“I have never needed any motive to attach me to science, which I have pursued with equal ardour under all circumstances, for its own sake, and for the sake of the public, uninfluenced by the fears of my friends, or the calumnies of my enemies. I glory in being in the chair of the Royal Society, because I think it ought to be a reward of scientific labours, and not an appendage to rank or fortune; and because it will enable me to be useful in a higher degree in promoting the cause of science.”
Davy was re-elected to the Presidential Chair without opposition for seven successive years—until, in short, his failing health compelled him to resign. Although the Society owes much to him, he himself derived little satisfaction or pleasure from the position. He soon found, as he anticipated, that the President’s Chair, after Sir Joseph, was no light matter; and there is little doubt that the worries and cares of the office contributed to his untimely death. In bearing, manner, temperament—in fact, in almost every particularity—he was the very opposite to his predecessor; and when the discontent which had slumbered, with an occasional awakening, during Sir Joseph’s long reign, and which his firmness, tact, and the weight of his personal character had for the time allayed, broke out, Davy was too impulsive and irascible to deal with it as Banks had done, and matters which a less sensitive or a more impassive man would have unheeded were causes of annoyance and ill-temper to him, and served to add to the spirit of disunion which prevailed. But if he occasionally lacked discretion, he was never wanting in zeal. He laboured incessantly to add to the dignity and usefulness of the Society. He strove in every way to enhance the character of its publications and to raise the standard of Fellowship. His great ambition was to bring the Society into more intimate relation with the State.
“It was his wish,” says his brother, “to have seen the Royal Society an efficient establishment for all the great practical purposes of science, similar to the college contemplated by Lord Bacon, and sketched in his New Atlantis; having subordinate to it the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for astronomy; the British Museum, for natural history, in its most extensive acceptation.”
Realising in his own case what such a laboratory as that of the Royal Institution, supported wholly by private liberality, had done for science, it was his desire that similar laboratories, amply provided with all means requisite for original inquiry, should be maintained and administered by the Society. But, as his brother adds, the Government, although ready enough to consult him when in want of his knowledge or of that of other Fellows of the Society, was lukewarm and indifferent in matters of science, and he received no effectual support. It is true that towards the end of his Presidency the Society received a mark of Royal favour by the foundation of the Royal Medals in 1825, but from various causes the medals were not actually forthcoming until 1833, when the Duke of Sussex was in the Chair, although no fewer than ten awards had been made in the meantime. In his attention to the personal duties of his office Davy was unremitting. His addresses were a feature of the session; in these he displayed all the ardour, eloquence and poetical fervour, and, it may be added, all the egoism, which characterised his lectures. He delighted to dwell upon the power and dignity of science, its worth as a mental instrument, and its value to the national life. In his announcements of the awards of the Society’s medals the range of his knowledge, his power of exposition, and his faculty of felicitous expression found ample opportunity for exercise. He was the first President to introduce obituary notices of Fellows, and his éloges are marked by judgment, taste, and warmth of feeling.
In everything that related to the dignity and ceremony of his office he was, as might have been expected, most punctilious. Although as a rule somewhat careless in dress, he invariably took the chair in full Court dress, sitting covered, and with the mace of office—the veritable “bauble” which Cromwell ordered to be removed from the table of the House of the Commons—in front of him, as is still the custom.
To enhance his dignity we are told that he petitioned Government for the Red Ribbon of his predecessor, and it was said that he felt so certain his request would be granted that his name was printed with the coveted letters K.B. appended.
During the session he followed the practice of Sir Joseph Banks in assembling the Fellows at a weekly conversazione at his house in Lower Grosvenor Street. Subsequently, on his removal to Park Street, these meetings were held in the apartments of the Society at Somerset House. Davy’s vivacity and conversational powers made the gatherings in the outset a great success, but when the tide of his unpopularity as President set in, the attendance fell off, and they were eventually discontinued.
During the autumn preceding his first election he spent some time with Scott at Abbotsford, in company with Wollaston and Mackenzie (the Man of Feeling), and Lockhart gives some account of him as the party started on a sporting expedition on a September morning.
“But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling ... and his fisherman’s costume—a brown hat with flexible brims, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks; jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon—made a fine contrast to the smart jackets, white-cord breeches, and well polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and with his noble serene dignity of countenance might have passed for a sporting archbishop.... I have seen Sir Humphry in many places, and in company of many different descriptions; but never to such advantage as at Abbotsford. His host and he delighted in each other, and the modesty of their mutual admiration was a memorable spectacle. Davy was by nature a poet—and Scott, though anything but a philosopher in the modern sense of that term, might, I think it very likely, have pursued the study of physical science with zeal and success, had he happened to fall in with such an instructor as Sir Humphry would have been to him, in his early life. Each strove to make the other talk—and they did so in turn more charmingly than I have ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott in his romantic narratives touched a deeper cord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy; and Davy, when induced to open his views upon any question of scientific interest in Scott’s presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table-talk (least of all in London), nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous Consolations in Travel) could suggest an adequate notion. I say his prose writings—for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth? I remember William Laidlaw whispering to me, one night, when their ‘wrapt talk’ had kept the circle round the fire until long after the usual bed-time of Abbotsford—‘Gude preserve us! This is a very superior occasion! Eh, sirs!’ he added, cocking his eye like a bird, ‘I wonder if Shakspeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up?’”
In spite of the many calls upon his time and energies entailed by his duties as President, he still found opportunity to work in his laboratory, and one outcome of his labours was a paper “On the magnetic phenomena produced by electricity,” published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1821—the sequel of a letter addressed to Wollaston and also printed in the Transactions. This memoir was followed a few months later by a communication “On the Electrical phenomena exhibited in vacuo.”