Kitabı oku: «Faraday: The Life», sayfa 7

CHAPTER 6 A Point of Light

They were all elated. It was freezing cold, bad enough for Sir Humphry and Lady Davy sitting inside the carriage, but deadly for those outside in the air. They were heading for Nemours, forty miles south of Paris, to spend the night, but it was evening before they reached the Forest of Fontainebleau. There had been no heat in the sun all day, and by evening the trees were still covered in hoar frost. This moved Faraday to lilting, Coleridgean prose.

… we did not regret the severity of the weather, for I do not think I ever saw a more beautiful scene than that presented to us on the road. A thick mist which had fallen during the night and which had scarcely cleared away had by being frozen dressed every visible object in a garment of wonderful airiness & delicacy. Every small twig and every blade of herbage was encrusted by a splendid coat of hoar frost, the crystals of which in most cases extended above half an inch. This circumstance … produced an endless variety of shapes and forms. Openings in the foreground placed far-removed objects in view which in their airiness, and softened by distance, appeared as clouds fixed by the hands of an enchanter: then rocks, hills, valleys, streams and roads, then a milestone, a cottage or human beings came into the moving landscape and rendered it ever new and delightful.¹

Sir Humphry was also moved to such pictorial levels of passionate exclamation as they galloped through the forest. The experience drew the romantic poet out of him, forty lines of passion. This is a sample:

The trees display no green, no forms of life;

And yet a magic foliage clothes them round,-

The purest crystals of pellucid ice,

All purple in the sunset …²

This poem captures an essential difference in outlook between Faraday and Davy. In worldly affairs Faraday was naïve, ignorant, and wilfully avoided considering political issues. His understanding of the very dangerous situation in France was practically non-existent. Blundering about a Parisian quarry, patently the uninformed Englishman, openly sketching Napoleon’s telegraph equipment, he was being careless in the extreme. He felt an unfortunate, but at the time perfectly commonplace, kind of juvenile superiority over the French and the Italians, and this emerges regularly in his account of the continental journey.

Davy, however, though feeling superior to most people around him, had political antennae. He saw the importance of racing to an understanding of what iodine was before Gay-Lussac got to it; knowledge was power. He saw, too, the importance of putting on a theatrical show of chemical effects for the French scientists, and making them nervous. And he saw the importance of not appearing impressed by the treasures in the Louvre. So, at the end of his versification, Davy gives the lines a twist, and turns them into poetry. He draws a picture of a golden eagle on the gorge at Fontainebleau:

… the bird of prey, –

Emblem of rapine and lawless power:

Such is the fitful change of human things:

An empire rises, like a cloud in heaven,

Red in the morning sun …

… soon its tints

Are darken’d, and it brings the thunder-storm, –

Lightning and hail, and desolation comes;

But in destroying it dissolves, and falls

Never to rise!

Davy could handle allegory; indeed his whole imaginative life was wreathed in it, his visionary writings were driven by it, and his later writings suggest that towards the end of his life he was taken over by it. Faraday, on the other hand, saw the natural world as part of the revealed truth, the real thing, and his life’s work came to be dedicated to understanding the purposes behind nature – God’s purposes, in his view – and to explaining them in their most direct terms to humanity.

Riding through the Forest of Fontainebleau as the winter’s day, and the year 1813, drew to their close, Davy and Faraday were separated by more than the roof of the carriage. Davy was inside, looking out of the window to the right or left. Faraday, however, sitting up with the driver and the luggage, could see from an aerial perspective the entire 360 degrees around him, and the zenith of the skies. The man of allegory was enclosed from the world; the budding scientist of revealed truth was out within the elements.

It took them five days to reach Lyons. Faraday writes of travelling hastily, faring meagrely and arriving ‘fatigued and at a late hour’ at one of their stops on the way.³ It was a difficult and uncomfortable trip, to say the least. But even after the ecstatic experiences of Fontainebleau there were more natural joys for them to witness. They set off before dawn, without knowing where they would sleep that night. ‘These dark hours however have their pleasures, and those are not slight which are furnished at such hours by the memory or the imagination,’ wrote Faraday. As the sun went down in the Burgundian hills they saw crepuscular rays, or ‘Zodiacal light’, as Faraday described it. ‘It appeared as an emanation of light in enormous rays from the sun into the expanse. There were about seven rays diverging upwards and sideways and ascending many degrees into the heavens. They continued for nearly half an hour …’.⁴

The horses splashed through the waters at the edge of the Loire as they galloped down to Lyons in the starlight. In the gorges of the Auvergne they walked ‘for some miles through these wild valleys and passes’, to rest the horses and for Sir Humphry to investigate the extinct volcanoes.⁵ This was one of the main purposes of this part of the journey – Napoleon himself wanted Davy to study volcanoes.⁶ ‘We seem tied to no spot, confined by no circumstances, at all hours, at all seasons and in all places,’ Faraday wrote, using words which have a distinct echo, remarkable in a young non-conformist, of a significant passage in the Anglican Holy Communion service.

We move with freedom. Our world appears extending and our existence enlarged. We seem to fly over the globe rather like satellites to it, than parts of it, and mentally take possession of every spot we go over … We have lived hard this last day of the year.⁷

But a few days into January 1814 they began to feel the welcome of the warm south. The weather gradually lost its icy grip, and their spirits rose at these first hints of a Mediterranean climate. Sir Humphry reached for his pencil:

The air is soft as in the month of June

In northern climes; a balmy zephyr blows,

And nothing speaks of winter’s harshest month

Save that the trees are leafless …⁸

Looking about the Rhône near Lyons, he saw the landscape with the eye of an eighteenth-century connoisseur:

… and all the tints

Which human art bestows upon the scene

Are chaste as if the master-hand of Claude

Had traced upon the canvass their design.

They first saw the Alps from outside Lyons. Mont Blanc ‘was readily distinguished’, Faraday writes, giving the facts as he saw them:

It appeared as an enormous isolated [?] mass of white rocks. At sunset as the light decreased, their summits took a hundred varying hues. The tone of colouring changed rapidly as the luminary sank down, became more grave, at last appeared of a dull red as if ignited, and then disappeared in the obscurity, until fancy and the moon again faintly made them visible.⁹

Sir Humphry, however, put his first view of Mont Blanc in his own poetic way:

With joy I view thee, bathed in purple light,

Whilst all around is dark; with joy I see

Thee rising from thy sea of pitchy clouds

Into the middle heaven …¹⁰

They were heading for Montpellier, where Davy knew there would be a good supply of seashore plants and sea creatures that might be rich sources of iodine. When they reached the town, eleven days after leaving Paris, Faraday climbed to the Place Peyrou, the highest point. From there he had ‘a clear unsullied view of the beautiful and extensive landscape. From this spot I could see around me the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the town as well as the country in the near neighbourhood.’¹¹

They remained a month in Montpellier. Sir Humphry disappeared into the hinterland and to the sea’s edge to look for sources of iodine, and presumably he took Faraday with him, though the Journal is not clear about this. They must have gone together on a four-mile walk to Mont Ferrier, an extinct volcano, which had blown a huge ball of basalt for two miles when it erupted in deep geological time, and this had become a small mountain in its own right. By now the volcano had become a settlement, and gave evidence to suggest that the earth had been formed through the heat of volcanic activity. Faraday and Davy were both attracted by the olive and pine trees: ‘the pines are short but airy’, Faraday noted. Davy, however, went much further, and the day after their visit to Mont Ferrier composed thirty-one lines of verse to ‘The Mediterranean Pine’:

Thy hues are green as is the vernal tint

As those fair meads where Isis flows along

Her silver floods …

From this poetic description Davy moves into the ancient past, describing places and events in world history on which the pine has cast its shade – the teaching of Socrates and Plato, Greek democracy, Roman virtue, the teachings of Christ and the wanderings of the Jews.

There is a powerful energy crossing the gap between Faraday’s approach to what he is seeing, and Davy’s. The natural distance between enthusiasm and experience, pupil and teacher is palpable. Writing as they do in such different ways about the same landscapes, the same views, the same daily experiences, even the same kind of tree, suggests that during the conversations that must have taken place on Faraday and Davy’s walks – even if they were broken by the effort of the walk, or stilted by the gap in status, age and social position – there was also a growing fault-line in attitude, laying down early markers of the distance and distaste that later grew between them. At the moment, however, the distance was small, and for Faraday, if not for Davy, the ideas that flew from one to the other were like electric sparks passing between two separated wires.

While Sir Humphry picked over the Mediterranean flora, Faraday made his own wanderings about Montpellier. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, but even so Faraday was very much happier in Montpellier than he had been in Paris: ‘The shops are pretty, and many well-furnished and kept. The markets seem busy places, the coffee houses well frequented. The inhabitants are respectable and I have found them very good natured and obliging. The weather alone is what we did not expect it to be.’¹²

He had time on his hands once again, and he writes of pacing the aqueduct at the Place Peyrou to discover its length, 792 of his paces.¹³ Here is another example of Faraday’s enthusiastic concern for facts, dimension, physical reality and record emerging yet again, as it did in the notes he took of Tatum’s and Davy’s lectures, and in his accounts of the continental journey so far. But as Faraday was rambling about pacing the antiquities and Sir Humphry was gathering plants, Montpellier was gearing up for war. There was a straggling resident army, a fort above the town, and some hot-headed inhabitants. Their enthusiasm to resist the oncoming armies of the Duke of Wellington was consuming and patriotic. Nevertheless, Michael Faraday, an innocent abroad, did not seem to sense the dangers. On the Esplanade he noticed the pillar surmounted by Napoleon’s eagle and the gilded letter N, but dismissed it as ‘ostensibly placed as an embellishment, but really intended to produce a political effect’.¹⁴ He even took the extraordinary risk of walking around the fort, which was full of soldiers, while the cannon were firing – ‘I do not know what for, nor could our host tell me.’

‘The stroll around the ramparts was pleasant,’ he writes disarmingly, ‘but I imagine that at times whilst enjoying myself I was transgressing, for the sentinels regarded me sharply, and more particularly at least I thought so as I stood looking at one corner, where from some cause or other the fortifications were injured.’¹⁵ But nobody challenged him, and he had a wonderful view. After his rash behaviour when confronted by Napoleon’s semaphores at Montmartre, it was just as well he did not take out his notebook and sketch at Montpellier.

Great world events were passing under Faraday’s very nose in that place, but he did not seem to fathom their importance. His entry for Tuesday, 1 February is restricted to: ‘This morning the town was all in uproar and running to see the passing of a large train of artillery which is going up towards Lyons. They seem in great haste.’¹⁶

And four days later, having amused himself by standing at the edge of the parade ground and watching the clumsy square-bashing:

Drilling is now the occupation of the town, and the Peyrou looks like a Parade. During the morning it is covered by clusters of clumsy recruits who are endeavouring to hold their arms right, turn their toes out, keep their hands in, hold their hands up &c according to the direction of certain corporals who are at present all authority and importance.¹⁷

Then, as if it were merely a passing show, ‘The Pope passed through this place a few days ago in [sic] his way to Italy. He has just been set at liberty … Almost every person in the town was there but myself.’¹⁸

Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.¹⁹

While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.

… On the wave

Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.

My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow

Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –

Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!

Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds

Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone

Of war destructive, but a living light

Of honour, glory, and security, –

A light of science, liberty, and peace!²⁰

Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.

Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’²¹ He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:

This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.

From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:

A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,

Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.

…

I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –

Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;

For such a scene was suited well to break

The tyrant-spell of love … ²²

Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:

At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.²³

Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.

There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.

They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’²⁴

It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.

They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.

I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.²⁵

They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.²⁶ On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.

There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.²⁷

By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.

The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.²⁸

The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.

Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.