SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE
The remarks which were made at the beginning of the chapter on
Philosophy and Theology apply with increasing force to the present
chapter; indeed, they need to be restated in a much more stringent and
exclusive form. To give some history of English philosophy and theology
in the nineteenth century, by noticing its literary expression, was
possible, though it had to be done, so to speak, in shorthand. To do the
same thing with science, or even with what is technically called
scholarship, would be simply impossible. Much of their expression is
hardly susceptible of literary form at all, hardly any ever receives
such form, while the subdivision of the branches of physical science is
now so great and their shadow so wide that no systematic sketch of them
is to be thought of. It is only possible to mention a few distinguished
writers, writers who would have been distinguished whatever their
subject, but who happen to have devoted themselves, solely or mainly, to
scientific writing, or to classical criticism and philology.
A curious independent study might be made of the literary gradations of
classical scholarship. In the Middle Ages, though the complete ignorance
of the classics, once imagined as prevailing, has been shown to be a
figment, scarcely anybody could claim to be a scholar. During the
Renaissance almost every man of letters had necessarily some tinge of
scholarship, and some of the greatest in its earlier period, such as
Erasmus, were scholars first of all. The growth of vernacular
literature, the constant increase and subdivision of subjects, and the
advance in minute study of the Greek and Latin languages, brought about
an inevitable cleavage, and from the seventeenth century onwards
scholarship became an independent profession or vocation. For some
considerable time, however, it was the almost indispensable novitiate of
a literary career, and the tradition that a scholar must be first
applied to, for no matter what literary work, was still potent in the
times of Salmasius, and cannot be said to have been discredited in those
of Bentley, who would undoubtedly have been as formidable in purely
political or general controversy as he was on _Phalaris_ or on his own
private interests. The eighteenth century, however, saw the divorce
nearly completed, and by the period of our present volume it was an
accomplished fact.
Even then, however, though for men of letters it was not customary to
turn first to scholars, scholars had not ceased to be men of letters,
and philology (or the mere study of language, as apart from literature)
had not absorbed them.
During that part of our period which is still concerned with the last
century, there were many excellent scholars in England, but perhaps only
three--two of whom as scholars were of no great account--who make much
figure in purely literary history. Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an odd
person of uncritical judgment but great learning, who belongs more to
the last volume than to the present, devoted himself chiefly to
mythology, a subject which had not yet attracted general interest, and
which was treated by him and others in a somewhat unhistorical manner.
Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801) was one of the characteristic figures of
the Revolutionary time. He was a Cambridge man, and took orders, but
left the church, became a violent Jacobin, and went to prison for a
seditious libel. He was one of those not very uncommon men who,
personally amiable, become merely vixenish when they write: and his
erudition was much more extensive than sound. But he edited several
classical authors, not wholly without intelligence and scholarship, and
his _Silva Critica_, a sort of _variorum_ commentary from profane
literature on the Bible, was the forerunner, at least in scheme, of a
great deal of work which has been seen since.
A very different person from these in scholarly attainments, in natural
gifts, and (it must unfortunately be added) in personal respectability,
was Richard Porson, who is generally bracketed with Bentley as the
greatest of English scholars, not of our own day, and who might have
been one of the most brilliant of men of letters. He was born in Norfolk
on Christmas Day 1759, of low station, but was well educated by the
parson of the parish, and sent to Eton by a neighbouring squire. In 1779
he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, did
brilliantly in University contests and became fellow in 1782. Although
he was almost a boy the genius of his papers in scholarship attracted
notice at home and abroad, and he made some excursions into general
literature wherein, as in his recorded conversations, he showed
epigrammatic wit of the first rank. He lost his fellowship because he
would not take orders; but was made Regius Professor of Greek, an
appointment which unluckily was then, in both Universities, almost
honorary as regards income. The Whig party accepted his partisanship,
but had no opportunity of rewarding it, and after receiving the
Librarianship of the London Institution in Moorfields, he died of
apoplexy in 1808. He possessed in almost the highest degree that power
of divination, based on accurate knowledge, which distinguishes the
scholar, and it is, as has been said, nearly certain that he would have
been a brilliant writer in English on any subject he chose to take up.
But he was a hopeless drunkard, an offensive sloven, rude and aggressive
in society--in short a survival of the Grub Street pattern of the
century of his birth. This period, which was that of Burney, Elmsley,
Gaisford, and other scholars, robust but not very literary (except in
the case of Elmsley, who was a contributor both to the _Edinburgh_ and
the _Quarterly Reviews_), was succeeded by one in which the English
Universities did not greatly distinguish themselves in this department.
Gaisford indeed lived till 1855 at Oxford, and Cambridge produced among
other respectable scholars the already mentioned Malden and George Long
(1800-79), a Lancashire man, who went to Trinity, distinguished himself
greatly, but found such preferment as he met with outside his
university, in America, at University College, London, and elsewhere.
Long was a great diffusion-of-useful-knowledge man, and edited the
_Penny Cyclopaedia_: but he did more germane work later in editing the
_Bibliotheca Classica_, an unequal but at its best excellent series of
classics, and in dealing with the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and
Epictetus. He was also one of the mainstays of the most important
enterprise of the middle of the century in classical scholarship, the
_Classical Dictionaries_ edited by the late Sir William Smith and
published by Mr. Murray; and he wrote an extensive but not
extraordinarily valuable _Decline of the Roman Republic_. Long appears
to have been one of those men who, with great ability, vast knowledge,
and untiring industry, somehow or other miss their proper place, whether
by fault or fate it is hard to say.
About 1860 three remarkable persons illustrated scholarship in the
Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh respectively, with a
combination of literary and linguistic knowledge which had been growing
rarer up to their time, and which has grown rarer still since.
The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born at Boston on
10th August 1825. He went to Rugby and to Magdalen College, Oxford,
whence he migrated to University College, and there obtained a
fellowship, making nearly a clean sweep of the chief University prizes
meanwhile. He became in 1854 the first Professor of Latin, and held the
post till his death in 1869. He edited Virgil, AEschylus (part) and
Persius, translated Horace, Homer, and Virgil, and did a certain amount
of miscellaneous literary work. He was neither a very exact nor a very
great scholar: his scholarship indeed took rather the character of that
of foreign nations, other than Germany, than the dogged minuteness of
German, or the large but solid strength of English study of the
classics. But he was an exceedingly stimulating professor; and coming at
the time when it did, his work was valuable as a reminder that the
classics are live literature, and not so much dead material for science.
Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, a native of Elgin, where he was born in
1819, a Shrewsbury boy and a scholar and fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, who became Professor of Latin there in 1869 and died in 1882,
was an incomparably greater verbal scholar than Conington, and may
fairly be said to have taken up the torch of Bentley and Porson. His
great edition (with a less great translation) of Lucretius, his work on
Horace and Catullus, and his scattered papers, all come up to a very
high standard; and in the delightful art of Greek and Latin composition
in verse, where England has long stood paramount, and which, since she
has abandoned it, remains uncultivated throughout Europe, he was almost
supreme. But Munro, though he never surrendered wholly to the
philological heresy, was affected thereby; and some of his Lucretian
readings were charged with a deficiency in ear such as that with which
he justly reproached his German predecessors.
The most strictly literary of the three has yet to be mentioned. William
Young Sellar, born near Golspie in the same year as Conington, was
educated at the Edinburgh Academy, at the University of Glasgow, and (as
a Snell exhibitioner) at Balliol. After holding an Oriel fellowship for
some years, and doing professorial or assistant-professorial work at
Durham and St. Andrews, he became in 1863 Professor of Humanity at
Edinburgh, and remained so till his death in 1890. In the year of his
election to the professorship appeared his _Roman Poets of the
Republic_, quite the best book of its kind existing in English; and this
was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and
Propertius--good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the
Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more strictly
poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus. Attempts, too few but
noteworthy, have since been made to handle classical literature in the
style of the _Roman Poets of the Republic_, but it has never been
surpassed, and it has very seldom been equalled.
On another scheme and in other circumstances names like those of Kennedy
and Shilleto, of Linwood and Burges, of Monk and Blomfield, would cry
for admission here, but as it is they must be ruled out. And it is not
possible to widen the scope much, so as to take in some eminent students
who have given not unliterary expression to the study of languages and
subjects other than the classical. It has indeed been a constantly
increasing feature of the century that fresh studies--AEgyptology, the
study of the Semitic languages, the study of the older forms not merely
of English but of the other modern tongues, the enormous range of
knowledge opened to Englishmen, and as it were forced on them by our
possession of India and our commerce and connection with other nations
of the East, as well as the newer subjects of comparative mythology,
folk-lore, and the like, all more or less offshoots of what may be
generally termed scholarship, have been added to the outer range of the
Humanities. Some of these appeal to very few, none of them to more than
few persons; and literature, in its best description if not exactly
definition, is that which does or should appeal to all persons of
liberal education and sympathies. Yet one exponent of these studies (and
of more than one of them) must have a place here, as well for the more
than professionally encyclopaedic character of his knowledge as for his
intellectual vigour and his services to letters.
William Robertson Smith was born in 1846, and died in 1894. A native of
Aberdeenshire, the son of a Free Kirk minister, and educated at Aberdeen
and elsewhere, he became Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College
of that city, and for some years discussed his subject, in the manner of
the Germans, without hindrance. His articles in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, however, gave offence, and after much controversy he was
deprived of his chair in 1881. Two years later, however, he was made
Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, where he also became
Fellow of Christ's and University Librarian. And from a contributor he
proceeded to be first assistant-editor and then editor in chief of the
_Encyclopaedia_. His health, never very strong, became worse and worse,
and he finally succumbed to a complication of diseases. It was
understood that the theological scandal connected with his name was
anything but a pleasure to him, and the justice of it does not concern
us; but his repute as an Orientalist is uncontested. Besides works
directly bearing on the Bible, he wrote two important books on _Kinship
and Marriage in Early Arabia_ and on _The Religion of the Semites_. He
was at least as remarkable for general as for special learning, and if
not actually a great man of letters, had a knowledge of literature
rivalled by few of his contemporaries.
To turn to physical science, Sir Humphry Davy, a great chemist and no
mean writer, was born at Penzance in December 1778. His father was a
wood-carver, but he himself was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and
betook himself seriously to chemistry. Fortunately for him, Dr. Beddoes,
the father of the poet, a physician of great repute at Clifton, took him
to be his assistant there, and Davy, in his twentieth year, not only had
much improved opportunities of study, but made valuable friends, both
among the persons of rank who then frequented Clifton for health, and
among the literary society of which Coleridge and Southey were then the
ornaments in Bristol. This part of his sojourn was noteworthy for his
experiments with nitrous oxide ("laughing gas"). These attracted a great
deal of attention, and in 1801, being then barely twenty-three, he was
appointed to a lectureship in the Royal Institution, London. His
appointment was the beginning of a series of brilliant lectures in the
same place during almost the whole of the century, first by Davy
himself, then by his assistant Faraday, and then by Faraday's assistant
Tyndall. He was knighted in 1812, and soon afterwards married Mrs.
Apreece, a lively, pretty, and wealthy widow. His later years were
occupied, first by the investigations which led to the perfecting of
his famous safety-lamp for coal-mines (these brought him a handsome
testimonial and a baronetcy), and later by electrical researches. He had
not reached middle age when his health began to fail, and he died in
1829, aged little more than fifty. In connection with literary science
or scientific literature Davy was perhaps more remarkable as a lecturer
than as a writer, but his accomplishments as the latter were
considerable, and in his later years he wrote two non-scientific books,
_Salmonia_ and _Consolations in Travel_. These (though the former was
attacked as the work of an amateur and a milksop by Christopher North)
were very popular in their day. Davy always kept up his friendship with
men of letters, especially the Lake Poets and Scott (who was a
connection of his wife's), and he was no very small man of letters
himself.
A contemporary (though very much longer lived) of Davy's and the most
famous Englishwoman who has ever written on scientific subjects, was
Mary Fairfax, better known from the name of her second husband as Mrs.
Somerville. She was born at Jedburgh on 26th December 1780, and when
twenty-four married her cousin, Captain Greig, a member of a family of
Scotchmen who had settled in the Russian navy. Her first husband died
two years afterwards, and six years later she married Dr. William
Somerville, also her cousin. She had already devoted much attention,
especially during her widowhood, to mathematics and astronomy; and after
her second marriage she had no difficulty in pursuing these studies. She
adapted Laplace's _Mecanique Celeste_ in 1823, and followed it up by
more original work on physics, astronomy, and physical geography. Her
life was prolonged till 1872, and an interesting autobiography appeared
a year later. It is possible that Mrs. Somerville profited somewhat in
reputation by her coincidence with the period of "diffusion of useful
knowledge." But she had real scientific knowledge and real literary
gifts; and she made good use of both.
Of at least respectable literary merit, though hardly of enough to
justify the devoting of much space to them here, were Sir David
Brewster (1781-1868), Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), Sir Charles Lyell
(1797-1875), Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), the first a
mathematician and physicist, the second an astronomer, the third and
fourth geologists, and all more or less copious writers on their several
subjects. John Tyndall (1820-1893), a younger man than any of these, had
perhaps a more distinctly literary talent. Born in Ireland, and for some
time a railway engineer, he gave himself up about 1847 to the study and
teaching of physics, was remarkable for the effect of his lecturing, and
held several Government appointments. His Presidential Address to the
British Association at Belfast in 1874 was not less noteworthy for
materialism in substance than for a brilliant if somewhat brassy style.
But the chief Englishmen of science who were men of letters during our
period were Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The opinions of the first
of these, their origin, the circumstances of their first expression, and
the probabilities of their future, have been the subject of about as
much controversy as in a given time has been bestowed upon any subject,
certainly on any similar subject. But we enjoy here the privilege of
neglecting this almost entirely. Darwin is to the literary historian a
very interesting subject, for he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who
himself, besides being the capital example of the polished mediocrity of
eighteenth century verse when all freshness had gone out of it, was a
man of science and an evolutionist in his way. Charles (who was also
christened Robert) was the son of yet another Dr. Darwin, an F.R.S. He
was born on 12th February 1809 at Shrewsbury, and his mother was (as was
afterwards his wife) a daughter of the Wedgwoods of Etruria. After
passing through the famous school of his native town, Darwin went to
Edinburgh for some years and then entered Christ's College, Cambridge,
in 1828. Here he devoted himself to physical science, and after taking
his degree was, in 1831, appointed to the _Beagle_, which was starting
on a scientific cruise. He spent five years in the South Seas and did
not return to England till late in 1836--a voyage which perhaps
prejudicially affected his health, but established his knowledge of
nature. After his return he settled down to scientific work, alone and
in the scientific societies, married in 1839, and was busy for many
years afterwards in publishing the results of the voyage. He possessed
considerable means, and for the last forty years of his life lived at
his ease at Down near Beckenham, experimenting in crossing species and
maturing his views. These took form, under circumstances interesting but
foreign to our theme, in the famous _Origin of Species_, published in
1859, and this was followed by a great number of other books, the most
noteworthy of which, if not the scientifically soundest, was _The
Descent of Man_ (1871). Darwin died after many years of continuous
ill-health on 19th April 1882.
Late in life he is said to have confessed that his relish for
Shakespeare and for pure literature generally, which had in earlier days
been keen, had entirely vanished. But there was perhaps nothing very
surprising in this, seeing that he had for half a century given himself
up with extraordinary and ever-increasing thoroughness to a class of
investigations the most remote possible from literature, and yet not, as
pure mathematical study not seldom induces its votaries, inducing men to
cultivate letters by mere contrast. Yet the ancestral literary tendency
had only fallen dormant in him then; and earlier it had been active. It
can indeed hardly be said that either his contribution to the _Voyage of
the Beagle_, or _The Origin of Species_, or _The Descent of Man_, or any
of the others, is absolutely remarkable for style in the ordinary sense
of that phrase. The style of Darwin attempts no ornateness, and on the
other hand it is not of those extremely simple styles which are
independent of ornament and to which ornament would be simply a
defacement. But it is very clear; it is not in the least slovenly; and
there is about it the indefinable sense that the writer might have been
a much greater writer, simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to
take the trouble, and had not been almost solely intent upon his matter.
Such writers are not so common that they should be neglected, and they
may at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the "provincial band"
of literature.
A very remarkable book which was in a way Darwinism before Darwin, which
attracted much attention and violent opposition in 1844, the year of its
publication, and which for a long time remained unowned, was the
_Vestiges of Creation_, subsequently known to be the work of Robert
Chambers, the younger of two brothers who did great things in the
popular publishing trade at Edinburgh, and who founded a house which has
always been foremost in the diffusion of sound and cheap literature,
information, and amusement. Robert was born at Peebles in 1802 and died
at St. Andrews in 1871, having been, besides his publishing labours, a
voluminous author and compiler. Nothing he did was quite equal to the
_Vestiges_, a book rather literary than scientific, and treating the
still crude evolution theory rather from the point of view of popular
philosophy than from that of strict biological investigation; but
curiously stimulating and enthusiastic, with a touch of poetry in it not
often to be found in such books, and attractive as showing the way in
which doctrines which are about to take a strong hold of the general
mind not infrequently communicate themselves, in an unfinished but
inspiring form, to persons who, except general literary culture and
interest, do not seem to offer any specially favourable soil for their
germination. Purely scientific men have usually rather pooh-poohed the
_Vestiges_, but there is the Platonic quality in it.
The _Vestiges_, like its more famous successor, was violently attacked
as irreligious. One of its opponents, from a point of view half orthodox
and half scientific, was Hugh Miller, a man of sterling excellence, of
an interesting and in its close melancholy career, of real importance as
a geologist, and possessed of an extremely agreeable literary faculty.
Miller was born at Cromarty in 1802, and though more than fairly
educated, held till he was past thirty no higher position than that of a
stone-mason. He had begun to write, however, earlier than this, and,
engaging in particular in the two rather dissimilar subjects of geology
and "Free Kirk" polemic, he was made editor of the _Witness_, a
newspaper started in the interest of the new principles. After nearly
twenty busy years of journalism and authorship he shot himself in
December 1856, as it is supposed in a fit of insanity brought on by
overwork. Miller was a very careful observer, and his _Old Red
Sandstone_ (1841) made a great addition to the knowledge of fossils. He
followed this up by a great number of other works, some merely
polemical, others descriptive of his own life and travels. In all the
better parts of Hugh Miller's writings there is a remarkable style,
extremely popular and unpretentious but never trivial or slipshod, which
is not far below the best styles of the century for its special purpose,
though in some respects it smacks more of the eighteenth, and has a
certain relation with that of White of Selborne.
The most considerable literary gifts of the century among men of science
probably belonged to a man more than twenty years younger than Miller,
and more than fifteen younger than Darwin, who died so recently that
until the greater part of this book was written it seemed that he would
have no place in it. Thomas Henry Huxley, born in May 1825, at Ealing,
studied medicine, and becoming a navy doctor, executed like Darwin a
voyage to the South Seas. His scientific work, though early
distinguished, met with no great encouragement from the Admiralty, and
he left the service, though he held many public appointments in later
life. He became F.R.S. at six-and-twenty, and from that time onwards
till his sixtieth year he was a busy professor, lecturer, member of
commissions, and (for a time) inspector of fisheries. In the ever
greater and greater specialising of science which has taken place,
Huxley was chiefly a morphologist. But outside the range of special
studies he was chiefly known as a vigorous champion of Darwinism and a
something more than vigorous aggressor in the cause of Agnosticism (a
word which he himself did much to spread), attacking supernaturalism of
every kind, and (though disclaiming materialism and not choosing to call
himself an atheist) unceasingly demanding that all things should submit
themselves to naturalist criticism. A great number of brilliant essays
and lectures were composed by him on different parts of what may be
called the debateable land between science, philosophy, and theology.
And one of his most characteristic and masterly single studies was a
little book on Hume, contributed to the series of "English Men of
Letters" in 1879.
This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not have been
open in substance to the charge which the bolder and more thoroughgoing
defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, that it committed the logical
error of demanding submission on the part of supernaturalism to laws and
limits to which, by its very essence, supernaturalism disclaimed
allegiance. But the form of it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much,
and had borrowed weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and
Father as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable
style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries,
"preciousness" and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too
mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley. It
has been said, with some truth as well as with some paradox, that a
literary critic of the very first class was lost in him, at the salvage
only of some scientific monographs, which like all their kind will be
antiquated some day, and of some polemics which must suffer equally from
the touch of time.