Herschel's observation of this very remote and seemingly petty world,
we must remember that up to that date all the planets which circle
round our own sun had been familiarly known to everybody from time
immemorial. To suggest that there was yet another world belonging to
our system outside the path of the furthest known planet would have
seemed to most people like pure folly. Since then, we have grown quite
accustomed to the discovery of a fresh small world or two every year,
and we have even had another large planet (Neptune), still more remote
than Herschel's Uranus, added to the list of known orbs in our own
solar system. But in Herschel's day, nobody had ever heard of a new
planet being discovered since the beginning of all things. A hundred
years before, an Italian astronomer, it is true, had found out four
small moons revolving round Saturn, besides the big moon then already
known; but for a whole century, everybody believed that the solar
system was now quite fully explored, and that nothing fresh could be
discovered about it. Hence Herschel's observation produced a very
different effect from, say, the discovery of the two moons which
revolve round Mars, in our own day. Even people who felt no interest
in astronomy were aroused to attention. Mr. Herschel's new planet
became the talk of the town and the subject of much admiring discussion
in the London newspapers. Strange, indeed, that an amateur astronomer
of Bath, a mere German music-master, should have hit upon a planet
which escaped the sight even of the king's own Astronomer Royal at
Greenwich.
Of course there were not people wanting who ascribed this wonderful
discovery of Herschel's to pure chance. If he hadn't just happened to
turn his telescope in that particular direction on that particular
night, he wouldn't have seen this Georgium Sidus they made such a fuss
about at all. Quite so. And if he hadn't built a twenty-foot
telescope for himself, he wouldn't have turned it anywhere at any time.
But Herschel himself knew better. "This was by no means the result of
chance," he said; "but a simple consequence of the position of the
planet on that particular evening, since it occupied precisely that
spot in the heavens which came in the order of the minute observations
that I had previously mapped out for myself. Had I not seen it just
when I did, I must inevitably have come upon it soon after, since my
telescope was so perfect that I was able to distinguish it from a fixed
star in the first minute of observation." Indeed, when once Herschel's
twenty-foot telescope was made, he could not well have failed in the
long run to discover Uranus, as his own description of his method
clearly shows. "When I had carefully and thoroughly perfected the
great instrument in all its parts," he says, "I made a systematic use
of it in my observation of the heaven, first forming a determination
never to pass by any, the smallest, portion of them without due
investigation. This habit, persisted in, led to the discovery of the
new planet (Georgium Sidus)." As well might one say that a skilled
mining surveyor, digging for coal, came upon the seam by chance, as
ascribe to chance the necessary result of such a careful and methodical
scrutiny as this.
Before the year was out, the ingenious Mr. Herschel of Bath was elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was also presented with the Copley
gold medal. From this moment all the distinguished people in Bath were
anxious to be introduced to the philosophical music-master; and,
indeed, they intruded so much upon his time that the daily music
lessons were now often interrupted. He was soon, however, to give up
lessons for ever, and devote himself to his more congenial and natural
work in astronomy. In May, 1782, he went up to London, to be formally
admitted to his Fellowship of the Royal Society. There he stayed so
long that poor Carolina was quite frightened. It was "double the time
which my brother could safely be absent from his scholars." The
connection would be broken up, and the astronomy would be the ruin of
the family. (A little of good old dame Herschel's housewifely leaven
here, perhaps.) But William's letters from London to "Dear Lina" must
soon have quieted her womanly fears. William had actually been
presented to the king, and "met with a very gracious reception." He had
explained the solar system to the king and queen, and his telescope was
to be put up first at Greenwich and then at Richmond. The Greenwich
authorities were delighted with his instrument; they have seen what
Herschel calls "MY fine double stars" with it. "All my papers are
printing," he tells Lina with pardonable pride, "and are allowed to be
very valuable." But he himself is far from satisfied as yet with the
results of his work. Evidently no small successes in the field of
knowledge will do for William Herschel. "Among opticians and
astronomers," he writes to Lina, "nothing now is talked of but WHAT
THEY CALL my great discoveries. Alas! this shows how far they are
behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are called GREAT.
Let me but get at it again! I will make such telescopes and see such
things!" Well, well, William Herschel, in that last sentence we get
the very keynote of true greatness and true genius.
But must he go back quietly to Bath and the toils of teaching? "An
intolerable waste of time," he thought it. The king happily relieved
him from this intolerable waste. He offered Herschel a salary of 200
pounds a year if he would come and live at Datchet, and devote himself
entirely to astronomical observations. It was by no means a munificent
sum for a king to offer for such labour; but Herschel gladly accepted
it, as it would enable him to give up the interruption of teaching, and
spend all his time on his beloved astronomy. His Bath friend, Sir
William Watson, exclaimed when he heard of it, "Never bought monarch
honour so cheap." Herschel was forty-three when he removed to Datchet,
and from that day forth he lived almost entirely in his observatory,
wholly given up to his astronomical pursuits. Even when he had to go
to London to read his papers before the Royal Society, he chose a
moonlight night (when the stars would be mostly invisible), so that it
might not interfere with his regular labours.
Poor Carolina was horrified at the house at Datchet, which seemed
terribly desolate and poor, even to her modest German ideas; but
William declared his willingness to live permanently and cheerfully
upon "eggs and bacon" now that he was at last free to do nothing on
earth but observe the heavens. Night after night he and Carolina
worked together at their silent task--he noting the small features with
his big telescope, she "sweeping for comets" with a smaller glass or
"finder." Herschel could have had no more useful or devoted assistant
than his sister, who idolized him with all her heart. Alexander, too,
came to stay with them during the slack months at Bath, and then the
whole strength of the family was bent together on their labour of love
in gauging the heavens.
But what use was it all? Why should they wish to go star-gazing? Well,
if a man cannot see for himself what use it was, nobody else can put
the answer into him, any more than they could put into him a love for
nature, or for beauty, or for art, or for music, if he had it not to
start with. What is the good of a great picture, a splendid oratorio,
a grand poem? To the man who does not care for them, nothing; to the
man who loves them, infinite. It is just the same with science. The
use of knowledge to a mind like Herschel's is the mere possession of
it. With such as he, it is a love, an object of desire, a thing to be
sought after for its town sake; and the mere act of finding it is in
itself purely delightful. "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and
the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is
better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine
gold. She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst
desire are not to be compared unto her." So, to such a man as
Herschel, that peaceful astronomer life at Datchet was indeed, in the
truest sense of those much-abused words, "success in life." If you had
asked some vulgar-minded neighbour of the great Sir William in his
later days whether the astronomer had been a successful man or not, he
would doubtless have answered, after his kind, "Certainly. He has been
made a knight, has lands in two counties, and has saved 35,000 pounds."
But if you had asked William Herschel himself, he would probably have
said, with his usual mixture of earnestness and humility, "Yes, I have
been a very fortunate man in life. I have discovered Uranus, and I
have gauged all the depths of heaven, as none before ever gauged them,
with my own great telescope."
Still, those who cannot sympathize with the pure love of knowledge for
its own sake--one of the highest and noblest of human aims--should
remember that astronomy is also of immense practical importance to
mankind, and especially to navigation and commerce. Unless great
astronomical calculations were correctly performed at Greenwich and
elsewhere, it would be impossible for any ship or steamer to sail with
safety from England to Australia or America. Every defect in our
astronomical knowledge helps to wreck our vessels on doubtful coasts;
every advance helps to save the lives of many sailors and the cargoes
of many merchants. It is this practical utility of astronomy that
justifies the spending of national money on observatories and transits
of Venus, and it is the best apology for an astronomer's life to those
who do not appreciate the use of knowledge for its own beauty.
At Datchet, Herschel not only made several large telescopes for sale,
for which he obtained large prices, but he also got a grant of 2000
pounds from the king to aid him in constructing his huge forty-foot
instrument. It was here, too, in 1783, that Herschel married. His
wife was a widow lady of scientific tastes like his own, and she was
possessed of considerable means, which enabled him henceforth to lay
aside all anxiety on the score of money. They had but one child, a
son, afterwards Sir John Herschel, almost as great an astronomer as his
father had been before him. In 1785, the family moved to Clay Hall, in
Old Windsor, and in 1786 to Slough, where Herschel lived for the
remainder of his long life. How completely his whole soul was bound up
in his work is shown in the curious fact recorded for us by Carolina
Herschel. The last night at Clay Hall was spent in sweeping the sky
with the great glass till daylight; and by the next evening the
telescope stood ready for observations once more in the new home at
Slough.
To follow Herschel through the remainder of his life would be merely to
give a long catalogue of his endless observations and discoveries among
the stars. Such a catalogue would be interesting only to astronomers;
yet it would truly give the main facts of Herschel's existence in his
happy home at Slough. Honoured by the world, dearly loved in his own
family, and engrossed with a passionate affection for his chosen
science, the great astronomer and philosopher grew grey in peace under
his own roof, in the course of a singularly placid and gentle old age.
In 1802 he laid before the Royal Society a list of five thousand new
stars, star-clusters, or other heavenly bodies which he had discovered,
and which formed the great body of his personal additions to
astronomical knowledge. The University of Oxford made him Doctor of
Laws, and very late in life he was knighted by the king--a too tardy
acknowledgment of his immense services to science. To the very last,
however, he worked on with a will; and, indeed, it is one of the great
charms of scientific interest that it thus enables a man to keep his
faculties on the alert to an advanced old age. In 1819, when Herschel
was more than eighty, he writes to his sister a short note--"Lina,
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." How delightful to find such a living
interest in life at the age of eighty!
On the 25th of August, 1822, this truly great and simple man passed
away, in his eighty-fifth year. It has been possible here only to
sketch out the chief personal points in his career, without dwelling
much upon the scientific importance of his later life-long labours; but
it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that Herschel's work was
no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the most profoundly
philosophical astronomical work ever performed, except perhaps Newton's
and Laplace's. Among astronomers proper there has been none
distinguished by such breadth of grasp, such wide conceptions, and such
perfect clearness of view as the self-taught oboe-player of Hanover.
V.
JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, PAINTER.
There is no part of France so singularly like England, both in the
aspect of the country itself and in the features and character of the
inhabitants, as Normandy. The wooded hills and dales, the frequent
copses and apple orchards, the numerous thriving towns and villages,
the towers and steeples half hidden among the trees, recall at every
step the very similar scenery of our own beautiful and fruitful
Devonshire. And as the land is, so are the people. Ages ago, about the
same time that the Anglo-Saxon invaders first settled down in England,
a band of similar English pirates, from the old common English home by
the cranberry marshes of the Baltic, drove their long ships upon the
long rocky peninsula of the Cotentin, which juts out, like a French
Cornwall, from the mainland of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and
beetling crags of busy Cherbourg. There they built themselves little
hamlets and villages of true English type, whose very names to this day
remind one of their ancient Saxon origin. Later on, the Danes or
Northmen conquered the country, which they called after their own name,
Normandy, that is to say, the Northmen's land. Mixing with the early
Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic
inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now
inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the
Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten
kinship with the English race. While other Frenchmen are generally
dark and thick-set, the Norman is, as a rule, a tall, fair-haired,
blue-eyed man, not unlike in build to our Yarmouth fisherman, or our
Kentish labourers. In body and mind, there is something about him even
now which makes him seem more nearly akin to us than the true Frenchmen
who inhabit almost all the rest of France.
In the village of Gruchy, near Greville, in this wild and beautiful
region of the Cotentin, there lived at the beginning of the present
century a sturdy peasant family of the name of Millet. The father of
the family was one of the petty village landholders so common in
France; a labourer who owned and tilled his own tiny patch of farm,
with the aid of his wife and children. We have now no class in England
exactly answering to the French peasant proprietors, who form so large
and important an element in the population just across the Channel.
The small landholder in France belongs by position to about the same
level as our own agricultural labourer, and in many ways is content
with a style of dress and a mode of living against which English
labourers would certainly protest with horror. And yet, he is a
proprietor, with a proprietor's sense of the dignity of his position,
and an ardent love of his own little much-subdivided corner of
agricultural land. On this he spends all his energies, and however
many children he may have, he will try to make a livelihood for all by
their united labour out of the soil, rather than let one of them go to
seek his fortune by any other means in the great cities. Thus the
ground is often tilled up to an almost ridiculous extent, the entire
labour of the family being sometimes expended in cultivating, manuring,
weeding, and tending a patch of land perhaps hardly an acre in size.
It is quite touching to see the care and solicitude with which these
toilsome peasants will laboriously lay out their bit of garden with
fruits or vegetables, making every line almost mathematically regular,
planting every pea at a measured distance, or putting a smooth flat
pebble under every strawberry on the evenly ridged-up vines. It is
only in the very last resort that the peasant proprietor will consent
to let one of his daughters go out to service, or send one of his sons
adrift to seek his fortune as an artisan in the big, unknown, outer
world.
Millet the elder, however, had nine children, which is an unusually
large number for a French peasant family (where the women ordinarily
marry late in life); and his little son Jean Francois (the second child
and eldest boy), though set to weed and hoe upon the wee farm in his
boyhood, was destined by his father for some other life than that of a
tiller of the soil. He was born in the year before Waterloo--1814--and
was brought up on his father's plot of land, in the hard rough way to
which peasant children in France are always accustomed. Bronzed by sun
and rain, poorly clad, and ill-fed, he acquired as a lad, from the open
air and the toilsome life he led, a vigour of constitution which
enabled him to bear up against the numerous hardships and struggles of
his later days. "A Norman Peasant," he loved to call himself always,
with a certain proud humility; and happily he had the rude health of
one all his life long.
Hard as he worked, little Francois' time was not entirely taken up with
attending to the fields or garden. He was a studious boy, and learned
not only to read and write in French, but also to try some higher
flights, rare indeed for a lad of his position. His family possessed
remarkable qualities as French peasants go; and one of his
great-uncles, a man of admirable strength of character, a priest in the
days of the great Revolution, had braved the godless republicans of his
time, and though deprived of his cure, and compelled to labour for his
livelihood in the fields, had yet guided the plough in his priestly
garments. His grandmother first taught him his letters; and when she
had instructed him to the length of reading any French book that was
put before him, the village priest took him in hand. In France, the
priest comes often from the peasant class, and remains in social
position a member of that class as long as he lives. But he always
possesses a fair knowledge of Latin, the language in which all his
religious services are conducted; and this knowledge serves as a key to
much that his unlearned parishioners could never dream of knowing.
Young Millet's parish priest taught him as much Latin as he knew
himself; and so the boy was not only able to read the Bible in the
Latin or Vulgate translation, but also to make acquaintance with the
works of Virgil and several others of the great Roman poets. He read,
too, the beautiful "Confessions" of St. Augustine, and the "Lives of
the Saints," which he found in his father's scanty library, as well as
the works of the great French preachers, Bossuet and Fenelon. Such
early acquaintance with these and many other masterpieces of higher
literature, we may be sure, helped greatly to mould the lad's mind into
that grand and sober shape which it finally acquired.
Jean Francois' love of art was first aroused by the pictures in an old
illustrated Bible which belonged to his father, and which he was
permitted to look at on Sundays and festivals. The child admired these
pictures immensely, and asked leave to be permitted to copy them. The
only time he could find for the purpose, however, was that of the
mid-day rest or siesta. It is the custom in France, as in Southern
Europe generally, for labourers to cease from work for an hour or so in
the middle of the day; and during this "tired man's holiday," young
Millet, instead of resting, used to take out his pencil and paper, and
try his hand at reproducing the pictures in the big Bible. His father
was not without an undeveloped taste for art. "See," he would say,
looking into some beautiful combe or glen on the hillside--"see that
little cottage half buried in the trees; how beautiful it is! I think
it ought to be drawn so--;" and then he would make a rough sketch of it
on some scrap of paper. At times he would model things with a bit of
clay, or cut the outline of a flower or an animal with his knife on a
flat piece of wood. This unexercised talent Francois inherited in a
still greater degree. As time went on, he progressed to making little
drawings on his own account; and we may be sure the priest and all the
good wives of Gruchy had quite settled in their own minds before long
that Jean Francois Millet's hands would be able in time to paint quite
a beautiful altar-piece for the village church.
By-and-by, when the time came for Francois to choose a trade, he being
then a big lad of about nineteen, it was suggested to his father that
young Millet might really make a regular painter--that is to say, an
artist. In France, the general tastes of the people are far more
artistic than with us; and the number of painters who find work for
their brushes in Paris is something immensely greater than the number
in our own smoky, money-making London. So there was nothing very
remarkable, from a French point of view, in the idea of the young
peasant turning for a livelihood to the profession of an artist. But
Millet's father was a sober and austere man, a person of great dignity
and solemnity, who decided to put his son's powers to the test in a
very regular and critical fashion. He had often watched Francois
drawing, and he thought well of the boy's work. If he had a real
talent for painting, a painter he should be; if not, he must take to
some other craft, where he would have the chance of making himself a
decent livelihood. So he told Francois to prepare a couple of
drawings, which he would submit to the judgment of M. Mouchel, a local
painter at Cherbourg, the nearest large town, and capital of the
department. Francois duly prepared the drawings, and Millet the elder
went with his, son to submit them in proper form for M. Mouchel's
opinion. Happily, M. Mouchel had judgment enough to see at a glance
that the drawings possessed remarkable merit. "You must be playing me
a trick," he said; "that lad could never have made these drawings." "I
saw him do them with my own eyes," answered the father warmly. "Then,"
said Mouchel, "all I can say is this: he has in him the making of a
great painter." He accepted Millet as his pupil; and the young man set
off for Cherbourg accordingly, to study with care and diligence under
his new master.
Cherbourg, though not yet at that time a great naval port, as it
afterwards became, was a busy harbour and fishing town, where the young
artist saw a great deal of a kind of life with which he possessed an
immense sympathy. The hard work of the fishermen putting out to sea on
stormy evenings, or toiling with their nets ashore after a sleepless
night, made a living picture which stamped itself deeply on his
receptive mind. A man of the people himself, born to toil and inured
to it from babyhood, this constant scene of toiling and struggling
humanity touched the deepest chord in his whole nature, so that some of
the most beautiful and noble of his early pictures are really
reminiscences of his first student days at Cherbourg. But after he had
spent a year in Mouchel's studio, sad news came to him from Gruchy.
His father was dying, and Francois was only just in time to see him
before he passed away. If the family was to be kept together at all,
Francois must return from his easel and palette, and take once more to
guiding the plough. With that earnest resolution which never forsook
him, Millet decided to accept the inevitable. He went back home once
more, and gave up his longings for art in order to till the ground for
his fatherless sisters.