contemporary notions of the cosmos.
Besides tracing the scientific relationship between William and Caroline Herschel, I also wanted to show the extraordinary imaginative impact of their work in several other fields. To do this I looked particularly at the reactions of the poets Shelley and Keats to the new discoveries, and also of the musician Joseph Haydn. One of the most remarkable things was the very different kinds of conclusions they each drew from it.
Shelley had been inspired to buy his own (extremely expensive) telescope while an undergraduate at Oxford University. He made astronomy, and an imaginary journey through the stars, a central theme of his first major poem, Queen Mab, published in 1813 (still within both Herschels’ lifetimes). Attached to it were a series of deliberately provoking prose notes on a variety of scientific and political subjects, including free love, vegetarianism and climate change. Inspired by William Herschel’s ‘deep space’ theories, he wrote a particularly fierce note ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ – that is, the existence of extra-terrestrial life on what we would now call ‘exoplanets’. He drew from this an atheist conclusion which would have delighted Professor Richard Dawkins:
The indefinite immensity of the universe is the most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman … All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve and an Intercessor, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against him … Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable Necessity.
Three years later, the reaction of the equally young John Keats was utterly different. Keats was twenty years old, and attending a full-time medical course at Guy’s Hospital in London. He wrote his sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ very early one autumn morning in October 1816. It celebrates a deeply Romantic idea of exploration and discovery. Without actually naming Herschel, it picks out the finding of Uranus, thirty-five years before, as one of the defining moments of the age. Although combining many sources of inspiration (it is possible that Keats may have attended Charles Babbage’s 1815 ‘Lectures on Astronomy’ at the Royal Institution), the poem itself was written in less than four hours. It ends:
… Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Keats’s vivid idea of the ‘eureka moment’ of instant, astonished recognition celebrates the Romantic notion of scientific discovery. But the efforts of other European astronomers, like Charles Messier (1730–1817) and Anders Johan Lexell (1740–84), in fact took weeks, if not months, to confirm the true planetary identification of Herschel’s ‘comet’ in 1781. Yet it is also true that Herschel too, despite the evidence of his own observation journal, gradually convinced himself that precisely such a moment of instant, sublime discovery had occurred in his garden at New King Street in Bath. So the paradox emerges that the scientist Herschel in the end may have remembered that night exactly as the poet Keats imagined it.
A third and much older artist who responded creatively to the Herschels’ work was the great composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Once again his reaction was revealingly, even astonishingly, different. It has long been accepted that Haydn’s famous and beautiful oratorio The Creation was the religious work that crowned his career. Completed in 1798, when Haydn was sixty-six, it was based on a pious libretto obtained by the London-based musical impresario Johann Peter Salomon.
This libretto was inspired by the traditional scriptural words from the King James Bible, the opening of the Book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and the Darkness was on the face of the Deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters. And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.’ Some additional elements were taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost. So the oratorio is fundamentally a religious work, as Haydn himself later movingly testified: ‘Never was I so pious,’ he wrote, ‘as when composing “The Creation”. I felt myself so penetrated with religious feeling that before I sat down to the pianoforte I prayed to God with earnestness that He would enable me to praise Him worthily.’
It is often said that in the lives of the great eighteenth-century composers there is only one parallel to this frame of mind – the religious fervour in which Handel composed Messiah. And that Haydn had set out to rival him in piety, as well as in musical brilliance.
Yet it is also possible that the highly unusual musical ideas for the first two parts of The Creation – the orchestral ‘Representation of Chaos’ with which it opens, and the recitative for the Archangel Raphael which follows – were strongly influenced by the new cosmological theories and discoveries of William Herschel. It is a strangely paradoxical idea that The Creation was also inspired by a distinctly secular, and potentially atheist, science.
Haydn’s eighteen-month visit to London in 1791–92, the first of two he made to the English capital, was the first time he had voyaged outside Austria in his life. Although he was already in his late fifties when he arrived in England, he engaged with this new world with immense intellectual excitement. Among many adventures and expeditions recorded in his London diary, one high point was his visit to the Herschels’ famous astronomical observatory at Slough in June 1792.
By now, the brother-and-sister astronomical team were renowned throughout Europe. Their enormous forty-foot reflector telescope, the biggest in the world, was one of the wonders of the age. Both the Herschels were also musicians. William was an accomplished composer and one-time organist and Kapellmeister of the Octagon Chapel, Bath. Caroline had trained as an opera singer, and had successfully performed in Handel oratorios. Moreover, as the Herschels originally came from Hanover, they and Haydn had German as a common language.
William’s diary shows that he himself was absent from the Slough observatory during much of this month. But Caroline’s journal records Haydn’s visit as one of the highlights of their summer. One of the things they had to discuss was the generosity of their English patrons in the financing of both telescopes and symphonies – finances and accounting being Caroline’s special department. But above all, Caroline was able to describe their astronomical work in detail to Haydn, while explaining her brother’s discoveries with the utmost enthusiasm and pride.
Haydn was an immensely hard worker – he would produce no fewer than twelve symphonies while in England – and he was evidently impressed by the punishing (not to say Teutonic) routine of the Herschels, who, as Caroline explained, worked all day on astronomical calculations, and then could spend ‘six hours at a time on freezing winter nights’ carrying out their observations. But as this was high summer, Haydn had plenty of leisure to look through all the telescopes – ten-, twenty-, and forty-foot – and discuss with Caroline her brother’s theories of stars, planets and musical composition.
As I have indicated, Herschel’s theories explored new and radical ideas about the formation of our own solar system and the galaxies beyond it. They had been published in a number of scientific papers in the journal of the Royal Society, the Philosophical Transactions, and had also been popularised in the work of the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a leading member of the Lunar Society. They spread
