Tag: Romanticism

The Devil, Perhaps – James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner

When I was a young teen, I attempted to make an agreement with God, which has given me a low hum of anxiety ever since. This is for the simple reason that I broke it, first in spirit and then eventually in practice. Now, I have no evidence that God did indeed agree to any deal, nor that He would exact the punishment I determined for myself for the breach. (Nor even that He exists to begin with.) Regardless, one consequence of the above is that since then my own innate sense of guilt has been bolstered by the feeling that I am well and truly metaphysically screwed, and that there may be no way out of the trap I both laid myself, and myself fell into, like an overconfident Mephistopheles. Bother though these feelings be, from them I do at least have an enhanced appreciation for tales involving the Faust myth and the idea of a soul eternally sold for earthly powers.

It is a long time since I’ve read such an interesting take on the whole topic as James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The “justified sinner” of the title is a young man who is convinced that he is one of God’s elect, and thus removed from all moral rules – a position known as antinomianism. It’s in line with some interpretations of Calvinism / the Reformed Church, the faith popular in Scotland at the time. With such convictions, the central character begins a string of unreasonable murders while yet believing himself every bit God’s chosen son.

Based on this description, we might be tempted to dismiss the work as a bit of fun and nothing more. Arguing against a position few of us hold from an unpopular faith, its relevance to us today can only be so great. Even if we extend the central idea concerning morality to bring into play other contexts where we might declare ourselves above its rules, often without being aware of it, such as in the case of radical politics, it still does not seem something meriting a whole novel.

Why then does Hogg succeed? He succeeds because his work is much more complicated than this simple description suggests. A Justified Sinner has a fascinating split structure, with the same tale told twice from different perspectives, a blurring of fact and fiction, and a curious interplay of brazen obviousness and paralysing ambiguity. More than just an argument against extremism, it emerges as a work soaked in the anxieties of an age where the promised clarity of the Enlightenment was being challenged by the ambiguities of experience as people actually lived it.

The Story

The story goes something like this. The Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan, inherits the family seat in Scotland in 1687. He marries a young woman of strong Calvinist convictions, who spends a single night with him before being so disgusted that she sets herself up in a different part of the estate, with only her friend, the priest Robert Wringham, for company. She gives birth to two sons, one certainly George’s and who takes his name, and one of more uncertain parentage, who is banished alongside her to live with Wringham, and takes the name Robert after him. Once older, the boys come into contact with one another, and in mysterious circumstances, George is murdered. His father dies of heartbreak, and Robert, born in wedlock and hence legitimate, takes over. Some time later, one of the elder George’s former lovers discovers young Robert and an accomplice to have been responsible for the murders and ties the new Laird up, only for him to flee just as the law is making its way to Dalcastle.

Anti-Antinomianism, then and now

The view of Christianity advanced by John Calvin, in Scotland and elsewhere, also known as Reformed Christianity, is easy for outsiders to criticise. It considers humans inherently sinful and that ascension to heaven is available to only a certain few, the “elect”. Importantly, however, election itself has nothing to do with moral merit or good works. It’s a choice God made at the beginning of time, so to speak, and you can’t convince Him otherwise. That means that if you are outside of the elect, or feel you are, you are basically trapped in despair. This idea is illustrated with terrible power by Jack Boughton, in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, who is convinced of his depravity and powerlessness to stop sinning. The result is that he continues to sin and loath himself, even though, as a human being, Robinson shows him to be as deserving of love as anyone. Perhaps Calvinism’s best popular defender these days is Robinson herself – her non-fiction explores Calvin’s legacy with greater depth and seriousness than I could. (Or indeed, than does Hogg here.)

For Hogg in his novel, the interest in Calvinism is in this idea of the elect and their relation to other obligations. If one is elected, then under certain interpretations of Calvinism, one can really do whatever one wants – because God chose you for election anyway, knowing this. The practical tension that the younger Robert faces is that he has “doubts, that, chosen as he knew he was from all eternity, still it might be possible for him to commit acts that would exclude him from the limits of the covenant.” Unfortunately, he has an accomplice or double or devil for a guide – a being calling itself Gil-Martin. As we learn in the second section of A Justified Sinner, this man is ready and waiting to convince Robert to kill whenever he starts with his worries again. If one is serving God, and one must be as one of the elect, then one can do anything one deems necessary because one can be sure it will be in God’s own service. Including, of course, murder.

It is tempting to laugh at such ideas, which are not the standard view in Calvinism, but we encounter people setting themselves outside of consistent moral rules almost every day. Religions are full of hypocrites, but so too are the irreligious, whose behaviour is conditioned by considerations of purity, something we see all too often in our decaying political discourse, especially on the internet. As soon as we learn someone is outside of our political group, we excuse ourselves of the responsibility of treating them as fully human and with the kindness and consideration we would someone of our own group. We dismiss them, denigrate them. Heaven forbid we should encounter them online, for we will then go through their entire post history to find something that gives them away as an enemy. In A Justified Sinner, there is a direct parallel in young Robert asking the older Robert about the spiritual qualities of a man he plans to murder to find the “gotcha” that proves it’s right to end his life.

The Novel’s Criticism of Antinomianism

If the criticism of antinomianism were only the dead that dot the novel’s pages, A Justified Sinner would be preaching to the converted, as I imagine the majority of its readers have never seriously contemplated murdering anyone. Yet the novel does much more than that in arguments against extremism, which does much to extend its interest today. The first way it does this is its emphasis on human fallibility through the courts and the priests, because for all young Robert’s interest in heavenly justice, the novel he inhabits is much more concerned with justice of an earthly sort. Among other situations, young Robert and George end up in court after a fight, there’s an investigation into George’s murder, and the elder George’s lover must disclaim knowledge of some stolen goods to save another woman’s life.

Each of these situations puts a crack in our idea of justice as a kind of idol. In the first, “the sheriff was a Whig,” and we hear that though it is “well known how differently the people of the present day, in Scotland, view the cases of their own party-men, and those of opposite political principles”, the situation at the time of the narrative was still worse. In the second case, the wrong man, a friend of George’s, is convicted of his murder, with contrary evidence being discounted, while in the third case, the pursuit of legal truth has to be neglected for the pursuit of moral truth and the discovery of Robert’s true purposes.

In a similar way, the treatment of religious discourse is such that we come to doubt the reliability of those who represent it. The priest Robert is a nasty man, more ready to “doom all that were aliens from God to destruction” than to wish them well, for example. And whenever the younger Robert doubts his obligation to murder, Gil-Martin always has a counterargument using scripture to get him back on track. Jesus himself came “with a sword”, so why shouldn’t young Robert? Alas, the Bible, being a big book, provides plenty of opportunities for crafting a more violent set of obligations upon Christians than we prefer to see these days.

One final point that is as obvious to me as it is impossible to consider for the younger Robert – how on earth does someone know they are one of the elect? In the younger Robert’s case, the only evidence is that his own probable father declares he is. But how can the priest be sure? We need not doubt the idea of election or the religious truth of Calvinism to doubt that it is practically possible to establish who is elected, and who is not. If we can’t trust authorities we have to trust our own consciences. This seems to be what A Justified Sinner is getting at, morally. Even young Robert, led astray by the devil, has one of those.

Narration and the Search for Truth

A Justified Sinner thus makes an argument against extremism first through its murders, then through its demonstration of the fallibility of scriptural interpretation and court justice. But where the book is most fascinating is at a still more fundamental level – the level of narration and structure themselves. This is because the entire book’s structure is itself an argument about the elusiveness of truth and hence an argument for moderation and carefulness.

A Justified Sinner is broken up into two main parts, with a final section tying them together. The first version of the story is “the editor’s narrative”, and details the version of the story that they could find from “history” and “tradition”. As a narrative, it covers the Story section earlier in this post. The narrator is largely a background presence, but his judgement against “the rage of fanaticism” of the events comes forth above all in his language. This is hard to miss – A Justified Sinner is at times anything but a subtle book. Young Robert is like a “demon”, a “devilish-looking youth” with a “malignant eye”. The narrator never says outright that either Robert or his familiar are devils, but they may as well do.

It’s not an ambiguous book, might be our conclusion from the first part of the work. But then the second section, the “Confessions”, begins, and things become a lot stranger. For here, the narrator is young Robert himself. He is convinced that he is guilty of no evil at all, and that what he did he did “in the faith of the promises, and justification by grace.” Through his condemnation of his brother (“ungodly and reprobate”) and father, and his black and white thinking, Robert’s narration provides a mirroring of the editor’s while relating many of the same events. Both, in their biases, cannot be true reflections of the world. By making the biases so obvious, it seems in fact that the text wants to make clear that neither is a true reflection.

The book does more than place two unambiguous texts against one another, for in Robert’s telling there’s also the problem of Gil-Martin. This creature, who has the ability to shapeshift, meets young Robert on the very morning when the priest has declared him one of the elect. The text allows a certain amount of uncertainty about who Gil-Martin really is, indeed whether he really exists at all beyond Robert’s mind: “I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious”.  

The overall result is that the narration is both real and unreal, both obvious and totally obfuscated at different moments. Robert is the subjectivity that becomes increasingly deranged, while the narrator is the attempt at objectivity that never quite works in spite of its best efforts. A Justified Sinner even contains a real letter from Hogg himself and features him as a minor character. It seems real, but it is so far from containing a simple truth that the only argument we can get from the text is that things will never be as certain as we want them to be. This, in turn, becomes an argument for moderation.

A Romantic Reaction

This line of method and argumentation also places A Justified Sinner within the context of other Romantic works. While the bulk of the novel is set in the early years of the 18th century and deals, indirectly, with a climate of significant religious tensions in Scotland at the time, its real thematic interests are Romantic. Specifically, they are anti-Enlightenment.

A Justified Sinner shares with writers like the German E.T.A. Hoffmann an engagement with the strangeness of perception. In Hoffmann’s Sandmann, a work full of looking-glasses and different perspectives – in this case, an epistolary section and a more impersonal narrative section – there is also a man who goes mad and acts violently out of a personal conviction. The anxiety as a whole likely leads back to a mixture of Kant and the Terror in France, where, in the latter case, the idea that all could be made rational led only to the guillotine. In A Justified Sinner, we have the sensible young George, who tries to reason with his brother and make peace with him, pitted against the thoroughly irrational Robert.

There are dark forces in the subconscious, and in the world itself. This was one key Romantic idea, as was the idea of the sublimity of subjective vision of the sort that Robert’s attitude embodies. In A Justified Sinner, the forces of unreason are stronger – first because Robert kills George, and then because he is driven mad himself. (More mad than mere murder). “Unreason”, though, has perhaps more negativity than what we really see here. What the novel suggests is just that there are forces beyond reason at play in the world, for good and for ill. The former is not too obvious unless we consider the work as a whole. In the final section, we return to the editor’s narrative to hear how he came across Robert’s Confessions. These were, we learn, miraculously preserved alongside his body in the grave of his eventual suicide.

In other words, God has intervened to bring us the anti-extremist message of this work. There’s a further irony, a further mystery. If God did do this, then perhaps the younger Robert was right all along – his life was serving God in an indirect way, because through A Justified Sinner we receive a text that reminds us of our obligations to follow His commandments. Whether this is the right interpretation, we shall never know – as with the rest of the book, it’s shrouded in the fog of mystery.

Conclusion

It’s by no means a perfect work, is Hogg’s. The language and characterisation, in particular, is at times so poor that I myself could have written it. (I learned since that Hogg had a thing against editing his works owing to a belief that he was a genius – I have taken this to heart as a warning). But the ideas here, the innovations of structure and narrative, make this a fine work to study, all the same. Plus, as a Scot myself who has barely read a thing by his fellow countrymen, it was a good place to start. Any other recommendations beyond Burns are welcome in the comments.

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. 

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.