CAROLINE HERSCHEL.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover, March 16th, 1750, and
was thus more than eleven years younger than the brother with whose
name hers is inseparably associated. She remembered the panic caused
by the earthquake of 1755, and her experience barely fell short of the
political earthquake of 1848; but the fundamental impressions of her
long life were connected with “minding the heavens.”
She was of little account in her family, except as a menial. Her
father, indeed, a man of high character and cultivated mind, thought
much of her future, and wished to improve her prospects by giving her
some accomplishments. So he taught her to play the violin well enough
to take part in concerted music. But her instruction was practicable
only when her mother was out of the way, or in a particularly good
humour. Essentially a “Hausfrau,” Anna Ilse had no sympathy with
aspirations. She was hard-working and well-meaning, but narrow and
inflexible, and she kept her second daughter strictly to household
drudgery. Her literary education, accordingly, got no farther than
reading and writing; even the third “R” was denied to her. But she was
carefully trained in plain sewing and knitting, and supplied her four
brothers with stockings from so early an age that the first specimen of
her workmanship touched the ground while she stood upright finishing
the toe! Few signs of tenderness were accorded to her. Her eldest
brother, Jacob, a brilliant musician, and somewhat high-and-mighty
in his ways, did not spare cuffs when she waited awkwardly at table;
and her sister, Mrs. Griesbach, evidently took slight notice of her.
William, however, showed her invariable affection; and him and her
father she silently adored. In 1756, when they both returned from
England with the Hanoverian Guard, she recalled how, on the day of
their arrival,
“My mother being very busy preparing dinner, had suffered me to go
all alone to the parade to meet my father, but I could not find him
anywhere, nor anybody whom I knew; so at last, when nearly frozen to
death, I came home and found them all at table. My dear brother William
threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome, and crouched down to
me, which made me forget all my grievances. The rest were so happy at
seeing one another again that my absence had never been perceived.”
How well one can realise the disconsolate little expedition, the
woe-begone entry of the six-year-old maiden, her heart-chill on finding
herself forgotten, and the revulsion of joy at her soldier-brother’s
cordial greeting!
Isaac Herschel died March 22nd, 1767. He had never recovered the
campaign of Dettingen, yet struggled, in spite of growing infirmities,
to earn a livelihood by giving lessons and copying music. His daughter
was thrown by his loss into a “state of stupefaction,” from which she
roused herself, after some weeks, to consider the gloomy outlook of
her destiny. She was seventeen, and was qualified, as she reflected
with anguish, only to be a housemaid. She was plain in face and
small in stature, and her father had often warned her that if she
ever married it would be comparatively late in life, when her fine
character had unfolded its attractions. Still, she did not lose hope
of making her way single-handed. Although over-burthened with servile
labours, she contrived, unknown to her mother, to get some teaching in
fancy-work from a consumptive girl whose cough from across the street
gave the signal for a daybreak rendezvous; trusting that, with this
acquirement, and “a little notion of music, she might obtain a place
as governess in some family where the want of a knowledge of French
would be no objection.” There was “no kind of ornamental needlework,
knotting, plaiting hair, stringing beads and bugles, of which she did
not make samples by way of mastering the art.” She was then permitted
to take some lessons in dressmaking and millinery. But the current of
her thoughts was completely changed by an invitation from her brother
William to join him at Bath. She was, if possible, to be made into
a concert-singer. Yet her voice had never been tried, and its very
existence was problematical. It may, then, be suspected that William’s
primary motive was to come to the rescue of his poor little Cinderella
sister.
Months passed in “harassing uncertainty” as to whether she was to go or
stay; months, too, during which her own mind was divided between the
longing to follow her rising star, and a certain compunctious clinging
to her duties at home. Time, however, did not pass in idleness.
Taking no notice of the superior Jacob’s ridicule of her visionary
transformation into an artist, she quietly set about practising, with a
gag between her teeth, the solo parts of violin concertos, “shake and
all,” so that, as she says, “I had gained a tolerable execution before
I knew how to sing.” She occupied herself besides in making a store of
prospective clothing for relatives, who, she could not but fear, would
miss her services. For her withdrawal her mother, however, received
from William money-compensation, which enabled her to keep a servant
in lieu of her daughter. The parting, when he came to fetch her, in
August, 1772, was none the less a sorrowful one; but Caroline had much
to distract her mind from dwelling on those she had left behind. She
had, besides, much discomfort to endure. Six days and nights in an
open stage-carriage were followed by a tempestuous passage; the packet
in which they embarked at Helvoetsluys reached Yarmouth dismasted and
half-wrecked; and they were finally, not duly landed, but “thrown like
balls by two sailors,” on the English coast. After a brief glimpse of
London, they started, August 28th, in the night coach for Bath, where
Caroline arrived “almost annihilated” by fatigue and want of sleep.
Her training for an unfamiliar life began without delay. She had to
learn English, arithmetic, and enough of account-keeping to qualify
her for conducting the household affairs; a routine of singing-lessons
and practising was entered upon; and she was sent out alone to market,
Alexander Herschel lurking behind to see that she came safely out of
the _mêlée_ of buyers and sellers, whence she brought home “whatever
in her fright she could pick up.” She suffered many things, too, from
her brother’s servant, “a hot-headed old Welshwoman,” whose _régime_
was one of rack and ruin to domestic utensils; while _heimweh_ made
formidable onslaughts on her naturally serene spirits.
A visit to London, as the guest of Mrs. Colebrook, one of her
brother’s pupils, gave her some experience of town gaieties. But the
expenses of dress and chairmen shocked her frugal ideas; and she
thought the young ladies, whose companionship was offered to her, “very
little better than idiots.” As a vocalist, Miss Herschel came easily
to the front. After a few months of study, her voice was in demand at
evening parties; when her foreign accentuation had been corrected,
she took the first soprano parts in “The Messiah,” “Samson,” “Judas
Maccabæus,” and other oratorios; and sang as prima donna at the winter
concerts both at Bath and Bristol. In accordance with her resolution
to appear only where her brother conducted, she declined an engagement
for a musical festival at Birmingham. A year’s training in deportment
was a preliminary to her _début_; a celebrated dancing mistress
being engaged--to use Caroline’s own phrase--“in drilling me for a
gentlewoman. Heaven knows how she succeeded!” A gift of ten guineas
from William provided her with a dress which made her, she was told,
“an ornament to the stage;” and she was complimented by the Marchioness
of Lothian on “pronouncing her words like an Englishwoman.” Her success
was decided, and promised to be enduring enough to satisfy her modest
ambition of supporting herself independently.
It was, however, balked by an extraordinary turn of affairs; a turn
at first not at all to her liking. After the lapse of half-a-century
she still set it down as the grievance of her life that “I have been
throughout annoyed and hindered in my endeavours at perfecting myself
in any branch of knowledge by which I could hope to gain a creditable
livelihood.”
William Herschel, when Caroline joined him at Bath, was just feeling
his way towards telescope-making. The fancy did not please her. The
beginnings of great things are usually a disturbance and an anxiety.
They imply a draft upon the future which may never be honoured, and
they often play sad havoc with the present. And Miss Herschel was
business-like and matter-of-fact. But her devotion triumphed over her
common-sense. Keeping her misgivings to herself, she met unlooked-for
demands with the utmost zeal, intelligence, and discretion. She was
always at hand when wanted, yet never in the way. Through her care,
some degree of domestic comfort was maintained amid the unwonted
confusion of optical manufacture. During the tedious process of
mirror-polishing, she sustained her brother physically and mentally,
putting food into his mouth, and reading aloud “Don Quixote,” and the
“Arabian Nights.” She was ready with direct aid, too, and “became in
time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master
in the first year of his apprenticeship.” “Alex,” she continued, “was
always very alert, assisting when anything new was going forward;
but he wanted perseverance, and never liked to confine himself at
home for many hours together. And so it happened that my brother
William was obliged to make trial of my abilities in copying for him
catalogues, tables, and sometimes whole papers which were lent him
for his perusal.” Musical business, meantime, received due attention.
Steady preparation was made for concerts and oratorios; choruses were
instructed, rehearsals attended, parts diligently written out from
scores. But the discovery of Uranus swept away the necessity for these
occupations; and with a final performance in St. Margaret’s Chapel, on
Whit-Sunday, 1782, the musical career of William and Caroline Herschel
came to a close.
Miss Herschel’s “thoughts were anything but cheerful” on the occasion.
She saw the terrestrial ground cut from under her feet, and did not
yet appreciate the celestial situation held in reserve for her. Music,
in her opinion, was her true and only vocation; the contemplation
of herself in the guise of an assistant-astronomer moved her to
cynical self-scorn. As usual, however, her personal wishes were
suppressed. Housewifely cares, too, weighed upon her. The dilapidated
gazebo at Datchet provided no suitable shelter for a well-regulated
establishment. It was roofed more in appearance than in reality; the
plaster fell from the ceilings; the walls dripped with damp; rheumatism
and ague were its rightful inmates. Then the prices of provisions
appalled her, especially in view of the scarcity of five-pound notes
since the opulence of Bath had been exchanged for the penury of a court
precinct.
Yet she set to work with a will to learn all that was needful for her
untried office. Not out of books. “My dear brother William,” she wrote
in 1831, “was my only teacher, and we began generally where we should
have ended; he supposing I knew all that went before.” The lessons were
of the most desultory kind. They consisted of answers to questions put
by her as occasions arose, during breakfast, or at odd moments. The
scraps of information thus snatched were carefully recorded in her
commonplace book, where they constituted a miscellaneous jumble of
elementary formulæ, solutions of problems in trigonometry, rules for
the use of tables of logarithms, for converting sidereal into solar
time, and the like. Nothing was entrusted to a memory compared by
her instructor to “sand, in which everything could be inscribed with
ease, but as easily effaced.” So that even the multiplication table was
carried about in her pocket. She appears never to have spent a single
hour in the systematic study of astronomy. Her method was that in vogue
at Dotheboys Hall, to “go and know it,” by practising, as it were,
blindfold, what she had been taught. Yet a computational error has
never, we believe, been imputed to her; and the volume of her work was
very great.
Its progress was diversified by more exciting pursuits. She began, in
1782, to “sweep for comets,” and discovered with a 27-inch reflector,
in the autumn of 1783, two nebulæ of first-rate importance--one
a companion to the grand object in Andromeda, the other a superb
elliptical formation in Cetus. She was by this time more than
reconciled to her astronomical lot; Von Magellan, indeed, reported in
1785, that brother and sister were equally captivated with the stars.
The original explorations, in which she was beginning to delight, were
interrupted by the commencement of his with the “large twenty-foot.”
Her aid was indispensable, and from December, 1783, she “became
entirely attached to the writing-desk.” She was no mere mechanical
assistant. A wound-up automaton would have ill served William
Herschel’s turn. He wanted “a being to execute his commands with the
quickness of lightning”; and his commands were various. For he was
making, not following precedents, and fresh exigencies continually
arose. Under these novel circumstances, his sister displayed incredible
zeal, promptitude, and versatility. She would throw down her pen to
run to the clock, to fetch and carry instruments, to measure the ground
between the lamp-micrometer and the observer’s eye; discharging these,
and many other successive tasks with a rapidity that kept pace with
his swift proceedings. Fatigue, want of sleep, cold, were disregarded;
and although nature often exacted next day penalties of weariness
and depression for those nights of intense activity, the faithful
amanuensis never complained. “I had the comfort,” she remarked simply,
“to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours to assist
him.” The service was not unaccompanied by danger. One night poor
Caroline, running in the dark over ground a foot deep in melting snow,
in order to make some alteration in the movement of the telescope,
fell over a great hook, which entered her leg so deeply that a couple
of ounces of her flesh remained behind when she was lifted off it.
The wound was formidable enough, in Dr. Lind’s opinion, to entitle a
soldier to six weeks’ hospital-nursing, but it was treated cursorily at
Datchet; the patient consoling herself for a few nights’ disablement
with the reflection that her brother, owing to cloudy weather, “was no
loser through the accident.”
Busy days succeeded watchful nights. From the materials collected at
the telescope, she formed properly arranged catalogues, calculating, in
all, the places of 2,500 nebulæ. She brought the whole of Flamsteed’s
_British Catalogue_--then the _vade mecum_ of astronomers--into
zones of one degree wide, for the purpose of William’s methodical
examination; copied out his papers for the Royal Society; kept the
observing-books straight, and documents in order. Then, in the long
summer months, when “there was nothing but grinding and polishing to
be seen,” she took her share of that too, and “was indulged with the
last finishing of a very beautiful mirror for Sir William Watson.”
On August 1st, 1786, her brother’s absence leaving her free to observe
on her own account, she discerned a round, hazy object, suspiciously
resembling a comet. Its motion within the next twenty-four hours
certified it as such, and she immediately announced the apparition to
her learned friends, Dr. Blagden and Mr. Aubert. The latter declared in
reply, “You have immortalised your name,” and saw in imagination “your
wonderfully clever and wonderfully amiable brother shedding,” upon
receipt of the intelligence, “a tear of joy.” This was the first of a
series of eight similar discoveries, in five of which her priority was
unquestioned. They were comprised within eleven years, and were made,
after 1790, with an excellent five-foot reflector mounted on the roof
of the house at Slough. Considering that she swept the heavens only as
an interlude to her regular duties, never for an hour forsaking her
place beside the great telescopes in the garden, her aptitude for that
fascinating pursuit must be rated very high. It was not until 1819 that
Encke identified her seventh comet--detected November 7th, 1795--with
one previously seen by Méchain in January, 1786. None other revolves
so quickly, its returns to perihelion occurring at intervals of three
and a quarter years. It has earned notoriety, besides, by a still
unexplained acceleration of movement.
Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet; and her
remarkable success in what Miss Burney called “her eccentric vocation,”
procured for her an European reputation. But the homage which she
received did not disturb her sense of subordination. “Giving the sum of
more to that which hath too much,” she instinctively transferred her
meed of praise to her brother. She held her comets, notwithstanding,
very dear. All the documents relating to them were found after her
death neatly assorted in a packet labelled “Bills and Receipts of my
Comets”; and the telescopes with which they had been observed ranked
among the chief treasures of her old age. She presented the smaller one
before her death to her friend Mr. Hausmann; the five-foot to the Royal
Astronomical Society, where it is religiously preserved.
The “celebrated comet-searcher” was described by Miss Burney in 1787
as “very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenuous; and her
manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world,
yet desirous to meet and return its smiles.” To Dr. Burney, ten years
later, she appeared “all shyness and virgin modesty”; while Mrs.
Papendick mentions her as “by no means prepossessing, but an excellent,
kind-hearted creature.” She was, in 1787, officially appointed her
brother’s assistant, with a salary of fifty pounds a year; “and in
October,” she relates, “I received twelve pounds ten, being the first
quarterly payment of my salary, and the first money I ever in all my
lifetime thought myself to be at liberty to spend to my own liking.”
The arrangement was made in anticipation of her brother’s marriage,
when--to quote her one bitter phrase on the subject--“she had to give
up the place of his housekeeper.” She did not readily accommodate
herself to the change; and a significant gap of ten years in her
journal suggests that she wrote much during that time of struggle
which her calmer judgment counselled her to destroy. Her strong sense
of right and habitual abnegation, however, came to her aid; the family
relations remained harmonious; and she eventually became deeply
attached to her gentle sister-in-law. But from 1788 onwards, she lived
in lodgings, either at Slough or Upton, whence she came regularly to
the observatory to do her daily or nightly work.
Miss Herschel began in 1796, and finished in about twenty months,
an Index to Flamsteed’s observations of the stars in the “British
Catalogue.” A list of “errata” was added, together with a catalogue of
561 omitted stars. The work, one of eminent utility, was published in
1798, at the expense of the Royal Society. In August, 1799, she paid
a visit to the Astronomer Royal, with the object of transcribing into
his copy of Flamsteed’s Observations some memoranda upon them made by
her brother. “But the succession of amusements,” we hear, “left me no
alternative between contenting myself with one or two hours’ sleep per
night during the six days I was at Greenwich, and going home without
having fulfilled my purpose.” Needless to say that she chose the former.
The Royal family paid her many attentions, partly, no doubt, because
of her intimacy with one of the ladies-in-waiting to the Queen.
This was Madame Beckedorff, who although of “gentle” condition, had
attended the same dressmaking class with the bandmaster’s daughter at
Hanover, in 1768. The distant acquaintanceship thus formed developed,
at Windsor, into a firm friendship, transmitted in its full cordiality
to a second generation. An entry in Caroline’s Diary tells of a dinner
at Madame Beckedorff’s, February 23, 1801, when the “whole party
left the dining-room on the Princesses Augusta and Amelia, and the
Duke of Cambridge coming in to see me.” In May, 1813, during a visit
to London, she passed several evenings at Buckingham House, “where I
just arrived,” she says, on May 12, “as the Queen and the Princesses
Elizabeth and Mary, and the Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester,
were ready to step into their chairs, going to Carlton House, full
dressed for a fête, and meeting me in the hall, they stopped for near
ten minutes, making each in their turn the kindest inquiries how I
liked London, etc. On entering Mrs. Beckedorff’s room, I found Madame
D’Arblay (Miss Burney), and we spent a very pleasant evening.”
Such Royal condescensions were frequent, and on occasions inconvenient.
The Princesses Sophia and Amelia, in especial, took a strong liking
for Miss Herschel’s conversation, and often required her attendance
for many hours together. She was graciously singled out for notice at
the Frogmore assemblages, and became quite inured to the reception
at Slough of dignitaries and _savants_. Nothing deranged the simple
composure of her deportment. One would give much to know what were her
private impressions about the notabilities who crossed her path; but
her memoranda are, in this respect, perfectly colourless. Names and
dates are jotted down with the same brevity as her entries of “work
done.” Even the personal troubles of years are curtly disposed of. Her
brother Dietrich’s stay in England from 1809 to 1813, left her not a
day’s respite from accumulated trouble and anxiety. Yet it occasioned
only one little outburst, penned long afterwards.
“He came,” she wrote, “ruined in health, spirit, and fortune, and,
according to the old Hanoverian custom, I was the only one from whom
all domestic comforts were expected. I hope I acquitted myself to
everybody’s satisfaction, for I never neglected my eldest brother’s
business” (Jacob Herschel died in 1792), “and the time I bestowed on
Dietrich was taken entirely from my sleep, or what is generally allowed
for meals, which were mostly taken running, or sometimes forgotten
entirely. But why think of it now?”
Her later journal is overshadowed with the fear of coming bereavement.
Recurrences to the state of William’s health become ominously frequent.
“He is not only unwell, but low in spirits,” she notes in February,
1817; and the following account of his departure for Bath, April 2,
1818, betrays her deep trouble:--
“The last moments before he stepped into the carriage were spent in
walking through his library and workrooms, pointing with anxious looks
to every shelf and drawer, desiring me to examine all, and to make
memorandums of them as well as I could. He was hardly able to support
himself, and his spirits were so low, that I found difficulty in
commanding my voice so far as to give him the assurance he should find
on his return that my time had not been misspent.”
“May 1st.--But he returned home much worse than he went, and for
several days hardly noticed my handiworks.”
His last note to her, indited with an uncertain hand on a discoloured
slip of paper, July 4, 1819, she put by with the inscription: “I keep
this as a relic. Every line _now_ traced by the hand of my dear brother
becomes a treasure to me.”
“Lina,” it ran, “there is a great comet. I want you to assist me. Come
to dine and spend the day here. If you can come soon after one o’clock
we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw its situation
last night--it has a long tail.”
Through that long tail the earth had, eight days previously--according
to Olbers’s calculations--cut its way; but the proposed observations at
Slough, if made, were never published.
In October, 1821, Caroline Herschel wrote this melancholy “Finis” to
what seemed to herself the only part of her life worth living. “Here
closed my day-book; for one day passed like another, except that I,
from my daily calls, returned to my solitary and cheerless home with
increased anxiety for each following day.”
Eighteen months after her loss of “the dearest and best of brothers,”
she at last gathered fortitude to put on paper her recollections of the
“heartrending occurrences” witnessed by her during the closing months
of her fifty years’ sojourn in England. In every line of what she then
wrote, her absorbed fidelity to him, growing more and more tenacious
as the end drew visibly nigher, comes out with unconscious pathos. The
anguish with which she watched each symptom of decay seared her heart,
but was refused any outward expression. She played out her rôle of
self-suppression until the curtain fell. A last gleam of hope visited
her July 8th, 1822, when she marked down in an almanac the cheering
circumstance that her invalid had “walked with a firmer step than usual
above three or four times the distance from the dwelling-house to the
library, in order to gather and eat raspberries in his garden with me.
But,” she added sadly, “I never saw the like again.”
In the impetuosity of her grief, she made an irreparable mistake. Only
a month earlier she had surrendered to her impecunious brother Dietrich
her little funded property of £500; now, without reflecting on the
consequences, she “gave herself, with all she was worth, to him and his
family.” She was in her seventy-third year; her only remaining business
in life, it seemed to her, was to quit it; the virtual close of her
career had come; the actual close could not long be delayed. So she
retired to her native place to die promptly, if that might be, but, at
any rate, to mark the chasm that separated her from the past. She soon
recognised, however, that she had taken a false step. “Why did I leave
happy England?” was the cry sometimes on her lips, always in her heart,
for a quarter of a century. She was taken aback by her own vitality.
She found out too late that her powers of work, far from being
exhausted, might have been turned to account for her nephew as they had
been for her brother. And it was to him and his mother, after all, that
her strong affections clung. Her relatives in Hanover, although they
treated her with consideration, were hopelessly uncongenial. “From the
moment I set foot on German ground,” she said, “I found I was alone.”
Fifty years is a huge gap in a human life. Miss Herschel had been all
that time progressing from the starting point where they had remained
stationary. Their tastes were then necessarily incongruous with hers;
nor could her interests be transplanted at will from the soil in which
they were rooted. She was unable to perceive that the change was in
herself. The “solitary and useless life” she led resulted, she was
convinced, from her “not finding Hanover, or anyone in it, like what I
left when the best of brothers took me with him to England in August,
1772!”
An exile in her old home, she felt pledged to remain there. She would
not “take back her promise.” For a person of her frugal habits, she was
well off. Her pension of fifty pounds would have supplied her small
wants, and she was reluctantly compelled to accept the annuity of £100,
left to her by her brother. And since she was most generous in the
bestowal of her spare cash, her presence was of some material advantage
to a poor household. It gave them credit, too; and notwithstanding that
they “never could agree” in opinions, she faithfully nursed Dietrich
Herschel until his death in January, 1827.
“I am still unsettled,” she wrote to her nephew, December 26th, 1822,
“and cannot get my books and papers in any order, for it is always noon
before I am well enough to do anything, and then visitors run away with
the rest of the day till the dinner-hour, which is two o’clock. Two or
three evenings in each week are spoiled by company. And at the heavens
there is no getting, for the high roofs of the opposite houses. But
within my room I am determined nothing shall be wanting that can please
my eye. Exactly facing me is a bookcase placed on a bureau, to which I
will have some glass doors made, so that I can see my books. Opposite
this, on a sofa, I am seated, with a sofa-table and my new writing-desk
before me; but what good I shall do there the future must tell.”
Seated at that “new desk,” she completed her most important work. This
was the reduction into a catalogue, and the arrangement into zones, of
all Sir William Herschel’s nebulæ and clusters. Despatched to Sir John
Herschel in April, 1825, it made his review of those objects feasible.
From it, he drew up his “working-list” for each night’s observations;
and from it, in constructing his “General Catalogue” of 1864, he
took the places of such nebulæ as he had not been able to examine
personally. In the course of the needful comparisons, “I learned,” he
said, “fully to appreciate the skill, diligence, and accuracy which
that indefatigable lady brought to bear on a task which only the most
boundless devotion could have induced her to undertake, and enabled
her to accomplish.” For its execution, the Gold Medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society was awarded to her in 1828--an honour by which
she was “more shocked than gratified.” Her “Zone-Catalogue” was styled
by Sir David Brewster “an extraordinary monument of the unextinguished
ardour of a lady of seventy-five in the cause of abstract science.”
In 1835, she was created an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical
Society, Mrs. Somerville being associated with her in a distinction
never before or since conferred upon a woman. Three years later, she
was surprised by the news that the Royal Irish Academy had similarly
enrolled her. “I cannot help,” she wrote, “crying out aloud to myself,
every now and then, What is that for?” The arrival, on another
occasion, of presentation-copies of Mrs. Somerville’s “Connexion of the
Physical Sciences,” and of Baily’s “Account of Flamsteed,” agitated her
painfully. “Coming to _me_ with such things,” she exclaimed, “an old,
poor, sick creature in her dotage.” “I think it is almost mocking me,”
she added in 1840, “to look upon me as a Member of an Academy; I that
have lived these eighteen years without finding as much as a single
comet.”
Her local celebrity, nevertheless, diverted her. It struck her as a
capital joke that she was “stared at for a learned lady.” Down to 1840
she regularly attended plays and concerts, and rarely left the theatre
without a “_Wie geht’s?_” from His Majesty. And to find herself--“a
_little_ old woman”--conspicuous in the crowd, produced a sense of
exhilaration. Her presence or absence was a matter of public concern,
and she very seldom appeared otherwise than alert and cheerful. When
close upon eighty her “nimbleness in walking,” she remarked, “has
hitherto gained me the admiration of all who know me; but the good
folks are not aware of the arts I make use of, which consist in never
leaving my room in the daytime except I am able to trip it along as
if nothing were the matter.” Music gave her unfailing pleasure. She
heard Catalani in 1828; shared in the Paganini _furore_ of 1831, and
conversed with him through an interpreter. With Ole Bull she was
“somewhat disappointed,” finding his performance “more like conjuration
than playing on a violin.”
But her “painful solitude” was most of all cheered by the visits and
communications of eminent men. No one of distinction in science came
to Hanover without calling upon her. Humboldt, Gauss, Mädler, Encke,
Schumacher, paid her their respects, personally or by letter, if not in
both ways. “Next to listening to the conversation of learned men,” she
told the younger Lady Herschel, “I like to hear about them; but I find
myself, unfortunately, among beings who like nothing but smoking, big
talk on politics, wars, and such-like things.” Her situation remained,
to the end, displeasing to her. She made the best of it; but the best
was, to her thinking, bad. Having wilfully flung herself out of the
current of life, she was nevertheless surprised at being stranded.
She recurred, with inextinguishable pain, to the crippling effects of
circumstances and old age.
“I lead a very idle life,” she wrote in 1826. “My sole employment
consists in keeping myself in good humour, and not being disagreeable
to others.” And in 1839: “I get up as usual, every day, change my
clothing, eat, drink, and go to sleep again on the sofa, except I am
roused by visitors; then I talk till I can talk no more--nineteen to
the dozen!” While at nights “the few, few stars I can get at out of my
window only cause me vexation, for to look for the small ones on the
globe my eyes will not serve me any longer.”
She followed, however, with intense delight the progress of her
nephew’s career, in which she beheld the continuation of his father’s.
The intelligence of his having opened a nebular campaign in 1825, was
like the sound of the trumpet to a disabled war-horse. Nothing but
the decline of her powers, she assured him, would have prevented her
“coming by the first steamboat to offer you the same assistance as, by
your father’s instructions, I was enabled to afford him.” And again,
in 1831: “You have made me completely happy with the account you sent
me of the double stars; but it vexes me more and more that in this
abominable city there is no one who is capable of partaking in the
joy I feel on this revival of your father’s name. His observations on
double stars were, from first to last, the most interesting subject; he
never lost sight of it. And I cannot help lamenting that he could not
take to his grave the satisfaction I feel at seeing his son doing him
such ample justice by endeavouring to perfect what he could only begin.”
Sir John’s trip to the Cape roused her ardent sympathy. “Ja!” she
exclaimed, on hearing of the project, “If I were thirty or forty years
younger, and could go too. In Gottes Namen!” But she was eighty-two,
and could only give vent to her feelings by “jingling glasses
with Betty” after dinner on his birthday, while mistress and maid
together cried, “Es lebe Sir John! Hoch! Hurrah!” The reports of his
achievements in the southern hemisphere were, she said, “like a drop
of oil supplying my expiring lamp.” “At first, on reading them,” she
wrote to Lady Herschel, “I could turn wild; but this is only a flash;
for soon I fall into a reverie on what my dear nephew’s father would
have felt if such letters could have been directed to him, and cannot
suppress my wish that _his_ life instead of _mine_ had been spared
until this present moment.”
The joyful intelligence of her nephew’s safe return to England was
sent to Miss Herschel by the Duke of Cambridge, whose attentions to
her were unfailing; and she lived to hold in her hands the volume of
“Cape Results,” by which her brother’s great survey of the heavens
was rounded off to completion. But by that time the lassitude of
approaching death was upon her.
Three visits from her nephew broke the monotony of separation. In
October, 1824, he stopped at Hanover on his way homeward from the
Continent. Before his arrival, her “arms were longing to receive him”;
after his departure, she “followed him in idea every inch he moved
farther” away from her. Six years passed, and then he came again.
“I found my aunt,” he reported, June 19th, 1832, “wonderfully well, and
very nicely and comfortably lodged, and we have since been on the full
trot. She runs about the town with me, and skips up her two flights of
stairs as light and fresh at least as some folks I could name who are
not a fourth part of her age. In the morning till eleven or twelve she
is dull and weary; but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite
‘fresh and funny’ at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay,
even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.”
Their final meeting was in 1838, when Sir John’s Cape laurels were just
gathered; and he brought with him his eldest son, aged six. But the
old lady was terrified lest the child should come to harm; his food,
his sleep, his scramblings, his playthings, were all subjects of the
deepest anxiety. Then Sir John, desiring to spare her “the sadness of
farewell,” perpetrated a moonlight flitting, which left her dismayed
and desolate at the abrupt termination of the visit, and smarting
with the intolerable consciousness of opportunities lost for saying
what could now never be said. “All that passed,” she said, “was like
Sheridan’s Chapter of Accidents.” It was too much for her; she did not
desire the repetition of a pleasure rated at a price higher than she
could afford to pay. “I would not wish on any account,” she told Lady
Herschel in 1842, “to see either my nephew or you, my dear niece, again
in this world, for I could not endure the pain of parting once more;
but I trust I shall find and know you in the next.”
She lived habitually in the past, and found the present--as Mrs.
Knipping, Dietrich’s daughter said--“not only strange, but annoying.”
Sometimes she would rouse herself from a “melancholy lethargy” to spend
a few moments “in looking over my store of astronomical and other
memorandums of upwards of fifty years’ collecting, and destroying
all that might produce nonsense when coming through the hands of a
Block-kopf into the Zeitungen.” Again she would dip back into the
career of the “forty-foot,” or recall the choral performance to
which the tube had resounded not far from sixty years before, “when
I was one of the nimblest and foremost to get in and out of it. But
now--lack-a-day--I can hardly cross the room without help. But what of
that? Dorcas, in the _Beggars’ Opera_, says:
“‘One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too!’”
That venerable instrument marked for her the _ne plus ultra_ of optical
achievement. She would not admit the sacrilegious thought of its being
outdone. “I believe I have water on my brains,” she informed her nephew
in August, 1842, “and all my bones ache so that I can hardly crawl;
and, besides, sometimes a whole week passes without anybody coming
near me, till they stumble on a paragraph in the newspaper about
Gruithuisen’s discoveries, or Lord Queenstown’s great telescope, which
_shall_ beat Sir William Herschel’s all to nothing; and such a visit
sometimes makes me merry for a whole day.”
From time to time she wrote books of “Recollections,” which she
forwarded, with anxious care, to England. They contain nearly all that
is intimately known of Sir William Herschel’s life. The entries in her
“Day-book” ceased finally only on September 3rd, 1845. In the hope of
giving permanent form to the memories that haunted her, she began, at
ninety-two, “a piece of work which I despair of finishing before my
eyesight and life leave me in the lurch. You will, perhaps, wonder what
such a thing can be as I may pretend to do; but I cannot help it, and
shall not rest till I have wrote the history of the Herschels.” “You
remember,” she added, “you take the work in whatever state I may leave
it, and make the best of it at your leisure.” It remained a piquant
fragment. The fervour of her start was soon quenched by physical
collapse, and she acknowledged her powerlessness “to do anything beside
keeping herself alive.” Her last letter to Collingwood was finished
with difficulty, December 3rd, 1846. Monthly reports of her state,
however, continued to be sent thither by Miss Beckedorff, who, with
Mrs. Knipping, cared for her to the last.
In honour of her ninety-sixth birthday, the King of Prussia sent her,
through Humboldt’s friendly hands, the Gold Medal of Science; and on
the following anniversary, March 16th, 1847, she entertained the Crown
Prince and Princess for two hours. Not only with conversation; she
sang to them, too, a composition of Sir William’s, “Suppose we sing a
Catch.” She had a new gown and smart cap for the occasion; and seemed
“more revived than exhausted” by her efforts. Her last message to her
nephew and his family--sent March 31st--was to say, with her “best
love” “that she often wished to be with them, often felt alone, did not
quite like old age with its weaknesses and infirmities, but that she,
too, sometimes laughed at the world, liked her meals, and was satisfied
with Betty’s services.”
On the 9th of January, 1848, she tranquilly breathed her last, and “the
unquiet heart was at rest.” She was buried beside her parents in the
churchyard of the Gartengemeinde, at Hanover, with an epitaph of her
own composition.[F] It records that the eyes closed in death had in
life been turned towards the “starry heavens,” as her discoveries of
comets, and her participation in her brother’s “immortal labours,” bear
witness to future ages. By her special request a lock of “her revered
brother’s” hair, and an old almanac used by her father, were placed in
her coffin, which was escorted to the grave by royal carriages, and
covered with wreaths of laurel and cypress from the royal gardens at
Herrenhausen.
[F] “Der Blick der Verklärten war hienieden dem gestirnten
Himmel zugewandt; die eigenen Cometen-Entdeckungen,
und die Theilnahme an den unsterblichen Arbeiten ihres
Bruders, Wilhelm Herschel, zeugen davon bis in die späteste
Nachwelt.”
Caroline Herschel was not a woman of genius. Her mind was sound and
vigorous, rather than brilliant. No abstract enthusiasm inspired her;
no line of inquiry attracted her; she seems to have remained ignorant
even of the subsequent history of her own comets. She prized them as
trophies, but not unduly. The assignment of property in comets reminded
her, she humorously remarked, when in her ninety-third year, of the
children’s game, “He who first cries ‘Kick!’ shall have the apple.”
Yet her faculties were of no common order, and they were rendered
serviceable by moral strength and absolute devotedness. Her persistence
was indomitable, her zeal was tempered by good sense; her endurance,
courage, docility, and self-forgetfulness went to the limits of what
is possible to human nature. With her readiness of hand and eye, her
precision, her rapidity, her prompt obedience to a word or glance, she
realised the ideal of what an assistant should be.
Herself and her performances she held in small esteem. Compliments and
honours had no inflating effect upon her. Indeed, she deprecated them,
lest they should tend to diminish her brother’s glory. “Saying too
much of what I have done,” she wrote in 1826, “is saying too little
of him, for he did all. I was a mere tool which _he_ had the trouble
of sharpening and adapting for the purpose he wanted it, for lack of
a better. A little praise is very comforting, and I feel confident
of having deserved it for my patience and perseverance, but none for
great abilities or knowledge.” Again: “I did nothing for my brother but
what a well-trained puppy-dog would have done; that is to say, I did
what he commanded me.” And her entire and touching humility appears
concentrated in the following sentence from a letter to her nephew: “My
only reason for saying so much of myself is to show with what miserable
assistance your father made shift to obtain the means of exploring the
heavens.”
The aim in life of this admirable woman was not to become learned
or famous, but to make herself useful. Her function was, in her own
unvarying opinion, a strictly secondary one. She had no ambition.
Distinctions came to her unsought and incidentally. She was accordingly
content with the slight and fragmentary supply of knowledge sufficing
for the accurate performance of her daily tasks. No inner craving
tormented her into amplifying it. The following of any such impulse
would probably have impaired, rather than improved, her efficiency.
The turn of her mind was, above all things, practical. She used
formulæ as other women use pins, needles and scissors, for certain
definite purposes, but with complete indifference as to the mode of
their manufacture. What was required of her, however, she accomplished
superlatively well, and this was the summit of her desires. She shines,
and will continue to shine, by the reflected light that she loved.