| CHAPTER XXV
| -1 | |
| THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
| 0 | |
| UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and
helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it
could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world.
While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed
it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its
superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley
knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well
have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. Yet
Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not
have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well
as one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge
counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply
it. Bacon took a vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I
and his subjects, American or other, towards the year 1620, that
true science was the development or economy of forces; yet an
elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces;
or even so much as to say to himself that his historical business
in the Exposition concerned only the economies or developments of
force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago.
| 1 | |
| Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had
looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses
called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art
exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of
history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at
Paris. Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment,
threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new
application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with,
almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored almost the
whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the
forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship
feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the
new Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had
become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as
destructive as the electric tram which was only ten years older;
and threatening to become as terrible as the locomotive
steam-engine itself, which was almost exactly Adams's own age.
| 2 | |
| Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and
explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any
kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in
inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout
less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it.
To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for
conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal
hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but
to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew
accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the
forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians
felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this
huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous
speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible
warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power --
while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.
Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct
taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite
force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo
was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
| 3 | |
| Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its
occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines
and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to
abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation
could he discover between the steam and the electric current than
between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were
interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an
absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help
him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same trouble,
for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical,
and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays, that
were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit towards
science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar
spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium
denied its God -- or, what was to Langley the same thing, denied
the truths of his Science. The force was wholly new.
| 4 | |
| A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and
mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort
of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses.
He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he
would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he
hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to
figure out the equation between the discoveries and the economies
of force. The economies, like the discoveries, were absolute,
supersensual, occult; incapable of expression in horse-power.
What mathematical equivalent could he suggest as the value of a
Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some
scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a
thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no
part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had
figured only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man
had translated himself into a new universe which had no common
scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual
world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance
collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even
imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other,
and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed
prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of
universes interfused -- physics stark mad in metaphysics.
| 5 | |
| Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories,
or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and
effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty
libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and
childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag
them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice,
that they had never supposed themselves required to know what
they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to
find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen volumes of
American history for no other purpose than to satisfy himself
whether, by severest process of stating, with the least possible
comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed
rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a
necessary sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied
him as little as at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other
men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit
of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about
his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself
and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of
sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would
try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence
of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society
could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was
artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at
last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after
ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of
Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck
broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.
| 6 | |
| Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person
without other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900
was not the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo
had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood
the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to
the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up
the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which
he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a
revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were
what, in terms of mediaeval science, were called immediate modes
of the divine substance.
| 7 | |
| The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value,
this common value could have no measure but that of their
attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been
felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on
thought. He made up his mind to venture it; he would risk
translating rays into faith. Such a reversible process would
vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could not deny that he,
or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the force of both.
When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had
probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the
Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or
automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force
of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.
| 8 | |
| Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be
by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he
must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two
kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction.
They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing
one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of
the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent
as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value
as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly
afraid of either.
| 9 | |
| This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American
historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still
seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was
she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her,
and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have
strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true
force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the
monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that
would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and
often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that
sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art
nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that
neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses
was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her
force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction -- the
greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was
to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools
of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of
Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin
literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked
the Virgin: --
| 10 | |
| "Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."
| 11 | |
| The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools: --
| 12 | |
"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."
| 13 | |
| All this was to American thought as though it had never
existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but
nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt
the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams
felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as
though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and
at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and
still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man,
the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly
more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines
and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to
the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command;
an American Venus would never dare exist.
| 14 | |
| The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth
century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost
violently to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys
were as useless as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos.
The idea survived only as art. There one turned as naturally as
though the artist were himself a woman. Adams began to ponder,
asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had
ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always
done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far
as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters,
for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment,
never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias
an unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language
and American education, was as far as possible sexless. Society
regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the
historian readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the
moment, did not concern one who was studying the relations of
unmoral force. He cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until
he could measure its energy.
| 15 | |
| Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor.
St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
interminable last touches, and listening to the usual
contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the
American artists who gave to American art whatever life it
breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens was perhaps the most
sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate. General Grant
or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric than he.
All the others -- the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford
White -- were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or
dilate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to
his work the forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or
affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the
brutalities of his world. He required no incense; he was no
egoist; his simplicity of thought was excessive; he could not
imitate, or give any form but his own to the creations of his
hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength of other
men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an
image in his mind.
| 16 | |
| This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For
such a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own
gaiety was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the
studio on Mont Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois
de Boulogne, or dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St.
Gaudens sometimes let Adams go about in his company.
| 17 | |
| Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of
Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves
actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it
dawn on Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that
spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great
men before great monuments express great truths, provided they
are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the
supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals:
"I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of
supersition." Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had
never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would
have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian,
on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his
readers -- perhaps himself -- that he was darting a contemptuous
look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the
respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always
feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one
felt also the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in
1789 religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark
sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had
heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and
certainly less simple. Without malice, one might find it more
instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one
brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution.
Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had
passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than
he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their
decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of
the force that created it all -- the Virgin, the Woman -- by
whose genius "the stately monuments of superstition" were built,
through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning
in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same
thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the
artist.
| 18 | |
| Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500;
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an
image of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like
Louis XI. In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by
chance to the twentieth century, and forgotten where it came
from. He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did
at his own, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of
Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a
quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like
Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from birth, and Adams's
instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but half of a
nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of Amiens
they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them one;
but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel
of force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of
taste.
| 19 | |
| For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman
monument. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so
American that, for at least forty years, Adams had never realized
that any other could be in sound taste. How many years had he
taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were
driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895
had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not
everywhere even so. At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly
at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked
Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force
to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago
in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly
less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew
Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses
as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty,
purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway
train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly
complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never
be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like
the Virgin, build Chartres.
| 20 | |
| Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on
man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science
measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a
straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no
serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his
convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable,
that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a
compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might
prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their
value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities
to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to
follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and
where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its
values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more
complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted,
polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter.
Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a mathematical
problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult,
all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
Virgin easiest to handle.
| 21 | |
| The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to
Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and
Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a
German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could
one force one's self into this old thicket of ignorance after
having been repulsed a score of entrances more promising and more
popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an
exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of study had proved
to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one controlled no
more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force
controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of
education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one
fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff
is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a
sort of blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the
gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand,
modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form
that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of
growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for
often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness,
loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on
its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result
of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what
is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on
their play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on
this support, Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures
as formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out,
altering, burning, experimenting, until the year had expired, the
Exposition had long been closed, and winter drawing to its end,
before he sailed from Cherbourg, on January 19, 1901, for home.
| 22 | |
|