The scientific sublime : popular science

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The Scientific Sublime
The Scientific Sublime
Popular Science Unravels the
Mysteries of the Universe

Alan G. Gross

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Gross, Alan G., author.
Title: The scientific sublime: popular science unravels the
mysteries of the universe / Alan G. Gross.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034685 (print) | LCCN 2017039862 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190637781 (updf) | ISBN 9780190637798 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190637804 (online course) |
ISBN 9780190637774 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Science—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC Q175.5 (ebook) | LCC Q175.5 .G7568 2018 (print) | DDC 501—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034685

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Bradley Benson and Aleksandr Lazaryan
Two extraordinary and caring physicians
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

CHAPTER 1 Isn’t Science Sublime? 1

PART ONE | The Physicists

CHAPTER 2 Richard Feynman: The Consensual Sublime 25
CHAPTER 3 Steven Weinberg: The Conjectural Sublime 47
CHAPTER 4 Lisa Randall: The Technological Sublime 63
CHAPTER 5 Brian Greene: The Speculative Sublime 81
CHAPTER 6 Stephen Hawking: The Scientific Sublime
Embodied 109

PART TWO | The Biologists

CHAPTER 7 Rachel Carson: The Ethical Sublime 133
CHAPTER 8 Stephen Jay Gould’s Books: The Balanced
Sublime 157
CHAPTER 9 Stephen Jay Gould’s Essays: Experiencing the
Sublime 177
CHAPTER 10 Steven Pinker: The Polymath Sublime 195
CHAPTER 11 Richard Dawkins: The Mathematical Sublime 217
CHAPTER 12 E. O. Wilson: The Biophilic Sublime 237
 PART THREE | Move Over, God
CHAPTER 13 Move Over, God 263

Notes 285
Index 311

viii | Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am the author of this book; my name appears alone on the title page. But
if you are lucky—​and I was lucky—​you are a member of a team dedi-
cated to your assistance. For their insightful efforts at improving my draft
I would like to thank Randy Allen Harris and the two other reviewers who,
regretfully, chose to remain anonymous. Nothing can adequately repay
this gift of constructive criticism. I would also like to thank the ten authors
I have chosen as my subject. One of my pre-​publication reviewers was
kind enough to say that my chapters read like pieces in the New Yorker.
However true this may be, one fact must be noted: it is impossible for
one’s sentences not to improve when writing in the shadow of these mas-
ters and mistresses of English prose.
I would also thank my editor Hallie Stebbins for her continued sup-
port and my former editor, Peter Ohlin, who referred me to her. I would
like also to pay tribute to Arthur Fine and to remember David Hull, who
together taught a middle-​aged man philosophy of science, and the late
Joseph Williams, who taught me how to write. Last but not least, I would
like to thank my long-​time co-​author, Joseph Harmon, who started this
project with me, helped it along manfully, but decided in the end to bow
out. I shall miss him; I miss him already.
It goes without saying that I alone am responsible for any errors in fact
or in judgment.
The Scientific Sublime
 CHAPTER 1 Isn’t Science Sublime?

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is

the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a
stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in
awe, is as good as dead—​his eyes are closed. The insight into the
mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to
religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting
itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our
dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—​
this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
—​Albert Einstein1

We were all overwhelmed with admiration and astonishment; indeed,

our surprise was so great that we had to repeat the experiment just to
be absolutely sure we were not mistaken.
—​Florin Périer, in a letter to Blaise Pascal2

For over a half century, popular science books have been embraced enthu-
siastically by the welcoming public, from Richard Dawkins on evolution
to Brian Greene on string theory. But while shelf upon shelf of books
of popular science exist, only one book exists on these books, Elizabeth
Leane’s Reading Popular Physics.3 Perhaps that’s because no other book
is needed; perhaps there is no more mystery to solve, no conundrum to
unravel. Take A Brief History of Time: it is selling far better than Gone
with the Wind, apparently with good reason: it is a better read. A reviewer
on Amazon opines: “Stephen Hawking is an established scientific gen-
ius, but this book establishes him as a brilliant writer—​an extremely rare,
yet valuable combination.” A blog critic pronounces his verdict: “A Brief
History of Time is far more than a science book. It’s one of the renaissance
books that is so seminal to the notion of who we are, and where we might
be in the next 50 years, that it should be required reading for every person
from high school on. If that seems like a big ask you’ve got the wrong
idea about this book. It’s light and easy and fun, full of subtle humor and
provocative notions.”4 These are views about a book chock-​full of abstruse
ideas strenuously avoided in their school years by all but future physicists.
The universal attraction of such books is the mystery I would like to solve,
the conundrum I would like to unravel.
Jon Turney, a scholar of popular science and former editor of Penguin
Books, questions whether such a book can be written: “At some point,” he
says, “one must ask if it is possible . . . to consider the whole ensemble of
books. I have my doubts. Even books on the same topic, quantum physics
say, are tremendously diverse, in style, level, approach, and in which genres
they draw on.”5 Turney is not totally despairing of success; he suggests that
potential authors see popular science books as symptoms of larger forces in
our culture. I intend to act on Turney’s suggestion. I acknowledge the diver-
sity of style, level, and approach that Turney sees as an obstacle to a compre-
hensive account. But I attribute this diversity not to a difference in goals but to
differing literary talents and to different takes on what science is and what it
can accomplish. However different their skills and their subject matter, these
writers are in the business of generating in their readers a sense of wonder at
a nature whose workings science, and only science, can comprehend.
To create this transcendental effect, this sense of emotional and intellec-
tual uplift, these writers rely on a form of experience well established in the
West: the sublime. We experience the sublime in literature when we read
John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness; we experience it in nature when
we visit the Grand Canyon; we experience it in science when we real-
ize that one short equation—​e = mc2—​led to Hiroshima and Fukushima.
Turney agrees that “science writers evoke their most telling effects by
evoking the sublime”6; however, he reserves this effect for the heightened
prose of isolated passages. This limitation also characterizes Marjorie
Hope Nicolson’s pioneering classic, Mountain Gloom and Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite.7 For her, the sublime is an
aspect of Romantic poetry, of the Romantic vision of the world. I differ
from Turney and Nicholson in generalizing the sublime to whole works.
I contend that heightened passages in the works of popular science I have
chosen are outward signs of the sublimity that inheres in their structure, a
spirit that informs their every aspect.
My views are not without distinguished predecessors. In Victorian
Sensation, James Secord explores the impact on its many readers of Robert

2 | The Scientific Sublime

Chambers’s bestselling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book
described at the time as “at once scientific, metaphysical, original, daring,
and sublime.”8 Vestiges is the grandfather of the evolutionary epic, a book
Secord links to authors I have chosen to analyze: “It is through reading
the successors to Vestiges that we make sense of our origins and poten-
tial futures. In best-​sellers ranging from Stephen Hawking’s Brief History
of Time (1988) to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994), readers
trace stories that start from swirling clouds of cosmic dust and end with
the emergence of mind and human culture.”9 Writing of the evolutionary
epic as a central theme of 19th-​century science, Bernard Lightman cites
reviewers for whom the work of Robert Ball “excite[d]‌astonishment”
by presenting his readers with “a fresh appreciation of the sublimity of
that scheme of creation in which our earth plays a small though digni-
fied part.”10 In his Cosmos, Alexander von Humboldt says of the epic of
evolution that

beginning with the depths of space and the regions of the remotest nebulae,
we will gradually descend through the starry zone to which our solar system
belongs, to our own terrestrial spheroid, circled by air and ocean, there to
direct our attention to its form, temperature, and magnetic tension, and to
consider the fullness of organic life unfolding itself upon its surface beneath
the vivifying influence of light.11

In On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson identifies the epic as the narra-

tive form of scientific materialism, a tale of “the evolution of the universe
from the big bang of fifteen billion years ago through the origin of the
elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth.”12 Of such
20th-​century embodiments of the evolutionary epic as Steven Weinberg’s
The First Three Minutes, Martin Eger says that they tell “one and the same
story . . . the story of evolution . . . a new epic [so vast] and so detailed that
no one book can encompass it.”13
Another of my predecessors is Elizabeth Kessler for whom the images
taken by the Hubble Space Telescope evoke an astronomical sublime, the
vastness of the cosmos causing us to “reach out with our minds and our
aesthetic and our imaginations and our sense of wonder and our sense of
curiosity. . . and grab hold of the universe and make it ours.”14 Finally, we
have David Nye, for whom there is a technological sublime, one mani-
fested in objects as different as the Golden Gate Bridge and the atom bomb,
and in events as different as the 1939 World’s Fair and the Apollo flight to
the moon. Nye’s work is an application of the insight of his mentor, Leo

Isn’t Science Sublime? | 3

Marx, for whom “the awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and
later bestowed on the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or
rather the technological conquest of matter.”15 To me, the sublime can be
as abstruse as the Standard Theory in physics and as concrete as the Large
Hadron Collider; the sublime in biology can be as abstract as evolutionary
theory or as concrete as a dinosaur footprint.

The Literary Sublime

The sublime takes its first step toward cultural immortality in an essay
written around the first or second century of our era and attributed, in
all probability misattributed, to Longinus. On the Sublime observes that
sublimity in poetry or prose “consists in a consummate excellence and
distinction of language.”16 These works do not “persuade the audience
but . . . transport them out of themselves,”17 by drawing their attention
away “from reasoning to the enthralling effect of the imagination.”18 Such
works lift them “near the mighty mind of God.”19
On the Sublime mysteriously disappears for over fourteen hundred
years, only to resurface two-​thirds intact, published in Basel in 1554. By
the end of the 18th century, a steady stream of Greek editions and Latin
translations follows. 20 Although turned into English as early as 1652, it is
not until 1704, in John Dennis’s The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry that
The Sublime finds its way into English literary criticism. Dennis defines
the sublime as “nothing else but a great thought, or great thoughts moving
the soul from its ordinary situation by the enthusiasm that naturally attends
them.”21 It is literature not life that creates this effect:

For the spirits being set in a violent emotion, and the imagination being fired
by that agitation; and the brain being deeply penetrated by those impres-
sions, the very objects themselves are set as it were before us, and conse-
quently we are sensible of the same passion that we should feel from the
things themselves. For the warmer the imagination is, the less able we are to
reflect, and consequently the things are the more present to us of which we
draw the images; and therefore where the imagination is so inflamed as to
render the soul utterly incapable of reflecting, there is no difference between
the images and the things themselves.22

Dennis shares with his fellow Britons Joseph Addison, John Baillie,
Joseph Priestley, and Hugh Blair the view that the literary sublime applies

4 | The Scientific Sublime

to isolated passages, not to whole literary works. Longinus is the source
of this exclusion: the overwhelming number of his examples are indeed
isolated passages, drawn from the works of Homer, the Greek tragedians,
and Genesis. Take this episode from the Iliad in which the gods intervene
in the battle for Troy. In Pope’s translation—​Pope at his iambic best—​the
sound echoes the sense:

The mountain shook, the rapid streams stood still:

Above, the sire of gods his thunder rolls,
And peals on peals redoubled rend the poles.
Beneath, stern Neptune shakes the solid ground;
The forests wave, the mountains nod around;
Through all their summits tremble Ida’s woods,
And from their sources boil her hundred floods.
Troy’s turrets totter on the rocking plain;
And the toss’d navies beat the heaving main.
Deep in the dismal regions of the dead,
Th’ infernal monarch rear’d his horrid head,
Leap’d from his throne, lest Neptune’s arm should lay
His dark dominions open to the day,
And pour in light on Pluto’s drear abodes,
Abhorr’d by men, and dreadful ev’n to gods.23

Longinus tells us why this passage elicits awe. It is Homer’s lofty language
combined with a conceptual grandeur: “The earth is split to its founda-
tions, hell itself laid bare, the whole universe sundered and turned upside
down; and meanwhile everything, heaven and hell, mortal and immoral
alike, shares in the conflict and dangers of that battle.”24 Inspired by this
inspired analysis, the young Edward Gibbon, not yet the great historian of
ancient Rome, says that its author “tells me his own feelings upon reading
it; and tells them with such energy, that he communicates them. I almost
doubt which is most sublime, Homer’s Battle of the Gods or Longinus’s
apostrophe . . . upon it.”25
The restriction to isolated passages is not long honored. Even Hugh
Blair admits that “some, indeed there are, who, by a strength and dignity in
their conceptions, and a current of high ideas that runs through their whole
composition, preserve the reader’s mind always in a tone nearly allied to
the sublime; for which reason they may, in a limited sense, merit the name
of continued sublime writers.”26 And Gibbon notices that there was no
reason to hesitate on Longinus’s account. Longinus thinks of the whole of

Isn’t Science Sublime? | 5

Book XX of the Iliad as sublime: “The Battle of the Gods is worthy of eve-
rything Longinus says of it. It would be difficult to find another example
which reunites so thoroughly every part of the sublime both as to thoughts
and language.”27 Gibbon does not notice that Longinus himself thinks of
the whole of the Iliad as sublime: “The consistent sublimity which never
sinks into flatness, the flood of moving incidents in quick succession, the
versatile rapidity and actuality, brimful of images drawn from real life.”28

From the Literary to the Natural Sublime

It is impossible to overestimate the importance and popularity of Addison

and Steele’s periodical The Spectator. Addison’s estimate of 60,000 read-
ers is not an exaggeration.29 Trivial today, this figure represents 10%
of the population of 18th-​century London, the equivalent of a YouTube
video gone viral.30 Moreover, the 18th century saw an astonishing fifteen
editions or reprints of the collected essays. There were translations into
French and German. Other works promoting the natural sublime were also
popular: Blair and Lord Kames went into seven editions, and Edmund
Burke into six. Burke was translated into French and into German. In the
last decade of the century, Lord Kames was translated into German and
reprinted in America. The natural sublime was on a roll.
What is the natural sublime? To Addison, “when we look on such hide-
ous objects [as a precipice at a distance], we are not a little pleased to think
we are in no danger of them. We consider them, at the same time, as dread-
ful and harmless; so that the more frightful appearance they make, the
greater is the pleasure we receive from the sense of our own safety.”31 So
long as we are safe, a storm fills us with an “agreeable horror.”32 Although
Addison clearly thought of himself as breaking new ground in defining a
natural sublime, Longinus had long ago anticipated this expansion:

It is by some natural instinct that we admire, surely not small streams, clear
and useful as they are, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far above
all, the sea. The little fire we kindle for ourselves keeps clear and steady, yet
we do not therefore regard it with more amazement than the fires of Heaven,
which are often darkened, or think it more wonderful than the craters of
Etna in eruption, hurling up rocks and whole hills from their depths and
sometimes shooting forth rivers of that pure Titanic fire. But on all such
matters I would say only this . . . it is always the unusual which wins our
wonder.33

6 | The Scientific Sublime

Edmund Burke deepens Addison’s analysis. He feels that pain and terror
are the only sources of the sublime, pain and terror transformed—​pain
not painful and terror not terrifying—​and both evoking a positive emotion
akin to pleasure. Burke calls it delight:

If the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the
pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the
present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether
fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capa-
ble of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort
of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-​preservation, is
one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. Its highest
degree I call astonishment; the subordinate degrees are awe, reverence, and
respect, which, by the very etymology of the words, show from what source
they are derived, and how they stand distinguished from positive pleasure.34

To Burke, astonishment is a psychological state in which the mind is so

filled with a sublime object that while the experience lasts, it can entertain
no other thought or image. The eruption of Vesuvius or a stormy coast in
Brittany possesses “the great power of the sublime, that, far from being
produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an
irresistible force.”35 To this psychological portrait, John Baillie adds that
the sublime varies from person to person,36 and that the effect depends on
novelty or surprise.37
Hugh Blair expands the scope of the sublime. The terrible is not its
only source; also sublime are “the magnificent prospect of wide extended
plains, and of the starry firmament [and] the moral dispositions and senti-
ments, which we view with high admiration.”38 This notion of moral sub-
limity, which will become especially important to Immanuel Kant, harks
back to Longinus: “How grand, for instance, is the silence of Ajax in the
Summoning of the Ghosts, more sublime than any speech?”39 Longinus
is referring to a scene in the Iliad in which Odysseus, meeting Ajax in
the underworld, apologizes for conduct that led to his suicide. But “while
yet I speak, the shade disdains to stay, /​In silence turns, and sullen stalks
away.”40 It is this form of sublimity to which Lord Kames refers. He quotes
from the third part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI:

Somerset. Ah! Warwick, Warwick, wert thou as we are,

We might recover all our loss again.
The Queen from France hath brought a puissant power,

Isn’t Science Sublime? | 7

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The lively
adventures of Gavin Hamilton
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The lively adventures of Gavin Hamilton

Author: Molly Elliot Seawell

Illustrator: H. C. Edwards

Release date: July 28, 2022 [eBook #68630]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Harper and Brothers Publishers,

1899

Credits: D A Alexander, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, for a

scan of the publisher's cover and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by
University of California libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIVELY

ADVENTURES OF GAVIN HAMILTON ***
THE LIVELY ADVENTURES
OF
GAVIN HAMILTON
By

MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL

AUTHOR OF “THE ROCK OF THE LION”
“A VIRGINIA CAVALIER” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
BY H. C. EDWARDS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1900
“‘IT IS MY TURN NOW!’ SHOUTED GAVIN”
 By MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL.
THE ROCK OF THE LION. Illustrated by A. I. Keller.
Post 8vo, cloth, $1 50.
The book is written with much dash and spirit, as
well as with painstaking accuracy.—N. Y. Times.
A VIRGINIA CAVALIER. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth,
$1 50.
A Virginia cavalier is the title under which George
Washington as a youth is presented to us. Some of
the incidents of his boyhood and early manhood are
told in a picturesque way, and the spirit and manners
of the time are well shown forth.—Atlantic Monthly.

NEW YORK AND LONDON:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

Copyright, 1899, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.
 NOTE
In this story, as in all the other stories for the young written by
the author, few, or no liberties have been taken with history and
chronology.
Molly Elliot Seawell
 ILLUSTRATIONS
ILLUSTRATED HALF-TITLE vii
“‘IT IS MY TURN NOW!’ SHOUTED GAVIN” Frontispiece
GAVIN THROWS AWAY HIS TROOPER’S
Facing p.
SABRE 18
THE KING DRAGGED GAVIN OUT OF THE
”
CLOSET 46
HE DROPPED SIR GAVIN ON TO THE
FLOWER-BED ”
FIFTEEN FEET BELOW 130
GAVIN CARRIES THE KING ACROSS THE
FLOODED ”
GARDEN 184
“TAKE CHARGE OF THE PRISONER UNTIL I
SEND ”
FOR HIM” 216
 THE LIVELY
ADVENTURES OF GAVIN HAMILTON
 CHAPTER I
In Silesia, the autumn of 1757 was one of frightful cold, of icy
winds, of sunless days, and freezing nights. The land, made
desolate by the contending armies of the Empress Queen, Maria
Theresa, and Frederick the Great, of Prussia, suffered still more from
this bitter and premature winter. The miserable inhabitants, many of
them houseless, died by thousands, of cold and starvation. The
wretched remnant of cattle left them perished; the fields lay untilled,
the mills were only piles of charred ruins, and desolation brooded
over the land. War could add but little more to the miseries of this
unfortunate region; but Frederick of Prussia and the lion-hearted
Empress of Austria fought as fiercely as they had done sixteen years
before when the Titanic combat had first begun. Rosbach had been
fought—that terrible battle in which Frederick prevailed against the
Austrians, who were assisted by the soldiers of France and the
money of England. The Austrians and French had, at first, attempted
an orderly retreat; but the piercing cold, the constant fall of snow,
and the difficulties of subsistence, had very much interfered with this.
Their object was to reach Prince Charles of Lorraine, in northwest
Silesia, and many small bodies of troops succeeded in maintaining
their organization until they joined Prince Charles. Others were not
so fortunate; soldiers found themselves without officers, and officers
found themselves without men. In this last case was Captain St.
Arnaud, of the French regiment of Dufour, a young gentleman who
had exchanged his commission in the King’s Musketeers, the most
royal of all the royal guards, for a line regiment where he could see
service. It cannot be denied that this decision on Captain St.
Arnaud’s part surprised his world, for he was a curled darling among
the ladies, and the most superlative dandy in Paris. And, wonderful
to say, he still looked the superlative dandy on the afternoon of the
coldest day he ever felt in his life, amid the snowy wastes of Silesia,
when, after two weeks of starving and running away from the
Prussians, it looked as if the inevitable hour had come. There was,
yet, not a speck upon his handsome uniform; his long, light hair lay
in curls upon his shoulders—he had admired his own locks too much
to cover them up with a periwig; and his delicate, handsome face,
now gaunt and pale, was exquisitely shaven. Clearly, starving did not
agree with his constitution. His whole life before that campaign had
been spent in the courts and camps of kings, and he had missed
those hardening and fortifying influences which is Fate’s rough way
of benefiting her favorites. But faint and weak and hopeless as he
seemed, his soul was still unconquered, and his eyes looked bravely
around upon the desolate waste before him. The cold, already
intense, was becoming severer every hour. St. Arnaud, being
naturally of a reflective nature, which he hid under a mask of the
utmost levity, was thinking to himself, as he patted the neck of his
lean and patient horse, “The whole social order depends on the
mercury in the tube. At a certain point, varying in different races, all
distinctions are abolished. If my general were here this moment, I
would be as good as he; for the best man would be he who could
keep up his circulation best. And if my orderly were here—bah! he
could only deprive me of my last chance of living through this night
by rubbing down my horse for me, which exercise would keep my
blood in circulation and increase the poor beast’s chances of
carrying me through to the end.” His piercing eyes had swept the
view in front of him, but he almost jumped out of his saddle as a
voice at his elbow said: “My Captain! I salute you!”
Close behind him, on a very good horse, sat a young private
soldier of St. Arnaud’s company. St. Arnaud at once recognized him;
he was so tall, so fresh coloured, so well made that he attracted
attention in the ranks; but private soldiers to St. Arnaud represented
not names, but numbers. He thought this young fellow was 472 on
the regimental roll, but had no idea of his name. He was a contrast to
St. Arnaud in every way; for besides being a perfect picture of
physical well-being, the young soldier was in rags. In one the inner
man had suffered, in the other the outer man. Having spoken, the
young man awaited speech from his officer with as much coolness
as if he were on parade at Versailles, instead of being alone with him
at nightfall in a frozen desert.
“I recognize you,” said St. Arnaud, after a moment; “where are
the others of your company?”
“I am the only man left, sir,” replied the soldier; “as you know, we
were very much cut up that villainous day at Rosbach; and when you
were swept from us, in that last charge, we had already lost half our
men. I don’t know how it was, sir; certainly it was not the fault of our
officers”—with another salute—“but I believe ours was the worst
demoralized regiment in the French forces after Rosbach, and my
company was the worst demoralized in the regiment. We had not an
officer left above a corporal, but the handful of us could have
remained together. Instead of doing that, it was sauve qui peut with
all of us. Note, sir, I do not say we did not fight like devils at
Rosbach; but being unused to defeat, we did not know how to take it.
I cannot tell you how it is I come to be here alone; only I know that I,
with twenty others, started out to make our way toward Prince
Charles, and one by one the men dropped off, until yesterday
morning, when, at sunrise, I found myself alone where I had
bivouacked the night before with three comrades. They had gone off
in the night, or early in the morning, to follow a road I did not believe
would lead us where we wanted to go. I came this way, and well it
was for me.”
The young soldier’s story, told jauntily, produced a singular effect
on St. Arnaud. He had kept on hoping that, in spite of the accident of
his being separated from his command—an accident caused by his
own impetuosity carrying him too far in advance of his men—he
would yet find his own personal command intact. But there was no
more room for hope in the face of what was before his eyes and
ringing in his ears. His countenance became so pale with grief and
chagrin that he seemed about to drop from his saddle. He laid the
reins on his horse’s neck, and raised both arms above his head in a
gesture of despair, but he said no word. The soldier, after waiting
vainly for a question or an answer, spoke again.
 “We have no time to lose, sir; we must cross this plain before
night. I have some forage here and something in my haversack, and
if we can get a fire we can live.”
St. Arnaud, still silent, mechanically gathered up the reins again,
and the horse instinctively made for a faint track beaten through the
snow. The soldier followed, ten paces behind. On they travelled for
an hour or two. As the sickly sun sank below the fringe of dun clouds
in the west the cold became more terrible. A fierce wind set in, which
drifted furious flurries of snow across the vast, white plain; and when
the sky showed black against the white earth, neither man nor horse
could travel farther. There was not a tree or even a bush in sight.
They had passed a few dead horses on the dreary waste, but that
was the only thing that broke the ghastly monotony of the way. Now
they involuntarily halted, and each knew that from then until sunrise
they would be fighting with the cold for life. The thought came back
to St. Arnaud, who had scarcely spoken a word to his companion,
how calamity levels all distinctions. It would not have surprised him
in the least if, when he dismounted, and mechanically threw the reins
to the soldier, to have heard him say: “Take care of your own horse,
and I will attend to mine.” Instead of this, the soldier only pointed to a
little hillock near by, and said: “That place, sir, is a little sheltered
from the wind. It will do us good to walk there.”
St. Arnaud, whose faculties seemed frozen, obeyed the soldier.
As he was tramping through the half darkness, his eyes blinded by
the snow, and the icy blast nearly cutting him to pieces, he heard a
shout of joy behind him. The soldier had suddenly stumbled upon
something which was worth to them at that moment all the gold in
the Bank of France. It was nothing less than a broken gun-carriage,
of which a few inches of the wheel appeared above the snow. The
soldier dashed toward it, and tugged and pulled at it, shouting out
exclamations of joy, as a man will who has found that which will give
him life. St. Arnaud watched him dully as he wrenched such of it
apart as he could, and dragging it to the sheltered spot under the
hillock, where St. Arnaud held the trembling horses, scooped out a
hole in the snow, and with a flint and steel struck a flash of fire.
 At first, the flame flickered tamely; then, suddenly, it burst into a
glory of light and warmth. St. Arnaud advanced, still leading the poor
horses, who gazed at the flames with an intelligent joy, almost
human.
By that time it was so black overhead and so white underfoot,
and the swirling snow was so whipped about by the furious north
wind, that it seemed as if the two men and the two shivering horses
were alone in a universe of cold and snow and blackness. The
young soldier first gave the horses the feed they had carried, and
melting some snow in a tin pan he carried in his knapsack, gave
them to drink. Then, washing out the pan, he produced some bacon
and cheese and black bread. St. Arnaud showed the first sign of
interest so far, by handing out his canteen, of which one whiff caused
the young soldier’s wide mouth to come open with a grin, that
showed the whitest teeth imaginable. And then, huddling under their
cloaks, officer and soldier shared their first meal together. That day
month St. Arnaud had been entertained by a countess in one of the
finest houses in Vienna, and the young soldier had fared
sumptuously in the kitchen with the maids; but to-night they were
supping together, and only too glad to sup at all. At last, all the bacon
and cheese being devoured, St. Arnaud’s spirit seemed to rouse
from its torpor. He looked at the soldier attentively and asked:
“What is your name?”
“Ameeltone,” was the response.
St. Arnaud’s French ear did not detect the strange pronunciation
of the name, yet he could not quite make it out.
“Can you spell it?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. H-a-m-i-l-t-o-n—Ameeltone.”
“But that is English.”
“Yes; my name is English all over. Gavin is my first name”—and
he pronounced it Garvan.
“Have you any English blood in you?”
 “I have not a drop of any but English blood, my Captain. My
father, Sir Gavin Hamilton, is an Englishman; and my mother, God
bless her, is Lady Hamilton.”
“Then,” said St. Arnaud, very naturally, “what are you doing as a
trooper in Dufour’s regiment?”
“Because,” replied Gavin, taking up the tin pan and scooping out
the last remnants of their supper, “my father is a great rascal.” And
he washed the pan out with snow.
St. Arnaud, accustomed to the extreme filial respect of the
French for their parents, felt a shock at Gavin’s cool characterization
of his father, and said in reply:
“A man sometimes has cause for resentment against his father,
but seldom calls him a rascal.”
“True, my Captain,” cheerfully replied Gavin, “but my father is a
terrible rascal. He has ill-used my mother, the finest creature God
ever made. What do you think of a man with a great fortune
deserting his wife and child in a foreign land and then using all his
power to make her admit she is not his wife, when he knows she is;
and when he finds she has a soul not to be terrified, trying to fool her
into a divorce? But I tell you, my Captain, my mother is a brave lady.
She told him and wrote him that she was his lawful wife, and that she
would defend me—I was a little boy then—that she would have no
divorce, lest it reflect on me, and that no one of my rights would be
bartered away by her. And at that very time she could barely keep
body and soul together by giving lessons in Paris. She is well
educated, luckily, being an English officer’s daughter. The English
laws are hard on poor and friendless women, and being in France,
too, my mother had little chance to prove her rights. She looked to
me, however, to be able one day to maintain all she had claimed;
and she taught me carefully, so that, as she said, when I came to the
condition and estate of a gentleman, I might know how to bear
myself. She did not wish to go back to England, where she knew
persecution awaited her, and brought me up as much an English boy
as she could in France. The only thing that troubled her was my
pronunciation—she always laughs when I pronounce my own name.
I have an English way of using my fists when I am angry. She scolds
me, but I know her brothers fought like that when they were lads at
school.”
“How came you to join the army?”
“Faith, sir, I had no choice. The King’s recruiting officers came
after me, and I had to go. But I cannot say I regretted it, for I could
never have been anything else but a soldier, and I have a better
chance to rise in the army than in any of the humble callings open to
me in civil life. My mother said it was best—that I came of good
fighting stock on her side—her brothers were officers, and as far
back as she knows her ancestors they were mostly in the army and
navy.”
The fire was burning brightly now; they were warmed through,
their hunger was appeased, and so comfortable was their situation
that they were both in a mood to entertain and be entertained. A fire
in the snow and a supper of cheese and bacon meant luxury to St.
Arnaud now, who had been brought up in palaces, and he found
himself listening to Gavin’s story with the same interest that the Arab
in the parching desert listens to the story-teller who makes him forget
all his miseries.
“Did you ever see your father?” he asked.
“Once. My father was sent to the court of the Empress Queen on
a diplomatic mission. He passed secretly through Paris and sent for
me. I went with the sole idea that he might do justice to my mother.
But I might have saved my shoe leather. However, what I did that
day to my father is written to my credit in heaven’s books, for I
mauled him well, and I was but eighteen—I am only nineteen now.”
St. Arnaud could not refrain from a look of disapproval, and
Gavin, noting it, asked at once, with the greatest naïveté:
“But he spoke abominably of my mother, and any man who
speaks one disrespectful word of her—he is my enemy, and I am his.
Would not you do the same by your mother?”
And St. Arnaud involuntarily answered “Yes.”
“Well, then,” continued Gavin, rising to his feet, “are you
surprised that I should think I did a righteous act in flying at Sir
Gavin? He is a strong, well-made man, though not so big as I am
now, and as I took him by surprise, I succeeded in knocking him off
his chair before he had got out half he had meant to say about my
mother. His valet came running in then, and Sir Gavin, smiling as he
wiped some blood off his face, sent the man away. Oh, he was a
cool one! He smiled all the time we were together, and he laughed
aloud when I called myself Gavin Hamilton.
“‘Garvan Ameeltone!’ he cried, mocking me.”
Gavin was now thoroughly inspired by his own eloquence. He
stood up and put his hands behind his back, English fashion, while
repeating his father’s words and mimicking him in an odd, drawling
voice. St. Arnaud fully believed in the scene that Gavin not only told,
but acted before him. Even the two horses, tethered close to the red
circle of light, lifted their heads, attracted by the ringing human voice,
and seemed to be listening attentively to the story of Gavin
Hamilton’s wrongs and revenges.
“My father then, instead of being angry with me, seemed to like
me the better, and offered me everything—everything if I would
abandon my mother. He would acknowledge me as his son,
according to both the French and English law, for I was born in
France; he would promise never to marry again, and I don’t know
what else beside. It was then my turn to laugh. I said: ‘Wait until I am
twenty-one, and then see if I do not prove I am your son. And as for
marrying again, you dare not in my mother’s lifetime.’
“There was an hour-glass in the room, and Sir Gavin said to me:
‘In about twenty minutes all the sand will have run out of that glass. I
give you until then to accept my offer.’ For answer I smashed the
hour-glass on the hearth. It was then he spoke insultingly of my
mother, and it was then that I think I laid up treasures in heaven by