice Jenkins’s Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850, which highlights “the tendency towards dematerialization,” towards the rational study of abstract concepts rather than the sensuous experience of material things, “in early nineteenth-century physics and other disciplines.”7 My emphasis is different. While recognising the importance of dematerialising accounts of science (and of poetry), I argue that matter remained the primary object of study, and a key source of contention, in poetry and in the physical sciences. Poets and science writers alike were preoccupied with the epistemological question of whether or not it was possible for the mind to apprehend matter through the senses, and with the ontological question of whether or not matter was the exclusive cause of natural processes. Their answers to these questions were influenced by, and helped to fuel, some of the most prominent philosophical, religious, and political debates in nineteenth-century Britain: theories of materiality were closely tied, for example, to disputes about the supposed atheism of science, and to the opposition between reformist and revolutionary models of political progress. 6  For another perspective on the opposition between materialist and idealist theories of poetic form, focusing on the contexts of technology, physiology, and experimental psychology, see Jason David Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 7  Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 208.

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The physical sciences’ sustained focus on matter, and the way in which that focus in turn made room for abstract and dematerialising perspectives, is evident in several of their most important theories. At the start of the nineteenth century, John Dalton’s atomic weight theory, set out in the first part of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), proposed that the chemical elements of matter consisted of solid, indivisible, and indestructible atoms of different weights.8 This quantitative model of matter, founded on the precise measurement of substances obtained through experimentation, was an influential example of the epistemological and theoretical efficacy of the experimental method. But it also raised two issues that were to be of concern to science writers and to poets throughout the rest of the century: it invited comparisons (damaging or not, depending on a writer’s philosophical and political stance) between modern science and the materialist (and arguably atheist) atomism of classical Epicurean philosophy; and it destabilised understandings of materiality by presenting as the ultimate constituent of matter a particle which was inaccessible to the senses and which therefore had to be understood in statistical or hypothetical terms. At the same time, phenomena such as light and heat, which had been attributed to the actions of putative forms of matter, were being redefined as kinds of motion. In 1799 Humphry Davy published the results of experiments which indicated that heat was caused not by a distinct substance, known as “caloric,” but by the motions of the particles of matter.9 And in 1801 Thomas Young demonstrated that light was not a flow of material corpuscles, as Isaac Newton had claimed, but a wave motion.10 Young’s observations were promptly incorporated into a comprehensive undulatory theory that defined “imponderables,” entities such as light and thermal radiation which were considered to be material in origin but which themselves had no mass, as vibrations or undulations in the ether, a material medium that permeated space. The scope of this theory was extended further by analogy with sound. In her influential 1834 book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Mary Somerville claimed that radiant heat, “like light and sound, probably consists in the undulations of an  John Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy (London: R. Bickerstaff, 1808).  See Humphry Davy, “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 2:5–86. 10  See Thomas Young, “The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92 (1802): 12–48. 8 9

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elastic medium,” and that “light, heat, sound, and the waves of fluids, are all subject to the same laws of reflection, and, indeed, their undulatory theories are perfectly similar.”11 Sarah Alexander has argued that, at the start of the century, “the physical sciences in Britain were increasingly dependent upon the theoretical rather than the empirical, and the invisible rather than the detectable, as imponderable matter theories became central to the study of mechanics.”12 I contend, though, that the analogy between sound and light was the exemplary argument of nineteenth-­ century physics precisely because it set up an equivalence, and not a distinction, between an empirical fact (the propagation of sound via the wave motion of material particles) and a speculative theory (the undulations of the ether). The ether’s scientifically precarious position as an unverified hypothesis was widely noted, with some writers using it to critique the sciences’ claims to empirical objectivity and others redeploying it in support of religious or spiritualist conjectures. But the ether was also considered to be a real form of matter. In an 1847 essay “On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in Common Life,” the psychologist Alexander Bain appears to propound an unambiguous kind of linguistic positivism, advising his readers to “push aside words and look at the actual things or substances that the world presents to us,” and arguing that “the best methods of fixing the bounds of the ‘material’ would be to refer it to all that immediately affects the senses, including solid, liquid, and gaseous substances.” Yet he then adds, seemingly without any awareness of a contradiction, “and also the fourth element, the ether, whose activity gives us light and heat, and regulates the forms, states, and affinities of tangible matter.”13 For Bain, the ether is as material as the tangible forms of matter. And for the majority of nineteenth-­ century writers, its most important property was that it was simultaneously material and theoretical. In this sense it was a limit case of nineteenth-century theories of materiality more generally, which typically emphasised a duality inherent in matter: while its properties were knowable through the senses, its ultimate structure and essence remained hidden. 11  Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1st edn. (London: John Murray, 1834), 250. 12  Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 3. 13  Alexander Bain, “On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in Common Life,” Fraser’s Magazine 35 (1847): 135.

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Some researchers, however, promoted an exclusively immaterial understanding of the physical sciences. In his 1846 “Thoughts on Ray-­ Vibrations” Michael Faraday tries to dispense with Dalton’s concrete atoms, positing a “view of the nature of matter which considers its ultimate atoms as centres of force, and not as so many little bodies surrounded by forces.”14 He also “endeavours to dismiss the æther, but not the vibrations” of the undulatory theory, replacing the luminiferous ether with “various kinds of lines of force” that convey light, heat, magnetism, and gravity between the atomic centres, and that fluctuate “in a manner which may be conceived as partaking of the nature of a shake or lateral vibration.”15 Faraday’s theorisation of “lines of force” was the basis of James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electricity and magnetism in the second half of the century, but Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory reversed Faraday’s position by reinstating matter as the universal medium of natural processes. The key difference was the replacement, both in electromagnetism and in the laws of thermodynamics, of force (a phenomenon independent of matter) with energy (a property inherent within matter). In his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Maxwell claims that “we are unable to conceive of propagation in time, except either as the flight of a material substance through space, or as the propagation of a condition of motion or stress in a medium already existing in space,” and that, therefore, “whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists.”16 Maxwell retained both ether and vibrations, arguing that spectroscopy, the analysis of the spectra of light emitted from stars, indicated that the various wavelengths of electromagnetic energy were linked to undulatory motions within ponderable matter. In an 1873 lecture on “Molecules” he comments that a molecule of matter, “though indestructible, is not a hard rigid body, but is capable of internal movements, and when these are excited it emits rays, the wave-­ length of which is a measure of the time of vibration of the molecule.”17 The most important developments in Victorian physics reiterated ideas that had also been present in the theories of Dalton and Young at the start of the century: that the processes of the universe were rhythmic (a 14  Michael Faraday, “Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 28 (1846): 345. 15  Ibid., 347–48. 16  James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873), 2:437–38. 17  Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 440.

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suggestion which was quickly endorsed and elaborated by poets); and that the things involved in those processes were simultaneously material and theoretical, beyond the range of sensuous experience. To some extent, the cultural history of nineteenth-century physics is comparable to that of sixteenth-century natural philosophy, as it is presented in Mary Thomas Crane’s Losing Touch with Nature. Crane argues that natural philosophers’ discussions of minute particles and immaterial forces, as well as the advent of heliocentric astronomy, prompted “an unprecedented epistemological rupture” in sixteenth-century English culture, “a sundering of an embodied, intuitive grasp of the world from the specialist’s increasingly abstract accounts of how things really worked.” Literary writers celebrated the imaginative possibilities of these abstract theories while also expressing a “horror at the idea that lived experience of the world did not reliably provide access to truth about it.”18 It is possible to formulate a similar argument about the physical sciences in the nineteenth century: scholars such as Jenkins and Alexander have persuasively highlighted the theoretical tendencies of these sciences, and several nineteenth-­century writers presented poetry, with its focus on the direct experience of nature’s tangible materiality, as the antagonist of scientific theory’s speculative materialism. This picture, however, is incomplete. Rather than describing a straightforward trend towards dematerialisation or an irrevocable sundering of scientific and literary perspectives, I want to argue in this book that poets and science writers frequently tried to reconcile the two aspects of matter: the hypothetical materialism of atoms and ether on the one hand, and the sensuous materiality accessible to the senses and to experiment on the other. This is a book of literary criticism rather than an intellectual history, and its primary focus is therefore on a linguistic problem that was closely connected to the shared methods and concerns of poetry and the physical sciences. Writers in both fields worried over two related questions: to what extent could language accurately record the experience of interacting with matter through touch, visual observation, or experimental manipulation? And was it possible to explain (and defend) in words the development of theoretical arguments from material evidence? The book examines various nineteenth-century attempts to answer these questions through a series of (roughly chronological) case studies, which attend to the ways in which 18  Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2.

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particular words were shared, and mutually constructed, by poets and science writers. Although the two groups’ respective definitions of these words rarely coincided fully, they nonetheless borrowed each other’s frames of reference to investigate, explain, and clarify them. The collective aim of the chapters is to show that poetic and scientific accounts of the materiality of nature were shaped by mutually informing sets of rhetorical and stylistic techniques, and by the contested use of specific words and phrases. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 consider terms that reflect the shared efforts of poets and science writers to determine how the experience of materiality might be conveyed in writing. Chapter 2 discusses the intersecting definitions of material and poetic “form” set out by William Wordsworth and Humphry Davy at the start of the century. Wordsworth and Davy agreed that chemistry and poetry both revealed the active properties hidden within the material “forms of nature.” And they also agreed in maintaining an opposition between scientific experimentation’s focus on physical processes and poetic form’s invocation of the metaphysical and moral powers inherent in matter. Although this book concentrates primarily on physics, Davy’s chemistry is central to its argument, because his experimental work on the identification of new chemical elements helped to set the agenda for nineteenth-century science’s sustained interest in the constitution of matter. This, together with his prominence as a science communicator and his enthusiasm for poetry, makes his writing an apt point of departure for the book’s discussion of the relations between matter and language in nineteenth-century Britain. Chapter 3 considers the various ways in which science writers made use of poetic quotations: to defend the physical sciences against accusations of reductive and mechanistic materialism; to summarise arguments about nature in eloquent and familiar language; and to gesture towards the metaphysical connotations of scientific theories. Quotation, for these writers, was a kind of rhetorical “experiment”; they presented poetry as a form of words that both reiterated and supplemented the experimental method’s observation, analysis, and theoretical interpretation of nature’s materiality. The book’s fourth chapter traces competing definitions of the relation between “words and things” in the periodical press. This chapter argues that the press was an important site of debate about the epistemological shortcomings, and especially the abstract materialism, of scientific language. Specialist terminology was satirised in poems that

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simultaneously identified verse as a mode of knowledge which offered unmediated access to the concrete materiality of nature’s things. The final three chapters ask how particular poets understood and deployed the forms of verse as expressions of the rhythmic vibrations of the material universe. As Anna Henchman points out, the “undularity” of sound, light, ether, and atoms in nineteenth-century physics “had longstanding associations with rhythm and poetic metre, a fact noted by poets and scientists alike.”19 Alfred Tennyson, characteristically, was both fascinated and dismayed by these associations. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which Tennyson’s poetry responds to scientific models of acoustics by trying to identify “sounds” (and particularly the sound of his poetic voice) as permanent signifiers of spiritual meaning as well as transitory vibrations of matter. Chapter 6 attends to the connections between “rhythm” and “energy” in electromagnetic and thermodynamic theory in the late nineteenth century. It focuses on the politically radical verse of Mathilde Blind, which presents metre as an expression of a universal rhythm that structures the motions of matter and energy, and that underwrites the ontological equality of living and inorganic things. The closing chapter argues that Thomas Hardy’s poetry reflects on nineteenth-century debates about matter through its interrogation of poetic and scientific understandings of “measure.” Like Tennyson and Blind, Hardy uses the “measures” of accentual-syllabic verse to present a view of the material universe, informed by physical science, as rhythmic and measurable. But the idiosyncratic stanza forms of his poetry also suggest that scientific measurements are inescapably subjective, and that the metrical motions of matter are subtended by a fundamental indeterminacy. The book’s consideration of the whole of the long nineteenth century (from Wordsworth’s writings of the 1790s to Hardy’s poetry of the 1920s), and its focus on specific case studies, means that there are gaps in its coverage. For instance, it does not discuss Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sustained interest in the physical sciences. And, at the other end of the century, several late-Victorian poets (such as Alice Meynell, May Kendall, and Gerard Manley Hopkins) wrote about physics and its relation to verse.20 A 19  Anna Henchman, “Outer Space: Physical Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 695. 20  On Shelley and chemistry, see Barbara Estermann, “Attraction and Combination: The Science of Metamorphosis in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (2011): 413–36. On Hopkins and physics, see Gillian Beer, “Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural

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number of important researchers in the physical sciences—namely Dalton, Faraday, and Young—are also absent throughout much of the book. My pragmatic (or self-justifying) reason for their omission is that they did not consistently write poetry, write about poetry, or use poetic quotations.21 Conversely, some writers—Herschel, Maxwell, Somerville, the historian and philosopher of science William Whewell, the physicist and science communicator John Tyndall, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—are discussed in several chapters, because their examinations of the links between poetry and the physical sciences were especially detailed and influential. Wordsworth and Tennyson, too, are important figures, because of the frequency with which they were alluded to by other poets and quoted by science writers. The recurring presence of these figures illustrates the main reason for the wide historical scope of this book: I want to emphasise the significant continuities between Romantic, Victorian, and early twentieth-century poetry and physics, which can be obscured by the widespread tendency to divide the long nineteenth century into discrete periods. My hope is that a historical purview of the century as a whole, structured and punctuated by detailed case studies, will enable a discriminating assessment both of what changes and of what stays the same in understandings of the relations between poetry and science. It will also counter the temptation to make one-sided statements about how Romantic and Victorian poetry, or Romantic science and Victorian scientific naturalism, differ fundamentally from one another. There are three broad continuities that underpin the book’s argument. The first is its poets’ adherence to the metres and forms of English accentual-­syllabic verse, and the belief, shared to some extent by most nineteenth-century poets and science writers, that those forms were a fractal manifestation of the rhythms that structured the interactions between mind and matter (this formal criterion explains why the final chapter discusses Hardy but not Modernist poets). Second, the majority of Romantic and Victorian poets and science writers used their investigations of matter as the basis of ontological claims about the essence of reality. Such claims Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 242–72; and Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 21  However, in his youth, Faraday wrote poems, and essays that quoted poetry, as part of a programme of self-education. See Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay Circle in Regency London, ed. Alice Jenkins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

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frequently revealed a shared debt to monist theories, particularly those of the Epicurean poet Lucretius and the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which argued that the universe was composed of a single substance (whether defined as matter, or God, or both simultaneously).22 Marjorie Levinson has suggested that Spinoza’s thinking is “a submerged philosophical context in a number of nineteenth-century poetries”; the same is true of the physical sciences.23 Third, these ontological arguments were also political. Exchanges between poetry and the physical sciences in nineteenth-century Britain supported the dissemination both of secular worldviews and of metaphysical (either Christian or idealist) interpretations of matter. In most cases, although not without exception, materialist theories of nature were associated with religious scepticism and political radicalism, while criticisms of materialism were deployed in aid of conservative positions. These debates about poetry, philosophy, and politics were linked by a shared problem of representation: to what extent was it possible to understand and theorise matter using language? By examining the history of this question across the nineteenth century, I aim to show that a comparative analysis of poetry and science writing can contribute to, and negotiate between, two of the most important recent trends in literary studies, which can be summarily identified as a “new materialism” and a “new formalism.” The study of literature and science, I think, offers a means of integrating the examination of material things with the interpretation of the linguistic and formal elements of written texts. My approach to realising this integration is based in part on Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” which argues that any phenomenon is constituted by a network of connections between a range of “actants,” a term that encompasses everything from “intentional humans” to animals, institutions to texts, human-made artefacts to “natural objects.”24 Latour’s flat ontology rejects distinctions between subject and object and between value and fact, replacing these binaries with what he terms, following 22  On Lucretius, see Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and John Holmes, “Lucretius at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Religion and Poetry,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51 (2008): 266–80. 23  Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007): 367. 24  Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61.

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Michel Serres, “quasi-objects, quasi-subjects.” These exist not as “simple, more or less faithful intermediaries” in social and natural processes but as “mediators—that is, actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.”25 Although Latour is chary of the word “matter” and its connotations of passivity— “the ‘matter’ of most self-proclaimed materialists does not have a great deal to do with the type of force, causality, efficacy, and obstinacy non-­ human actants possess in the world”—his theory is particularly useful in the study of literary and scientific writing about materiality.26 It offers a model in which different kinds of text (poems or lectures), person (poets, experimental researchers, or science communicators), and thing (the tangible matter of a rock or the hypothetical medium of the ether) can be viewed as equivalent actors in the historical development of arguments about matter. The “vital materiality” theorised by Jane Bennett is also important to this book, because it is based on a definition of matter strikingly similar to that which underpinned nineteenth-century debates. Like several Romantic and Victorian poets and science writers, Bennett locates her theory of matter within a historical tradition founded on the monisms of Lucretius and Spinoza. She shares with those philosophers an understanding of matter that emphasises its activity and motion rather than its inert rigidity: “my goal is to theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension.”27 And, using Latour’s term “actants,” she puts forward a levelling interpretation of the human and the non-human as ontologically equivalent: “the case for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants: not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting these powers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality.” “Human power,” she concludes, “is itself a kind of thing-power.”28 Bennett’s arguments, and the sublimity with which her adjectives (“vibrant,” “vital,” “awesome,” “awful”) imbue matter, aligns her work with the “dynamic materialism” that Levinson identifies as characteristic of Romantic 25  Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 51 and 81. 26  Latour, Reassembling, 76. 27  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20. 28  Ibid., 10.

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poetry.29 This reading of matter, I argue, is central not just to Romantic verse but to poetry and science writing throughout the long nineteenth century. Disputes about materiality often hinged on the question of whether or not particular poets and science writers, or poetry and the physical sciences in general, endorsed this view of matter as the vital stimulus of natural processes and human actions. At the same time as they embraced or deplored humans’ proximity to matter, nineteenth-century writers also frequently emphasised the otherness and epistemological intractability of material things. A comparable position is advocated in Graham Harman’s account of “object-oriented literary criticism.” Harman’s argument is based on speculative realism, a philosophy which insists on the legitimacy of theorising “a mind-­ independent reality” of external objects.30 Literary criticism, Harman contends, has to acknowledge that this reality cannot be straightforwardly explained in the terms of human experience, and that not just literary texts but “all human dealings with the world” automatically fail to grasp the essence of objects: “the irreducibility of reality to literal presence applies as much to the sciences as it does to poetry.”31 Harman is concerned with the problems involved in representing objects, but, surprisingly, his essay says nothing about the particular ways in which writers’ language might acknowledge, exacerbate, elide, or circumvent those problems. Nineteenth-­ Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, conversely, aims to study the linguistic difficulties and possibilities involved in writing about natural objects, of which poets and science writers were acutely aware. In 2015 Richard Grusin presented speculative realism, actor-network theory, and Bennett’s “thing-power” as examples of a “nonhuman turn” in literary studies. “Among the features that loosely link” them, according to Grusin, “is that they were all opposed, in one way or another, to the more linguistic or representational turns of the 1970s through 1990s— such as the textual, cultural, ideological, or aesthetic turns.”32 In my view, though, this account of an opposition between matter and representation as objects of study is too straightforward; even if theorists present their work as unambiguously objective or realist in orientation, it is difficult to  Levinson, “Motion,” 374.  Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 184. 31  Ibid., 190. 32  Richard Grusin, Introduction, in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), x. 29 30

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see how literary critics and historians can avoid addressing linguistic, textual, and aesthetic questions. My approach, examining representations of the relation between matter and language as they developed over the course of the nineteenth century, builds on the work of scholars such as Noah Heringman, who in Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology practises what he terms “aesthetic materialism,” “a critical method responding to historical and cultural materialism by articulating a historically specific conception of materiality.” Although “oriented toward the social context of literature,” Heringman writes, “my method differs from other historicist approaches by attempting to locate the sphere identified as material in the period under analysis itself.”33 Along with Paul Gilmore’s work on nineteenth-century American literature and electricity, Heringman’s elaboration of the links between Romantic poetry and geology demonstrates that scientific theories, social contexts, and the linguistic details of literary texts are interconnected elements of any “historically specific conception of materiality.”34 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences uses Heringman’s critical method of aesthetic materialism to trace the history of Romantic and Victorian debates about philosophical materialism, the belief that everything in the universe is explicable on the basis of matter and its properties. While I argue that philosophical materialism exerted a significant, and to a large extent unrecognised, influence on nineteenth-century British culture, I also want to emphasise the ambiguity with which “materialism” and related words were deployed, and the difficulty involved in trying to assign them fixed meanings. Numerous writers throughout the century accused other people of materialism, but few were prepared to identify themselves as materialists. In studying the protean and contested meanings of “materialism” and of other key terms such as “nature,” my goal is to reconstruct, as carefully as possible, what writers thought about matter by examining the best available evidence: the language they used to write about it. This version of historicism has been identified by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, following Thomas Dixon, as “word history” or “historical semantics,” an approach which recognises that “the changing fortunes of a term have significant 33  Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 21. 34  Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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implications for the construction and communication of the various ideas it might entail,” and that language “is not passively reflective, but is itself an agent of intellectual change.”35 This method underpins the book as a whole and each of its separate case studies, which examine the competing and overlapping uses, in poetry and in science, of particular terms: form, experiment, words, things, sound, energy, rhythm, and measure. The case studies also attend to the social contexts that helped to shape the nineteenth century’s languages of materiality. Chapters 2, 3, and 4, for example, consider how the political tenor of debates about matter and language was determined in part by the institutions within which words were spoken or written. These chapters examine several different institutional contexts: the metropolitan Royal Institution; the more socially and geographically inclusive, but also professionalising (and therefore exclusive in another way), meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; and, within the periodical press, the Tory Quarterly Review, the satirically conservative Punch, and the liberal Fortnightly Review. As the example of the press illustrates, institutional contexts were often inseparable from textual contexts, and Nineteenth-­ Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences also considers the different ways in which a poem (or an excerpted line or stanza) might be interpreted when it was published in a volume of verse, in a periodical, or as the epigraph to a scientific treatise. The book analyses science writing in the same way, asking how different institutional environments or textual media (notebooks, lectures, textbooks) modified the meanings of new or contentious words such as “energy” or “materialism.” The book’s method, then, is first and foremost historicist, and therefore typical of perhaps the majority of scholarship on literature and science. But it is also influenced by recent calls for a renewed attention to the formal structures of literary texts, and I think that the study of literature and science is particularly well-positioned to mediate between the concerns of historicism and those of the new formalism. Some critics, conversely, place the two in opposition to each other. In The Limits of Critique Rita Felski argues that the revival of interest in form has highlighted the way in which historicism’s focus on context petrifies “works of art as nothing more than cultural symptoms of a historical moment, as moribund matter immured 35  Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, Introduction, in Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity, ed. Dawson and Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2.

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in the past.” “We cannot close our eyes to the historicity of art works,” Felski concedes, but “we sorely need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally timeless on the one hand and imprisoned in their moment of origin on the other.”36 She advocates Latour’s actor-network theory as the way out of the contextual prison, because it enables a redefinition of works of art as actants with a degree of agency rather than as inert epiphenomena of historical contexts. But she also warns of the limitations of “lopsided” modes of Latourian literary criticism, in which “themes from actor-­ network theory are incorporated into existing practices of close reading,” as “the critic traces out the movement and interconnection of actants within the confines of a literary work.”37 Felski is sceptical of this approach, it seems, because she views it as a kind of repackaged new criticism. If I am honest, though, much of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is devoted to precisely this sort of reading, analysing the interconnections between human and non-human actants within poetry and science writing. This method of historically informed close reading is not especially original, but its integration of historical and linguistic concerns is precisely the means through which scholarship on literature and science can negotiate between materialist and formalist approaches to literary studies. It is, in effect, already the type of literary criticism that Felski advocates: not really close reading, but “mid-level reading,” involving the interpretation of “objects and mediations as well as literary works, a practice of lateral reading across multiple texts rather than deep and intensive reading of a single text.”38 By examining two radically distinct kinds of writing, by analysing the similarities and differences in their diction and style, and by mapping the intellectual and institutional networks that link them together and that help to explain those similarities and differences—to use Latour’s terms, by attending to linguistic and formal as well as material and social actants—literature and science studies can illuminate the historically contingent ways in which the relations between the human and the non-­ human have been understood. My dual emphasis on linguistic and historical specificity diverges in some respects from the new formalism, particularly as it has been theorised by Caroline Levine. In a 2006 essay outlining her method of “strategic  Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 154.  Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 130 (2015): 738. 38  Ibid., 741. 36 37

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formalism,” Levine promotes an understanding of form that refuses textual or historical limitations: Form, in my definition, refers to shaping patterns, to identifiable interlacings of repetitions and differences, to dense networks of structuring principles and categories. It is conceptual and abstract, generalizing and transhistorical. But it is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. It does not fix or reduce every pattern to the same. Nor is it confined to the literary text, to the canon, or to the aesthetic.39

My approach is transhistorical to the extent that it maps the persistence of forms (for example, accentual-syllabic verse and poetic quotations in science writing) across the long nineteenth century. But I worry, despite Levine’s assurances, that her definition of form is too generalising, both because it risks ignoring the particular historical conditions that help to shape each iteration of a form (a risk which I hope is countered in this book by the specific focus of each of the case studies) and because it collapses the distinctions between textual and non-textual forms. Any network or structure may be identifiable as a form in the sense that it depends on spatial and temporal patterns, but it does not follow that these different forms can be studied and interpreted using the same critical methods. Levine refined her definition of form in 2015, acknowledging that forms are determined to some extent by their material conditions, and that language “lays claim to its own forms—syntactical, narrative, rhythmic, rhetorical—and its own materiality—the spoken word, the printed page.”40 And in a contrasting take on formalism, of direct relevance to the study of literature and science, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian argue that “a truly interdisciplinary practice will accept that notions of form vary meaningfully across disciplines” and “that the differences among them are sometimes irreducible.” “To use form to explain something” in literary criticism, therefore, “requires a working vocabulary proper to the literary before form can be welcomed into analogy with other things.”41 This book discusses institutional networks and the objects and phenomena 39  Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 632. 40  Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10. 41  Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 652.

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studied by the physical sciences, but its method is founded on interpretations of the textual and rhetorical forms of language, and of the different ways in which those forms are deployed in poetry and in science writing. These comparative readings are guided by another aspect of Levine’s strategic formalism: its emphasis on the relations between forms. Levine writes that forms “have no intrinsic political efficacy” in themselves; “they take on their political force only in encounters with other forms.” The aim of her method is therefore “not to isolate forms” or “to choose between them, but to recognize their challenges to each other.”42 If the scope of these formal encounters and challenges is widened to take in their epistemological and emotional as well as their political force, then they become valuable tools for a historicist literary criticism that reads across multiple kinds of text. And Henry Turner has suggested that the tendency of forms to overlap, collide, and redefine one another is similarly important to the history of science. Citing the range of concepts, metaphors, and representations that have accrued around the gene, a seemingly discrete material thing, he notes that “the very term ‘form’ in the singular tends to reify and render static something that is better regarded both as a plurality—as a collection of forms, across many different scales—and as an ongoing process.”43 Form, in just this sense of an active process or patterning, was a keyword in nineteenth-century theories that defined nature as the sum of matter’s motions. The exemplary form in the physical sciences was wave motion: in an 1830 essay on sound, John Herschel summarily classified sound waves and other undulations as not “things, but forms.”44 For a number of nineteenth-century science writers, and for poets too, the plural process of undulation connected the movement of the seas, the propagation of sound in the air, the transmission of light and energy through the ether, and, by extension, the oscillating metres of accentual-syllabic verse; each, they suggested, was a different manifestation of a universal pattern. And both groups of writers worried about, and discussed in their work, the question of whether or not it was possible to represent natural forms using the stylistic and rhetorical forms of written and spoken  Levine, “Strategic Formalism,” 647.  Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form’,” Isis 101 (2010): 584. 44  Herschel, “Sound” (1830), in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, vol. 4 (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), 755. 42 43

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language. In nineteenth-century texts, and, I think, in the study of literature and science today, form—in its diverse literary, material, and processual meanings—can highlight both the possible exchanges and the inevitable gap between language and materiality. The word is examined throughout Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, and it is the particular focus of the next chapter.

Bibliography Alexander, Sarah C. 2016. Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bain, Alexander. 1847. On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in Common Life. Fraser’s Magazine 35: 127–140. Beer, Gillian. 1996. Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination. In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 242–272. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2009. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983). 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, Daniel. 1997. Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crane, Mary Thomas. 2014. Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dalton, John. 1808. A New System of Chemical Philosophy. London: R. Bickerstaff. Davy, Humphry. 1839–40. An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light. In The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 2: 5–86. London: Smith, Elder. Dawson, Gowan, and Bernard Lightman, eds. 2014. Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Estermann, Barbara. 2011. Attraction and Combination: The Science of Metamorphosis in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam. Studies in Romanticism 50: 413–436. Faraday, Michael. 1846. Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations. London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 28: 345–350. ———. 2008. Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay Circle in Regency London. Ed. Alice Jenkins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Felski, Rita. 2015a. Latour and Literary Studies. PMLA 130: 737–742.

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———. 2015b. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilmore, Paul. 2009. Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goldstein, Amanda Jo. 2017. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grusin, Richard, ed. 2015. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, Jason David. 2017. Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardy, Thomas. 2009. Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook.  Ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harman, Graham. 2012. The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. New Literary History 43: 183–203. Henchman, Anna. 2013. Outer Space: Physical Science. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 690–708. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heringman, Noah. 2004. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herschel, John. 1830. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1st edn. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. ———. 1845. “Sound” (1830). In Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 4: 747–824. London: B. Fellowes. Holmes, John. 2008. Lucretius at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Religion and Poetry. English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51: 266–280. Jenkins, Alice. 2007. Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. 2017. Form and Explanation. Critical Inquiry 43: 650–669. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Caroline. 2006. Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies. Victorian Studies 48: 625–657. ———. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levinson, Marjorie. 2007. A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza. Studies in Romanticism 46: 367–408. Maxwell, James Clerk. 1873a. Molecules. Nature 8: 437–441. ———. 1873b. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Mitchell, Robert. 2013. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Somerville, Mary. 1834. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. 1st edn. London: John Murray. Turner, Henry S. 2010. Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on “Form.” Isis 101: 578–589. Young, Thomas. 1802. The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92: 12–48.

CHAPTER 2

Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature

1 In 1798 William Wordsworth drafted some lines, as part of a projected conclusion to “The Ruined Cottage,” which voiced a conviction that remained central to his thinking throughout his career: And never for each other shall we feel As we may feel till we have find sympathy With nature in her forms inanimate With objects such as have no power to hold Articulate language. In all forms of things There is a mind.1

These lines encapsulate the philosophical radicalism of the young Wordsworth’s beliefs: that there is a mind within inarticulate objects, and that sympathy for other people is founded on, and impossible without, sympathy for nature’s inanimate forms. The older Wordsworth may have shied away from the pantheism (or panpsychism) espoused here, but his belief in the ethical importance of “sympathy with nature,” and in poetry’s particular capacity to nurture and communicate that sympathy, was immutable. In 1843 he suggested that scientific study, “the habit of 1  William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 121 and 123.

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analysing, decomposing, and anatomizing,” might excite similar feelings: “admiration and love, to which all knowledge truly vital must tend, are felt by men of real genius in proportion as their discoveries in Natural Philosophy are enlarged.”2 However, he was often critical of the intellectual habits of natural philosophy; as those habits were standardised as the empirical and experimental methods of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, his was among the most prominent voices expressing the view that poetic and scientific approaches to nature were, in some respects, mutually exclusive. By reading Wordsworth’s poems next to the writings of the chemist Humphry Davy, this chapter aims to show that the word “form” was crucial to debates about poetry and science in the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth and Davy identified the methods of chemistry and poetry as similarly inductive, using the observation of the material forms of nature as the basis for theoretical conclusions. At times, though, both writers tried to distinguish the goals of science from those of poetry, suggesting that chemistry’s primary concern was the investigation of the physical properties of nature’s forms, and that moral and metaphysical arguments were poetry’s remit. Davy wrote verse throughout his life, and he was acquainted with Wordsworth through their mutual friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge and Wordsworth asked Davy to read the proofs of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, and Wordsworth owned copies of some of Davy’s writings.3 Their knowledge of each other’s work, and their shared preoccupation with the similarities and differences between their respective fields, means that their careers offer important evidence for nineteenth-century understandings of the relation between poetry and science. Recent studies of Wordsworth and Davy have aimed to recover the cultural connections between science and literature by emphasising the affinities between the two writers’ definitions of poetry and chemistry, and of the poet and the “man of science.”4 Without wishing to return to an outdated critical model that presented Romanticism as straightforwardly 2  Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 448. 3  Maurice Hindle, “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence,” Romanticism 18 (2012): 20; Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–72. 4  See Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 45–91; and Sharon

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antagonistic to science, I want to suggest that Wordsworth and Davy each set out sustained (if inconsistent) arguments for distinguishing between poetic and scientific interpretations of nature, and that those arguments were reiterated and rethought in debates about poetry and science throughout the century. As Catherine Ross has argued, Romantic poets and science writers “vied for the same jurisdiction (that of philosopher and sage); hence, their similarities became a professional problem,” and “a rivalry ensued that became the catalyst for both groups to initiate the delineation and emphasis of their differences.”5 “Differentiation,” rather than “professionalisation” or “specialisation,” is probably the best description of this process. Wordsworth and Davy were wary of delimiting the scope and influence of their work by identifying themselves as professional specialists, but both nonetheless tried to champion the epistemological authority and the particular intellectual contribution of their discipline, and the effort to differentiate between poetry and science is a foundational concern of Wordsworth’s unfinished project The Recluse. Both poetry and chemistry set out (to quote the Wanderer in The Excursion) to “read / The forms of things.”6 The argument for differentiation hinged on two issues: the ontological question of how to define nature’s forms, and the methodological question of how to record and communicate the investigation of those forms in words. These issues were inseparable from the ambiguities of the word “form” itself, which encompassed a range of philosophical traditions and positions. It might denote a visible and physical shape; the Aristotelian essence of a particular arrangement of matter; or a Platonic form, an “intelligible” and ideal “principle” ontologically prior to “any thing which is sensible.”7 For nineteenth-century science writers, the word hovered between these three meanings, and they often negotiated between them by deploying a Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7–27. 5  Catherine E. Ross, “‘Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes’: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 24. 6  Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James Butler, and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1:969–70. Subsequent line references are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 7  Plato, The Republic, in The Works of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor, vol. 1 (London: R. Wilks, 1804), 354.

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conception of form, recalling Francis Bacon’s definition of the term in the seventeenth century, as a law or property immanent within and constitutive of a material body.8 But the word’s ambiguities were amplified rather than resolved by its repeated use, because no two writers’ definitions of form coincided fully. As Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian point out, form, “perhaps like any useful and compelling term,” is a “notion bound pragmatically to its instances.”9 In Wordsworth’s 1798 lines, for example, forms are not ideal but material, the inanimate and inarticulate objects of nature; but his reading of those forms reveals latent and immaterial properties. There is a similar openness in Davy’s statement, in his 1812 Elements of Chemical Philosophy, that “the various forms of matter, and the changes of these forms, depend upon active powers, such as gravitation, cohesion, calorific repulsion or heat, chemical attraction, and electrical attraction.”10 This may be interpreted as supporting those historians of science who identify forces rather than things as the primary agents of Davy’s chemistry: David Knight argues that he adhered to the Newtonian view that “powers such as gravity were not inherent to matter, which was inanimate, brute and inert.”11 Matter’s formal variety, in this reading, is determined by the “active powers,” either immaterial or imponderable in essence, which impel it. However, Davy’s language in his discussions of matter is consistently inconsistent; in the same 1812 textbook he also writes that the goal of the chemist is “to ascertain the powers and properties of matter, which are the causes of the phenomena of chemistry,” implying that those powers are inherent within material things.12 Davy’s chemistry incorporates two distinct but overlapping understandings of form: as matter and as process. Broadly speaking, his focus shifts from the former to the latter over the course of his career. His earliest writings, published when he was working with the politically radical physician Thomas Beddoes in Bristol, propound an ambitious 8  See Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form’,” Isis 101 (2010): 583. 9  Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 661. 10  Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 4:46. 11  David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58. 12  Davy, Elements, 4:44.

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materialism: he claims in a 1799 essay that “the laws of corpuscular motion” determine “the laws of mind” and of “life.”13 In 1801 Davy was appointed lecturer in chemistry at the newly founded Royal Institution (RI) in London. Arguably the main aim of this institution, established under the auspices of the mostly aristocratic fellowship of the Royal Society, was to promote the practical and social utility of the physical sciences while at the same time divorcing them from philosophical and political radicalism.14 On moving to the RI, Davy became part of Britain’s intellectual establishment, and this social and institutional environment was an important influence on his more cautious discussions of matter, and his corresponding emphasis on nature’s active powers, in his lectures and later writings. His retreat from materialism is an example of a wider ambivalence towards matter in Romantic writing, which has in turn prompted a range of assessments of the relation between Romanticism and philosophical materialism. Some critics have argued that the two are opposed: Christopher Lawrence states that Davy’s identification of “powers rather than matter as the fundamental agency of order and change” is one of the key “assumptions” that characterises his science as “Romantic.”15 On the other side of the argument, Paul Fry claims that Wordsworth’s preoccupation with “the forms of things” reveals his adherence to a “monistic materialism” that subverts his frequent appeals to pantheism and to Christianity.16 The majority of critics adopt an intermediate position, Tom Furniss, for example, concluding that Romantic poetry and science share an “assumption that nature and/or matter has inward powers.”17 Building on this 13  Davy, “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in Collected Works, 2:84. 14  Jon Klancher discusses the founding of the RI, and Davy’s early career there, in Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51–84. 15  Christopher Lawrence, “The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 222. For a contrasting interpretation, which emphasises Davy’s materialism, see Lisa Ann Robertson, “‘Swallowed up in Impression’: Humphry Davy’s Materialist Theory of Embodied Transcendence and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’,” European Romantic Review 26 (2015): 591–614. 16  Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 10. 17  Tom Furniss, “A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’,” Romanticism 16 (2010): 309.

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position, and on Marjorie Levinson’s discussion of Romantic poetry’s “dynamic materialism,” I want to suggest that Wordsworth and Davy are not philosophical materialists, because they do not consistently try to explain natural processes in exclusively material terms. But their stance towards nature is non-dualist, because they both imply that active powers (whether physical forces, metaphysical essences, or moral sympathies) are intrinsic rather than superadded to matter. Knowledge of those powers depends, for Davy, on the investigation of matter’s changing forms. On the first page of his Elements of Chemical Philosophy he comments that “most of the substances belonging to our globe are constantly undergoing alterations in sensible qualities, and one variety of matter becomes as it were transmuted into another,” before stating that “the object of Chemical Philosophy is to ascertain the causes of all phenomena of this kind, and to discover the laws by which they are governed.”18 In one of his notebooks he defines “the physical sciences” more generally as “the Knowledge of the phenomena of the external world & its changes.”19 And in an 1807 “Introductory Lecture to the Chemistry of Nature” he asserts again that the goal of chemistry is the explanation of the changes of nature’s material forms: The order of nature is immediately dependent upon the continual transmutations and changes of external objects. The variety of the forms of things, their unceasing modifications, but for chemistry, would be unintelligible enigmas. The diversities of matter, the causes of its mutations, are perhaps the first amongst the subjects of speculation that press themselves upon the inquisitive mind; and they will likewise be the first to occupy our consideration.20

These comments demonstrate how Davy’s lectures at the RI promoted the particular value of chemistry without reducing it to a narrow specialism. In a flattering nod to his audience, Davy suggests that matter’s diversities are of general interest to “the inquisitive mind,” but he also indicates that the methods of chemistry are the exclusive means of making sense of “the variety of the forms of things.” Discussing the chemical elements, he claims that “amidst their numerous alterations, the chemist is generally  Davy, Elements, 4:1.  Davy, RI MS HD/13H, 29. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 20  Davy, “Introductory Lecture to the Chemistry of Nature,” in Collected Works, 8:168. 18 19

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capable of arresting them, and of examining them in their pure forms, and in their different states of existence.”21 Chemical research is “almost wholly dependent on the minute observation and comparison of properties of things not immediately obvious to the senses,” and these comparative observations in turn depend on the chemist’s skill in manipulating and arresting matter’s unceasing motions.22 Davy’s language indicates that his approach to the study of matter was analytical, concerned with the isolation of its “pure forms” and constituent properties. But experimental analysis had its limitations. In the Elements of Chemical Philosophy Davy notes that, in addition to the “forms of matter which are easily submitted to experiment,” there are “imponderable substances,” “forms of matter which are known to us only in their states of motion when acting upon our organs of sense, or upon other matter, and which are not susceptible of being confined.”23 Inaccessible, in themselves, to experiment, and knowable solely through their effects, these forms of matter can nonetheless be interpreted, in Bruno Latour’s terms, as actants or mediators in Davy’s experimental research, transforming his understanding of chemistry: his identification of several chemical elements in the RI’s laboratory depended on the use of an imponderable—electricity—to decompose compound substances. At the same time, the imponderables’ ambiguous materiality offered Davy a degree of speculative licence, encouraging him to develop theories that outstripped his experimental findings. Writing to the botanist Thomas Andrew Knight in 1809, he posited that “Water is the basis of all the gasses [sic]” and “the only matter without power, & capable according as it receives electrical powers or charge in its electricity of assuming various forms hitherto considered as elementary.”24 In this private communication with another scientific researcher, Davy reiterates, in boldly speculative terms, his view of form as the interaction between matter and physical powers.

 Ibid., 8:169.  Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, in Collected Works, 3:2. 23  Davy, Elements, 4:45–46. 24  Davy to Thomas Andrew Knight, 12 March 1809, http://www.davy-letters.org.uk (accessed 8 March 2019). This website will be superseded by The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 21 22

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He sets out similarly ambitious theories in his poetry, but these typically attribute the arrangement of nature’s forms to a different kind of power. “A Platonic Poem,” for example, written in 1811 or 1812, describes how: The living power of wisdom had gone forth The Eternal power creative;—matter rose In all its forms of order, modelled fair Harmonious as the immortal archetype.25

Employing the same words as his letter to Knight—“matter,” “power,” and “forms”—Davy’s poem sets out not a scientific hypothesis but a religious invocation of a living and eternal wisdom that shapes matter in harmony with an “immortal archetype.” Yet, despite the poem’s title, “form” is not used in its Platonic sense to denote that archetype. Instead, forms remain what they are in Davy’s science writing: plural and mutable configurations of matter. The poem points to a continuity and a distinction between Davy’s chemistry and his poetry: both use descriptions of the motions of material forms as the bases of theoretical conclusions, locating matter’s changes within a wider explanatory framework; but in his poetry the emphasis shifts from physical powers to metaphysical causes. Wordsworth also deploys the observation of forms as the foundation of inductive arguments about the powers or properties inherent within matter. But there are two key differences between his understanding of form and Davy’s: his poetry attends first and foremost to the moral powers of material things; and he typically describes forms as solid and durable rather than dynamic and mutable. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he celebrates “low and rustic life” because “in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”26 The poet’s ability to articulate and strengthen the link between enduring form and subjective feeling is a central tenet of Wordsworth’s argument, in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, for poetry’s distinctive contribution to knowledge. “A Poet’s Epitaph,” for instance, is a sort of manifesto, outlining the capacities of poetry through contrast with the deficiencies of other professions, such as the law, the church, and empirical science: “Physician  Davy, RI MS HD/9, 167. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.  Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 743–44. 25 26

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art thou? One, all eyes, / Philosopher! a fingering slave.” The poem also castigates those thinkers who seek to construct a science of human nature founded on reason: —A Moralist perchance appears; Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod: And He has neither eyes nor ears; Himself his world, and his own God; One to whose smooth-rubb’d soul can cling Nor form nor feeling great nor small, A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All in All!27

The poem’s critique of scientific method focuses at first on the limitations of empiricism: physicians and natural philosophers, “all eyes” (and fingers), attend too narrowly to the objects of sense. The attack on the “Moralist” is launched from the opposite direction: “he has neither eyes nor ears,” and ignores the material conditions that constitute the world around him. Physical science is too empirical, and scientific theory is too abstractly intellectual. Poetry, these stanzas imply, occupies a perfect middle ground between the two, because it recognises the vital connection between form and feeling, or between what Simon Jarvis terms “description” and “prescription.” Throughout Wordsworth’s writing, Jarvis argues, “a norm, or a value, or a meaning, echoes in what is apparently the most naked and simple ‘is’.”28 The poet bases his claims on accurate descriptions of the material forms of nature, but his reading of those forms is not exclusively realist or objective. “A Poet’s Epitaph” denies the natural philosopher access to the affective side of nature’s forms. At times, however, Wordsworth concedes that scientific study might prompt, and be prompted by, powerful feelings. The 1802 version of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads simultaneously aligns and separates the epistemologies of poetry and chemistry: We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and  Wordsworth, “A Poet’s Epitaph,” in Lyrical Ballads, ll. 17–18, 25–32.  Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29. 27 28

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exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this.

Wordsworth indicates that knowledge in general (and, to some extent, poetic knowledge as well) depends both on pleasure and on “general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts,” the inductive method practised by the “Man of Science.” But poetry is not straightforwardly inductive, because it also articulates “immediate knowledge,” a “knowledge which all men carry about with them,” based on “convictions, intuitions, and deductions” and on “sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight.”29 Although Wordsworth accepts that scientific knowledge is motivated by pleasure, he insists that science, as a specialist discipline, is incapable of realising the kind of intuitive and deductive knowledge that distinguishes poetry: the “discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist” are not yet “familiar to us,” the “relations” between them not “manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.”30 By arguing that poetry is both less and more material than science, less subservient to facts but more attuned to the embodied feelings of daily life, Wordsworth establishes a hierarchical distinction between the specialist knowledge of the scientific discoverer and the shared and “immediate knowledge” of poetic feeling. As Brian Goldberg has commented, the poet’s sympathetic interpretation of nature’s forms is “a process that is not yet held as a monopoly by its practitioners and which does not obviously depend on the still-tenuous authority” of science’s “empirical method.”31 Coleridge shared Wordsworth’s concerns about the emotional limitations of that method. Writing about Davy to their mutual friend Robert Southey in 1801, he warns that chemistry dangerously misdirects the feelings of its devotees: We all have obscure feelings that must be connected with some thing or other—the Miser with a guinea—Lord Nelson with a blue Ribbon— Wordsworth’s old Molly with her washing Tub—Wordsworth with the Hills, Lakes, & Trees—all men are poets in their way, tho’ for the most part  Wordsworth, Preface, 752.  Ibid., 753. 31  Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 221. 29 30

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their ways are damned bad ones. Now Chemistry makes a young man associate these feelings with inanimate objects—& that without any moral revulsion, but on the contrary with complete self-approbation.32

For Coleridge, chemistry’s narrow attention to “inanimate objects” is a moral failing. The comparisons here are presumably intended to be favourable to Wordsworth’s poetry: his hills and lakes (and living trees) are animate, or animated by the poet’s feelings, in a way that the miser’s guinea or the young chemist’s materials cannot be. Written soon after Davy’s move from Bristol (where he first met Coleridge and Southey) to London, the letter expresses Coleridge’s concern at his decision to commit himself exclusively to specialist research in the physical sciences. Coleridge remained worried about what he saw as Davy’s materialism, lamenting after he was knighted in 1812 that “H.  Davy is become Sir Humphry Davy, and an Atomist!”33 Coleridge was consistently dismissive of arguments, such as John Dalton’s, for the objective existence of atoms; he wrote in his notebook in 1827 that “an Atom is a Fiction of Science,” a “symbol” or hypothesis “expressing operations of the mind, not representing things.”34 But his criticism of Davy’s atomism is misplaced. Davy tried assiduously to distance himself in his later writings from anything that sounded like materialism, and in Consolations in Travel, written shortly before his death in 1829, he suggests in Coleridgean terms that “the ultimate particles or atoms are mere creations of the imagination.”35 It was perhaps this sort of claim that prompted Coleridge to cite Davy’s chemistry in Aids to Reflection as evidence of “the increasingly dynamic spirit of the physical Sciences now highest in public estimation,” contrasting it with the “dogmatism of the Corpuscular School” of science.36 Coleridge was in two minds about chemistry. Throughout his writings his aversion to its materialism is balanced by a belief in its potential to support 32  Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, 21 October 1801, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 2:768. 33  Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 1, ed. George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 572. 34  Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 5, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), entry 5479. 35  Davy, Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher, in Collected Works, 9:363. 36  Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 395.

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an idealist system of natural philosophy, in which material forms are properly subordinated to “operations of the mind.” In his essays on method in the 1818 edition of The Friend he writes that “the word Nature has been used in two senses, viz. actively and passively; energetic (=forma formans), and material (=forma formata).” The first “signifies the inward principle of whatever is requisite for the reality of a thing, as existent”; the second denotes “the sum total of all things, as far as they are objects of our senses, and consequently of possible experience.”37 These definitions are based on Spinoza’s terms “natura naturans” and “natura naturata”; Coleridge’s rephrasing of Spinoza illustrates the importance of the language of form to Romantic definitions of nature. As Angela Leighton notes, the “difference between ‘forming form’ and ‘formed form’” enables Coleridge to argue that nature is in essence “not a body but an agent. It forms.”38 The Friend sets out a hierarchical relation between “energetic” and “material” nature, valuing “inward principle” above the objects of experience, just as, in his definition of “all, that truly merits the name of Poetry in its most comprehensive sense,” Coleridge insists on the “necessary pre-dominance of the Ideas (i.e. of that which originates in the artist himself) and a comparative indifference of the materials.”39 While Wordsworth and Davy share a monist view of the involved and reciprocal relations between matter and its properties, Coleridge’s understanding of form is rooted in the dualist opposition of matter and mind; as Seamus Perry notes, he “thinks very instinctively in antithetical terms.”40 But he typically presents his antitheses as the preliminaries of a dialectical process of thought; legitimate method points towards, even if it does not attain, unity. For Trevor Levere, “the conviction that both poets and scientists apprehended and created unity in nature through their ideas, which were essentially one with the laws, powers, or causes in nature, was fundamental to Coleridge’s thought.”41 In The Friend Coleridge equates 37  Coleridge, The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara E.  Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:467. 38  Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7. 39  Coleridge, Friend, 1:464. 40  Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 12. 41  Trevor H.  Levere, “‘The Lovely Shapes and Sounds Intelligible’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Humphry Davy, Science and Poetry,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 88.

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chemistry with poetry by suggesting that, despite its focus on inanimate objects, its method depends first and foremost on ideas rather than materials. The “sense of truth,” he argues, resolves and reconciles oppositions: It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Hence the strong hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination. If in Shakespeare we find nature idealized into poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet observant meditation, so through the meditative observation of a Davy, a Woollaston [sic], or a Hatchett;     By some connatural force, Powerful at greatest distance to unite With secret amity things of like kind, we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature.42

The “correspondency of nature” is anticipated and informed by an a priori “principle of connection” within the mind. The observations of chemists such as Davy, William Hyde Wollaston, and Charles Hatchett are meditative rather than empirical, and they reveal an equivalence between the poetic imagination’s “creative power” and the scientific elucidation of the inward principle, the forming form, which directs natural processes. Coleridge tries to enact this equivalence between poetry and science in his own writing by quoting lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost that invoke a unifying and “connatural force.” His quotation of a speech by Milton’s Sin as she revels in news of the fall, however, threatens to subvert his professed admiration of chemistry; it implies that the scientific realisation of poetry in nature may involve a kind of lapse from the ideal to the material. The ambiguity of Coleridge’s juxtaposition of Davy and Milton points to another sense in which the word “form” was significant to poetry and the physical sciences: the question of how arguments based on observations of natural forms were to be communicated in linguistic and textual forms of expression. Although Davy’s fame was founded in part on the eloquence of his lectures at the RI, he worried that the conventions of literary form might distort the accuracy of scientific description. To win the “assent” of others, he complains in a notebook, “we must neglect the forms of nature for the forms of man, the simple expressions of facts for  Coleridge, Friend, 1:471, quoting John Milton, Paradise Lost, 10:246–48.

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the rhetorical & figurative modes of speech of the poetical philosophy.”43 Wordsworth argues for a “contradistinction” between “Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, but he also maintains that poetry, like Davy’s science, benefits from simple and unadorned expression: in his poems, he claims, there is “little of what is usually called poetic diction” and “little falsehood of description.”44 Science writers and poets faced the same difficulty of finding “modes of speech” that were capable of precisely yet persuasively conveying their interpretations of nature. In a formulation which is also relevant to Romantic poetry, Jan Golinski points out that science in the early nineteenth century aimed to construct public knowledge based on data (the subjective observations of a small number of individuals) that were “not public at all.”45 For Wordsworth and Davy, the linguistic issue of how to communicate their knowledge of matter’s forms was as pressing as the epistemological issue of how to read those forms.

2 Davy’s opposition between “the forms of nature” and “the forms of man” is reiterated, to an extent, across the formal structures of his writing. While eighteenth-century writers such as Erasmus Darwin were happy to publish scientific arguments in verse, and while several nineteenth-century science writers quote poetry readily and frequently, Davy tries to differentiate the disciplines of chemistry and poetry, maintaining a firm boundary between them: on one side, he avoids poetic quotation in his science writing; on the other, he uses his poetry to articulate metaphysical speculations that exceed the naturalistic remit of the physical sciences. But, in practice, the details of his language and arguments persistently threaten to undermine this boundary. In his 1807 lecture, for instance, he acknowledges that the inductive scientific method requires a negotiation between matter and mind, the factual and the figurative: Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by 43  Davy, RI MS HD/22A, 29. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 44  Wordsworth, Preface, 750, 747, and 748. 45  Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.

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experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; its governing spirit is analogy,—the relation or resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed.46

To borrow the terms of Robert Mitchell’s summary of the definitions of experiment developed by sociologists of science, Davy considers experiments to be simultaneously “epistemological” and “ontogenetic,” capable of verifying hypotheses and of “creating new assemblages”—new circumstances, properties, and forms of matter.47 He emphasises the ontogenetic potential of experiment throughout his work: in the Syllabus of his 1802 course of lectures on chemistry at the RI, he claims that “the chemist is capable of imitating the operations of nature, and of producing new operations.”48 Andrea Henderson notes that Victorian physicists consistently based their arguments (for example, the undulatory theory) on analogies between different natural forms (such as light and sound) and on analogical figures of speech, because they viewed nature as “a concatenation of patterns and structures” that encompassed “not just thoughts and things but also the relations of thoughts and things to representations of them.”49 Davy’s statements show that analogy was similarly central to Romantic science’s investigations of the changing forms of matter. The physical act of experimentation, of placing nature’s agents “under new circumstances” and “producing new operations,” was methodologically inseparable from the mental act of using analogical comparisons to synthesise and express the findings of experiment. In his poetry Davy puts forward a different perspective on the connection between matter and mind; several of his poems try to merge the inductive methods of physical science with the powerful feelings that Wordsworth and Coleridge argued were misplaced in chemistry. His “Lines Descriptive of Feelings,” published in Southey’s Annual Anthology in 1800, record a visit to his childhood home in Cornwall: “Here first I  Davy, “Introductory Lecture,” 8:167–68.  Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 18. 48  Davy, A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Royal Institution, 1802), 3. 49  Andrea K. Henderson, Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 129–30. 46 47

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woo’d thee Nature, in the forms / Of majesty and freedom.” Davy’s poem argues that the process of youthful psychological development is directed by an affective connection to nature’s forms, but it combines this Wordsworthian stance with an arguably scientific description of those forms: Here first my serious spirit learnt to trace The mystic laws, from whose high energy The moving atoms in eternal change Still rise to animation.50

In claiming that nature’s laws are manifested in the traceable movements of (objectively real) atoms, this poem aligns itself with the materialism of Davy’s early science writing. But it also incorporates several aspects of the broader definition of chemistry to which Davy adhered throughout his career: its observation of the changing states of matter; its focus on the hidden properties of things that are accessible solely to skilled chemists; and its “serious spirit,” its disinterested attention to the facts and forms of nature. To an extent, the poem joins Davy’s other writings in supporting the view of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison that “the emergence of scientific objectivity in the mid-nineteenth century necessarily goes hand in glove with the emergence of scientific subjectivity,” the disciplined persona of the scientific professional.51 But Davy’s career predates this emergence, and his poem also makes room for a Wordsworthian subjectivity whose knowledge is dependent on feelings of pleasure and admiration (“I woo’d thee Nature”).52 In his biography of Davy, Golinski argues that, with no established model of scientific subjectivity to guide him at the start of the century, Davy approached his career as a series of “experiments in selfhood” that were constructed in part through his “experiments in authorship of various textual genres.”53 Davy’s writing of verse offered 50  Davy, “Lines Descriptive of Feelings,” in The Annual Anthology, ed. Robert Southey (London: Longman and Rees, 1800), 294. 51  Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 197. 52  The poem is also informed by what Tim Fulford describes as the “avowedly radical” records of experiments that Davy composed while working with Beddoes in Bristol, which deliberately “foregrounded, in their narrative voice and form as well as their content, the effects of individual subjectivity on experimental results.” Fulford, “Science and Poetry in 1790s Somerset: The Self-Experiment Narrative, the Aeriform Effusion, and the Greater Romantic Lyric,” ELH 85 (2018): 89. 53  Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 158.

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him a means of experimenting with and displaying personality traits, such as sensibility and philosophical ambition, which he considered important in promoting the cultural legitimacy and public utility of his chemistry. And this strategy remained relevant to constructions of scientific subjectivity throughout the century, as researchers and science communicators used the writing and quoting of poetry to refute charges of narrow specialism and heartless materialism. Davy’s recognition of the value of sensibility to science was countered by his distrust of poetry’s reliance on rhetorical and figurative modes of speech. In one of his notebooks he asserts that: Words will change, taste must be modified; the works of Genius of one Nation can never be justly estimated by another nation. The Visions of the poet the sublime speculations of the orator; all the mighty combinations of words which constitute the spirit & life of our intellectual communications will at some period be remembered no more. But the language of exp[erimen]t is universally intelligible & the truths it conveys can never be forgotten. In our imitation of Nature we have proceeded so far as to be able to produce if not a correct copy a beautiful imitation in which as in the work of a great artist not only the form is expressed but likewise the living power.54

The opposition set out here is not between subjectivity and objectivity or the arts and the sciences, but specifically between words and experiments. The truths of chemistry are not just “universally intelligible” but also beautiful; like an artistic depiction of nature, the experimental method reveals and conveys both the visible form and the “living power” of any natural phenomenon. Experiment is its own language, which, because it imitates nature, is immune to the vicissitudes of spoken and written language that distort and delimit the “Visions of the poet.” Davy’s note reverses Wordsworth’s argument in his 1802 Preface: poetic knowledge, confined within the ephemeral medium of words, is local and temporary; scientific knowledge is universal and permanent. Davy found this opposition difficult to sustain. In the same notebook he wrote the first draft of a poem that simultaneously highlights the differences and the similarities between his experimental research and the “sublime speculations” of which he is critical in his note. While his science writing records his analyses of the physical powers that underpin natural 54  Davy, RI MS HD/13C, 94–95. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

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processes, this poem uses descriptions of the same processes as the inductive basis of an explanation of matter’s metaphysical powers. Like Wordsworth, Davy frequently revised his poetry, as he searched for a form of words that might articulate the metaphysical significance of his observations of nature, and he returned to this particular poem throughout his life.55 Its first iteration, a manuscript titled “The Spinosist” and written in 1800, starts with a monist argument for the interconnection of mutable matter and immortal mind: Lo o’er the earth the kindling spirits pour The spark seeds of life that bounteous mighty nature gives.— The liquid dew becomes the rosy flower The sordid dust awakes & moves & lives.— All, All is change, the renovated forms Of ancient things arise & live again. The light of suns, the angry breath of storms The everlasting motions of the main Are but the engines of that powerful will.— The eternal link of thoughts whose firm resolves Have ever acted & are acting still.— Whilst age round age & world round world revolves.56

In these lines the thoughts of “bounteous nature” are realised in the transformations of matter, “the renovated forms / Of ancient things.” The relation between them is difficult to pin down in the language of Davy’s poem: the word “engines” implies that material changes might be interpreted either as the constitutive impulses or as the mechanical instruments of “that powerful will.” But the form of his verse endorses Spinoza’s view of the ontological parity of matter and thought, in which “the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that.”57 The 55  Sharon Ruston discusses the composition history of this poem in “From ‘The Life of the Spinosist’ to ‘Life’: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet,” in Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities, ed. Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 77–97. For complete transcriptions of Davy’s poetic manuscripts, see Wahida Amin, “The Poetry and Science of Humphry Davy” (PhD thesis, University of Salford, 2013). 56  Davy, “The Spinosist,” RI MS HD/13C, 7. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 57  Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 451.

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rhythmic fluctuations of matter—the sea’s “everlasting motions,” the temporal and spatial cycles of astronomy, “the light of suns” (which Davy characterises in his 1802 Syllabus, with a nod to the experiments of Thomas Young, as “the undulatory motion of an elastic ethereal medium extended through space”)—are enacted in the rhythms of Davy’s verse, and the equivalence between this perpetual mutability and “the eternal link of thoughts” is encapsulated in the rhyme of “resolves” with “revolves.”58 Davy recycled some of this poem’s argument and language in his Elements of Chemical Philosophy, commenting that “the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates;” and that “elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower.”59 But the scientific legitimacy of this kind of expression was precarious. Young, in a notice of Davy’s book in the Quarterly Review, remarks on its “ornamented and popular style of expression and embellishment,” and advises that it contains “a multitude of sentimental reflections, and appeals to the feelings, which many will think beauties, and some only prettinesses,” and which are “indifferent to the immediate object” of Davy’s chemical research.60 For Young, Davy’s style, which relies too heavily on embellished forms of expression, is not suitable to a scientific treatise. Davy’s notebooks reveal that he shared this concern about rhetorical and ornamented language, but in “The Spinosist” he puts forward reflections that are not just sentimental but also boldly metaphysical: perhaps, then, the conventions of poetry legitimised in his mind the sort of speculative language that the discursive standards of nineteenth-­ century science were starting to disavow. The poem builds on Spinoza’s monist philosophy to suggest that thoughts, as well as material forms, are unceasingly mutable: Linked to the whole the human mind displays No sameness & no deep identity divine Changeful as is the surface of the seas Impressible as is the blue & moving sky To scattered thoughts some unknown laws are given By which they join & move in circling life.  Davy, Syllabus, 56–57.  Davy, Elements, 4:43. 60  Thomas Young, review of Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Quarterly Review 8 (1812): 85–86. 58 59

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Being of aggregate the power of the love Gives it the life the joy of moments, bids it rise In the wild forms of mortal things to move Fixd to the earth below the eternal skies.61

This link between nature and the human mind is to some extent similar to the vital connection of objective form and subjective feeling propounded by Wordsworth. But, although the convoluted syntax of Davy’s draft seems to identify the mind as part of a “being” or “power of love” that permeates nature, the poem departs from Wordsworth’s belief in the immutability of the relation between things and feelings. Instead, reasoning by analogy from his knowledge of the transmutations of matter in chemical processes, Davy argues that mind also displays “no sameness and no deep identity.” The “unknown laws” of nature dictate that thoughts move in “the wild forms of mortal things,” which are simultaneously “fixd” and changeful, material and dynamic. These lines commence a list of infinitives which, at the end of the poem, figures human life as one facet of the inexorable process of change that constitutes nature: To live in forests mingled with the whole Of natures forms. to die beneath upon feel the breezes play O’er the parched forehead brow to see the planets roll oer their grey head their life diffusing ray To die in agony & In many days To give to Nature all her stolen powers Ethereal fire to feed the solar rays Ethereal dew to feed the earth in showers.62

“The Spinosist” shifts here from a metaphysical to a physical stance: the terminology of thoughts and spirits in the opening lines is replaced by a naturalistic depiction of death as a redistribution of matter and ethereal (or imponderable) powers. This turn troubled Coleridge: commenting on the poem in a letter, he warns Davy that “the last stanza introduces confusion into my mind, and despondency—& has besides been so often said by the Materialists &c, that it is not worth repeating.” Anticipating his later criticism of Davy’s atomism, Coleridge worries that the poem’s analysis of  Davy, “Spinosist,” 8.  Ibid., 9–10.

61 62

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thought and life as temporary arrangements of nature’s “stolen powers” is depressingly reductive. Nonetheless, he writes, “but for the last Stanza, I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural & beautiful words with strict philosophic Truths, i.e. scientifically philosophic.”63 Coleridge’s clarification raises more questions than it answers: he may mean that Davy’s poem is scientifically as well as philosophically correct, or he may mean that it is “philosophic” in a narrowly scientific sense, attending too exclusively to the materiality of nature’s forms and disregarding the priority of their (ideal) forming principles. Later versions of this poem reflect the older Davy’s philosophical conservatism. Sharon Ruston suggests that “the poem evolves from a youthful materialism to a more orthodox Christianity,” but Davy’s position in “The Spinosist” is better characterised as monist, emphasising the identity of matter and mind, rather than exclusively materialist.64 Perhaps surprisingly, the version of the poem that he published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1806 keeps the final stanza that Coleridge criticised as materialist, but the argument of the poem as a whole is transformed: To live in forests mingled with the whole   Of natural forms, whose generations rise In lovely change, in happy order roll   On land, in ocean, in the glittering skies:— Their harmony to trace—Th’ Eternal Cause   To know in love, in reverence to adore— To bend beneath the inevitable law,   Sinking in death; its human strength no more:—65

These stanzas argue, in keeping with Davy’s writings on chemistry, that natural laws are traceable through the observation and inductive interpretation of “natural forms.” The poem’s focus, however, is not on the physical properties of those forms but on their metaphysical origins. In a strategy that was widely adopted by poets writing in response to physical  Coleridge to Davy, 9 October 1800, in Collected Letters, 1:630.  Ruston, “Chemist and Poet,” 78. 65  Davy, “By Mr. Davy,” Gentleman’s Magazine 76 (1806): 1148. This version of the poem was located by Sam Illingworth. See Illingworth, A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and their Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 63 64

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science in the nineteenth century, Davy deploys poetic form as an expression of the order that he perceives in nature. The stanzas’ regular pentameter quatrains and perfect rhymes (with the exception of “cause” and “law,” which is an error for “laws”) exemplify the poem’s religious certitude.66 They present the ordered mutability or “lovely change” of natural and poetic forms as proof of the universe’s providential uniformity, and of the beneficence of an “Eternal Cause” which is more closely aligned to the Christian God than to the “eternal link of thoughts” of “The Spinosist.” In its emphasis on nature’s “happy order,” the poem dispenses with the manuscript’s denial of the human mind’s “deep identity” and replaces it with a sustained expression of Wordsworthian natural piety. Reverence for God is directly linked to poetry in a simile at the start of the poem, as Davy examines the forms and processes of nature: These are but engines of th’ Eternal Will,   The One Intelligence; whose potent sway Has ever acted, and is acting still,   Whilst stars, and worlds, and systems, all obey: Without whose power, the whole of mortal things   Were dull, inert, an unharmonious band; Silent as are the harp’s untuned strings   Without the touches of the Poet’s hand.67

These stanzas renounce the monism of “The Spinosist,” asserting instead that natural phenomena are directed by, rather than equivalent to, the thinking aspect of the universe. In an unambiguously dualist argument, “mortal things” are presented as inert, their activity and significance dependent on the “Eternal Will.” The poem’s argument and form support Roger Sharrock’s view that Davy “wrote the sort of second order verse” which “combines a workmanlike effort in the fashionable mode of expression of the age with relevance to the main current of its thought.”68 Davy sets out a conventional analogy between divine power and the work of

66  In a version of the poem that Davy printed privately in 1808, “law” is corrected to “laws.” See John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, in Collected Works, 1:116. 67  Davy, “By Mr. Davy,” 1148. 68  Roger Sharrock, “The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 17 (1962): 58.

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“the Poet’s hand,” identifying both as more regulatory than creative: the poet tunes the harp’s strings, and the “One Intelligence” controls the systems of the universe. And the studied regularity of his poem’s stanzas acts as a formal illustration of that analogy. Another iteration of the poem, published in an 1823 volume of verse edited by Joanna Baillie, insists just as firmly that nature’s changes are harmonised within a providential order: “matter’s fairest forms / And genial powers,” Davy writes, “are engines of Eternal Will, / For good and useful ends.”69 The teleological optimism of these lines constitutes a thoroughly orthodox interpretation of matter, in keeping with Davy’s socially prestigious position in the 1820s as President of the Royal Society. The different titles of his poem—“The Spinosist” in 1800, “By Mr. Davy” in 1806, and “Life” in 1823—reflect the development, across his career, of his philosophical confidence and conservatism: the poem moves from a radical and marginal philosophical position to a personal effusion by a renowned man of science and then to a comprehensive theory of life. Its different versions share, though, a belief that, in poetry, metaphysical arguments can be inductively extrapolated from observations of nature’s active powers and material forms. Davy was at times prepared to make similar arguments in his public pronouncements about science. In his “Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry” delivered at the RI in 1802, he says of the student of chemistry: “from observing in the relations of inanimate things fitness and utility, he will reason with deeper reverence concerning beings possessing life” and “the designs of a perfect intelligence.”70 This kind of natural theological association of matter with providential design was rhetorically useful in rebutting the charges of materialism sometimes levelled at the physical sciences. Davy’s reticence about articulating such metaphysical reflections in his science writing, however, prompted him to turn to poetry to voice his changing convictions about the fundamental cause of the “relations of inanimate things.” He also addresses this issue in the prose of Consolations in Travel, published posthumously in 1830. Structured as a series of dialogues, the text is nonetheless dominated by the voice of “the Unknown,” a preternaturally wise chemist who shares his insights with his companions as they 69  Davy, “Life,” in A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors, ed. Joanna Baillie (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 156–57. 70  Davy, “A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,” in Collected Works, 2:326.

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travel around Europe. He advises them that “the true chemical philosopher sees good in all the diversified forms of the external world”; his “sublime occupation” is “to measure and weigh those invisible atoms, which, by their motions and changes according to laws impressed upon them by the Divine Intelligence, constitute the universe of things.”71 The experimental measurement of matter, he suggests, leads directly to a recognition of the divine. And the study of chemistry brings other benefits too: Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feelings; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they likewise 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.72

Writing in the months before his death, Davy summarily resolves the distinctions—between knowledge and sensibility, fact and analogy, the specialist analysis of “minute forms” and the admiration of nature’s magnificence—that had shaped his views on chemistry and poetry throughout his career. Kurtis Hessel argues that this resolution is made possible by the “generic admixture” of Consolations in Travel; incorporating aspects of “the philosophical dialogue, the travel narrative,” and “the scientific treatise,” Davy’s text rejects the “disciplinary divide” between the arts and the sciences.73 But Davy himself positioned Consolations in Travel on one side of that divide, describing it in a letter to his wife Jane as “philosophical poetry though not in metre.”74 This generic label suggests that, for him, “philosophical poetry” was the form of expression best suited to negotiating between physical science and metaphysical argument. Wordsworth agreed, but in his view metre was an essential mediator in that negotiation. While Davy typically identified figurative and speculative language, rather than metre, as poetry’s defining characteristic, Wordsworth insisted that it was not possible to separate poetic philosophy from poetic form.

 Davy, Consolations in Travel, 9:361.  Ibid., 9:361–62. 73  Kurtis Hessel, “Humphry Davy’s Intergalactic Travel: Catching Sight of Another Genre,” Studies in Romanticism 54 (2015): 58–59. Hessel sets out a similar argument about Davy’s RI lectures in “The Romantic-Era Lecture: Dividing and Reuniting the Arts and Sciences,” Configurations 24 (2016): 501–32. 74  Davy to Jane Davy, 14 July 1828, http://www.davy-letters.org.uk. 71 72

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3 The question of how humans read the forms of nature, of what happens when they build arguments on the basis of the experience of materiality, recurs throughout Wordsworth’s unfinished project The Recluse. Take, for example, these lines, written in 1798 to describe the Pedlar (later the Wanderer in The Excursion), but then recast in the first person and incorporated into the third book of The Prelude: From deep analogies by thought supplied, Or consciousnesses not to be subdued, To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, I gave a moral life, I saw them feel, Or link’d them to some feeling: the great mass Lay bedded in a quickening soil, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning.75

Expressing Wordsworth’s habitual philosophical ambivalence, these lines switch between active constructions (“I gave”), which suggest that the “moral life” of material forms is supplied (in a Coleridgean fashion) by an a priori power of the mind, and contrasting statements (“I saw them feel”) which indicate that his interpretation of those forms is founded on the empirical observation of properties inherent within them. Adam Potkay has pointed out that, when Wordsworth writes about material things, his “style allows for maximal possibilities of interconnection with minimal clarification of who or what is acting or being acted on.”76 The repetition of “or,” for instance, maintains a balance between the alternatives of subjectivity and objectivity, and it is possible to argue that these lines dissolve the subject/object binary, redistributing agency across an ontologically flat network of actants. Tristram Wolff reads the exchange between matter and mind here as reciprocal: while the lines are “spiritualizing,” they also register an “absorption of a kind of inorganicism from stone’s substance, a confrontation with forms of insensibility that then start to seep in.”77 75  Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude (1805), ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3:122–29. 76  Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 80–81. 77  Tristram Wolff, “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic,” ELH 84 (2017): 626.

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The texture of the verse highlights the substantiality not just of stone but of nature in general: the hyperstressed listing of “form, rock, fruit or flower,” and the line-ending spondaic emphasis on “great mass,” dramatises Wordsworth’s belief that moral feeling is grounded in the tangible materiality of natural and poetic forms. This grounding is realised through analogy and, Wordsworth goes on to explain, through the activity of his “eye,” “looking for the shades of difference / As they lie hid in all exterior forms.”78 His vocabulary is strikingly similar to Davy’s, and another way of reading these lines is as a description of an inductive method comparable to that of the physical sciences. The observation of “exterior forms”; the discriminating comparison of their differences; the perception of an “inward meaning” hidden from most people; and the use of analogical thinking to reach speculative conclusions: if Davy heard this when Wordsworth “read a part of the Recluse to him” (presumably some, rather than all, of the recently finished Thirteen-Book Prelude) in 1805, then he may have noted a resemblance between his science and Wordsworth’s response to nature.79 But the emphasis of Wordsworth’s language is on the subjective act of analogical thinking rather than on the properties of the material forms being compared; he offers no specific examples of the analogies and differences that he finds in nature. According to Onno Oerlemans, Romantic “lyric is a key form of the exploration of the otherness of the material or the ground of being,” because “it can allow for the ostensive moment,” for a condensed and figurative use of language that directly demonstrates the intransigent reality of matter. But lyric also reveals that “it is finally impossible to achieve” this demonstration, because “language is the medium of consciousness, and thus poetry offers no final escape from the self.”80 For Oerlemans, the characteristic philosophical position of Romantic verse is a materialism frustrated by the inherent idealism of language. He reads these particular lines, though, as deliberately idealist; they record Wordsworth’s “faith in his own ability to find a continuity between the physical realm and his imagination which he seems unproblematically  Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 3:156 and 158–59.  Dorothy Wordsworth to Margaret Beaumont, 27 October 1805, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Alan G. Hill, Mary Moorman, and Chester L. Shaver, 8 vols., 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–93), 1:634. 80  Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 21. 78 79

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to allow is a matter of deliberate projection.”81 This interpretation is supported by Wordsworth’s revision, in the text of The Prelude published in 1850, of “quickening soil” to “quickening soul.”82 The alteration of a single letter does a lot of work, transforming the earthy materiality of the 1805 lines into an animating and informing spirit. The range of readings invited by these lines suggests that their idealism is not as unproblematic as Oerlemans claims. Nonetheless, at times, Wordsworth unequivocally acknowledged the appeal of idealism’s emphasis on the autonomy and priority of (the poet’s) mind. In the Preface to the 1815 edition of his poems he argues that the limitations of a focus on nature’s materiality are revealed in the poets “of ancient Greece and Rome”: “the anthropomorphitism of the Pagan religion subjected the minds of the greatest poets in those countries too much to the bondage of definite form.”83 Their slavish imitation of external forms is contrasted with the synthetic power of the imagination: “when the Imagination frames a comparison,” Wordsworth writes, its “truth” depends “less upon outline of form and feature than upon expression and effect, less upon casual and outstanding, than upon inherent and internal, properties.”84 This argument is in striking contrast to Wordsworth’s position in “A Poet’s Epitaph” and The Prelude, in which the poetic and moral value of nature’s forms is bound up with their materiality, their definite and abiding presence to the senses. In 1815 he divorces poetry from material form; his claim that poetic comparisons are based on “expression and effect” rather than “form and feature” aligns the imagination with Davy’s “forms of man” and separates it from the fact-based analogies of science. “The materials of Poetry” may be “cast, by means of various moulds, into divers forms,” but those forms are independent of the forms of nature.85 The Coleridgean idealism of the 1815 Preface may have been a reaction to Coleridge’s criticism of The Excursion (1814), the sole substantial part of The Recluse published in Wordsworth’s lifetime. Coleridge had expected to find in The Recluse “true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism,

 Ibid., 61.  Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.  J. B.  Owen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 3:134. 83  Wordsworth, Preface (1815), in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 638. 84  Ibid., 639–40. 85  Ibid., 633. 81 82

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& Realism refining itself into Idealism.”86 He was perhaps guided in that expectation by the definition of poetic form set out in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth writes that metre exists in verse as “the co-­ presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state.” He emphasises the way in which this “intertexture of ordinary feeling” regulates the “passion” expressed in poetry, but it has an epistemological as well as an emotional purpose. In 1802, when Wordsworth added his discussion of the differences between poetic and scientific knowledge to the Preface, he also elaborated on his definition of metre, commenting that, while it is representative of “ordinary feeling,” it also tends “to divest language in a certain degree of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition.”87 The coincidence of these two revisions suggests that, for Wordsworth, metre acts as a formal articulation of the deductive knowledge “which all men carry about with them” in “daily life,” and which he distinguishes from the inductive and esoteric knowledge of science. Metre, at the same time empirical and spiritualising, imbues any theme addressed by the poet with something of the immediacy of poetic knowledge, which is both a posteriori and a priori, realist and idealist: it is communicated through the contemplation of facts, but it is founded on innate intuitions. Wordsworth, according to Susan Wolfson, situates “aesthetic work along routes of commerce between abstract principle and specific event, so that metaphysical form, embodied form, and poetic form might have open congress with one another in a capacious mimesis.”88 But the mimesis of The Excursion is founded on an understanding of form that prioritises the material ahead of the metaphysical, and this maybe explains why Coleridge interpreted the poem as exclusively and frustratingly realist. While Davy’s poetic forms (and the verse forms of several other nineteenth-century writers) aim to embody the laws, either physical or divine, that subtend nature, Wordsworth’s blank verse records and restages the process through which the mind identifies moral properties within material forms. The development of moral sympathy with nature involves tracing both the analogies and the contrasts between the human and the non-human; the  Coleridge to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, in Collected Letters, 4:575.  Wordsworth, Preface, 755. 88  Susan J.  Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 22. 86 87

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process is therefore another example of “the perception of similitude in dissimilitude” which Wordsworth invokes in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads as “the great spring of the activity of our minds” and of “the pleasure received from metrical language”: “upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings.”89 In the blank verse of The Excursion, poised between uniformity and rhythmic irregularity, Wordsworth tries to enact both the apprehension of unity and the analysis of difference on which an accurate and sympathetic interpretation of nature depends. In his Preface to The Excursion Wordsworth describes The Recluse as “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.”90 The mode of philosophising presented in the dialogues of The Excursion is, as Sally Bushell points out, “performative, that is, concerned with the way in which moral ideas can best be communicated as much as with the ideas themselves.”91 The poem communicates its conviction of the moral link between humans and nature in its metre and in the syntactic and rhetorical patterns of its characters’ voices, especially that of the Wanderer. But it balances this self-conscious attention to language with a sustained focus on matter, and specifically on the recognition of the “active principle” that “subsists / In all things” (9:3–5). This recognition is to some extent empiricist and inductive, and John Wyatt has shown that The Excursion’s integration of scrupulous observation with earnest eloquence had an important influence on the professional self-definitions of British scientists in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.92 Despite Coleridge’s concerns about the poem’s realism, however, its stance towards nature balances induction with intuition, and the Wanderer, who monopolises its discussions of science, persistently emphasises his reservations about scientific methods. Tim Fulford identifies The Excursion and Davy’s similarly dialogic Consolations in Travel as “works in which the author’s multiple loyalties—his affiliation to several discourses that do not necessarily dovetail—are spread across several speakers, without any one

 Wordsworth, Preface, 756.  See Wordsworth, Excursion, 38. 91  Sally Bushell, Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 14. 92  John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–104. See also Daniel Brown, “William Rowan Hamilton and William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Science,” Studies in Romanticism 51 (2012): 475–501. 89 90

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having to be wholly endorsed.”93 But while the dialogues of Wordsworth’s poem interrogate the relation between poetry and science, they also endorse one of these discourses ahead of the other: science is assigned a legitimate but secondary role in the poem’s epistemology, subordinate to poetry’s knowledge of the moral sympathies active within natural forms. In the eighth book of The Excursion the Wanderer gives science what he considers its due, applauding the industrial developments made possible by scientific knowledge:              “I exult, Casting reserve away, exult to see An Intellectual mastery exercised O’er the blind Elements; a purpose given, A perseverance fed; almost a soul Imparted—to brute Matter. I rejoice, Measuring the force of those gigantic powers, Which by the thinking Mind have been compelled To serve the Will of feeble-bodied Man.” (8:201–9)

Davy, in his 1802 Discourse at the RI, argued that chemistry enables “man” to “modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by experiments to interrogate nature with power,” “as a master.”94 The Wanderer uses the terminology of chemistry to announce, similarly, that industry and physical science have established an “Intellectual mastery” over the “blind Elements” and “gigantic powers” of nature. His exultation at humans’ ability to harness and quantify those powers is voiced in the inverted stresses on the first syllables of “Casting” and “Measuring,” examples of what Wordsworth describes in a letter to John Thelwall as a “dislocation of the verse” which is “justified” not by the regular “passion of metre” but by the idiosyncratic “passion of the subject.”95 In these lines the Wanderer attributes to science’s specialist knowledge of “brute Matter” the kind of moral and practical value that Wordsworth typically ascribes to the passionate knowledge conveyed in metre. However, he also claims (in the words of the introductory argument to the eighth book) that “physical science” is “unable to support itself,” and 93  Fulford, “The Volcanic Humphry Davy,” in The Regency Revisited, ed. Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 142. 94  Davy, “Discourse,” 2:319. 95  Wordsworth to John Thelwall, January 1804, in Letters, 1:434.

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the rhythms of these lines highlight the dualism, the opposition between matter and mind, that informs his criticism of science.96 The otherness of materiality acts as a kind of metrical stumbling block, as the spondee of the first two syllables of “brute Matter,” buttressed by lineation and punctuation, impedes the flow of the Wanderer’s oratory: “almost a soul / Imparted—to brute Matter.” In contrast, hesitancy and qualification disappear in the assured voice and regular iambic pentameter of line 209, which celebrates the hierarchical subordination of matter (and the “feeble” body) to the agency of the will. The problem with physical science, in the Wanderer’s opinion, is that it subverts this hierarchy, privileging material above moral concerns: “How insecure, how baseless in itself, Is that Philosophy, whose sway is framed For mere material instruments:—how weak Those Arts, and high Inventions, if unpropped By Virtue.” (8:225–29)

These reiterative clauses typify the rhetoric of repetition that characterises the Wanderer’s speeches throughout The Excursion. The tone of this rhetoric is relentlessly and exasperatingly didactic, but the Wanderer’s repetitions are nonetheless (in theory) an apt expression of Wordsworth’s belief that poetry articulates a “knowledge which all men carry about with them.” As Peter McDonald puts it, “The Excursion becomes the moralistic counterpart” for the poet’s “own distinctive experience of verse, as a constant reminding.”97 Wordsworth advised Coleridge that his goal in The Excursion was “rather to remind men of their knowledge, as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds, than to attempt to convey recondite or refined truths.”98 The Wanderer, accordingly, insists on the value of the mind’s a priori knowledge of virtue, while censuring what he sees as the recondite materialism of physical science. He also argues that an attention to nature’s materiality can offer a corrective to materialism, both scientific and social. In the poem’s pivotal fourth book, “Despondency Corrected,” the Wanderer sets out his prescription for the ennui of the Solitary, and of an industrial society which,  See Wordsworth, Excursion, 46.  Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66. 98  Wordsworth to Coleridge, 22 May 1815, in Letters, 3:238. 96 97

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in its pursuit of intellectual and economic improvement, confines people in schools and factories and “Blocks out the forms of Nature” (8:290). He promises that “the Man” who         “communes with the Forms Of Nature, who with understanding heart, Doth know and love, such Objects as excite No morbid passions, no disquietude, No vengeance, and no hatred, needs must feel The joy of that pure principle of love So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose But seek for objects of a kindred love In Fellow-natures, and a kindred joy.” (4:1201–11)

The direct experience of natural objects, the Wanderer contends, leads inexorably to a knowledge of the affective kinship between the forms of nature and the “Fellow-natures” of other people, in a process which is comparable to that described in Wordsworth’s lines on the “deep analogies” between material form and moral feeling. The analogy here, though, is based not on the comparison of the “shades of difference” hidden within forms, but on the Wanderer’s a priori conviction of what Paul Fry terms “the ontic unity of all things, including human things,” the ontological equivalence of inanimate objects and human beings.99 The lines on analogy were perhaps relocated to The Prelude because they were too analytical for the Wanderer, too reliant on the observation of the particularising details of things. The Wanderer’s advice, conversely, promotes a method that Jonathan Farina defines as a “taxonomic affect,” a “feeling of contiguity with other entities” which is nurtured through a “reaching for distinctions that are not divisions.”100 The human and the non-human are distinct, but they are also “kindred”; the metrical regularity of these lines articulates a connection between matter and mind that is founded not on hierarchy, as it is in The Excursion’s eighth book, but on similitude. The sympathetic aim of the Wanderer’s passionate knowledge is encapsulated in his use of the adjective “exquisite” (etymologically, “sought out”), which is another instance of his partiality for the prefix “ex” (“exult,”  Fry, What We Are, 6.  Jonathan Farina, “The Excursion and ‘the Surfaces of Things’,” Wordsworth Circle 45 (2014): 99 and 102. 99

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“exercised,” “excite”), for diction that articulates the understanding heart’s outgoing determination to commune with, rather than to analyse, other things. The Wanderer’s belief in the equivalence of the human and non-human objects of his love sits awkwardly next to the Anglican theology propounded in much of The Excursion. Some readers of the poem thought that its attempt to balance these two positions was not convincingly orthodox. Wordsworth was at pains to correct them, insisting, in effect, that the dualism of book eight trumped the monism of book four. Although there is “something” in the poem’s philosophy, he wrote in 1815, “ordinarily but absurdly called Spinosistic,” the forms of nature invoked in The Excursion are really “analogies and types of infinity […] which I have transfused into that Poem from the Bible of the Universe.”101 William Hazlitt offered a different reading of the poem’s negotiation between the material and the ideal. Highlighting its “superstitious awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of Nature,” he suggests in his review of The Excursion that Wordsworth feels less sympathy for human than for non-human beings. The poet “scans the human race as the naturalist measures the earth’s zone, without attending to the picturesque points of view, the inequalities of surface”: “The common and the permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities.”102 Hazlitt recognises that, despite its dialogic form, The Excursion promotes a normative theory of human psychology, in which knowledge, love, and moral principles are founded uniformly on sensory experience of nature. His simile sets up an equivalence between the poem’s moral philosophy and the generalising theories of natural philosophy, and in the fourth book the Wanderer too suggests that his readings of nature and those of science are to some extent complementary. If people learn to “read / Their duties in all forms” (4:1235–36),            “Science then Shall be a precious Visitant; and then, And only then, be worthy of her name. For then her Heart shall kindle; her dull Eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery;  Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, January 1815, in Letters, 3:188.  William Hazlitt, review of The Excursion, in William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage (1793–1820), ed. Robert Woof (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 369–70. 101 102

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But taught with patient interest to watch The processes of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most noble use, Its most illustrious province, must be found In furnishing clear guidance, a support Not treacherous, to the Mind’s excursive Power.” (4:1247–59)

In these lines, as is often the case in the Wanderer’s speeches, Wordsworth deploys his practice of metrical dislocation, expressive of the “passion of the subject,” in the service of partial and polemical rhetoric, as the consecutive stresses and repetitions of “dull Eye, / Dull” relentlessly voice the Wanderer’s conviction that scientific observation constitutes a kind of mental slavery to external things. This is not, though, an argument for dualism: echoing Coleridge’s criticism of chemistry in his letter to Southey, the Wanderer censures a focus on objects not because matter is in itself inert but because science misinterprets it as inanimate. This sort of dull science is represented in The Excursion by the Solitary’s desultory pile of “mechanic tools” (2:691) and by the classifications of the geologist described in the third book, who studies rocks using “A chip, or splinter,—to resolve his doubts’ and “with that ready answer satisfied, / Doth to the substance give some barbarous name” (3:187–89). The Wanderer advises that science attend not to things themselves but to “the processes of things,” presumably because a knowledge of matter’s physical powers can support (perhaps through analogy) the mind’s excursive communication with the sympathies and duties that are also active in nature’s forms. The characterisation of science as a “precious Visitant” recalls Wordsworth’s wish, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, to “welcome” scientific knowledge “as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.”103 The Wanderer’s repetition of “then,” however, emphasises that this welcome is conditional, dependent on science’s recognition of the epistemological priority of moral duties over physical processes. At present, the Wanderer claims, men of science are little better than “bewildered Pagans” (4:930):          “Shall Men for whom our Age Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared,

103

 Wordsworth, Preface, 753.

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To explore the world without and world within, Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious Souls— Whom Earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And They who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or analysed The thinking principle—shall They in fact Prove a degraded Race?” (4: 940–50)

Metrically, these lines are perhaps as close as Wordsworth gets in The Excursion to the typical formal approach of nineteenth-century poetry about physical science, in which the regularity of metre is used to enact and represent the ordered and quantifiable processes that constitute nature. But the Wanderer’s admiration of the “Ambitious Souls” who explain “the processes of things” is checked by his concern about the moral and emotional failings of science, and his reference to “They who rather dive than soar” indicates that Wordsworth may have viewed Davy’s chemistry, among other physical and mental sciences, as guilty of those failings. Davy often defined chemistry as the investigation of the properties hidden with inanimate things, and some of his most widely publicised research involved the solving or analysis of matter into its elementary substances. The Wanderer cautions that this kind of experimentation, diving through matter’s obscure recesses, risks degrading those who practise it, because its analytical method disregards and destroys the moral feelings that are realised through a more direct interaction with the forms of nature. The Wanderer’s speeches imply an opposition—between a science that interrogates the hidden processes of matter and a poetry that communes with visible and tangible forms—that was reiterated by poets throughout the century. His criticisms of scientific analysis suggest that, in this published portion of The Recluse, Wordsworth wanted to announce a firm preference for the methods of poetry over those of science. The distinction between them is less straightforward, though, in some of The Recluse’s unpublished verse. For example, the 1826 fragment “Composed when a Probability Existed of our Being Obliged to Quit Rydal Mount as a Residence” ends with an analogy based on Wordsworth’s observation of the surface of the stream flowing near his home, which reflects the profusion of the stream’s banks:

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           So (if Truths The highest condescend to be set forth By processes minute) even so—when thought Wins help from something greater than herself— Is the firm basis of habitual sense Supplanted, not for treacherous vacancy And blank dissociation from a world We love, but that the Residues of flesh, Mirrored, yet not too strictly, may refine To Spirit; for the idealizing Soul Time wear the features of Eternity; And Nature deepen into Nature’s God.104

The natural theological claim that the study of nature can deepen into an apprehension of “Nature’s God” is more philosophically conventional than Wordsworth’s usual emphasis on the moral powers of matter. These lines enact an understanding of poetic form and language, shared by Davy, as especially attuned to the voicing of metaphysical speculation. If, as Wordsworth claims in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, metre imposes “a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence” on language, then the rising iambs of these lines convey the activity of “the idealizing Soul” as it ascends from thought to “something greater than herself,” and as “the Residues of flesh” “refine / To Spirit.” Yet Wordsworth does not try to obscure the material ground of his idealising: he argues that the highest truths are revealed, using a method which is comparable to Davy’s inductive science and which can be interpreted either as analogical thinking or as imaginative synthesis, through “the firm basis of habitual sense” and the observation of “processes minute.” Wordsworth also connects poetic knowledge to science’s analytical investigation of nature in his commentary on the “unsightly objects” that float in the stream and are “turned to brilliant ornaments” by its “crystal bead-drops”:           Should some venturous hand Abstract those gleaming relics, and uplift them, However gently, toward the vulgar air, 104  Wordsworth, “Composed when a Probability Existed of our Being Obliged to Quit Rydal Mount as a Residence” (fair copy), in The Tuft of Primroses, with Other Late Poems for The Recluse, ed. Joseph F. Kishel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), ll. 106–17.

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At once their tender brightness disappears, Leaving the Intermeddler to upbraid His folly.—Thus (I feel it while I speak) Thus, with the fibres of these thoughts it fares; And oh! how much, of all that love creates Or beautifies, like changes undergoes, Suffers like loss when drawn out of the Soul, Its silent laboratory!105

The lament for the intermeddler seems, at first, to support Wordsworth’s critique of an atomising science that degrades natural objects. But then Wordsworth identifies the poet’s soul as a “laboratory,” a word that is used nowhere else in his poetry. In February 1801 Coleridge wrote to Davy to inform him of his plan “to build a little Laboratory” in which to study chemistry, and to tell him that “Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly inclined to adopt the scheme.”106 Like most of Coleridge’s schemes this laboratory came to nothing, but Wordsworth’s use of the word 25 years later implies a recognition of some sort of equivalence between the physical act of scientific experimentation and the mental act of poetic composition. And his self-conscious admission of poetic incapacity “(I feel it while I speak),” its similarity to the intermeddler’s folly highlighted by their juxtaposition in the same line, indicates that this equivalence is founded in part on a shared problem: the difficulty of finding words that can articulate the silent processes of induction and imagination which underpin both poetry and experiment.

Bibliography Amin, Wahida. 2013. The Poetry and Science of Humphry Davy. PhD thesis, University of Salford. Brown, Daniel. 2012. William Rowan Hamilton and William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Science. Studies in Romanticism 51: 475–501. Bushell, Sally. 2002. Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956–71. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 Ibid., ll. 48–61.  Coleridge to Davy, 3 February 1801, in Collected Letters, 2:670.

105 106

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———. 1969. The Friend (1818). Ed. Barbara E.  Rooke. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1980. Marginalia. Vol. 1. Ed. George Whalley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1993. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. Notebooks. Vol. 5. Ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone. Davy, Humphry. 1800. Lines Descriptive of Feelings. In The Annual Anthology, ed. Robert Southey, 293–296. London: Longman and Rees. ———. 1802. A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: Royal Institution. ———. 1806. By Mr. Davy. Gentleman’s Magazine 76: 1148. ———. 1823. Life. In A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors, ed. Joanna Baillie, 156–162. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. ———. 1839–40. The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. Ed. John Davy. 9 vols. London: Smith, Elder. ———. RI MS HD/9. Royal Institution of Great Britain. ———. RI MS HD/13C. Royal Institution of Great Britain. ———. RI MS HD/13H. Royal Institution of Great Britain. ———. RI MS HD/22A. Royal Institution of Great Britain. ———. The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy. http://www.davy-letters.org. uk. Accessed 8 Mar 2019. Farina, Jonathan. 2014. The Excursion and “the Surfaces of Things.” Wordsworth Circle 45: 99–105. Fry, Paul H. 2008. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fulford, Tim. 2016. The Volcanic Humphry Davy. In The Regency Revisited, ed. Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra, 133–145. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Science and Poetry in 1790s Somerset: The Self-Experiment Narrative, the Aeriform Effusion, and the Greater Romantic Lyric. ELH 85: 85–117. Furniss, Tom. 2010. A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 “Theory of the Earth.” Romanticism 16: 305–321. Goldberg, Brian. 2007. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Golinski, Jan. 1992. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2016. The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hazlitt, William. 2001. Review of The Excursion. In William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage (1793–1820), ed. Robert Woof, 368–381. Abingdon: Routledge. Henderson, Andrea K. 2018. Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hessel, Kurtis. 2015. Humphry Davy’s Intergalactic Travel: Catching Sight of Another Genre. Studies in Romanticism 54: 57–78. ———. 2016. The Romantic-Era Lecture: Dividing and Reuniting the Arts and Sciences. Configurations 24: 501–532. Hindle, Maurice. 2012. Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence. Romanticism 18: 16–29. Illingworth, Sam. 2019. A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and Their Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jarvis, Simon. 2007. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klancher, Jon. 2013. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knight, David. 1992. Humphry Davy: Science and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. 2017. Form and Explanation. Critical Inquiry 43: 650–669. Lawrence, Christopher. 1990. The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism. In Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, 213–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leighton, Angela. 2007. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levere, Trevor H. 1989. “The Lovely Shapes and Sounds Intelligible”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Humphry Davy, Science and Poetry. In Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, 85–101. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McDonald, Peter. 2012. Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-­ Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Robert. 2013. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Oerlemans, Onno. 2002. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Perry, Seamus. 1999. Coleridge and the Uses of Division. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato. 1804. The Republic. In The Works of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor 1: 97–479. London: R. Wilks.

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Potkay, Adam. 2012. Wordsworth’s Ethics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robertson, Lisa Ann. 2015. “Swallowed up in Impression”: Humphry Davy’s Materialist Theory of Embodied Transcendence and William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” European Romantic Review 26: 591–614. Ross, Catherine E. 2003. “Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes”: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth. In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman, 23–52. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ruston, Sharon. 2013a. Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013b. From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet. In Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities, ed. Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen, 77–97. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Sharrock, Roger. 1962. The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 17: 57–76. Smith, Jonathan. 1994. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-­ Century Literary Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Spinoza, Baruch. 1985. Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, 1: 408–617. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Henry S. 2010. Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on “Form.” Isis 101: 578–589. Wolff, Tristram. 2017. Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic. ELH 84: 617–647. Wolfson, Susan J. 1997. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1979. The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar. Ed. James Butler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1985. The Fourteen-Book Prelude. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1986. The Tuft of Primroses, with Other Late Poems for The Recluse. Ed. Joseph F. Kishel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1989. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820. Ed. Carl H.  Ketcham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1991. The Thirteen-Book Prelude. Ed. Mark L. Reed. 2 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1992. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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———. 1999. Last Poems, 1821–1850. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. The Excursion. Ed. Sally Bushell, James Butler, and Michael C. Jaye. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wordsworth, Dorothy, and William Wordsworth. 1967–93. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Alan G.  Hill, Mary Moorman, and Chester L. Shaver. 8 vols. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wu, Duncan. 1995. Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyatt, John. 1995. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Thomas. 1812. Review of Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Quarterly Review 8: 65–86.

CHAPTER 3

Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment

1 When John Tyndall published his presidential address to the 1874 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) as a pamphlet, he ended the text with a quotation from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” that he identified as “words known to all Englishmen, and which may be regarded as a forecast and religious vitalization of the latest and deepest scientific truth”:         “For I have learned To look on nature; not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_3

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A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”1

In the months after the BAAS meeting in Belfast, Tyndall’s address was widely attacked for promoting philosophical materialism and atheism. Historians of science have shown that Tyndall’s critics consistently misrepresented his position; according to Bernard Lightman, Tyndall was sceptical of “ontological materialism” and its claims that “everything can be reduced to matter.”2 In Ruth Barton’s view, “to label Tyndall a ‘materialist’ and the Belfast Address as ‘materialism’ is to mislead and oversimplify.” “The core of the Belfast Address,” she suggests, “was an argument for the adequacy of materialism as a philosophy of science” rather than as an ontology.3 Tyndall champions a methodological materialism in which the observation and experimental manipulation of matter constitute the basis of generalisable theories of nature. It is “an intellectual necessity,” he argues, to “cross the boundary of the experimental evidence,” and via this inductive leap he concludes that “the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life” is traceable in “that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium.”4 By ending his text with a quotation, Tyndall presents “Tintern Abbey” as a kind of summary of or keystone to his arguments. Wordsworth’s lines are a forecast of Tyndall’s science (and, in this interpretation, of the “vital materiality” espoused by Jane Bennett and other contemporary materialists) because they posit an inherent equivalence between “all things,” whether “thinking things” or inanimate objects of thought. At the same time, through their familiarity (as “words known to all Englishmen”) and through their metaphysical invocation of “something far more deeply interfused,” they help to reassure Tyndall’s 1  John Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 64–65, quoting William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 89–103. 2  Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 200. 3  Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris 3 (1987): 113 and 116. 4  Tyndall, Address, 55.

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readers that his scientific naturalism, his conviction that natural phenomena can be explained comprehensively and exclusively through the empirical methods of science, is not inimical to religious sentiment. In the version of the address that Tyndall read in Belfast, however, and in the text published the next day in Nature, the quotation is absent. Instead, Tyndall ends on an expression of intellectual modesty, concluding his discussion of the relations between matter and mind, and between scientific theory and aesthetic and religious feeling, by announcing that “I must quit a theme too great for me to handle, but which will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”5 His reasons for adding Wordsworth’s lines to the pamphlet version are unknown, but the explanation may be that he considered Wordsworth to be one of the lofty minds capable of handling this great theme, and of communicating it to the wider readership that he presumably hoped for, and succeeded in attaining. The pamphlet was reprinted several times in 1874, and in its seventh printing Tyndall excised “Tintern Abbey” from his peroration and repositioned Wordsworth’s lines as an epigraph to the text. This revision possibly suggests a diffidence about the legitimacy of poetic quotation in science writing, but by placing Wordsworth’s poetry at the start of the address, and omitting any discussion of it, Tyndall arguably enhances his presentation of “Tintern Abbey” as an authoritative forecast of “scientific truth.” The epigraph sits in close textual proximity to the Preface to the seventh printing, in which Tyndall repeats his characterisation of experiment as the necessary but limited foundation of knowledge: “I am blamed for crossing the boundary of the experimental evidence. This, I reply, is the habitual action of the scientific mind—at least of that portion of it which applies itself to physical investigation.” He claims “that in physics the experiential incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part, the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator.”6 In an illustration of what Gillian Beer terms his “Romantic materialism,” but which may also be described as a Romantic monism comparable to that of Wordsworth and Davy, Tyndall insists that his theorisations of the “latent  Tyndall, “Inaugural Address of Professor John Tyndall,” Nature 10 (1874): 319.  Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast, “seventh thousand” (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), xiv. 5 6

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powers” of matter are not unscientific or illegitimate speculations.7 Instead—and in keeping with “Romantic theories of matter” which, as Richard Sha argues, “granted it an essence (vitality) without essence insofar as this essence was a principle that could not be reduced to empirical observation”—he claims that the elaboration of “ultra-experiential” theories is an essential part of “physical investigation.”8 For Tyndall, science starts but does not end with experience of and experiments on matter. Wordsworth’s poem, his quotation implies, enacts a similar inductive method, extrapolating its “sense sublime” from the poet’s observations of natural objects. As Peter Dear points out, Tyndall’s recourse to the pantheism of “Tintern Abbey” in his address unsurprisingly “failed to placate people determined to regard it as atheism. And those people were probably not wrong,” because Tyndall promotes a monist worldview in which “there is no ontological gap between Mind and Nature.”9 But there is an epistemological gap between them, and Tyndall deploys Wordsworth’s poetry as an analogy for the way in which the idealising “action of the scientific mind” bridges this gap, evolving theories that are grounded in but not confined to the experience of materiality. As I intend to show in this chapter, the practice of poetic quotation was widespread in nineteenth-century science. Verse was for the most part excluded from the technical and mathematical language of papers published in journals such as the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, but quotations of poetry were prominent in those kinds of science writing—from lectures at the RI and Mechanics’ Institutes to articles in Nature and the generalist periodical press—that were targeted at non-­ specialist as well as specialist audiences. The uses of quotation were various: science writers employed verse to encapsulate science’s inductive method and to highlight and supplement its shortcomings; to borrow the cultural authority of poetry and to assert science’s superior authority; as ornamentation and as supporting evidence for specific theories. Benjamin Morgan points out that, although Victorian literature and science were 7  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 142. 8  Richard C.  Sha, “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality,” Romanticism 20 (2014): 238. 9  Peter Dear, “Romanticism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” European Romantic Review 26 (2015): 338.

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“material practices that connected particular associations of people whose endeavors were focused through objects as well as texts,” they can also be understood “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on.”10 Poetic quotation, this chapter argues, was a conveniently adaptable and versatile rhetorical tool, used both in the self-­ definitions of science writers and in explanations of the physical sciences’ orientation towards matter. The frequency and diversity of poetic quotation in nineteenth-century science writing means that any discussion of the practice has to be selective in its coverage. Rather than examining, say, the use of poetry in a particular scientific discipline, this chapter considers how quotation intersects with, and helps to shape, another important rhetorical strategy: the appeal to the authority of experiment.11 There are three reasons for this focus. First, the rhetoric of experimentation was discursively open, taking in descriptions of specific experiments, theorisations of experimental method, and a range of metaphorical uses of the term “experiment”; it was, therefore, available to and utilised by poets as well as science writers. Second, quotation itself can be understood as an experimental practice, involving the active manipulation and reinterpretation of its materials. Third, and most importantly, science writers frequently used poetic quotation as a form of direct commentary on the capacities and the limitations of scientific experiment. The chapter starts by arguing that Tyndall, one of the most prominent science communicators in Victorian Britain, consistently presents poetry as emblematic of the ideal and speculative aspects of the scientific method, which are guided by but not reducible to “experimental evidence.” This Romantic position, which Tyndall’s work shares with Coleridge’s writings on literary and scientific method, exemplifies Beer’s argument that literary allusions in Victorian science often “harbour anxieties and insights that tapped the further implications of current scientific theories, beyond the 10  Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 17–18. 11  For considerations of the use of poetic quotation in writings about specific disciplines, see Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 95–130; Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 117–61; and Gillian Daw, “‘Dark with Excessive Light’: Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Nineteenth-Century Astronomical Imagination,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37 (2015): 107–26.

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range for which experiment could vouch.”12 But this chapter also discusses examples of nineteenth-century science writing, informed by natural theology, in which poetic quotation directly corroborates experimental evidence, and in which poetry is used to articulate the view that the process of experimentation can in itself demonstrate God’s designing influence on nature. The chapter ends with a consideration of metascience, a genre which aims to elucidate the methodological and philosophical principles of science. Metascientific writing, I argue, occupies a middle ground between natural theology and Tyndall’s Romantic monism; its poetic quotations typically suggest that scientific method consists in a balanced negotiation between experimental evidence and the mind’s speculative action. Despite their differences, these approaches to poetic quotation all imply an analogy between the method of experimental research and that of science writing: just as the development of scientific theories depends on the inductive elaboration of limited evidence, so the communication of those theories in lectures or texts is founded on the selection and interpretation of what Leah Price describes as “synecdochal evidence,” examples and extracts that represent a part, but are used to stand for the whole, of the information from which they are excerpted.13 As Price and Kate Rumbold have shown, habits of extracting, excerpting, and quoting were widespread in the literary culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.14 Dahlia Porter suggests that, for writers at the turn of the century, literary excerpts represented a kind of “database” of evidence, used as the foundation of inductive arguments in a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy of mind to botany.15 And Casie LeGette argues that the popularity of albums and anthologies in nineteenth-century Britain encouraged a view of poetry specifically as “free-floating” eloquence, easily divisible and transferable between different contexts.16 This view is evident in science writing, which often comprises a tissue of quotations from different sources: reports of 12  Beer, “Parable, Professionalization, and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 215. 13  Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. 14  Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 15  Dahlia Porter, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 51–61. 16  Casie LeGette, “Cutting Lyric Down to Size: Victorian Anthologies and the Excerpt as Poem,” Genre 50 (2017): 401.

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experiments, the works of other science writers, and, frequently, isolated lines and stanzas of verse. Building on Gregory Machacek’s suggestion that the study of literary allusions “needs the insight—call it a new-historical insight—that allusion is culturally mediated,” this chapter aims to show that the uses of poetic quotation in science writing were shaped by assumptions about poetry that permeated nineteenth-century British culture.17 Two assumptions were especially relevant. First, that poetry’s movement from observations of nature’s things to speculative reflections on the significance of those things was comparable to, or exemplary of, the method of inductive reasoning that also underpinned physical science. And second, that poetry bestowed a degree of personal respectability and cultural legitimacy on those who invoked it. Quotations helped writers such as Tyndall to counterbalance the philosophically radical associations of methodological materialism with the polite eloquence and the moral and aesthetic concerns typically attributed to poetry. There is no guarantee that quotations always succeeded in performing their various roles, because the diverse audiences for nineteenth-century science must have interpreted them differently. Machacek points out that allusions, which are “generally integrated unobtrusively into the alluding text” and therefore may be missed entirely by some readers, have the effect of separating “an audience into those who have a cultural kinship with the author and those who do not.”18 This division is even more pronounced with direct quotation than it is with allusion, because typographical indicators (indentation, quotation marks) mean that readers are in no doubt that the writer is quoting. If they recognise the quotation, they may identify it as a sign of their “cultural kinship” with the science writer. If they do not, they may interpret it as evidence of that writer’s superior erudition and sensibility. Alternatively, whether they identify a quotation or not, they may dismiss it as irrelevant to the text’s scientific argument. However nineteenth-century audiences interpreted quotations of verse, the act of quoting was, to some extent, inherently disruptive to the authority of the physical sciences, because it suggested that poetic language conveyed some kind of signification which was not available to the prose that was, by the nineteenth century, the established medium of science writing.

 Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA 122 (2007): 533–34.  Ibid., 526–27.

17 18

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Quotations seemingly figured poetry and science as mutually supportive, but they also highlighted distinctions between them. This tendency of quotation is evident in Coleridge’s philosophical writings. In Aids to Reflection, for instance, published 50  years before the Belfast address, he quotes the lines of “Tintern Abbey” also used by Tyndall, but he does so in support of a sweeping critique of philosophical materialism.19 He censures those “in whom a false and sickly Taste co-­ operates with the prevailing fashion” of thought, and who “(to use the language, but not the sense or purpose of the great Poet of our Age) would fain substitute for the Jehovah of their Bible”          “A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round Ocean and the living Air; A Motion and a Spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things!”20

Ewan Jones suggests that Coleridge’s frequent recourse to poetic quotation in his prose writings and lectures can be interpreted as a strategy of “interruption,” “a dialogic process” in which “voice finds itself (or permits itself to be) interrupted by another.”21 In this instance, though, his strategy is more one of appropriation than of dialogue. Rather than deferring to the quoted poem as a prior authority, Coleridge rewrites it. By omitting line 101 of “Tintern Abbey” (“And the blue sky, and in the mind of man”), and by criticising Wordsworth’s language, he implies that the poem’s attention to nature’s material things, and its invocation of the nebulous something that pervades them, obscures its inherently Christian spirituality. This selective reading of Wordsworth contributes to the opposition between Christianity and materialism that runs throughout Aids to 19  For a survey of the wide range of scientific, philosophical, and religious views which these lines were used to promote in the nineteenth century, see Robert M. Ryan, Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 94–99. 20  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 404, quoting Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” ll. 96–103 (omitting l. 101). 21  Ewan Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.

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Reflection, as Coleridge champions the ontological priority of mind or spirit in an effort to counter what he sees as the misguided materialism of modern habits of thinking. “Every one, who calls himself a Christian,” he complains, persistently and erroneously “attaches the attributes of reality, of substance” to “sensible Objects, to Bodies, to modifications of Matter.”22 Coleridge employs poetry in the service of a dualist philosophy which is at odds with Tyndall’s methodological materialism, but the role of quotation in the two writers’ arguments is surprisingly similar. Tyndall’s scientific epistemology incorporates the view, first put forward by David Hume, that inductive reasoning is inescapably subjective; no amount of objective evidence is in itself enough to validate an inductive inference. For Tyndall, as for several other nineteenth-century science writers, this “problem of induction” is less a problem than an intrinsic feature of the scientific method, and both he and Coleridge use poetic quotation to articulate the subjective or ideal aspect of knowledge. In the introductory treatise on method which he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana in 1818, Coleridge sets out a distinction between this kind of thinking, exemplified and demonstrated in poetry, and experimental knowledge. He classifies hypotheses about matter—in which either “a fact of actual experience is taken, and placed experimentally as the common support of certain other facts,” or “a fact is imagined” as that “common support” (for example, “an atom or physical point” or “an universal ether”)—as “the lowest condition of Method.”23 And he argues that “the place of a perfect idea cannot be exactly supplied, in the sciences of experiment and observation,” because “the observation, though aided by experiment, is necessarily limited and imperfect.”24 The problem with experimental comparison and with materialist speculation is that both are founded on “necessarily limited” observations of the external world rather than on the a priori exercise of reason. In the physical sciences, he claims, “the mental initiative may have been received from without,” but “in the fine arts the mental initiative must necessarily proceed from within.” This is not a strict antithesis, because he assigns poetry “a sort of middle place between the method of law,” which underpins the “pure” sciences of logic, mathematics, and metaphysics, and the  Coleridge, Aids, 394.  Coleridge, “Treatise on Method,” in Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:677. 24  Ibid., 1:640–41. 22 23

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a posteriori knowledge of the physical sciences: “certainly the fine arts belong to the outward world,” he concedes, “for they all operate by the images of sight and sound, and other sensible impressions;” but they are “impelled first by a mighty, inward power, a feeling.”25 As Jon Klancher notes, Coleridge identifies poetry “as both ideal and experiential at once.”26 The revised version of the treatise, which Coleridge published later in 1818 as the essays on method in The Friend, suggests that scientific experiment can be similar to poetry in this respect. The “enlightened naturalist,” according to Coleridge, “admits a teleological ground in physics and physiology: that is, the presumption of a something analogous to the causality of the human will, by which, without assigning to nature, as nature, a conscious purpose, he may yet distinguish her agency from a blind and lifeless mechanism.” The agency of nature serves “as a regulative principle; as a ground of anticipation, for the guidance of his judgment and for the direction of his observation and experiment.”27 Natural processes are informed by something akin to an idea or mental initiative, and the presumption of this constitutes an equivalent idea, informing and directing the naturalist’s observations and experimental comparisons of those processes. Coleridge summarises this negotiation between idealism and empiricism with uncharacteristic brevity in his claim that “an idea is an experiment proposed, an experiment is an idea realized.”28As Michael Raiger argues, for Coleridge, the “true poet and true scientist” each recognise the indivisible connection between “human subjectivity and laws of nature, subject and object,” through which “the forms of nature and the forms of mind are unified.”29 Coleridge seems, then, to resolve the opposition between the forms of nature and the forms of man that troubled his friend Humphry Davy. But his emphasis on unity is countered, throughout his writings, by a persistent dualism that implies, if not an antagonism between science and poetry, then a subordination of the former to the latter. Literary method, he  Ibid., 1:680–81.  Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 169. 27  Coleridge, The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara E.  Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:498. 28  Ibid., 1:489. 29  Michael Raiger, “Coleridge’s Theory of Symbol and the Distinction between Reason and Understanding: A Genealogical Recovery of the Baconian Method of Science,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 315. 25 26

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argues in The Friend, depends on the recognition of the relative insignificance of material things. “Man sallies forth into nature,” he writes, “to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect.” But this error is corrected when, “under the tutorage of scientific analysis,” he at once discovers and recoils from the discovery, that the reality, the objective truth, of the objects he has been adoring, derives its whole and sole evidence from an obscure sensation, which he is alike unable to resist or to comprehend, which compels him to contemplate as without and independent of himself what yet he could not contemplate at all, were it not a modification of his own being.

He then quotes, without comment, an extended excerpt from Wordsworth’s 1807 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” which celebrates the soul’s “obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things.”30 The absence of commentary on this quotation indicates Coleridge’s confidence in poetry’s self-sufficiency as a medium of philosophical argument. It supports James Vigus’s contention that he uses poetic quotations in his prose to communicate “esoteric doctrines,” a “poetic philosophy” which is articulated through “a kind of language that is not committed to its own denotational and logical adequacy to its objects.”31 Coleridge deploys quotations in this way because his philosophy subordinates external objects to subjective thoughts. Scientific analysis is a necessary step in literary method, but this questioning of “outward things” leads to and is superseded by the discovery, which finds its surest expression in poetry, that those things are the modifications, and not the originals, of the forms of the intellect. Coleridge quotes Wordsworth here in support of his prioritising of mind over matter, but he was often unhappy about the realism or, as he puts it in Biographia Literaria, the “matter-of-factness” of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetic theory.32 The rhetoric of experiment was not employed exclusively by science writers in the nineteenth century; it also played a part in debates, such as this, about literature’s relation to the external world. In his Preface Wordsworth describes Lyrical Ballads as “an experiment,” designed to test “how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a 30  Coleridge, Friend, 1:509–10, quoting Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 77–84 and 132–70 (ll. 144–45). 31  James Vigus, Platonic Coleridge (London: Legenda, 2009), 6. 32  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.  Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:126.

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selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.”33 Coleridge paraphrases this statement in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, at the start of his extended critique of the empirical orientation of Wordsworth’s philosophy and language. It prompts him to set out his own definition of the poetic imagination as an ideal “spirit of unity,” a “synthetic and magical power” that nonetheless shares with Wordsworth’s experiment a degree of realism— the imagination, “while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter.”34 He illustrates this definition with a quotation from John Davies’s 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum. The subject of the lines is the soul, but Coleridge is characteristically relaxed about interpreting the poem to suit his argument: Davies’s “words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately to the poetic imagination.” Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light, on her celestial wings. Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates Steal access through our senses to our minds.35

The “slight alteration” involves rewriting the final two lines of the quotation; Davies’s poem discusses “universal kinds” “Which bodilesse, and immateriall are, / And can be lodg’d but onely in our minds.”36 Coleridge 33  Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 741. 34  Coleridge, Biographia, 2:16–17. 35  Ibid., 2:17, quoting John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, ll. 537–48. 36  Davies, Nosce Teipsum, ll. 547–48, in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

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deliberately blurs the dualism of his source in order to support his claim that poetic imagination is inductive, grounded in experience of material bodies. The quotation performs within his prose the epistemological process it describes, using a concrete and specific example as the demonstration of a theoretical argument. It also conveys a criticism of poetic experiments that are informed by empirical observations rather than ideas; the inductive imagination necessarily acts on “gross matter,” but it aspires to a universal knowledge of ideal forms. At the same time, this discussion of the imagination shows that Coleridge’s dualism incorporates what Seamus Perry terms an “appeal to thingy externality,” an acknowledgement of the epistemological value of matter.37 This use of quotation to dramatise the way in which poetic imagination starts with but then transcends the experience of materiality is comparable to Tyndall’s alignment of poetry with methodological materialism. In an 1868 lecture on the “Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism,” Tyndall defines the experimental method in Coleridgean terms as a dialectical negotiation between realism and idealism: “the brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact,” and therefore “the vocation of the true experimentalist may be defined as the continued exercise of spiritual insight, and its incessant correction and realisation.”38 The balance between the two aspects of this process varies across Tyndall’s writings. In the Belfast address he quotes poetry that exemplifies the “exercise of spiritual insight” on which scientific theorising depends. By contrast, he sometimes cites experimental evidence as a means of correcting poetic language which, in his view, is not verified by “the world of fact.” In two lectures, “Matter and Force” (1867) and “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870), Tyndall criticises Edward Young’s use of the phrase “brute matter” in his popular eighteenth-century poem Night Thoughts: “Who bid brute Matter’s restive Lump assume / Such various

37  Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 132. Raimonda Modiano similarly argues that Coleridge’s understanding of the relation between the mind and nature involves both “a predominantly speculative interest in nature’s dynamic constitution” and “a direct engagement with external objects.” Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985), 5. 38  Tyndall, “Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism,” in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 111.

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Forms, and gave it Wings to fly?”39 In “Matter and Force” Tyndall places the phrase in opposition to the findings of experimental physics: “experiments show that the common matter of our earth—‘brute matter,’ as Dr. Young pleases to call it—when its atoms and molecules are permitted to bring their forces into free play, arranges itself, under the operation of these forces, into forms which rival in beauty those of the vegetable world.”40 Tyndall’s matter is not the inert lump of Young’s poem, but an active entity, the motions and forms of which are determined by forces inherent in its elementary particles, and which constitutes the basis both of scientific knowledge and of the aesthetic admiration of nature. Young’s poetry, with its assumption of matter’s reliance on an animating creator, propounds a dualism to which Tyndall’s Romantic monism is implacably opposed; the phrase “brute matter” encapsulates the false “antithesis of spirit and matter” which fuels theological hostility to science.41 More typically, though, Tyndall tries to present poetry as complementary to physical science, quoting verse that in his view supports rather than contradicts his monism. He closes an 1875 essay on “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents” by advocating “the lifting power of an ideal element in human life.” The agnostic spirituality that he has in mind must be independent both of “the torn swaddling bands of the past” (religious dogma) and of “the practical materialism of the present,” but it must also be founded on a “deeper knowledge of matter” and a “more faithful conformity to its laws.”42 Tyndall’s position here, rooted in knowledge of matter but stopping short of the claim that everything can be explained in material terms, also informs his scientific method, and in this essay he indicates that he quotes poetry specifically in order to encapsulate that position: The reader of my small contributions to the literature which deals with the overlapping margins of science and theology, will have noticed how ­frequently I quote Mr. Emerson. I do so mainly because in him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present, or prospective. In his case poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by the hand, 39  Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9:1470–71. 40  Tyndall, “Matter and Force,” in Fragments, 85–86. 41  Tyndall, Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 48. 42  Tyndall, “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents,” Fortnightly Review 18 (1875): 599.

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and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world.

He then quotes four lines of Emerson’s “The Sphinx” (which he versifies as two)—“The journeying atoms, primordial wholes / Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles”—to support his emphasis on the active powers inherent in matter, before praising the poem’s “veracity and insight.”43 This is a rare instance of a science writer directly discussing the practice of quotation; lines of verse tend to appear with minimal commentary, as free-­ floating snippets of authoritative eloquence. Tyndall’s defence of quotation simultaneously aligns poetry with science—Emerson’s verse presents an accurate insight into a physical process—and separates them, setting out a conventional distinction between science’s serious objectivity and the joy, warmth, and spirituality of poetry. Although Tyndall’s quotations of the “profoundly religious” verse of Emerson and Wordsworth did nothing to placate those critics who attacked him, especially after 1874, as a materialist, some commentators did endorse his practice of linking science and metaphysics through poetry. Reviewing his “Scientific Use of the Imagination” in 1870, the Times described the lecture as a “lay sermon” in which Tyndall had shown that the search after truth which is the sole object of the investigation of nature is neither so prosaic nor so dangerous a quest as the false prophets and the Philistines would assert—that philosophy is not “harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose”— But musical as is Apollo’s lute. And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns.44

Tyndall, a canny self-publicist, republished this review, together with other laudatory and hostile notices, in later printings of his lecture. The newspaper’s quotation of Milton’s Comus shows that poetry informed definitions of the physical sciences not just in science writing itself but throughout the network of texts, reviews, and responses that constituted  Ibid., 592, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Sphinx,” ll. 29–32.  Times, 3 October 1870, quoting Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), ll. 476–79, in Tyndall, Essays, 12. 43 44

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nineteenth-century scientific debate. It also indicates that a quotation’s efficacy was not entirely dependent on readers’ knowledge of its source. The language of these lines endorses the moral and cultural legitimacy of Tyndall’s argument, and this endorsement is presented as being authoritative, in part, simply because it is in verse. Knowledge of the lines’ context further enhances their authority, though, as Tyndall’s imaginative science is positioned in correspondence to Milton’s “divine philosophy” and, it is implied, in opposition to the “carnal sensuality” that Comus censures.45 Critics of Tyndall employed discussions of poetry to make the opposite case, construing his methodological materialism as a dangerously plausible legitimisation of atheism and immorality. In 1876 Robert Buchanan used an article on the Roman poet Lucretius and his materialist epic De Rerum Natura to critique Tyndall’s “modern materialism.” As Gowan Dawson notes, in comparing Tyndall to Lucretius “Buchanan considered Victorian science as if it were another form of poetry”; his attacks on the immorality of scientific materialism are strikingly similar to the charges he levelled at Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the “fleshly school of poetry” in 1871.46 But he also impugns the epistemological validity of materialism by reversing the terms of Tyndall’s rhetoric. While Tyndall quotes poetry in order to represent the process through which experimental evidence is elaborated, inductively and subjectively, into theoretical (and in some cases metaphysical) conclusions, Buchanan claims that the eloquence of Lucretius and Tyndall is used to mask an absence of evidence: materialism, ancient and modern, depends on “a precision of conception which supplies the place of actual verification.”47 Tyndall’s inductive (and supposedly scientific) reasoning is no different, Buchanan avers, from the religious faith of his Christian critics: “what right have you to ‘prolong your vision across the boundary of the experimental evidence?’ You laugh at us for doing so.”48 Buchanan collapses Tyndall’s distinction between scientific naturalism and theology, but at the same time he insists on his own dualist opposition, between an experimentation which is narrowly confined to matter and a faith that claims the exclusive right to metaphysical and speculative thought.

45  Milton, Comus, ll. 475 and 473, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (Harlow: Longman, 1997). 46  Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20. 47  Robert Buchanan, “Lucretius and Modern Materialism,” New Quarterly Magazine 6 (1876): 16. 48  Ibid., 23.

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2 The separation of science from religion was one of the most influential rhetorical features of disputes about scientific naturalism; as Buchanan’s article indicates, different versions of it were disseminated not just by scientific naturalists such as Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley but also by their critics. This separation contributed on both sides to an understanding of the physical sciences as more or less specialist disciplines, firmly differentiated from other ways of thinking. It also involved a rejection of the established discourse of natural theology, in which knowledge of nature was viewed as the reliable foundation of knowledge of God. As I will show in later chapters, natural theology did not disappear in the second half of the nineteenth century; it remained an important if muted presence, for example, in the science writing of James Clerk Maxwell. And in this chapter I will discuss two texts from the first half of the century—Margaret Bryan’s Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1806) and Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1848)—with the aim of highlighting some of the continuities between natural theology and scientific naturalism. Writers in both camps, I argue, share the belief that observations of matter are legitimate grounds for the elaboration of speculative conclusions. And both sets of writers use poetic quotation to suggest that poetry expresses and enacts this inductive process in condensed form. But there is also an important difference between their respective uses of poetry: while Tyndall deploys quotations to represent the subjective aspect of induction that transcends empirical and experimental evidence, Bryan and Hunt quote verse to support their view that the experimental study of natural processes is in itself demonstrative of metaphysical and theological truths. Margaret Bryan’s stance towards Christianity differs widely from Tyndall’s, and the difference is shaped in part by their contrasting historical and institutional contexts. Several of Tyndall’s writings started as lectures or addresses in settings such as the BAAS or the RI, professionalising environments that legitimised his promotion of methodological materialism and his criticisms of theology. Bryan’s text, conversely, based on her teaching of natural philosophy to pupils at her boarding school for girls, presents a theologically safe mode of knowledge, which supports rather than subverts Christian understandings of nature. But in some ways Bryan’s method of constructing natural knowledge is comparable to that promoted by Tyndall 70 years later. She joins him in arguing that knowledge commences with the sensory experience of an external world that is

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unambiguously and comprehensively material: throughout her lectures she maintains the outdated Newtonian position that light “is evidently a material substance,” and she observes at one point that “our sight, hearing, smell and feeling, all bear evidence of the materiality of the electric fluid.”49 Like Tyndall’s dynamic materialism, Bryan’s natural philosophy also depends on a transition from material and empirical evidence to ideal belief, although the similarity ends there, because in Bryan’s case the belief is in the Christian deity: “throughout the subjects of nature,” she writes, “we shall trace continually a directing Power: a Being independent of matter.”50 While Tyndall offers a monist explanation of properties that are inherent in nature’s materiality, Bryan practises a kind of empiricist dualism, in which natural philosophy is the methodological and epistemological support of natural theology, as concrete experience leads to the apprehension of a power that is prior and superior to matter. Despite this philosophical disagreement, Bryan shares Tyndall’s view that poetry can encapsulate the process of inductive reasoning which underpins natural knowledge. At the end of her third lecture on optics she interprets the phenomena of light as “evidences of the Deity”; once enough evidence has been assembled, it is not the phenomena themselves but “the great Cause of the effects perceived, rising supremely conspicuous above them all,” which “claims and receives our first attention” and “our most exalted and concentrated admiration, love and gratitude!” She concludes her argument with a quotation from James Thomson’s eighteenth-­ century poem The Seasons: By swift degrees the love of nature works, And warms the bosom, ’till at last, sublimed To rapture and enthusiastic heat, We feel the present Deity.51

These lines, like several of Bryan’s quotations (and like Tyndall’s quotation of “Tintern Abbey”), are positioned as the closing words of a lecture, as the keystone of that lecture’s argument, and as a summary of her epistemology. Bryan places the verse beneath the lecture’s final paragraph without comment, suggesting that, to some extent, the presence of poetry 49  Margaret Bryan, Lectures on Natural Philosophy (London: George Kearsley, 1806), 218 and 173. 50  Ibid., 21. 51  Ibid., 272, quoting James Thomson, “Spring,” ll. 899–902.

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is in itself sufficient to give an authoritative stamp to her argument. But the quotation’s source also adds to its authority: much of this lecture focuses on Newton’s theory of light; Thomson was an adherent of Newtonian philosophy; and Bryan also quotes Thomson at three earlier points in the lecture. Readers who knew about the poetry’s context, then, would likely have identified this quotation as an unambiguous example of intellectual alignment between poetry and natural philosophy. And the particulars of Thomson’s language also assist Bryan in communicating an inductive method which is, for her, both material and spiritual in its scope. Just as in Thomson’s lines the process of sublimation, in which solid matter is distilled through exposure to rising heat, becomes a metaphor for the progress from “love of nature” to a rapturous awareness of the sublimity of God, so Bryan uses Thomson’s poetry to imply an analogy between his religious feeling and her own argument for the existence of a “great Cause.” That argument depends first and foremost on experimental evidence. Throughout her Lectures on Natural Philosophy Bryan recounts experiments which she has performed, some of which she invites her readers to perform as well. She also presents numerous diagrams of the apparatus used in those experiments. Her text relies on something similar to what Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin describe as “the literary technology of virtual witnessing,” the set of rhetorical strategies designed to persuade readers of the empirical accuracy and legitimacy of scientific claims, in seventeenth-century science writing.52 Natural theological arguments must be supported by documentation of the processes and findings of experiment, Bryan suggests, because “evidence of the wisdom employed in producing the effects perceived by us” in nature is “procurable only by that touchstone of physical truth—experimental demonstration” and not by “superficial observation.”53 Nonetheless, she worries in her Preface that her emphasis on virtual witnessing has diminished the eloquence of her prose: For any deficiency of elegance in the diction, I must plead, that descriptions of apparatus and experiments do not admit of that graceful and decorated style of expression, which the sublime nature of the subjects, unfettered by 52  Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 61. 53  Bryan, Lectures, 2.

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scientific elucidation, naturally demand: but this apparent disadvantage in philosophical writing is more than compensated by the simplicity and importance of the truths it explains; which need no aid of ornament—being such as appeal to the reason, not to the passions, to effect their essential and valuable purposes.54

While Bryan laments the exclusion of a “graceful and decorated style of expression” from her writing, she also argues, in a position which she shares with her contemporaries Humphry Davy and Thomas Young, that “scientific elucidation” is of necessity objective and unadorned. But there is a perplexing gap in this argument: over the course of her lectures Bryan suggests that both experimentation and poetry can help to reveal the providential cause of nature’s effects, but in her Preface she says nothing about the poetic quotations that recur throughout the text. This is doubly surprising, because those quotations are often used to represent the emotional and sublime aspects of nature which, she claims in the Preface, are marginalised in her writing. Bryan’s motivation for this omission is difficult to determine; its implication may be that, for her, there is not enough poetry in the lectures to counteract the “deficiency of elegance” in her “descriptions of apparatus and experiments.” But it is also possible that these sentences are an effort at persuasion disguised as an apology; that Bryan’s goal is to emphasise, rather than depreciate, the rigorous simplicity of her style. Bryan’s text illustrates Ralph O’Connor’s observation that the shifts between literary allusion, reports of experiments, and theoretical exposition “contributed to the stylistic instability of scientific writings” in the nineteenth century.55 The uncertain role of poetic quotation in Bryan’s style is exemplified in the epigraph to her first lecture on pneumatics, which she excerpts from Raphael’s narrative of the creation in book 7 of Paradise Lost:           God made The firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, elemental air, diffused In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great round.

 Ibid., n.p.  O’Connor, Earth, 23.

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The epigraph seems somewhat incongruous within the layout of Bryan’s text: together with the title and summary of the lecture, it appears immediately after four pages of diagrams depicting “the construction and operation” of an air pump and immediately before 14 pages of descriptions of “the experiments on air” that can be carried out with this apparatus.56 For Kristine Larsen, descriptions such as these allow Bryan to circumvent the gendered restrictions imposed on women’s involvement in science in nineteenth-century Britain, which often relegated women writers to the more or less passive role of a “reporter of the works of male scientists.” Although her “works reflect the morals and religious values central to the traditional space for women,” Bryan also “subverts the traditional role of woman science writer,” as her text actively demonstrates “the scientific method for her students by posing testable hypotheses” and by verifying those hypotheses through experimental reports.57 Poetic quotation simultaneously supports and undermines this reformist rhetoric of experiment. As an epigraph, the quotation from Paradise Lost to some extent prefigures and summarises the argument of the text which it precedes: both Milton’s poetry and Bryan’s prose depict an unambiguously material nature which nonetheless owes its existence to the omnipotence of the Christian God. Yet Bryan also experiments with the quotation, altering its meaning by positioning it in a new context: Milton’s identification of the celestial firmament as a material “expanse of liquid,” diffused by God throughout the void of chaos, is used to validate her rather different emphasis on the materiality of the earth’s terrestrial atmosphere. She appropriates what Lucy Newlyn terms the “quasi-­ scriptural authority” of Paradise Lost in nineteenth-century Britain, enlisting the poem in support of her natural philosophy.58 But, at the same time, this authority poses a threat to the intellectual independence of Bryan’s experimental method. Bryan identifies her poetic quotations solely by the surnames of their authors; in this case, “milton.” The name embodies a male poetic tradition that bolsters yet also destabilises the more tenuous religious authority of the experimental demonstrations that surround  Bryan, Lectures, 55, quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 7:263–67.  Kristine Larsen, “Margaret Bryan and Jane Marcet: Making Space for ‘Space’ in British Women’s Science Writing,” in Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820, ed. Karen Gevirtz and Mona Narain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 76. 58  Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 223. 56 57

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Milton’s verse. This ambiguous effect of quotation perhaps explains why Bryan avoids any mention of poetry in her Preface. The relation between poetry and experiment in the Lectures on Natural Philosophy is further complicated by the presence of unattributed poetry, written by Bryan herself. At one point Bryan comments that “water is purified by distillation, which raises the pure parts, leaving the heterogenous ones at the bottom of the retort.” She then suggests an equivalence between this experimental process and the evaporation of water through “the heat of the sun,” which she illustrates with three lines of verse: Thus, in his stupendous lab’ratory, The sun, arch chemist, unceasingly performs His daily task of subtlest distillation!

In a footnote at the bottom of the same page, after explaining what a retort is, she advises her readers that “I do not enter on the subject of chemistry in these lectures, as the experiments in that art are too inconvenient and dangerous for female performance and introspection.”59 It might be argued that, in the context of the footnote, Bryan’s poetry represents a kind of intellectually conservative substitution, covering the absent discussion of chemistry, a subject from which women are excluded, with a more polite and suitably feminised form of writing. But poetry in this text is gendered male, as Bryan exclusively quotes male poets, and I think that these lines are presented as a quotation—their grammar and their brevity imply that they are an excerpt rather than a poem in themselves—in order to borrow some of the authority of poetic tradition and to subvert the footnote’s acceptance of women’s exclusion from chemistry. Chemical experiments may be too “dangerous for female performance,” but Bryan still puts forward an ambitious argument about those experiments. While her quotation of James Thomson uses the purifying process of distillation or sublimation as a metaphor for the spiritually edifying effects of inductive reasoning, her own poetry articulates a more concrete analogy, in which the act of experimentation imitates, on a smaller scale, the natural processes that transform matter. This reading of Bryan’s lines supports Adeline Johns-Putra’s argument that the composition of verse represented another way for women writers in the early nineteenth century to disrupt the “heavily gendered”  Bryan, Lectures, 102.

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conventions of science writing, particularly the distinction between male “discoverers” and female “educators” and communicators of knowledge.60 Another example of Bryan’s poetry, the epigraph to her lecture on magnetism, shows how she uses poetic form to resolve several different distinctions, reconciling education with experiment and theology with materiality: The magnet’s potent spell attracts the ore, Whose strong affinity obeys its power; Possess’d, diffus’d, its laws impress’d exacts; The needle points where’er its power directs; That power, so useful to commercial store, Points the skill’d seaman to the distant shore: Thus, may the force of virtue charm my soul, Possess my reason, and my act control: Nor useless be the boon—but teach me this, To point the mind of youth the way to bliss; Instruct me how to teach life’s vernal dawn, By strong impressive science, truths unknown, Where Wisdom, Virtue, Truth unrivall’d shine: For nature’s laws result from pow’r divine; ’Till pure, exalted, their chief joy they find, In adoration, praise, and love combin’d, To God Omnipotent! whose gracious word, Created all!—and saw that all was good!61

These heroic couplets summarise both the experimental method of Bryan’s natural philosophy and the rhetorical method of her writing. The power of magnetism, impressed on the matter of iron ore and usefully manifested in the form of the compass needle, is placed in experimental and metaphorical comparison with Bryan’s power, as a teacher, to guide “the mind of youth” towards divine virtue and wisdom. That this moralised divinity is diffused throughout material nature is confirmed when, a few pages later, she describes the process of magnetising iron and steel as an “Experiment of communicating the Magnetic Virtue.”62 For Bryan, natural theology reveals analogies (often signposted in her poetry with the word “thus”)

60   Adeline Johns-Putra, “‘Blending Science with Literature’: The Royal Institution, Eleanor Anne Porden and The Veils,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33 (2011): 47. 61  Bryan, Lectures, 143. 62  Ibid., 146.

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between experimental, natural, and spiritual processes, and those analogies can be conveyed both in reports of experiments and in poetry. A similar cluster of analogies underpins the argument of Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science. Despite the 40-year gap between them, during which the vocabulary of natural knowledge in Britain moved away from the “natural philosophy” of Bryan’s lectures and towards the “science” of Hunt’s title, the two texts share some key rhetorical features. Both claim that experiments can encapsulate and reveal theoretical truths, and both present poetry as a culturally authoritative expression of this inductive process; read together, they indicate how persistently nineteenth-century writers used poetic quotation to communicate their understandings of science to non-specialist readerships. Hunt, an educator and writer who published poetry as well as scientific texts, deploys verse throughout The Poetry of Science to convey the spiritual and aesthetic significance of scientific theories; his title page displays, as an epigraph, Milton’s lines on the “nectar’d sweets” of “Divine Philosophy” which are also quoted in the Times review of Tyndall. Like Bryan, though, Hunt seems somewhat diffident about his reliance on poetry. In his Preface, he reassures his readers that “for the purpose of exhibiting the great facts of Science in their most attractive aspects, the imagination has been occasionally taxed, but it has never been allowed to interfere with the stern reality of Truth.” And he insists that his arguments are founded not on imaginative speculation but on scientific knowledge and experimental skill: “the authority for each statement is given at the conclusion of the volume, and an experimental examination has been made of all the instances adduced in exemplification of particular views.”63 This subordination of poetic imagination to scientific authority and “stern reality” is reiterated in Hunt’s quotations of Shakespeare, which manage to be both laudatory and dismissive. In his chapter on light he announces that the speed of light “almost approaches the quickness of thought itself, yet by the refinements of science we have been enabled to measure its velocity with the utmost accuracy.” Mentioning Shakespeare not by name but as “the immortal poet of our own land and language,” Hunt then claims that “his creation of Ariel” in The Tempest, who could “girdle the earth in thirty minutes, appears to have approached to the highest point to which mere imagination could carry the human mind as to the powers of things ethereal.” But “science has, since then, shown to  Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848), v-vi.

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man that this ‘spirit, fine spirit,’ was a laggard in his tasks and a gross piece of matter, when compared with” light and other “subtile essences.”64 By invoking England’s “immortal poet,” Hunt is presumably trying, in a strategy similar to Tyndall’s quotation of Wordsworth, both to establish a cultural common ground between himself and his readers and to borrow some of Shakespeare’s intellectual authority. But his three-word quotation of Shakespeare’s language acts primarily as the basis of a pun, in which The Tempest’s “fine spirit” is reduced to “a gross piece of matter” in comparison with the imponderable entities studied by the physical sciences. Poetic quotation is used here to highlight the way in which science has surpassed poetry; the representation of nature offered by “mere imagination” is neither as accurate nor as refined as scientific measurement. For the most part, though, as Melanie Keene argues, “Hunt presented the poetic and the scientific as complementary and intertwined enterprises.”65 This is particularly the case in his descriptions of experiments, which reverse the terms of his discussion of Shakespeare by emphasising the importance of “gross matter” to scientific knowledge and by suggesting that poetry can be used to support and possibly to supplement the epistemological claims of experimental science. In a chapter on gravity, for instance, Hunt recounts an experiment in which drops of olive oil are suspended in a mix of water and alcohol that has the same specific gravity as the oil: instead of being “flattened” by “the earth’s gravitating influence,” as they would be “under any other conditions,” the drops retain their “orbicular form.” “Simple as this illustration is,” Hunt writes, “it tells much of the wondrous secret of those beautifully balanced forces of cohesion and of gravitation; and from the prosaic fact we rise to a great philosophic truth.” He then describes a means of extending the experiment: If we pass an iron wire through one of those floating spheres of oil, and make it revolve rapidly, imitating the motion of a planet on its axis, the oil spreads out, and we have the spheroidal form of our earth. Increase the rapidity of this rotation, and when a certain rate is obtained the oil divides, and a ring, connected by the finest possible film with the central globe, revolves around it. Here we have a minute representation of the ring of Saturn.  Ibid., 134–35, quoting William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1:2:421.  Melanie Keene, “An Active Nature: Robert Hunt and the Genres of Science Writing,” in Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800–1914, ed. Hazel Hutchison, Ben Marsden, and Ralph O’Connor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 41. 64 65

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In these experiments, he concludes, “we produce results resembling, in a striking manner, the conditions which prevail in the planetary spaces.”66 For Hunt, the relation between experiment and nature is fractal: experimental processes represent natural processes in miniature. In this case, from the starting point of the “prosaic fact” of the olive oil’s motion, “we rise” in scale to an apprehension of sublime astronomical phenomena, and we also rise by induction “to a great philosophic truth,” a theoretical understanding of the forces that shape matter across the universe. Unlike Bryan, Hunt does not claim that experimentation reveals evidence of the providential cause of physical phenomena. This is perhaps indicative of a decline in natural theology’s influence on science between 1806 and 1848, but Hunt is happy to invoke God in the lines of verse which follow his descriptions of his experiments, and which form the peroration to his chapter on gravity: The smallest dust which floats upon the wind Bears this strong impress of the eternal mind. In mystery round it, subtile forces roll; And gravitation binds and guides the whole. In every sand, before the tempest hurl’d, Lie locked the powers which regulate a world, And from each atom human thought may rise With might, to pierce the mysteries of the skies,— To try each force which rules the mighty plan, Of moving planets, or of breathing man; And from the secret wonders of each sod, Evoke the truths, and learn the power, of God.67

Hunt’s heroic couplets are stylistically similar to Bryan’s: both writers aim to imitate the polite erudition and speculative ambition of eighteenth-­ century philosophical poems such as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. The formal separation of the couplets from one another, enforced by their rhymes and by the correspondence between syntactic units and line endings, allows Hunt and Bryan to present each couplet as an epigrammatic summary of the relations between nature and God. The rhymes of Hunt’s verse set out a series of dualist antitheses—the “dust” on the “wind” and “the eternal mind,” “sod” and “God”—which turn out to be continuities,  Hunt, Poetry, 24–25.  Ibid., 25.

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as the apparent gap between the two elements is closed by an inductive ascent comparable to that made possible by experiment. This inductive reconciliation of opposites also occurs within single lines, assisted by the balanced syntax of the Popian couplet: just as Bryan places “strong impressive science” and “truths unknown” in the same line, implying that natural knowledge points immediately to metaphysical insights, so Hunt confidently announces that the study of matter launches the mind towards theoretical and theological truths: “And from each atom human thought may rise.” His couplets enact a “formal analogy,” a heuristic device that, according to Devin Griffiths, is widespread in nineteenth-century literature and science writing. Griffiths argues that “forms are not only structures but also methods that allow us to derive new knowledge from the world,” and in formal analogies “one system of relations is used to model the patterns of another.”68 Hunt uses the syntax, rhymes, and lineation of the couplet form to model the inductive method of experimentation, but by juxtaposing and reconciling the material and the divine, he also enhances that method, suggesting that poetry articulates a kind of knowledge that is analogous to, but more comprehensive than, experimental science.

3 In a lecture on “The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People,” read to a Mechanics’ Institute in 1833 and printed in the politically radical Monthly Repository in 1834, the Reverend John Phillips Potter sets out a direct analogy between quotation and experimentation. “If we desire to diffuse the physical sciences as widely as possible,” he argues, “we must unite physics with morals, breathing a living soul into a material body.” And just as “lectures on the physical sciences are rendered interesting and convincing by physical experiments,” so “the works of Shakespeare and Scott, Edgeworth and Martineau, supply what may well be called moral experiments, and give at once spirit and evidence to the moral science.”69 Potter’s plan for disseminating knowledge of the physical sciences throughout British society might be viewed as interdisciplinary in its emphasis 68  Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 201. 69  John Phillips Potter, “The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People,” Monthly Repository n.s. 8 (1834): 281.

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on the connection between physics and morals, but it also hinges on a methodological and ontological dualism that separates science, experiment, and matter on the one hand from poetry, quotation, and spirit on the other. His rhetorical practice in his lecture, however, complicates this dualism, as he deploys poetic quotations to articulate a morality which, he implies, is inherent in rather than superadded to physical science. Celebrating the importance to scientific knowledge of the imagination, with its power to stimulate “apathetic minds to interest and to energy,” he nonetheless advises that if we would prevent this interest and energy from running wild, if we would give it a steadier spirit to control it, we must have recourse to that philosophy of realities, which, so far from being identified with materialism, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

In an argument that remained popular throughout the mid-nineteenth century, Potter associates poetry, and especially the morally unimpeachable poetry of “the national writer,” not with speculative imagination but with a concrete “philosophy of realities.”70 His quotation of Shakespeare suggests that poetry shares science’s focus on the materiality of nature, while at the same time rejecting materialism through its moral and theological interpretations of matter. Potter presumably views these lines from As You Like It as a moral experiment because they offer a self-conscious reflection on the mind’s relation to matter, and he presents them as evidence for what he considers to be the correct psychological and moral attitude of physical science, poised between imagination and observation. This position was also promoted in metascientific writings that studied the methodological and philosophical principles of science. The 1830s was a key decade for British metascience, as writers such as John Herschel and William Whewell tried to influence, explain, and justify science’s ongoing development into a professionalising system of knowledge founded on an experimental and inductive method. The concerns of metascience are arguably distinct from those of Potter’s popular science, but Herschel’s writing in particular illuminates the porous and fluid boundary between the popular and the specialist in nineteenth-century Britain: his 1830  Ibid., 277, quoting Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2:1:16–17.

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Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy was published as part of the science lecturer Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, a series aimed at a general readership, but it also had a significant influence on other theorists of science. Herschel and Whewell share Potter’s belief that poetry can perform an important role in the explanation of the scientific method, because it acts as a compressed and authoritative expression of science’s negotiation between matter and mind. Metascience sets out a moral case for the physical sciences by emphasising both their foundation in reality, in the observation and experimental manipulation of material things, and their dependence on an inductive process which is also imaginative and speculative, and which therefore demonstrates the power of the mind to rethink matter. Herschel quotes poetry throughout his Preliminary Discourse, and in his discussion of the sort of mind best suited to “the study of natural science” he uses the lines of Shakespeare also quoted by Potter, commenting that one would think that Shakespeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man as finding “Tongues in trees—books in the running brooks— Sermons in stones—and good in every thing.”

The natural philosopher, Herschel states, is “accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws,” in particular material things.71 Like Potter, he presents Shakespeare’s words as confirmation of a methodological link between poetry and science, of their shared focus on identifying epistemological and moral significance in seemingly insignificant natural objects. As James Brooke-Smith argues, though, this quotation is also partly defensive; borrowing Shakespeare’s unassailable cultural prestige, Herschel deploys poetry as a “warrant against possible accusations of overweening scientific pride and abstruse disciplinary specialization.”72 Herschel’s attitude towards the specialisation of knowledge is complex: while the title of his discourse uses the 71  John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 14–15, quoting Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2:1:16–17. 72  James Brooke-Smith, “‘A Great Empire Falling to Pieces’: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge,” Configurations 20 (2012): 311.

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traditional and intellectually capacious phrase “natural philosophy,” the titles of its various subdivisions refer to “the physical sciences,” “physics,” and other specialist disciplines. This mixed vocabulary implies that Herschel wanted to promote a broad definition of natural knowledge while at the same time championing the legitimacy of specialised scientific inquiry. If this is the case, then it is suggestive that, in the “new edition” of the Preliminary Discourse published in 1851, he replaced his direct quotation of As You Like It with an indirect allusion, noting that Shakespeare “describes a contemplative man as finding all nature eloquent—the very trees, the brooks, and the stones reading to him lessons of deep and serious import.”73 This revision, which excises Shakespeare’s references to religion and morality, perhaps suggests a wish to differentiate science’s empirical study of nature from the competing authority and eloquence of poetry. The revision is also indicative of a wider hesitancy that characterises Herschel’s rhetoric. At times he is bold in his claims for science, arguing that “the successful results of our experiments and reasonings” on “matters purely physical, tend of necessity to impress something of the well weighed and progressive character of science on the more complicated conduct of our social and moral relations.” Therefore, “legislation and politics become gradually regarded as experimental sciences.”74 Herschel’s expansion of the scope of experiment is more ambitious, in some ways, than either Bryan’s natural theology or Tyndall’s scientific naturalism, because it claims that the developing authority of experimental science has already transformed understandings of “social and moral” as well as physical phenomena. But Herschel is more equivocal at other times. He speculates, for instance, that “the discoveries of modern chemistry,” which demonstrate the uniformity of the elements involved in chemical reactions, “effectually destroy the idea of an eternal self-existent matter, by giving to each of its atoms the essential characters, at once, of a manufactured article, and a subordinate agent.” This is comparable to Bryan’s claim that experimentation can in itself point to the divine cause of natural processes, but Herschel immediately qualifies his identification of material atoms as evidence of a manufacturing deity, warning that “to ascend to the origin of things, and speculate on the creation, is not the business of the 73  Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, “new edition” (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), 15. 74  Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, 1st edn., 72–73.

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natural philosopher.”75 In contrast to his confident assertion of science’s relevance to politics, he is apologetic about putting forward the kind of metaphysical claims which, despite their religious differences, are central to the arguments both of Bryan and of Tyndall. The main reason for this contrast is that Herschel, unlike Tyndall and Bryan, focuses on the method of experimentation rather than on the evidence procured through that method. As I discussed in my introduction, Herschel defines experiment as “active observation,” and, for him, this observation can be legitimately directed towards social and moral as well as natural processes. But he is not convinced that material evidence, either in itself or through induction, can constitute a reliable foundation for metaphysical speculations. He cautions readers of his Preliminary Discourse that “the essential qualities of material agents” may be “occult, or incapable of being expressed in any form intelligible to our understandings” and that therefore the task of the natural philosopher is perhaps “to approach as near to their comprehension as the nature of the case will allow; and devise such forms of words as shall include and represent the greatest possible multitude and variety of phenomena.”76 In Herschel’s view, linguistic expression is an intrinsic part of the development of scientific theories, and poetic language, at the same time concise and figuratively expansive, is well-suited to assist in the organised representation of diverse phenomena. Herschel notes that “cautious verification” is also key to this process, because “in forming inductions, it will most commonly happen that we are led to our conclusions by the especial force of some two or three strongly impressive facts.”77 But, he argues, an induction may be considered trustworthy when a number of “particular cases” have been observed, compared, and verified as mutually supportive: Of such collective instances as these, it is easy to see the importance, and its reason. They lead us to a general law by an induction which offers itself spontaneously, and thus furnish advanced points in our enquires; and when we start from these, already “a thousand steps are lost.”78

The source of the quoted phrase, a description of a hunt in Pope’s 1713 poem “Windsor-Forest,” is not relevant to Herschel’s argument, and to  Ibid., 37–38.  Ibid., 39. 77  Ibid., 182. 78  Ibid., 185–86, quoting Alexander Pope, “Windsor-Forest,” l. 154. 75 76

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some extent the purpose of the quotation is simply to resettle on his prose the eloquence and polite associations of Pope’s verse. But the act of quotation also points to a correspondence between poetry and science. As a loco-descriptive poem which uses its observations of a specific location to address broader political and philosophical questions, “Windsor-Forest” exemplifies the inductive method of much eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century poetry. Herschel’s quotation tacitly utilises this methodological correspondence, as well as the cultural authority of poetry, to summarise and validate science’s inductive leap from empirical particularity to general explanation.79 The “active observation” of experiment, according to Herschel, depends on a cautious mediation between an attention to empirical phenomena and the inductive reasoning of what he twice refers to, borrowing a phrase from Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” as “the philosophic mind.” He claims that “the first thing that a philosophic mind considers, when any new phenomenon presents itself, is its explanation, or reference to an immediate producing cause”; he also comments that the discovery of new facts “establishes relations which afford to the philosophic mind a constantly extending field of speculation.”80 Herschel’s decision to allude to Wordsworth’s phrase rather than to quote it directly is another example of his diffidence about the legitimacy of poetic quotation. But it also enables him to fashion an allusion that works simultaneously on two levels: to readers who recognise the allusion, it suggests the possibility of an alignment between Herschel’s science and the lyrical eloquence and spiritual concerns of Wordsworth’s poem; to those who do not, the phrase encapsulates the argument, which runs throughout the Preliminary Discourse, that specialised science can retain or even exceed the epistemological scope of natural philosophy, and that its method is not limited to the passive observation of material things. Wordsworth’s poetry is deployed to similar effect in the metascientific writings of William Whewell. Whewell’s work as a philosopher and historian was shaped by his sense of the methodological and intellectual heterogeneity of what he termed “the inductive sciences.” This prompted him 79  Tyndall deploys Pope’s words more provocatively in his Belfast address, quoting his poem “The Universal Prayer” in the course of his argument that the “doctrine” of the conservation of energy, rather than God, “binds nature fast in fate.” Tyndall, Address, 45, quoting Pope, “The Universal Prayer,” l. 11. 80  Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, 1st edn., 144 and 358, quoting Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” l. 189.

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to try to incorporate the various scientific disciplines within a coherent philosophical system, and to differentiate that system from other forms of knowledge, such as poetry. Yet, despite this emphasis on differentiation, poetic quotation played a significant part in Whewell’s project; his quotations exemplify the way in which mid-century metascience used poetry to promote a definition of physical science as the integration of matter and mind, observation and induction. As Richard Yeo points out in his discussion of Whewell’s metascience, Whewell was a writer of verse and a reader of Wordsworth’s poems, and he “realized that the contrasts between science and poetry in much Romantic writing demanded a philosophical and moral defence of the nature of science.”81 Quotation contributes to this defence in Whewell’s work, as it does in the writings of Potter and Herschel, by encapsulating the physical sciences’ epistemologically modest negotiation between truth to nature and the free activity of the mind. Like most nineteenth-century science writers, Whewell is sometimes dismissive of poetry. In The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) he writes that “facts, when used as the materials of physical science, must be referred to conceptions of the intellect only, all emotions of fear, admiration, and the like, being rejected or subdued.” “We cannot,” he asserts, “make the poets our observers.”82 While indicating that poetry and physical science rely similarly on observations of matters of fact, Whewell deems their perspectives on those observations to be mutually exclusive, maintaining a conventional Romantic opposition between poetic emotion and scientific rationalism. But he is happy to enlist poetry in support of his philosophy of science, arguing, for example, that A colour, a form, a sound, are not produced by the mind, however they may be moulded, combined, and interpreted by our mental acts. A philosophical poet has spoken of          All the world Of eye and ear, both what they half create, And what perceive.

81  Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70. 82  William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 2:197.

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But it is clear that though they half create, they do not wholly create; there must be an external world of colour and sound to give impressions to the eye and ear, as well as internal powers by which we perceive what is offered to those organs. The mind is in some way passive as well as active: there are sensations as well as acts of thought; objects without, as well as faculties within.83

The traffic between realism and subjectivism in Wordsworth’s poetry allows Whewell to deploy these lines from “Tintern Abbey” as a summary of the balance on which knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, depends. This quotation can be read as a rhetorical experiment because it establishes an analogy between the seemingly distinct processes of scientific inquiry and linguistic communication, repeating in Whewell’s prose the exchange between external things and “acts of thought” which constitutes the basis of the scientific method. Despite his injunction that “we cannot make the poets our observers,” Whewell quotes Wordsworth’s observations on the process of observation to bolster his argument, presenting the words of the “philosophical poet” as corroborative evidence in themselves. But he also moulds and interprets that evidence, counterbalancing Wordsworth’s reference to the half-creative powers of eye and ear with an emphasis on inductive reasoning’s foundation in natural objects. Employing a metaphor which highlights his sense of the epistemological parity of thoughts and things, Whewell describes unmediated sensations as “matter without form.” But “matter without form cannot exist: and in like manner sensations cannot become perceptions of objects, without some formative power of the mind.”84 In a biography of Humphry Davy published in 1839, the chemist’s brother John quotes the same lines from “Tintern Abbey” to illustrate Davy’s “fondness for nature,—(in its best and most comprehensive meaning,—the poets’ and philosophers’ external world).”85 For Whewell and (according to his brother) for Davy, the scientific study of nature and nature itself can be defined as composites, shaped both by the forming form of the mind’s “internal powers” and by the material forms of the “external world,” which remain stubbornly independent of thought.

 Ibid., 1:25–26, quoting Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ll. 106–8.  Ibid., 1:31. 85  John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 1:444. 83 84

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General knowledge, according to Whewell, is determined by the “common everyday perception” of the phenomena of the external world, whereas inductive science demands a higher degree of mental activity, a consideration of “occurrences and appearances, with a design of obtaining from them speculative knowledge. This process is more peculiarly called observation, or, when we ourselves occasion the facts, experiment.”86 Whewell’s claim that both observation and experiment are inherently active and guided by deliberate design is comparable to Coleridge’s theorisation of the mental initiative which underpins legitimate method, and it highlights the dualism of his philosophy, which is consistently framed through antitheses between passivity and activity, nature and mind, facts and thoughts. In another similarity to Coleridge, though, and as his quotation of “Tintern Abbey” demonstrates, Whewell sets out these antitheses with the aim of highlighting the constitutive and permanent linkages between their two poles. His philosophy of science is dialectic and synthetic, as is the scientific method itself. Whewell argues that analysis is “the beginning of exact knowledge”: the “decomposition of facts into elementary facts, clearly understood and surely ascertained, must precede all discovery of the laws of nature.”87 But the end of knowledge is “the Colligation of Facts,” a process “in which, by an act of the intellect, we establish a precise connexion among the phenomena which are presented to our senses. The knowledge of such connexions, accumulated and systematized, is Science.”88 The subtitle of The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences informs readers that it is “founded upon their history,” and it is possible to argue that Whewell’s whole metascientific project rests on an extended analogy between the accumulative method of the inductive sciences, his synthetic philosophy of science, and the historical development of scientific knowledge. Whewell quotes verse extensively throughout his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences, often presenting poetry as a kind of historical documentation: he cites Milton’s cosmogony in Paradise Lost, for instance, as evidence of trends and debates in seventeenth-century astronomy.89 He uses Wordsworth’s poetry differently, however, quoting it in implicit  Whewell, Philosophy, 2:205.  Ibid., 2:199. 88  Ibid., 2:202. 89  See, for example, Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1837), 1:389–90, quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 8:128–30 and 163–66. 86 87

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defence of the morality of science, or at least of his particular theory of science. The epigraph to the third volume of his history is excerpted from the fourth book of The Excursion, in which the Wanderer warns of the dangers of scientific analysis:              Go, demand Of mighty Nature, if ’twas ever meant That we should pry far off and be unraised, That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore, Viewing all objects unremittingly In disconnexion dead and spiritless; And still dividing, and dividing still, Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied With the perverse attempt, while littleness May yet become more little; waging thus An impious warfare ’gainst the very life Of our own souls.90

Poetic epigraphs often act as a corroborative summary of a prose argument, but this epigraph is defensive: it pre-emptively acknowledges a criticism of science’s materialist and atomising tendencies that was widespread in nineteenth-century Britain. Positioning one of Wordsworth’s most uncompromising attacks on science at the start of a volume, Whewell launches his defence by implying that his definition of the inductive sciences is in some way supported by the poet’s views. As an epigraph, the quotation is not directly discussed by Whewell, but its significance is demonstrated when it is read in the context of his historical arguments. He claims that the history of science is characterised by the progressive incorporation of specific discoveries into increasingly comprehensive understandings of nature: “earlier truths,” he writes, “are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements [sic].”91 This Whiggish narrative is the opposite of Thomas Kuhn’s influential twentieth-century analysis of the

 Ibid., 3:2, quoting Wordsworth, The Excursion, 4:953–64.  Ibid., 1:10.

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history of “scientific revolutions.”92 Wordsworth’s lines endorse Whewell’s position inasmuch as they censure scientific practices which promote “disconnexion,” the division of knowledge intro discrete categories. As Brooke-Smith argues, “early nineteenth-century metascientific authors described an emerging synthesis of the various branches of scientific knowledge that hovered just beyond the horizon of representation,” and “poetic quotations enabled them to gesture toward the formal structure of this synthesis, without specifying its explicit contents.”93 For Whewell, the cumulative history of science is a reiteration, on a larger scale, of the scientific method’s “colligation of facts,” and therefore the significance of this quotation is simultaneously historical and methodological. In their criticism of the impious and perverse habit of analysing objects in isolation, the Wanderer’s words offer support for Whewell’s theorisation of science as a dialectical exchange between the observation of nature’s material things and the synthetic exercise of the mind’s inductive powers.

Bibliography Barton, Ruth. 1987. John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address. Osiris 3: 111–134. Beer, Gillian. 1996. Parable, Professionalization, and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing. In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 196–215. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2009. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983). 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooke-Smith, James. 2012. “A Great Empire Falling to Pieces”: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge. Configurations 20: 299–325. Bryan, Margaret. 1806. Lectures on Natural Philosophy. London: George Kearsley. Buchanan, Robert. 1876. Lucretius and Modern Materialism. New Quarterly Magazine 6: 1–30. Buckland, Adelene. 2013. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-­ Century Geology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969. The Friend (1818). Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

92  See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 93  Brooke-Smith, “Great Empire,” 302.

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———. 1983. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1993. Aids to Reflection. Ed. John Beer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. Treatise on Method. In Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. Jackson, 1: 629–87. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davies, John. 1975. The Poems of Sir John Davies. Ed. Robert Krueger. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davy, John. 1839. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. Ed. John Davy. London: Smith, Elder. Daw, Gillian. 2015. “Dark with Excessive Light”: Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Nineteenth-Century Astronomical Imagination. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37: 107–126. Dawson, Gowan. 2007. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dear, Peter. 2015. Romanticism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism. European Romantic Review 26: 329–340. Griffiths, Devin. 2016. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Herschel, John. 1830. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1st edn. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. ———. 1851. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. New edn. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Hunt, Robert. 1848. The Poetry of Science. London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2011. “Blending Science with Literature”: The Royal Institution, Eleanor Anne Porden and The Veils. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33: 35–52. Jones, Ewan. 2014. Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keene, Melanie. 2013. An Active Nature: Robert Hunt and the Genres of Science Writing. In Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800–1914, ed. Hazel Hutchison, Ben Marsden, and Ralph O’Connor, 39–53. London: Pickering and Chatto. Klancher, Jon. 2013. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 4th edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Larsen, Kristine. 2014. Margaret Bryan and Jane Marcet: Making Space for “Space” in British Women’s Science Writing. In Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820, ed. Karen Gevirtz and Mona Narain, 67–82. Farnham: Ashgate. LeGette, Casie. 2017. Cutting Lyric Down to Size: Victorian Anthologies and the Excerpt as Poem. Genre 50: 397–419.

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Lightman, Bernard. 2004. Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address. In Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 199–237. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Machacek, Gregory. 2007. Allusion. PMLA 122: 522–536. Milton, John. 1997. Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman. Modiano, Raimonda. 1985. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. London: Macmillan. Morgan, Benjamin. 2017. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newlyn, Lucy. 1993. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Connor, Ralph. 2007. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perry, Seamus. 1999. Coleridge and the Uses of Division. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Porter, Dahlia. 2018. Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, John Phillips. 1834. The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People. Monthly Repository n.s. 8: 266–281. Price, Leah. 2000. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raiger, Michael. 2010. Coleridge’s Theory of Symbol and the Distinction Between Reason and Understanding: A Genealogical Recovery of the Baconian Method of Science. History of European Ideas 36: 311–323. Rumbold, Kate. 2016. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Robert M. 2016. Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Simon, and Steven Shapin. 1985. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sha, Richard C. 2014. John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality. Romanticism 20: 233–245. Tyndall, John. 1870. Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1871. Fragments of Science for Unscientific People. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1874a. Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1874b. Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. Seventh thousand. London: Longmans, Green.

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———. 1874c. Inaugural Address of Professor John Tyndall. Nature 10: 309–319. ———. 1875. “Materialism” and Its Opponents. Fortnightly Review 18: 579–599. Vigus, James. 2009. Platonic Coleridge. London: Legenda. Whewell, William. 1837. History of the Inductive Sciences. 3 vols. London: John W. Parker. ———. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Wordsworth, William. 1992. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, 741–760. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yeo, Richard. 1993. Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Edward. 1989. Night Thoughts. Ed. Stephen Cornford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Words and Things in the Periodical Press

1 William Whewell voiced his concern about the fragmentation of knowledge throughout his metascientific writings. In an 1834 notice of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, published in the Quarterly Review, he writes that “the tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity to separation and dismemberment.” Today, he laments, if “a poet, like Goethe, wanders into the fields of experimental science, he is received with contradiction and contempt,” because “the students of books and of things are estranged from each other in habit and feeling.”1 Whewell characterises the separation of poetry from science as an opposition between two kinds of materiality, of texts and of things. He is troubled by this opposition, but it is soon superseded in his review by another worry: “the disintegration goes on,” he writes, “like that of a great empire falling to pieces; physical science itself is endlessly subdivided, and the subdivisions insulated.” This disintegration threatens to invalidate Whewell’s synthetic and cumulative philosophy of science, and he reports that, at the 1833 meeting of the BAAS in Cambridge, an effort was made to arrest the trend by deciding on a “name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively.” He notes 1  William Whewell, review of Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Quarterly Review 51 (1834): 58–59.

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_4

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that the designation “Philosophers” was “very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician,” and that instead “some ingenious gentleman” (presumably Whewell himself) “proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist.”2 Whewell succeeds in coining a collective name for students of physical science (although “scientist” remained unpopular throughout the nineteenth century), but that name simultaneously entrenches the wider disciplinary division between “the knowledge of the material world” and the knowledge of books. The relation between words and things was a key issue for nineteenth-­ century science writers and for organisations such as the BAAS. If scientific knowledge was to a significant extent founded on the observation and experimental manipulation of material things, then how was this knowledge to be communicated through words, either in lectures or in the alternative materiality of the printed text? And how might the expectations of different audiences and readers determine the kinds of words to be used in science communication? In this chapter I want to argue that the periodical press was an important forum for the discussion of these questions. Richard Yeo suggests that Whewell’s promotion of the word “scientist” “charted out a space for metascientific comment” in the press, because it showed how specialist debates about the theory and practice of science could be shared with the readership of a generalist periodical.3 This chapter will consider three examples of mid-century metascientific comment that responded directly to meetings of the BAAS: Whewell’s 1834 review; satirical poems about the BAAS published in the 1860s and 1870s; and the controversy that followed Tyndall’s Belfast address in 1874. In each case, the discussions at the BAAS prompted periodicals to examine (and sometimes to mock or attack) the validity of scientific methods, the supposed materialism of the physical sciences, and the language used in science communication. Poetry featured prominently in these examinations, often acting as the formal vehicle for commentary on and criticism of science. And the same poems and poetic quotations were used to ask questions about poetry itself, as periodical writers debated to what extent poetic language was an elevated mode of expression superior

 Ibid., 59.  Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 111. 2 3

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to the jargon of science, a record of sensations of the material world, or a combination of the two. These intersecting discussions of scientific and poetic language were made possible by the discursive heterogeneity of the press, which enabled it to combine science with poetry in ways that were both oppositional and complementary, and by what James Mussell describes as “the perplexing materiality of the periodical,” its “confusion between word and thing, text and work.”4 Periodicals disseminated the words of poems and the spoken discussions of scientific meetings in a form of text that was conspicuously tangible, a process which exemplifies Ivan Kreilkamp’s observation that “to understand nineteenth-century print culture we must take into account its coexistence and competition with what might be called ‘vocal cultures’.”5 Writers in the press frequently used their discussions of the “vocal cultures” of science as the foundations of a broader effort to map and define the connections between different kinds of language and different forms of materiality. Whewell, for instance, deploys poetry in his review of Somerville’s book as a means of resisting (with mixed success) the disciplinary division between the scientific knowledge of nature and the literary knowledge of books. Whewell’s commentary on this division was a continuation of a debate that had been ongoing for decades, both in Romantic poetry and in Romantic science. While Humphry Davy was tempted to draw a sharp distinction between the limited and mutable significance of words and the universal intelligibility of the “language of experiment,” other Romantic writers hoped to abolish such oppositions. Writing to William Godwin in 1800, Coleridge asserted that “I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too.”6 This view of words as “living things” was part of his broader conviction of the reciprocal and active connection between nature and the human mind. As William Keach puts it, “words are things” for Coleridge “because they operate according to principles of order that also govern things, principles that ultimately derive from the structure of the creative 4  James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 11. 5  Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. 6  Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin, 22 September 1800, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1:626.

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mind.”7 Coleridge developed this linguistic theory as a response to the empiricist and associationist model of language, formulated by John Locke and still influential in the nineteenth century, which understood words as “voluntary and unsteady signs” of ideas in the mind that in turn derived from sensations of external things, and which therefore considered the relation between language and the material world to be arbitrary. Words, Locke insists in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, must be “taken for what they are, the Signs of our Ideas only, and not for Things themselves.”8 This theory buttressed the codification of scientific practice in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because its scepticism about notions of fixed linguistic meaning validated the distrust of rhetoric, and the corresponding emphasis on direct observation and experiment, that often characterised definitions of the inductive scientific method. In the nineteenth-century press, this view of science was exemplified in the lines of Wordsworth’s poetry used as an epigraph to Nature (first published in 1869): “To the solid ground/Of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye.”9 Whewell’s metascience, however, finds room both for the “solid ground” of the material world and for abstract and theoretical language. Whewell opens his 1834 review by describing “two different ways in which Physical Science may be made popularly intelligible and interesting: by putting forward the things of which it treats, or their relations.” The first kind of “popular knowledge” relies on “definite images and trains of reasoning,” which are “perfectly distinct as far as they go,” and which are “conveyed by the public lecturer” by “means of his models, his machines, his diagrams.”10 The second, more “comprehensive” but also “somewhat vague,” is communicated “in general terms” that explain “the relation of what is now doing to that which has already been done, the bearing of new facts in one subject upon theory in another.”11

7  William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 32. 8  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H.  Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 503 and 499. 9  William Wordsworth, “A volant Tribe of Bards on earth are found,” in Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ll. 5–6. See Thomas Owens, “Nature’s Motto: Wordsworth and the Macmillans,” Notes and Queries 62 (2015): 430–35. 10  Whewell, review of Somerville, 54. 11  Ibid., 54–55.

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Whewell suggests that the material things of which physical science treats are best explained through visual and experimental demonstrations, but he also writes that “words can call up thoughts as well as things,” implying (contra Locke) that language may be capable of referring directly to the material world.12 He argues that thoughts and things are equally useful in the communication of the findings of scientific research, just as they are in his model of the scientific method itself. The negotiation between theoretical exposition and empirical evidence is a consistent feature of the Quarterly Review’s generalist stance on science. In an 1831 review of John Herschel’s “Sound,” David Brewster (one of the founders of the BAAS) advocates a mode of science communication “freed from mathematical symbols and technical terms, written in simple and perspicuous language, and illustrated by facts and experiments which are level to the capacity of ordinary minds.”13 This was not easy to realise in practice. The interaction between language, scientific theory, and experimental demonstration was particularly complex in the nineteenth century because the two most influential theories in the physical sciences were simultaneously material and abstract. The undulatory or wave theory posited that the imponderables—light, radiant heat, magnetism, electricity, and maybe gravity—were wave motions in the universal (but undetectable) ether, and the atomic theory argued that matter consisted of indivisible and infinitesimally small elementary particles. Both were to some extent supported by mathematical calculations and experimental tests, but while the phenomena of imponderable and atomic matter were demonstrable to the senses, their putative causes were not. The theories raised a tricky linguistic problem: was the language used by science writers and lecturers supposed to describe observed phenomena, the material causes of those phenomena, or the theoretical frameworks constructed to explain them? Gillian Beer notes that “wave theory seems to make a single process a sufficient explanation of all phenomena,” but that “this universalizing impulse is counter-set” in the nineteenth century “by an insistence on relativizing, the relativizing both of our knowledge and of possible descriptions.”14 In an 1849 article on “Popular Science” in the Quarterly Review, Whitwell Elwin broadly endorses the  Ibid., 55.  David Brewster, review of John Herschel, “Sound,” Quarterly Review 44 (1831): 476. 14  Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 296. 12 13

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undulatory theory: “though neither ether nor undulations can be shown to exist, the supposition explains such a myriad of facts that we can hardly suppose it to be destitute of foundation.” But he also worries that the use of speculative terms such as “ether” exposes scientific vocabulary’s origin in ideas as well as things, highlighting the relativism of linguistic description that is an inescapable but lamentable part of science communication: “Unless the language of science is as rigorous as its truths, facts may be intended, but fiction will be inferred.”15 The rigour of Somerville’s language is the main reason for Whewell’s admiration of her writing. He views On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences as an exemplary instance of the theoretical mode of science communication, and he praises Somerville’s scrupulous and comprehensive explanations of the “general principles” of the physical sciences, particularly the theory of “the undulationists,” and of “that mathematical language” in which those principles are expressed.16 He also admires Somerville’s deployment of “the technical terms which the history of the progress of human speculations necessarily contains.”17 Alice Jenkins reads Whewell’s review as indicative of the way in which “Romantic science tended to follow German idealism in emphasizing the value of the rational over the empirical,” and of the widespread view among science writers that “mathematics could express the laws of the physical world, and could perhaps go where the human senses might never catch up.”18 While Elwin sounds a note of caution about the precision of scientific language, and while Brewster expressly forbids the use of “mathematical symbols and technical terms” in science communication, Whewell celebrates Somerville’s theoretical, linguistic, and mathematical synthesis of current scientific knowledge. However, although Whewell enlists Somerville’s writing in support of his advocacy of a theoretical mode of science communication, his frequent references to material things and empirical observations complicate any reading of his position as straightforwardly idealist or rationalist. Whewell returns to the distinction between thoughts and things at the end of the review, but he now presents it as a gendered opposition. “Notwithstanding  Whitwell Elwin, “Popular Science,” Quarterly Review 84 (1849): 327.  Whewell, review of Somerville, 60. 17  Ibid., 55. 18  Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 92–93. 15 16

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all the dreams of theorists, there is a sex in minds,” he claims. “One of the characteristics of the female intellect is a clearness of perception, as far as it goes: with them, action is the result of feeling; thought, of seeing.” In contrast, the male intellect is speculative and linguistic in its orientation: “the man” is “involved in a cloud of words, and cannot see beyond it. He does not know whether his opinions are founded on feeling or on reasoning, on words or on things.”19 Whewell’s qualification of the female intellect’s clarity, “as far as it goes,” echoes his description of the empirical form of popular knowledge, communicated through “definite images” that are “distinct as far as they go.” This suggests a direct correlation between his two binaries. Jenkins argues that, if “for women thought is usually a kind of seeing,” then this is “a habit of mind which necessarily marginalizes them in a physical science in which prestige is increasingly invested in reasoning over observing.”20 According to Whewell, it seems, empirical science is feminine, rational science masculine. His opinion of Somerville’s book, though, complicates this interpretation: he champions On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences as a model not of the empirical but of the theoretical approach to science communication. In a demonstration of his view of the “inextricable confusion” of the male intellect, Whewell struggles to maintain fixed and consistent distinctions between male and female minds, thought and feeling, words and things. He claims that, “in many or in most” women, “the powers of thought are less developed than the instincts of action,” but that “if they attain to the merit of being profound, they will add to this the great excellence of being also clear.” He adorns his discussion of this clarity with a quotation from Milton’s Comus. If women “theorize, they do so” “In regions mild, of calm and serene air, Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth.”21

Whewell’s argument about gender here is simple: Somerville is an exceptional case, a writer who combines the typical clarity of the female intellect with theoretical rigour. But this argument’s relation to the distinction  Whewell, review of Somerville, 65.  Jenkins, Space, 103. 21  Whewell, review of Somerville, 65–66, quoting John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), ll. 4–6. 19 20

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between empirical and rational science, and the role of poetry within it, is less certain. The quotation from Comus perhaps genders poetry as female, aligning it with feminine feeling in opposition to masculine reason. But the quotation also supports Whewell’s interpretation of Somerville’s writing as theoretical rather than empirical: it implies that her concentration on words over things is comparable to the spiritual and “divine philosophy” celebrated in Milton’s poem, and distinct both from the “smoke and stir” of male confusion and from the material focus of empirical science. The review’s other instance of poetic quotation is less ambiguous. Discussing Somerville’s description of an incident in France in 1832, when a calculation that a comet would cross the earth’s orbit prompted public alarm, Whewell comments that: instead of an imaginary line in the trackless ocean of space, the fears of our friends appear to have represented to them the earth’s orbit as a sort of railroad, which might be so damaged by what Mr. Campbell calls the “bickering wheels and adamantine car” of the “fiery giant,” that the earth must stick or run off, the next time the revolving seasons brought her to the fatal place.22

As Jenkins notes, the people of France in this anecdote “wrongly consider an orbit to be material, a physical boundary in space. For the mob it exists as a tangible object; for the educated it is a notional line, a geometrical rather than physical entity.”23 Whewell’s quotation of Thomas Campbell’s 1799 poem The Pleasures of Hope, in conjunction with the bathetic simile of the railroad, aligns poetry with a popular view of astronomy, which is based erroneously on sensory feeling and material things, and which he implicitly contrasts with a specialist and rational understanding of the physical sciences. But Whewell is not consistently dismissive of matter in his metascientific writings. As I argued in Chap. 3, he often deploys poetic quotations to summarise his belief that inductive reasoning depends equally on the active exercise of the intellect and on observations of nature’s materiality. And in an 1831 review of Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy he sets out a firmly empiricist view of science, emphasising the importance of the material over the rational, things over words.  Ibid., 58, quoting Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope, 2:285–86.  Jenkins, Space, 111.

22 23

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In contrast to his praise of Somerville’s use of technical terms, here he laments “the barrier with which the passionless discussions and repulsive formularies of science generally surround” natural knowledge, applauding Herschel for demolishing that barrier by writing for a popular audience. But he also criticises the “loose analogies and accidental associations” of “common language” as unhelpful to science.24 Whewell was a prolific coiner of scientific neologisms, and the 1831 review indicates that this tendency was perhaps motivated by a scepticism about the capacity of “common language” to communicate scientific knowledge. Beer suggests that debates about nomenclature and linguistic description in science may be impelled by “a form of hyper-realism: an assertion that there is an ‘out there’ so powerfully sui generis that it cannot be captured by already existing terms.”25 This is arguably the case in Whewell’s review of Herschel: he repeatedly emphasises the material character of science, identifying it as the study of “things altogether independent of the operations of human thought,” and insisting that new scientific terms are legitimate only if “they connect us, by the shortest road, with the surest elements of knowledge—actual phenomena.”26 When Herschel reviewed Whewell’s works on the history and philosophy of science a decade later, he closely echoed Whewell’s assessment of the limitations of words, arguing that “common language is a mass of metaphor, grounded not on philosophical resemblances, but on loose, fanciful, and often mistaken analogies,” and warning that “from studying such language as the representative of Nature, no pure and fundamental classification of facts, such as legitimate Induction requires, can result.”27 Both Whewell and Herschel deplore the “loose analogies” of “common language,” implying a (perhaps unrealisable) wish for a scientific language that might articulate a more direct representation of the facts of nature. They raise a concern which, despite the widely recognised importance of analogical thinking to nineteenth-century science, was shared by several writers throughout the century. As Dahlia Porter concisely puts it, “analogy was patently dangerous when used in natural philosophy because 24  Whewell, review of John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Quarterly Review 45 (1831): 375 and 382. 25  Beer, “Wave Theory,” 306. 26  Whewell, review of Herschel, 377 and 390. 27  Herschel, review of Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Quarterly Review 68 (1841): 190.

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of its propensity to present as true what might be merely metaphor.”28 Herschel’s warning about the misalignment between linguistic metaphor and factual correspondence is arguably a veiled criticism of Whewell’s philosophy of science, which he considers to be intuitionist rather than inductive: “experience,” for Whewell, “only exemplifies, cannot prove a general proposition,” and proof instead “stands on the higher and independent ground of inherent necessity, and is recognized to do so by the mind so soon as it becomes thoroughly familiarized with the terms of its expression.”29 Herschel interprets Whewell’s metascience as an idealist system, in which thoughts and words rather than things are presented as the surest elements of legitimate scientific knowledge. He ends his review by praising Whewell’s “poetical talent,” and by offering as an example the first stanza of Whewell’s translation of Goethe’s “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” which he describes as a “perfect little bijou.” The poem, Herschel hopes, will be “a sweetener after such a dose of bitter metaphysic as we have been forced to inflict upon our readers”: “Thou, my love, art perplexed with the endless seeming confusion   Of the luxuriant wealth which in the garden is spread. Name upon name thou hearest; and, in thy dissatisfied hearing,   With a barbarian noise one drives another along:— All the forms resemble, yet none is the same as another.   Thus the whole of the throng points at a deep-hidden law,— Points at a sacred riddle. Oh! could I to thee, my beloved friend,   Whisper the fortunate word by which the riddle is read!”30

Herschel’s light tone might imply a condescension towards Whewell’s poetry, and might suggest a reading of the poem as supporting evidence for his argument that Whewell’s philosophy privileges words over empirical facts. But this tone belies the serious interest in poetry which Herschel shared with Whewell; both were to contribute (together with Whewell’s friend Julius Charles Hare) to an 1847 volume of hexameter translations in which this stanza was republished.31 So while Herschel’s quotation of 28  Dahlia Porter, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 87. 29  Herschel, review of Whewell, 194. 30  Ibid., 238. 31  Julius Charles Hare, Herschel, and Whewell, English Hexameter Translations from Schiller, Göthe, Homer, Callinus and Meleager (London: John Murray, 1847).

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the poem can be read as an expression of his scepticism about figurative language, its role in his review is not exclusively that of an unscientific and more or less frivolous sweetener. Instead, like several of the poetic quotations discussed in Chap. 3, it acts as a kind of keystone to his argument, summarising it in a condensed and concise form. Whewell was particularly interested in the question of whether or not the classical hexameter was a legitimate metre for English verse, and he made several contributions to the debate about hexameters that took place in the periodical press in the 1840s.32 In this context, the long lines and proliferating stresses of his hexameter translation can be read as striking a fine balance between the “luxuriant wealth” of poetic expression and the “barbarian noise” of an outmoded metre. In the more local context of Herschel’s review, the same phrases may represent a reiteration of Herschel’s distinction between two different philosophies of science: the inductive study of nature and the analysis of terms of expression. In contrast to Herschel’s characterisation of Whewell’s philosophy, the poem describes forms rather than names, things rather than words, as pointing to a “deep-hidden law.” And while it raises the possibility of a “fortunate word,” a kind of language that might fully explain nature’s riddle, it also withholds that word, and so reiterates Herschel’s position that the metaphors and analogies of language cannot directly represent nature. Whewell’s 1834 review of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences ends with two of his poems (although he does not acknowledge them as his), which he dismisses as “nugæ academicæ” (academic trifles). The first is a sonnet addressed to Somerville that Whewell originally wrote, in an 1831 letter to Somerville’s husband, to express his admiration for her first book, Mechanism of the Heavens: “Lady, it was the wont in earlier time, When some fair volume from a valued pen, Long looked for, came at last, that grateful men Hailed its forthcoming in complacent lays; As if the Muse would gladly haste to praise That which her mother, Memory, long should keep Among her treasures. Shall such custom sleep With us, who feel too slight the common phrase For our pleased thoughts of you: when thus we find 32  See, for example, Whewell, “Letters on English Hexameters,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846): 19–21, 327–33, and 477–80.

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That dark to you seems bright, perplexed seems plain, Seen in the depths of a pellucid mind, Full of clear thought; free from the ill and vain That cloud our inward light? An honoured name Be yours, and peace of heart grow with your growing fame.”

The second poem, a set of rhyming couplets modelled on John Dryden’s lines about Milton, connects science to poetry through a simile, as it celebrates Hypatia, Maria Agnesi, and Somerville as three women of exceptional genius: “Rare as poetic minds of master flights, / Three only rose to science’ loftiest heights.”33 On the whole, though, it is tempting to read the two poems as entrenching rather than bridging the divide between poetry and physical science which Whewell bemoans in this review. He is diffident about his use of verse, positioning the poems as insignificant ornaments to the substantive argument of his prose. Poetry, it seems, is an afterthought here, and this interpretation is supported by an error at the start of the sonnet: the phrase “earlier days,” used in the 1831 version of the poem, is rewritten as “earlier time.” This was presumably intended to rhyme with a revised fourth line (“complacent rhyme”), but the effect of the half-finished revision is to collapse the sonnet’s rhyme scheme at its very start. The separation of poetry and science is also highlighted by the archaic poetic diction of the sonnet (“fair volume,” “complacent lays”), which implies an understanding of poetry as a discrete kind of specialist language, unambiguously distinct both from the technical terms of Somerville’s book and from the terminological debates of the BAAS. Linda Hughes has argued that poetry was often deployed in the nineteenth-­ century press to “enhance the cultural value and prestige of the periodical itself.”34 Whewell seems to present his poems in a comparable way in relation to science, using the elevated language of poetry to offset, and to boost the cultural capital of, his detailed discussions of the physical sciences. This is a gendered strategy: like Whewell’s translation of Goethe, his sonnet to Somerville is spoken by a male voice addressing a voiceless woman. Emphasising Somerville’s gender and the rarity of women’s 33  Whewell, review of Somerville, 68. The 1831 version of the sonnet is in Martha Somerville, Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville (London: John Murray, 1873), 171–72. 34  Linda K. Hughes, “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review 40 (2007): 94.

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c­ ontributions to science, it reiterates the opposition, set out in the prose of his review, between masculine thought and feminine feeling. Whewell’s poems, then, recapitulate the binaries of his prose argument, but their presence in the review also redefines those binaries. In contrasting Somerville’s “clear thought” with “the ill and vain/That cloud our inward light,” Whewell’s sonnet echoes his prose analysis of the distinction between the female intellect’s “clearness of perception” and the male intellect, “involved in a cloud of words.” The repetition of this argument in verse undermines the disciplinary division between poetry and science, books and things, as it suggests that poetic diction (as opposed to “the common phrase”) may be the mode of language best suited to praising the thing-based approach which Whewell sees as characteristic of feminine science. And the sonnet’s focus on language also complicates Whewell’s gendered binary by reminding readers that he identifies Somerville’s book as an example of the verbal and typically masculine, rather than the empirical and feminine, mode of science communication. Jason Camlot has argued that “transpositions between poetry and prose” were a significant feature of periodical writing in the 1820s and 1830s and that these experiments in the mixing of forms “serve as illustrative tests concerning which kinds of subject matter belong to which kinds of writing.”35 This argument is particularly useful in studying the interactions between poetry and science in the press not just in these decades but throughout the nineteenth century, because it highlights the dialogue between supposedly conflicting sorts of language that was a central element of periodical writing about words and things. By transposing their arguments into verse, Whewell and Herschel connect poetry with science, implying that debates about the physical sciences are legitimate subjects for poetry (it might be argued, because Whewell’s sonnet was written three years before his review, that aspects of his prose argument are in fact transpositions of his poem). There is no straightforward disciplinary division between poetic words and scientific things, but the distinctions made by these writers between common language, poetic diction, and scientific terminology nonetheless suggest that verse and scientific prose articulate differing perspectives on language’s relation to matter.

35  Jason Camlot, “Prosing Poetry: Blackwood’s and Generic Transposition, 1820–1840,” in Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: “An Unprecedented Phenomenon,” ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 154.

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2 Some nineteenth-century periodicals used verse as a means of preserving the opposition between science and poetry, aligning poetic diction with common language in order to satirise the jargon of the physical sciences. Punch, the immensely popular comic weekly which first appeared in 1841, frequently printed poems that mocked the specialist terms employed by science writers and lecturers, and these poems often took the annual meetings of the BAAS as their targets. As an organisation founded to promote scientific work, and as a forum in which a large amount of current research was presented and discussed, the BAAS was a convenient symbol for the field of science as a whole. For the writers of Punch, the language used at the annual meetings, and the kind of knowledge which that language conveyed, was both suspiciously materialist and confusingly abstruse. The speaker of a poem titled “Mother Goose on Modern Science,” for example, written by the satirist Percival Leigh, is unimpressed with the discussions at the 1864 BAAS meeting in Bath: That British Ass—what?—for the good of Science—that Association, Ass-tronomy, geehology, and all that nonsense, botheration! That met at Bath—ay, go to Bath, or Jericho, or wheresoever;— A nasty good-for-nothin’ lot, I never couldn’t bear ’em, never! Don’t talk to me of the earth’s age bein’ so old as they makes out it. I say I can’t, I shan’t, I won’t, I don’t believe a word about it! And has to all them mouldy bones and things they finds in them there strater, I don’t consider, no not I, sitch rubbidge wuth a rotten tater.36

These lines set up an opposition between poetic and scientific language through their distorted rendering of the words “astronomy,” “geology,” and “strata.” The words seem comic, in part, because of their unusual formal context, their positioning within the long lines and polysyllabic rhymes of the poem’s verse form. The kind of poetic language used here is strikingly different from the elevated diction of 36  Percival Leigh, “Mother Goose on Modern Science,” Punch 47 (1864): 146. The author of the poem is identified in a manuscript list of “Punch Contributors (11 October 1862  – 2 October 1869)” in the Punch archive, British Library, Add MS 88937/4/33, entry 1213.

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Whewell’s sonnet; it is an extreme, colloquial version of the “real language” championed by Wordsworth. Contrasting this register with the deliberations of the BAAS meeting, “Mother Goose on Modern Science” demonstrates the comic potential of what Robin Valenza describes as the Romantic and post-­Romantic understanding of poetry not as “a specialized language,” comparable to the language of science, but “as common language used in a specialized way.”37 The poem’s mangling of scientific terms implies that specialised language has no place in verse, and that comedy is the likely consequence of any effort to combine the two. The speaker’s disapproval of scientific words is rooted in a distrust of the physical sciences’ counterintuitive interpretation of nature in general and of astronomical processes in particular: Ah! well there, now, ’tis my belief, which I defy it to be shaken, That one of these days they’ll find out that they’ve been all on ’em mistaken, And clever as they thinks theirselves, appear to be complete tomnoddies, Forced to go back to what folks thought of old about the ’evinly bodies. The world flat, like a pancake, or about the shape of this round table, Beneath the crystial firmament, stock still, its movin’ all a fable. The Sun a runnin’ of his course, just as he looks to do it, raly From East to West, which likewise I desire to do my duty daily. Suppose we turns out arter all right in relyin’ on our senses. I should so laugh at all that there philosophy and wain pretences, If our ideers of them there things was found correct, and theirn delugion. Ah! we old women yet may put the wise and larned to confugion.38

“Mother Goose on Modern Science” exemplifies the way in which, as James Paradis argues, Punch’s scientific satire depends not on “the engagement of scientific materials” but on a “loss of capacity to engage them, the language and subject matter of science having begun to pull away from the comprehension of the larger culture.”39 The speaker refuses to countenance the “wain pretences” of modern scientific 37  Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146. 38  Leigh, “Mother Goose,” 146. 39  James G.  Paradis, “Satire and Science in Victorian Culture,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 155.

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theory, which do not conform to the evidence of her senses. She voices her nostalgia for ancient explanations that assume an uncomplicated correspondence between ideas, sensory perceptions, and things, and that posit a fixed system of natural and moral order (the sun moves “just as he looks to do it, raly,” and the speaker does her “duty daily”). But the poem does not straightforwardly endorse this exaggerated criticism of science. Much of its satire is at the expense of its speaker’s prolixity and colloquial mispronunciations, and one of its goals is presumably to flatter Punch’s mostly middle-­class readership by reassuring them of their relative sophistication. This classed and gendered comedy also aligns with Whewell’s description of the habitually and narrowly empirical stance of the “female intellect.” Yet “Mother Goose on Modern Science” nonetheless articulates, and tacitly invites readers to recognise the appeal of, what Dallas Liddle identifies as a “commonsense worldview” that was characteristic of the mid-century press.40 The poem is typical of much periodical writing about science, in that it implies admiration for the intellectual virtuosity of scientific work while simultaneously voicing scepticism towards its alienating interpretations of natural phenomena. Liddle’s “commonsense worldview” is evident in a number of poetic responses to science which appeared in the press during the 1860s and 1870s. These decades were marked by the growing cultural prestige of science, by a rising confidence among scientific naturalists in promoting and defending their understanding of nature, and, as a result, by heightened anxiety in some quarters about the seemingly materialist philosophy that underpinned their scientific method. Periodical poetry frequently responded humorously, transposing scientific theories into verse with the aim of poking fun at their strange terminology and counterintuitive conclusions. Examining a similar trend in mid-century periodical poems about education, Brian Maidment notes that these poems were “essentially middlebrow” in orientation, combining satire with subdued appreciation in a way that made new ideas more accessible, and less threatening, to a general readership.41 As “Mother Goose on Modern Science” indicates, periodical verse offered a comparable perspective on 40  Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in MidVictorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 23. 41  Brian Maidment, “Imagining the Cockney University: Humorous Poetry, the March of Intellect, and the Periodical Press, 1820–1860,” Victorian Poetry 52 (2014): 38.

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science, and it did so by presenting poetry as a form of language and knowledge that was less intellectually presumptuous than scientific naturalism, and therefore more in touch with material facts and everyday experience. Periodical verse makes use, to some extent, of conventional understandings of poetry as an ideal and spiritual form, with an inherent authority to correct the errors of science and materialism. It is more dependent, though, on an alternative definition of poetry as a practical mode of expression that uses Wordsworthian “real language” to engage with the external world and to intervene in press debates about current issues. As Alison Chapman and Caley Ehnes have pointed out, the periodicity of the press “allowed the swift circulation of topical poems directly related to news events, interweaving poetry and journalism, and often involving direct calls for action, satire, or humor.”42 The rest of this section will consider how periodical poetry made topical and satirical contributions to debates in Victorian science by offering rapid responses to two presidential addresses at meetings of the BAAS: William Thomson’s at the Edinburgh meeting in 1871, and John Tyndall’s at Belfast in 1874. These responses share a focus on the relation between words and things, and on the question of whether poetic or scientific language is more capable of constructing an interpretation of nature’s materiality that is simultaneously intellectually robust, epistemologically persuasive, and compatible with religion and morality. Two of my examples are poems printed in Punch, a magazine that frequently invited its readers to laugh at the abstruse jargon used by scientific specialists.43 The third was written by the physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1874. Like Whewell’s periodical poetry, these poems enact a kind of formal transposition: in each case, words, phrases, and arguments from an address to the BAAS are borrowed, reformulated, and held up for evaluation.

 Alison Chapman and Caley Ehnes, Introduction, Victorian Poetry 52 (2014): 3.  In August and September 1872, for instance, around the time of that year’s BAAS meeting in Brighton, Punch printed two poems, both written by Percival Leigh, satirising scientific terms which “have of sense been divested”: “Words and Wind” and “The Autumn Ologies,” Punch 63 (1872): 64 and 97. The poems are attributed to Leigh in a ledger of “Punch Contributors (9 October 1869–7 April 1877),” British Library, Add MS 88937/4/34, entries 1622 and 1626. 42 43

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Rather than mocking the physical sciences in general, the poems take sides in a dispute within Victorian science about the importance of matter to scientific methodology. In 1864 Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley formed the London-based X Club with the aim of promoting the cause of scientific naturalism. They and their fellow members frequently found themselves in disagreement with a network of Scottish physicists such as Thomson and Maxwell, who, motivated by their Presbyterian faith and by their mathematical and theoretical approach to physical science, criticised scientific naturalism for its proximity to philosophical materialism. The poetic rewritings of the BAAS addresses indicate that the generalist periodical press was often happy to throw its weight behind that criticism. The satirical ventriloquism of Punch gently mocks some of the arguments about matter set out in Thomson’s 1871 speech, but its attack on the imputed materialism of Tyndall’s Belfast address is much more vigorous. And Maxwell’s poem satirises what he sees as the showy rhetoric of Tyndall’s address, using poetic language to highlight the linguistic strategies that underpin (and, in his view, undermine) the supposedly empirical methods of scientific naturalism. Thomson (later Baron Kelvin) used his presidential address to the BAAS in August 1871 to survey recent scientific developments, taking in atomic physics, the spectroscopic analysis of stellar light, debates about evolution, and the theory of panspermia, which posited that life had originated in space and been conveyed to earth by meteors. Punch responded with a poem titled “The Truth after Thomson,” written by the playwright Tom Taylor and printed a week after the address. The poem pokes fun at Thomson’s advocacy of panspermia, jokingly comparing the orbits of planets and comets to railway lines (the same metaphor that was ridiculed by Whewell in his review of Somerville): “as earth’s rails with wreck too oft are strown, / Smashes on heavenly tracks are not unknown.”44 On the whole, though, as Richard Noakes observes, “The Truth after Thomson” evinces Punch’s “respect and even admiration for scientific societies” such as the BAAS.45 It particularly approves of Thomson’s argument that,  Tom Taylor, “The Truth after Thomson,” Punch 61 (1871): 62. For the attribution of the poem to Taylor, see “Punch Contributors,” British Library, Add MS 88937/4/34, entry 1570. 45  Richard Noakes, “Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, ed. Geoffrey Cantor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98. 44

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however life arrived on earth, its origin cannot be explained exclusively in terms of inorganic matter and physical forces. Dismissing the hypothesis that “dead matter may have run together or crystallised or fermented into ‘germs of life,’ or ‘organic cells,’ or ‘protoplasm’,” Thomson claims that “science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence against this hypothesis of spontaneous generation,” and insists that it is “an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life.”46 The verses in Punch repeat this argument, at times word for word: Life only can give life. There is a chasm No words can bridge…germ-cells nor protoplasm… Betwixt dead matter, in its dreamless sleep, And lowest forms where life’s faint pulses creep. So Wisdom’s last word with her first doth fit, Both verdict give, ex nihilo nihil fit. And stamp this truth, above schools and their strife, “Life from life comes, and comes from nought but life.”47

By transposing Thomson’s address into Popian heroic couplets, the poem gives his words something of the epigrammatic eloquence typically associated with that verse form, while also preserving what Taylor sees as the key points of his argument. As I discussed in Chap. 3, science writers such as Margaret Bryan and Robert Hunt use the counterbalancing structure of the couplet form to articulate connections between the material and the metaphysical. Taylor deploys rhyme and lineation differently, emphasising Thomson’s insistence on the unambiguous ontological distinction between the organic and the inorganic. Three of the couplets here set out an opposition between life and something which is viewed as inimical to the correct interpretation of life: “dead matter” itself; the futile strife of scientific schools; and the specialist words that aim to reduce life’s origin to a process of spontaneous generation from matter. The scientific term “protoplasm” is divested of meaning through its incorporation into the comically obtrusive, polysyllabic rhyme with “chasm,” but Thomson’s use  William Thomson (Baron Kelvin), “Presidential Address to the British Association, Edinburgh, 1871,” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1891–94), 2:197–99. 47  Taylor, “Truth,” 62. 46

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of quotation marks in his address is already dismissive of this and other neologisms. In this case, transposition from poetry to prose is used to reiterate and promote Thomson’s argument rather than to satirise it; the words of a scientific address are redeployed to highlight the insufficiency of scientific terms, and to undermine the materialist theories which those terms are supposed to explain. The poem presents Thomson’s address as intellectually modest, indicating that his scepticism about scientific terminology and his rejection of materialism display a becoming deference to religion: “Though ne’er so high we soar, or deep we go, / The infinite’s above us, and below.”48 Although the poem endorses several of Thomson’s arguments, these lines suggest that it shares with the speaker of “Mother Goose on Modern Science” a concern about the intellectual presumption of some scientific theories. It identifies Thomson’s address as a corrective to such presumption, but this interpretation is dependent on the exclusion of some of his arguments, and particularly of his confident claim that scientific research is fashioning “a great chart,” a theoretical mapping of knowledge “in which all physical science will be represented with every property of matter shown in dynamical relation to the whole. The prospect we now have of an early completion of this chart is based on the assumption of atoms.”49 Thomson acknowledges that the laws of atomic physics have yet to be fully verified or demonstrated, but he nonetheless asserts that the atom is “a piece of matter of measurable dimensions, with shape, motion, and laws of action, intelligible subjects of scientific investigation.”50 While not as philosophically alarming as a materialist theory of life, Thomson’s realist position—that atoms are objectively real and material, that their properties can be known and quantified, and that they can constitute the basis of a comprehensive theory of physical science—hardly conforms to Taylor’s depiction of his epistemological humility, which perhaps explains why the poem ignores this part of his address. Punch’s broad endorsement of Thomson’s science contrasts strikingly with the magazine’s response to the Belfast address. Another poem by Taylor, titled “Democritus at Belfast” and printed on the first page of the issue of 29 August 1874 (ten days after Tyndall had delivered the address),  Ibid.  Thomson, “Presidential Address,” 2:163–64. 50  Ibid., 2:167–68. 48 49

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lambasts what it sees as the presumptuous materialism of Tyndall’s arguments: Tyndall, high-perched on Speculation’s summit,   May heave his sounding-line in Nature’s ocean But that great deep has depths beyond his plummet,   The springs of law and life, mind, matter, motion. Democritus imagined that the soul   Was made of atoms, spheric, smooth, and fiery: Plato conceived it as a radiant whole—   A heavenly unit baffling Man’s inquiry.51

The poem sets out to reclaim words such as “law,” “life,” and “motion,” which are assigned worryingly mechanistic meanings in Tyndall’s address. It rejects physical science’s authority over these words by contending that Tyndall, despite his unequivocal location of the origins of life in matter, is incapable of fathoming the metaphysical springs from which natural phenomena emerge. While “The Truth after Thomson” praises Thomson’s humility in rejecting materialism and in refusing to transgress on the deep mystery of the infinite, the first stanza of “Democritus at Belfast” censures Tyndall’s hubris in thinking that he can sound the depths of nature and speculate on first causes. The second stanza spells out the consequences of Tyndall’s argument: his identification of a link between classical materialism and modern atomic theory, which he expounds in detail in the address, implies a general rejection of spirituality and an understanding of the soul itself as material.52 Reacting, perhaps, both to Tyndall’s quotations of poetry in his address and to his combative criticisms of theology, “Democritus at Belfast” insists on a direct opposition between scientific materialism on the one hand and religion and poetry on the other: If, as the wide-observant Darwin dreams,   Man be development of the Ascidian, 51  Taylor, “Democritus at Belfast,” Punch 67 (1874): 85. For the attribution of the poem to Taylor, see “Punch Contributors,” British Library, Add MS 88937/4/34, entry 1729. 52  This is one of several responses to the Belfast address that criticised Tyndall’s use of classical materialism, either for its tacit legitimisation of atheism or for the limited knowledge of classical philosophy on which it was based. See Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82–115.

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Methinks his great deeds and poetic dreams   Scarce square with this molluscous pre-meridian. But, even as Milton’s demons, problem-tossed,   When they had set their Maker at defiance, Still “found no end, in wandering mazes lost,”   So is it with our modern men of science. Still in the “Open Sesame” of Law,   Life’s master-key professing to deliver: But meeting with deaf ear or scorn-clenched jaw,   Our question “Doth not law imply law-giver?”53

The hendecasyllabic second and fourth lines of each stanza end in the metrical bathos of unstressed rhymes, a device frequently used in these comic poems to satirise polysyllabic scientific words. The biological term “Ascidian,” for example, is ridiculed through the repetition of its sounds in the pretentiously Latinate “pre-meridian,” and by contrast with the monosyllabic “dreams,” a word which, in its self-rhyming repetition, suggests that scientific theorising, as much as poetry, is dependent on subjective imagination. “Democritus at Belfast” insistently highlights the verbal dimension of science: the “Open Sesame” of the word “Law” is presented as a mystifying incantation, designed to distract audiences from the epistemological shortcomings of Tyndall’s materialism. The poem also attacks his use of the “phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’” to refer not to natural selection but to Empedocles’s view that “it lay in the very nature of those combinations” of atoms “suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with their environment) to maintain themselves.”54 This effort on Tyndall’s part to establish a theoretical connection between evolution, classical materialism, and atomic theory is dismissed in the poem as another example of his imprecise and misleading use of language. Paradis notes that Punch regularly mocked “Tyndall’s intense earnestness, which sought continuously to coin deeply mystical significance out of thin air.”55 “Democritus at Belfast” indicates that Punch’s primary concern about Tyndall’s rhetoric was that it tried to coin  Taylor, “Democritus,” 85, quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 2:561.  Ibid., and John Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 5. 55  Paradis, “Satire,” 156. 53 54

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mystical significance not out of thin air but out of solid matter. Disapproving of his words, the poem turns to another kind of eloquence, quoting Paradise Lost in support of its attack on irreligious science. “Modern men of science” are as happy as “Milton’s demons” to indulge in futile and dangerous talk, but when questioned they respond with silence, “deaf ear or scorn-clenched jaw.” The final stanza of “Democritus at Belfast” reiterates the poem’s warning about Tyndall’s language, forecasting the potentially subversive effect of the Belfast address on religion and society: If Tyndall’s last word be indeed the last—   Of Hope and Faith hence with each rag and tatter! A black cloud shrouds our future as our past;   Matter, the wise man’s God: the Crowd’s—no Matter!56

These lines reimagine the last words of the address, Tyndall’s “infinite azure,” as a “black cloud” of materialism and atheism that blots out religious faith. Aligning itself with the presumed concerns of Punch’s mostly middle-class readership, the poem uses its pun on “matter” to suggest that, although godless atheism may be intellectually (if not morally) satisfying to the educated “wise man,” it is dangerous when communicated to “the Crowd.” Tyndall’s eloquent championing of scientific materialism threatens social order by conveying a seditious atheism to a popular audience that is likely to accept his words unquestioningly. The accusations of atheism directed at Tyndall were prompted, in part, by his criticisms of scientific theorists who tried to preserve a link between science and theology. In the Belfast address he takes issue with Maxwell’s argument, in his lecture on “Molecules” delivered at the 1873 BAAS meeting in Bradford, that the identical properties of molecules of the same kind give matter, “as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article,” and refute “the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.”57 Tyndall comments that “in his ‘manufactured articles,’ as he calls the atoms, Professor Maxwell finds the basis of an induction which enables him to scale philosophic heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the logical step from the atoms to their  Taylor, “Democritus,” 85.  James Clerk Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 441

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Maker.” Omitting any mention of Herschel, presumably to avoid criticism of such an influential figure, Tyndall claims that Maxwell uses the phrase “manufactured article” in a hopeless effort to bridge the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal. For that reason, Tyndall states, “I doubt the legitimacy of Maxwell’s logic.”58 In his poetic rejoinder to the Belfast address Maxwell returns the favour: his poem mocks Tyndall’s language in order to suggest that his scientific materialism is based not, as he claims, on legitimate induction from experiments on nature’s material things, but on speculative arguments, verbal conceits, and rhetorical eloquence. This war of words encapsulates the differences between scientific naturalism and Scottish physics: Maxwell accuses Tyndall of making unverifiable claims about matter, while Tyndall implies that Maxwell utilises language in the service of an unscientific metaphysics. For Daniel Brown, Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism (and his poetry) exemplifies the way in which “physics and mathematics became increasingly dependent upon the imagination during the early to mid-Victorian period.” Because the dominant physical theories were founded on “such hypothetical entities as the luminiferous ether, the energy principle, the electromagnetic field and the irreducible particles of atoms and molecules,” the mid-nineteenth century saw “a shift from positivist experiment to a priori analysis.”59 Maxwell unequivocally states his preference for theory over experimentation in his 1873 lecture, asserting that “no one has ever seen or handled a single molecule” and that “molecular science, therefore, is one of those branches of study which deal with things invisible and imperceptible by our senses, and which cannot be subjected to direct experiment.”60 He reiterates this point when he notes that “the smallest portion of matter which we can subject to experiment consists of millions of molecules, not one of which ever becomes individually sensible to us” and that therefore “we are obliged” to “adopt the statistical method of dealing with large groups of molecules.”61 Maxwell sets out a foundational problem in nineteenth-­ century physics: while nature is understood to consist of material things, the constituents of natural  Tyndall, Address, 26.  Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 142. 60  Maxwell, “Molecules,” 437. 61  Ibid., 440. 58 59

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phenomena (such as atoms and the motions of the ether) are not demonstrable to the senses. For Tyndall, as I argued in Chap. 3, the way out of this conundrum is to reason (and imagine) inductively from experiments to theoretical conclusions about matter. Maxwell’s solution is instead to subordinate the experimental method to the abstract methods of mathematics. However, Maxwell also acknowledged that observation and experiment might potentially result in definite knowledge about molecular matter. His theological argument in his 1873 lecture, for instance, is based on recent spectroscopic analyses of the light of stars: “this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth.” The experimental practice of spectroscopy, he concludes, shows that “a molecule of hydrogen,” wherever it is in the universe, “executes its vibrations in precisely the same time” and emits light of precisely the same wavelength, and these identical properties underpin his interpretation of matter as a “manufactured article.”62 Maxwell’s disagreement with Tyndall was not based on any straightforward opposition between empirical and abstract science. It was instead a dispute over the legitimacy of their respective inductive arguments about matter, and over the language used to communicate those arguments. Each accused the other of the cardinal Lockean sin of taking words for things, of using language to plug gaps in their reasoning or evidence. Printed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in November 1874, Maxwell’s poem “British Association, 1874: Notes of the President’s Address” is a dramatic monologue that transposes parts of Tyndall’s speech into verse. By sticking closely to the language of its source, it acts as a kind of satirical transcription, using Tyndall’s own words to expose what Maxwell sees as the verbal, rather than the material or rational, basis of his arguments. Like “Democritus at Belfast,” the poem’s satire focuses on the supposed agreement between the philosophies of classical materialism and scientific naturalism. Maxwell ventriloquises Tyndall’s discussion of Greek and Roman scepticism towards religion: Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way, With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway.

 Ibid., 441.

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From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance,   but by fate; There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!63

The speaker paraphrases Lucretius’s description of the gods, in De Rerum Natura, as distant and attenuated beings, isolated from and irrelevant to the physical universe. This paraphrase in turn supports the deterministic argument (lifted directly from the Belfast address and attributed by Tyndall to Democritus) that “nothing happens by chance” and that natural processes are explicable in terms of uniform laws.64 The speaker deploys the maxim ex nihilo nihil fit (“from nothing comes nothing”) in the service of a claim which is the opposite of the argument implied in the same phrase in “The Truth after Thomson”: instead of affirming an ontological distinction between dead matter and divinely ordained life, it describes a godless universe in which phenomena are derived exclusively from the physical properties of matter. The assertion that “there is nothing but atoms and void” articulates precisely the kind of overconfident positivism that Maxwell considered to be unverifiable and scientifically invalid. Throughout the poem Maxwell uses long lines and prominent caesuras to satirise his speaker’s studied and verbose eloquence, and to reiterate his point that Tyndall’s supposedly empirical science is more dependent on words than on things: But not by the rays of the sun, nor the glittering shafts of the day, Must the fear of the gods be dispelled, but by words, and their   wonderful play. So treading a path all untrod, the poet-philosopher sings Of the seeds of the mighty world—the first-beginnings of things; How freely he scatters his atoms before the beginning of years; How he clothes them with force as a garment, those small incompressible  spheres!65

The speaker’s celebration of the “poet-philosopher” rewrites Tyndall’s discussion of Lucretius in the Belfast address. The first line directly quotes

63  Maxwell, “British Association, 1874: Notes of the President’s Address,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116 (1874): 582. 64  Tyndall, Address, 4. 65  Maxwell, “British Association,” 582.

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Tyndall’s own quotation of De Rerum Natura, but the second line replaces Lucretius’s claim that his materialism is based on observations of “the aspect and the law of nature” with an admission, on the speaker’s part, that his arguments are founded more on Lucretius’s poetry than on any physical evidence.66 Jason Camlot notes that transpositions between prose and verse in nineteenth-century periodicals were often used “to unpack the absurdity of figurative, poetic language by testing it against sensible reality.”67 Maxwell’s poem does the same to figurative, scientific language: its satirical rendering of Tyndall’s address aims to show that materialism (ancient and modern) bases its understanding of nature on verbal speculations about phenomena that cannot be known empirically: “the first-beginnings of things,” the properties of force, and the shape and dimensions of atoms. Brown suggests that in this poem “Maxwell opposes Tyndallic materialism by playfully insisting upon the re-enchantment of nature.”68 This insistence is based on Maxwell’s conviction that Tyndall’s materialist science is itself a form of enchantment, of playful poetry or irrational rhetoric rather than factual knowledge. The poem sets out a common-sense rejection of Tyndall’s arguments which suggests that Maxwell, and the editor of the conservative Blackwood’s, shared with the writers of Punch the opinion that readers were likely to be sceptical about any claim that natural phenomena could be understood in exclusively material terms. Maxwell uses the concision and compression of poetic language to present a reductio ad absurdum of Tyndall’s controversial claim that life originated in the properties of inert matter: “Thus in atoms a simple collision excites a sensational thrill, / Evolved through all sorts of emotion, as sense, understanding, and will.” The overweening ambition of this argument is dangerous, Maxwell suggests, not just to religion but to the intellectual credibility of science, and particularly of the BAAS. By presenting such unverifiable claims in a presidential address, Tyndall risks reducing the BAAS to a forum for pointlessly speculative talk, doomed to “carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you, / Have melted in infinite azure—and, in short, till all is blue.”69 In these closing lines of the poem, as Bernard Lightman points out, the last words of Tyndall’s address (“the infinite azure”) “become for Maxwell a poetic  Tyndall, Address, 8.  Camlot, “Prosing,” 158. 68  Brown, Poetry, 254. 69  Maxwell, “British Association,” 583. 66 67

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metaphor for the haziness of materialism.”70 By transposing Tyndall’s language into verse, Maxwell presents the Belfast address as an inferior type of poetry, a metaphorical form of words rather than a legitimately inductive scientific argument.

3 The November 1874 number of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine also featured another disparaging answer to Tyndall’s address, an article on “Modern Scientific Materialism” by the Church of Scotland minister and university teacher John Tulloch. Tulloch’s criticisms of Tyndall centre on his belief that physical science is properly and exclusively an empirical discipline: A man may have a keen and bright intelligence eminently fitted for scientific observation and discovery, and a fertile and lucid power of exposition, and yet no gifts of speculation or prophetic depth. The very keenness of vision which traverses rapidly the superficialities of things, often becomes blunted when trying to penetrate below the surface. The audacity which ministers to success in experiment often overleaps itself in the task of thought.71

In language that echoes Whewell’s description of the feminine mode of science communication, Tulloch defines inductive science as visual and material in essence, its methods limited to observation of and experiment on “the superficialities of things,” methods in which, he implies, thought is subordinate. Sharing his assessment of the address with the Punch poem “Democritus at Belfast,” Tulloch accuses Tyndall of intellectual presumption in trying to “penetrate below the surface” of nature and to speculate about the causes and constituents of the material things he studies. The “Modern School” of science, of which Tyndall is the figurehead, has deserted its proper “sphere of mere observation and experiment.”72

70  Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 217. 71  John Tulloch, “Modern Scientific Materialism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116 (1874): 520. 72  Ibid., 533.

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For Tulloch, this desertion is demonstrated in Tyndall’s misuse of language. He is the victim of his own “fertile and lucid power of exposition,” and his assertions in the Belfast address are characterised by “the confidence of an ignorance that thinks itself in the front of knowledge, because it has learned the most recent nomenclature of scientific pretension.”73 This is particularly grating because of Tyndall’s insistence that his scientific method is objective and independent of language: Tulloch derides the “emphasis of abuse” in Tyndall’s critical comment that Aristotle, in his physical theories, “put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object.”74 Tulloch’s article shares an argument with Maxwell’s poem: in both, the criticisms of the Belfast address are founded not on a scepticism about particular kinds of language, but on a general disapproval of Tyndall’s use of words, whether poetry, the language of popular exposition, or the “recent nomenclature” of science, to elaborate theories which he disingenuously claims are based on the rigorous observation and experimental analysis of matter. Comparing the different published versions of the address, Tulloch is scathing both about “the infinite azure of the past” (a “bit of rhetorical pathos”) and about the quotation from “Tintern Abbey” with which Tyndall replaced that phrase. Quoting the same lines of Wordsworth’s poem, Tulloch argues that they “appear to apply far more grandly to a great Mind, living in nature, than to matter of whatever promise or potency.”75 He interprets the language of Wordsworth’s poetry as idealist and religious, at odds with the ignorant materialism of Tyndall’s glib eloquence and scientific jargon. Tulloch’s article is representative of the hostile response to Tyndall in the conservative press. Lightman suggests that “the general periodical press may have been one of the few remaining outlets for voicing criticism” of scientific naturalism, because, “by the 1870s, scientific naturalists had consolidated enough power, especially within the institutional framework of British science,” to constitute a “new scientific establishment.”76 The November 1874 number of Blackwood’s, featuring Tulloch’s article and Maxwell’s poem, highlights three important points about criticisms of Tyndall’s address: that they were implicitly if not explicitly Christian in their orientation; that they were voiced from a range of different  Ibid., 522.  Ibid., 526, quoting Tyndall, Address, 15. 75  Ibid., 531 and 536. 76  Lightman, “Scientists,” 228. 73 74

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professional perspectives; and that poetry was a surprisingly prominent element within them. In this section I argue that the Belfast address prompted a debate in the press about the legitimate epistemological scope of the physical sciences, and that this debate in turn invited discussions about the differences between various kinds of knowledge, and about the trend towards disciplinary specialisation in nineteenth-century culture. These discussions were often illustrated by analyses of different kinds of language. Tulloch, for instance, laments that the intellectual world should be divided into so many schools as it is. It narrows intellectual work, and sectarianises culture. Our scientific and literary coteries jostle one another like so many sects in the religious world, each often with a jargon of its own, and a mission in comparison with which nothing else is of any consequence.77

Forty years on, Tulloch echoes Whewell’s concern about the widening breach between disciplinary sects. His article, however, is typical of much 1870s periodical writing in deploring this breach while simultaneously implying that there is an opposition between scientific and literary knowledge, that this opposition is exemplified in the binary of science and poetry, and that it is realised in the differences between their respective languages. By considering responses to Tyndall in the conservative Fraser’s Magazine and the liberal Fortnightly Review—several of which comment directly on the use of poetry in science communication—I want to show how the relation between poetry and the physical sciences was formulated through competing understandings of their characteristic modes of language. Some writers defined poetry as a more idealist form of words than that used in science, and some identified it as more matter-of-fact and empirical, more in touch with immediate experience. Other writers, conversely, tried to emphasise the similarities and connections between scientific and poetic language. Science was a prominent subject in the Fortnightly Review. Typically, though, as Helen Small points out, “scientific specialization was eschewed in favour of large historical overviews of the progress of knowledge, and provocative but generalist pieces.”78 The magazine’s championing of  Tulloch, “Modern Scientific Materialism,” 530.  Helen Small, “Liberal Editing in the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century,” in Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material, ed. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 64. 77 78

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liberal progressivism and reform encouraged its contributors to promote the social utility of science, to resist the centrifugal tendencies of intellectual specialisation, and to emphasise the complementarity of different kinds of knowledge and language. This position informs the argument of Tyndall’s article on “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents,” printed in the Fortnightly in November 1875, in which he tries to undermine critics of the Belfast address such as Maxwell and Tulloch by agreeing with them. He concedes the point that his explanation of his philosophy of science is just as dependent on eloquent words and theoretical imagination as on experimental evidence and inductive reasoning. He suggests that “in our day the philosopher who wanders beyond the strict boundary of Science is more or less merged in the poet,” presenting poetry as an extension or elaboration of the (inherently limited) knowledge attained through the physical sciences.79 This argument is, in part, a means of diminishing the remit of religion by reassigning its moral and emotional capacities to poetry, but it also reiterates the point, which Tyndall propounds throughout his writings, that things and words, empirical observation and verbal imagination, are not mutually exclusive. Yet Tyndall’s definition of the scientific imagination is often uncompromisingly material and empirical. In “‘Materialism’ and Its Opponents” he expresses “contempt for the picturesque interpretation of nature,” and emphasises in contrast the importance of “accuracy of vision.” The word “imagination,” he writes, “as used by me, means the power of definite mental presentation, of attaching to words the corresponding objects of thought, and of seeing these in their proper relations, without the interior haze and soft penumbral borders, which the theologian loves.”80 Tyndall does not directly connect words to material things, but he does restrict the scientific imagination to the “definite mental presentation” of “objects of thought,” a description that seems to separate it not just from the haziness of theological thinking but from the speculative imagination of poetry. As I discussed in Chap. 3, Tyndall quotes verse extensively in this essay, and he also offers a defence of his practice of quotation, arguing that poetry is able to transmute (or transpose) “scientific conceptions” into the “finer forms” of an “ideal world.” He essentially retains the opposition, identified by Tulloch and others, between the materialism of scientific language and the idealism of poetic language, but he rejects the notion that this  Tyndall, “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents,” Fortnightly Review 18 (1875): 581.  Ibid., 590.

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opposition implies any kind of ontological divide between poetry and the physical sciences, arguing instead, both in the language and the form of his writings, for the possibility of translation between them. This stance aims to resist what Whewell identified in the 1830s as the “separation and dismemberment” of knowledge into isolated disciplines. Retaining Whewell’s emphasis on the equal value of material evidence and verbal theorising, Tyndall goes further in arguing that words and things are not representatives of alternative approaches to science, but inseparable features of a scientific method that is simultaneously inductive and imaginative. The controversy surrounding the Belfast address fuelled wider debates about disciplinary differentiation, in which some writers were less certain than Tyndall about the complementarity of poetic language and scientific knowledge. Discussing Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in the Fortnightly in January 1875, John Addington Symonds suggests that “in the progress of culture there has been an ever-growing separation between the several spheres of intellectual activity,” which means that it is now almost impossible “to express philosophy in verse, and to combine the accuracy of scientific language with the charm of rhythm and the ornaments of the fancy.”81 But he argues that science itself has not significantly changed: “The most modern theories of evolution and of molecular structure may be stated in language which, allowing for the progress made by exact thought during the last twenty centuries, is singularly like that of Lucretius.” The limits of scientific knowledge are also broadly the same: “ontological speculation is as barren now as then,” and the “chief difference” between Lucretius and “modern investigators is that they have been lessoned by the experience of the last two thousand years to know better the depths of human ignorance.”82 According to this historical argument the principles of scientific theorisation, and the inability of the sciences to access nature’s ontological depths, have remained fixed, but the differentiation of knowledge in modern culture has opened a breach ­ between “the accuracy of scientific language” and the linguistic conventions of poetry. Yet Symonds also notes that, even in De Rerum Natura, “for the most part reason and fancy worked separately,” with Lucretius alternating between “pictures of unparalleled sublimity and grace” and “long passages of scientific explanation” using “the phraseology of atoms,

 John Addington Symonds, “Lucretius,” Fortnightly Review 17 (1875): 54.  Ibid., 58.

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void, motion, chance.”83 The separation of science and poetry, it seems, is to some extent essential rather than historical. In an 1879 article in the Fortnightly, though, Symonds argues that it might be possible to reverse this separation, and he identifies Wordsworth’s poetry as the means of that reversal. Joining Tyndall and Tulloch in quoting “Tintern Abbey,” he claims that Wordsworth’s “creed” “might be described as the inner soul of Science, the bloom of feeling and enthusiasm destined to ennoble and to poetize our knowledge of the world and of ourselves.” “In proportion as the sciences make us more intimately acquainted with man’s relation to the universe, while the sources of life and thought remain still inscrutable,” he writes, “Wordsworth must take stronger and firmer hold on minds which recognise a mystery in Nature far beyond our ken.”84 The vagueness of Symonds’s formulation here allows him to tread a middle ground between Tyndall’s use of Wordsworth, in which poetry is presented as the “religious vitalization” of physical science, and Tulloch’s interpretation of the lines as a celebration of “Mind” that is detached, linguistically and ontologically, from the sciences’ investigations of matter. Like Tyndall, Symonds emphasises poetry’s connection with and ennobling effect on scientific thinking, but at the same time, like Tulloch, he divides the two by suggesting that poetic language can reveal mysterious depths in nature which cannot be accessed by scientific explanation. While the Fortnightly Review typically endorsed the methods of the physical sciences, and while its articles often presented science and poetry as mutually supportive, the magazine’s commitment to liberal debate ensured that this stance was not uniform. In the first of two articles on “Evolution and Positivism,” published in the summer of 1877, the Comtean positivist J.  H. Bridges quotes two lines of Wordsworth’s The Excursion—“The intellectual power, through words and things / Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!”—to illustrate his narrative of the development of scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century.85 Bridges contrasts this period of progress with the intellectual failings of the nineteenth century; in his view, contemporary science muddles together words  Ibid., 57.  Symonds, “Matthew Arnold’s Selections from Wordsworth,” Fortnightly Review 26 (1879): 698. 85  J. H. Bridges, “Evolution and Positivism,” Fortnightly Review 21 (1877): 861, quoting Wordsworth, The Excursion, 3:709–10. 83 84

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and things rather than rationally investigating them. Despite his title, Bridges claims that “the scientific imagination of our times shows itself to greater advantage in Physics than in Biology,” and he criticises physicists for championing an atomic theory which assumes the reality of phenomena that are neither observable nor empirically verifiable: The molecular view of the constitution of matter, upheld many years ago by Comte as a subjective artifice or logical tool, susceptible in wise hands of most valuable results, has long since been elevated to an objective reality. We are told what the precise size and weight of a molecule of matter is, what its shape is, how rapidly it moves. The atom itself is not only called into objective existence, but that existence is mathematically explained.86

Nineteenth-century physics, Bridges claims, mistakes words for things by reifying a theoretical model of the universe. Its speculations, which illegitimately transcend the boundaries of empirical knowledge, are more characteristic of outmoded metaphysical systems than of positivism. His reference to the scientific imagination suggests that he may be thinking specifically here of Tyndall’s “ultra-experiential” theorising, and his argument is comparable to that of the critics who disparaged Tyndall’s reliance on speculative rhetoric. But Bridges’s scepticism towards mathematical explanations indicates that he also disapproves of the theoretical and statistical physics of Maxwell and Thomson; physical science in general is compromised by its promotion of a materialism that is founded not on positive evidence but on linguistic and mathematical abstraction. Writing in Fraser’s Magazine a few months later, the poet William Allingham cites Bridges’s criticisms of the atomic theory in support of his sustained polemical assault on the “Modern Prophets” of physical science. The “scientific doctrine now in vogue,” Allingham observes, reduces the universe to “Atoms and Ether; and we are told a great deal of the size and movements of the invisible Atoms, and of the qualities of the mysterious Ether.” He then paraphrases (or misquotes) Bridges’s verdict that this doctrine “is mere speculation.”87 Allingham’s article was one of several printed in Fraser’s in the 1860s and 1870s that attacked the speculative pretensions of scientific language. In 1873, for example, John Stuart Blackie lamented the reliance of “some of our most  Ibid., 872.  William Allingham, “Modern Prophets,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 16 (1877): 284.

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prominent modern scientific speculators” on “certain fashionable technical names, such as law, force, sequence, development, evolution, natural selection, which at bottom express only methods of operation, but are given forth with an air as if they contained some idea of an ultimate cause.”88 And after the Belfast address, in 1875, the Conservative MP William Forsyth censured Tyndall for having “used language which it is difficult by any charitable construction to exculpate from” the “charge of teaching mere materialism in its most uncompromising form.” “What I complain of,” Forsyth writes in his article “On the Limits of Science,” “is that scientific men should quit the domain of science, and substitute conjecture for proof, and imagination for reality.”89 He criticises Tyndall’s language both for being too reductive and for not being reductive enough: the uncompromising materialism of the address is founded not on facts but on conjectural and scientifically vacuous words. And, like John Tulloch in Blackwood’s, Forsyth contrasts the reckless imagination of Tyndall’s rhetoric with the respectable and devout eloquence of poetry, asserting that if Science steps out of her lines and seeks to assail the citadel of religion, she never can by any legitimate logic or experimental test disprove what the poet has said: All are but parts of one stupendous whole Whose body nature is, and God the soul.90

These lines from Pope’s Essay on Man are the last words of Forsyth’s article, and they are presented as an irrefutable summary of or conclusion to his prose argument. Forsyth uses the couplet form, and particularly the clichéd rhyme of “whole” and “soul,” to encapsulate both the connection and the hierarchical distinction between nature and God, matter and spirit. Poetic language, he implies, is the proper medium of this sort of metaphysical statement.91 Tyndall’s rhetoric, conversely, is fraudulent 88  John Stuart Blackie, “The Relation of Metaphysics to Literature and Science,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 8 (1873): 198. 89  William Forsyth, “On the Limits of Science,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 11 (1875): 204–5. 90  Ibid., 207, quoting Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1:267–68. 91  Roland Jackson notes that Tyndall himself quoted this couplet in a lecture at the RI in 1872, omitting the final four words. See Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 279.

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because it tries to base its speculative arguments on scientific methods (experimentation and inductive logic) that are inapplicable to metaphysics. William Allingham, in his 1877 article, similarly focuses much of his criticism on Tyndall’s deliberately crafted rhetoric, characterising Tyndall’s style as that of “eloquent and imaginative discourse,” “not confined to the worse than Pigeon-English or Chocktaw of scientific phraseology,” and arguing that this eloquence is borrowed from “the Poets,” “the inventors and purifiers of language.”92 Yet this linguistic debt in no way implies an epistemological equivalence between poetry and the physical sciences, because Allingham views Tyndall’s rhetoric, and especially his quotations of poetry, as a form of intellectual imposture. Both Allingham and Forsyth are among the several critics who, as Bernard Lightman notes, “focused on Tyndall’s dishonest use of language to conceal the dangerous materialistic and heterodox consequences of his thought.”93 Allingham mocks those writers who claim to find “poetic pleasures” in scientific theories, deriding Tyndall in particular as a materialist who “indulges us with quotations from the poets.”94 Poets are the inventors of language, in Allingham’s view, because poetry constitutes the historical foundation of other forms of expression. His essay “On Poetry,” published in Fraser’s in 1867, sets out a narrative of linguistic development in which the synchronic distinction between poetic and scientific language is mapped onto a diachronic opposition between poetry and prose. “Prose is a later, less natural, more conventionalised and artificial form of composition than Poetry,” Allingham asserts, and “Prose Composition” is “a form of language growing out of scientific limitations and the spirit of analysis, and is only perfectly attained through the culture of ages. In early times, everything is chanted.” The modern prevalence of prose is a sign of the disintegration and differentiation of knowledge: “with the progress of culture came necessarily division of studies, definitions, exclusions, application to particulars, and the growth of Prose as a distinct vehicle of thought.”95 The identification of poetry as natural and prose as artificial enables Allingham to claim that “good poetic language” is “more exact” than “ordinary language,” characterised by “directness, nature, truth”: it was “the Spirit of Poetry” which, “at an earlier stage of  Allingham, “Modern Prophets,” 290.  Lightman, “Scientists,” 212. 94  Allingham, “Modern Prophets,” 289 and 276. 95  Allingham, “On Poetry,” Fraser’s Magazine 75 (1867): 525. 92 93

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language, fitted words to things, and ever it requires the word and phrase not merely to approach but to get as near as possible to the thought.”96 The representation of thought in poetic language is inseparable from and dependent on poetry’s precise fitting of “words to things”; for Allingham, the “Poetic Imagination” is the most reliable source of knowledge about the “External Universe.”97 His understanding of the poetic imagination as simultaneously material and verbal aims to occupy similar epistemological and methodological ground to Tyndall’s definition of the scientific imagination. The significance of Allingham’s 1867 article resides in its argument that poetic language is not more ideal but more material than the language of science. In 1877 Allingham expands this claim into a broader opposition between artistic directness and scientific abstraction: “the world which the poet and the painter see is,” he insists, “not only more beautiful, but incomparably more true, more like the real ‘substance’ of things, than the world of microscopists and atom-hunters.” Rather than arguing, like most of Tyndall’s critics, that poetry accesses depths of signification in nature to which the shallow materialism of science is blind, he identifies the proper sphere of poetry as “the surface of things,” which “is what we most want, and must always come back to.” Just as “when we long for music, a lecture on acoustics will not serve,” so the empirically exact words of poetry are preferable to the physical sciences’ abstruse theorisations of matter.98 In essence, Allingham repeats the argument that was mocked by Punch in “Mother Goose on Modern Science,” but he is unequivocally serious about his privileging of the sensory immediacy of poetic language. This understanding of the relation between science and poetry, which is prominent in Wordsworth’s writing, remained influential in the second half of the nineteenth century. As scientific naturalism grew more intellectually and culturally assertive (and, according to its critics, more assertively materialist), while at the same the physical sciences became more theoretically ambitious, poetry was often championed as a form of words that could recapture the tangible materiality, as opposed to the theoretical materialism, of nature’s things.

 Ibid., 529.  Ibid., 534. 98  Allingham, “Modern Prophets,” 291. 96 97

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Bibliography Allingham, William. 1867. On Poetry. Fraser’s Magazine 75: 523–536. ———. 1877. Modern Prophets. Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 16: 273–292. Beer, Gillian. 1996. Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism. In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 295–318. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blackie, John Stuart. 1873. The Relation of Metaphysics to Literature and Science. Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 8: 191–200. Brewster, David. 1831. Review of John Herschel, “Sound.”. Quarterly Review 44: 475–511. Bridges, J.H. 1877. Evolution and Positivism. Fortnightly Review 21: 853–874. Brown, Daniel. 2013. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Camlot, Jason. 2013. Prosing Poetry: Blackwood’s and Generic Transposition, 1820–1840. In Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: “An Unprecedented Phenomenon,”, ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel S.  Roberts, 149–160. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapman, Alison, and Caley Ehnes. 2014. Introduction. Victorian Poetry 52: 1–20. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956–71. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dawson, Gowan. 2007. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elwin, Whitwell. 1849. Popular Science. Quarterly Review 84: 307–344. Forsyth, William. 1875. On the Limits of Science. Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 11: 199–207. Hare, Julius Charles, John Herschel, and William Whewell. 1847. English Hexameter Translations from Schiller, Göthe, Homer, Callinus and Meleager. London: John Murray. Herschel, John. 1841. Review of William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Quarterly Review 68: 177–238. Hughes, Linda K. 2007. What the Wellesley Index Left out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies. Victorian Periodicals Review 40: 91–125. Jackson, Roland. 2018. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Alice. 2007. Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keach, William. 2004. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kreilkamp, Ivan. 2005. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leigh, Percival. 1864. Mother Goose on Modern Science. Punch 47: 146. ———. 1872a. The Autumn Ologies. Punch 63: 97.

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———. 1872b. Words and Wind. Punch 63: 64. Liddle, Dallas. 2009. The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Lightman, Bernard. 2004. Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address. In Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 199–237. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maidment, Brian. 2014. Imagining the Cockney University: Humorous Poetry, the March of Intellect, and the Periodical Press, 1820–1860. Victorian Poetry 52: 21–39. Maxwell, James Clerk. 1873. Molecules. Nature 8: 437–441. ———. 1874. British Association, 1874: Notes of the President’s Address. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116: 582–583. Mussell, James. 2007. Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. Aldershot: Ashgate. Noakes, Richard. 2004. Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain. In Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, ed. Geoffrey Cantor, 91–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owens, Thomas. 2015. Nature’s Motto: Wordsworth and the Macmillans. Notes and Queries 62: 430–435. Paradis, James G. 1997. Satire and Science in Victorian Culture. In Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman, 143–175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Dahlia. 2018. Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Punch Contributors (11 October 1862 – 2 October 1869). Add MS 88937/4/33. British Library. Punch Contributors (9 October 1869  – 7 April 1877). Add MS 88937/4/34. British Library. Small, Helen. 2007. Liberal Editing in the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century. In Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material, ed. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay, 56–71. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Somerville, Martha. 1873. Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville. London: John Murray. Symonds, John Addington. 1875. Lucretius. Fortnightly Review 17: 44–62. ———. 1879. Matthew Arnold’s Selections from Wordsworth. Fortnightly Review 26: 686–701. Taylor, Tom. 1871. The Truth after Thomson. Punch 61: 62–63. ———. 1874. Democritus at Belfast. Punch 67: 85.

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Thomson, William (Baron Kelvin). 1891–94. Presidential Address to the British Association, Edinburgh, 1871. In Popular Lectures and Addresses, 3 vols., 2:132–205. London: Macmillan. Tulloch, John. 1874. Modern Scientific Materialism. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116: 519–539. Tyndall, John. 1874. Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1875. “Materialism” and its Opponents. Fortnightly Review 18: 579–599. Valenza, Robin. 2009. Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whewell, William. 1831. Review of John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Quarterly Review 45: 374–407. ———. 1834. Review of Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Quarterly Review 51: 54–68. ———. Letters on English Hexameters. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846): 19–21, 327–33, and 477–80. Wordsworth, William. 1999. “A volant Tribe of Bards on earth are found.” In Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis, 24. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yeo, Richard. 1993. Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Tennyson’s Sounds

1 When Alfred Tennyson revised “The Miller’s Daughter” in 1842, he added a stanza that summarised a habitual concern of his poetry: the ambiguities involved in hearing, and voicing, the sounds of verse. The poem’s speaker, remembering his youth, recalls how: A love-song I had somewhere read,   An echo from a measured strain, Beat time to nothing in my head   From some odd corner of the brain. It haunted me, the morning long,   With weary sameness in the rhymes, The phantom of a silent song,   That went and came a thousand times.1

This “love-song,” which the speaker “had somewhere read,” was presumably a written poem, but it is converted in memory into a “silent song,” an acoustic sensation echoing (but not sounding) in his head. The stanza highlights what Eric Griffiths describes as the “double nature in printed 1  Alfred Tennyson, “The Miller’s Daughter” (1842), ll. 65–72, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols., 2nd edn. (Harlow: Longman, 1987). Subsequent line references to Tennyson’s poetry are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

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poetry,” which is both “a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the voice in air.”2 Tennyson tended to prioritise the acoustic over the textual aspects of poetry, recollecting, for instance, that his first juvenile composition, a line of iambic pentameter, was modelled on the sounds of nature rather than on any written source: “Before I could read, I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind’.”3 “The Miller’s Daughter” points to a similar understanding of verse as voice: writing may fix the “measured strain” of a poem to the page, but once it is memorised, it reverts to being a kind of sound. The stanza raises a set of issues that consistently shaped Tennyson’s thinking about that sound. There is a visceral materiality to the speaker’s memory of the poem, as its rhythm beats in his brain, but at the same time it is figured as immaterial, a phantom, a nothing that has been abstracted from its material conditions. And the remembered poem is simultaneously interminable, haunting the speaker with the “weary sameness” of rhyme, and intermittent. The sound of poetry is heard as an echo, lingering yet precariously impermanent. A comparable definition of sound as both material and immaterial, transient and abiding, was set out in nineteenth-century elaborations of the science of acoustics, a number of which appeared in surveys of the physical sciences in the 1830s. Tennyson, at the start of his career, read several of these books, including Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, and William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences.4 As John Picker has argued, accounts of acoustic science such as these “sounded the first hints of a larger cultural shift toward close listening,” a widespread preoccupation with the problems and possibilities of sound, in nineteenth-century Britain.5 Acoustics was important to the work of writers who aimed to promote and elucidate the physical sciences because, for them, sound exemplified science’s capacity to explain nature while at the same time demonstrating the  Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 60.  Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), 1:11. 4  Tennyson’s copies of these books are described in Nancie Campbell, Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre, 2 vols. (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1971–73), 1:29, 34, 95, and 105. 5  John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8. 2 3

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methodological and epistemological limits of scientific inquiry. Throughout the century, these writers quoted and discussed poetry as evidence both of naturalistic models of acoustics and of the subjective aspects of sound that resisted naturalistic explanation. This chapter argues that the physical sciences were in turn an important context for Tennyson’s sustained and self-conscious considerations of poetic voice. In poetry and in science writing, voice was identified as an exemplary type of sound, a material phenomenon that also, as a marker of personal identity, resonated with psychological and spiritual meaning. Like several other poets, Tennyson sometimes presented the ideality of poetic language as a counter to scientific materialism, but he also tried to ascribe a less reductive and more comforting kind of materiality to poetic voice by arguing for its tangible and demonstrable influence on other people, and on natural and social environments. The three sections of this chapter examine how Tennyson’s preoccupation with the duality of voice informed his views on personal immortality, his politics, and his understanding of poetry’s relation to the physical processes of nature. The science of acoustics was valuable to expositions of the physical sciences primarily because of its theoretical coherence. The consensus on sound, in the words of Mary Somerville, identifies it as “undulations received by the air,” which are then “propagated in every direction, and produce the sensation of sound upon the auditory nerves.”6 In his History of the Inductive Sciences, Tennyson’s former university tutor William Whewell argues that acoustics is exceptional in possessing a firmly established theoretical base, and that it is therefore more of a deductive than an inductive science: “Instead of having a series of inductive truths, successively dawning on men’s minds, we have a series of explanations, in which certain experimental facts and laws are reconciled, as to their mechanical principles and their measures, with the general doctrine already in our possession.”7 This model of acoustic science, in which “experimental facts” are reconciled to a foundational and “general doctrine,” seems to constitute an example of what Thomas Kuhn terms “normal science.” Kuhn argues that an established scientific paradigm “provides rules that 6  Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 4th edn. (London: John Murray, 1837), 148. Throughout this chapter I cite this edition, which Tennyson owned, rather than the first edition. 7  William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London: John W.  Parker, 1837), 2:298.

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tell the practitioner of a mature speciality what both the world and his science are like,” and that, therefore, researchers within such a paradigm “can concentrate with assurance upon the esoteric problems that these rules and existing knowledge define” for them.8 Nineteenth-century science writers, however, used the consensus on the mechanics of sound not to address the specialist problems of experimental research but to set out more general hypotheses and to widen the speculative scope of their work; as Shelley Trower notes, sound “provided a basis for explaining the vibratory activity of energies in the external world.”9 For Somerville, Whewell, and others, the wave theory of acoustics offers an analogy for matter’s other rhythmic motions, and particularly for the motion of the imponderables through the ether: Whewell comments that “it is by means of such pulses, or undulations, that not only sound, but light, and probably heat, are propagated.”10 And the general doctrine of the undulatory theory in turn constitutes the foundation of even broader arguments and conjectures, as these writers ask a number of open (and strikingly Tennysonian) questions about the permanence or impermanence of waves, about the precise point at which sound vanishes into silence, and about the relation between the objective and subjective aspects of acoustics, between the physical motion of sound waves and the hearing of sounds. Somerville presents these two aspects of sound as epistemologically incommensurable. Sound waves, she argues, can be studied comprehensively using scientific methods: because “all the phenomena of the transmission of sound are simple consequences of the physical properties of the air, they have been predicted and computed rigorously by the laws of mechanics.”11 This emphasis on the atmosphere as a material medium was central to naturalistic definitions of sound as a physical process, but, according to Somerville, such definitions cannot be extended to the experience of hearing sounds. “The human frame,” she suggests, may be “regarded as an elastic system, the different parts of which are capable of receiving the tremors of elastic media.” Just as the eye responds to the undulations of light and the skin to those of heat, the ear registers sounds 8  Thomas S.  Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 42. 9  Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012), 37. 10  Whewell, History, 2:312. 11  Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 152.

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by “vibrating in unison” with the air, but “here our knowledge ends; the mysterious influence of matter on mind will in all probability be for ever hid from man.”12 John Herschel, in his influential 1830 essay on sound in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, similarly states that the “auditory nerve” is where “all inquiry terminates, for to trace the progress of sensation along the nerve to the brain, and thence to the sentient soul, it is needless to remark, is altogether beyond our reach.”13 Somerville and Herschel impose fixed limits on the efficacy of scientific research, restricting it to matter and refusing to speculate on or analyse the subjective sensation of sound in brain, mind, or soul. Other writers were less circumspect, citing acoustic theory as evidence in polemical arguments about the relation between science and philosophical materialism. Ludwig Büchner, in his book Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter), unequivocally asserts that “all the so-called imponderables, such as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., are neither more nor less than changes in the aggregate state of matter,” and that “light and sound are vibrating, undulatory bodies.”14 Tennyson was unimpressed by this thoroughgoing materialism when he read the 1864 English translation, which he dismissed as “that foolish book.”15 This assessment was in keeping with his general scepticism towards theories that classified nature’s processes in exclusively material terms; his friend John Tyndall characterised his “interest in science” as “profound, but not, I believe, unmingled with fear of its ‘materialistic’ tendencies.”16 Tennyson took some solace from Paul Janet’s riposte to Büchner, The Materialism of the Present Day, which he read in 1866 and from which he concluded that “matter can do nothing by itself.”17 Janet’s refutation of materialism involves a focus on the subjective dimension of sound: “till the moment when the acoustic nerve begins to act, there is nothing out of us but a vibratory movement,” he argues; “absolutely nothing analogous in the smallest degree to what we call a  Ibid., 260–61.  John Herschel, “Sound” (1830), in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, vol. 4 (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), 810. 14  Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter, trans. J. Frederick Collingwood (London: Trübner, 1864), 4. 15  Tennyson to George Grove, 17 January 1868, in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90), 2:479. 16  John Tyndall, in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 2:469. 17  William Allingham, A Diary, 1824–1889, ed. Helen Allingham and Dollie Radford (London: Penguin, 1985), 136. 12 13

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sound.”18 While Büchner equates sounds with physical vibrations, Janet separates the two, divorcing sound from its atmospheric conditions and identifying it as an inward and subjective experience. For perhaps the majority of commentators on acoustics, the relation between the materiality and the interiority of sound was one of tension rather than straightforward identity or opposition, and this tension informed discussions of the human voice, which was interpreted both as a stable signifier of personal identity and as a contingent physical phenomenon. In his Letters on Natural Magic, David Brewster quotes Byron’s Manfred (“Say on, say on— / I live but in the sound—It is thy voice!”) in illustration of his argument that “the influence of” the voice’s “immutability over the mind has been recorded by the poet in some of his most powerful conceptions.” But he then questions the scientific validity of those conceptions, noting that the permanence of character thus impressed upon speech exists only in those regions to whose atmosphere our vocal organs are adapted. If either the speaker or the hearer is placed in air differing greatly in density from that to which they are accustomed, the voice of the one will emit different sounds, or the same sounds will produce a different impression on the ear of the other.19

Variations in the material constitution of the air, Brewster argues, alter the voice at the point of utterance and at the point of hearing, dissolving the permanence of vocal character that acts, conventionally, as a synecdoche for the permanence of personal character. Voice is material, shaped by environmental circumstances, but it is also relational, determined by the relative positions of speaker and hearer. Brewster’s account of voice exemplifies nineteenth-century science’s preoccupation with what Paul Ricoeur terms “the trace,” a kind of material evidence that is at once a “static” thing and a “passage,” a process which changes over time and which can be quantified, mapped, and reconstructed.20 The voice is an especially

18  Paul Janet, The Materialism of the Present Day: A Critique of Dr. Büchner’s System, trans. Gustav Masson (London: H. Baillière, 1866), 40. 19  David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1834), 213–14, quoting Byron, Manfred, 2:4:150–51. 20  Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88), 3:120.

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tenuous trace, both because of its dependence on subjective and intersubjective sensation and because of its rapid dissipation in the air. This recognition of the mutability of voice typifies wider understandings of sound in the nineteenth century. Expositions of the physical sciences routinely defined sound waves as active processes, constituted, like the tangible and visible forms of nature, by changing arrangements of matter. For Somerville, “motion seems to be a law of matter,” and the phenomena of acoustics are determined by a particular sort of motion: the bounded fluctuation of particles in a wave pattern.21 Writers on acoustics often emphasised the dynamic patterning of sound waves ahead of their materiality, Whewell, for instance, observing that “when an undulation is propagated in a fluid, it is not matter, but form, which is transmitted from one place to another.”22 Picker points out that Victorian acoustic science “gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial,” but its identification of sound waves as mutable forms was also grounds for the dissolution of sound in general and of voice in particular.23 The mechanics of wave theory dictated not just the mutability but also the diminution of sounds: Somerville notes that sound waves are transmitted through the air and other substances “with decreasing intensity, in consequence of the increasing number of particles of inert matter which the force has to move.”24 The stubborn solidity of matter both enables and impedes the propagation of waves, meaning that sounds are in the end evanescent, and that their fading from human hearing is a mathematical and physical certainty. This understanding of sound, commonplace in science writing in the 1830s, is in direct opposition to the sort of metaphysical belief in acoustic permanence expressed in Wordsworth’s 1835 poem “On the Power of Sound”: O Silence! are Man’s noisy years No more than moments of thy life? Is Harmony, blest Queen of smiles and tears, With her smooth tones and discords just, Tempered into rapturous strife,  Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 255.  Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W.  Parker, 1840), 1:298. 23  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 83. 24  Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 148. 21 22

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Thy destined Bond-slave? No! though Earth be dust And vanish, though the Heavens dissolve, her stay Is in the Word, that shall not pass away.25

Like much of his late poetry, these lines are rooted in the older Wordsworth’s Anglican faith. The material universe is dismissed as ephemeral dust, which, when it vanishes, will be survived by the immortal and immaterial word of God, a conventional dualism encapsulated in the antithesis of the closing couplet’s perfect rhyme: “stay” and “away.” Gillian Beer has argued that the invisibility of sound’s wave motions prompted the development, in the late nineteenth century, of non-material models of acoustics: “sound began to assume the status as ideal function that sight had earlier held.”26 Wordsworth’s poem, which draws a firm distinction between metaphysical “tones and discords” and the silence of brute matter, shows that a similar idealising stance, informed by Christianity, played a part in debates about sound throughout the century. Tennyson, with his scepticism towards materialism, consistently sets out to represent sound in ideal terms. His poetry is haunted and motivated by scientific understandings of the impermanence of sound, as he tries to reconcile naturalistic models of acoustics with his belief (or hope) that the voice of poetry “shall not pass away,” and that the endurance of voice can offer proof of the immortality of personal identity. “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” for example, written in 1861 on a trip to the Pyrenees and recalling Tennyson’s visit to the same valley with his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1830, listens to the spiritual overtones of the sounds of nature: All along the valley, stream that flashest white, Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night, All along the valley, where thy waters flow, I walked with one I loved two and thirty years ago. All along the valley, while I walked today, The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away; For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed, The living voice to me was as the voice of the dead, 25  William Wordsworth, “On the Power of Sound,” in Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ll. 217–24. 26  Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 91.

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And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

The voice invoked at the start of this poem is the sound of a natural process, the flow of the stream along its “rocky bed,” but in the poem’s second half this material sound is modulated and amplified into a metaphysical “living voice,” an atemporal continuity of sound that preserves and restores the voice of Tennyson’s friend. The stream’s echoing of Hallam’s tones is articulated in Tennyson’s verse, as the alliterative pattern of the mantra “all along the valley” resounds in the repetitions of “living voice.” In the manuscript draft of the poem the endurance of voice is further prolonged, as the verbs in lines eight and ten shift from the past to the present tense (“The voice of the dead is a living voice to me”).27 Tennyson’s revision of “is” to “was” is perhaps a small demonstration of his doubts about the survival of voice, but it is also an instance of his more general habit (which he shared with Wordsworth) of revision, of reforming his poems in ways that recognise the mutability of poetic voice while also affirming its identity over time. “In the Valley of Cauteretz” subordinates the material motion of sound to the spiritual significance of voice, but the poem nonetheless derives some of its claims from acoustic science. Glossing the second line (“Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night”), Tennyson commented that he wrote the poem “after hearing the voice of the torrent seemingly sound deeper as the night grew.”28 The argument that sounds are (or seem to be) more resonant at night was widespread in nineteenthcentury acoustics; it was set out in Herschel’s “Sound” in sentences that were later quoted by Somerville: In the continual hum of noises which is always going on by day, and which reach us from all quarters, and never leave the ear time to attain complete tranquillity, those feeble sounds which catch our attention at night make no impression. The ear, like the eye, requires long and perfect repose to attain its utmost sensibility.29

Rejecting hypotheses that attributed this phenomenon to changes in atmospheric temperature, Herschel puts forward a subjective explanation:  See Tennyson, Poems, 2:618.  Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 1:474–75. 29  Herschel, “Sound,” 771; Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 155. 27 28

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sounds are heard more clearly because the quiet of night facilitates concentrated attention and aural sensibility. “In the Valley of Cauteretz” adapts and extends this explanation to suggest that, if the ear’s repose is sufficiently “long and perfect,” it might hear again “the voice of the dead.” The poem frames this as a spiritual communion, but its final words, “to me,” complicate this interpretation, implying that it may also be a subjective psychological phenomenon, originating in the tranquillity of the ear and the disturbance of memory. Herschel and Somerville reach their conclusion from the opposite direction, extrapolating from their knowledge of acoustic science to set out the sort of psychological argument which at other times they claim is beyond the remit of the physical sciences. The normal scientific theories of acoustics also informed more idiosyncratic speculations. In his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an unauthorised contribution to the series of essays that aimed to reconcile scientific theory with natural theology, the mathematician Charles Babbage asserts unequivocally that sound is eternal. His argument, grounded in the undulatory theory, posits that the survival of sound depends paradoxically on its gradual diminution into silence. It is the physical motions of sound waves, rather than the audible echoes of sounds, that endure: The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighbourhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their quickly attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. The motions they have impressed on the particles of one portion of our atmosphere, are communicated to constantly increasing numbers, but the total quantity of motion measured in the same direction receives no addition.30

While the impetus of the human voice is “quickly attenuated,” Babbage claims that a material trace of speech remains in the “pulsations of the air,” which, even as they dissipate, impress some of their movement on adjacent particles, and so alter the motions and positions of those particles. The alterations are minute but irreversible, and Babbage concludes from this that “the air itself is one vast library,” in which “stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united 30  Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1838), 108–9.

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movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.”31 James Emmott cites Babbage’s argument as an example of what he describes as a shift in mid-century scientific thinking “from the presumption of static persistence of forms” to “a framework of understanding that assumes the capacity to describe a kind of dynamic persistence.”32 The voice, like any sound, fades as it moves through the air, but the dynamic motion of sound waves ensures that it persists in a different form as particulate writing, as silent speech materially inscribed on the atmosphere. Although this speech is “inaudible to human ears,” Babbage suggests that it might be heard by those with access to more sophisticated auditory instruments: If we imagine the soul in an after stage of our existence, to be connected with a bodily organ of hearing so sensitive, as to vibrate with motions of the air, even of infinitesimal force, and if it be still within the precincts of its ancient abode, all the accumulated words pronounced from the creation of mankind, will fall at once upon that ear. Imagine, in addition, a power of directing the attention of that organ entirely to any one class of those vibrations: then will the apparent confusion vanish at once; and the punished offender may hear still vibrating on his ear the very word uttered, perhaps, thousands of centuries before, which at once caused and registered his own condemnation.33

Babbage employs the undulatory theory as the basis for natural theological speculations about the immortality of the soul: if sound waves subsist as material traces, then a beneficent deity might grant the soul, in some “after stage” of existence, the capacity to register and interpret those traces. Conjectures such as these show how nineteenth-century scientific theories of acoustics, with their focus on the forms and processes of matter, contributed to debates about the psychological and spiritual aspects of sound and voice.34 Tennyson’s thinking about these issues in relation to  Ibid., 112.  James Emmott, “Parameters of Vibration, Technologies of Capture, and the Layering of Voices and Faces in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 476. 33  Babbage, Bridgewater Treatise, 164. 34  Babbage’s speculations have been discussed by critics such as Picker and Robert DouglasFairhurst, but not specifically in relation to their similarities with Tennyson’s concerns about the permanence or impermanence of voice. See Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 15–16; and Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 96–100. 31 32

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poetic sound was informed by his reading of acoustic theory and by the arguments of Arthur Hallam, who once observed that “rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope. This is true of all verse, of all harmonized sound.”35 Babbage goes further, implying that memory and hope inhere in all utterances. His macabre example of the criminal rehearing his condemnation acknowledges the regressive pull of words, their tendency to dwell on and linger in the past. But he also hopes that the tenacity of voice might demonstrate the immortality of personal identity, through a process which is both spiritual and material, dependent on molecular vibrations and the workings of a more sensitive “bodily organ of hearing.” Tennyson, at times, succeeds in imagining personal immortality in similarly aural terms. In Memoriam, his elegy for Hallam, frequently addresses the genre’s conventional concern with the silenced voice of the dead and with the efforts of the poetic voice to fill that silence. In section 38 Tennyson expresses his hope that Hallam’s spirit may still have some interest in listening to his friend’s voice: “Then are these songs I sing of thee / Not all ungrateful to thine ear” (38:11–12). Like Babbage, he describes this act of communication as in some sense physical, assuming Hallam’s possession of something equivalent to a bodily ear. The closing sections of In Memoriam, written to affirm the poem’s progress from despair to reinvigorated faith, similarly present a metaphysical account of voice which is nonetheless conveyed in material terms, and which, like “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” merges Hallam’s “living voice” with the physical processes of nature. “Thy voice is on the rolling air,” Tennyson writes in section 130, hearing a spiritual sound in the material medium of the atmosphere: “I have thee still, and I rejoice; / I prosper, circled with thy voice” (130:1 and 14–15). This rejoicing, though, is hard-won, and throughout much of the poem Tennyson puts forward the more pessimistic (and epistemologically modest) view that, whatever Hallam has become, he cannot be reached through the instrument of the human voice. Tennyson’s “feud with Death” in section 82 is motivated by grief at this mutual silencing: Hallam’s death “put our lives so far apart / We cannot hear each other speak” (82:1 and 15–16).36 35  Arthur Hallam, “The Influence of Italian upon English Literature,” in The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA, 1943), 222. 36  Tennyson imagines Hallam confirming this vocal segregation in section 85: “But in dear words of human speech / We two communicate no more” (85:83–84).

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The voices of In Memoriam, then, announce both the immortality of the soul and the separation of the living from the dead, a separation enforced in part by the materiality of sound. Tennyson composed his elegy over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, the same years in which he was reading the work of Babbage, Brewster, Somerville, and Whewell. None of these writers subscribed to philosophical materialism, but Tennyson sometimes struggled to interpret their emphasis on the physical processes of sound as anything other than depressingly materialist. Section 35, for example, links sound to an understanding of nature that subverts his efforts to persuade himself of his belief in immortality: Yet if some voice that man could trust   Should murmur from the narrow house,   “The cheeks drop in; the body bows; Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:” Might I not say? “Yet even here,   But for one hour, O Love, I strive   To keep so sweet a thing alive:” But I should turn mine ears and hear The moanings of the homeless sea,   The sound of streams that swift or slow   Draw down Æonian hills, and sow The dust of continents to be. (35:1–12)

In contrast to the “living voice’” of the stream at Cauteretz, “the sound of streams” here is generative of nothing but “dust,” the mutable and disintegrating matter of geological processes. As Michelle Geric notes of Maud, “everything seems to have a voice” in Tennyson’s verse: his poetry stages a series of dialogues, informed by his knowledge of the physical sciences, between the poetic voice and the contentious (and often dispiriting) voices of nature.37 For the physicist Oliver Lodge, writing in 1911, Tennyson’s work offered a model for the conciliation of science and faith. “Never did his recognition of the materialistic aspect of nature cloud his perception of its spiritual aspect as supplementing and completing and dominating the mechanism,” Lodge asserts, adding that “his was a voice from other

37  Michelle Geric, Tennyson and Geology: Poetry and Poetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 191.

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centuries, as it were, sounding through the nineteenth.”38 The buildup of verbs in Lodge’s comment leaves the relation between the two aspects of nature unspecified: is spirituality a supplementary and subjective epiphenomenon of nature’s material mechanism, or does it dominate and control that mechanism? Although section 35 of In Memoriam tries to turn a deaf ear to nature’s cacophony, dismissing the materialist perspective as “an idle case” (35:18), the voice of Tennyson’s verse also registers a doubt about the dominance of spiritual faith, which is eroded in the first stanza through the ironic rhyme of “trust” and “dust.” In the rhyme of “here” and “hear,” which silences Tennyson’s optimistic utterance and repositions him as a helpless listener, and in the alliterative sibilance of the third stanza (“homeless sea,” “swift or slow”), the sounds of nature threaten to drown out the poet’s believing voice. In Memoriam’s material and spiritual understandings of sound and voice are directly juxtaposed with each other in the pivotal section 95, in which Tennyson recalls reading Hallam’s letters: And strangely on the silence broke   The silent-speaking words, and strange   Was love’s dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell   On doubts that drive the coward back. (95:25–30)

These lines are structured around the interplay between the alliterative keywords “strange,” “silent,” and “speak.” Hallam’s letters are strange because they constitute a verbal and material trace of his personality, preserving something of a voice that has been silenced by death. Tennyson’s reading of the letters succeeds in defying this seemingly irrevocable change: Hallam’s voice is heard again in the “silent-speaking words” of writing, sounded through Tennyson’s memories of his friend’s audible speech. Letters are presented here as a sort of dramatic monologue: a kind of speech that is fixed in writing, or a kind of text that exemplifies the way in which writing, as Eric Griffiths puts it, “envisages and reaches towards a rediscovery” of “tones of absent voice.”39 The religious faith expressed 38  Oliver Lodge, “The Attitude of Tennyson towards Science,” in Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), 283. 39  Griffiths, Printed Voice, 36.

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in Hallam’s letters elicits a “dumb cry” of love from Tennyson, and the first stanza’s argument is encapsulated in its enveloping rhyme of “broke” and “spoke”: the silent speech of the letters breaks Tennyson’s silence, establishing reciprocal communication between him and his friend. This exchange is then subsumed within a “trance,” in which Tennyson claims to hear “the deep pulsations of the world,” Ӕonian music measuring out   The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—   The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancelled, stricken through with doubt. Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame   In matter-moulded forms of speech,   Or even for intellect to reach Through memory that which I became. (95:40–48)

The first stanza registers a tension that is present, too, in Babbage’s treatise. The pulsations of silent sound can only be heard, it seems, when the soul is liberated from the sensory limitations of the body, yet Tennyson figures these pulsations as a tangible and quantifiable measure, as somatic beats which are sounded in the percussive stresses of lines 42 and 43: “The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— / The blows of Death.” Barri Gold has argued that while “Tennyson resists any simple materialism, the knowledge he seeks” in In Memoriam “is not knowledge of the extraphysical, but of the physical and extraphysical as ultimately inseparable.”40 This is without question the sort of comprehensive knowledge to which he and Babbage both aspire, but section 95 also voices his doubts about whether the physical and the extraphysical are commensurable. The section reclaims the word “Ӕonian,” invoking a metaphysical music which is presumably, in its “measuring out” of time, more permanent than the geological forms of section 35’s “Æonian hills.” But Tennyson emphasises how difficult it is for the poetic voice to mediate between the metaphysical and the material. He struggles to convey the significance of his trance in “matter-moulded forms of speech” because language is confined 40  Barri J.  Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 51.

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e­ pistemologically to the level of sensory experience, but also because voice itself is a matter-moulded form, a material process which, in its impermanence, cannot resonate with the music of eternity.

2 While Tennyson is doubtful in In Memoriam about his capacity to commune with Hallam’s spirit, he takes solace in imagining how Hallam, had he lived, might have spoken to others. Section 113, which incorporates lines from Tennyson’s political poem “Hail Briton,” depicts Hallam’s thwarted future as “a potent voice of Parliament” and as   A lever to uplift the earth And roll it in another course, With thousand shocks that come and go,   With agonies, with energies,   With overthrowings, and with cries, And undulations to and fro. (113:11 and 15–20)

This section equates the undulations of sound and voice with other forms of binary oscillation: the pulses of iambic metre and the reverses of political dispute. Tennyson was as sceptical of political radicalism as he was of philosophical materialism, but here his preference for gradual reforms rather than violent overthrowings is presented in strikingly material terms. The progress implied in the mechanical levering of the earth “in another course” is checked in the next stanza by the “thousand shocks” that echo section 95’s “shocks of Chance,” and by metrically regular phrases such as “come and go” and “to and fro,” which circumscribe the energies and cries of political debate and which articulate, in miniature, the cyclical pattern of In Memoriam’s abba stanza. Matthew Bevis identifies the stanza’s circularity as a “compound rhythm” that merges “propulsion” with “conservation” in a balancing act which is analogous to Tennyson’s political caution.41 A comparable rhythm also characterises the bounded motions of sound waves in acoustic science.

41  Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 152.

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The checks and balances of section 113 exemplify the way in which, as Anna Barton has argued, “the formal freedoms of poetry” offer Tennyson “a pattern for poetic practice that might […] be termed liberal.”42 Sound, according to nineteenth-century science, was shaped by an interplay between motion and regular form, and Tennyson’s reading in acoustics enabled him to deploy sound and voice as suitably balanced metaphors through which to convey the measured liberalism, or reformist conservatism, of his political views. He found support for these views not just in acoustic science but also in broader theorisations of the scientific method. Tennyson owned a copy of Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, and one of the twelve passages that he marked is Herschel’s discussion of the way in which “the successful results of our experiments and reasonings” on “matters purely physical, tend of necessity to impress something of the well weighed and progressive character of science on the more complicated conduct of our social and moral relations.” Thanks to the influence of physical science, “legislation and politics become gradually regarded as experimental sciences; and history” as an “archive of experiments, successful and unsuccessful.”43 By transferring the epistemological stance of the scientific method, founded on principles of repetition and rigorous verification but nonetheless o ­ riented towards the development of new knowledge, to the field of “legislation and politics,” Herschel aligns experimental science with the sort of cautious progressivism to which Tennyson was instinctively sympathetic. The Princess (1847) recounts a radical political experiment—Princess Ida’s project of founding a university for women—which Tennyson presents as unsuccessful, and which is consistently described in acoustic terms: Ida designates her ultimate goal, the permanent realignment of gender norms, as “A trumpet in the distance pealing news / Of better” (4:63–64). And, at the end of the poem’s second part, the Prince enters her university’s chapel at the start of a service, 42  Anna Barton, “Long Vacation Pastorals: Clough, Tennyson, and the Poetry of the Liberal University,” Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 262. 43  Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 72–73. Tennyson’s copy is now in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina; I would like to thank Patrick Scott for telling me about it. See Scott, “Tennyson’s Marginalia in John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse,” Victorian Poetry (forthcoming), and Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 90.

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While the great organ almost burst his pipes, Groaning for power, and rolling through the court A long melodious thunder to the sound Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies, The work of Ida, to call down from Heaven A blessing on her labours for the world. (2:450–55)

The music of Ida’s hymns testifies to the scope of her ambition, as it asks divine sanction for her “labours for the world,” and its enduring power is communicated in Tennyson’s verse through the accumulation of long vowels: “groaning,” “rolling,” “melodious,” “sound.” This merging of Tennyson’s poetry with Ida’s songs might be interpreted as offering support for her project, but The Princess resounds with other voices as well, many of which seek to silence Ida. The Prince, for example, in his effort to persuade her to marry him, borrows from scientific understandings of the inexorable uniformity of nature’s rhythms to warn her of the difficulty of enacting change: her work, he cautions, might prove to be “that footprint upon sand / Which old-recurring waves of prejudice / Resmooth to nothing” (3:223–25). Voice is typically presented in this poem as the medium of personal identity and political debate rather than as a physical process, but the Prince’s metaphor is a reminder of the materiality of wave motion. Material traces erode and disintegrate over time, and Ida’s words, the Prince suggests, are no exception. The politics of The Princess are conveyed in its acoustics: throughout the poem, the mutability of sound is deployed to represent the certainty (and, to a limited extent, the desirability) of political change, but at the same time its predictable motions and fixed laws are used to emphasise the importance of order and restraint. The poem’s doubts about Ida’s radicalism are matched by its characteristically Tennysonian ambivalence towards the theories and methods of science. Ida makes the scientific education of women a central part of her project, and she is comfortable with the specialist language of the sciences: her father Gama recalls how she “talked with” her friend Lady Psyche “Of sine and arc, spheroid and azimuth, / And right ascension, Heaven knows what” (6:238–40). These lines on geometry and astronomy appear to affirm the women’s expertise while poking fun at Gama, but the joke may also be on Ida: mediated through her father’s incomprehension, her words are arguably dismissed as ridiculous, out of place both in female conversation and in verse.

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The framing narrative of The Princess aims to secure a legitimate space for science within the poem by distancing scientific knowledge from Ida’s work and aligning it with a more restrained form of progressive politics. The speaker is a guest of a university friend whose father’s estate is open to the public for a day. The crowds are offered (suitably educational) amusement by the local Mechanics’ Institute, and in the poem’s conclusion the speaker advises “patience” both to advocates and to opponents of political reform, opining that “the happy crowd, / The sport half-science, fill me with a faith” that “there is a hand that guides” (ll. 73, 75–76, and 79). The swapping of Ida’s radicalism for this providential liberalism supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument that the framing narrative presents science as “harmonious, disinterested, and nationally unifying,” the “legitimate offspring of patronage.”44 In the poem’s prologue scientific knowledge is figured as harmonious because it also upholds conventional gender distinctions. The speaker describes the activities of the crowds visiting Sir Walter Vivian’s estate: A man with knobs and wires and vials fired A cannon: Echo answered in her sleep From hollow fields: and here were telescopes For azure views; and there a group of girls In circle waited, whom the electric shock Dislinked with shrieks and laughter. (ll. 65–70)

These are typically noisy lines, and their various sounds carry gendered overtones. The man who fires the cannon, eliciting a sonic response from the landscape, is given agency over technology and, indirectly, over nature as well. The answering echo, markedly different from the morbid echo in Maud that “whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’” (1:4), affirms this masculine control over technological mechanisms and the laws of acoustics. The “girls,” in contrast, collapsing in discordant laughter, are the objects of a scientific experiment: the balanced syntactic construction of the lines (“here were telescopes,” “there a group of girls”) implies that the group is just another exhibit, comparable to the telescopes and the ordnance. The speaker observes that “sport / Went hand in hand with Science” (ll. 79–80), but like the electrocuted women, the two are “dislinked” here, as the women are made the sport of male scientific authority. 44  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 125.

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This gendered distinction informs the structure of The Princess as a whole. Ida’s story is told among some ruins on the Vivian estate, where the speaker and his friends meet with Lilia, the daughter of the house, and her friends. Overlooked by a statue of the family’s ancestor Sir Ralph, their conversation turns to the issue of women’s education, and the speaker then suggests that the men tell a story: “But something made to suit with Time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies’ rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments For which the good Sir Ralph had burnt them all— This were a medley! we should have him back Who told the ‘Winter’s tale’ to do it for us. No matter: we will say whatever comes. And let the ladies sing us, if they will, From time to time, some ballad or a song To give us breathing-space.” (ll. 224–35)

Aligned with the shrieks of the women in the crowd, the “strange experiments” of the Mechanics’ Institute also prefigure Ida’s university: both are innovations that need to be guided and controlled. This control is barely realised in the arrangement and assimilation of incongruous subjects within Tennyson’s blank verse; by directly juxtaposing contemporary social debates with nostalgia for a feudal past and with scientific questions, The Princess becomes its own kind of formal experiment or (as the poem’s subtitle puts it) “medley.” The speaker decrees that this medley will consist of two types of utterance: the men will say the poem’s main narrative, and the women will sing occasional ballads to offer them “breathingspace.” Women’s shrieks are modulated into song here, but their voices remain subordinate, responding to rather than articulating the poem’s central concerns. As Tennyson revised The Princess, the opposition between speech and song hardened: in the third edition of 1850 he inserted rhymed lyrics between the blank-verse sections of the main narrative.45 This segregated structure formalises the division between masculine talk on serious 45  For another discussion of the relation between song and speech in The Princess, see Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 102–16.

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subjects, such as science and educational reform, and the passive, intermittent, feminine voice of lyric song. Tennyson’s marginalisation of song implies a self-doubt, a fear that (in Sedgwick’s words) “poet’s work and women’s work fell in the same ornamental, angelic, and negligible class.” 46 Ida, however, tries to promote a more constructive understanding of the connection between her work and that of the poetic voice. In other lines added in 1850 she critiques the conservative gender politics of love poetry, with which men “blaspheme the muse,” but she also insists that “great is song / Used to great ends” (4:119–20). Ida’s psalms and litanies, together with the voices and songs of other women, are present not just between the sections of the narrative but also within the poetic speech of its blank verse, and to this extent The Princess complicates and arguably undermines its foundational and gendered opposition between two distinct forms of poetry. Men are barred from Ida’s university, and so the Prince and his friends, wishing to enrol as students, disguise themselves as women. They attend Psyche’s lecture on history, which ends with her forecasting of a society transformed by gender equality: She rose upon a wind of prophecy Dilating on the future; “everywhere Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two in the liberal offices of life, Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss Of science, and the secrets of the mind: Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more: And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth Should bear a double growth of those rare souls, Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.” (2:154–64)

Psyche champions a thoroughgoing demolition of gender boundaries and separate spheres in domestic life, politics, science, and the arts. She is most enthusiastic, though, about the projected “double growth” of poets, and her argument that poetic thought can enrich and reform society is supported by the shaping of her speech within these lines. The rhetorical patterning of her words subverts the iambic metre of the blank verse, and this reordering of metre is a way of imagining the reordering of gender  Sedgwick, Between Men, 133.

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relations: the trochaic and spondaic stresses on her repetitions of “two,” for instance, voice her conviction of the possibility of a differently structured and more equitable society. Psyche’s prophecy is communicated in the rhythms of her versified oration, enacting her belief that the poetic voice can articulate radical political arguments. The study of science, according to Psyche, involves a different kind of sounding: the investigation and measurement of nature’s hidden depths. Poetry and science are grouped together in her prophecy, and in the radical curriculum of the university, but the relation between them within Ida’s project is uncertain. As well as listening to Psyche, the Prince hears on his first day A classic lecture, rich in sentiment, With scraps of thundrous Epic lilted out By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever: then we dipt in all That treats of whatsoever is, the state, The total chronicles of man, the mind, The morals, something of the frame, the rock, The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower, Electric, chemic laws, and all the rest, And whatsoever can be taught and known. (2:352–63)

Teaching was conventionally viewed as the most respectable area of scientific work for women in the nineteenth century, and Patricia Fara has argued that, for the majority of women science writers and educators, “the point of learning about science was to develop girls’ characters and help them to become better wives and mothers, not embark on an unconventional life as a female intellectual.”47 This assessment is perhaps unfair on intellectually ambitious writers such as Margaret Bryan, but The Princess articulates the possibility of a mode of pedagogy far more radical than Bryan’s lectures, in which female teachers offer female students a scientific education that is both comprehensive and socially subversive. There is a dismissive misogyny in the Prince’s comments that the lecturers “dipt in” 47  Patricia Fara, “Educating Mary: Women and Scientific Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. Jane Goodall and Christa Knellwolf (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 22.

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their subjects, teaching “something of” each science, but the university’s coverage appears to be imposingly thorough: more inclusive than the surveys of the physical sciences which Tennyson read, it takes in politics, mental and moral philosophy, physiology, geology, astronomy, natural history, and chemistry. Science is joined by poetry (in a range of forms and genres, from “thundrous Epic” to odes to lyric quotations) on the Prince’s timetable, but the two are also differentiated from each other in these lines. The sciences are introduced primarily in material terms, as the Prince lists various animate and inanimate forms of nature (“the frame” and “the flower,” “the rock” and “the star”), and the physical laws which shape them. They are also temporally bounded, fixed in the present as “whatsoever is.” The lilted sentiments of verse are assigned their own materiality, metaphorically identified as jewels, but they are abstracted from time: the words of poetry, unlike the material things studied by science, speak to posterity and endure “for ever.” Characteristically, Tennyson finds it difficult to sustain this optimism about the endurance of voice. In the third part of The Princess, the Prince travels to some nearby hills with Ida and her retinue to collect geological samples. Seeing “The bones of some vast bulk that lived and roar’d / Before man was,” Ida reflects: “As these rude bones to us, are we to her / That will be” (3:277–80). Virginia Zimmerman reads the poem’s discussions of geology as supportive of Ida’s project: the survival of material traces such as fossils, she argues, implies that “women might leave their own mark on time.”48 Michelle Geric puts forward an opposing interpretation, suggesting that Tennyson uses geological comparisons “to figure feminism as extinct and consign it, once and for all, to the rubbish heap of history’s most absurd and implausible creations.”49 The sounds imagined in these lines arguably support this conservative reading: the analogy which Ida draws from the silenced and fossilised bones indicates that living voices must fade and die, leaving behind nothing but inert matter. According to Donald Hair, Tennyson’s poetic voice is “engaged in a double struggle: to make articulate the sounds of nature, and to persuade others of the truth” of poetic utterance.50 The Princess shows that this struggle is both informed and complicated by the physical sciences: 48  Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2008), 82. 49  Geric, Tennyson, 37. 50  Donald S. Hair, Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 70.

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scientific models of materiality intensify Tennyson’s doubts about the significance of nature’s sounds, and about the capacity of voice to interpret and communicate those sounds. This is evident in the closing lines of part three, as Ida, the Prince, and their companions survey the hills:           Many a little hand Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks, Many a light foot shone like a jewel set In the dark crag: and then we turned, we wound About the cliffs, the copses, out and in, Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff, Amygdaloid and trachyte, till the Sun Grew broader toward his death and fell, and all The rosy heights came out above the lawns. (3:338–47)

These lines begin and end with routine poetic diction: the Prince starts by making objectifying and belittling references to the female body (“little hand,” “light foot”), and closes by describing the picturesque spectacle of a sunset. In between, though, the register shifts away from the conventionally lyrical with the introduction of geological terms: “shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff, / Amygdaloid and trachyte.” These terms are located strictly within the iambic metre of the lines and are linked together through the alliterative patterning of “a” and “t” sounds, but their integration into the poem’s blank verse is ambiguous in its effects. Is Tennyson’s use of these words an assertion of the inclusive potential of the poetic voice, its capacity to assimilate the jargon of science? Or is it a comic strategy, similar to the technical language of Punch’s satirical poems, emphasising the incongruous sounds of the words and therefore helping the Prince to mock Ida’s scientific pretensions? Geology is a noisy business here, punctuated by chattering, hammering, and clinking among the cliffs and copses; rather than articulating the sounds of nature, these amateur geologists populate or pollute the landscape with their own sounds. Tennyson’s alliteration, which enacts the echoing of these sounds throughout the hills, perhaps constitutes a criticism of geology, highlighting its destructive effects on nature and suggesting that the party’s “stony names” (like the “barbarous” names disparaged by Wordsworth in The Excursion) are a rote recycling of jargon

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rather than an articulation of knowledge. Dennis Dean argues that the outing descends “into congenial triviality.”51 This interpretation is supported, to some extent, by a consideration of the particular terms used in these lines, which originate in Tennyson’s reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and which refer to a range of igneous and sedimentary rocks and minerals with no clear connection to each other.52 However, many of these terms are not scientific neologisms, formulated to identify specific geological substances. Instead, they derive from a number of different vernacular languages—“rag” from Middle English, “trap” from Swedish, “tuff” from Italian—and their definitions are open and imprecise. From this perspective, the lines suggest that scientific terminology is not categorically distinct from other types of language, and that the rhythms of verse and the idioms of science can therefore work in unison in their investigations of nature’s materiality. The song that Tennyson inserted between parts three and four of The Princess in 1850 can be read as a summary of the poem’s ambivalent assessment of voice. It borrows from scientific theories of acoustics in its description of the motions of sound through the air:   The splendour falls on castle walls    And snowy summits old in story:   The long light shakes across the lakes,    And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.   O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,    And thinner, clearer, farther going!   O sweet and far from cliff and scar    The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. (ll. 1–12)

The lyrical register of this song, juxtaposed with the technical terms of the closing lines of part three, exemplifies the divided structure of The Princess, through which the feminised songs are excluded from the political and  Dennis R. Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985), 16.  See the glossary in vol. 3 of Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–33). 51 52

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scientific debates of the poem’s main narrative. This transition from discursive blank verse to rhymed lyric is also emblematic of a pervasive tension in the poem’s self-reflexive stance towards poetry. Throughout the main narrative, characters such as Ida and Psyche insistently try to affirm the permanence and enduring influence of poetic voice. This song, conversely, considers the possibility, addressed in much nineteenth-­century writing on acoustics, that all sounds are essentially impermanent. It plaintively reiterates the argument, shared by Somerville and Herschel, that echoes epitomise the way in which sound loses impetus as it moves, “growing fainter and fainter till it dies away,” or in Herschel’s words, “till it dies away altogether.”53 The formal structure of “The splendour falls on castle walls” evinces a connection between the dying of echoes and the silencing of Ida’s oppositional voice. Discussing the history of politicised interpretations of rhyme, Peter McDonald suggests that “every rhymed utterance is also an echo of itself,” and concedes that “it is easy to see how this aspect of rhyme,” its repetitiveness, “can appear to be in league with an underlying conservatism.”54 For Tennyson, the repetitions of verse are a form of security, a means of containing dangerously experimental change, but in this song they also raise a concern that the poetic voice is merely engaged in a self-answering dialogue, an echoing exchange that might, in the end, die away altogether. The lyric’s musical sounds seem, at times, to be amplified by their echoes, “thinner, clearer, farther going,” and its rhymed structure constitutes a sort of formal echo chamber, preserving and perpetuating sound. But each stanza ends with an acknowledgement that echoes are nothing more than faint and inexorably fading copies of prior sounds. This tension remains in the final stanza:    O love, they die in yon rich sky,     They faint on hill or field or river:    Our echoes roll from soul to soul,     And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. (ll. 13–18)

 Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 157; Herschel, “Sound,” 752.  Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12. 53 54

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Some critics have claimed that the echoes in this song are not really dying. Zimmerman, for instance, writes that “Tennyson’s use of the present participle suggests the continuation of the sound rather than its absolute death.”55 Alisa Clapp-Itnyre makes a similar argument as part of her reading of the songs of The Princess as progressive endorsements of gender equality: this song, “by reinforcing the timeless energy of music,” enables the women in the poem’s framing narrative to “reinscribe value to ‘their’ aesthetic form. Even after the men’s story is over, they imply, their songs will ‘grow for ever and for ever.’”56 These readings, however, try too determinedly to resolve the ambiguities of the song, which turn, in the final stanza, on its overlapping considerations of two different but related types of echo. In the first two lines, the bugle’s acoustic echoes faint and die, but the next two lines describe echoes that, rolling “from soul to soul,” “grow for ever.” These are not the reverberations of sounds, but “our echoes,” the influence of personal actions and words that will survive, Tennyson hopes, for eternity. The closing couplet returns to the material echoes of the musical notes, reaffirming that these sounds must repeat themselves with decreasing intensity until, eventually, they diminish to nothing. “The splendour falls on castle walls” strikes an acoustic balance that is characteristic of Tennyson’s poetry: it suggests that, although sounds cannot endure permanently, they may nonetheless have an ongoing effect on the people who hear them. Ida retains her belief that voices (poetic, scientific, and political) can prophesy and realise change. At the start of part four she rejects the lyrical diction of the preceding song and returns to scientific classifications of nature, observing: “There sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun, / If that hypothesis of theirs be sound” (4:1–2). For Ewan Jones, the “scientism” of the first line of part four and the “estranged conditionality” of the second enact an “alienation from lyric.”57 But Ida’s words also point to an affiliation between science and poetry: her pun on “sound” implies that scientific theories, such as Pierre-Simon Laplace’s nebular hypothesis of stellar formation, can be interrogated through discussion and debate as well as through specialist investigation, and that they can legitimately be discussed in the medium of the poem’s blank verse.  Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, 89.   Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson’s Critique of Conventionality in The Princess,” Victorian Poetry 38 (2000): 239. 57  Ewan Jones, “Lyric Explanation: Tennyson’s Princesses,” Thinking Verse 4 (2014): 62. 55 56

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This dialogue between poetry and science, however, is not sustained throughout the rest of The Princess. The poem’s second half subordinates Ida’s revolutionary educational plans to a more conventional model of gender relations, as she reluctantly closes her university and agrees to marry the Prince. The sounds of poetry are put to conservative ends in the pastoral idyll that she reads to the Prince in the seventh and final part, an idyll which resounds with “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees,” and in which a shepherd tells a maid that “sweet is every sound, / Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet” (7:206–7 and 203–4). The alliteration and repetition in these lines immerse the woman’s voice in a flow of undifferentiated and aestheticised sound. In the first half of The Princess women are presented as active interpreters of nature, using their education in geology, astronomy, and other sciences both to study natural processes and to promote the goal of gender equality. At the end of Tennyson’s poem, though, Ida surrenders her voice to the authority of a male poetic persona who presents the voice of his addressee as merely one of nature’s sweet sounds, denying women agency over themselves and over the external world. The Princess represented a convenient point of reference in debates about women’s education in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1872 James Clerk Maxwell published a parody of “The splendour falls on castle walls” in Nature. Responding to the magazine’s campaign for an increase in the number of scientific lectures open to women, the poem expresses Maxwell’s doubts about the expansion of women’s involvement in the sciences.58 A male tutor and a female student, hidden in “an alcove with drawn curtains,” experiment with the mirror galvanometer, an instrument (patented by Maxwell’s friend William Thomson) that measures electrical current through the motion of a reflected spot of light: “The long beam trails o’er pasteboard scales, / With slow-decaying oscillations.” In the final stanza the tutor addresses the student:    O love! you fail to read the scale     Correct to tenths of a division;    To mirror heaven those eyes were given,     And not for methods of precision. Break, contact! break! set the free light-spot flying! Break, contact! rest thee, magnet! swinging, creeping, dying.59 58   See Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112. 59  James Clerk Maxwell, “A Lecture on Thomson’s Galvanometer,” Nature 6 (1872): 46.

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Maxwell’s poem reads The Princess as a reactionary critique of women’s education, and it juxtaposes lyrical and scientific registers to comic effect. The internal rhyme of “heaven” and “given,” contrasted with the mathematical language of “division” and “precision,” summarises Maxwell’s conservative satirical point: that the sentiment and romance which he attributes to women cannot be integrated with the precise methods of scientific observation. The quantifiable oscillations of the “light-spot” in this experiment constitute a critical reimagining of the indeterminate musical echoes of Tennyson’s feminised lyric, but Maxwell’s parody also picks up on the undulatory theory’s analogy between light and sound, which is hinted at in Tennyson’s poem in the phrase “the long light shakes,” and which Maxwell characterises in his 1855 paper “On Faraday’s Lines of Force” as “a resemblance in form between the laws of light and those of vibrations.”60 Maxwell’s model of electromagnetism expanded the remit of the undulatory theory by mathematically verifying Faraday’s claim that other types of energy, as well as light, are transmitted in wave motions. By hinting at another formal resemblance, between those motions and the periodic repetitions of metre and rhyme, Maxwell’s parody uses Tennyson’s verse as a means of communicating scientific theories, at the same time as it excludes women from the study of those theories.

3 Despite the significance of Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism, the analogy between light and sound remained the most prominent argument in support of the undulatory theory. It was especially influential in the communication of the theory to non-specialist audiences, because sound waves represented, in comparison to the ethereal undulations of the imponderables, a familiar and concrete example of the vibrations that pervaded nature. In the 1830s David Brewster noted that, just “as sound is produced by undulations or waves in the air,” so “light is supposed to be produced by waves or undulations in an ethereal medium, filling all nature.”61 Thirty years later, in an 1865 lecture “On Radiation” (a copy of which he presented to Tennyson), John Tyndall discussed in similar terms

60  Maxwell, “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 1:156. 61  Brewster, Letters, 199–200.

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perhaps the most important physical conception that the mind of man has yet achieved: the conception of a medium filling space and fitted mechanically for the transmission of the vibrations of light and heat, as air is fitted for the transmission of sound. This medium is called the luminiferous æther.62

Shelley Trower, in her history of sound, identifies the vibrations of nineteenth-century physics as exemplary instances of Bruno Latour’s “quasiobjects.” Vibration “is neither wholly material nor wholly discursive: it has physical existence but cannot itself be perceived except through its effects.”63 The seemingly fundamental difference between the demonstrable materiality of sound waves and the hypothetical materiality of the ether and the imponderables was not a problem for proponents of the undulatory theory, because, as Tyndall puts it in his 1867 book Sound, the undulatory form of sound “is exactly the same as that of light and radiant heat,” and “every experiment on the reflection of light, has its analogue in the reflection of sound.”64 Although it was impossible to perceive the undulations of sound or of light directly, experimental tests and analogical reasoning affirmed the existence of a universal motion that shaped physical processes. Like Humphry Davy and (despite their differences on other things) like Maxwell, Tyndall believed that poetic form could embody and articulate this rhythmic motion. And while Tennyson never unequivocally subscribed to that belief, it nonetheless informed his writing about nature’s materiality and about the survival (or otherwise) of sound and voice. In Sound Tyndall presents poetry as an emblem of the theoretical regularity of sound waves, which in practice are often converted, by environmental and material conditions, into the vibrations “of irregular strength and recurrence” that “produce noise”: Music resembles poetry of smooth and perfect rhythm, noise resembles harsh and rumbling prose. But as the words of the prose might, by proper arrangement, be reduced to poetry, so also by rendering its elements periodic the uproar of the streets might be converted into the music of the orchestra.65 62  Tyndall, “On Radiation,” in Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 176–77. For details of Tennyson’s copy of the 1865 printing of Tyndall’s lecture, see Campbell, Tennyson in Lincoln, 1:102. 63  Trower, Senses, 8. 64  Tyndall, Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), 13. 65  Ibid., 50.

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Unsurprisingly, the quotation of poetry, and of Tennyson’s poetry in particular, was a habitual feature of the rhetoric of Tyndall’s discussions of acoustics. Picker notes that, during an 1878 lecture at the RI on the new technologies of the phonograph and the telephone, and with Tennyson in the audience, Tyndall used a phonograph to record his recitation of lines from Maud.66 And in the RI lectures that were later published as Sound he also quoted Maud to illustrate his description of the various natural processes that generate sounds. Attributing the peculiar sound of a “rough tide” on a “pebbled beach” to “innumerable collisions” of “irregular intensity and recurrence” between the stones, he commented that “the union of these shocks impresses us as a kind of scream. Hence the line in Tennyson’s Maud:—‘Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.’”67 Tyndall presumably did not consider the irregular anapaests of this line to be “poetry of smooth and perfect rhythm”; although he identified poetry as an ideal form of acoustic regularity, this quotation indicates that he also understood verse to be in some way mimetic of the noisy materiality of the sounds of nature. Tyndall wrote poetry as well as quoting it. His research on glaciers in the 1850s involved field work in the Alps, and he became an enthusiastic and successful mountaineer, returning almost every year for the rest of his life; his poem “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” a celebration of the Alpine landscape, was printed at the end of his final book, New Fragments, in 1892. While the poem briefly gestures towards a conventionally Romantic evocation of the sublimity of mountains, much of its focus is on sound, and specifically on the role of poetic language in the representation of nature’s sounds and in the communication of scientific theories. The poem was also published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881, titled “From the Alps: A Fragment” and signed “J. T.”68 Both versions ask what “craft” could have fashioned the sublime scenery of the Alps, and in 1881 66  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 113. For another discussion of the part played by Tennyson’s verse in promoting sound-recording technologies in the nineteenth century, see Matthew Rubery, “Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18 (2014): http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.678/ (accessed 8 March 2019). 67  Tyndall, Sound, 55, quoting Tennyson, Maud, 1:99. Tyndall discusses the same line in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 2:474–75. 68  The 1881 version of the poem was located by Roland Jackson. See Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 449.

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         The answer is abroad, Buzzing through all the atmosphere of mind, ‘Tis Evolution! East, west, north, and south— From droughty sage and spinster shrill we learn ’Twas Evolution! When the word has spread Its magic to the limits of the world, Till its reverberation thence becomes A lullaby—how sweet ’twill be to doze Over thy emptied cup of nectar’d sweets, Divine Philosophy!—to doze in peace.69

Tyndall here widens his claim, made in the Belfast address, that evolution can explain not just the development of biological organisms but the forms and processes of matter in general. This understanding of evolution is presented in acoustic terms, not as a theory but as a word, a sound that reverberates through “the atmosphere of mind.” Tyndall’s borrowing of the phrases “nectar’d sweets” and “Divine Philosophy” from Milton’s Comus suggests that this reverberation will in the end be transformed into the kind of aesthetically pleasing sound, conveying morally edifying knowledge, that is characteristic of poetry. He expresses some doubts about this process of science communication: “spinster shrill” indicates a misogynistic regret, similar to Maxwell’s, that science has become so popular that its words can be parroted by those, especially women, who do not understand them. And the description of evolution as a soporific lullaby sounds the kind of warning, about the dangers of unthinkingly embracing scientific jargon, which was often directed at Tyndall himself by his critics. But the words and sounds of this poem are far more assertive than those of the 1892 version, in which Tyndall labels “science dumb” a “babbling Gnostic,” and tells it: “cease to beat the air. / We yearn, and grope, and guess, but cannot know.”70 The atmospheric reverberation of 1881 is rewritten as an aimless beating of the air, as Tyndall steps back from his usual pugnacious championing of science. Perhaps he thought that the modesty of these revised lines, emphasising the epistemological limitations of scientific rhetoric, might be more appropriate to a poem that proved, in terms of his published writing, to be a valediction.

 Tyndall, “From the Alps: A Fragment,” Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1881: 10.  Tyndall, “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” in New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 499. 69 70

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However, “A Morning on Alp Lusgen” retains the ambitious opening lines of the 1881 poem, which imply that verse has the potential to articulate sounds that would otherwise remain unheard. The Alps in these lines are simultaneously silent and alive with rhythm: The sun has cleared the peaks and quenched the flush Of orient crimson with excess of light. The tall grass quivers in the rhythmic air Without a sound; yet each particular blade Trembles in song, had we but ears to hear. The hot rays smite us, but a quickening breeze Keeps languor far away. Unslumbering, The soul enlarged takes in the mighty scene.71

The manuscripts of the poem include five preliminary drafts of these lines, which place an even greater emphasis on the paradoxical silence of nature’s song: the quivering of the grass is identified as “voiceless music” and “noiseless periods.”72 This quivering is just one aspect of the insistently dynamic account of nature put forward here: the sun’s “excess of light,” its “hot rays,” and the rhythmic motion of the air together constitute a sort of undulatory sublime. Tyndall’s soul-enlarging apprehension of the scene bridges the material and the metaphysical; as Daniel Brown notes, nature in this poem “allows the imagination to grasp a scientific truth that is not amenable to our limited senses.”73 The poem’s argument, progressing from an iteration of silent sounds to a rapturous response to those sounds, recalls Tennyson’s hearing of “Ӕonian music” in In Memoriam. But it is also grounded in a scientific knowledge of the undulatory theory and of the limitations of human hearing, which mute much of nature’s rhythmic sound. Poetry, for Tyndall, is a means of making that sound audible. Tennyson’s doubts about this correspondence between poetic and physical rhythms are indicated in his 1868 poem “Lucretius.” The Roman poet characterises his verse as “shutting reasons up in rhythm, / Or Heliconian honey in living words” (ll. 223–24), but Tennyson’s poem

 Ibid., 498.  Tyndall, RI MS JT/3/44, 3–4. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 73  Brown, Poetry, 159. 71 72

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implies that the smooth and measured sounds of Lucretius’s poetry misrepresent his materialist philosophy. In a dream, Lucretius recounts, “A void was made in Nature; all her bonds Cracked; and I saw the flaring atom-streams And torrents of her myriad universe, Ruining along the illimitable inane, Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another frame of things For ever.” (ll. 37–43)

The torrents of matter described in these lines consist not of quantifiable patterns of wave motion but of the random clashing together of discrete atoms, endlessly reshaping the “frame of things.”74 In Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura sound is incorporated into his theory that these atomic collisions are the exclusive cause of natural phenomena: “all sound and voice is heard when they have made their way into the ears and have struck with their body the sense of hearing. For voice too and sound you must admit to be bodily.”75 This percussive materialism sets out a view of matter that differs both from the rhythmic universality of the undulatory theory and from the providential order of natural theology. And it encourages an alignment between science and poetry which emphasises the rhythmic disturbances rather than the metrical uniformity of poetic form, and which resounds in Tyndall’s quotation of Maud, in the “shocks” and “blows” of In Memoriam, and in the violent trochaic inversions— “cracked,” “ruining,” “fly”—of “Lucretius.” As Tyndall remarked, Tennyson was troubled by the “materialistic tendencies” of science. Accordingly, his poem depicts a Lucretius who is sick of his own materialism and who, in an effort to escape matter, turns his attention to the “illimitable inane,” the void through which atoms stream, invoking

74  In his 1873 lecture on “Molecules,” Maxwell quotes these lines from Tennyson’s poem in support of his argument that Lucretius subverts his own materialism “by making his atoms deviate from their courses at quite uncertain times and places, thus attributing to them a kind of irrational free will.” Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 440. 75  Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. H.  A. J.  Munro, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1864), 1:176.

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        “The Gods, who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm!” (ll. 104–10)

Metrical regularity in these lines is representative not of the undulations of sound but of a blissful isolation from the noisy turmoil of nature’s materiality: the “sacred everlasting calm” of the gods, fixed in the perfect iambic rhythm of line 110, is imagined primarily as an absence of sound. Tennyson’s account of these silent and ethereal gods may borrow not just from Lucretian materialism but also from nineteenth-century understandings of sound’s dependence on the material medium of the atmosphere. Somerville observes that the transmission of sound “requires a much denser medium than that either of light or heat; its intensity diminishes as the rarity of the air increases.” Therefore, “at a very small height above the surface of the earth, the noise of the tempest ceases,” and “the thunder is heard no more in those boundless regions where the heavenly bodies accomplish their periods in eternal and sublime silence.”76 By representing the transition from “the air” to the “boundless regions” of space (and the ether) in terms of different densities of matter, Somerville demonstrates the way in which nineteenth-century physical science blurs the division between materiality and immateriality, and between sound and silence. Like Somerville’s prose, Tennyson’s lines ring with the sounds of nature— the thunder, the vocal noise of “human sorrow”—even as they imagine their silencing. In its evocation of divine calm through a listing of natural processes and sounds, the poem highlights the inescapability of what Angela Leighton terms the “materialist or ‘matter-moulded’ perspective on the world” which Tennyson shared with Lucretius and which, despite his doubts about materialism, “remained with him to the end.”77 Tyndall was more relaxed than Tennyson about the similarities between his thinking and Lucretian materialism, and in the Belfast address he quotes these lines from “Lucretius” to illustrate the Epicurean belief that  Somerville, Connexion, 4th edn., 260.  Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67. 76 77

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“nature pursues her course in accordance with everlasting laws, the gods never interfering.”78 His quotation performs the dual purpose that John Holmes has identified in other scientific citations of Tennyson: it enables him to “cash in on” the poet laureate’s “cultural capital,” while also positioning the poetry as supporting evidence for his particular view of science.79 He uses the lines to bolster his controversial argument with Tennyson’s eloquence and cultural respectability, but he also quotes them specifically to validate his hostility to theological interference in science and his emphasis on the uniformity of nature. Tyndall’s explanations of sound and voice epitomise this commitment to a scientific naturalism founded on “everlasting laws”: “the spoken language, which is to give us pleasure or pain, which is to rouse us to anger or soothe us to peace,” exists, he comments in Sound, “between us and the speaker, as a purely mechanical condition of the intervening air.”80 Like those of other science writers, Tyndall’s distinction between the subjective and objective aspects of sound is an assertion of scientific fact (in the terms of acoustic science, the voice can be defined exclusively as a material configuration of the air) which also recognises that the emotional effects of sound may lie outside the remit of nature’s physical laws. Tyndall’s confident tone elides the tension between the two aspects of sound that shaped Tennyson’s thinking about voice throughout his career. This tension is addressed again in “Parnassus,” written during the 1880s, which starts with Tennyson announcing his determination to “overcome” the mountain of the muses And stand with my head in the zenith, and roll my voice from the summit, Sounding for ever and ever through Earth and her listening nations, And mixt with the great Sphere-music of stars and of constellations. (ll. 5–8)

The poem predicts an immortal fame for the poet, founded on the propagation of a voice that will sound “for ever and ever.” It is another iteration of the aspiration to lasting personal influence (poetic, spiritual, or political) that Tennyson expresses, more ambivalently, in The Princess and In Memoriam. In these lines the poetic voice reverberates triumphantly 78  Tyndall, Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 6. 79  John Holmes, “‘The Poet of Science’: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson,” Victorian Studies 54 (2012): 657. 80  Tyndall, Sound, 49.

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through the terrestrial atmosphere and over the “listening nations,” while also harmonising with the “Sphere-music” of the universe as a whole. “Parnassus” juxtaposes this invocation of the music of the spheres with another perspective on the universe, which threatens to silence the poet’s voice and which is represented by “two shapes high over the sacred fountain, / Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain” (ll. 9–10): Look, in their deep double shadow the crowned ones all disappearing! Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing! “Sounding for ever and ever?” pass on! the sight confuses— These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses! If the lips were touched with fire from off a pure Pierian altar, Though their music here be mortal need the singer greatly care? Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter; Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there. (ll. 13–20)

Tennyson intermittently found in acoustic science some affirmation of his hopes for the endurance of sound and voice. The first of these two stanzas, however, warns that physical science more widely, in the form of astronomy and geology, demonstrates the impermanence of all things in a material universe and so reveals that the poet’s song cannot be deathless. Tennyson articulates this bitter conclusion by echoing his own words, “sounding for ever and ever,” turning them into a hopeless and self-correcting question. This stanza sets out a straightforward conflict between science and song, in which scientific epistemology robs poetry of its permanence and value. In a typically Tennysonian strategy, the poem’s final stanza seeks to resolve this conflict not through direct argument but through a studied ambiguity that blurs the clarity of the preceding stanza’s discomfiting conclusion. As Cornelia Pearsall notes, this poem “dismisses the idea of poetry’s immortality,” but it nonetheless “maintains the primacy of the poet’s memorable words over any other kind of speech.”81 The source of that primacy is not explained, but it possibly depends on a speculation that is underpinned by, rather than in opposition to, the theories of nineteenth-century physical science. In this poem, it seems, Tennyson is willing to join Tyndall in imagining that verse may represent 81  Cornelia Pearsall, Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 348.

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a manifestation of nature’s undulatory motion. The rolling waves of the poet’s voice are in themselves mortal and impermanent, but “other songs” and other rhythms resound throughout the universe, inaudible to human ears.

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Gold, Barri J. 2010. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Griffiths, Eric. 1989. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hair, Donald S. 1991. Tennyson’s Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hallam, Arthur. 1943. The Influence of Italian upon English Literature. In The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T.H. Vail Motter, 213–234. New York: MLA. Henchman, Anna. 2014. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herschel, John. 1830. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1st edn. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. ———. 1845. “Sound” (1830). In Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 4: 747–824. London: B. Fellowes. Holmes, John. 2012. “The Poet of Science”: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson. Victorian Studies 54: 655–678. Jackson, Roland. 2018. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janet, Paul. 1866. The Materialism of the Present Day: A Critique of Dr. Büchner’s System. Trans. Gustav Masson. London: H. Baillière. Jones, Ewan. 2014. Lyric Explanation: Tennyson’s Princesses. Thinking Verse 4: 50–78. Karlin, Daniel. 2013. The Figure of the Singer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 4th edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leighton, Angela. 2007. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lodge, Oliver. 1911. The Attitude of Tennyson towards Science. In Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson, 280–284. London: Macmillan. Lucretius. 1864. De Rerum Natura. Trans. H.A.J.  Munro. 2 vols. Cambridge: Deighton Bell. Lyell, Charles. 1830–33. Principles of Geology. 3 vols. London: John Murray. Maxwell, James Clerk. 1872. A Lecture on Thomson’s Galvanometer. Nature 6: 46. ———. 1873. Molecules. Nature 8: 437–441. ———. 1890. On Faraday’s Lines of Force. In The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, 2 vols., 1: 155–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDonald, Peter. 2012. Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in NineteenthCentury Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearsall, Cornelia. 2008. Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Picker, John M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984–88. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rubery, Matthew. 2014. Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/ view/ntn.678/. Accessed 8 Mar 2019. Scott, Patrick. Forthcoming. Tennyson’s Marginalia in John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse. Victorian Poetry. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Somerville, Mary. 1837. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. 4th edn. London: John Murray. Tennyson, Alfred. 1982–90. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1987. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 3 vols. 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman. Tennyson, Hallam. 1897. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Trower, Shelley. 2012. Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. London: Continuum. Tyndall, John. RI MS JT/3/44. Royal Institution of Great Britain. ———. 1867. Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1871. On Radiation. In Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, 169–218. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1874. Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled at Belfast. London: Longmans, Green. ———. 1881. From the Alps: A Fragment. Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August, 10. ———. 1892. A Morning on Alp Lusgen. In New Fragments, 498–500. London: Longmans, Green. Whewell, William. 1837. History of the Inductive Sciences. 3 vols. London: John W. Parker. ———. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Wordsworth, William. 1999. On the Power of Sound. In Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis, 116–124. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zimmerman, Virginia. 2008. Excavating Victorians. Albany: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 6

Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution

1 In her 1881 sonnet “The Dead,” Mathilde Blind uses the undulatory motions of the ether across space and time as a metaphor for intergenerational communication and influence: The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still: They have forged our chains of being for good or ill; And their invisible hands these hands yet hold. Our perishable bodies are the mould In which their strong imperishable will— Mortality’s deep yearning to fulfil— Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold. Vibrations infinite of life in death, As a star’s travelling light survives its star! So may we hold our lives, that when we are The fate of those who then will draw this breath, They shall not drag us to their judgment bar, And curse the heritage which we bequeath.1

1  Mathilde Blind, “The Dead,” in The Prophecy of Saint Oran and Other Poems (London: Newman, 1881), 119.

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_6

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Throughout the octave, influence, and the positivist version of immortality which it guarantees, is framed in material terms: in the first quatrain, the “stark and cold” corporeality of the dead prefigures the abiding grip of “their invisible hands”; in the second, the abstraction of the intransitive verb “to fulfil” is realised in the mould of “our perishable bodies.” This materiality is both retained and moderated in the simile which opens the sestet: the vibrations of light in the ether are at the same time material and imponderable, and they are therefore an apt metaphor for Blind’s understanding of the influence of the dead, a heritage which is physical in its means of transmission but moral (and arguably spiritual) in its effects, and particularly in the responsibility it imposes on the living. Blind’s sonnet sets out a teleological and purposive model of influence, in which the mortal will yearns to fulfil itself in future generations; that will is communicated, according to her astronomical metaphor, in the rhythmic repetitions of “vibrations infinite.” This understanding of influence, simultaneously progressive and repetitive, is embodied in Blind’s preferred Petrarchan sonnet form, in which the development of an argument is dependent on the cyclical patterns of abba rhymes. The language of this sonnet is consistently Tennysonian: the clasping of dead and living hands gestures to In Memoriam and to Tennyson’s lyric “Break, break, break”—“But O for the touch of a vanished hand” (l. 11)—and its “vibrations infinite” resonate with the “other songs for other worlds” that he invokes at the end of “Parnassus.” Blind’s politics, however, are, to say the least, different from Tennyson’s, and in this chapter I want to consider her writing as an example of the way in which late-­ Victorian radicals deployed scientific theories in support of their political beliefs. Blind, I argue, uses her knowledge of the physical sciences to postulate a kind of rhythmic communication that connects living organisms and non-living things across the universe. This rhythm underpins Blind’s poetics and her politics. It is made audible, she argues, in the rhythms of verse, and it also informs her understanding of political progress, in which revolution is characterised both as a cataclysmic transformation of society and as a reiteration of an eternal principle of equality. For Caroline Levine, rhythm, as “a category that always already refuses the distinction between aesthetic form and other forms of lived experience,” offers exemplary support for her transhistorical method of formalist criticism, which encompasses both textual and non-textual forms.2 But the case of Blind illus2  Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 53.

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trates the importance of historical specificity to the study of literary form: her writing shows how debates in the physical sciences in the late nineteenth century prompted the development of a historically idiosyncratic interpretation of rhythm, in which poetic form was aligned not just with “other forms of lived experience” but also with the material forms of physical processes throughout the universe. Blind was born in Mannheim in 1841, and her family moved to London after her mother and stepfather’s involvement in the failed 1848 revolutions in Germany. As a child she knew Karl Marx and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, and her commitment to radical politics was lifelong. She developed an interest in science at a young age, and there has been a significant amount of research on her poetry’s response to Darwinism.3 However, her knowledge of the physical sciences, and especially of trends in nineteenth-century astronomy and thermodynamics, has not been closely examined. This knowledge is evident throughout her poetry, but it is particularly prominent in the poem that also represents her most sustained intervention in debates about evolution, The Ascent of Man (1889). The biological and physical sciences are linked, for Blind, through the universal fact of rhythm. Rhythm, both as a metaphor and as a material process, had been important to the physical sciences, and especially to the undulatory theory, throughout the nineteenth century. Writing in the 1830s, Mary Somerville broadened the scope of the undulatory theory, arguing that “astronomy affords the most extensive example of the connection of the physical sciences”: In it we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with every thing that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a rain drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air as in the periods of the moon. Gravitation not only binds satellites to their planet, and planets to the sun, but it connects sun with sun throughout the wide extent of creation, and is the cause of the disturbances, as well as of the order, of nature: 3  See Katy Birch, “‘Carrying Her Coyness to a Dangerous Pitch’: Mathilde Blind and Darwinian Sexual Selection,” Women: A Cultural Review 24 (2013): 71–89; Susan Brown, “‘A Still and Mute-Born Vision’: Locating Mathilde Blind’s Reproductive Poetics,” in Victorian Women Poets, ed. Alison Chapman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 123–44; and Robert P.  Fletcher, “‘Heir of All the Universe’: Evolutionary Epistemology in Mathilde Blind’s Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident,” Victorian Poetry 43 (2005): 435–53.

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since every tremour it excites in any one planet is immediately transmitted to the farthest limits of the system, in oscillations, which correspond in their periods with the cause producing them, like sympathetic notes in music, or vibrations from the deep tones of an organ.4

As Michelle Boswell points out, “Somerville’s use of antithetical phrasing” here “creates a syntactical tension” that “not only contrasts but also links” its various antitheses.5 This phrasing articulates Somerville’s point that the force of gravity validates the intellectual connection between the physical sciences through its connection of material phenomena across the universe. It links “sun with sun,” “planets to the sun,” and “satellites to their planet,” but as well as directing astronomical processes it also pervades matter on every scale, from “the motions of animate and inanimate beings” to those of single atoms. And Somerville identifies gravity as an inherently rhythmic force, propagated “in oscillations” that are “like sympathetic notes in music.” Frustratingly, Somerville does not elaborate on this idiosyncratic view of gravity; it is unclear, for instance, whether she thinks that gravity’s oscillations, like the vibrations of light, are conveyed through the ether. But her description indicates how influential the undulatory paradigm was to nineteenth-century physics. It is also a precursor to Blind’s ambitious theorisation of a pervasive rhythm that directs both the order of the universe and the revolutionary disturbances that punctuate that order. William Whewell set out a strikingly different conception of rhythm in his 1840 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an enthusiastic writer and quoter of poetry, Whewell anticipates Blind in identifying poetic form as the exemplary instance of rhythm: “the term rhythm is most commonly used to designate the recurrence of times marked by the syllables of a verse, or the notes of a melody.”6 Unlike Somerville, Whewell defines rhythm not as a physical phenomenon but as one of the a priori mental acts that structure human perceptions of the external world. In a chapter on “the perception of time and number,” he asserts that “if the apprehension of number be accompanied by an act of 4  Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 4th edn. (London: John Murray, 1837), 1–2. This paragraph is not present in the first edition. 5  Michelle Boswell, “Poetry and Parallax in Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45 (2017): 731. 6  William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 1:126.

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the mind, the apprehension of rhythm is so still more clearly,” and that “all the forms of versification and the measures of melodies are the creations of man, who thus realises in words and sounds the forms of recurrence which rise within his own mind.”7 Blind’s understanding of rhythm fluctuates between these two positions. Her writing finds room for a stance which is similar to Somerville’s in its identification of a universal rhythm that inheres in matter; for an idealism that defines rhythm in mental and spiritual terms; and for an interpretation that tries to present it as an activity both of matter and of mind. These differing perspectives often coexist in the same poem (for example, in The Ascent of Man). But matter in its various forms arguably remains the primary vehicle of rhythm in Blind’s work, and on occasion she voices a scepticism towards the kind of subjectivist explanation put forward by Whewell. Among the “Maxims and Reflections from the German of Goethe” that she translated and published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1876 is Goethe’s observation that “there is a certain magic in rhythm leading us to believe that its sublimity belongs to ourselves.”8 Apparently sharing his doubts about this belief, Blind often presents rhythm as evidence of the sublimity of matter rather than of mind. The link between matter and rhythm was also emphasised in the second half of the century by researchers in thermodynamics, the branch of physics which studied energy, or the different modes of matter’s motion (or potential motion). The displacement of the word “force” (signifying an impetus acting on matter from without) by “energy” (denoting a property of matter itself) was one of the most important semantic shifts in nineteenth-­century science, and it prompted writers of widely differing philosophical perspectives to affirm the centrality of matter, and particularly of the undulatory motions of the ether, to the physical sciences. James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian and theorist of the imponderable phenomena of electromagnetism, wrote in his 1876 Matter and Motion (a book published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) that energy cannot exist except in connexion with matter. Hence since, in the space between the sun and the earth, the luminous and thermal radiations, which have left the sun and which have not reached the earth, possess  Ibid., 1:134.  Blind, “Maxims and Reflections from the German of Goethe,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 13 (1876): 348. 7 8

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energy, the amount of which per cubic mile can be measured, this energy must belong to matter existing in the interplanetary spaces, and since it is only by the light which reaches us that we become aware of the existence of the most remote stars, we conclude that the matter which transmits light is disseminated through the whole of the visible universe.9

As in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Maxwell argues here that, because of its basis in the motions of matter, the transmission of energy entails the existence of a material ether. And he proceeds to summarise the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which had been developed by several British and European researchers during the mid-nineteenth century. The first law, of the conservation of energy, states that, although energy is converted into different forms, it can neither be created nor destroyed; the quantity of energy in a closed system is fixed. The second law states that the universe’s entropy (also known to the Victorians as the “dissipation of energy”) tends towards a maximum: while energy is not destroyed, more and more of it is transformed into uniform heat which cannot do any work. For Maxwell, “the discussion of the various forms of energy,” of “the conditions of the transference of energy from one form to another,” and of “the constant dissipation of the energy available for producing work,” comprises “the whole of physical science” in its “dynamical form under the various designations of Astronomy, Electricity, Magnetism, Optics, Theory of the Physical States of Bodies, Thermo-dynamics, and Chemistry.”10 In an 1873 letter to Herbert Spencer, Maxwell distinguishes heat from other forms of energy in terms that point to a connection between physics and poetry (as I discussed in Chaps. 4 and 5, Maxwell wrote verse himself).11 He informs Spencer that “I use the word agitation to distinguish the local motion of a molecule in relation to its neighbours,” that is, “the motion called heat.” He uses it specifically to emphasise “the irregularity of that motion of agitation”; “the word agitation excludes the notion of rhythm.” Maxwell separates molecular heat from those phenomena that depend on “the motion of the particles of a medium during the propagation of a 9  James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876), 93. 10  Ibid., 95. 11  Ewan Jones has also discussed some of the ways in which Maxwell and John Tyndall draw parallels between the rhythms of verse and those of the universe. See Jones, “Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste,” Representations 144 (2018): 61–89.

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wave”—for example, sound or electromagnetic energy such as light or thermal radiation—because “these motions, at least in those cases which are explained in books, are periodic and regular.”12 Like Somerville and John Tyndall, Maxwell simultaneously highlights the regularity and the irregularity of matter’s motions; both (despite his claim that “agitation excludes the notion of rhythm”) find expression in the rhythms of nineteenth-­century verse, and, according to Blind, in the unfolding of political revolution. Maxwell’s distinction between heat and rhythmic motion is linked to a broader opposition, influential throughout late-Victorian culture, between the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Tina Young Choi summarises this binary in her essay on thermodynamics and the novel: “entropy demanded a linear narrative, while conservation suggested a closed, circulatory one.”13 Choi shows that the linear narrative of the inexorable dissipation of energy gave impetus to late-Victorian fictions of apocalypse and degeneration; I want to suggest, comparably, that the circular and repetitive process of energy conservation, especially in conjunction with the identification of light and sound as rhythmic waves, had an important influence on Victorian understandings of poetic form. Surprisingly, while critics have discussed the contribution of Victorian physical science to Modernist accounts of rhythm, its relevance to Victorian verse has not been examined in any detail.14 Before discussing Blind’s poetry, I want to consider how her views on physical science were influenced by her work translating David Friedrich Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New in 1873. As James Diedrick argues, Blind’s decision to translate Strauss was motivated by several biographical and intellectual similarities: “Strauss was a fellow countryman, freethinker, and scientific materialist”; he was also the pioneer of “a form of historical materialism that bridged the ideas of Hegel and Marx and contributed to 12  Maxwell to Herbert Spencer, 17 December 1873, in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. P. M. Harman, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990–2002), 2:962–63. 13  Tina Young Choi, “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative,” ELH 74 (2007): 307. 14  See Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 295–318; Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

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the political radicalism that characterized Blind’s entire family.”15 Strauss’s historical materialism was given its most famous (or infamous) expression in his analysis of the gospels in The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835). In The Old Faith and the New he expands the scope of this critique to set out a comprehensively atheistic interpretation of humanity’s place in the universe. The book’s argument relies on several scientific theories, especially the nebular hypothesis of stellar formation, ether theory, and the circular narrative of the conservation of energy. Strauss uses these theories to reject the theological notion of a finite universe created by a deity and to argue instead for an infinite and eternal universe characterised by perpetual variation. In Blind’s English translation that variation is shaped equally by uniform laws and by radical upheavals: “The Cosmos itself—the sum-total of infinite worlds in all stages of growth and decay—abode eternally unchanged, in the constancy of its absolute energy, amid the everlasting revolution and mutation of things.”16 There are two significant disparities between Blind’s translation and Strauss’s German text: “Das Universum ein unendlicher Enbegriff von Welten, in allen Stadien des Werdens und Bergehens, und eben in diesem ewigen Kreislauf und Wechsel es selbst in ewig gleicher absoluter Lebensfülle sich erhaltend.”17 The word “revolution” does not appear in Strauss’s German; instead he uses “Kreislauf,” “circulation.” Blind perhaps intended this revision to acknowledge an important difference between her and Strauss: despite his theological radicalism, Strauss was a political conservative. In the memoir of his life that she added to later editions of her translation, Blind felt the need to apologise for his “deep-seated dislike to the revolutionary mode of effecting political changes,” commenting that, in reaction to the 1848 German revolutions, in which her own family took part, “he became even vehement in his protest against it.”18 The word “energy” is also missing from Strauss’s text; he instead uses “Lebensfülle,” which translates literally as “fullness of life.” Blind’s interpretation of this as “energy,” and of “circulation” as “revolution,” implies, 15  James Diedrick, Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 105–6. 16  David Friedrich Strauss, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Blind, 1st edn. (London: Asher, 1873), 173–74. 17  Strauss, Der Alte und Der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniss (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1872), 149. 18  Blind, “Memoir of David Friedrich Strauss,” in Strauss, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Blind, 3rd edn. (London: Asher, 1874), xliii.

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I think, two important points. First, that she wanted to suggest that perpetual transformation was a characteristic not just of life but of the energy and matter which were understood in thermodynamics and electromagnetism to be the two fundamental constituents of the universe. And second, that she wanted to hint that this mutability, with its rhythmic cycles of “growth and decay,” might be reimagined through political analogy as cataclysmic and revolutionary. These points are a response not just to Strauss but to the numerous British writers who invoked the two laws of thermodynamics in support of conservative political arguments. Some suggested that the first law, with its insistence that no new energy can be created within a closed system, validated the view that revolutionary social change was a violation of natural law. Others used the dissipation of energy to underpin apocalyptic warnings about the degeneration of British society into communism and decadence. Blind’s translation of Strauss is one example of her deployment of a capacious understanding of energy, taking in both the transmission of vibrations across space and the cyclical transformations of thermodynamics, to characterise the tendency of the universe’s physical processes not as static or degenerative but as progressive. As Blind knew, Strauss would have disagreed with her political reading of thermodynamics. In other ways, though, he shares her understanding of the motions of matter and energy as simultaneously cyclical and progressive. He argues that some of the “auguries of religion and philosophy have in recent times gained scientific probability” from the “discovery” of “the conservation of energy”: If it be a Cosmic law that impeded motion is transformed to heat, and heat again begotten by motion—that, in fact, the force of nature, as soon as it has disappeared in one form, reappears in another—the possibility surely here dawns upon us that in this retardation of Cosmic motion, Nature may possess the means of summoning new life out of death.19

Like Blind in “The Dead,” Strauss deploys the theories of the physical sciences to posit an atheistic form of immortality, imagining a repetitive and rhythmic process, directed by “Nature” rather than God, in which the “retardation of Cosmic motion” results not in the dissipation of energy and of life but in their rebirth. The similarity of the two writers’ views is indicated by the proximity of their language here: Blind’s word “energy”  Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 181.

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is in this case a rendering not of the ambiguous and arguably figurative “Lebensfülle” but of “Kraft,” a term that translates both as “force” and as “energy.”20 Despite the Christian connotations of this speculation, Strauss identifies his philosophical position in The Old Faith and the New as unambiguously opposed to Christianity: If this be considered pure unmitigated materialism, I will not dispute it. In fact, I have always tacitly regarded the so loudly proclaimed contrast between materialism and idealism (or by whatever term one may designate the view opposed to the former), as a mere quarrel about words. They have a common foe in the dualism which pervaded the conception of the world throughout the Christian era, dividing man into body and soul, his existence into time and eternity, and opposing an eternal Creator to a created and perishable universe. Materialism, as well as idealism, may, in comparison with this dualistic conception, be regarded as Monism; i.e., they endeavour to derive the totality of phenomena from a single principle—to construct the universe and life from the same block.21

This freethinking rejection of Christianity points to the intellectual sympathies that motivated Blind to translate Strauss’s book: a similar championing of a materialism which is the obverse rather than the opposite of idealism, and which therefore enables the expression of a kind of secular spirituality, is evident in much of her work. In an 1870 essay on Shelley in the Westminster Review, her first published response to a poet whose writing and radical politics she promoted throughout her career, Blind asserts that “we think it evident that the bent of his mind impelled him strongly towards an idealistic conception of the universe.” “Even in his days of rampant materialism,” when he wrote Queen Mab, Shelley’s language reveals his “original bias towards transcendentalism.”22 This construction of an idealist Shelley points to a bias on Blind’s part which, Diedrick suggests, shifted over the course of the 1870s. In that decade, he argues, Blind embarked on an “emotionally as well as philosophically wrenching” move towards naturalism and away from “the pantheism of Wordsworth and Shelley.”23  Strauss, Alte Glaube, 156.  Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 241–42. 22  Blind, “Shelley,” Westminster Review n.s. 38 (1870): 92–93. 23  Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 159. 20 21

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Blind’s 1891 “Personal Recollections of Mazzini” in the Fortnightly Review appear to support this interpretation of her changing philosophical views, nostalgically relegating her interest in idealism to her youth. Her conversations with the Italian revolutionary, she writes, helped her to escape some of the doubts caused by her intellectual upbringing: The materialist school of thought, which recognised force and matter as the only factors in the world, the notion that we are ephemeral creatures here to-day and gone to-morrow, that the life in us is as the flame of a candle which burns down to the socket and goes out, left a void which it required Mazzini’s essentially spiritual doctrine to bridge over.24

To some extent, this description of Mazzini’s “essentially spiritual doctrine” acts as part of Blind’s affectionate recollection of her younger self’s callow optimism. But it also points to a tension between philosophical and political radicalism that remains a concern in her mature work. She suggests that the materialism of Strauss and of her family, with its identification of “force and matter as the only factors in the world,” runs the risk of legitimising a fatalist resignation in the face of the status quo; political action, conversely, demands some form of belief in personal agency, moral responsibility, and the possibility of enduring change. This mix of revolutionary activism and purposive spirituality helps to explain Blind’s lifelong admiration for Mazzini: his political philosophy arguably represented for her a middle ground between the atheist conservatism of Strauss on the one hand and the thoroughgoing materialism and historical determinism of Marx on the other. Although, as Diedrick indicates, Blind’s views throughout much of her adult life were informed by philosophical materialism and scientific naturalism, she consistently tried to integrate these perspectives with idealism in a monist explanation of universal and political change.

2 Spirituality and theology were key points of contention among Victorian commentators on thermodynamics, with conservative writers arguing that the inexorable dissipation of energy reaffirmed the dualist distinction between the ephemeral material universe and the immortal permanence of  Blind, “Personal Recollections of Mazzini,” Fortnightly Review 49 (1891): 703.

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God and spirit. As Crosbie Smith notes in his history of nineteenth-­ century energy physics, among those conservatives were a number of Scottish and Presbyterian physicists—Maxwell, William Thomson, Balfour Stewart—who helped to pioneer the science of energy, and whose reading of thermodynamics was opposed by others, particularly John Tyndall, who wanted to refigure the conservation of energy in the terms of scientific naturalism.25 In an 1865 essay on “The Constitution of the Universe” in the Fortnightly Review, Tyndall defines the conservation of energy as “the rhythmic play of nature as regards her forces. Throughout all her regions she oscillates from tension to vis viva, from vis viva to tension.” In an argument which is similar to Strauss’s, Tyndall presents the first law of thermodynamics as one of the theoretical foundations of his account of the rhythmically uniform processes of nature. And although here he uses outdated terms (“vis viva” and “tension”) to denote kinetic and potential energy, in the next paragraph he claims the language as well as the laws of thermodynamics in support of his argument, introducing “the term ‘energy,’ embracing under that term both tension and vis viva.”26 In an 1877 lecture, also published in the Fortnightly, Tyndall claims that “the great doctrine” of the conservation of energy “recognises in the material universe a constant sum of power made up of items among which the most Protean fluctuations are incessantly going on. It is as if the body of Nature were alive, the thrill and interchange of its energies resembling those of an organism.”27 This comparison of the “material universe” to a living organism is typical of the animist rhetoric of Tyndall’s Romantic monism, and it also maintains his usual opposition to theological interventions in science: for him, the conservation of energy is evidence not of Christian dualism but of the uniformity of nature. Blind was a reader of and contributor to the Fortnightly, and, as Diedrick notes, she on occasion attended Tyndall’s lectures at the RI in the 1870s; it seems reasonable to assume that his discussions of the rhythms of thermodynamics helped to inform the comparable discussions in her poetry.28 There is a suggestive similarity, for instance, between the terms in which Tyndall describes the thrill of the universal body’s energies and the eroticised language of Blind’s 25  Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 171. 26  John Tyndall, “The Constitution of the Universe,” Fortnightly Review 3 (1865): 141. 27  Tyndall, “Science and Man,” Fortnightly Review 22 (1877): 597. 28  Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 147.

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love poetry: in an 1889 poem she writes that “the unfathomed ether throbs and burns / With star on star.”29 Both Tyndall and Blind use the interchange of energy to present bodily sensuality as one particular example of the rhythmic materiality of the universe. Other writers deployed the conservation of energy in support of positions directly opposed to Tyndall’s scientific naturalism. In The Creed of Science (1881), for example, the philosopher William Graham sets out to refute what he views as a fashionable and reductive materialism, specifically identifying Strauss as one of his targets.30 It is a mark of Blind’s philosophical open-mindedness, and of her enduring interest in spiritual interpretations of nature, that, despite Graham’s opposition to Strauss, she admired the book. “I like the tone of mind it shows extremely,” she wrote in a letter, praising Graham’s refusal “to dogmatise about the origin of the world & other matters of that nature.”31 The laws of thermodynamics, in Graham’s opinion, offer no help to Strauss’s arguments for atheism, because the phenomena of life and mind demonstrate that those laws are “inapplicable” to some aspects of the universe: Physical energy is not all energy; there is spiritual energy also, however little the extreme materialist may be disposed to accept the fact. There is spiritual energy, which is conserved like the physical, but which, unlike it, is ever on the increase. The thoughts of great minds live after them, and, by producing ever new thought, are a constant and inexhaustible source of ever new energy. Their echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever.32

Graham’s use of poetic quotation deploys the dualism of Tennyson’s “The splendour falls on castle walls” to enforce an opposition between the inexorable dissipation of “physical energy” and the cumulative increase of “spiritual energy.” His argument is in some ways comparable to that of Blind’s sonnet “The Dead,” published in the same year as The Creed of Science, but whereas Blind’s poem turns on an equivalence between the  Blind, “L’Envoi,” in The Ascent of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889), 198.  William Graham, The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 15 31  Blind to Richard Garnett, 10 October 1881, “Blind Correspondence,” vol. 2, British Library, Add MS 61928, 140r. 32  Graham, Creed, 309. 29 30

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propagation of energy in the material universe and the progressive transmission of moral influence, Graham’s conclusion depends on a belief in the essential dissimilarity of the two processes. The Creed of Science champions the kind of dualism to which Strauss is opposed, and which is typical of Christian interpretations of thermodynamics. A similar stance was endorsed by several of the researchers who were at the forefront of energy physics in Britain: Graeme Gooday has argued that the Scottish physicist Balfour Stewart consistently used his writings in the periodical press to promote an “anti-materialist” model of the science of energy.33 It was arguably given its most extreme and theologically unorthodox expression in The Unseen Universe, co-written by Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait and published anonymously in 1875. Blind is likely to have known about the book, because a close friend, the mathematician and freethinker William Kingdon Clifford, published a cutting critique of it in the Fortnightly Review, in which he suggests that the authors’ “deductions” from their “wide and accurate knowledge of physical science” are “wafted on theologic wings beyond the bounds of sober inference.”34 The Unseen Universe assumes the existence of a material ether; Stewart and Tait agree with Maxwell in asserting that an “ethereal medium” pervades space, “capable of moving and transmitting energy, and therefore, from the very conception of energy, possessing mass.”35 They also agree with Somerville in implying that gravity, as well as “luminiferous vibrations,” may possibly be conveyed through this medium. On these foundations, they speculate that thought is perhaps transmitted through space in the same manner, because “every thought that we think is accompanied by a displacement and motion of the particles of the brain, and somehow—in all probability by means of the medium—we may imagine that these motions are propagated throughout the universe.”36 And the 33  Graeme Gooday, “Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s AntiMaterialist Representations of ‘Energy’ in British Periodicals,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 111–47. 34  William Kingdon Clifford, review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, Fortnightly Review 17 (1875): 777. 35  Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 116. 36  Ibid., 156–57. Stewart and Tait acknowledge the similarities between their hypothesis and Charles Babbage’s arguments for the preservation of voice in the earth’s atmosphere (see

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ether may not just communicate thought across space; it may also convey it to an “unseen universe” of spirit, in which transmitted thoughts are preserved as a form of eternal life: “May we not at once say that when energy is carried from matter into ether it is carried from the visible into the invisible; and that when it is carried from ether to matter it is carried from the invisible into the visible?”37 As Bruce Clarke points out, in this sort of argument “the ether model provided the bridge over which one might proceed to metaphysical matters while ostensibly maintaining a materialistic grounding.”38 For Stewart and Tait the ether is both a methodological bridge between the empirically verifiable and the theoretically imaginable, and an ontological bridge between the physical and the spiritual. This is possible because of the ether’s dual status as a form of matter and as a hypothesis which, while it offers “the best explanations of the phenomena of the visible universe,” is unsupported, and therefore untrammelled, by “the direct evidence of our senses.”39 While using the ether as a mediator between matter and spirit, The Unseen Universe at the same time tries to preserve a dualist distinction between them. Stewart and Tait accept what they present as the position of “the extreme materialistic school” of physical science: “that the visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end.”40 Like the physical body, the visible universe is inescapably ephemeral; the possibility of eternal life exists solely in the immateriality of the unseen universe, and in the transmission of thought to that universe. Allen MacDuffie, in his study of Victorian literature and energy, places the dualist interpretation of thermodynamics in opposition to Darwinian evolution, arguing that while Charles Darwin’s writing displays “wonder and even a kind of love for the very materiality of nature, Victorian thermodynamics often tends to denigrate material nature as flawed, transitory, and, ultimately, unreal.”41 This distinction was not consistent or straightforward, but MacDuffie’s comment accurately summarises Chap. 5). However, they do not discuss the important difference between the unambiguous materiality of the air and the hypothetical materiality of the ether. 37  Ibid., 159. 38  Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 167. 39  Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 47. 40  Ibid., 46 and 64. 41  Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14.

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the anti-materialist (and anti-material) stance of some Victorian writers on thermodynamics. In The Unseen Universe this ontological argument is joined to a political one: discussing the dissipation of “transformable energy” as uniform heat, Stewart and Tait observe that “the tendency of heat is towards equalisation; heat is par excellence the communist of our universe, and it will no doubt ultimately bring the system to an end.”42 Thermodynamics is presented here as a teleological narrative of decline: entropy is the goal of the material universe as communism is the end of political history, and the outcome of both, according to Stewart and Tait, is an unproductive and irredeemable inertia. This is one example of the use of thermodynamics—both the circular narrative of the first law and the linear narrative of the second—to support political conservatism as well as Christianity. Stewart sets out a similar argument in his 1868 essay on “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” co-written with the astronomer Norman Lockyer and published in Macmillan’s Magazine. The first part of the essay presents a detailed discussion of the link between the periodicity of sunspots and the relative positions of the planets around the sun. The second part, subtitled “The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy,” uses the statistical precision of the first half as the basis of some sweeping speculations, concluding with the assertion that we cannot fail to remark that the different members of our [solar] system (and the thought may be extended to other systems) are more closely bound together than has been hitherto supposed. Mutual relations of a mathematical nature we were aware of before, but the connexion seems to be much more intimate than this—they feel, they throb together, they are pervaded by a principle of delicacy even as we are ourselves. We remark, in conclusion, that something of this kind might be expected if we suppose that a Supreme Intelligence, without interfering with the ordinary laws of matter, pervades the universe, exercising a directive energy capable of comparison with that which is exercised by a living being. In both cases delicacy of construction would appear to be the thing required for an action of this nature.43

 Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 90–91.  J. Norman Lockyer and Balfour Stewart, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe: The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy,” Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (1868): 327. 42 43

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Deploying language and premises similar to Tyndall’s (and to Blind’s)— the uniformity of nature, the correspondence between the interchanges of energy and the rhythmic and sympathetic throbs of living beings—Stewart and Lockyer reach a strikingly different conclusion. The “delicacy of construction” that is the best explanation of astronomical objects’ mutual influence is not possible, they suggest, without the “directive energy” of a deity, which is comparable to the energy of life but distinct from that of the rest of the material universe. In their discussion of the concept of potential energy at the start of the essay’s second part, however, Lockyer and Stewart emphasise the similarities between the energies of matter and of life. They observe that “if two men throw stones at one another, one of whom stands on the top of a house and the other at the bottom, the man at the top of the house has evidently the advantage,” because of the potential energy available to him as a result of his distance from the earth’s surface. Lockyer and Stewart “venture to begin this article by instituting an analogy between the social and the physical world,” arguing that, “in like manner, if two men of equal personal energy contend together, the one who has the highest social position has the best chance of succeeding.” In the physical universe, they write, “as in the social world, it is difficult to ascend.”44 Greg Myers has shown that the conservation of energy was often presented in Victorian Britain in terms of the capitalist circulation of funds and goods.45 By focusing on the retention rather than the transformation of energy, however, Lockyer and Stewart align the first law of thermodynamics with a Tory and pre-capitalist model of a rigid class hierarchy, in which it is supremely difficult to alter a person’s “social position,” just as it is difficult for other forms of energy to overpower the potential energy of gravity. As Barri Gold puts it in her concise summary of Lockyer and Stewart’s argument, “the more things change, they seem to suggest, the more they stay the same.” For Gold, the article exemplifies the “characteristic doubleness” which “inheres in the shape of thermodynamics” and in which “progression appears repeatedly against the background of conservatism.”46

 Ibid., 319.   Greg Myers, “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy,” Victorian Studies 29 (1985): 54–57. 46  Barri J.  Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 138. 44 45

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I would like to argue, though, that the most prominent tension in this article is between two kinds of conservatism, one that emphasises social and physical inertia and another that warns of universal decline. In their discussion of the second law, Lockyer and Stewart observe that “here also there is a striking analogy between the social and the physical world; for as in the social world there are forms of energy conducing to no useful result, so likewise in the physical world there are degraded forms of energy from which we can derive no benefit.” “In both worlds,” they conclude, “when degradation is once accomplished, a complete recovery would appear to be impossible, unless energy of a superior form be communicated from without.”47 The dissipation of energy within a closed system—whether the physical universe, a society, or an individual life—is also a degradation, a descent from higher to lower value that is irreversible. On the next page of the article, they reiterate this claim in even starker terms: The principle of degradation is at work throughout the universe, not less surely, but only more slowly, than when it combats our puny efforts, and it will ultimately render, it may be, the whole universe, but more assuredly that portion of it with which we are connected, unfit for the habitation of beings like ourselves. As far as we are able to judge, the life of the universe will come to an end not less certainly, but only more slowly, than the life of him who pens these lines or of those who read them.48

This unambiguously Christian view equates degradation with death, and insists on the inescapability of both. There is no hint of progress in this narrative of individual, social, and universal dissipation. It is at this point that Lockyer and Stewart, in a rhetorical move akin to that employed by Stewart and Tait in The Unseen Universe, reveal that the material universe is in fact not a closed system: there is a divine energy “communicated from without,” and embodied in the “delicacy of construction” of biological organisms and astronomical objects, which transcends the dissipation of physical energy and offers hope of permanence and purpose.49 There is a similarity between this argument and Blind’s political interpretation of thermodynamics and astronomy; both find a source of  Lockyer and Stewart, “Sun,” 322.  Ibid., 323. 49  Sarah Alexander also notes that, in The Unseen Universe, “the universe is negentropic because it is not really a closed system.” Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 89. 47 48

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optimism in a kind of universal and rhythmic sympathy that connects living and inanimate things. But while Lockyer and Stewart’s optimism relies on Christian dualism and is used to endorse social conservatism, Blind’s sympathy, which is intrinsic to matter and energy, is presented as one of the foundations of her commitment to social and political revolution. Blind shared her political stance with her friend Algernon Charles Swinburne; in his 1871 poem “To Walt Whitman in America,” Swinburne insists that “freedom,” rather than degradation, is the goal towards which the universe is inexorably moving: Freedom we call it, for holier   Name of the soul’s there is none; Surelier it labours, if slowlier,   Than the metres of star or of sun; Slowlier than life into breath, Surelier than time into death,   It moves till its labour be done.50

There is an ambiguity in Swinburne’s optimism here that also recurs throughout Blind’s poetry. The teleological progress of freedom is compared, in structure if not in speed, to the periodic “metres of star or of sun,” and its labour is articulated in the metres and rhymes, simultaneously propulsive and circular, of Swinburne’s verse. In the repetitive and rhythmic patterns of poetry, it seems, progress must be voiced and understood in cyclical terms that are not dissimilar to those of politically conservative interpretations of the first law of thermodynamics. The phrasing of this stanza—“surelier it labours, if slowlier”—sounds like a rejoinder to Lockyer and Stewart’s language (“not less surely, but only more slowly”), and it is highly possible that Swinburne saw their article; there are several references in his letters to his reading of Macmillan’s Magazine in the late 1860s.51 If he did read the article, then his reworking of its language suggests a determination to redeploy a conservative model of thermodynamics in the service of his radical politics. And whether he read it or not, “To Walt Whitman in America” demonstrates the close connection in his poetry between rhythm and revolution. 50  Algernon Charles Swinburne, “To Walt Whitman in America,” in Songs before Sunrise (London: F. S. Ellis, 1871), 148. 51  The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y.  Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–62), 1:201, 229, and 297.

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This connection is evident, too, in Blind’s verse, but her depictions of the rhythms of nature find room for the sort of spiritual speculation of which Swinburne was a vehement critic. For instance, the opening poem of her first volume, published in 1867 under the pseudonym “Claude Lake,” sets out a dualist argument in which natural phenomena are directed by ideal forces. The poem is addressed to Mazzini, and it presents “The Torrent” of its title as an image of the Italian revolutionary: E’en thus thou art! for that Titanic stream   But a material symbol was of thee! A dim reflection of thy being did seem   Thou man, high‐souled as son of man can be! Into whose mind, vast, noble, pure, and free,   Flash awful revelations light‐like in: Unveiling spiritual laws to thee;   Great central truths, that glow all life within,   That move the nations on, and make the planets spin.52

The poem anticipates Blind’s 1891 contrast of Mazzini’s “spiritual doctrine” with the “materialist school of thought.” In her “Personal Recollections of Mazzini” she recalls that he advised her to “study astronomy” and to “dive down, through geology, to the forces which have elaborated our globe,” because “when you have discovered that the laws which govern history are in harmony with those which rule the heavens and the earth, the meaning of life will grow clearer.” But he also cautioned her that “you are objective—by which I mean that you have no aim or ideal after which to strive.”53 Mazzini, according to Blind, located the value of the physical sciences not in their objective observations of phenomena but in their revelation of the laws that govern astronomical, geological, and human history. And he identified those laws as teleological: for him, “the meaning of life” was dependent on adherence to an “aim or ideal.” Blind expresses similar sentiments in “The Torrent,” in which “spiritual laws” underpin political and astronomical processes. The action of those laws is simultaneously progressive (“move the nations on”) and cyclical (“make the planets spin”), and the balance between these two kinds of action is articulated in the rhyme scheme of the poem’s Spenserian stanzas (ababbcbcc), which both moves on and returns on itself.  Blind, “The Torrent,” in Poems by Claude Lake (London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1867), 10.  Blind, “Personal Recollections,” 707–8.

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This poem’s hierarchical distinction between material phenomena and spiritual laws is not typical of Blind’s verse. Her poetry more frequently puts forward a monist view of the universe in which laws, and the rhythmic processes that instantiate them, are inherent within matter. Another poem in the 1867 volume, “The Orange-Peel in the Gutter,” opens with its speaker lamenting the poverty and social inequity of Victorian London. When a discarded orange-peel catches her eye, it prompts a reverie in which she witnesses the orange’s growth in Italy, its export to London, and its consumption by a sick child. Through this reverie, the speaker claims, the dead matter of the orange-peel “Revealed life’s perfect harmony! / Revealed the throbs of mutual love, / Ensphered by kindling stars above!”54 The poem is an exemplary instance of nineteenth-century poets’ habitual use of seemingly inert objects as the bases of theoretical speculations. The love of the child’s mother and grandmother redeems the mutual indifference of the population of London as a whole, but the speaker’s reverie also discloses a wider harmony that connects not just person with person but the earth with the stars. The speaker concludes that her vision Revealed the mystic link, that thrills Through joy and pain, through good and ills, Wafts influences from afar, Connects the worm still with the star, And binds the earth, the skies, the main, The worlds, with one electric chain!55

This “mystic link” is described (as it is by Tyndall and by Lockyer and Stewart) in terms of the biological rhythms of thrills and throbs, but its influence extends not just to living beings but also to the inanimate forms of matter, joined together by the “electric chain” of energy. The poem’s sentimental argument suggests that personal feelings are manifestations of a universal process of sympathy that is simultaneously material and active. In The Creed of Science William Graham comments that, according to the physics of “our modern materialists,” “energy of motion is the final one to which heat, electricity, chemical affinity, nerve force, and all others, if there be others, must be reduced; matter in motion being the final explanation  Blind, “The Orange-Peel in the Gutter,” in Poems, 55.  Ibid., 56.

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of the world.”56 While Graham distinguishes the physical energy of matter from the spiritual energy of thought and feeling, Blind’s poem extends the material explanation to the human soul: the references to “kindling stars,” which are connected equally to “the worm” and to human “joy and pain,” suggest that the energy of living things is thermodynamically linked with, and perhaps dependent on, the light and heat emitted by the sun and stars and conveyed in the motions of the ether. In contrast to the dualism of “The Torrent,” “The Orange-Peel in the Gutter” sets out what Sara Lyons, in her discussion of Blind’s poetry, identifies as a “sacralized materialism” that is typical of Victorian aestheticism.57 Sympathy and morality are founded not on any spiritual laws but on a rhythmic exchange of influence which is an intrinsic property of matter. That exchange, and the transformations of energy that underpin it, remained central to Blind’s thinking about politics. Her final volume of verse, Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1895), abounds with rhythms and vibrations which form the basis of arguments that are simultaneously ontological and political. In “The Tombs of the Kings” Blind voices her disdain for the pharaohs whose tombs she visited on two trips to Egypt in the 1890s: Have they conquered? Oh the pity of those Kings within their tombs, Locked in stony isolation in those petrifying glooms! Motionless where all is motion in a rolling Universe, Heaven, by answering their prayer, turned it to a deadly curse. Left them fixed where all is fluid in a world of star-winged skies; Where, in myriad transformations, all things pass and nothing dies; Nothing dies but what is tethered, kept when Time would set it free, To fulfil Thought’s yearning tension upward through Eternity.58

 Graham, Creed, 303.  Sara Lyons, “‘Let Your Life on Earth Be Life Indeed’: Aestheticism and Secularism in Mathilde Blind’s The Prophecy of St. Oran and ‘On a Torso of Cupid’,” in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn Oulton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 63. 58  Blind, “The Tombs of the Kings,” in Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895), 24–25. 56 57

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The propulsive metre of the poem’s trochaic and catalectic lines, starting and ending with stressed syllables, enacts its description of a universe in which “all is motion.” Blind widens the scope of thermodynamics to claim that not just energy but “all things” are subject to “myriad transformations.” This view of the universe as characterised by motion and transience means that the pharaohs’ ambition to preserve their authority throughout time is presented as a physical impossibility as well as a deplorable example of political absolutism. The desire to remain fixed or tethered is equivalent to death, Blind argues, because it vainly tries to arrest the revolutionary motion that is the defining quality of the “rolling Universe.” It also tries to deny humanity’s upward and teleological progress “through Eternity”; the cyclical transformations of energy and matter are presented as analogies for the progressive (and arguably spiritual) development of intellectual and political freedom, for what Blind describes both here and in “The Dead” as thought’s “yearning” to “fulfil” itself. In “The Tombs of the Kings” this idealist teleology is embodied in, and inseparable from, the perpetual fluctuations of the material universe. Other poems in Blind’s 1895 volume, however, imply that the progress of freedom is dependent to some extent on a dualist separation of thought from matter. “Soul-Drift” connects the rhythms of nature to personal rather than political liberty: Go, happy Soul! run fluid in the wave,   Vibrate in light, escape thy natal curse; Go forth no longer as my body-slave,   But as the heir of all the Universe.59

The undulations of waves and the vibrations of light exemplify nature’s rhythmic motions in this poem, but they also, in an argument which is not dissimilar to that of The Unseen Universe, act as the vehicle of a process of spiritual transcendence. Like Stewart and Tait, Blind suggests that the soul’s communion with “the Universe” involves its transmission from the body to a more refined material form: the waves of water, or the vibrations of light through the air (or, as in The Unseen Universe, through the ether). This speculation may have been informed by her attendance at a lecture on phosphorescence by the chemist James Dewar at the RI in January 1895; Diedrick notes that her description of this lecture in her commonplace  Blind, “Soul-Drift,” in Birds, 80.

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book is characterised by a “kind of natural supernaturalism” that is also evident in the poems of Birds of Passage.60 Blind wrote of Dewar’s demonstrations that the “play of phosphorescence in the darkness, after the luminous object itself was withdrawn (if I understood correctly) gave me the impression of a ghost of light, suggesting the most subtle, almost inexpressible analogies between possible spiritual vibrations of life after death?”61 Blind’s language in this note echoes the “vibrations infinite of life in death” in her 1881 sonnet. In that poem, the undulations of light are used as a metaphorical support for Blind’s championing of a kind of positivist immortality, in which the dead communicate their moral influence to future generations. “Soul-Drift” imagines a more unambiguously idealist form of spiritual inheritance, in which the soul is liberated from the body and propagates itself, like light, throughout the universe. Blind’s career-long theorisation of rhythm is one of the most important elements of her poetry, but it is also the source of some of the intellectual and imaginative tensions that are evident in her writing. The rhythms that structure Blind’s verse are analogous to those which, for her and for numerous Victorian writers on the physical sciences, enact the universal laws of matter and energy. Those rhythms also, however, inform her spiritual speculations about the future of the human soul. There is a similar duality in her understanding of the rhythms of history: her commitment to political progress is materialist in its focus on social conditions, but idealist in its teleological assumptions and in its emphasis on purposive thought. The relation between materialist and idealist conceptions of rhythm is examined throughout Blind’s poetry, but it is given its fullest consideration in The Ascent of Man, the poem which represents her most sustained effort to integrate her knowledge of scientific naturalism with her interest in idealism and her hopes for political change.

3 The first part of The Ascent of Man, “Chaunts of Life,” narrates the history of the earth; its second and third parts attack the social inequities which Blind identifies as the contemporary results of that history, while also offering some optimistic indications of humanity’s potential for moral and  Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 235.  Blind, “Commonplace Book,” Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Walpole e. 1, 30r. 60 61

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social improvement in the future. Blind’s condensed epic is typically read as an example of what John Holmes terms “cosmic evolutionism,” the late-Victorian effort to interpret Darwinian evolution as a safely progressive model of biological, social, and universal development.62 As the title suggests, The Ascent of Man is, in part, a rewriting of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and several critics have linked the poem’s concern with Darwinism to its formal structure: Lindsay Wilhelm, for instance, argues that its “virtuosic array of verse forms exemplifies a variety and excess that seems to recreate the conditions of Darwinian evolution on the level of form itself.”63 Darwinism is a central issue in the poem, but in this section I want to suggest that critics’ focus on evolution has missed the ways in which the poem employs and reimagines the theories of nineteenth-­ century physics. As well as discussing biological evolution, it persistently addresses the transformations and transmissions of energy—in the various forms of motion, heat, and light—that act on inorganic matter. The poem’s formal heterogeneity can be read not just as a representation of evolutionary variation but as an expression of Blind’s interest in the relation between two kinds of rhythm: the material metres of energy and the ideal measures imposed on nature by the mind (and especially by the poet’s mind). The alignment of these rhythms, Blind suggests, can help to realise a revolutionary politics which is simultaneously material and spiritual, cyclical and progressive. The first lines of “Chaunts of Life” present the formation of the earth as a physical process, characterised exclusively in terms of matter and motion: Struck out of dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour, Repelled and attracted the atoms flashed mingling in union primeval, And over the face of the waters far heaving in limitless twilight Auroral pulsations thrilled faintly, and, striking the blank heaving surface, The measureless speed of their motion now leaped into light on the waters. And lo, from the womb of the waters, upheaved in volcanic convulsion, Ribbed and ravaged and rent there rose bald peaks and the rocky 62  John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 43. 63  Lindsay Wilhelm, “The Utopian Evolutionary Aestheticism of W.  K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind,” Victorian Studies 59 (2016): 27. See also Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 214; and Fabienne Moine, Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 254.

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Heights of confederate mountains compelling the fugitive vapours To take a form as they passed them and float as clouds through the   azure. (7–8)64

These lines share their language with William Graham’s summary of the nebular hypothesis of stellar and planetary formation: Graham writes that “the original diffused matter” of the universe “became resolved into a number of rotating nebular masses of spherical form, of immense volume, and in a state of high heat from the previous shock of their atoms and constituent parts.”65 The energetic shock of the earth’s atoms and “electrical vapour” is conveyed in Blind’s disruptions of her metre; the lines are primarily anapaestic, but the inverted stresses on the first syllables of some lines (“struck” and “ribbed”) emphasise the magnitude of the physical forces involved. Blind’s versification here enacts a process closer to the agitation of heat as described by Maxwell, or to the percussive collisions of Lucretian materialism, than to the regular rhythms of undulatory physics. However, the “auroral pulsations” of light offer some indication of periodic rhythm within the chaos of creation. The light moves, in an allusion to Genesis, “over the face of the waters,” a biblical borrowing that supports Charles LaPorte’s reading of Blind as a writer of “atheist prophecy” who tries to balance her “religious skepticism” with the moral authority of the “religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition.”66 But, as Gillian Beer points out, the “invocation of the sea” is also “intrinsic to the new understandings of a universe extensive, propulsive, in which the agency and medium was an invisible luminiferous ether”; Blind’s “imagery of waves,” Beer notes, is both an example of the characteristic nineteenth-­ century comparison between the waves of the ocean and those of the ether, and, through her reference to “the womb of the waters,” “a medium for exploring sexuality and gender.”67 The creative transformations of matter and energy in The Ascent of Man are consistently gendered

64  All references to The Ascent of Man are from the 1889 edition and will be cited in the text. 65  Graham, Creed, 6. 66  Charles LaPorte, “Atheist Prophecy: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and the Victorian Poetess,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 427. 67  Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 88.

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feminine; for Blind, rhythm constitutes the foundation of a critique of sexual as well as social politics. The gendering of rhythm continues in the second of the “Chaunts of Life,” which introduces living things into Blind’s narrative of the history of the earth: And vaguely in the pregnant deep,   Clasped by the glowing arms of light From an eternity of sleep   Within unfathomed gulfs of night A pulse stirred in the plastic slime Responsive to the rhythm of Time. Enkindled in the mystic dark   Life built herself a myriad forms, And, flashing its electric spark   Through films and cells and pulps and worms, Flew shuttlewise above, beneath, Weaving the web of life and death. (9–10)

The iambic tetrameter of these stanzas embodies the pulse of life, but this biological rhythm responds to an anterior and more pervasive “rhythm of Time.” The stanzas rewrite several words and phrases from the opening lines of “Chaunts of Life” to suggest, in opposition to writers such as Lockyer and Stewart, that life’s energy is not distinct from or superior to the physical energies inherent in matter: life’s “myriad forms” imitate the “form” of the “fugitive vapours” at the earth’s commencement; its “electric spark” echoes the “electrical vapour” of the primeval atoms; and the “pregnant deep” recalls “the womb of the waters.” Blind presents life, and the feminine processes of creation by which it is propagated, as a continuation of rather than a departure from the motions of inorganic matter. Jason Rudy, in his discussion of Blind’s verse, defines “the ascent of man” as “a movement toward form facilitated by poetic structure and made possible by the universality of rhythmic experience.”68 Like other critics, though, Rudy characterises the supposed universality of rhythm in Blind’s poetry in exclusively biological terms, limiting his argument to Blind’s

68  Jason R.  Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 156.

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representation of Darwinian evolution. But Blind understands rhythm to be genuinely universal: the pulses of life are just one example of the rhythms that shape all physical processes. Isobel Armstrong acknowledges this in her observation that The Ascent of Man “searches for a new language, not entirely successfully, to suggest a plastic transformation and possibility in matter, a vocabulary of movement and coalescing vitality.”69 In a stance which is comparable to the new materialism of Jane Bennett’s “thing-power,” Blind identifies matter in general, rather than life in particular, as the source of the vibrancy that inheres in rhythm. The history of humanity set out in “Chaunts of Life” closes with the French Revolution, an event which Blind uses to demonstrate her belief that social and political change is shaped by rhythms that are analogous to those of matter and energy. Blind evokes the optimism of the revolution’s early years in terms that recall her narrative of the formation of the earth: the French people are “Free and equal—rid of king and priest,”    And electrified     Masses, far and wide,     Thrill to hope and start Vibrating as with one common heart. (43–44)

These lines indicate why Armstrong views Blind’s effort to develop a “new language” of vital materialism as not entirely successful; the description of the French people “vibrating” with hope is bathetically literal. There is a reason, though, for this seemingly excessive literalism: it articulates Blind’s conviction of the continuity between material, biological, and political phenomena. Her language of vibrations and electricity—the phrase “electrified masses” alludes to the primordial “electrical vapour” and to the “electric spark” of life—acts as a bridge that links several different but related kinds of rhythmic process: the transformation of energy within inorganic matter; the evolution of biological organisms; and the communal sensations of political sympathy and solidarity. Blind’s depiction of these processes is characterised, throughout The Ascent of Man, by a levelling of hierarchies: like the theories of the physical sciences, the egalitarianism of the French Revolution recognises the connective and equalising energy that pervades the universe. However, its 69  Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 376.

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success in embodying this energy is limited and temporary: subsequent stanzas deplore the revolution’s descent into violence and terror. In the closing “chaunt” of the poem’s first part Blind argues, in a surprisingly Wordsworthian gambit, that poetry rather than history offers the most reliable guide to social and moral progress. This is because, for her, verse is mimetic and constitutive of the rhythms of the universe. She extols The poet, in whose shaping brain Life is created o’er again With loftier raptures, loftier pain;   Whose mighty potencies of verse   Move through the plastic Universe,   And fashion to their strenuous will   The world that is creating still. (54)

Like Blind’s sonnet “The Dead,” these lines place their trust in an idealist will: the “mighty potencies of verse” are reflective of the motions of “the plastic Universe,” but they also have the capacity to refashion the universe in accordance with the dictates of the poet’s “shaping brain.” The pessimistic narrative of human history in The Ascent of Man suggests that political revolution has failed to transform society, but this stanza implies that poetry may succeed where politics has not. Blind’s stance at the end of the “Chaunts of Life” appears to be closer to Tennyson’s tentative liberalism (or progressive conservatism) than to any kind of revolutionary radicalism: it pins its hopes on a type of change that is aesthetic and ideal, rather than political and material, in essence. The idealism of Blind’s claim that the poet’s mind exerts a shaping influence on the external world, and therefore on the conditions of human life, is emphasised again in her celebration of the transcendent effects of poetry: “All triumphant blasts of sound / Lift you at one rhythmic bound / From the thraldom of the ground” (55).70 These lines are another example of Blind’s intermittent recourse to a conventional dualism, in which materiality is denigrated as a thraldom which the soul must strive to escape. Despite its conventionality, though, Blind suggests that this kind of dualism can be interpreted as revolutionary, because it emphasises the soul’s capacity for self-development and progress; this is a version of 70  Blind later reiterates this sentiment: “Harmonies of confluent sound / Lift you at one rhythmic bound / From the thraldom of the ground” (57).

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idealism that is influenced both by Mazzini’s “spiritual doctrine” and by the revolutionary politics of Shelley’s poetry. And Blind almost immediately complicates and qualifies her idealist account of poetic rhythm, incorporating it into a monist position that reaffirms an equalising connection between mind and matter. In a stance which is similar to the epistemological theories of (for example) Wordsworth and Whewell, she identifies poetry as the union of objective facts with subjective sensations: Yea, all rhythms of air and ocean Married to the heart’s emotion, To the intervolved emotion Of the heart for ever turning   In a whirl of bliss and pain,   Blending in symphonious strain All the vague, unearthly yearning   Of the visionary brain. (56)

Shelley was Blind’s particular model for this understanding of poetry: in her 1886 lecture on “Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s,” she states that he “succeeded, perhaps more completely than any other poet, in marrying the most sublime or evanescent appearances of the material universe to human emotion.”71 She uses almost identical language in The Ascent of Man to refigure dualism as Romantic monism: the processes of the poet’s brain are identified as immaterial, unearthly, and visionary, but poetry also depends on and (to some extent) imitates the material “rhythms of air and ocean.” The difficulties involved in maintaining this balance between the material and the ideal are evident in a sonnet at the end of the first part of The Ascent of Man. Blind tries here to elide the tensions between physical and spiritual understandings of energy by using one as a metaphor for the other. Like “The Dead,” “A Symbol” presents the motions of matter (and specifically its transmission of light) as emblematic of the communication of influence across generations: Hurrying for ever in their restless flight   The generations of earth’s teeming womb   Rise into being and lapse into the tomb 71  Blind, Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s (London: privately printed, 1886), 20.

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Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light; They sink in quick succession out of sight   Into the thick insuperable gloom   Our futile lives in flashing by illume— Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night. Nay—but consider, though we change and die,   If men must pass shall Man not still remain?   As the unnumbered drops of summer rain Whose changing particles unchanged on high,   Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky. (59)

This poem is a good example of the nineteenth-century tendency to understand physical processes in terms of forms rather than things, of patterns within matter rather than matter itself. In contrast to the transient forms of matter and energy depicted in the octave—bubbles and lightning—the sestet presents as the poem’s titular symbol a physical phenomenon (the rainbow) that is changing but unchanged, “fixed, in perpetual motion.” Although Blind uses these words to describe the particles of water in “summer rain,” they are also applicable to the periodic waves of light of which the rainbow is composed. But this symbol offers little support for Blind’s narrative of “the ascent of man”; rather than progress, the balance between motion and permanence in the rainbow indicates a kind of mutable stasis, in which an abstract “Man” is identified as essentially unchanged throughout history. Instead of synthesising Blind’s opinions on politics, science, and poetry, the sonnet highlights the divisions between them. The progress which Blind champions throughout her writing is checked here both by the sonnet’s simile and by its form. Although there is perhaps some argumentative development or resolution in the turn from the octave to the sestet, it is also possible to read the sonnet’s two parts as statements of the same point—“we change and die”—from two different perspectives. And Blind’s effort to reconcile her positivist and spiritual conceptions of moral influence in the symbol of the rainbow is undermined by the inconvenient fact that rainbows are not fixed or unchanging; they are almost as transient as the bubbles and lightning of the octave. In the second and third parts of The Ascent of Man, “The Pilgrim Soul” and “The Leading of Sorrow,” Blind experiments with other symbols in

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an effort to reaffirm the permanence and the progress of social and moral sympathy. In “The Pilgrim Soul” the speaker recognises a personification of love in the figure of a neglected child; her sympathy for the child is presented as a possible remedy for the pervasive misery that she witnesses as she wanders through an unnamed city. In “The Leading of Sorrow,” though, the child disappears and the speaker is led by another figure through numerous scenes that highlight both the violence of Darwinian nature and the suffering and injustice endemic in modern society. The speaker then witnesses an apocalyptic sea-storm which, in her despair, she welcomes: Through the crash of wave on wave gigantic,   Through the thunder of the hurricane, My wild heart in breaking shrilled with frantic   Exultation—“Chaos come again! Yea, let earth be split and cloven asunder   With man’s still accumulating curse— Life is but a momentary blunder   In the cycle of the Universe.” (105)

This stanza seems to align itself with the teleological narratives of degeneration influenced by the second law of thermodynamics, in which the disintegration of the earth was often presented as a preliminary stage in the entropic decline of the universe.72 As The Ascent of Man appears set to return to the unformed chaos with which it began, Blind’s verse enacts, in Maxwell’s terms, a shift from the periodic rhythm of energy to the irregular agitation of heat, as the rhythms of her lines insistently deviate from the metrical pattern of the stanza as a whole. But, in another instance of Blind’s impressively universal perspective in The Ascent of Man, the stanza also indicates that decline and failure are in this case limited to the earth; life may be a blunder and a curse, but the “cycle of the Universe” continues. That cycle is embodied here in the stanza’s regular alternation between stressed and unstressed rhymes; Blind’s verse suggests that poetry can articulate a permanent and universal rhythm that transcends the local chaos of social injustice, Darwinian violence, and planetary decay. After this stanza, The Ascent of Man moves hurriedly to its conclusion. The figure of sorrow is revealed to be “Love himself, Love re-arisen /  See, for example, Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 126.

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With the Eternal shining through his eyes” (110), and he offers the poem’s speaker a reassuring confirmation of humanity’s capacity for future moral improvement. Critics have typically agreed that these final pages, and the poem as a whole, endorse a narrative of linear progress: Herbert Tucker comments that The Ascent of Man “expressed a progressivism that, while radical rather than mainstream in its ideological bearing, was at the end of the day late-Victorian progressivism still.”73 Helen Groth doubts the poem’s radicalism but remains convinced of its progressivism: she argues that “Christian ideology” represents “the only hope in Blind’s bleak Darwinian narrative,” and that “there is a sustained emphasis on design and progress in Blind’s deterministic vision of man’s ascent. The relentless teleology of this suggests that if there is chaos or moral anarchy it is simply part of the linear progression.”74 Groth’s position is supported by the optimism of the poem’s conclusion and by Blind’s frequent recourse to spiritual language. But linear readings of The Ascent of Man disregard the presence in the poem of another narrative pattern that is modelled on the cycle of the universe, the pervasive and material rhythm which shapes astronomical, thermodynamic, and electromagnetic phenomena. This cycle is revolutionary, Blind suggests, both because it is eternally repetitive and because it incorporates the possibility of disruption, upheaval, and radical change. This revolutionary repetition forms the basis of the poem’s conclusion. Before the speaker hears Love’s consoling prophecy, she experiences a vision of astronomical activity which directly recalls the narrative of the earth’s formation at the start of the poem. The speaker sees “stars unnumbered” in the sky: Rhythmical in luminous rotation,   In dædalian maze they reel and fly, And their rushing light is Time’s pulsation   In his passage through Eternity. Constellated suns, fresh lit, declining,   Were ignited now, now quenched in space, 73  Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 506. 74  Helen Groth, “Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 336.

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Rolling round each other, or inclining   Orb to orb in multi-coloured rays. Ever showering from their flaming fountains   Light more light on each far-circling earth, Till life stirred crepuscular seas, and mountains   Heaved convulsive with the throes of birth. (106)

There is progress here, in the creation of new geological and biological forms, but that progress is inseparable from the cyclical structure of The Ascent of Man as a whole. “Time’s pulsation” echoes “the rhythm of Time” in “Chaunts of Life,” and both the start and the end of the poem describe the same process: the development of life as a secondary result of the rhythmic motion of matter in the formation of stars and planets. Instead of presenting a linear narrative, Blind’s poem sets out a rhythmic and repetitive model of time that nonetheless contains within it the potential for variation: life may have proven to be a blunder on this earth, but it may enjoy more success on other worlds. This model is relevant, too, to the poem’s gender politics: Blind elaborates “a non-linear temporality which is experienced as cyclical rather than being goal-directed” and which, as Isobel Armstrong points out, is a recurring feature of the writing of several nineteenth-century women poets.75 There is another political ambiguity here. On the one hand, Blind’s emphasis on the biological cycles of gestation and parturition— “the throes of birth” recalls “the pregnant deep” and “the womb of the waters” at the start of the poem—points to an arguably conservative essentialism, in which women are defined exclusively as mothers. On the other hand, her insistent feminising of creation is perhaps intended to identify the levelling of gender hierarchies as one of the revolutionary changes that will inevitably transpire in the course of the cycle of the universe. The tension between repetition and progress that characterises the poem’s representation of femininity, and its politics more generally, is evident too in the form of its closing stanzas. These stanzas alternate trochaic pentameter lines of ten syllables with catalectic lines of nine, and unstressed rhymes with stressed, in a representation of the eternal cycle that, according to Blind, directs both the motions of inorganic matter and 75  Armstrong, “Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 12.

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the development of life. But the variations inherent in that cycle are articulated in the rhythms of particular lines, in upheavals which, unlike those in the speaker’s premonition of returning chaos, are presented as creative rather than destructive. The extra stresses in spondees such as “fresh lit” or “life stirred,” for instance, are disruptions of the stanzas’ metre that coincide with their depiction of cataclysmic changes, the birth of stars and of life. Repetition and transformation combine in Blind’s narrative of universal revolution. The closing stanzas of The Ascent of Man also address the poem’s other central tension, between materialism and idealism. Blind’s speaker suggests that the perpetual transformations of matter and energy connect the stars and planets in a kind of universal community: And the noble brotherhood of planets,   Knitted each to each by links of light, Circled round their suns, nor knew a minute’s   Lapse or languor in their ceaseless flight. And pale moons and rings and burning splinters   Of wrecked worlds swept round their parent spheres, Clothed with spring or sunk in polar winters   As their sun draws nigh or disappears.

The stars are identified in the next stanza as “Torches of the Cosmos which enkindling / Flash their revelation on the soul” (107), a description that introduces the prophecy of moral progress which ends the poem. This spiritual revelation of humanity’s teleological advancement is founded, however, on the perception of the material rhythm of the planets’ ceaseless orbit: the “links of light” that bind astronomical objects to one another exemplify the rhythmic exchange of matter and energy which, for Blind, constitutes the physical universe. The conclusion of The Ascent of Man returns to the argument, characteristic of much of Blind’s poetry, that the rhythms of inorganic matter are the basis of organic sensation, moral sympathy, and political solidarity. The reference to the planets as a “noble brotherhood” reaffirms Blind’s conviction that rhythm guarantees an egalitarian connection between things (and people) throughout the universe. The reference also echoes a sentence in Blind’s translation of Strauss, which rejects Immanuel Kant’s “supposition of a central body for our Milky Way” and other galaxies, and notes that “the generally accepted view is now that of an equal mutual attraction and corresponding motion

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of all the stars in the same group—a republic instead of a monarchy, as it were.”76 This notion of an “equal mutual attraction” that pervades the universe is the foundation both of Blind’s politics and of her understanding of the physical sciences. The equal mutual attraction between people and things, and the rhythmic transmission of energy that underpins it, complicates the teleological models of progress and degeneration that were associated with the laws of thermodynamics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite the apparently progressive argument of The Ascent of Man, a scepticism towards such linear models was an important part of Blind’s intellectual and political radicalism. In her translation of The Old Faith and the New she added a pertinent comment which is not present in Strauss’s German: “The fact is, that ascent and decline are only relative conceptions. The life of the earth, for example, is at the present period quite as certainly waning in one respect as it is waxing in another.”77 Blind’s writing defines both the motions of matter and the history of humanity as rhythmic cycles of ascent and decline, form and chaos, variation and repetition. This definition causes problems for straightforward narratives of progress, but it imagines in their place a universe characterised by intrinsic equality and perpetual revolution.

Bibliography Alexander, Sarah C. 2016. Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Armstrong, Isobel. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-­ Century Women’s Poetry. In Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, 3–32. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beer, Gillian. 1996a. “Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century. In Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, 85–98. London: Routledge. ———. 1996b. Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism. In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 295–318. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 187.  Ibid., 259.

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Birch, Katy. 2013. ‘Carrying Her Coyness to a Dangerous Pitch’: Mathilde Blind and Darwinian Sexual Selection. Women: A Cultural Review 24: 71–89. Blind, Mathilde. 1867. Poems by Claude Lake. London: Alfred W. Bennett. ———. 1870. Shelley. Westminster Review n.s. 38: 75–97. ———. 1876. Maxims and Reflections from the German of Goethe. Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 13: 338–348. ———. 1881. The Prophecy of Saint Oran and Other Poems. London: Newman. ———. 1886. Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s. London: Privately Printed. ———. 1889. The Ascent of Man. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1891. Personal Recollections of Mazzini. Fortnightly Review 49: 702–712. ———. 1895. Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. Blind Correspondence. Vol. 2. Add MS 61928. British Library. ———. Commonplace Book. MS Walpole e. 1. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Boswell, Michelle. 2017. Poetry and Parallax in Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Victorian Literature and Culture 45: 727–744. Brown, Susan. 2003. “A Still and Mute-Born Vision”: Locating Mathilde Blind’s Reproductive Poetics. In Victorian Women Poets, ed. Alison Chapman, 123–144. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Choi, Tina Young. 2007. Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative. ELH 74: 301–322. Clarke, Bruce. 2001. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clifford, William Kingdon. 1875. Review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe. Fortnightly Review 17: 776–793. Diedrick, James. 2016. Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Enns, Anthony, and Shelley Trower, eds. 2013. Vibratory Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fletcher, Robert P. 2005. “Heir of All the Universe”: Evolutionary Epistemology in Mathilde Blind’s Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident. Victorian Poetry 43: 435–453. Gold, Barri J. 2010. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Golston, Michael. 2008. Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. New York: Columbia University Press. Gooday, Graeme. 2004. Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representations of “Energy” in British Periodicals. In Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 111–147. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Graham, William. 1881. The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social. London: Kegan Paul. Groth, Helen. 1999. Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives. In Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, 325–351. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holmes, John. 2009. Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jones, Ewan. 2018. Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste. Representations 144: 61–89. LaPorte, Charles. 2006. Atheist Prophecy: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and the Victorian Poetess. Victorian Literature and Culture 34: 427–441. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lockyer, J. Norman, and Balfour Stewart. 1868. The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe: The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy. Macmillan’s Magazine 18: 319–327. Lyons, Sara. 2012. “Let Your Life on Earth Be Life Indeed”: Aestheticism and Secularism in Mathilde Blind’s The Prophecy of St. Oran and “On a Torso of Cupid.” In Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn Oulton, 55–69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacDuffie, Allen. 2014. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, James Clerk. 1876. Matter and Motion. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1990–2002. The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell. Ed. P.M. Harman. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moine, Fabienne. 2015. Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Farnham: Ashgate. Myers, Greg. 1985. Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy. Victorian Studies 29: 35–66. Rudy, Jason R. 2009. Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Smith, Crosbie. 1998. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Somerville, Mary. 1837. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. 4th edn. London: John Murray. Stewart, Balfour, and Peter Guthrie Tait. 1875. The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State. London: Macmillan. Strauss, David Friedrich. 1872. Der Alte und Der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniss. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.

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———. 1873. The Old Faith and the New: A Confession. Trans. Mathilde Blind. 1st edn. London: Asher. ———. 1874. The Old Faith and the New: A Confession. Trans. Mathilde Blind. 3rd edn. London: Asher. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1871. Songs before Sunrise. London: F. S. Ellis. ———. 1959–62. The Swinburne Letters. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. 6 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tucker, Herbert F. 2008. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyndall, John. 1865. The Constitution of the Universe. Fortnightly Review 3: 129–144. ———. 1877. Science and Man. Fortnightly Review 22: 593–617. Whewell, William. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker. Wilhelm, Lindsay. 2016. The Utopian Evolutionary Aestheticism of W. K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind. Victorian Studies 59: 9–34.

CHAPTER 7

Hardy’s Measures

1 Thomas Hardy was sensitive about criticisms of his technical skill as a poet. In his autobiography, written in the third person, he responds to the reviewers who had questioned the formal competence of his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898): If any proof were wanted that Hardy was not at this time and later the apprentice at verse that he was supposed to be, it could be found in an examination of his studies over many years. Among his papers were quantities of notes on rhythm and metre: with outlines and experiments in innumerable original measures, some of which he adopted from time to time.1

Hardy’s defence of his metrical knowledge is also a summary of one of the most striking features of his poetry: its simultaneous adherence to and reworking of the nineteenth-century tradition of accentual-syllabic verse. In the poetry that he published between the 1890s and the 1920s, Hardy chose not to write in free verse or to embrace other Modernist innovations, but he also refused to restrict himself to the conventional forms that he had used in his early poems, written in the 1860s. The “innumerable original measures” which constitute the basis of his poetic writing 1  Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984), 324.

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demonstrate his view of poetry as something measurably regular, but they also reveal his interest in experimenting with the forms of verse. In this chapter I want to suggest that it is possible to read Hardy’s experimental measures as formal expressions of an understanding of nature which was broadly shared by poets and science writers throughout the nineteenth century. Hardy’s verse, I argue, puts forward the view that the universe, as defined by physical science, is quantifiable and uniform but also incommensurable with human experience and emotion. Although in 1888 Hardy copied into his notebook a comment that “a certain inexactitude” is “more poetic than scientific precision,” the interpretation of nature set out in his poems complicates this opposition.2 Both aspects of nature, his verse suggests, the scientifically precise and the irreducibly inexact, are communicable through the formal organisation and the experimental irregularities of poetry. Hardy indicates as much in the Preface to Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), in which he writes that “unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.”3 This statement represents one of Hardy’s frequent efforts to convince his readers that there is no coherent system of belief underpinning his poems, but he contradicts himself here. He presents his poetry as epistemologically modest, its method limited to the humble recording of phenomena, the more or less passive observation of “poetical matter.” But the “diverse readings” of these phenomena in his poems also represent “the road to a true philosophy of life.” This is because his “unadjusted impressions” are adjusted both by one another and by the verse forms in which they are communicated, in a process of experimental comparison that is similar to the inductive method of science. For Hardy, science and poetry share the (perhaps impossible) goal of a precise theory of nature, which is founded on, but cannot be fully reconciled with, the inexact impressions of the senses. Discussions of Hardy and science, and of the particular influence on his writing of Victorian scientific naturalism, tend to focus on his lifelong preoccupation with evolutionary theory, but his interest in the physical 2  Hardy, The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Björk, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985), 1:210. 3  Hardy, Preface to Poems of the Past and the Present, in The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–95), 1:113.

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sciences was just as sustained, if more diffuse. As a child and young man he read John Moffatt’s The Boy’s Book of Science (1842) and Jabez Hogg’s Elements of Experimental and Natural Philosophy (1853), and he kept his copies of these books throughout his life.4 His autobiography shows that, in the 1890s and 1900s, he frequently attended the annual conversazione at the Royal Society in London, at which new instruments and experimental processes were exhibited to the public.5 But he does not seem to have had much direct knowledge of the work of prominent Victorian physicists: there are almost no references in his notebooks and letters, for example, to James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, or John Tyndall. Hardy’s poetry addresses several key issues in nineteenth-century physics: the undulatory theory of sound and light; debates about the relation between the ether and other forms of matter; and the laws of thermodynamics. However, his notebooks indicate that his knowledge of these issues was, perhaps more than Tennyson’s or Blind’s, indirect, based on reports or summaries in newspapers, magazine articles, or expository surveys of science as a whole. Hardy’s considerations of physical science often focus on its links to other fields such as evolutionary biology and psychology, suggesting that, although his knowledge of physics was not comprehensive, it was an important element in his understanding of the worldview of scientific naturalism. Hardy’s comments on physics in his notebooks and letters become more numerous from the turn of the century on. One reason for this may be that, as he switched his attention from prose fiction to the verse that was to be his exclusive focus in the final 30 years of his life (1898–1928), he started to recognise a particular connection between the theories of the physical sciences and the formal and epistemological concerns of poetry. This connection is manifested throughout his poems in an analogy between poetic and scientific methods of measuring, and it is examined in detail in “A Sign-Seeker” (1898): I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,   The noontides many-shaped and hued;   I see the nightfall shades subtrude, And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by. 4  See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s Library at Max Gate: Catalogue of an Attempted Reconstruction, http://hardy.library.utoronto.ca (accessed 8 March 2019). 5  Hardy, Life, 270, 317, and 349.

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I view the evening bonfires of the sun   On hills where morning rains have hissed;   The eyeless countenance of the mist Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done. I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,   The cauldrons of the sea in storm,   Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm, And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are. I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,   The coming of eccentric orbs;   To mete the dust the sky absorbs, To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips. (ll. 1–16)6

These opening stanzas encapsulate a view of the universe, set out by scientific naturalists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as uniform and quantifiable. They describe an inductive accumulation of knowledge: the speaker’s repeated observations of nature’s unvarying cycles, and his investigations of its spectacular phenomena, precede and inform his predictions of future astronomical events. The poem’s focus is both insistently visual and insistently material, as it emphasises the speaker’s tactile experience of the forms of nature. Those forms are sublime— “the sea in storm,” the “abysmal fires” of volcanoes, the “snow-cones” of mountain peaks—but they are described with a matter-of-fact brevity that appears to exemplify the observational objectivity of science. Nature itself is eyeless, but it is entirely accessible to the probing eye of the speaker, and his observations culminate in a series of measurements, in which the matter of the sky and the sun is confidently quantified. That confidence is checked, though, by the poem’s form. It is possible to read its regular stanza shape and abba rhyme scheme as formal enactments of the speaker’s method of acquiring knowledge through repeated observations of the same natural phenomena. But the circularity of the poem’s rhymes runs counter to the presentation of that method as a model of inductive progress, from observation to inference to quantification. As Matthew Campbell points out, the stanza of “A Sign-Seeker” is “a parody of the rhyme scheme of the In Memoriam stanza,” but while the

6  All line references to Hardy’s poetry are from Complete Poetical Works and will be cited in the text.

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“measured language” (5:6) of Tennyson’s elegy is voiced in stanzas of unvarying iambic tetrameter, the inconsistent length of Hardy’s lines complicates the speaker’s emphasis on the predictable uniformity of natural processes.7 “And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by” is a line that Hardy’s critics might have dismissed as negligent precisely because of its insufficient monotony and regularity, but Hardy would doubtless have said that its discordant clang and listless accumulation of unstressed syllables serve a purpose: they demonstrate, together with the line’s glum language, that the speaker’s performance of dispassionate objectivity is skin-deep. In the context of the irregular measures of the verse, his emphasis on the precision of his measurements sounds like an effort to compensate for something. His motivation, and the argument that underpins the poem’s formal rewriting of In Memoriam, becomes clear in later stanzas: But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense—   Those sights of which old prophets tell,   Those signs the general word so well, As vouchsafed their unheed, denied my long suspense. In graveyard green, where his pale dust lies pent   To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,   Wearing his smile, and “Not the end!” Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment. (ll. 21–28)

Like Tennyson’s elegy, this poem seeks a sign of human immortality, but finds itself frustrated by the materiality of experience. Confined by the limitations of his senses, and trapped in a body that is identified (in an echo of the opening stanzas) as “dust,” the speaker is denied any glimpse of the existence of spirit. The frustration of his desire for knowledge of something other than matter is articulated in the enclosing rhymes of the first and last lines of each stanza: spiritual perception is either withheld indefinitely (“sense”/“suspense”) or denied by the inescapable corporeality of personal identity (“pent”/“enlightenment”). While In Memoriam resolves its doubts by reaffirming a dualist distinction between mutable matter and the permanence of the soul, “A Sign-Seeker” ends with a blunt dismissal of the hope of immortality: “And Nescience mutely muses: 7  Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 222.

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When a man falls he lies” (l. 48). Physical science is capable of analysing the materiality of nature and of the body, but it has nothing to say about spiritual questions, and the epistemological gap is filled not by religious faith but by nescience. The opaque and convoluted syntax of these stanzas (“that I fain would wot of,” “those signs the general word so well”), strikingly different from the composed syntactic progress of the poem’s opening lines, expresses both the intensity and the futility of the speaker’s search for empirical evidence of immortality. “A Sign-Seeker” could be read as a critique of the deadening effect of quantitative scientific naturalism on poetic faith and feeling. A similar argument about Hardy’s writing more generally is put forward by Anne DeWitt, who emphasises “how important the distinction between science and literature was to his understanding of the novel.” Both in his fiction and in his poetry, DeWitt claims, Hardy insists that “the scientific and emotional views of human life cannot be reconciled”; this insistence is “a rejection, in effect, of the claims of the scientific naturalists.”8 And it is possible to make an analogous claim about his use of poetic form. In a discussion of Hardy’s writing about practices of measurement in Victorian anthropology, Andrew Radford suggests that his poetry censures those thinkers who are “motivated by what they see as strictly scientific issues of verification and authenticity,” and that it instead “affirms the blessings and beats of a different ‘measure’, in defiance of mere representation and synonymous with the grace and expressive possibilities of poetic rhythm.”9 These readings are supported, to some extent, by the distinction between science and literature which Hardy sets out in his 1891 essay on “The Science of Fiction.” He starts by describing the “comprehensive and accurate knowledge of realities which must be sought for, or intuitively possessed, to some extent, before anything deserving the name of an artistic performance in narrative can be produced,” but he then asserts that “in no proper sense can the term ‘science’ be applied to other than this fundamental matter.”10 Science and fiction both commence with the precise observation of empirical reality, he suggests, but apart from that their 8  Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 98 and 122. 9  Andrew Radford, “Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy’s Poetry,” in Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, ed. John Holmes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 174. 10  Hardy, “The Science of Fiction,” in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 106.

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methods are profoundly different. Hardy takes issue with theories of literary realism, and particularly with Emile Zola’s naturalism, for their attempted “conformation of story-writing to scientific processes.” These theories ignore “the impossibility of reproducing in its entirety the phantasmagoria of experience with infinite and atomic truth.” “The fallacy,” Hardy writes, “appears to owe its origin to the just perception that with our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces, and man’s position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment.”11 The expectation that fiction must adjust to developments in scientific knowledge is a “just perception,” but theorists of realism are mistaken when they suggest that subjective experience can be represented with the “infinite and atomic truth” that science attains in its observations of the physical universe. In the case of narrative fiction, then, Hardy endorses a conventional opposition between scientific objectivity and the subjective remit of literature. His poetry, conversely, questions this opposition. It is true that Hardy’s poems refuse the emotional consolation and rhetorical optimism for which scientific naturalists such as Tyndall turned to poetic quotation. And there is no place in his verse for anything as heartening as the principle of universal equality that Mathilde Blind identified in the laws of physical science. But this does not mean that science and poetry are in opposition for Hardy, or that he employs poetic form and language as a corrective to rigid scientific reductionism. There are two main reasons, I think, for the difference between his novelistic theory and his poetic practice. The first is that in the final decades of his life he was more willing to consider the possibility that subjective experience might be explained and represented using scientific theories. The second is that he saw the methods and concerns of nineteenth-century science, and especially of the physical sciences, as more closely aligned with the formal capacities of verse than with those of prose fiction. Hardy’s diligent study of poetic form, I want to suggest, prompted an understanding of poetry as essentially quantitative, as a way of thinking that enabled both the measurement of human experience of the world and a recognition of the indeterminacy exposed by that measurement. In “A Sign-Seeker,” poetic measures and scientific measurement share the same problem. Both bring a degree of precision to their observations and representations of physical nature (which encompasses personal  Ibid., 107–8.

11

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identity as well as material phenomena), but this precision has strict limits, and it cannot resolve the speaker’s doubts about immortality. Poetic expression and scientific quantification each end in nescience, which in this poem is not exactly ignorance but a kind of half-knowledge that perpetually generates further questions. “A Sign-Seeker” contributes to the “willful, ironic, simultaneous demolishing and establishing of barriers between human and matter” that Linda Shires identifies as a recurring strategy of Wessex Poems.12 Hardy’s universe is composed of tangible, observable, quantifiable dust, but the human mind, one of the forms which that dust takes, is capable of thinking beyond materiality to the limited extent of asking unanswerable questions about itself and about matter in general.13 In November 1893, two years after publishing “The Science of Fiction,” Hardy wrote a poem which contradicts that essay by suggesting that “our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces, and man’s position therein,” is communicable in literary writing: No use hoping, or feeling vext, Tugged by a force above or under Like some fantocine, much I wonder What I shall find me doing next! Shall I be rushing where bright eyes be? Shall I be suffering sorrows seven? Shall I be watching the stars of heaven, Thinking one of them looks like thee? Part is mine of the general Will, Cannot my share in the sum of forces Bend a digit creature-courses, And a fair desire fulfil?

The poem’s identification of its speaker as a “fantocine” or puppet suggests a thoroughgoing determinism that might have been conveyed 12  Linda M. Shires, “Matter, Consciousness, and the Human in Wessex Poems,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 55 (2015): 918. 13  Tim Armstrong makes a similar argument, suggesting that, for Hardy, nineteenth-century science and philosophy configure both the physical universe and the mind as simultaneously material and spectral (and therefore unknowable). See Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 30–38.

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formally in a monotonous rhythm. Hardy, though, packs his stanzas with metrical variations, and this rhythmic irregularity contributes to a general impression of technical imperfection; some of the rhymes, too, seem arbitrary, especially that of “seven” and “heaven” in the second stanza. But it is possible to read the poem’s form as an expression of the argument hinted at in its title: “He Wonders about Himself.” Like “A Sign-Seeker,” this poem uses a scientific interpretation of nature and of personal identity as the basis of a series of unanswered questions. By defining himself as part of “the sum of forces” in the universe, the speaker implies that his motivations can, like those forces, be quantified. But because of the complexity of the forces, his actions cannot be predicted; determinism, it seems, is not that deterministic. The indeterminacy generated by scientific knowledge is articulated in the rhythms of the final stanza: the trochaic inversion in the opening foot of the third line, for example, registers the speaker’s doubt about whether or not he can alter his course of action by “a digit.” Hardy is evidently capable of bending the measures of his verse, but does this particular irregularity reflect the speaker’s agency or his imprisonment within the mechanistic but indeterminate forces of nature? This doubt is also present in the poem’s circular rhyme scheme, as Hardy uses the concluding question mark to undercut the otherwise affirmative rhyme of “Will” and “fulfil.” When this poem was first published in Moments of Vision (1917), the middle lines of the final stanza read: “Cannot my share in the sum of sources / Bend a digit the poise of forces.”14 Hardy’s revision of the poem in the 1920s reflects and perpetuates the speaker’s unresolved doubt, but the speculation that underpins the rhyme remains the same: “sources,” “forces,” and “courses”—natural laws, physical processes, and personal actions—are to some extent identical, and human will is an inseparable and subordinate part of the uniformity of nature. The language and form of “He Wonders about Himself” illustrate Dennis Taylor’s argument “that the rhythms of the speaking voice” in Hardy’s poetry “are influenced by the rhythms of the outer world, or rather that a common rhythm runs through both.”15 This common rhythm is simultaneously quantifiable and unfathomable: the speaker knows that his actions are determined by physical forces, but he also knows that a knowledge of those forces is  See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 2:257.  Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 109. 14 15

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insufficient to predict what he will do next, and this epistemological tension is registered in the formal imbalances of the verse. The poem concisely demonstrates Peter Howarth’s observation that “a determinism rigid with effort is the paradox behind Hardy’s worked-at style whose subject is helpless knowledge.”16 Rather than rejecting the claims of scientific naturalism, the speaker of “He Wonders about Himself” goes further than the scientific naturalists in announcing the subordination of subjective emotion to scientific theory. In one of his notebooks Hardy recorded Thomas Henry Huxley’s rejection of this kind of argument in his 1886 essay “Science and Morals”: I understand the main tenet of Materialism to be that there is nothing in the universe but matter & force, & that all the phenomena of nature are explicable by deduction from the properties assignable to these two primitive factors. […] All this I heartily disbelieve. […] It seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness.17

In the same essay Huxley insists that “the terms ‘atom’ and ‘force’” denote two of “the working hypotheses of physical science” rather than “real entities, having an objective existence.”18 For Huxley, because physical forces and the constituents of matter cannot be examined directly, there can be no evidence of their objective reality or of their inherent properties, and so the argument that consciousness is explicable in terms of matter and force has no foundation. As Hardy was keen to point out, his writing is not philosophically consistent, and his noting of Huxley’s argument suggests that he had some interest in it, but much of his poetry is founded on a materialist position which abandons the epistemological caution that Huxley shared with several other Victorian science writers and poets. Hardy’s poems frequently suggest that consciousness and the other phenomena of nature are determined by the quantifiable processes of matter and force, and that those processes can be enumerated and studied in the experimental measures of verse.

16  Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151. 17  Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 1:177. 18  Thomas Henry Huxley, “Science and Morals,” Fortnightly Review 40 (1886): 795.

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2 Hardy’s conviction of the inseparability of psychology and physics is also expressed in the final stanza of “A Dream Question,” published in Time’s Laughingstocks (1909). This is one of Hardy’s numerous “God” poems, in which a speaker demands from an omnific entity (either the God of Christianity, or nature, or another hypostasised abstraction) an explanation for the suffering and purposelessness that characterise the universe.19 God’s answer in “A Dream Question” is typically unhelpful: “Why things are thus, whoso derides, May well remain my secret still…. A fourth dimension, say the guides, To matter is conceivable. Think some such mystery resides Within the ethic of my will.” (ll. 19–24)

“A Dream Question” repeats an argument that Hardy sets out in several other poems, but it is saved from redundancy by its grim comedy: the use of “derides” instead of the expected “decides” sums up god’s disregard of human suffering by identifying his creation of the universe as an insult rather than a purposive act. And while the poem’s argument is nothing new, the terms in which it is framed are surprising. The metre is unusually regular for Hardy’s verse, and this, combined with the punctuation that end-stops every second line, gives the stanza an epigrammatic air. The formal equivalence of the three pairs of lines implies an ontological equivalence between their subjects: the secret reason “why things are thus,” the “fourth dimension” of matter, and the mystery of god. The quantifiable laws of the material universe are capable of explaining not just human consciousness but also the ethic (or, as Hardy put it in the manuscript of Time’s Laughingstocks, the “measure”) of god’s will.20 The poem’s reference to matter’s “fourth dimension” is curious. It is probably not an allusion to Hermann Minkowski’s four-dimensional model of space-time, because the poem predates the popularisation in Britain of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which was the most influential interpretation of Minkowski’s work. The reference may be 19  See Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40–41 and 50. 20  See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 1:317.

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informed by debates about the fourth dimension in late-Victorian mathematics, but these tended to define the fourth dimension in abstract and spatial rather than material terms. Hardy’s use of the phrase in relation to matter, I think, reflects his sustained interest in the physical sciences. In the recollections of his friend Leslie Stephen that he wrote after Stephen’s death in 1904, Hardy describes an incident in 1875 when Stephen asked him to witness his signature on “a deed renunciatory of holy orders”: The deed was executed with due formality. Our conversation then turned upon theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, the unreality of time and kindred subjects. He told me that he had “wasted” much time on systems of religion and metaphysics, and that the new theory of vortex rings had a “staggering fascination” for him.21

The vortex-ring theory, elaborated by William Thomson, speculates that the atoms which constitute ponderable matter exist as vortices within the otherwise uniform substance of the ether.22 Thomson’s conjecture is a good example of the way in which nineteenth-century physics separated matter from the tangible solidity of sense data, turning it into something rarefied and inexplicable. Hardy may, then, have had the vortex-ring theory in mind when writing about the mysterious fourth dimension of matter in “A Dream Question.”23 His interest in such theories helps to answer the question that Marjorie Levinson asks of his poetry: “how can a discourse be at once so thingified—characterized throughout the criticism as solid, hard, substantial, real—and at the same time, so blurred, foggy, and amorphous?”24 Hardy’s poems frequently categorise the universe in

 Hardy, “Recollections of Leslie Stephen,” in Public Voice, 263–64.  Stephen may have learned about the vortex-ring theory from his friend William Kingdon Clifford, who summarises it in his review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, Fortnightly Review 17 (1875): 782–84. For a discussion of the theory, and of its influence on The Unseen Universe, see Mark Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 44–48. 23  The “mystery” in “A Dream Question” also echoes Hardy’s reference to “the ‘mystery of radium’” (the headline of an article about the radioactive element in the Times) in a 1903 letter. See The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, Richard Little Purdy, and Keith Wilson, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–2012), 8:70. 24  Marjorie Levinson, “Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry,” ELH 73 (2006): 561. 21 22

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material terms, while also identifying the essence of matter as mysterious, unknowable, and remote from humans’ sensory experiences. There is further evidence of Hardy’s knowledge of scientific debates about matter in his notebooks, in the form of a quotation from a 1905 article by E. Armitage on “The Scientists and Common Sense.” Armitage describes recent research on radioactivity and subatomic particles as a “revolt” that “seemed to overturn all current theories of the constitution of matter.” As these established theories, founded on the indivisibility of the atom, are overturned, “some physicists are clinging to ether as their last plank. May not perhaps atoms, they ask, be ‘knots’ in the ether, or perhaps vortices in it, or ‘strains’?” Armitage has little patience for these “almost poetical” suggestions, noting that “there is something ghost-like here and far removed from that common-sense matter from which the man of science set out.”25 Dismissing speculations about “the constitution of matter” as the last gasp of “the confusions and extravagances of modern naturalism” and its “careless substitution of inadequate models for the actual things,” Armitage censures Victorian scientific naturalism’s espousal of a theoretical materialism that had no basis in experience, “in which mind was denied all control over matter, or even over its own thoughts, and in which man was declared an automaton dancing to the pulling-­ strings of a giant mechanism.”26 This is another example of Hardy recording an interpretation of science with which he disagreed. In “He Wonders about Himself” and “A Dream Question,” and throughout his poetry, Hardy elaborates a monist philosophy that rejects Armitage’s dualist distinction between mind and matter. If human consciousness and “God” in its various guises are explicable in any way, he suggests, then they are explicable in terms of the properties of matter. This monism is given its fullest expression in The Dynasts (1904–8), Hardy’s “epic-drama” of the Napoleonic wars. The earthly action of this vast poem’s narrative is punctuated by the commentaries of an array of spirits, which are manifestations of the “Immanent Will” that instigates, without conscious intent, the processes of the universe and the actions of the poem’s human characters. There are three possible interpretations of Hardy’s, or any, monism: the singular substance of the universe can be defined either as matter, as mind 25  E. Armitage, “The Scientists and Common Sense,” Contemporary Review 87 (1905): 729–30; Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:418. 26  Armitage, “Scientists,” 731.

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or spirit, or as both simultaneously. The designation of the universe’s motive force in The Dynasts as a “will” (a word that is also used in “A Dream Question” and “He Wonders about Himself”) seems to identify it as a mind rather than a mechanism. But Hardy also discusses it in language that invokes the material phenomena studied by the physical sciences. In the Preface to The Dynasts he justifies his use of the spirits, rather than a more conventional divine chorus, by observing that “the wide acceptance of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation,” and he labels the Immanent Will as “the First or Fundamental Energy.”27 This suggests something corresponding to the uniform processes of physics, and Hardy voiced reservations about the term “will” in a 1904 letter, stating that “another word would have been better if one could have had it, though ‘Power’ would not do, as power can be suspended or withheld, & the forces of nature cannot.”28 Hardy’s shifting vocabulary, which finds room both for the term “energy” and for its scientific precursor “force,” illustrates his monist position: that inanimate matter, physical energy, and human and universal will are different facets of the same thing. Some critics have identified Hardy’s stance in his poetry as idealist: Seamus Perry, for instance, equates the monism of The Dynasts with the “post-Hegelian Idealism” that was the most influential school of British philosophy in the late nineteenth century.29 And Catherine Maxwell, discussing the prevalence of ghosts, spirits, and hallucinations in Hardy’s poems, suggests that he “sees as ‘real’ what is normally regarded as metaphysical, abstract, supernatural, or unconscious.”30 Despite his disagreement with the criticisms of scientific materialism set out by Huxley and Armitage, there is evidence to indicate that Hardy’s views were not consistently materialist. As Maxwell points out, in 1887 he wrote that “the material is not the real—only the visible, the real being invisible optically,” a sentiment that runs athwart the emphasis in some of his poems on the observational precision of positive science.31  Hardy, Preface to The Dynasts, in Complete Poetical Works, 4:6–7.  Hardy to Edward Clodd, 22 March 1904, in Letters, 3:117. 29  Seamus Perry, “Hardy’s Imperfections,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 542. 30  Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 205. 31  Hardy, Life, 192. 27 28

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Hardy also expressed an interest in idealist interpretations of physics: for example, there are several references in his letters and notebooks to William Kingdon Clifford’s theory of “mind-stuff.” In an essay read to the Metaphysical Society in 1874 and published in Mind in 1878, Clifford posits that consciousness comprises an organised form of a mental substance that exists in conjunction with, and subtends, matter: “That element of which, as we have seen, even the simplest feeling is a complex, I shall call Mind-stuff. A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-­ stuff.”32 Writing in 1892, Hardy acknowledged the appeal of Clifford’s theory but rejected the idealist notion of a mental principle pervading the universe: “with Spinoza, & the late W. K. Clifford, you may call all matter mind-stuff (a very attractive idea this, to me) but you cannot find the link (at least I can’t) of one form of consciousness with another.” For Hardy, consciousness cannot be conceived separately from the particular material forms—the body and the brain—in which it is manifested. And in the same letter, discussing idealism and metaphysics more generally, he comments that “I prefer to relegate such thoughts to the domain of fancy, & to recognize them as pure imagination.”33 The philosophical framework of The Dynasts has less in common with idealism than with the monism set out by the biologist Ernst Haeckel in The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, the English translation of which was published in 1900. There is evidence that Hardy read the book in his notebooks and in his reference to Haeckel as a philosophical authority in his autobiography.34 Haeckel argues that “the two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter and ether, are not dead, and only moved by extrinsic force, but they are endowed with sensation and will (though, naturally, of the lowest grade),” and that these endowments constitute “a universal ‘soul’ of the simplest character,” an argument which is strikingly similar to Hardy’s representation of the 32  Clifford, “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves,” in Lectures and Essays, ed. Frederick Pollock and Leslie Stephen, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 2:85. These sentences are (mis)transcribed in Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:108. 33  Hardy to Roden Noel, 3 April 1892, in Letters, 1:261–62. In 1901 he similarly expressed his preference for “an idealism in which Fancy is no longer tricked out and made to masquerade as Belief, but is frankly and honestly accepted as an imaginative solace.” See Public Voice, 210. 34  See Thomas Hardy’s “Facts” Notebook, ed. William Greenslade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 313; and Hardy, Life, 338.

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unconscious Immanent Will in The Dynasts.35 In contrast to Clifford, Haeckel persistently frames his monism in language which suggests that the ideal aspect of the universe may simultaneously be understood as a physical process. He announces that “we adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely-extended substance, and Spirit (or Energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes, or principal properties, of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”36 This conflation of spirit with energy recurs throughout the book, and it enables Haeckel to put forward a definition of humanity as “a transitory phase of the evolution of an eternal substance, a particular phenomenal form of matter and energy, the true proportion of which we soon perceive when we set it on the background of infinite space and eternal time.”37 The contextualisation of humanity is precisely what Hardy sets out to do in The Dynasts, as the poem views the history of the Napoleonic wars from the universal perspective of the Immanent Will and its spirits. If, as Robert Gittings suggests, Haeckel’s theories can be “seen not so much as an influence but as a reinforcement of what were already Hardy’s own views,” then this supports the argument that Hardy’s poetry is underpinned by a physicalist (if not unambiguously materialist) monism, in which human psychology and history are directed by the transformations of matter and energy.38 In The Dynasts the Immanent Will is frequently presented as a universal brain or nervous system.39 In the Fore Scene that commences the poem, the spirits survey the Europe-wide turmoil of the Napoleonic wars, and Hardy’s stage directions announce that “a new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle,” revealing “as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display.” This seems to identify the Immanent Will as a specifically biological entity, but the Spirit of the Pities says: 35  Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: Watts, 1900), 224 and 229. 36  Ibid., 21. 37  Ibid., 249. Hardy notes this sentence, as quoted in a review of Haeckel’s book, in Literary Notebooks, 2:99. 38  Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978), 114. 39  For a discussion of the influence of nineteenth-century neurology on The Dynasts, and on Hardy’s writing more generally, see Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014).

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Amid this scene of bodies substantive Strange waves I sight like winds grown visible, Which bear men’s forms on their innumerous coils, Twining and serpentining round and through. (1:Fore Scene:161–64)40

For Herbert Tucker, these “strange waves” demonstrate Hardy’s debt to the undulatory theory of physics: throughout The Dynasts, he points out, human sensations and actions are depicted in rhythmic terms “strikingly continuous both with the undulation of light, sound, and felt force in the physical universe and with the scripted vibration that is poetry.”41 The forces that act on “bodies substantive” are physical as well as biological, and the rhythms of those forces are substantiated in the metres of Hardy’s poetry and in the cyclical waves and coils that permeate nature. In the poem’s second part the Spirit of the Years, which represents a self-­aware facet of the unconscious Immanent Will, describes the Will’s impulses as “weird unrest along the firmament / Of causal coils in passionate display” (2:6:4:3–4). As with the reference to the fourth dimension in “A Dream Question,” there is no single scientific source that explains Hardy’s meaning here, but these lines indicate that his determinism in The Dynasts is founded on the premise, different versions of which were also put forward by nineteenth-century science writers and by poets such as Tennyson and Blind, that the physical universe consists of forms and patterns which are material and rhythmic. Hardy’s “causal coils” may be influenced both by the vibrations of the undulatory theory and by the rotating and imponderable knots of the vortex-ring theory. And, in an apt pun, the word “coil” refers both to a circular shape and to a “noisy disturbance.”42 The “innumerous coils” of the Immanent Will are characterised equally by rhythmic regularity and by “weird unrest,” and their simultaneous uniformity and tumult is articulated in the sounds of Hardy’s verse. This relation between the form and the content of The Dynasts is evident in the Fore Scene, as the Spirit of the Years describes the processes of the Immanent Will in language that borrows both from physics and from neurology:

40  References to The Dynasts identify part, act and scene (or the Fore Scene or After Scene), and line numbers. 41  Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 600. 42  Oxford English Dictionary, “coil.”

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  Their sum is like the lobule of a Brain   Evolving always that it wots not of;   A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,   And whose procedure may but be discerned   By phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessed   Of those it stirs, who (even as ye do) dream   Their motions free, their orderings supreme;   Each life apart from each, with power to mete   Its own day’s measures; balanced, self-complete;   Though they subsist but atoms of the One   Labouring through all, divisible from none; But this no further now. Deem yet man’s deeds self-done. (1:Fore Scene:171–82)

The Immanent Will is compared to a brain here, but the beings whose motions and measures are determined by it are identified as inanimate atoms. Hardy’s formal experimentation in these lines represents an attempt to enact the inseparability of three kinds of measure: human decisions, uniform physical processes, and poetic rhythms. The transitions from blank verse to rhyming couplets to a half-formed Spenserian stanza embody the inexorable but arbitrary directives of the Immanent Will. And the introduction of rhyme into the verse, just as the Spirit of the Years explains humanity’s erroneous belief in free will, reflects the inescapable determinism of the poem’s philosophy. While the rhythms of particular lines—for example, the effortful accretion of stresses in “Its own day’s measures”—point to the persistence of human notions of agency, the Spirit of the Years answers the question posed in “He Wonders about Himself” with an unequivocal “no”: it is not possible for humans to “bend a digit” the forces of nature. These lines present life as stirred by a universal rhythm that is relentless but disconcertingly erratic. Despite Hardy’s disavowals of a coherent philosophy in his poems, the epic ambition of The Dynasts’ argument is demonstrated by its insistence that the rhythm of the Immanent Will is operative not just in verse and in human actions but in physical processes throughout the universe. Employing terms that echo the keywords of nineteenth-century physics, the Spirit of the Years comments that “something hidden urged / The giving matter motion” (1:1:2:83–84), and this motion is insistently characterised as metrical. Witnessing Napoleon’s coronation as King of Italy, the same spirit explains “what is the creed that these rich rites disclose”:

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A local cult called Christianity, Which the wild dramas of the wheeling spheres Include, with divers other such, in dim Pathetical and brief parentheses, Beyond whose span, uninfluenced, unconcerned, The systems of the suns go sweeping on With all their many-mortaled planet train In mathematic roll unceasingly. (1:1:6:1–9)

The gravitational roll of solar systems may be unceasing and mathematically calculable, but that does not mean that it is regular or purposeful. In the spondees and pyrrhics of the second line, which register the “wild dramas” of astronomical processes, and in the unstressed line endings that introduce an intermittent note of metrical bathos, the variable texture of Hardy’s blank verse illustrates his conviction that, although positive science may be able to measure the physical universe precisely, it cannot therefore bestow meaning on it. In the After Scene that ends The Dynasts, a chorus of the Pities uses rhymed verse in an effort to imagine a more deliberate arrangement of natural processes, invoking the Immanent Will and singing that “The systemed suns the skies enscroll / Obey Thee in their rhythmic roll” (3:After Scene:48–49). The formal regularity of these lines, and the systematic order they describe, is in keeping with the Pities’ purpose throughout The Dynasts, which is to try (typically in vain) to offer some kind of consolation for the suffering that the poem depicts. And it is also in keeping with the poem as a whole that their optimism is dismissed by the more jaded (or objective) Spirit of the Years: “You almost charm my long philosophy / Out of my strong-built thought,” it tells the Pities, but these hymns are not “chords consistent with our spectacle” (3:After Scene:64–66). Like Blind in The Ascent of Man, Hardy deploys a variety of stanza forms in The Dynasts to articulate his view of a universe shaped by rhythmic repetition and perpetual mutability. Unsurprisingly, given the poem’s subject, there is a political element to this view—by insisting that the actions of those in power are contingent and determined by universal forces, the poem announces the futility of dynastic ambition—but it is less fully developed, and less intrinsic to the form of the verse, than the evocation of universal equality that recurs throughout Blind’s epic. Hardy’s main point in The Dynasts is theological rather than political: the poem insistently depicts a universe devoid of purpose or morality. At the end of

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the battle of Waterloo, which is described in brutal detail, a chorus of Ironic Spirits asks what, if anything, motivates the Immanent Will: Are then, Love and Light Its aim— Good Its glory, Bad Its blame? Nay; to alter evermore Things from what they were before. (3:7:8:135–38)

The aim of the universe is not in fact an aim but a process, an unending series of transformations to which moral arguments are irrelevant. And these transformations do not emerge from the actions of autonomous agents, whether human or universal, but from indeterminate variations in the “mathematic roll” of the universe, in the cyclical motions of astronomical processes and the repetitive recyclings of matter and energy. Hardy shares with Blind and Tennyson the characteristically nineteenth-­ century belief that accentual-syllabic verse may be able to articulate the universal rhythm that underpins matter’s motions. In his copy of In Memoriam he underlined Tennyson’s invocation of “the deep pulsations of the world” in section 95.43 But while Tennyson tries to interpret this rhythm as the measure of a spiritual permanence that transcends the ephemerality of matter, and while Blind hears in it the equalising throb of political revolution, Hardy scans its pulsations as inherently and disconcertingly haphazard. The last word in The Dynasts goes to the precarious optimism of the Pities, but immediately before that the Spirit of the Years delivers its verdict in lines that encapsulate the poem’s determinist philosophy and the formal framework through which it is communicated:      Last as first the question rings      Of the Will’s long travailings;      Why the All-mover,      Why the All-prover Ever urges on and measures out the chordless chime of Things. (3:After Scene: 85–89)

For this spirit, ten years of European history and thousands of lines of poetry have offered no answer to the central question of The Dynasts: how can the processes of the universe be uniform and inexorable and yet, at the 43  For details of Hardy’s copy of In Memoriam, now at the Dorset County Museum, see Millgate, Library.

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same time, arbitrary and inexplicable? This contradiction was identified by poets and science writers throughout the nineteenth century, but most of them found a means of resolving it, in Blind’s case through an assertion of political belief, but more typically through an appeal to the divine or the ideal in one form or another. Hardy, though, considers it incapable of resolution: for him, nature as defined by physical science is simultaneously rhythmic and chordless, measurable and inexact, deterministic and unknowable. And this conviction is expressed here in the juxtaposition of short and long lines that was one of his favourite formal devices. In a fractal mimesis of the universe it describes, Hardy’s verse is both organised and irregular; it can be measured, but it resists systematic classification. Despite the relentlessness with which he propounds his monist determinism in The Dynasts, Hardy also acknowledged the appeal of the dualism that enabled other writers to posit the existence of something distinct from and in control of matter. In 1915 he read the English translation of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, commenting that Bergson’s insistence on “a line of demarcation between the inert & the living,” between inanimate and biological matter, represented “an inconsistent rupture of order” in the “uniform & consistent laws” of nature. Nonetheless, he admitted, “I want to be a Bergsonian (indeed I have for many years). But I fear that his philosophy is, in the bulk, only our old friend Dualism in a new suit of clothes.” It is “an ingenious fancy without real foundation, & more complicated, & therefore less likely, than the determinist fancy & others that he endeavours to overthrow.”44 Jane Bennett explains Bergson’s philosophy in terms that offer a different perspective on Hardy’s disagreement with him. For Bergson, “matter was not in principle calculable: something always escaped quantification, prediction, and control,” and Bennett sees his “efforts to remain scientific while acknowledging some incalculability to things” as “exemplary” of the “vital materiality” which she herself propounds.45 Hardy’s monism, conversely, depends on a conviction of the calculability of matter, and in the notes he took during his reading of Creative Evolution he concentrated as much on the determinism that the book aims to refute as on Bergson’s own theories. He transcribed Bergson’s quotation of Huxley’s argument, in his essay “The Genealogy of Animals,” that  Hardy to Caleb Saleeby, 2 February 1915, in Letters, 5:79.  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 63. 44 45

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if the fundamental proposition of evolution is true, that the entire world, living & not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed, it is no less certain that the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour; & that a sufficient intellect could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say, the state of the Fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter’s day.46

Hardy often used his notebooks to record arguments with which he disagreed, probably as prompts to his thinking, and this “determinist fancy” represents the kind of systematic and unambiguous determinism about which he (and Huxley himself) at times expressed scepticism. But its presence in his notebook indicates that, in the later years of his poetic career, the materialist definition of the universe as the sum of the quantifiable properties of matter retained its hold on his imagination. In The Dynasts this view is deployed in support of an unyielding determinism which is closely aligned to pessimism, although Hardy frequently refused to acknowledge it as such. In other poems, though, Hardy joins Tennyson and Blind in presenting a determinist understanding of the universe as grounds for optimism or solace. “A Kiss,” for example, was published in Moments of Vision (1917): By a wall the stranger now calls his, Was born of old a particular kiss, Without forethought in its genesis; Which in a trice took wing on the air. And where that spot is nothing shows:    There ivy calmly grows,    And no one knows    What a birth was there! That kiss is gone where none can tell— Not even those who felt its spell: It cannot have died; that know we well. Somewhere it pursues its flight, One of a long procession of sounds    Travelling aethereal rounds  Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:221.

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   Far from earth’s bounds    In the infinite.

Like numerous nineteenth-century poets and science writers, Hardy speculates that the undulatory theory might affirm a kind of immortality. Sound’s status as a form of motion within matter, rather than a bounded material thing, enables him to have it both ways. The kiss is presented as materially and personally specific, located in a particular time and space, and indivisible from the physical sound through which it is broadcast. But it is also transcendent: by ignoring the distinction between the ponderable matter of bodies and air and the hypothetical matter of the ether, Hardy also removes the barrier between the earth and space, so that the kiss ascends without resistance from its material origin to “the infinite.” As Gillian Beer points out, the notion of sound’s material permanence probably represented for Hardy a consoling but intellectually legitimate alternative to his habitual religious scepticism; “A Kiss” tries to offer an affirmative answer to the questions “How to discover some form of eternity without religion? Some form for continuance that will not be mere false optimism?”47 The optimistic understanding of sound, light, and other forms of energy as material but eternal had been eroded throughout the late nineteenth century by the second law of thermodynamics, but Hardy could have found support for his speculation in The Riddle of the Universe, in which Haeckel confidently asserts that the second law is “untenable,” because “there is neither beginning nor end of the world. The universe is infinite, and eternally in motion.”48 As in Tennyson’s rhymed verse, the stanza form of “A Kiss” both embodies and complicates the poem’s celebration of the eternal motion of sound. The rhyming triplets, aaa and ccc, represent a straightforward voicing of the kiss’s repetitions in “aethereal rounds.” But the distance between the b rhymes, in combination with the rhyming words themselves (“air” and “there” in the first stanza and “flight” and “infinite”—the poem’s sole half-rhyme—in the second), arguably has the effect of emphasising the fugitive ephemerality of the kiss, the way in which something personal and physical is lost to the speaker as it becomes ethereal and intangible. And this balance between permanence and impermanence is 47  Gillian Beer, “Hardy and Decadence,” in Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, ed. Charles Pettit (London: Macmillan, 1996), 97. 48  Haeckel, Riddle, 252–53.

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present in the poem’s visual as well as its aural form: the shorter lines in the second half of each stanza suggest the attenuation of the sound over time, even as their rhymes articulate its echoes in the infinite. The optimism of “A Kiss,” however qualified by the poem’s measured form, is the exception rather than the rule in Hardy’s thinking about the materiality of nature. More characteristic is the sardonic pessimism of “A Philosophical Fantasy,” first published in the Fortnightly Review on 1 January 1927 and then reprinted in Hardy’s posthumous volume Winter Words (1928). This is a “God” poem in which god flippantly promises to reveal the meaning of things to his questioner at some point in the future, “Say, just about the Maytime / Of my next, or next, Creation” (ll. 74–75), but then corrects himself: “One of thy representatives In some later incarnation I mean, of course, well knowing Thy present conformation But a unit of my tentatives, Whereof such heaps lie blowing As dust, where thou art going.” (ll. 80–86)

The measures of this poem are the opposite of experimental or original: it is written predominantly in the jaunty, catalectic, and irregular metre which is typical of doggerel. However, the use of the same metre in the chorus of the Ironic Spirits in The Dynasts suggests that the artlessness of the verse is a reflection not of Hardy’s technical clumsiness but of god’s. The drollery of the rhythm is a formal expression both of god’s carelessness and of the absurdity of the physical universe, which is presented, as it is throughout Hardy’s poetry, as simultaneously uniform and baffling. Humanity is figured in this poem as (to use Haeckel’s words) “a transitory phase” of the mutations of matter and energy; it is briefly quantifiable in a particular material form—“a unit of my tentatives”—but that form soon dissolves, in an echo of the language that Hardy used in “A Sign-Seeker” 30 years earlier, into disorganised dust. The god of “A Philosophical Fantasy” consistently speaks in the language of materialism. It identifies itself as “blind force persisting” (l. 52), and it justifies its indifference to “the world’s sore situation” (l. 97) by highlighting the disjunction between its perspective and that of humanity:

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To me ’tis malleable matter For treatment scientific More than sensitive and specific— Stuff without moral features, Which I’ve no sense of ever, Or of ethical endeavour, Or of justice to Earth’s creatures, Or how Right from Wrong to sever. (ll. 100–107)

These lines imply a materialism more thoroughgoing than that of Hardy’s other poems. In “A Dream Question” the material and the ethical aspects of the universe are presented as equivalents of each other. In “A Philosophical Fantasy” human suffering is defined as exclusively material; from the objective perspective of this omnific entity, the ethical distinction between right and wrong is irrelevant. The poem’s god reiterates this position when it comments that “moral features” are “something Time hath rendered / Out of substance I engendered” (ll. 112–13); it is humanity’s experience of cause and effect in time, from which god is exempt, that prompts the development of moral judgements. The distinction between “treatment scientific” and “sensitive and specific” points to a conventional opposition between scientific objectivity and poetic subjectivity, but Hardy’s poetry refuses to stick to its side of this binary. While registering the pain and perplexity inflicted on humans by a deterministic universe, it nonetheless persists in deploying a “treatment scientific” which examines humanity in terms of the physical processes and “malleable matter” that constitute nature as a whole.

3 Hardy intermittently tried to find room for a degree of agency in his poetry’s deterministic view of nature. In the Apology published in Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), for instance, he argues that suffering shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces—unconscious or other—that have “the balancing of the clouds”, happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.49  Hardy, Apology, Late Lyrics and Earlier, in Complete Poetical Works, 2:319.

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This tentative appeal to free will recalls the unresolved questions of “He Wonders about Himself.” As in that poem, scientific knowledge and subjective feeling are linked together in a quantitative assessment of humanity’s position in the universe: when the forces of nature are in equilibrium, organic life’s share in the sum of those forces might allow the exercise of a measure of autonomy. This suggestion is in keeping with the moderately optimistic tone of the Apology; Hardy also voices what “may indeed be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion” and “complete rationality,” brokered “by means of the interfusing effect of poetry.” He retains this hope, he comments, “notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect.”50 The pessimist thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann was an important influence on Hardy’s work, but it is surprising to see Albert Einstein in this company; there is nothing inherently pessimistic in Einstein’s model of the universe. Perhaps Hardy is trying here to deflect the accusations of pessimism often levelled at him by reattributing “the supercilious regard of hope” to the deterministic physics of Einstein’s theories of relativity. But just as his writing in general is indebted to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, so, on a smaller scale, his poetry of the 1920s makes significant and sympathetic use of Einstein’s determinism. And in an effort to refute the claims of critics who “were fond of charging Hardy with postulating a malignant and fiendish God,” he writes of himself in his autobiography that “his view is shown, in fact, to approximate to Spinoza’s, and later Einstein’s—that neither chance nor purpose governs the universe, but necessity.”51 In this section I want to argue that Hardy’s responses to Einstein represent a conclusion of sorts to the poetic and scientific debates about matter that ran throughout the nineteenth century. In 1921 Hardy’s second wife Florence wrote that he “ponders over Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in the night.”52 The issues that he pondered, I think, were similar to those that had been addressed by poets and science writers from Wordsworth and Davy to Blind and Tyndall: the effect of scientific theories on religious notions of free will and immortality; the way in which science theorised matter as both familiar and inexplicable; the limits of the physical sciences’  Ibid., 2:325.  Hardy, Life, 363–64. 52  Quoted in Gittings, Older Hardy, 193. 50 51

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capacity to analyse and quantify nature’s materiality; and the power of accentual-syllabic verse to represent the motions of matter in language. These concerns were shaped by Hardy’s preoccupations and assumptions as a poet who wrote with an essentially nineteenth-century understanding of poetic form; his interpretation of relativity was therefore distinct from those developed by Modernist writers. But Hardy’s reading of Einstein also highlights what Michael Whitworth describes as “thematic continuities between late-Victorian science and the new physics,” continuities that were often occluded as science writers “encouraged the literary culture of the 1920s to understand the revolution in physics as a dramatic rupture.”53 This is not to say that the differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century physics were negligible, but that the similarities were real enough for Hardy to recognise and examine them in his verse. There are two aspects of relativity that are of particular philosophical relevance to that verse. The first is Einstein’s theorisation of the equivalence of matter and energy, which Hardy may have seen as supportive of the monism of his poetry. In Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, a Popular Exposition, the 1920 English translation of which Hardy read and annotated, Einstein writes that before the advent of relativity, physics recognised two conservation laws of fundamental importance, namely, the law of the conservation of energy and the law of the conservation of mass; these two fundamental laws appeared to be quite independent of each other. By means of the theory of relativity they have been united into one law.54

Einstein affirms a key argument of nineteenth-century physics: that matter and energy are both indestructible. But because each can be transformed into the other, what is conserved is neither energy nor matter but the aggregate of the two. Although he presents this claim as an innovation of relativity, it is also set out in Haeckel’s 1900 Riddle of the Universe: “it will be self-evident to many readers,” Haeckel comments, “and it is acknowledged by most of the scientific men of the day, that these two great laws”

53  Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111. 54  Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, a Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920), 45–46. For details of Hardy’s copy, now at the Dorset County Museum, see Millgate, Library.

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of conservation “are essentially inseparable.”55 For Haeckel, and possibly for Hardy, the equivalence of the laws confirms the monist position that matter and energy are two facets of the one substance that constitutes the universe. The second relevant point is that, throughout his book, Einstein’s exposition of his theories hinges on discussions of measurement. He defines reality as a four-dimensional continuum of time and space. Time is not a directional process but a measurable property of the physical universe, and material things exist as quantities in one temporal and three spatial dimensions. The “permanent existence” of “a material point with any kind of motion” can “be characterised by an infinitely large number of such systems of values, the co-ordinate values of which are so close together as to give continuity; corresponding to the material point, we thus have a (uni-dimensional) line in the four-dimensional continuum.” The motions of matter can be quantified not just in space but also in time, and represented as lines on a four-dimensional graph. But despite his deterministic emphasis on measurement, Einstein asserts that “the only statements having regard to these points which can claim a physical existence are in reality the statements about their encounters.”56 The dimensions of a material thing, conversely, cannot claim an objective reality, because they alter depending on the speed of its motion. One of the foundations of Einstein’s argument is the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, the hypothesis that, at extremely high speeds, objects shorten along the ­direction of their motion. Using the mathematics of George FitzGerald and Hendrik Lorentz, Einstein demonstrates that “a rigid metre-rod” is “shorter when in motion than when at rest, and the more quickly it is moving, the shorter is the rod.”57 But the physical existence of this contraction is not absolute, because measurements are determined by an object’s motion relative to a particular observer. Einstein’s book describes a universe which is measurable, but in which measurements (of length, mass, or time) acquired from distinct points of view are irreconcilably different. In one of his notebooks Hardy wrote a list of “ideas in the new theory” of relativity, culled from the British physicist Arthur Eddington’s 1920 article on Einstein in the Quarterly Review. Among these ideas are the  Haeckel, Riddle, 215.  Einstein, Relativity, 94–95. 57  Ibid., 35. 55 56

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claims that “time is not a particular direction but depends on the motion of the observer,” and that “physics is not interested in” the difference between past and future.58 Eddington highlights the foundation of relativity in the experimental measurement of phenomena, writing that “Einstein’s devotion to the scale and the clock sometimes appears almost an obsession, but at least it relieves his work from the charge of being metaphysical.”59 For Eddington, though, this methodological emphasis on measurement does not lead to a deterministic view of the temporal dimension as fixed and non-directional. Although “the static four-­ dimensional world suffices for everything that comes within the scope of physics,” this neither invalidates the experience of linear time nor negates human agency. In a sentence that Hardy omits from his notes, Eddington argues that “we cannot alter the past; we can to some extent mould the future; that is a feature of time-order which suggests that past and future are not merely arbitrary conventions like right and left.” And he suggests that “there is no difficulty in fitting this distinction of past and future into the relativity theory; but physics is not interested in it.”60 This article, then, offers a reading of Einstein’s model of time that is at odds with philosophical determinism. Hardy’s contrasting interpretation of relativity is set out in “The Absolute Explains,” written in 1922 and published in Human Shows (1925). This “God” poem starts with the Absolute consoling the poem’s speaker about the death of a loved woman: “O no,” said It: “her lifedoings    Time’s touch hath not destroyed: They lie their length, with the throbbing things    Akin them, down the Void,     Live, unalloyed.” (ll. 1–5)

Hardy speculates that it might be possible, from the perspective of the Absolute, to move through time in different directions, or to exist outside of the temporal dimension (as the god of “A Philosophical Fantasy” does), and so to perceive a permanence that is obscured by the limited perspectives of human observers. “The Absolute Explains” elaborates a thoroughly  Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:228–29.  Arthur Eddington, “Einstein on Time and Space,” Quarterly Review 233 (1920): 234. 60  Ibid., 231. 58 59

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deterministic version of relativity, rejecting the distinction between past and future and imagining time as a static dimension that is fully knowable to the Absolute, which comments that “Future and Past stand sheer, / Cognate and clear” (ll. 24–25). However, it also refuses to inform the poem’s speaker about the future: “let the future be, / Unshown by me” (ll. 59–60). This decision is one thing that the Absolute does not explain, and it is primarily an excuse for Hardy to concentrate on one of his poetry’s abiding concerns: memory. The poem posits a secular immortality, guaranteed by physical science, in which the past and the dead are sustained and resurrected. This is similar to the premise of “A Kiss,” but it seems that, for Hardy, relativity offers a surer basis for this speculation than other scientific theories. In Hardy’s poems, and throughout Victorian poetry, nineteenth-century physics takes away as much as it gives: the undulatory theory involves the attenuation as well as the persistence of sound; the conservation of energy is checked by the inexorable spread of entropy. By rejecting the directional model of time, conversely, relativity in “The Absolute Explains” appears to affirm, without equivocation, the permanence of the past. But the gaps in the Absolute’s coverage, and the tensions in its language, complicate this optimistic interpretation. The woman’s “lifedoings” are identified in tangible terms as “throbbing things,” but they are also located in the most abstract and distant of places, “down the Void.” In typical Hardyesque fashion, the poem takes a scientific argument— Einstein’s claim that things can be measured in four dimensions, but that the measurements of different observers are incommensurable—and makes it personal. From an absolute perspective, people and things exist permanently. The problem is that in relativity there is no absolute perspective; all observations are relative. It is not possible for the speaker, or for humans in general, to access the void that is the temporal dimension. And the inaccessibility of the past is linked to its immutability: the poem offers no indication that past events can be altered, and the woman’s experiences are described, in a way that sharpens Hardy’s deterministic reading of relativity, not as willed actions but as inert objects that “lie their length.” “Length” is a keyword in “The Absolute Explains”: both in its spatial and in its temporal meanings, it encapsulates Hardy’s understanding of a universe which is quantifiable, but in which subjective points of view are variable and frustratingly partial. This understanding is embodied, too, in the shape of the poem’s stanza, which varies between tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter lines, and which

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incorporates both delayed rhymes—the abab of the first four lines—and the immediate bb rhyme of the concluding couplet. Adela Pinch argues that fin-de-siècle poets frequently examine the experience of time by alternating long and short lines and by manipulating the length of the gap between rhymes: “one way to think about rhyme is to notice the ways in which it seems to open up or to compress time by either creating a long interval between sound A and sound A, or by having sound A return quickly.”61 In “The Absolute Explains” Hardy adapts this strategy, which he learned at the start of his career as a publishing poet in the 1890s, to convey the simultaneous proximity and distance of the past in Einstein’s model of space-time. He does something similar in “A Kiss,” in which rhyme and line length mediate between the transience and the permanence of sound as defined by the undulatory theory. The conclusions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics are more alike than the speaker of “The Absolute Explains” might wish; both are uncertain about the physical survival of traces of the past. “The Absolute Explains” is unusual among Hardy’s “God” poems because, as the title promises, its omnific entity offers an explanation of reality rather than voicing its ignorance of or indifference to the universe. Despite the shortcomings of that explanation, the poem sticks to its optimistic gloss on relativity, which culminates in the Absolute’s claim that “In fine, Time is a mock,—yea, such!—    As he might well confess: Yet hath he been believed in much,    Though lately, under stress     Of science, less. And hence, of her you asked about    At your first speaking: she Hath, I assure you, not passed out   Of continuity,     But is in me. So thus doth Being’s length transcend    Time’s ancient regal claim To see all lengths begin and end.    ‘The Fourth Dimension’ fame      Bruits as its name.” (ll. 66–80)  Adela Pinch, ‘Rhyme’s End,’ Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 488.

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In his Popular Exposition Einstein comments that “there is no more common-place statement than that the world in which we live is a four-­ dimensional space-time continuum”; nonetheless, “the non-­mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of ‘four-dimensional’ things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult.”62 The portentous couplet that ends “The Absolute Explains” suggests that Hardy, or the Absolute, is one of those exasperating non-mathematicians who perceive something occult in four-dimensional space-time. The poem repeats the closing gambit of “A Dream Question” by deploying a physical theory of the fourth dimension as the basis of a metaphysical speculation. But while the earlier poem establishes a deliberately imprecise analogy between the fourth dimension and god’s will, “The Absolute Explains” directly asserts that access to the temporal dimension constitutes the difference between the point of view of the Absolute and the limited perspective of humanity. The repetition of “length” in the longer first and third lines of the final stanza—a length which overwhelms “Time’s ancient regal claim” in the second line—enacts the argument (or the consoling fantasy) that, thanks to Einstein, time has been reduced to a measurable dimension of the continuum of the universe. “The Absolute Explains” sets out what is for Hardy an unusually optimistic version of scientific determinism, in which the continuity of Einstein’s fourth dimension is presented as evidence of the immortality of the past. Other writers employed Einstein’s theories in support of more conventional accounts of immortality. In a 1924 article in the Nineteenth Century and After, which Hardy read, the physicist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge notes that, “largely through the genius of Einstein,” “Matter is turning out to be one of the forms of energy.” Lodge emphasises the links between relativity and nineteenth-century physics: in his view, Einstein’s equivalence of matter and energy builds on the vortex-ring theory and the undulatory theory, both of which assume an ether as the medium in which material phenomena exist. The ether, Lodge asserts, is “an extremely substantial entity,” and energy and matter are different “forms which its rotatory or circulating motion, or some other modification as yet unspecified, can take.”63 This belief in the materiality of the ether was not shared by Einstein. Although he does not pronounce directly on the ether’s physical  Einstein, Relativity, 55.   Oliver Lodge, “Outlook on the Universe,” Nineteenth Century and After 95 (1924): 141–42. 62 63

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existence in his Popular Exposition, he indicates that the hypothesis is not needed in relativity, because there is no “‘specially favoured’ (unique) co-­ ordinate system,” no objective frame of reference in the universe, that demands a fixed medium as its substrate.64 And Eddington argues that relativity implies an “emaciated dematerialised æther,” a field of space through which energy is transmitted.65 Lodge, conversely, emphasises the materiality of ether and energy in order to reaffirm a dualist distinction between matter and spirit. He speculates that the ether, as “something more fundamental than Matter, something of which Matter is only a sensuous modification,” may be the “material vehicle” of “Life and Mind.” But he also claims that his observations of spiritualist séances have convinced him of the immortality of personal identity, and that “a demonstration has been thus given us that memory and affection, and personality generally, are not functions of Matter, but only utilise Matter for communication with those in material surroundings.”66 Hardy quoted this part of Lodge’s argument in one of his notebooks, but considering his other comments about dualism, he presumably disagreed with Lodge’s spiritualist interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics.67 Two years later, he was unambiguously sceptical of the dualism propounded by the philosopher and Conservative politician Arthur Balfour in the introduction to a volume of essays titled Science, Religion and Reality. Balfour insists that scientific theories “may be capable of explaining the constitution and behaviour of inanimate objects,” but “they certainly cannot explain mind”: To me therefore it seems that in the present state of our knowledge or (if you prefer it) of our ignorance, we have no choice but to acquiesce provisionally in an unresolved dualism. Our experience has a double outlook. The first we may call material. It brings us face to face with such subjects as electricity, mass, motion, force, energy, and with such manifestations of energy as ethereal radiation. The second is spiritual.68  Einstein, Relativity, 53.  Eddington, “Einstein,” 235 66  Lodge, “Outlook,” 143–44. 67  The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard H. Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1978), 77. 68  Arthur Balfour, Introduction, in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (London: Sheldon Press, 1926), 16. 64 65

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Discussing Balfour’s essay in a letter in January 1926, Hardy wrote that he “found it hopelessly old fashioned, leaving you after studying it ‘as you was’.”69 He dismisses the essay as a predictable reiteration of a conventional dualism, but, if he continued reading, he would have found that Balfour’s position is characteristic of the book as a whole. In his contribution, “The Domain of Physical Science,” Eddington agrees with Balfour that science and religion address distinct aspects of reality: “The problem on which we may hope to attain some light is that perplexing dualism of spirit and matter which always confronts us when we try to get to the bottom of things.”70 If this dualism is to be resolved, he suggests, it will be in favour of a religious idealism rather than nineteenth-century scientific naturalism.71 The theories of relativity have subverted Victorian assumptions about the constitution of matter, and even if relativity proves in some respects erroneous, “students of the nineteenth and the twentieth ­centuries have at least different ways of losing themselves, and the unqualified materialism of the last century is not to-day the most inviting bypath.”72 Eddington’s critique of nineteenth-century materialism is founded on the argument that while Victorian physical science made claims “as to the intrinsic nature of space, time, matter, and force,” the theories of relativity require scientists to “give up” such claims and to “substitute for them a knowledge expressible in terms of the readings of measuring instruments.”73 Eddington here illustrates Michael Whitworth’s point that physicists in the early twentieth century “preferred to ‘explain’ natural phenomena in formal or statistical rather than materialistic and deterministic terms,” or to reject explanation entirely in favour of description.74 This stance leads Eddington to set out an alternative kind of dualism: “I venture to say that the division of the external world into a material world and a spiritual world is superficial, and that the deep line of cleavage is between the metrical and the non-metrical aspects of the world.”75 But his opposition  Hardy to J. H. Morgan, 12 January 1926, in Letters, 7:3.  Eddington, “The Domain of Physical Science,” in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (London: Sheldon Press, 1926), 202. 71  For a detailed discussion of Eddington’s idealist interpretation of relativity, see Katy Price, Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 72  Eddington, “Domain,” 217. 73  Ibid., 199. 74  Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, 4. 75  Eddington, “Domain,” 200. 69 70

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between nineteenth-century materialism and Einstein’s science of measurement is tendentious. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Tyndall and Huxley on the one hand and Maxwell and Thomson on the other argued both that material things and processes were measurable through scientific methods and that there remained an aspect of the universe (located for the scientific naturalists in the mystery of consciousness and for the Scottish physicists in God) that resisted quantification. As I have argued throughout this book, this was an important reason why poetry was viewed as an effective means of examining and communicating scientific theories. The forms of verse, nineteenth-century writers believed, were able to embody the material and measurable processes of nature while also registering the psychological or theological surplus that complicated scientific measurement. Hardy conveys this duality in the experimental measures, regular yet idiosyncratic, of his poetry. For him, Einstein’s theories exemplify the way in which the universe as defined by physical science is simultaneously metrical and non-metrical. To borrow the words of a 1920 article in the Times Literary Supplement which Hardy copied into his notebook, relativity “leaves no absolute physical reality which can be contemplated in entire detachment from the position of the contemplator”; “the work of physical science,” therefore, “is to co-ordinate the observations of perceivers for whom there is no common measure.”76 This interpretation of relativity is in keeping with the “epistemological instability” that Anna Henchman has identified in the “perspectival strategies” of The Dynasts, and that is characteristic of Hardy’s verse in general.77 His poems are populated and spoken by gods, spirits, intelligences, and humans who can to some extent quantify nature, but whose knowledge (particularly self-knowledge) is limited and whose perspectives are mutually incommensurable. It may not be possible, these poems suggest, for physical science (or for poetry) to reconcile the observations of different perceivers. This assessment informs Hardy’s identification of Einstein as a pessimist, and it also gives rise to the incredulity that he expresses in a 1919 letter to the philosopher J.M.E.  McTaggart: “You probably, or I shd say certainly, have grasped with ease all that Einstein has been telling us, which is more than I have

 Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 2:229.  Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228. 76 77

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done. Really after what he says the universe seems to be getting too comic for words.”78 Hardy’s comic reading of Einstein, strikingly different both from the optimistic determinism of “The Absolute Explains” and from the dualist interpretations of Eddington and Lodge, finds expression in “Drinking Song,” a poem that was published posthumously in 1928, first in the Daily Telegraph and then in Winter Words. Hardy’s speaker toasts those thinkers (Copernicus, Hume, Darwin) whose theories have subverted religious dogma and questioned humanity’s centrality to the universe. The song’s penultimate stanza presents relativity as the latest step in this bewildering process of demystification: And now comes Einstein with a notion—    Not yet quite clear    To many here— That there’s no time, no space, no motion,    Nor rathe nor late,    Nor square nor straight, But just a sort of ether-ocean. (ll. 64–70)

This stanza is a good example of the ways in which the technical imperfections of Hardy’s poetry contribute to its arguments. The extreme compression of his language, as he attempts to fit it to the brevity of the verse, results in a confusing gloss on relativity: the speaker claims “that there’s no time, no space,” yet Einstein defines the universe as nothing but space-­ time. The confusion can be resolved, though, by interpreting the poem as arguing that, in Einstein’s universe, there is no absolute time, space, or motion: temporal and spatial measurements are irreducibly relative. The speaker’s self-confessed perplexity, and the imprecision of his language, represents a cognitive analogy to the poem’s metaphysical conclusion: that Einstein’s theories strand humanity in general, and each particular perceiver, in a relativistic universe in which observations can be quantified, but cannot be verified by any common standard of measurement. The shape of the stanza, a regular pattern of alternating long and short lines and immediate and delayed rhymes, is a formal expression of the notion that time and space are fundamental but mutable elements of the  Hardy to J.M.E. McTaggart, 31 December 1919, in Letters, 5:353.

78

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physical universe. And the circular rhyme scheme, a more elaborate version of those of “A Sign-Seeker” and “He Wonders about Himself,” embodies the kind of nescient knowledge that is characteristic of Hardy’s speakers: they can trace patterns in nature, but they cannot transcend their limited perspectives to identify any objective meaning in those patterns. This formal similarity between early and late poems suggests that Hardy’s understanding of the relation between poetry and physical science remained broadly consistent, despite the differences that separate twentieth-­century physics from Victorian scientific naturalism. Written at the end of Hardy’s career, “Drinking Song” represents a resigned and amused summary of the debates about physical science that were staged throughout the nineteenth-century verse which influenced his poetry. The poem’s form, regular yet self-consciously arbitrary, articulates its claim that science constructs a universe which is empirically knowable but nonetheless baffling. The question of whether or not nature was material in essence was one of the key issues in nineteenth-century discussions of the physical sciences, and it is addressed in the final line of this stanza. Both 1928 printings, in the Daily Telegraph and in Winter Words, identify Einstein’s universe as a “bending-ocean.” But, as Samuel Hynes notes, in the manuscript of the poem “ether” is written in ink, while “bending” is written in pencil above it. Neither is crossed out, and there is no evidence that Hardy had definitively decided which word to use at the time of his death.79 It is perhaps plausible to argue, with Tim Armstrong, that “‘ether-ocean’ suggests an outmoded theory in physics” and that “‘bending-ocean’ is closer to Einstein’s actual theories, and we might do Hardy a service by restoring it.”80 But as the arguments of Lodge and Eddington demonstrate, the ether remained an important and contested theory in British physics in the 1920s. For science writers throughout the long nineteenth century, the ether hypothesis epitomised both the explanatory power and the limitations of a material understanding of nature. The unresolved phrasing of Hardy’s line similarly encapsulates the efforts of nineteenth-century poets to represent, in the forms and words of their verse, a universe that is both tangibly material and disconcertingly inexplicable.

 See Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 3:249 and 331.  Armstrong, Haunted Hardy, 186.

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Bibliography Armitage, E. 1905. The Scientists and Common Sense. Contemporary Review 87: 727–738. Armstrong, Tim. 2000. Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Balfour, Arthur. 1926. Introduction. In Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham, 1–18. London: Sheldon Press. Beer, Gillian. 1996. Hardy and Decadence. In Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, ed. Charles Pettit, 90–102. London: Macmillan. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blacklock, Mark. 2018. The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Matthew. 1999. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, William Kingdon. 1875. Review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe. Fortnightly Review 17: 776–793. ———. 1879. On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves. In Lectures and Essays, ed. Frederick Pollock and Leslie Stephen, 2 vols., 2: 71–88. London: Macmillan. DeWitt, Anne. 2013. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eddington, Arthur. 1920. Einstein on Time and Space. Quarterly Review 233: 226–236. ———. 1926. The Domain of Physical Science. In Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham, 187–218. London: Sheldon Press. Einstein, Albert. 1920. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, a Popular Exposition. Trans. Robert W. Lawson. London: Methuen. Gittings, Robert. 1978. The Older Hardy. London: Heinemann. Haeckel, Ernst. 1900. The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Joseph McCabe. London: Watts. Hardy, Thomas. 1978. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy.  Ed. Richard H. Taylor. London: Macmillan. ———. 1978–2012. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate, Richard Little Purdy, and Keith Wilson. 8 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1982–95. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy.  Ed. Samuel Hynes. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1984. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Michael Millgate. London: Macmillan. ———. 1985. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy. Ed. Lennart A. Björk. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

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———. 2001. Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2004. Thomas Hardy’s “Facts” Notebook.  Ed. William Greenslade. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook. Ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henchman, Anna. 2014. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howarth, Peter. 2005. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, Thomas Henry. 1886. Science and Morals. Fortnightly Review 40: 788–802. Keen, Suzanne. 2014. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Levinson, Marjorie. 2006. Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry. ELH 73: 549–580. Lodge, Oliver. 1924. Outlook on the Universe. Nineteenth Century and After 95: 137–146. Maxwell, Catherine. 2008. Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy’s Library at Max Gate: Catalogue of an Attempted Reconstruction. http://hardy.library.utoronto.ca. Accessed 8 Mar 2019. Perry, Seamus. 2013. Hardy’s Imperfections. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 536–548. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinch, Adela. 2011. Rhyme’s End. Victorian Studies 53: 485–494. Price, Katy. 2012. Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radford, Andrew. 2012. Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy’s Poetry. In Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, ed. John Holmes, 167–180. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Shires, Linda M. 2015. Matter, Consciousness, and the Human in Wessex Poems. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 55: 899–924. Taylor, Dennis. 1988. Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tucker, Herbert F. 2008. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitworth, Michael. 2001. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index

A Agnesi, Maria, 116 Alexander, Sarah, 6, 8, 202n49 Allingham, William, 138, 140, 141 Amin, Wahida, 40n55 Aristotle, 25, 133 Armitage, E., 237, 238 Armstrong, Isobel, 212, 218 Armstrong, Tim, 232n13, 261 Atoms, 5, 7, 8, 10, 33, 38, 46, 73, 78, 79, 90–91, 94, 109, 124–131, 136, 138, 178, 187, 188, 209–211, 234, 236, 237, 242 B Babbage, Charles, 146, 154–157, 159, 198n36 Bacon, Francis, 26 Baillie, Joanna, 45 Bain, Alexander, 6 Balfour, Arthur, 257, 258

Barton, Anna, 161 Barton, Ruth, 66 Beddoes, Thomas, 26, 38n52 Beer, Gillian, 2, 10n20, 67, 69–70, 109, 113, 152, 191n14, 210, 247 Bennett, Jane, 13, 66, 245 Bergson, Henri, 245 Bevis, Matthew, 160 Blackie, John Stuart, 138–139 Blacklock, Mark, 236n22 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 121, 129, 131–133, 139 Blind, Mathilde, 10, 185–220, 231, 241, 243–246, 250 The Ascent of Man, 187, 189, 208–220, 243 “The Dead,” 185–186, 193, 197, 207, 213, 214 “The Orange-Peel in the Gutter,” 205, 206 “Personal Recollections of Mazzini,” 195, 204

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5

265

266 

INDEX

Blind, Mathilde (cont.) “Shelley,” 194 “Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s,” 214 “Soul-Drift,” 207, 208 “The Tombs of the Kings,” 206, 207 “The Torrent,” 204, 206 Boswell, Michelle, 188 Brewster, David, 109, 110, 146, 150, 157, 173 Bridges, J. H., 137, 138 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 16, 65, 66, 81, 105, 106, 109, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 127, 131 Brooke-Smith, James, 93, 101 Brown, Daniel, 51n92, 128, 131, 172n58, 177 Bryan, Margaret, 81–88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 123, 166 Buchanan, Robert, 80 Büchner, Ludwig, 149, 150 Buckland, Adelene, 69n11 Bushell, Sally, 51 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 150 C Camlot, Jason, 117, 131 Campbell, Matthew, 228 Campbell, Nancie, 146n4 Campbell, Thomas, 112 Chapman, Alison, 121 Choi, Tina Young, 191 Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa, 171 Clarke, Bruce, 199 Clifford, William Kingdon, 198, 236n22, 239, 240

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 11, 24, 32–35, 37, 42, 43, 47, 49–51, 53, 56, 59, 69, 72–77, 99, 106–108 Aids to Reflection, 33, 72–73 Biographia Literaria, 75–77 The Friend, 34, 35, 74, 75 “Treatise on Method,” 73–74 Comte, Auguste, 138 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 260 Crane, Mary Thomas, 8 D Daily Telegraph, 260, 261 Dalton, John, 5, 7, 11 Darwin, Charles, 125–126, 187, 199, 209, 214, 260 Darwin, Erasmus, 36 Daston, Lorraine, 38 Davies, John, 76–77 Davy, Humphry, 5, 9, 23–59, 67, 74, 84, 98, 107, 174, 250 “By Mr. Davy,” 43–45 Consolations in Travel, 33, 45, 46, 51 “A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,” 45, 52 Elements of Chemical Philosophy, 26, 28, 29, 41 “Introductory Lecture to the Chemistry of Nature,” 25–29, 36–37 “Life,” 45 “Lines Descriptive of Feelings,” 37–38 “The Spinosist,” 40–45 Daw, Gillian, 69n11 Dawson, Gowan, 15–16, 80, 125n52 Dean, Dennis R., 169 Dear, Peter, 68

 INDEX 

Democritus, 125, 130 Dewar, James, 207–208 DeWitt, Anne, 230 Diedrick, James, 191, 194–196, 207 Dixon, Thomas, 15 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, 155n34 Dryden, John, 116 E Eddington, Arthur, 252, 253, 257, 258, 260, 261 Ehnes, Caley, 121 Einsteins, Albert, 235, 250–257, 259–261 Electromagnetism, 7, 10, 128, 173, 189, 193 Elwin, Whitwell, 109, 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 78, 79 Emmott, James, 155 Empedocles, 126 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 73, 149 Enns, Anthony, 191n14 Epicurean, 5, 12, 179 Estermann, Barbara, 10n20 Ether, 5–8, 10, 13, 19, 41, 73, 109, 110, 128, 129, 138, 148, 173, 174, 179, 185, 186, 188–190, 192, 197–199, 206, 207, 210, 227, 236, 237, 239, 246, 247, 256, 257, 260, 261 F Fara, Patricia, 166 Faraday, Michael, 7, 11, 173 Farina, Jonathan, 54 Felski, Rita, 16, 17 FitzGerald, George, 252 Forsyth, William, 139, 140 Fortnightly Review, 16, 134–137, 195, 196, 198, 248

267

Fraser’s Magazine, 134, 138–141, 189 Fry, Paul H., 27, 54 Fulford, Tim, 38n52, 51 Furniss, Tom, 27 G Galison, Peter, 38 Geric, Michelle, 157, 167 Gilmore, Paul, 15 Gittings, Robert, 240 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 105, 114, 116, 189 Gold, Barri J., 159, 201 Goldberg, Brian, 32 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 12n22 Golinski, Jan, 36, 38 Golston, Michael, 191n14 Gooday, Graeme, 198 Graham, William, 197, 198, 205, 206, 210 Griffiths, Devin, 91 Griffiths, Eric, 145, 158 Groth, Helen, 217 Grusin, Richard, 14 H Haeckel, Ernst, 239, 240, 247, 248, 251, 252 Hair, Donald S., 167 Hall, Jason David, 4n6 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 152, 153, 156, 158–160 Hardy, Florence, 250 Hardy, Thomas, 1, 2, 10, 11, 225–261 “The Absolute Explains,” 253–256, 260 “A Dream Question,” 235–238, 241, 249, 256 “Drinking Song,” 260, 261 The Dynasts, 237–246, 248, 259

268 

INDEX

Hardy, Thomas (cont.) “He Wonders about Himself,” 232–234, 237, 238, 242, 250, 261 “A Kiss,” 246–248, 254, 255 “A Philosophical Fantasy,” 248, 249, 253 “Poetical Matter” notebook, 1 “The Science of Fiction,” 230–232 “A Sign-Seeker,” 227–233, 248, 261 Hare, Julius Charles, 114 Harman, Graham, 14 Hartmann, Eduard von, 250 Hazlitt, William, 55 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 191, 238 Henchman, Anna, 10, 161n43, 259 Henderson, Andrea K., 37 Heringman, Noah, 15 Herschel, John, 3, 11, 19, 92–97, 109, 112–115, 117, 127, 128, 149, 153, 154, 161, 170 A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 3, 93–96, 112–113, 161 Hessel, Kurtis, 46 Hindle, Maurice, 24n3 Hogg, Jabez, 227 Holmes, John, 180, 209 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 10 Howarth, Peter, 234 Hughes, Linda K., 116 Hume, David, 73, 260 Hunt, Robert, 81, 88–91, 123 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 81, 122, 234, 238, 245, 246, 259 Hynes, Samuel, 261 Hypatia, 116

I Illingworth, Sam, 43n65 Imponderables, 5, 6, 26, 29, 42, 89, 109, 148, 149, 173, 174, 186, 189, 241 J Jackson, Roland, 139n91, 175n68 Janet, Paul, 149, 150 Jarvis, Simon, 31 Jenkins, Alice, 4, 8, 110–112 Johns-Putra, Adeline, 86–87 Jones, Ewan, 72, 171, 190n11 K Kant, Immanuel, 127, 219 Karlin, Daniel, 164n45 Keach, William, 107–108 Keen, Suzanne, 240n39 Keene, Melanie, 89 Klancher, Jon, 27n14, 74 Knight, David, 26 Kramnick, Jonathan, 18, 26 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 107 Kuhn, Thomas S., 100–101, 147–148 L Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 171 LaPorte, Charles, 210 Lardner, Dionysius, 93 Larsen, Kristine, 85 Latour, Bruno, 12, 13, 17, 29, 174 Lawrence, Christopher, 27 LeGette, Casie, 70 Leigh, Percival, 118–120, 121n43 Leighton, Angela, 34, 179 Levere, Trevor H., 34 Levine, Caroline, 17–19, 186 Levinson, Marjorie, 12, 13, 28, 236

 INDEX 

Liddle, Dallas, 120 Lightman, Bernard, 15–16, 66, 131, 133, 140 Locke, John, 108, 109, 129 Lockyer, J. Norman, 200–203, 205, 211 Lodge, Oliver, 157, 158, 256, 257, 260, 261 Lorentz, Hendrik, 252 Lucretius, 12, 13, 80, 130, 131, 136, 177–179, 210 Lyell, Charles, 169 Lyons, Sara, 206 M MacDuffie, Allen, 199 Machacek, Gregory, 71 Maidment, Brian, 120 Marx, Karl, 187, 191, 195 Maxwell, Catherine, 238 Maxwell, James Clerk, 7, 11, 81, 121, 122, 127–133, 135, 138, 172–174, 176, 178n74, 189–191, 196, 198, 210, 216, 227, 259 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 187, 195, 204, 214 McDonald, Peter, 53, 170 Millgate, Michael, 227n4, 244n43, 251n54 Milton, John, 35, 79, 80, 84–86, 88, 99, 111, 112, 116, 126, 127, 176 Comus, 79, 80, 111, 112, 176 Paradise Lost, 35, 84, 85, 99, 126, 127 Minkowski, Hermann, 235 Mitchell, Robert, 3n4, 37 Modiano, Raimonda, 77n37 Moffatt, John M., 227 Moine, Fabienne, 209n63 Morgan, Benjamin, 68–69

269

Mussell, James, 107 Myers, Greg, 201 N Natural theology, 45, 58, 70, 81–83, 87, 90, 94, 154, 178 Nature, 67, 68, 108, 172 Nersessian, Anahid, 18, 26 Newlyn, Lucy, 85 Newton, Isaac, 5, 26, 82, 83 Noakes, Richard, 122 O O’Connor, Ralph, 69n11, 84 Oerlemans, Onno, 48, 49 Owens, Thomas, 108n9 P Paradis, James G., 119, 126 Pearsall, Cornelia, 181 Perry, Seamus, 34, 77, 238 Picker, John M., 146, 151, 155n34, 175 Pinch, Adela, 255 Plato, 25, 30, 55, 125 Pope, Alexander, 90, 95, 96, 139 Porter, Dahlia, 70, 113–114 Potkay, Adam, 47 Potter, John Phillips, 91–93, 97 Price, Katy, 258n71 Price, Leah, 70 Punch, 16, 118–127, 131, 132, 141, 168 Q Quarterly Review, 16, 41, 105, 109, 252

270 

INDEX

R Radford, Andrew, 230 Raiger, Michael, 74 Ricoeur, Paul, 150 Robertson, Lisa Ann, 27n15 Ross, Catherine E., 25 Royal Institution (RI), 16, 27, 28, 35, 37, 45, 52, 68, 81, 139, 175, 196, 207 Royal Society, 27, 45, 68, 227 Rubery, Matthew, 175n66 Rudy, Jason R., 211 Rumbold, Kate, 70 Ruston, Sharon, 24n4, 40n55, 43 Ryan, Robert M., 72n19 S Schaffer, Simon, 83 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 250 Scott, Patrick, 161n43 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 163, 165 Serres, Michel, 13 Sha, Richard C., 68 Shakespeare, William, 35, 88, 89, 91–94 Shapin, Steven, 83 Sharrock, Roger, 44 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 194, 214 Shires, Linda M., 232 Small, Helen, 134 Smith, Crosbie, 196 Smith, Jonathan, 24n4 Somerville, Mary, 5, 6, 11, 105, 107, 110–113, 115–117, 122, 146–149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 170, 179, 187–189, 191, 198 Southey, Robert, 32, 33, 37, 56 Spencer, Herbert, 190 Spinoza, Baruch, 12, 13, 34, 40, 41, 55, 239, 240, 250

Stephen, Leslie, 236 Stewart, Balfour, 196, 198–203, 205, 207, 211, 216n72, 236n22 Strauss, David Friedrich, 191–198, 219, 220 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 203, 204 Symonds, John Addington, 136, 137 T Tait, Peter Guthrie, 198–200, 202, 207, 216n72, 236n22 Taylor, Dennis, 233 Taylor, Tom, 122–127 Tennyson, Alfred, 10, 11, 145–182, 186, 197, 213, 227–229, 241, 244, 246, 247 In Memoriam, 156–160, 177, 178, 180, 186, 228, 229, 244 “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” 152–154, 156 “Lucretius,” 177–179 Maud, 157, 163, 175, 178 “The Miller’s Daughter,” 145, 146 “Parnassus,” 180–182, 186 The Princess, 161–173, 180, 197 Thermodynamics, 7, 10, 187, 189–191, 193, 195–203, 207, 216, 217, 220, 227, 247 Thomson, James, 82, 83, 86 Thomson, William (Baron Kelvin), 121–125, 138, 172, 196, 227, 236, 259 Times, 79, 88, 236n23, 259 Trower, Shelley, 148, 174, 191n14 Tucker, Herbert F., 217, 241 Tulloch, John, 132–135, 137, 139 Turner, Henry S., 19, 26n8

 INDEX 

Tyndall, John, 11, 65–73, 77–82, 88, 89, 94, 95, 96n79, 106, 121, 122, 124–141, 149, 173–181, 190n11, 191, 196, 197, 201, 205, 227, 231, 250, 259 Belfast address, 65–68, 72, 77, 96n79, 106, 121, 122, 124–136, 139, 176, 179, 180 “‘Materialism’ and its Opponents,” 78, 79, 135, 136 “A Morning on Alp Lusgen,” 175–177 “On Radiation,” 173–174 “The Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 77–79 Sound, 174, 175, 180 U Undulatory theory, 5–7, 19, 37, 41, 110, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155, 173, 174, 177, 178, 185, 187–189, 210, 227, 241, 247, 254–256 V Valenza, Robin, 119 Vigus, James, 75 Vortex-ring theory, 236, 237, 241, 256 W Whewell, William, 11, 92, 93, 96–101, 105–117, 119–122, 132, 134, 136, 146–148, 151, 157, 188, 189, 214

271

Whitworth, Michael, 251, 258 Wilhelm, Lindsay, 209 Wolff, Tristram, 47 Wolfson, Susan J., 50 Wordsworth, William, 9–11, 23–59, 65–68, 72, 75–76, 79, 89, 96–101, 108, 119, 121, 133, 137, 141, 151–153, 168, 213, 214, 250 “Composed when a Probability Existed of our Being Obliged to Quit Rydal Mount as a Residence,” 57–59 The Excursion, 25, 47, 49–57, 100, 101, 137, 168 “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” 65–68, 72, 82, 98, 99, 133, 137 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 75, 96 “On the Powser of Sound,” 151–152 “A Poet’s Epitaph,” 30, 31, 49 Preface (1815), 49 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 30–32, 36, 39, 50, 51, 56, 58, 75–76 The Prelude, 47–49, 54 Wu, Duncan, 24n3 Wyatt, John, 51 Y Yeo, Richard, 97, 106 Young, Edward, 77, 78 Young, Thomas, 5, 7, 11, 41, 84 Z Zimmerman, Virginia, 167, 171