The Bride of Science

There is a particular pleasure in a letter that comes by the morning post bearing nothing but a difficulty — a thing one cannot yet do, set down in another's hand, and waiting to be conquered before the candles are lit. I had such letters once; a great many of them; and I lie now in a darkened room where the post brings only condolence, and never again that one difficulty waiting to be conquered before the candles are lit — and I would barter a year of what is left to me for one more morning of that particular hunger. For there was a season — it opened, I think, in the summer of 1840, and ran on into the winter of '41 and '42 — when I was the most fortunate woman in England, though none but myself knew it; because I had found at last a man who would neither flatter me nor spare me, and who consented, chiefly by the post, to teach me mathematics in earnest.

Augustus De Morgan was that man — Professor at the new University College, a logician of the first rank, and, what weighed with me beyond all rank, honest. I had laboured before at algebra under my own steam and under Mrs Somerville's gentler guidance; but it is one thing to read a matter through and feel the warm glow of comprehension settle, and quite another to be set a problem, and to fail at it, and to be told plainly that one has failed, and why. He sent me functions; I returned him my workings, blotted and over-corrected, by the carrier or the post; he sent them back marked, with a fresh difficulty appended — as a man lays down one more stone for the next tread of a stair that mounts into the dark. I climbed it. From the manipulation of symbols I came to the differential calculus — to that strange and beautiful business of quantities which vanish and yet leave behind them a perfectly definite ratio: the speed of a thing at the very instant it is nowhere, the slope of a curve at a single dimensionless point.

I stumbled — and I shall not pretend otherwise, for I am grown weary of the legend that would have me arrive already finished, like Minerva out of the head. I would race ahead of my own foundations. I would seize upon some grand general view, and find, on being pressed, that I had not secured the dull particular beneath it — that I had run up a turret and forgotten the footing. There were whole days when a single sign eluded me; when I read the same half-page nine times and understood it less at the ninth than at the first; and wept, I confess, from sheer vexation, certain I was a fraud got up in a bluestocking's collar. De Morgan, I came to suspect, thought my very eagerness a kind of hazard — that I attacked a subject where I should rather have laid siege to it. He was right. Yet not once did he tell me I could not do the thing; he told me only that I had not yet done it — which is a wholly different sentence, and the only one a true teacher should permit himself.

And here, lying still, I must set down the discovery that came to me in the thick of all that ascent — not a theorem, but a recognition, and the dearest I ever made. I had been reared, as whoever reads these pages already knows, for a corrective. My mother — herself no mean mathematician, whom my father had once crowned his Princess of Parallelograms, with that compound of homage and mockery only he could mix — had set Number against me as one sets a splint against a crooked limb, to make the imaginative inheritance grow straight. Poetry was the enemy in the nursery; reason was the cure. I had believed it. And then, in the calculus — of all unlooked-for places — I found that I had been deceived: not by malice, but by a false partition drawn straight through the middle of the human soul.

For I saw that the faculty by which I leapt ahead of my foundations — the very impatience De Morgan checked — was not other than the faculty of the analyst at his highest reach. Imagination, as the world employs the word, it dressed in feathers and gave to the poets; and analysis it called cold, and handed to the clerks of Number. I knew, from the inside, that this was nonsense. Imagination is the Discovering faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science; it is that which seizes a relation between things never before brought into relation, and holds them together in the mind until the slow machinery of proof can be wheeled up behind. What is the differential coefficient but an act of imagination made exact? What is a curve, but a thought we have agreed to see? I had been told my two parents were at war within me. I found, rather, that they were one country — and I its only native; and I gave that country a name. I called it poetical science; and I have never since believed the two words to be other than a single word the language has not yet learnt to write without a space.

It was an audacious season, and I will not now, with so little time left me for honesty, feign a modesty I did not feel. There rose in me a measure I scarcely dared whisper even to myself, and committed but once or twice to a letter: that I might be to the analytical world what my father was to the poetical — that the unexplored country of analysis might find in me its Childe Harold, its singer who was also its surveyor. He had gone out into Greece and into legend, and died at six-and-thirty at Missolonghi, and I never looked upon his living face; but I had his blood, and I had begun to think it ran, in me, not into verse but into operations — into the long sweet logic of the cards and the Store and the Mill, the unbuilt engine I had already begun to dream upon. That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal — I wrote to Mr Babbage — as time will show. I set it down to him who, alone of my correspondents, would neither be appalled by the boast nor school me out of it — as my mother had spent my childhood schooling me to distrust precisely such flights. I do not retract it now. I cannot prove it; I never could; and that is at once the cruelty and the grandeur of a vocation — it is felt long before it can be demonstrated, the way one feels a theorem to be true and then labours months to earn the right to say so.

For it was a vocation, and not mere ambition — and in that distinction lies the whole of the matter. Ambition wants the world's eye; I have had my portion of that wanting, and it is a low fire, and burns out. But a calling is a thing that arrives from elsewhere and uses you — it lays its hand upon the shoulder and says, this is what you are for; and the saying carries the force of a command laid down before you were born. I had felt it once before, at seventeen, in a London drawing-room, watching a portion of Mr Babbage's engine work its silent arithmetic, and knowing — with a certainty no evidence yet warranted — that here was the thing my life would bend itself around. The calculus, under De Morgan, was the instrument tuning itself. To what music, I did not yet know. But I knew the instrument was mine; and that I had been, all unknowing, in training for it since the nursery — that even the splint my mother bound me with had, by the strangest providence, made the very limb that should one day reach where no one's had reached.

I think, lying here, how little of all this was visible from without. A countess at her desk in the country; three children abovestairs; a great, kind, earnest husband building his terraces and his towers in Somerset; the household running upon its rails — and within, this furnace, this annunciation. None passing the window would have guessed that the woman bent over her papers believed herself summoned. That is the secret life of women of my kind — and, it may be, of every soul that is more than it is suffered to appear: the great event happens entirely within, by candlelight, between the posts; and the world is told nothing, and notices less.

The medicine is pulling at me again, and the letters of my own hand swim a little upon the page. But I would have whoever reads this understand that the happiest I ever was — happier than at my marriage, happier than at the births of my children, and God forgive a dying mother the comparison — was in those plain laborious months of being taught: of being a beginner with a great matter in view. I was a bride that season, though I had been five years a wife. I was wedded, as more than once I declared myself, to science; and I went to that altar not as a sacrifice, but as one who has, after long mistaking, found the only bridegroom who was ever truly hers. The dowry I brought was imagination. The vow I made was rigour. And the union of the two — let the unbuilt engine and these dim last pages stand as the banns of it — that was the marriage of my life; and I do not believe, even now, even here, that it has been annulled by anything so small as my death.