THE SHOCK OF THE REAL: SCIENTISTS AND ROMANTICS

AS THE WAR CLOUDS THICKENED in 1939, the historic collections of dried and mounted plants prepared by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century and stored at the Linnaean Society headquarters in London were moved for safety to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. The following year, as an insurance policy, a photographic record was made of these systematically arranged herbarium sheets, in which the great classifier’s view of botanical order had found its physical expression. In the process of posing the stinging nettle sheet for its portrait, the photographer, Gladys Brown, was stung on the arm, ‘raising a definite blister apparently similar to one produced by a fresh specimen’. Two hundred years old, and as desiccated as a skeleton, the nettle had bitten back.

It would be easy to make a parable out of the stinger’s dogged refusal to be emasculated. Linnaeus’s ‘system’ was one of the bedrocks of biological science in the eighteenth century, but deeply nettling to poets and Romantics of all sorts. His invention of the binomial system, in which all organisms could be named by just two terms – the first identifying the family and the second the species – revolutionised taxonomy, and therefore biology. But he couched it in a foreign tongue, the Latin of the educated elite, and alienated those who saw nature as a commonwealth. His further attempts to classify and name plant species according to the numbers and disposition of their sexual parts (and describe these as if they were bohemian human liaisons) was a piece of comparatively short-lived whimsy, shocking to decent folk though surviving into the Victorian era as a colourful way of identifying flowers for an album. However, it ignored the more complex and subtle ways in which plants were related to each other and to their fellow organisms, and was soon superseded.

But the contemporary hostility to Linnaeus was deeper and more idealistic than an objection to this or that criteria. It was the idea of universal ordering itself that raised the Romantics’ hackles. They saw his ‘naming of the beasts’ and building of biological family trees as Adamic hubris. With plants, it implied that they were fixed, predictable entities, devoid of vitality. The poet John Clare felt an especial bitterness about what he called the ‘dark system’, which had removed plants from their proper homes, and in its Latinate language had stolen them from common understanding too. ‘I love to see the nightingale in its hazel retreat,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘& the Cuckoo hiding in its solitudes of oaken foliage & not examine their carcases in glass cases yet naturalists & botanists seem to have no taste for this poetical feeling they merely make collections of dryd specimens classing them after Leanius into tribes and families … I have none of this curiosity.’ I’ve written about Clare’s feeling for plants elsewhere, and he has been a powerful influence on my own thinking and that of an increasing range of modern writers. He was not as antithetical to science as he liked to pretend, and was skilled enough in discriminate observation to make the first records of more than forty plant species for his home county of Northamptonshire. But he was uncompromising in his feeling for them as subjects, not objects in collections. Not even Coleridge or Wordsworth in their most animistic moods would have felt able to begin a spring poem with such open arms as Clare. ‘Welcome, old matey!’ he exclaims to an April daisy. Or to compose an entire poem as if it were a plea by an exploited patch of vegetation (‘The Lament of Swordy Well’).

There was a powerful contemporary symbolism in the ‘dryd specimen’, evidence of the pressing out of life, the expulsion of the vital force that made living plants different from stones. The tone of much of post-Newtonian science was reductionist, intent on imposing order on the apparent anarchy of nature, and explaining its organisms and processes according to mathematical and mechanical laws. Not everyone approved. In 1817, at a very lively party at the painter Benjamin Haydon’s house, Wordsworth, Keats and Charles Lamb had drunk a toast to ‘Newton’s health and confusion to mathematics!’ Keats raised his now famous objection to Newton, that he ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’. The idea that understanding could be seen as destructive of poetic feeling is hard for us to grasp today, comparable to suggesting that knowing the tonic scale destroys the possibility of appreciating the beauty of music. Yet most of the Romantics retained some kind of religious belief, and the deconstruction of big phenomena – light, plant growth, life itself – seemed to trespass into territory that was the prerogative of a Creator. And if all was explained, where was the space for the inherent ambiguity of poetry?

The rainbow wasn’t the best Romantic stick to beat Newton with. It was already ‘reduced’ – or ‘unweav’d’, as Keats later put it – from sunlight, created in nature itself through the refractive properties of raindrops. A more apt target would have been Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, with its gloomy declaration that, in all closed systems, entropy (or disorder, put crudely) is inexorably on the increase. A perpetual-motion machine is an impossibility. There can be no sudden replenishments of energy from out of the blue. The workings of the universe are remorselessly running down.

The discovery of extraordinary new species and vegetal processes during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to suggest otherwise, that the plant world was constantly renewing and expanding itself, and the spirits of those who engaged with it. Most scientists, philosophers and creative artists shared this optimistic vision. But their different perspectives on how plants ‘fitted’ – as machines, or property, or conduits for some nebulous creative energy – generated the excited tension that permeated the contemporary debate about the vegetal world.