Perhaps the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth has not yet produced his equal, was William Thomson, afterwards Lord Kelvin. His only rival, Helmholtz, put Kelvin on a pedestal by himself. Every one knows how he made the first Atlantic cable a success; it was an instrument which he had discovered that sent the first telegram between England and America in '58. He was the first, too, to light his own house with electricity.
In the last days of the century I was introduced to him by Alfred Russel Wallace, and was very much surprised to find that he was lame, the result of a skating accident in youth; but in spite of his lameness he had a wonderful presence-no one could forget the domed head and the kindly, frank eyes and grey beard. Two things I remember him by peculiarly: he talked of Joule as his master because he was the first to prove that heat was a mode of motion; Kelvin then went on to say that in every transformation of energy from one form to another, a certain proportion changes into heat, and the heat thus produced becomes diffused by radiation. This gradual transformation of energy into heat is perpetually going on and must sooner or later put an end to all life.
Almost before his death his whole theory was thrown overboard. His gloomy predictions of a degeneration of energy, ending in stagnation, are no longer justified. His conception of atoms and atomic energies has been entirely superseded by the electronic view of matter, and we now look forward to an endless and boundless unfolding, not of energy and power alone, but of life itself.
Kelvin was the first, I suppose, to point out that the amount of time now required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory, and upholders of the process of evolution, couldn't be conceded without assuming the existence of a different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted. I understood him to speak of Darwinism somewhat contemptuously. He seemed to say: 'We know nothing of creation. They talk of life beginning in seething marshes and say this earth has gradually cooled, and is cooling.'
Kelvin declared positively that if at any time the earth was hotter on the surface by even fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, all life would have been impossible.
I have never known so strenuous a worker. If he had five minutes to wait at any time, he pulled out a little notebook and began to make notes or solve some problem. The only time I seem to have moved him was when I spoke of the 'weary weight of this unintelligible world.'
'Oh, how true,' he said, 'I want to take that down'; and out came the notebook. 'We know nothing,' he went on, 'and I am much afraid we never shall know anything but appearances; the meaning of it all, the purpose, if purpose there be, is hidden from us; of essentials, we know nothing.'
Kelvin always struck me as perfectly simple and unaffected. He made a great fortune; everything he touched seemed to succeed. He lived till over eighty and went through life with perfect simplicity, not a trace of pose or snobbishness-probably in the twenty years from 1890 to 1910, the wisest man in the world.
We are gradually moving away from the attitude of mind engendered by religion to the attitude born of science. Then we accepted statements and believed; now we question all things and doubt.
Will the scientific habit of mind produce as great masterpieces in art and literature as the religious habit? There are no messiahs of science; a Kelvin is superseded almost in his own lifetime; yet the masterpieces of art will surely be built on our emotions and sexual desires, which grow in strength as we grow in health and knowledge of living.
Kelvin knew nothing, I think, of the marvelous discoveries of J. C. Bose in Calcutta. Bose has proved that plants live and feel as we do, are exhilarated by caffeine and killed by chloroform; he has shown, too, that metals respond to stimuli, are prone to fatigue and react to poisons; in fact, he has extended the realm of life and feeling to infinity.
One result is that we fear and tremble less; but hope and marvel and enjoy more.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1892 two men died-Tennyson, the poet, in England, and Renan, the great prose writer, in France. The sensation caused by the death of Tennyson in England was unparalleled: he was treated like a demi-god: on all sides one heard that he was the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century. The Quarterly Review affirmed that 'no English poet has possessed a more complete command of his genius in its highest form. No crudities of image like those of Byron, nor cloudy word-phantasms such as those of Shelley, nor fanciful affectations like those of Keats, nor versified prose, such as that of Wordsworth, mar his equality of treatment.' A well known writer declared that 'the marvellous island held nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, wonderful and dear.' Swinburne published a threnody on him of lyrical adoration, and in the press many compared him with Shakespeare. Renan, too, was overpraised by the French, but to nothing like the same extent: they recognized that he was a master of prose, a really great writer, but no Frenchman would have thought of putting him with Montaigne.
Or let us take Victor Hugo, whose life has more points of resemblance with that of Tennyson: he was a greater singer and his genius was far more widely recognized; he was as peculiarly French as Tennyson was English; he, too, lived to a great age and was accorded a public state funeral which was turned into a great ceremony. But there were no such dithyrambs of praise in the French press over Hugo: there was far more measure, more reason; the best heads did not hesitate to qualify their admiration for a great poet and master of musical French.
Tennyson's last day was described by a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette with a fervor of admiration that made him a sacred memory to thousands who had never seen him or read a line of his finer work. I quote the account because it was peculiarly characteristic of English sentiment.
The morning yesterday rose in almost unearthly splendour over the hills and valleys on which the windows of Aldworth House look out, where Lord Tennyson lay dying. From the mullioned window of the room where the poet lay, he could look down upon the peaceful fields, the silent hills beyond them, and the sky above, which was a blue so deep and pure as is rarely seen in this country.
Lord Tennyson woke ever and again out of the painless, dreamy state into which he had fallen, and looked out into the silence and the sunlight.
In the afternoon, in one of his waking moments, during which he was always perfectly conscious, he asked for his Shakespeare, and with his own hands turned the leaves till he found Cymbeline. His eyes were fixed on the pages, but whether and how much he read no one will ever know, for again he lay in dream or slumber, or let his eyes rest on the scene outside.
As the day advanced a change came over the scene, a change almost awful to those who watched the death-bed. Slowly the sun went down, the blue died out of the sky, and upon the valley below there fell a perfectly white mist. The hills, as our representative was told, put on their purple garments to watch this strange, white stillness; there was not a sound in the air, and, high above, the clear, cloudless sky shone like a pale glittering dome. All nature seemed to be watching, waiting.
Then the stars came out and looked in at the big mullioned window, and those within saw them grow brighter and brighter, until at last a moon-a harvest moon for splendour, though it was an October moon-sailed slowly up and flooded the room with golden light. The bed on which Lord Tennyson lay, now very near to the gate of death, and with his left hand still resting on his Shakespeare, was in deep darkness; the rest of the room lit up with the glory of the night, which poured in through the uncurtained windows. And thus, without pain, without a struggle, the greatest of England's poets passed away.
The idea of the stars growing brighter as the moon rose, and the hills putting on purple while the Lord was dying is pure English, or, perhaps I should say, English journalism. Yet everyone praised the description, and there was no criticism of it.
In every paper, too, one found Carlyle's pen portrait of the poet, which is excellent, though not unduly flattering:
Tennyson is one of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusty hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion; almost Indianlooking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic-fit for
