The Herschels and Modern Astronomy

CHAPTER I.. Early Life of William Herschel.

EARLY LIFE OF WILLIAM HERSCHEL.

William Herschel was descended from one of three brothers, whose Lutheran opinions made it expedient for them to quit Moravia early in the seventeenth century. Hans Herschel thereupon settled as a brewer at Pirna, in Saxony; his son Abraham rose to some repute as a landscape-gardener in the royal service at Dresden; and Abraham’s youngest son, Isaac, brought into the world with him, in 1707, an irresistible instinct and aptitude for music. Having studied at Berlin, he made his way in 1731 to Hanover, where he was immediately appointed oboist in the band of the Hanoverian Guard. A year later he married Anna Ilse Moritzen, by whom he had ten children. The fourth of these, Frederick William, known to fame as William Herschel, was born November 15th, 1738.

His brilliant faculties quickly displayed themselves. At the garrison-school he easily distanced his brother Jacob, his senior by four years, and learned besides, privately, whatever French and mathematics the master could teach him. He showed also a pronounced talent for music, and was already, at fourteen, a proficient on the hautboy and violin. In this direction lay his manifest destiny. His father was now bandmaster of the Guard; he was poor, and had no other provision to give his sons than to train them in his own art; and thus William, driven by necessity to become self-supporting while still a boy, entered the band as oboist in 1753. They were a family of musicians. Of the six who reached maturity, only Mrs. Griesbach, the elder daughter, gave no sign of personally owning a share in the common gift, which descended, nevertheless, to her five sons, all noted performers on sundry instruments.

William Herschel accompanied his regiment to England in 1755, with his father and elder brother. He returned a year later, bringing with him a copy of Locke “On the Human Understanding,” upon which he had spent the whole of his small savings. Two of the three volumes thus acquired were recovered by his sister after seventy years, and transmitted to his son. The breaking-out of the Seven Years’ War proved decisive as to his future life. Campaigning hardships visibly told upon his health; his parents resolved, at all hazards, to rescue him from them; and accordingly, after the disaster at Hastenbeck, July 26th, 1757, they surreptitiously shipped him off to England. By this adventure, since he was in the military service of the Elector of Hanover, George III. of England, he incurred the penalties of desertion; but they were never exacted, and were remitted by the King himself in 1782.

William Herschel was in his nineteenth year when he landed at Dover with a French crown-piece in his pocket. Necessity or prudence kept him for some time obscure; and we next hear of him as having played a solo on the violin at one of Barbandt’s concerts in London, February 15th, 1760. In the same year he was engaged by the Earl of Darlington to train the band of the Durham Militia, when his shining qualities brought him to the front. The officers of the regiment looked with astonishment on the phenomenal young German who had dropped among them from some cloudy region; who spoke English perfectly, played like a virtuoso, and possessed a curious stock of varied knowledge. Their account of him at a mess-dinner excited the curiosity of Dr. Miller, organist and historian of Doncaster, who, having heard him perform a violin solo by Giardini, fell into a rapture, and invited him on the spot to live with him.

He left nothing undone for the advancement of his protégé; procured for him tuitions and leading concert engagements; and encouraged him, in 1765, to compete for the post of organist at Halifax. Herschel’s special qualifications were small; his chief rival, Dr. Wainwright, was a skilled player, and at the trial performance evoked much applause by his brilliant execution. Only the builder of the organ, an odd old German named Schnetzler, showed dissatisfaction, exclaiming: “He run about the keys like one cat; he gif my pipes no time for to shpeak.” Then Herschel mounted the loft, and the church was filled with a majestic volume of sound, under cover of which a stately melody made itself heard. The “Old Hundredth” followed, with equal effect. Schnetzler was beside himself with delight. “I vil luf dis man,” he cried, “because he git my pipes time for to shpeak.” Herschel had virtually provided himself with four hands. A pair of leaden weights brought in his pocket served to keep down two keys an octave apart, while he improvised a slow air to suit the continuous bass thus mechanically supplied. The artifice secured him the victory.

This anecdote is certainly authentic. It is related by Dr. Miller from personal knowledge. Nor is it inconsistent with a story told by Joah Bates, of King’s College, Cambridge, a passionate lover of music. Repairing to Halifax, his native place, to conduct the “Messiah” at the opening of a new organ, he was accosted in the church by a young man, who asked for an opportunity of practising on it. Although as yet, he said, unacquainted with the instrument, he aspired to the place of organist; and the absolute certitude of his manner so impressed Bates that he not only granted his request, but became his warm patron. The young man’s name was William Herschel. We hear, further, on Dr. Burney’s authority, that he played first violin in Bates’s orchestra.

But the tide of his fortunes was flowing, and he knew how to “take it at the flood.” Early in 1766 he removed to Bath as oboist in Linley’s celebrated orchestra, which played daily in the Pump Room to enliven the parade of blushing damsels and ruffling gallants pictured to our fancy in Miss Austen’s novels. Bath was then what Beau Nash had made it--the very focus of polite society. Turbans nodded over cards; gigs threaded their way along Union Passage; Cheap Street was blocked with vehicles; the Lower Rooms witnessed the nightly evolutions of the country-dance; the Grove, as Doran reminds us, was brilliant with beauty, coquelicot ribbons, smart pelisses, laced coats, and ninepins. The feat of “tipping all nine for a guinea” was frequently performed; and further excitement might be had by merely plucking some lampoons from the trees, which seemed to bear them as their natural fruit. Music, too, was in high vogue. The theatres were thronged; and Miss Linley’s exquisite voice was still heard in the concert-halls.

On the 4th of October, 1767, the new Octagon Chapel was opened for service, with Herschel as organist. How it was that he obtained this “agreeable and lucrative situation” we are ignorant; but he had that singular capacity for distinction which explains everything. The Octagon Chapel became a centre of fashionable attraction, and he soon found himself lifted on the wave of public favour. Pupils of high rank thronged to him, and his lessons often mounted to thirty-five a week. He composed anthems, psalm-tunes, even full services for his assiduously-trained choir. His family were made sharers in his success. He secured a post in Linley’s orchestra for his younger brother Alexander, in 1771; and he himself fetched his sister Caroline to Bath in 1772. Both were of very considerable help to him in his musical and other enterprises, the latter of which gradually gained ground over the former.

Music was never everything to William Herschel. He cultivated it with ardour; composed with facility in the prevalent graceful Italian style; possessed a keen appreciation and perfect taste. But a musical career, however brilliant, did not satisfy him. The inner promptings of genius told him to look beyond. The first thirty-five years of his life were thus spent in diligently preparing to respond to an undeclared vocation. Nothing diverted him from his purpose of self-improvement. At first, he aimed chiefly at mastering the knowledge connected with his profession. With a view to the theory of music, “I applied myself early,” he said, in a slight autobiographical sketch sent to Lichtenberg at Göttingen, “to all the branches of the mathematics, algebra, conic sections, fluxions, etc. Contracting thereby an insatiable desire for knowledge in general, I extended my application to languages--French, Italian, Latin, English--and determined to devote myself entirely to the pursuit of knowledge, in which I resolved to place all my future enjoyment and felicity. This resolution I have never had occasion to change.” At Bath, in the midst of engrossing musical occupations, his zeal for study grew only the more intense. After fourteen or sixteen hours of teaching, he would “unbend his mind” by plunging into Maclaurin’s “Fluxions,” or retire to rest with a basin of milk, Smith’s “Opticks,” and Ferguson’s “Astronomy.” He had no sooner fallen under the spell of this last science than he “resolved to take nothing upon trust, but to see with my own eyes all that other men had seen before.”

He hired, to begin with, a small reflector; but what it showed him merely whetted his curiosity. And the price of a considerably larger instrument proved to be more than he could afford to pay. Whereupon he took the momentous resolution of being, for the future, his own optician. This was in 1772. He at first tried fitting lenses into pasteboard tubes, with the poor results that can be imagined. Then he bought from a Quaker, who had dabbled in that line, the discarded rubbish of his tools, patterns, polishers, and abortive mirrors; and in June, 1773, when fine folk had mostly deserted Bath for summer resorts, work was begun in earnest. The house was turned topsy-turvy; the two brothers attacked the novel enterprise with boyish glee. Alexander, a born mechanician, set up a huge lathe in one of the bedrooms; a cabinet-maker was installed in the drawing-room; Caroline, in spite of secret dismay at such unruly proceedings, lent a hand, and kept meals going; William directed, inspired, toiled, with the ardour of a man who had staked his life on the issue. Meanwhile, music could not be neglected. Practising and choir-training went on; novelties for the ensuing season were prepared; compositions written, and parts copied. Then the winter brought the usual round of tuitions and performances, while all the time mirrors were being ground and polished, tried and rejected, without intermission. At last, after two hundred failures, a tolerable reflecting telescope was produced, about five inches in aperture, and of five and a half feet focal length. The outcome may seem small for so great an expenditure of pains; but those two hundred failures made the Octagon Chapel organist an expert, unapproached and unapproachable, in the construction of specula. With his new instrument, on March 4th, 1774, he observed the Nebula in Orion; and a record of this beginning of his astronomical work is still preserved by the Royal Society.

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