Tag: Richard Holmes

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena. 

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder takes us into the period between about 1760 and 1830, a time of rapid change in the sciences – and indeed everywhere else. In literary and philosophical matters, we saw the rise of Romanticism, a counterforce to the stodgy orderliness of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason and humanity’s perfectibility. Romanticism, against that backdrop, emphasized a rather more complex view of human nature and the world, one full of the interplay between light and dark, reason and unreason, and chaos and order, where nothing was ever quite completed and put away neatly. It also, in poetry, in particular, brought attention to the importance of personal, subjective experience in a way that had never really been the case before. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how revolutionary Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were when it was first published in 1798.

In others of his books that I have read on this blog, Holmes has dealt with the heroes and heroines of British Romanticism – the likes of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. In the Age of Wonder, he puts forward a Romantic science, to go alongside literary Romanticism. Both science and art, he argues, are linked by a feeling of wonder. Romantic science and its popularizes took Romantic ideas of genius and work, that “ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery”, and used it to shape the myths it told about its famous figures – astronomers, explorers of continents and the contents of test tubes.

One of Holmes’ many achievements in the book is to draw together science and arts once more, to demonstrate to a new set of readers that the two cultures set out in C. P. Snow’s famous lecture of the same name need not be divided but ought instead to be harmonious. Coleridge and Humphry Davy inhaled laughing gas together, after all. But beyond simply making use of the material facts, it is Holmes’ particular artistic talent which serves this end. Holmes makes science exciting – to a non-scientist such as myself – by infusing it with flesh and blood. The Age of Wonder is the fruit of countless years of research. It takes figures from the past and brings them into immediacy so that their discoveries seem to matter, not just for us, whose world is based upon the past, but for their contemporaries. We see just how revolutionary, for example, Davy’s safety lamp for mining was, because Holmes recreates the world of the miner – ugly, dirty, brutish, and short.

We meet a cast of characters ranging from Joseph Banks, who in his youth was an explorer and botanist and who later came to lead the Royal Society (Britain’s great academy for the sciences) for over forty years, to William Herschel and his sister Caroline, Germans from Hanover who after emigrating to England came to revolutionize our understanding of the stars. Although the focus is on British science, Holmes gives us a sense of how European science was at the time, highlighting the connections between figures like Lichtenberg and Humboldt in the German lands, Linnaeus further North, and various French scientists, with their British counterparts.

At the same time, Holmes shows an increasing politicisation of science that is now somewhat familiar. Much of the book takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and although these wars were punctuated by years of peace, relations between France and Britain were not always cordial. British scientists were often awarded prizes in France which they were kindly advised not to collect. The technology of hot air balloons, which to us now seems so innocent, once was a source of great anxiety, as it was feared that the French could use it to send an entire army across the Channel to catch the British by surprise. 

Perhaps this is most obvious in the case of Mungo Park. He was an explorer from Scotland who took two journeys in West Africa around the turn of the century. The first time he travelled almost on his own, a kind of proto-backpacker, relying on the kindness of the locals he met to see him safely home. The result of this was kidnap and torture, and his papers only survived because they were stored safely in his hat. Still, rather surprisingly, Park made it out of Africa and told his tale. He returned to country life in Scotland but grew restless. He declared he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors” than stay in these “lonely heaths and gloomy hills”. He organized another expedition, but this time his financial backing came from the Colonial Office. Instead of a one-man jaunt, he led nearly a hundred soldiers. As happened all too often, a few cheery letters arrived from the coast and then rumour ended up being all was left of Park. Captain Cook, whose arrival at Tahiti begins The Age of Wonder, also died after peaceful methods of engaging with natives were replaced by a more aggressive, violent, and indeed imperial approach.

Holmes’ telling of Park’s story is gripping. It wouldn’t look out of place next to Lytton Strachey’s tale of General Gordon in Eminent Victorians. Of course, that is why Holmes’ book is so effective. This is less a work of history than a group biography, “a relay race of scientific stories,” that “link together to explore a larger historical narrative”. Through these stories – of balloonists and astronomers, physicians, and inventors – we have a sense of history passing.

Though there are dates, this is not history as a cascade of facts. We see time passing through the ageing and decline of a cast of characters. Joseph Banks goes from a spry young man to a gout-ridden old one, Davy suffers a stroke and a rapid decline. Almost without noticing it, we realise that one cast of characters has, by the book’s end, been shifted out for another. William and Caroline Herschel have been replaced by their son John, Charles Babbage has come onto the scene, and Michael Faraday has begun to eclipse his mentor Davy. With them, Holmes stops.

Though we wish he could continue forever, his endpoint is not an arbitrary one. Science and artistic Romanticism could coexist for a good reason. Wonder was the natural feeling of these scientists because they could more or less maintain Christian belief as they worked. Their discoveries seemed to reveal God’s greatness – the watchmaker analogy suggested by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – more than they did His absence. There was not as yet a pronounced sense that science was undermining God.

But by the end of The Age of Wonder, this is much less true. Materialism, founded on a sense of deep time and deep space, begins chipping away at the old certainties. And when the book finally ends with Charles Darwin setting off in 1831 towards the discoveries that would make his name, we have a sense almost of apprehension. Gone are the days when a man like Davy could write bad poetry and play with gases, or Novalis could journey into the depths of the earth to look at rocks before writing poetry that actually works. The armies have been drawn up – the artists, retaining their romantic ethos; and the scientists, retaining their commitment to truth. To this day, there are too few connections between them.

Holmes’ work is itself a source of wonder. And for that, it already serves to begin building bridges between science and the arts. To restore the sense of wonder at science is essential to rekindling our present interest in it. The facts are never as important as we may claim they are, at least when we ourselves are not donning lab coats. An artistic approach, that teaches us to see in a new way by recreating the past and the excitement of its questions and problems, is what is truly necessary to make us more rounded readers and beings in the world. And that is exactly what The Age of Wonder provides.

More Holmes can be found here and here.