7.
However, the cosmogony of Eureka was late and
isolated—intellectually Poe was an offspring of the
eighteenth
century—at a time (1848) when the trium-
phant world view was not only Heraclitean but ro-
mantic, in the strict sense of the word, rather than
baroque. The Great Vortex, without being abandoned
(pure astronomers are
still inclined to accept it, at least
in the form of a complete rotation of
our whole galaxy)
enjoys less favor than the flight to infinity. The
circle,
and even the ellipse, yielded to the straight line or
to
curves (parabola, hyperbola) which are fascinating
because they are
open-ended. Scientific excuses were
offered by Herschel and then by Laplace
(Exposition
du système du monde,
1796). “Several observations,”
Laplace says, “are represented well enough by suppos-
ing the solar system being carried
towards the constel-
lation of
Hercules.” It was only a mere hypothesis but
the romantic
imagination took hold of it. And for the
intellectual delight of completely
embracing the whole
cosmos, the romantic substituted the joy of
feeling
himself projected outward, beyond all anticipation, the
joy of
resigning and losing one's self, relishing the
mysterious and a certain
intellectual vertigo with the
savor of the “maybe.”
Carried away towards what?
Towards regions of light, dense with stars, or
towards
some frightful collision? The romantic mind succumbed
to the
pathos of the “Voyage Out With No Return.”
This
propensity for the “voyage out,” associated with
the
desire for freedom, had created the prestige of
comets. (We refer to the
comet of the astronomical
era, when the comet was recognized as a
heavenly
body and not as a supernatural apparition.) The comets'
vast
orbits, their unpredicted appearance, and the
belief, due to Descartes,
that they can escape from
their own vortex and pass from one system to
another—
all that had made comets the model vagabonds; but
now the whole solar system was in flight. Works, solidly
documented for
their time in astronomical matters,
yielded to this intoxication and
maintained it. For
example, Alexander von Humboldt's
Kosmos (1845)
offered the reader an impressive speeded-up film
of
a universe in flight: “Countless stars are carried away,
like whirlwinds of dust, in opposite directions.” Jean
Reynaud's
Earth and Sky (
Terre et
ciel, 1854) also
insisted on the exalted idea that navigation by
the stars
never followed the same route twice.
However, among the romantics (with a few excep-
tions like Byron and Leopardi) optimism carried the
day; fear itself
can be, after all, no more than a
pleasurable intoxication. Faith in a
Supreme Being was
not given up. Only the “harmony of the
world” was
not divorced from time; it was in the process of
be-
coming. Minds, preoccupied with
socialism, like the
Saint-Simonian socialism of J. Reynaud, or with an
esoteric idea, like that of Flammarion (to name only
truly informed
astronomical writers), conceived the
universe as “a great
fraternal society” (Reynaud) or
as a place reserved for souls
allowed to rise from one
world to a higher world in an indefinite progress.
Quite different was the reaction to the universe in
flight by the
pessimistic type of minds that formed the
majority of sky-watchers at the
end of the nineteenth
century. What occurred now was a very intense nega-
tion of the “harmony of the
world.” The source of this
current was not astronomical; the slow and steady
progress of science did not
justify it, but on the con-
trary, it offered
grounds for creating enthusiasm. The
discovery of Neptune in 1877, the
study of Mars'
“canals” revived speculation on the plurality
of in-
habited worlds, and the flood of
Martian fiction began
to mount.
The influence of Schopenhauer and Hindu philoso-
phy, accompanying perhaps an era of social stagnation
and boredom,
and perhaps also, the mysterious play
of the psychological pendulum,
imposed on cosmolo-
gists and poets the
vision of an empty, dark, and icy
space in which the imaginary voyage can
only be a
nauseating dizzy fall into the infinite. The hospitable
space of Newton gave way to an uninhabitable space.
And in this sea of
Darkness all that the earthly ship
could expect thereafter without a pilot
was shipwreck.
