Humphrey Davy - Consolations in Travel

H >> Humphrey Davy >> Consolations in Travel

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL;
OR, THE LAST DAYS OF A PHILOSOPHER.

BY SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, BART.,
_Late President of the Royal Society_.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1889

INTRODUCTION.

Humphry Davy was born at Penzance, in Cornwall, on the 17th of December,
1778, and died at Geneva on the 29th of May, 1829, at the age of fifty.
He was a philosopher who turned knowledge to wisdom; he was one of the
foremost of our English men of science; and this book, written when he
was dying, which makes Reason the companion of Faith, shows how he passed
through the light of earth into the light of heaven.

His father had a small patrimony at Varfell, in Ludgvan. His mother had
lost in early childhood both her parents within a few hours of each
other, and had been adopted by John Tonkin, an eminent surgeon in
Penzance, to whom, therefore, so to speak, Humphry Davy became grandson
by adoption. There were five such grandchildren--Humphry, the elder of
two boys, the other boy being named John, and three girls.

At a preparatory school and at the Penzance Grammar School Humphry Davy
was a noticeable boy. He read eagerly and showed great quickness of
imagination, delighted in legends, when eight years old told stories to
his companions, and as a boy wrote verse. There was a Quaker saddler who
made for himself an electrical machine and mechanical models, in which
young Davy took keen interest, and from that saddler, Robert Dunkin, came
the first impulse towards experiments in science. At fifteen Davy was
placed for further education at a school in Truro. A year later his
father died, and John Tonkin apprenticed him, on the 10th of February,
1795, to Dr. Borlase, a surgeon in large practice at Penzance. Medical
practitioners in those days dispensed their own medicines, and the
inquiring mind of this young apprentice being let loose upon a store-room
of chemicals, experimental chemistry became his favourite pursuit. His
grandfather, by adoption, allowed him to fit up a garret as a laboratory,
notwithstanding the fears of the household that "This boy, Humphry, will
blow us all into the air."

Activity and originality of mind, with a persistent habit of inquiry and
experiment, brought Davy friends who could appreciate and help him. When
Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol, was examining the Cornish coast, in 1798, he
came upon young Humphry Davy, was told of researches made by him, and
urged to engage him as laboratory assistant in a Pneumatic Institution
that he was then establishing in Bristol. Davy went in October, 1798,
then in his twentieth year; but his good friend, and grandfather by
adoption, had set his heart upon Humphry's becoming an eminent burgeon,
and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptation of a
laboratory for research. Men also know something of the trouble of the
hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumacious
chicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings of her love.

At Bristol Humphry Davy came into companionship with Coleridge and
Southey, who were then also at the outset of their career, and there are
poems of his in the Poetical Anthology then published by Southey. But at
the same time Davy contributed papers on "Heat, Light, and the
Combinations of Light," on "Phos-Oxygen and its Combinations," and on
"The Theory of Respiration," to a volume of West Country Collections,
that filled more than half the volume. He was experimenting then on
gases and on galvanism, and one day by experiment upon himself, in the
breathing of carburetted hydrogen, he almost put an end to his life.

In 1799 Count Rumford was founding the Royal Institution, and its home in
Albemarle Street was then bought for it. The first lecturer appointed
was in bad health, and in 1801 he was obliged to resign. Young Davy was
now known to men of science for the number and freshness of his
experiments, and for the substantial value of his chemical discoveries.
It was resolved by the managers, in July, 1801, that Humphry Davy be
appointed Assistant-Lecturer in Chemistry, Director of the Chemical
Laboratory, and assistant-editor of the journals of the Royal
Institution. His first remuneration was a room in the house, coals and
candles, and 100 pounds a year. Count Rumford held out the prospect of a
professorship with 300 pounds a year, and the certainty of full support
in the use of the laboratory for his own private research. His age then
was twenty-three. He at once satisfied men of science and amused people
of fashion. His energy was unbounded; there was a fascination in his
personal character and manner. He was a genial and delightful lecturer,
and his inventive genius was continually finding something new. A first
suggestion of the process of photography was dropped incidentally among
the records of researches that attracted more attention. Davy had been
little more than a year at the Royal Institution when he was made its
Professor of Chemistry. After another year he was made a Fellow. Dr.
Paris, his biographer, says that "the enthusiastic admiration which his
lectures obtained is at this period scarcely to be imagined. Men of the
first rank and talent--the literary and the scientific, the practical,
the theoretical--blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the
young, all crowded--eagerly crowded--the lecture-room." At the beginning
of the year 1805 his salary was raised to 400 pounds a year. In May of
that year the Royal Society awarded to him the Copley Medal. Within the
next two years he was elected Secretary of the Royal Society. Since 1800
he had been advancing knowledge by experiments with galvanism. The Royal
Institution raised a special fund to place at his disposal a more
powerful galvanic battery than any that had been constructed. The fame
of his discoveries spread over Europe.

The Institute of France gave Davy the Napoleon Prize of three thousand
francs for the best experiments in galvanism. Dublin, in 1810, paid Davy
four hundred guineas for some lectures upon his discoveries. The Farming
Society of Ireland gave him 750 pounds for six lectures on chemistry
applied to agriculture. In the following year he received more than a
thousand pounds for two courses of lectures at Dublin, and was sent home
with the honorary degree of LL.D. In April, 1812, he was knighted,
resigned his professorship at the Royal Institution, and "in order more
strongly to mark the high sense of his merits" he was elected Honorary
Professor of Chemistry. In the same month Davy married a young and rich
widow, who had charmed all Edinburgh by her beauty and her wit. Two
months after marriage Sir Humphry Davy dedicated to his wife his
"Elements of Chemical Philosophy." In March, 1813, he published his
"Elements of Agricultural Chemistry." He travelled abroad, and was
received with honour by the chief men of science in all places that he
visited. When, at Pavia, he first met Volta: he found that Volta had put
on full-dress to receive him.

In August, 1815, Davy's attention was drawn to the loss of life by
explosions of fire-damp, and by the end of the year he had devised his
safety-lamp. The coal owners subscribed 1,500 pounds for a testimonial,
gave him also a dinner and a service of plate. In October, 1818, he was
made a baronet. In November, 1820, he was elected President of the Royal
Society.

His next researches were chiefly on electro-magnetism and the protection
of the copper sheathing on ships' bottoms. At the end of 1826 his health
failed seriously. He went to Italy; resigned, in July, 1827, the
Presidency of the Royal Society; came back to England, longing for "the
fresh air of the mountains;" wrote and published his "Salmonia, or Days
of Fly-fishing." In the spring of 1828 he left England again. He was at
Rome in the winter of 1829, still engaged in quiet research, and it was
then that he wrote his "Consolations in Travel; or, the Last Days of a
Philosopher." His wife, who shone in London society, did not go with him
upon this last journey, but travelled day and night to reach him when
word came to her and to his brother John, who was a physician, that he
had again been struck with palsy and was dying. That stroke of palsy
followed immediately upon the finishing of the book now in the reader's
hand. Davy lived to see again his wife and brother, rallied enough to
leave Rome with them, and had got as far as Geneva on the 28th of May,
1829. He died in the next night.

H. M.

A NOTE,

_Prefixed to the First Edition, by Sir Humphry Davy's Brother_.

As is stated in the Preface which follows, this work was composed during
a period of bodily indisposition;--it was concluded at the very moment of
the invasion of the Author's last illness. Had his life been prolonged,
it is probable that some additions and some changes would have been made.
The editor does not consider himself warranted to do more than give to
the world a faithful copy, making only a few omissions and a few verbal
alterations. The characters of the persons of the dialogue were intended
to be ideal, at least in great part such they should be considered by the
reader; and, it is to be hoped, that the incidents introduced, as well as
the persons, will be viewed only as subordinate and subservient to the
sentiments and doctrines. The dedication, it may be specially noticed,
is the author's own, and in the very words dictated by him, at a time
when he had lost the power of writing except with extreme difficulty,
owing to the paralytic attack, although he retained in a very remarkable
manner all his mental faculties unimpaired and unclouded.

JOHN DAVY.
_London_,
_January 6th_, 1830.

TO THOMAS POOLE, ESQ. OF NETHER STOWEY
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
THIRTY YEARS OF CONTINUED AND FAITHFUL
FRIENDSHIP.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

Salmonia was written during the time of a partial recovery from a long
and dangerous illness. The present work was composed immediately after,
under the same unfavourable and painful circumstances, and at a period
when the constitution of the Author suffered from new attacks. He has
derived some pleasure and some consolation, when most other sources of
consolation and pleasure were closed to him, from this exercise of his
mind; and he ventures to hope that these hours of sickness may be not
altogether unprofitable to persons in perfect health.

_Rome_,
_February_ 21, 1829.

DIALOGUE THE FIRST. THE VISION.

I passed the autumn and the early winter of the years 18-- and 18-- at
Rome. The society was, as is usual in that metropolis of the old
Christian world, numerous and diversified. In it there were found many
intellectual foreigners and amongst them some distinguished Britons, who
had a higher object in making this city their residence than mere
idleness or vague curiosity. Amongst these my countrymen, there were two
gentlemen with whom I formed a particular intimacy and who were my
frequent companions in the visits which I made to the monuments of the
grandeur of the old Romans and to the masterpieces of ancient and modern
art. One of them I shall call Ambrosio: he was a man of highly
cultivated taste, great classical erudition, and minute historical
knowledge. In religion he was of the Roman Catholic persuasion; but a
Catholic of the most liberal school, who in another age might have been
secretary to Ganganelli. His views upon the subjects of politics and
religion were enlarged; but his leaning was rather to the power of a
single magistrate than to the authority of a democracy or even of an
oligarchy. The other friend, whom I shall call Onuphrio, was a man of a
very different character. Belonging to the English aristocracy, he had
some of the prejudices usually attached to birth and rank; but his
manners were gentle, his temper good, and his disposition amiable. Having
been partly educated at a northern university in Britain, he had adopted
views in religion which went even beyond toleration and which might be
regarded as entering the verge of scepticism. For a patrician he was
very liberal in his political views. His imagination was poetical and
discursive, his taste good and his tact extremely fine, so exquisite,
indeed, that it sometimes approached to morbid sensibility, and disgusted
him with slight defects and made him keenly sensible of small perfections
to which common minds would have been indifferent.

In the beginning of October on a very fine afternoon I drove with these
two friends to the Colosaeum, a monument which, for the hundredth time
even, I had viewed with a new admiration; my friends partook of my
sentiments. I shall give the conversation which occurred there in their
own words. Onuphrio said, "How impressive are those ruins!--what a
character do they give us of the ancient Romans, what magnificence of
design, what grandeur of execution! Had we not historical documents to
inform us of the period when this structure was raised and of the
purposes for which it was designed, it might be imagined the work of a
race of giants, a Council Chamber for those Titans fabled to have warred
against the gods of the pagan mythology. The size of the masses of
travertine of which it is composed is in harmony with the immense
magnitude of the building. It is hardly to be wondered at that a people
which constructed such works for their daily sports, for their usual
amusements, should have possessed strength, enduring energy, and
perseverance sufficient to enable them to conquer the world. They appear
always to have formed their plans and made their combinations as if their
power were beyond the reach of chance, independent of the influence of
time, and founded for unlimited duration--for eternity!"

Ambrosio took up the discourse of Onuphrio, and said, "The aspect of this
wonderful heap of ruins is so picturesque that it is impossible to regret
its decay; and at this season of the year the colours of the vegetation
are in harmony with those of the falling ruins, and how perfectly the
whole landscape is in tone! The remains of the palace of the Caesars and
of the golden halls of Nero appear in the distance, their gray and
tottering turrets and their moss-stained arches reposing, as it were,
upon the decaying vegetation: and there is nothing that marks the
existence of life except the few pious devotees, who wander from station
to station in the arena below, kneeling before the cross, and
demonstrating the triumph of a religion, which received in this very spot
in the early period of its existence one of its most severe persecutions,
and which, nevertheless, has preserved what remains of that building,
where attempts were made to stifle it almost at its birth; for, without
the influence of Christianity, these majestic ruins would have been
dispersed or levelled to the dust. Plundered of their lead and iron by
the barbarians, Goths, and Vandals, and robbed even of their stones by
Roman princes, the Barberini, they owe what remains of their relics to
the sanctifying influence of that faith which has preserved for the world
all that was worth preserving, not merely arts and literature but
likewise that which constitutes the progressive nature of intellect and
the institutions which afford to us happiness in this world and hopes of
a blessed immortality in the next. And, being of the faith of Rome, I
may say, that the preservation of this pile by the sanctifying effect of
a few crosses planted round it, is almost a miraculous event. And what a
contrast the present application of this building, connected with holy
feelings and exalted hopes, is to that of the ancient one, when it was
used for exhibiting to the Roman people the destruction of men by wild
beasts, or of men, more savage than wild beasts, by each other, to
gratify a horrible appetite for cruelty, founded upon a still more
detestable lust, that of universal domination! And who would have
supposed, in the time of Titus, that a faith, despised in its
insignificant origin, and persecuted from the supposed obscurity of its
founder and its principles, should have reared a dome to the memory of
one of its humblest teachers, more glorious than was ever framed for
Jupiter or Apollo in the ancient world, and have preserved even the ruins
of the temples of the pagan deities, and have burst forth in splendour
and majesty, consecrating truth amidst the shrines of error, employing
the idols of the Roman superstition for the most holy purposes and rising
a bright and constant light amidst the dark and starless night which
followed the destruction of the Roman empire!"

Onuphrio now resumed the discourse. He said, "I have not the same
exalted views on the subject which our friend Ambrosio has so eloquently
expressed. Some little of the perfect state in which these ruins exist
may have been owing to causes which he has described; but these causes
have only lately begun to operate, and the mischief was done before
Christianity was established at Rome. Feeling differently on these
subjects, I admire this venerable ruin rather as a record of the
destruction of the power of the greatest people that ever existed, than
as a proof of the triumph of Christianity; and I am carried forward in
melancholy anticipation to the period when even the magnificent dome of
St. Peter's will be in a similar state to that in which the Colosaeum now
is, and when its ruins may be preserved by the sanctifying influence of
some new and unknown faith; when, perhaps, the statue of Jupiter, which
at present receives the kiss of the devotee, as the image of St. Peter,
may be employed for another holy use, as the personification of a future
saint or divinity; and when the monuments of the papal magnificence shall
be mixed with the same dust as that which now covers the tombs of the
Caesars. Such, I am sorry to say, is the general history of all the
works and institutions belonging to humanity. They rise, flourish, and
then decay and fall; and the period of their decline is generally
proportional to that of their elevation. In ancient Thebes or Memphis
the peculiar genius of the people has left us monuments from which we can
judge of their arts, though we cannot understand the nature of their
superstitions. Of Babylon and of Troy the remains are almost extinct;
and what we know of these famous cities is almost entirely derived from
literary records. Ancient Greece and Rome we view in the few remains of
their monuments; and the time will arrive when modern Rome shall be what
ancient Rome now is; and ancient Rome and Athens will be what Tyre or
Carthage now are, known only by coloured dust in the desert, or coloured
sand, containing the fragments of bricks or glass, washed up by the wave
of a stormy sea. I might pursue these thoughts still further, and show
that the wood of the cross, or the bronze of the statue, decay as quickly
as if they had not been sanctified; and I think I could show that their
influence is owing to the imagination, which, when infinite time is
considered, or the course of ages even, is null and its effect
imperceptible; and similar results occur, whether the faith be that of
Osiris, of Jupiter, of Jehovah, or of Jesus."

To this Ambrosio replied, his countenance and the tones of his voice
expressing some emotion: "I do not think, Onuphrio, that you consider
this question with your usual sagacity or acuteness; indeed, I never hear
you on the subject of religion without pain and without a feeling of
regret that you have not applied your powerful understanding to a more
minute and correct examination of the evidences of revealed religion. You
would then, I think, have seen, in the origin, progress, elevation,
decline and fall of the empires of antiquity, proofs that they were
intended for a definite end in the scheme of human redemption; you would
have found prophecies which have been amply verified; and the foundation
or the ruin of a kingdom, which appears in civil history so great an
event, in the history of man, in his religious institutions, as
comparatively of small moment; you would have found the establishment of
the worship of one God amongst a despised and contemned people as the
most important circumstance in the history of the early world; you would
have found the Christian dispensation naturally arising out of the
Jewish, and the doctrines of the pagan nations all preparatory to the
triumph and final establishment of a creed fitted for the most
enlightened state of the human mind and equally adapted to every climate
and every people."

To this animated appeal of Ambrosio, Onuphrio replied in the most
tranquil manner and with the air of an unmoved philosopher:--"You mistake
me, Ambrosio, if you consider me as hostile to Christianity. I am not of
the school of the French Encyclopaedists, or of the English infidels. I
consider religion as essential to man, and belonging to the human mind in
the same manner as instincts belong to the brute creation, a light, if
you please of revelation to guide him through the darkness of this life,
and to keep alive his undying hope of immortality: but pardon me if I
consider this instinct as equally useful in all its different forms, and
still a divine light through whatever medium or cloud of human passion or
prejudice it passes. I reverence it in the followers of Brahmah, in the
disciple of Mahomet, and I wonder at in all the variety of forms it
adopts in the Christian world. You must not be angry with me that I do
not allow infallibility to your Church, having been myself brought up by
Protestant parents, who were rigidly attached to the doctrines of
Calvin."

I saw Ambrosio's countenance kindle at Onuphrio's explanation of his
opinions, and he appeared to be meditating an angry reply. I endeavoured
to change the conversation to the state of the Colosaeum, with which it
had begun. "These ruins," I said, "as you have both observed, are highly
impressive; yet when I saw them six years ago they had a stronger effect
on my imagination; whether it was the charm of novelty, or that my mind
was fresher, or that the circumstances under which I saw them were
peculiar, I know not, but probably all these causes operated in affecting
my mind. It was a still and beautiful evening in the end of May; the
last sunbeams were dying away in the western sky and the first moonbeams
shining in the eastern; the bright orange tints lighted up the ruins and
as it were kindled the snows that still remained on the distant
Apennines, which were visible from the highest accessible part of the
amphitheatre. In this glow of colouring, the green of advanced spring
softened the grey and yellow tints of the decaying stones, and as the
lights gradually became fainter, the masses appeared grander and more
gigantic; and when the twilight had entirely disappeared, the contrast of
light and shade in the beams of the full moon and beneath a sky of the
brightest sapphire, but so highly illuminated that only Jupiter and a few
stars of the first magnitude were visible, gave a solemnity and
magnificence to the scene which awakened the highest degree of that
emotion which is so properly termed the sublime. The beauty and the
permanency of the heavens and the principle of conservation belonging to
the system of the universe, the works of the Eternal and Divine
Architect, were finely opposed to the perishing and degraded works of man
in his most active and powerful state. And at this moment so humble
appeared to me the condition of the most exalted beings belonging to the
earth, so feeble their combinations, so minute the point of space, and so
limited the period of time in which they act, that I could hardly avoid
comparing the generations of man, and the effects of his genius and
power, to the swarms of luceoli or fire-flies which were dancing around
me and that appeared flitting and sparkling amidst the gloom and darkness
of the ruins, but which were no longer visible when they rose above the
horizon, their feeble light being lost and utterly obscured in the
brightness of the moonbeams in the heavens."

Onuphrio said: "I am not sorry that you have changed the conversation.
You have given us the history of a most interesting recollection and well
expressed a solemn though humiliating feeling. In such moments and among
such scenes it is impossible not to be struck with the nothingness of
human glory and the transiency of human works. This, one of the greatest
monuments on the face of the earth, was raised by a people, then its
masters, only seventeen centuries ago; in a few ages more it will be but
as dust, and of all the testimonials of the vanity or power of man,
whether raised to immortalise his name, or to contain his decaying bones
without a name, no one is known to have a duration beyond what is
measured by the existence of a hundred generations; and it is only to
multiply centuple for instance the period of time, and the memorials of a
village and the monuments of a country churchyard may be compared with
those of an empire and the remains of the world."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12