This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer. Richard Holmes
Deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters. And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.’ Some additional elements were taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost. So the oratorio is fundamentally a religious work, as Haydn himself later movingly testified: ‘Never was I so pious,’ he wrote, ‘as when composing “The Creation”. I felt myself so penetrated with religious feeling that before I sat down to the pianoforte I prayed to God with earnestness that He would enable me to praise Him worthily.’
It is often said that in the lives of the great eighteenth-century composers there is only one parallel to this frame of mind – the religious fervour in which Handel composed Messiah. And that Haydn had set out to rival him in piety, as well as in musical brilliance.
Yet it is also possible that the highly unusual musical ideas for the first two parts of The Creation – the orchestral ‘Representation of Chaos’ with which it opens, and the recitative for the Archangel Raphael which follows – were strongly influenced by the new cosmological theories and discoveries of William Herschel. It is a strangely paradoxical idea that The Creation was also inspired by a distinctly secular, and potentially atheist, science.
Haydn’s eighteen-month visit to London in 1791–92, the first of two he made to the English capital, was the first time he had voyaged outside Austria in his life. Although he was already in his late fifties when he arrived in England, he engaged with this new world with immense intellectual excitement. Among many adventures and expeditions recorded in his London diary, one high point was his visit to the Herschels’ famous astronomical observatory at Slough in June 1792.
By now, the brother-and-sister astronomical team were renowned throughout Europe. Their enormous forty-foot reflector telescope, the biggest in the world, was one of the wonders of the age. Both the Herschels were also musicians. William was an accomplished composer and one-time organist and Kapellmeister of the Octagon Chapel, Bath. Caroline had trained as an opera singer, and had successfully performed in Handel oratorios. Moreover, as the Herschels originally came from Hanover, they and Haydn had German as a common language.
William’s diary shows that he himself was absent from the Slough observatory during much of this month. But Caroline’s journal records Haydn’s visit as one of the highlights of their summer. One of the things they had to discuss was the generosity of their English patrons in the financing of both telescopes and symphonies – finances and accounting being Caroline’s special department. But above all, Caroline was able to describe their astronomical work in detail to Haydn, while explaining her brother’s discoveries with the utmost enthusiasm and pride.
Haydn was an immensely hard worker – he would produce no fewer than twelve symphonies while in England – and he was evidently impressed by the punishing (not to say Teutonic) routine of the Herschels, who, as Caroline explained, worked all day on astronomical calculations, and then could spend ‘six hours at a time on freezing winter nights’ carrying out their observations. But as this was high summer, Haydn had plenty of leisure to look through all the telescopes – ten-, twenty-, and forty-foot – and discuss with Caroline her brother’s theories of stars, planets and musical composition.
As I have indicated, Herschel’s theories explored new and radical ideas about the formation of our own solar system and the galaxies beyond it. They had been published in a number of scientific papers in the journal of the Royal Society, the Philosophical Transactions, and had also been popularised in the work of the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a leading member of the Lunar Society. They spread widely, and were taken up in France by the atheist astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who developed them as ‘the nebular hypothesis’ and published them in his own massive study of astronomy in 1796, Exposition du Système du Monde.
Laplace argued that there were millions of other solar systems besides our own. Other suns had spun out clusters of individual planets which circled around them, again through the force of universal gravity. There must be innumerable such ‘solar systems’ even in our own Milky Way. So the whole universe was a laboratory. Clearly, these ideas of Herschel and Laplace moved away from the traditional six-day Creation ‘myth’ of Genesis, and came much closer to modern ideas of evolutionary cosmology. They were also supported by the ‘deep time’ ideas of the British geologist James Hutton (1726–97).
It seems likely that the early sections of Haydn’s oratorio reflect something of such revolutionary speculations. This was emphasised by his giving such unusual and inventive attention to the idea of ‘chaos’ at the opening of the work. Nothing that he – or indeed Handel – had ever previously written is remotely like these extraordinary passages. Haydn’s use of unresolved musical phrases, unsettling shifts from major to minor chords, sudden bursts of melody broken off by unexpected dissonance, all seem to suggest the vision of a highly active, explosive, cosmological chaos: the whirling, colliding and condensing of truly vast nebulae. It does not seem anything like the passive ‘brooding’ darkness of the Book of Genesis. What it so vividly summons up are the luminous celestial ‘laboratories’ of Herschel and Laplace.
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There are many other subjects that I attempted to explore in The Age of Wonder – for example, the speculative impact of Davy’s chemical lectures on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the idea of flight launched by the early ballooning experiments of Blanchard and the American John Jeffries; or the heroic concept of geographical exploration pioneered by the expeditions of Mungo Park. All of them seemed to offer a fascinating new way of looking at the dynamic interface between the arts and the sciences in the Romantic period, and radically to call in question the old, tired idea of the ‘Two Cultures’ division.
Essentially, I wanted to experiment: to take risks and break conventions. First, by exploring the possibilities of ‘group biography’, especially as it can explain and illuminate the particular nature of teamwork in science. Next, to use literary narrative, accurate and vivid storytelling, to demonstrate the step-by-step (and often step-by-misstep) of the actual process of scientific discovery. In doing this, I wanted to discover the human face of science, the hearts and minds behind the ‘white coats’. My real subject was always scientific passion in all its manifestations. It was not only the poets, I found, who have the passion. Beyond all this, I wanted to prove that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European history is still important for understanding the twenty-first century, and not only in the West. One of my proudest reflections is that The Age of Wonder has recently been translated into popular Arabic, Russian and Chinese editions. Now that really is an experiment, and I do not yet know the result.
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As he set out to wreak havoc on his four Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey tenderly suggested that English biography might eventually rediscover its true calling as ‘the most delicate and most humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. Some three generations later, the form has certainly expanded out of all recognition, gained a broad new readership, and achieved considerable (though not unchallenged) intellectual authority. At its best, I think, biography can indeed now call itself a true ‘art of writing’, and also perhaps a humanist discipline. It is ‘the proper study of mankind’ – and womankind too. But is it an art and a discipline that can also be taught? Is it a proper subject for an academic course?
It has always seemed to me that the essential spirit of biography – of English biography at least – has been a maverick and unacademic one. (The French, German and American traditions are different, for interesting historical and institutional reasons.) For some three hundred years, from John Aubrey and James Boswell onwards, much of its most exciting and innovative work – among which I would now include certain books by Michael Holroyd, Claire Tomalin, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Spurling, Frances Wilson and Alexander