Faraday: The Life

Great world events were passing under Faraday’s very nose in that place, but he did not seem to fathom their importance. His entry for Tuesday, 1 February is restricted to: ‘This morning the town was all in uproar and running to see the passing of a large train of artillery which is going up towards Lyons. They seem in great haste.’

And four days later, having amused himself by standing at the edge of the parade ground and watching the clumsy square-bashing:

Drilling is now the occupation of the town, and the Peyrou looks like a Parade. During the morning it is covered by clusters of clumsy recruits who are endeavouring to hold their arms right, turn their toes out, keep their hands in, hold their hands up &c according to the direction of certain corporals who are at present all authority and importance.

Then, as if it were merely a passing show, ‘The Pope passed through this place a few days ago in [sic] his way to Italy. He has just been set at liberty … Almost every person in the town was there but myself.’

Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.

While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.

… On the wave

Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.

My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow

Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –

Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!

Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds

Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone

Of war destructive, but a living light

Of honour, glory, and security, –

A light of science, liberty, and peace!

Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.

Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’

He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:

This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.

From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:

A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,

Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.

…

I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –

Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;

For such a scene was suited well to break

The tyrant-spell of love …

Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:

At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.

Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.

There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.

They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’

It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.

They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.

I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.

They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.

On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.

There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.

By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.

The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.

The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.

Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.

There were … an immense number of persons who stood on each side of the street looking and gazing with great apparent satisfaction, and who if they had been conscious of the comparison I was then making between the scene before me and the one I had just left would have looked down on me with contempt and derision, no doubt equal at least to that which at the same time occupied my mind.

The continental journey was, for Faraday, beginning by now to develop a pattern of its own. Long, weary travelling from town to town was enlivened by ad hoc instruction from Davy, and landscapes and antiquities that he had read or been told about and perhaps never dreamt he would one day see. His Journal record is detailed and engaging, and although scientific subjects are regular themes, they do not dominate. He writes as if he is taking notes (which he probably was), quite as much as making an account for his own future reflection, enjoyment and remembrance.

Davy and Faraday were among the very last of the Grand Tourists, those wealthy Englishmen and their companions who in the decades leading up to the war with France had travelled in their thousands through France and Germany to Italy in search of antiquities and classical learning. Davy’s mission was science, while for Faraday there was an ambivalence about the true aims of the journey. He had scientific duties to perform for Sir Humphry, certainly, but for himself the dividend would not be science but a widening knowledge that it brought him of the depth, richness and pattern of European culture. This came to underpin Faraday’s outlook all his life, and as the decades passed we can see how crucial these eighteen months in Europe were for him, and how they influenced the pattern and direction of his career and achievement.

The character that the Journal most directly evokes is of a receptive young man, talkative, animated, urgent, eager to know, determined to understand, one who happily disregards the discomforts in exchange for the riches that travel will reveal. He is curious about religious practices on the continent, but there is little clear evidence of his own religious beliefs. On his travels this reluctant Sandemanian comes across as a bon viveur who enjoys good food and wine, attending the theatre, dressing up and taking part with enthusiasm in masked balls. He has read his guide books, and is precise in recording details of distance and dimension, as if he too were writing a guide. As a tourist, slogging round the towns he visits on foot, he is energetic and assiduous, keen to find the high point for the panoramic view, eager to visit museums, galleries and gardens, and to watch local celebrations and processions. He does not waste his time. Whether in the marketplace, the inn or the museum, Faraday is curious, and works very hard to feel and to express the textures of the continent, and the customs of the people around him.

All these qualities, which the continental Journal articulated, emerge in their time in Faraday’s later life. The Journal is the seedbed where we can see the shoots of his coming character beginning to poke through. The fact that he wrote it up a second time, the latter part perhaps nearly ten years later, also tells us something worth noting: without making too much of it, Faraday is preserving the young, ebullient Mike for posterity before he is sucked down into adulthood, marriage, responsibility, social conformity, religious non-conformity, decisions, and the perpetual need to earn a living.

In many of the towns he visited, Faraday sought out the bookshops, printers and bookbinders, looking back through them at his earlier, now abandoned, life. He wrote to Riebau: ‘My old profession of books has oftentimes occurred to my mind and been productive of much pleasure.’

He bought books at ‘every large town we came to’, but soon found he had accumulated too many, and had to deny himself, though he may have lost some of those he had bought somewhere en route.