Part 5

Tycho was born in 1546 and was the eldest of ten children. His father, Otto Brahe, was lord of Knudstrup in Scaane, which now forms part of Sweden. At an early age he was adopted by his uncle, Jorgen Brahe, who treated him as if he were his son, had him educated at Copenhagen, but by spoiling him a good deal was no doubt responsible for the somewhat conceited and domineering manner he developed in later years. At the age of fourteen Tycho received what might be termed his “call” from the heavens. It came in the form of an eclipse of the sun, which roused the boy’s interest to such an extent that from that moment he made up his mind to turn his attention to astronomy. It is a curious fact that ten years later, when chemistry had so absorbed him that he had almost abandoned his astronomical studies, he again received a sign from the heavens. This time it was the appearance of a new star which he observed one night while walking from his laboratory, and which caused him to take up again the beloved pursuit of which he never wearied to his dying day. He discovered the new star, and it may be equally truly said that the star discovered him. But at first the idea of his devoting his time to astronomy was not at all favored or encouraged. After he had spent three years in the Copenhagen University his uncle sent him to Leipzig, where it was intended he should study law. His tutor, who accompanied him, conscientiously tried to make Tycho devote all his attention and time to his legal studies, but his task was almost hopeless. It is impossible to force any one to take an interest in something he does not like. These obstacles only served to strengthen Tycho’s resolve. He devoured every book he could find on astronomy, and at night, unknown to his tutor, he would creep out and begin his first intercourse with the stars. A copy of Ptolemy’s great work on astronomy, copiously annotated and marked by the schoolboy, is preserved as one of the chief treasures in the library of the University at Prague.

While he was thus engaged a fatal accident befell his uncle. Jorgen Brahe was riding in attendance on the King of Denmark when a bridge collapsed under them. He plunged into the water and attempted to save the King’s life. In consequence of this he contracted a chill, which soon afterwards caused his death. Tycho hurried home to Copenhagen, but he did not stay long. He returned to Germany and continued his studies at Wittenberg, the home of the great Reformer Luther, who had been dead only about twenty years. He seems to have had no desire to go home, for he settled down at Rostock and then at Augsburg, where he was fortunate enough to find many scientific men with whom he could associate and exchange ideas. Here it was that he invented and constructed some remarkable astronomical instruments, one of which was that enormous globe you saw in his library. It was four feet in diameter, and covered with a coating of brass on which was engraved a representation of the heavens founded on his own observations.

Otto Brahe, who was governor of Helsingborg Castle, died in 1570, and Tycho returned to Denmark to arrange his father’s affairs. Another uncle placed his house at the disposal of his remarkable young nephew, and soon Tycho was eagerly watching his new star, about which he wrote a book in Latin. There was some difficulty about publishing the book, because it was supposed to be beneath the dignity of a nobleman to demean himself by writing books. However, by the assistance of friends, it was published and added very much to his reputation. This was an age when nobles and aristocrats had great power and dominated the country. Like nobles in all ages, physical work in time of peace or mental work of any kind was beneath their dignity: they occupied most of their time in pleasure and amusement. They considered themselves the elect, who were born to be served. Although he belonged by birth to this class, Tycho detested the frivolous, aimless lives they led. In a letter in which he expresses his intention of leaving Denmark, he says:

Neither my country nor my friends keep me back; one who has courage finds a home in every place and lives a happy life every where. Friends, too, one can find in all countries. There will always be time enough to return to the cold North to follow the general example, and, like the rest, in pride and luxury to play for the rest of one’s years with wine, dogs, and horses (for if these were lacking how could the nobles be happy?). May God, as I trust He will, accord me a better lot.

He traveled about in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and he made great friends with the Landgrave of Hesse, who was very much interested in mathematics and astronomy and had a fine observatory of his own. While Tycho was staying with him at Cassel a serious fire broke out in the palace. But such was the astronomer’s power of concentration and absorption in his work that, regardless of the general alarm, he could not be persuaded to leave his study until he had finished the particular piece of work with which he was occupied at the moment.

The fame of the great astronomer was now spreading, and the King of Denmark, Frederick II, who heard his praises sung by the Landgrave of Hesse, was determined to show his appreciation of the remarkable talents of his subject in a practical way. He therefore presented Tycho Brahe with the island of Hveen, in the Baltic, as his own personal property, with sufficient money to erect on it whatever buildings he might desire. The foundation of the great castle was laid on August 30, 1576. A party of scientific friends had assembled, and the time had been chosen so that the heavenly bodies were auspiciously placed. Libations of costly wines were poured forth and the stone was laid with due solemnity. Here at Uraniborg, the castle you visited, he lived for about twenty years, keeping a diary not only of astronomical observations but of all events that passed on the island.

The peasants on the island, whom he doctored and to whom he gave medicines for nothing, regarded him of course as a wizard, and a number of strange legends were circulated about the magician and his wonderful castle. Many visitors came to visit him at Uraniborg from all parts of the world—distinguished astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers, divines, princes and kings. Queen Sophie of Denmark came on several occasions and brought her father, Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg. In 1590 James VI of Scotland, who thirteen years later became James I of England, came over to marry Princess Anne of Denmark. She had intended to go to the home of her betrothed, but owing to stormy weather had been wrecked off the coast of Norway. James therefore, who rather feared that Queen Elizabeth might interfere and upset his plans of marriage, sailed forth himself to fetch his bride. The marriage was celebrated at Oslo, on the coast of Norway, and the royal couple came subsequently on a visit to Copenhagen. James took the opportunity to visit Uraniborg, and was very much interested in Tycho Brahe’s work. On leaving the island he asked what he should give the astronomer in return for his hospitality. Tycho, like a true courtier, replied: “Some of your Majesty’s own verses.” The King was delighted and readily acquiesced. Tycho’s opinion of the literary efforts of the poet King is not recorded. Queen Elizabeth’s Minister at the Court of Denmark also visited the island, and Duncan Liddel, the Scottish astronomer.

Tycho was a great talker; he had a somewhat overbearing and arrogant manner, and was intolerant and contemptuous with those whom he considered to be his inferiors intellectually. But although he was conceited he was thoroughly genuine, and despised the shams and artificialities of life. His motto was _Esse potius quam haberi_ (To be rather than to seem to be). That is to say, he did not value reputation and fame unless it was accompanied by real accomplishment. He preferred working hard for the pure satisfaction of doing good work, even if it were not recognized, and he despised people who got credit and fame without really deserving it. He was quite right. And it is worth remembering that many people who are doing valuable work in the world remain absolutely unknown: while many of the names which appear most frequently before the public are those of men who have become famous by chance and not by merit.

In addition to being an astronomer, Tycho was a skilled mechanic, mathematician, and architect: he wrote verses which were much admired and was a great lover of music. It was only natural in such an age that a man who devoted himself to astronomy and chemistry should believe in astrology and alchemy; and it is not to be wondered at that Tycho Brahe should have attempted to find some connection between the movements of the stars and the course of events in the lives of men. When the King of Denmark asked him to cast the horoscope of some of the young princes, that is to say, foretell their future by the position of the stars at the time of their birth, he did it very elaborately, but with a caution that too much reliance should not be placed on such prophecies. His first attempt at prophesying was anything but successful. He said the eclipse of the moon in 1566 meant that the Turkish Sultan would die. Presently the news arrived of the Sultan’s death, but it appeared that it had taken place _before_ the eclipse—a fact which caused people to laugh at Tycho’s expense. But he certainly made one very singular prediction from the appearance of the comet of 1577. It announced, he declared, that in the north, in Finland, there would be born a prince who would lay waste Germany and vanish in 1632. Now, Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, was born in Finland, overran Germany, and died in 1632.

Tycho, indeed, was superstitious by nature. If he met an old woman or a hare on going out, he took it as a bad omen and would return home; and he often listened attentively to the sayings and prophecies of Jeppe, his dwarf jester.

It is not surprising that such a man as this did not marry one of his own class. A lady of the nobility would have been too frightened to lead such an adventurous life and an educated woman would have refused to submit to so domineering and tyrannical a nature in a husband. When he was twenty-seven he married a poor peasant girl by whose beauty he had been struck, and she seems to have been more of a servant than a companion to him.

The glories of the Castle of Uraniborg were not destined to last for long, and no one was to blame for this but Tycho himself, though he certainly had enemies who were jealous of him, and who were only too ready to take advantage of the decline in his fortunes. A series of unpleasant incidents, combined with his somewhat restless and discontented spirit, forced him at last to abandon his magnificent home and to leave his native land for good. He had neglected his duties, squandered his money, and displeased people by his views. The peasants on the island complained of ill-treatment. A disagreeable lawsuit with regard to his daughter’s marriage worried him, and many of his influential friends at court had died or retired. He addressed a letter to the King of Denmark, Christian IV, the son of his original patron, Frederick II, hoping to be restored to favor, but he was sternly rebuked and his pension was withdrawn. A poem lamenting over the ingratitude of Denmark shows with what keen regret he left the country. It must have been a tragic moment when all his instruments and treasures were packed up and the castle and observatory left deserted. There is hardly any trace even of the ruins on the island to-day. The truth is that a man engaged in intellectual work is only hampered by such lavish patronage. Tycho’s head was turned, and indeed he would have required to have a very strong character to remain unaffected in such peculiar conditions.

Undismayed, however, by temporary bad fortune, the astronomer, after a year or so of travel, during which he never ceased from his work, turned from one royal patron to another. He was received at Prague in 1599 by the Emperor Rudolph the Second, who pensioned him and gave him the castle of Benatke, near by, where he established himself and his family and set up at once an observatory. Comfortable as he was, still he yearned for his fatherland and never forgot the great generosity of his munificent friend, King Frederick II.

Among the disciples and assistants who gathered round him here was Johann Kepler, whom we mentioned before. He was then twenty-eight years old, and lived to become an even greater astronomer than Tycho Brahe himself. He owed a great deal to the profound and extensive observations of his master on the subject of fixed stars, and with the aid of all the careful information which Tycho had gathered together and bequeathed to his favorite pupil on his death, he made important discoveries with regard to the movements of the planets, and elaborated a much more advanced idea of the universe. Curiously enough, Tycho Brahe, with all his astonishing industry, never completely accepted the system of Copernicus. His idea was that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun formed the center for the orbits of the planets, but the sun itself, together with the planets, moved round the earth.

By his diligent observation of a thousand fixed stars, he gave to the world a catalogue of accurate positions of these bodies which took the place of the old catalogue of Ptolemy of Alexandria, who lived in the second century. This catalogue of observations held its own for more than a hundred years, until telescopes and clocks of precision came into use. It was the mighty impulse that Tycho Brahe gave to practical astronomy that caused that science to be taken up at universities, among which those of Copenhagen and Leyden were the first to found observatories.

In 1601, at the age of fifty-five, Tycho Brahe died after a short illness. He was accorded by the Emperor’s orders a funeral of great pomp, and buried in the Teyn Church at Prague. In the funeral oration pronounced over his grave he was well described thus:

In his words were truth and brevity, in his demeanor and countenance sincerity, in his counsel wisdom, in his deeds success. In him was nothing artificial or hypocritical, but he spoke his mind straight out, and to this no doubt is due the hatred with which many regarded him. He coveted nothing but time, and his endeavor was to be of service to all and hurtful to none.

The tomb, with the effigy of the great Danish astronomer and the epitaph composed by Kepler, was restored and put in order in 1901, on the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of his death.

By his wonderful industry Tycho Brahe laid the foundations on which others were able to build up great inventions and great discoveries. A discoverer or inventor may only put the finishing touch to the labor of others who have gone before him, preparing the way. Their names may not be known, their work may be forgotten, while he gets all the praise and renown for the famous achievement, which, however, without the help of his predecessors he could never have accomplished. You may see a man trying to pull a stiff cork out of a bottle. He fails. Another man tries. He too fails. A third man tries and out it comes. “Ah,” every one says, “he has done what the others could not do.” But the truth is that he succeeded because the first two men loosened the cork before him. Much of the great preparatory toil of the world’s work has been done by men and women whose names do not appear in any record. Tycho, however, did leave his mark, for it was not usual for a man of noble birth to devote his time to arduous study.

By far the greater number of men who are famous in history, especially those who have achieved renown in science and the arts, have been men of humble origin who have had to work for their living and even struggle against the adversity which poverty brings. It is this very struggle and continuous effort that is the making of them. Those who are born in more fortunate circumstances, and are surrounded by luxury and comfort which tempt them to lead lives of ease and idleness rarely succeed in accomplishing notable achievements. Alexander Humboldt, who lived at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, is another notable instance of a man of high position (and in his case, too, considerable means) giving up his life to an untiring pursuit of knowledge and to amassing a remarkable amount of valuable scientific information.

To work when you need not work, to prevent your time being wasted in pleasure and amusements and your efforts being relaxed by comforts and luxuries, is perhaps even more difficult than the struggle against necessity and poverty. Only a few great men brought up in such circumstances have succeeded. Tycho Brahe was one of them, and it is very greatly to his credit that by strength of will and character he overcame to the extent he did these formidable obstacles.

A. P.

IV

CERVANTES

1547–1616

Leisure, an agreeable residence, pleasant fields, serene skies, murmuring streams, and tranquillity of mind—by these the most barren muse may become fruitful and produce that which will delight and astonish the world.

It is not often that great men are recognized in their lifetime. They may have a few admirers, but their work is probably the subject of dispute and disagreement, and not till years have passed, and the smaller men who attracted momentary attention have been forgotten, are they valued at last at their true worth. Thus it may happen that men who are talked about a great deal, and rather noisily praised by their contemporaries, disappear almost entirely from the memory of man in succeeding generations, while men who in their day have despaired of success, have been neglected, and have sometimes felt the humiliation of failure, live on in their work long after their death and exercise an influence more far-reaching than they themselves ever dreamed of.

Of course you have heard of Don Quixote, and you have probably read some of his amusing adventures—how he went about with his funny little squire, Sancho Panza, and gave proof of his heroism in many diverting ways. But the book in which his adventures are written is not only an entertaining story—it is a wonderfully accurate picture of Spanish life in the sixteenth century, and is a record of many interesting events that took place outside Spain as well. When it was published in 1605, the book was very popular in Spain, but nobody thought it was going to become one of the world’s greatest books, no one guessed that it would be translated into more foreign languages than any other book in the world except the Bible and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” No one, therefore, paid much attention to the author, and his very birthplace was not even remembered after he died. But when the Spaniards found that Cervantes had become famous throughout the world, then they took the trouble to unearth something about his history, and it was found that he had a claim to fame as a man, apart from his renown as an author.

Cervantes was a soldier. It is not usual for a soldier to write imaginative books. But he was not a soldier in a regular army, drilling every day in a barrack square, but a soldier who went out and fought, endured fearful hardships, and had the most terrible adventures. He gained in this way a very wide knowledge of the world, which, combined with his powerful imagination, made him into one of the world’s great geniuses.

Let us try and follow him through the main events of his crowded life. Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547. Alcala de Henares in New Castille was his birthplace, but very little is known of his childhood. As a boy he used to watch the strolling players in the town, and he relates details of his recollection of them which remained stamped on his memory. They would come round and give performances in the market square. Their properties consisted of a sack which held four white sheepskin dresses trimmed with gilt leather, four beards, wigs, and crooks. The decoration of the theater was an old blanket hung on two ropes. One can well imagine that their performances and the verses of the comedies remained with him vividly when he was grown up. His education was supposed to have been neglected because he never went to a university. But if he made mistakes in his writings which a man who had passed examinations would have avoided, he managed to obtain a knowledge of men and life—a more important knowledge, which many a ripe scholar might envy. At an early age he tried his hand at writing, and at twenty-one his poems, on the death of the Queen of Spain, were especially praised by his tutor.

Years were destined to pass before Cervantes settled down to any literary work. I expect he knew he had the talent, but there was very little chance for him to test it. He liked adventure and wanted to be up and doing, so he seized the first opportunity he could of gaining some experience of the world outside his own country. He went to Rome and became a page in the household of an envoy of the Pope whose acquaintance he had made in Madrid. But this did not suit him, because the life of a page or chamberlain was intolerably slow and uneventful. Bowing and scraping, entertaining and intriguing, was not in his line at all. He resigned his post and enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish regiment in Italy. Pope Pius V was organizing at that time a Holy League against the Turks, whose great conquests were alarming the States of Europe. But there was some difficulty in getting European nations to agree to any plan for attacking Turkey. They were jealous of one another and would not all act together. At last, after a long delay, which was spent by Cervantes in Naples, the League, consisting of the Pope, Venice, and Spain, was organized under the command of the famous Don John of Austria, a brilliant general, who was half-brother of King Philip II of Spain. The fleet of these three States was the largest that had ever sailed under a Christian flag. It consisted of galleys rowed by a large number of oarsmen, who were all criminals under sentence. In the Turkish fleet the oarsmen were Christian slaves. The object of the allies was to recover Cyprus from the Turks. But before they could reach so far a great naval engagement took place in the Gulf of Lepanto, at the entrance of the Gulf of Corinth. After some hard fighting the allied fleets were victorious.

Miguel de Cervantes, though he was acting only as a common soldier, behaved with conspicuous heroism. Weak with fever which he had caught at Naples, he insisted, in spite of protests, on obtaining the command of a dozen men, and stood with them in a position exposed to the hottest fire of the enemy. From his ship he boarded one of the Turkish galleys and received three gunshot wounds—two in the breast and one shattering his left hand, which was maimed for the rest of his life. His conduct won for him the applause of all his comrades, and he always looked back on this episode as the most glorious in his career.

Twenty thousand Turks perished, and a hundred and seventy of their galleys were captured in this memorable fight at Lepanto, which, if it did not destroy, anyhow arrested the power of Turkey. A great storm followed the victory, and Don John sailed away to Messina with his wounded men, whom he landed there. Cervantes, whose wounds were very severe, was among them. He received a special grant of money for his distinguished service. But so eager was he to be at the front again that it was not long before he had joined Don John in his second attempt to overcome the Turkish fleet, which, however, was unsuccessful.