served with his regiment for many years in the chilly climate of North
Germany, and was left at last broken down in health and spirits by the
many hardships of several severe European campaigns. Isaac Herschel was
a man of tastes and education above his position; but he had married a
person in some respects quite unfitted for him. His good wife, Anna,
though an excellent housekeeper and an estimable woman in her way, had
never even learned to write; and when the pair finally settled down to
old age in Hanover, they were hampered by the cares of a large family
of ten children. Respectable poverty in Germany is even more pressing
than in England; the decent poor are accustomed to more frugal fare and
greater privations than with us; and the domestic life of the Herschel
family circle must needs have been of the most careful and penurious
description. Still, Isaac Herschel dearly loved his art, and in it he
found many amends and consolations for the sordid shifts and troubles
of a straitened German household. All his spare time was given to
music, and in his later days he was enabled to find sufficient pupils
to eke out his little income with comparative comfort.
William Herschel, the great astronomer (born in 1738), was the fourth
child of his mother, and with his brothers he was brought up at the
garrison school in Hanover, together with the sons of the other common
soldiers. There he learned, not only the three R's, but also a little
French and English. Still, the boy was not content with these ordinary
studies; in his own playtime he took lessons in Latin and mathematics
privately with the regimental schoolmaster. The young Herschels,
indeed, were exceptionally fortunate in the possession of an excellent
and intelligent father, who was able to direct their minds into
channels which few people of their position in life have the
opportunity of entering. Isaac Herschel was partly of Jewish descent,
and he inherited in a marked degree two very striking Jewish gifts--a
turn for music, and a turn for philosophy. The Jews are probably the
oldest civilized race now remaining on earth; and their musical
faculties have been continuously exercised from a time long before the
days of David, so that now they produce undoubtedly a far larger
proportion of musicians and composers than any other class of the
population whatsoever. They are also deeply interested in the same
profound theological and philosophical problems which were discussed
with so much acuteness and freedom in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the
subtle argument of Job and his friends. There has never been a time
when the Jewish mind has not exercised itself profoundly on these deep
and difficult questions; and the Hanover bandsman inherited from his
Jewish ancestry an unusual interest in similar philosophical subjects.
Thus, while the little ones were sleeping in the same common room at
night, William and his father were often heard discussing the ideas of
such abstruse thinkers as Newton and Leibnitz, whose names must have
sounded strange indeed to the ordinary frequenters of the Hanover
barracks. On such occasions good dame Herschel was often compelled to
interpose between them, lest the loudness of their logic should wake
the younger children in the crib hard by.
William, however, possessed yet another gift, which he is less likely
to have derived from the Jewish side of the house. He and his brother
Alexander were both distinguished by a natural taste for mechanics, and
early gave proof of their learning by turning neat globes with the
equator and ecliptic accurately engraved upon them, or by making model
instruments for their own amusement out of bits of pasteboard. Thus, in
early opportunities and educational advantages, the young Herschels
certainly started in life far better equipped than most working men's
sons; and, considering their father's doubtful position, it may seem at
first sight rather a stretch of language to describe him as a working
man at all. Nevertheless, when one remembers the humble grade of
military bandsmen in Germany, even at the present day, and the fact
that most of the Herschel family remained in that grade during all
their lives, it is clear that William Herschel's life may be fairly
included within the scope of the present series. "In my fifteenth
year," he says himself, "I enlisted in military service," and he
evidently looked upon his enlistment in exactly the same light as that
of any ordinary soldier.
England and Hanover were, of course, very closely connected together at
the middle of the last century. The king moved about a great deal from
one country to the other; and in 1755 the regiment of Hanoverian Guards
was ordered on service to England for a year. William Herschel, then
seventeen years of age, and already a member of the band, went together
with his father; and it was in this modest capacity that he first made
acquaintance with the land where he was afterwards to attain the
dignity of knighthood and the post of the king's astronomer. He played
the oboe, like his father before him, and no doubt underwent the usual
severe military discipline of that age of stiff stocks and stern
punishments. His pay was very scanty, and out of it he only saved
enough to carry home one memento of his English experiences. That
memento was in itself a sufficient mark of the stuff from which young
Herschel was compounded. It was a copy of "Locke on the Human
Understanding." Now, Locke's famous work, oftener named than read, is a
very tough and serious bit of philosophical exposition; and a boy of
seventeen who buys such a book out of his meagre earnings as a military
bandsman is pretty sure not to end his life within the four dismal bare
walls of the barrack. It is indeed a curious picture to imagine young
William Herschel, among a group of rough and boisterous German
soldiers, discussing high mathematical problems with his father, or
sitting down quietly in a corner to read "Locke on the Human
Understanding."
In 1757, during the Seven Years' War, Herschel was sent with his
regiment to serve in the campaign of Rossbach against the French. He
was not physically strong, and the hardships of active service told
terribly upon the still growing lad. His parents were alarmed at his
appearance when he returned, and were very anxious to "remove" him from
the service. That, however, was by no means an easy matter for them to
accomplish. They had no money to buy his discharge, and so, not to call
the transaction by any other than its true name, William Herschel was
forced to run away from the army. We must not judge too harshly of this
desertion, for the times were hard, and the lives of men in Herschel's
position were valued at very little by the constituted authorities.
Long after, it is said, when Herschel had distinguished himself by the
discovery of the planet Uranus, a pardon for this high military offence
was duly handed to him by the king in person on the occasion of his
first presentation. George III. was not a particularly wise or
brilliant man; but even he had sense enough to perceive that William
Herschel could serve the country far better by mapping out the stars of
heaven than by playing the oboe to the royal regiment of Hanoverian
Guards.
William was nineteen when he ran away. His good mother packed his boxes
for him with such necessaries as she could manage, and sent them after
him to Hamburg, but, to the boy's intense disgust, she forgot to send
the copy of "Locke on the Human Understanding." What a sturdy deserter
we have here, to be sure! "She, dear woman," he says plaintively, "knew
no other wants than good linen and clothing!" So William Herschel the
oboe player started off alone to earn his living as best he might in
the great world of England. It is strange he should have chosen that,
of all European countries; for there alone he was liable to be arrested
as a deserter: but perhaps his twelvemonth's stay in London may have
given him a sense of being at home amongst us which he would have
lacked in any other part of Europe. At any rate, hither he came, and
for the next three years picked up a livelihood, we know not how, as
many other excellent German bandsmen have done before and since him.
Our information about his early life is very meagre, and at this period
we lose sight of him for a while altogether.
About the year 1760, however, we catch another incidental glimpse of
the young musician in his adopted country. By that time, he had found
himself once more a regular post as oboist to the Durham militia, then
quartered for its muster at Pontefract. A certain Dr. Miller, an
organist at Doncaster, was dining one evening at the officers' mess;
when his host happened to speak to him in high praise of a young German
they had in their band, who was really, he said, a most remarkable and
spirited performer. Dr. Miller asked to see (or rather hear) this
clever musician; so Herschel was called up, and made to go through a
solo for the visitor's gratification. The organist was surprised at his
admirable execution, and asked him on what terms he was engaged to the
Durham militia. "Only from month to month," Herschel answered. "Then
leave them at the end of your month," said Miller, "and come to live
with me. I'm a single man; I think we can manage together; and I'm sure
I can get you a better situation." Herschel frankly accepted the offer
so kindly made, and seems to have lived for much of the next five years
with Miller in his little two-roomed cottage at Doncaster. Here he took
pupils and performed in the orchestra at public concerts, always in a
very quiet and modest fashion. He also lived for part of the time with
a Mr. Bulman at Leeds, for whom he afterwards generously provided a
place as clerk to the Octagon Chapel at Bath. Indeed, it is a very
pleasing trait in William Herschel's character that to the end he was
constantly engaged in finding places for his early friends, as well as
for the less energetic or less fortunate members of his own family.
During these years, Herschel also seems to have given much attention to
the organ, which enabled him to make his next step in life in 1765,
when he was appointed organist at Halifax. Now, there is a great social
difference between the position of an oboe-player in a band and a
church organist; and it was through his organ-playing that Herschel was
finally enabled to leave his needy hand-to-mouth life in Yorkshire. A
year later, he obtained the post of organist to the Octagon Chapel at
Bath, an engagement which gave him new opportunities of turning his
mind to the studies for which he possessed a very marked natural
inclination. Bath was in those days not only the most fashionable
watering-place in England, but almost the only fashionable
watering-place in the whole kingdom. It was, to a certain extent, all
that Brighton, Scarborough, Buxton, and Harrogate are to-day, and
something more. In our own time, when railways and steamboats have so
altered the face of the world, the most wealthy and fashionable English
society resorts a great deal to continental pleasure towns like Cannes,
Nice, Florence, Vichy, Baden, Ems, and Homburg; but in the eighteenth
century it resorted almost exclusively to Bath. The Octagon Chapel was
in one sense the centre of life in Bath; and through his connection
with it, Herschel was thrown into a far more intelligent and learned
society than that which he had left behind him in still rural
Yorkshire. New books came early to Bath, and were read and discussed in
the reading-rooms; famous men and women came there, and contributed
largely to the intellectual life of the place; the theatre was the
finest out of London; the Assembly Rooms were famous as the greatest
resort of wit and culture in the whole kingdom. Herschel here was far
more in his element than in the barracks of Hanover, or in the little
two-roomed cottage at rustic Doncaster.
He worked very hard indeed, and his work soon brought him comfort and
comparative wealth. Besides his chapel services, and his later
engagement in the orchestra of the Assembly Rooms, he had often as many
as thirty-eight private pupils in music every week; and he also
composed a few pieces, which were published in London with some modest
success. Still, in spite of all these numerous occupations, the eager
young German found a little leisure time to devote to self-education;
so much so that, after a fatiguing day of fourteen or sixteen hours
spent in playing the organ and teaching, he would "unbend his mind" by
studying the higher mathematics, or give himself a lesson in Greek and
Italian. At the same time, he was also working away at a line of study,
seemingly useless to him, but in which he was afterwards to earn so
great and deserved a reputation. Among the books he read during this
Bath period were Smith's "Optics" and Lalande's "Astronomy." Throughout
all his own later writings, the influence of these two books,
thoroughly mastered by constant study in the intervals of his Bath
music lessons, makes itself everywhere distinctly felt.
Meanwhile, the family at Hanover had not been flourishing quite so
greatly as the son William was evidently doing in wealthy England.
During all those years, the young man had never forgotten to keep up a
close correspondence with his people in Germany. Already, in 1764,
during his Yorkshire days, William Herschel had managed out of his
savings as an oboe-player to make a short trip to his old home; and his
sister Carolina, afterwards his chief assistant in his astronomical
labours, notes with pleasure the delight she felt in having her beloved
brother with her once more, though she, poor girl, being cook to the
household apparently, could only enjoy his society when she was not
employed "in the drudgery of the scullery." A year later, when William
had returned to England again, and had just received his appointment as
organist at Halifax, his father, Isaac, had a stroke of paralysis which
ended his violin-playing for ever, and forced him to rely thenceforth
upon copying music for a precarious livelihood. In 1767 he died, and
poor Carolina saw before her in prospect nothing but a life of that
domestic drudgery which she so disliked. "I could not bear the idea of
being turned into a housemaid," she says; and she thought that if only
she could take a few lessons in music and fancy work she might get "a
place as governess in some family where the want of a knowledge of
French would be no objection." But, unhappily, good dame Herschel, like
many other uneducated and narrow-minded persons, had a strange dread of
too much knowledge. She thought that "nothing further was needed," says
Carolina, "than to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be
taught to make household linen; so all that my father could do was to
indulge me sometimes with a short lesson on the violin when my mother
was either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief
that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my
eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little
less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame
Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are
sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for "looking too
high"!
Nevertheless, Carolina managed by rising early to take a few lessons at
daybreak from a young woman whose parents lived in the same cottage
with hers; and so she got through a little work before the regular
daily business of the family began at seven. Imagine her delight then,
just as the difficulties after her father's death are making that
housemaid's place seem almost inevitable, when she gets a letter from
William at Bath, asking her to come over to England and join him at
that gay and fashionable city. He would try to prepare her for singing
at his concerts; but if after two years' trial she didn't succeed, he
would take her back again to Hanover himself. In 1772, indeed, William
in person came over to fetch her, and thenceforth the brother and
sister worked unceasingly together in all their undertakings to the day
of the great astronomer's death.
About this time Herschel had been reading Ferguson's "Astronomy," and
felt very desirous of seeing for himself the objects in the heavens,
invisible to the naked eye, of which he there found descriptions. For
this purpose he must of course have a telescope. But how to obtain one?
that was the question. There was a small two-and-a-half foot instrument
on hire at one of the shops at Bath; and the ambitious organist
borrowed this poor little glass for a time, not merely to look through,
but to use as a model for constructing one on his own account. Buying
was impossible, of course, for telescopes cost much money: but making
would not be difficult for a determined mind. He had always been of a
mechanical turn, and he was now fired with a desire to build himself a
telescope eighteen or twenty feet long. He sent to London for the
lenses, which could not be bought at Bath; and Carolina amused herself
by making a pasteboard tube to fit them in her leisure hours. It was
long before he reached twenty feet, indeed: his first effort was a
seven-foot, attained only "after many continuous determined trials."
The amateur pasteboard frame did not fully answer Herschel's
expectations, so he was obliged to go in grudgingly for the expense of
a tin tube. The reflecting mirror which he ought to have had proved too
dear for his still slender purse, and he thus had to forego it with
much regret. But he found a man at Bath who had once been in the
mirror-polishing line; and he bought from him for a bargain all his
rubbish of patterns, tools, unfinished mirrors and so forth, with which
he proceeded to experiment on the manufacture of a proper telescope. In
the summer, when the season was over, and all the great people had left
Bath, the house, as Carolina says ruefully, "was turned into a
workshop." William's younger brother Alexander was busy putting up a
big lathe in a bedroom, grinding glasses and turning eyepieces while in
the drawing-room itself, sacred to William's aristocratic pupils, a
carpenter, sad to relate, was engaged in making a tube and putting up
stands for the future telescopes. Sad goings on, indeed, in the family
of a respectable music-master and organist! Many a good solid
shopkeeper in Bath must no doubt have shaken his grey head solemnly as
he passed the door, and muttered to himself that that young German
singer fellow was clearly going on the road to ruin with his foolish
good-for-nothing star-gazing.
In 1774, when William Herschel was thirty-six, he had at last
constructed himself a seven-foot telescope, and began for the first
time in his life to view the heavens in a systematic manner. From this
he advanced to a ten-foot, and then to one of twenty, for he meant to
see stars that no astronomer had ever yet dreamt of beholding. It was
comparatively late in life to begin, but Herschel had laid a solid
foundation already, and he was enabled therefore to do an immense deal
in the second half of those threescore years and ten which are the
allotted average life of man, but which he himself really overstepped
by fourteen winters. As he said long afterwards with his modest manner
to the poet Campbell, "I have looked further into space than ever human
being did before me; I have observed stars of which the light, it can
be proved, must take two millions of years to reach this earth." That
would have been a grand thing for any man to be able truthfully to say
under any circumstances: it was a marvellous thing for a man who had
laboured under all the original disadvantages of Herschel--a man who
began life as a penniless German bandsman, and up to the age of
thirty-six had never even looked through a telescope.
At this time, Herschel was engaged in playing the harpsichord in the
orchestra of the theatre; and it was during the interval between the
acts that he made his first general survey of the heavens. The moment
his part was finished, he would rush out to gaze through his telescope;
and in these short periods he managed to observe all the visible stars
of what are called the first, second, third, and fourth magnitudes.
Henceforth he went on building telescope after telescope, each one
better than the last; and now all his glasses were ground and polished
either by his own hand or by his brother Alexander's. Carolina
meanwhile took her part in the workshop; but as she had also to sing at
the oratorios, and her awkward German manners might shock the sensitive
nerves of the Bath aristocrats, she took two lessons a week for a whole
twelvemonth (she tells us in her delightfully straightforward fashion)
"from Miss Fleming, the celebrated dancing mistress, to drill me for a
gentlewoman." Poor Carolina, there she was mistaken: Miss Fleming could
make her into no gentlewoman, for she was born one already, and nothing
proves it more than the perfect absence of false shame with which in
her memoirs she tells us all these graphic little details of their
early humble days.
While they were thus working at Bath an incident occurred which is
worth mentioning because it shows the very different directions in
which the presence or the want of steady persistence may lead the
various members of the very self-same family. William received a letter
from his widowed mother at Hanover to say, in deep distress, that
Dietrich, the youngest brother, had run away from home, it was supposed
for the purpose of going to India, "with a young idler no older than
himself." Forthwith, the budding astronomer left the lathe where he was
busy turning an eye-piece from a cocoa-nut shell, and, like a good son
and brother as he always was, hurried off to Holland and thence to
Hanover. No Dietrich was anywhere to be found. But while he was away,
Carolina at Bath received a letter from Dietrich himself, to tell her
ruefully he was "laid up very ill" at a waterside tavern in
Wapping--not the nicest or most savoury East End sailor-suburb of
London. Alexander immediately took the coach to town, put the prodigal
into a decent lodging, nursed him carefully for a fortnight, and then
took him down with him in triumph to the family home at Bath. There
brother William found him safe and sound on his return, under the
sisterly care of good Carolina. A pretty dance he had led the two
earnest and industrious astronomers; but they seem always to have
treated this black sheep of the family with uniform kindness, and long
afterwards Sir William remembered him favourably in his last will.
In 1779 and the succeeding years the three Herschels were engaged
during all their spare time in measuring the heights of about one
hundred mountains in the moon, which William gauged by three different
methods. In the same year, he made an acquaintance of some importance
to him, as forming his first introduction to the wider world of science
in London and elsewhere. Dr. Watson, a Fellow of the Royal Society,
happened to see him working at his telescope; and this led to a visit
from the electrician to the amateur astronomer. Dr. Watson was just
then engaged in getting up a Philosophical Society at Bath (a far rarer
institution at that time in a provincial town than now), and he invited
William Herschel to join it. Here Herschel learned for the first time
to mix with those who were more nearly his intellectual equals, and to
measure his strength against other men's.
It was in 1781 that Herschel made the great discovery which immediately
established his fame as an astronomer, and enabled him to turn from
conducting concerts to the far higher work of professionally observing
the stars. On the night of Tuesday, March 13th, Herschel was engaged in
his usual systematic survey of the sky, a bit at a time, when his
telescope lighted among a group of small fixed stars upon what he at
first imagined to be a new comet. It proved to be no comet, however,
but a true planet--a veritable world, revolving like our own in a
nearly circular path around the sun as centre, though far more remote
from it than the most distant planet then known, Saturn. Herschel
called his new world the _Georgium Sidus_ (King George's star) in
honour of the reigning monarch; but it has since been known as Uranus.
Astronomers all over Europe were soon apprised of this wonderful
discovery, and the path of the freshly found planet was computed by
calculation, its distance from the sun being settled at nineteen times
that of our own earth.