| CHAPTER XXVI
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| TWILIGHT (1901)
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| WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the
Paris Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin,
and Besnard, the world that thought itself serious, and showed
other infallible marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in
weird doings at Peking and elsewhere such as startled even
itself. Of all branches of education, the science of gauging
people and events by their relative importance defies study most
insolently. For three or four generations, society has united in
withering with contempt and opprobrium the shameless futility of
Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du Barry; yet, if one bid at an
auction for some object that had been approved by the taste of
either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy
half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all
the philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a
cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had adorned.
The same thing might be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire;
while, as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke of
Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all
proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to
delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values,
and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile.
The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle
for the control of China, which, in his view, must decide the
control of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China
was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese
porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than
universal war.
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| The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama
on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew
no more about it than though he were the best-informed statesman
in Europe. Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations
were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championed China's
"administrative entity," would be massacred too, since he must
henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany
dismembered China, and shut up America at home. Nine statesmen
out of ten, in Europe, accepted this result in advance, seeing no
way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and laughed at Hay for his
helplessness.
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| When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on,
as incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on
that branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing
so meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On
returning to Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the
world as astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a
moment, indeed, the world had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put
Europe aside and set the Washington Government at the head of
civilization so quietly that civilization submitted, by mere
instinct of docility, to receive and obey his orders; but, after
the first shock of silence, society felt the force of the stroke
through its fineness, and burst into almost tumultuous applause.
Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, with all its
painful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the American
blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History broke
in halves.
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| Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of
his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him
fresh life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic,
and depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles
nested at home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's
diplomatic court had become the largest in the world, and the
diplomatic relations required far more work than ever before,
while the staff of the Department was little more efficient, and
the friction in the Senate had become coagulated. Hay took to
studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams eighty years before,
and calculated that the resistance had increased about ten times,
as measured by waste of days and increase of effort, although
Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly
treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved
it, for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes
painful.
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| For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole
load and turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and
Holleben helped the Senate to make what trouble they could,
without serious offence, and the Irish, after the genial Celtic
nature, obstructed even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks
to their sympathetic qualities, never made lasting enmities; but
the Germans seemed in a fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly
temper in the spirit of politics, which was by no means a part of
Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to overcome domestic
friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign powers. Yet so
much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they commonly
knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive. Cassini
had for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of
his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief
as with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious
objects; but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction.
In every hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and
try to invent reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no
worse than the board of a university; but incorporators as a rule
have not made this class of men dictators on purpose to prevent
action. In the Senate, a single vote commonly stopped
legislation, or, in committee, stifled discussion.
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| Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused
incessant obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience
and bargaining in executive patronage, if indeed it could be
overcome at all. The price actually paid was not very great
except in the physical exhaustion of Hay and Pauncefote, Root and
McKinley. No serious bargaining of equivalents could be
attempted; Senators would not sacrifice five dollars in their own
States to gain five hundred thousand in another; but whenever a
foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage without an
equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty. In all
such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of
time and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed
Hay; "the Major will have promised all the consulates in the
service; the Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe
me dis-consulate; I shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by
one, by the thirty-four per cent of kickers and strikers; the
only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part of the
time; I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great culbute is
approaching."
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| He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight -- the
solitary picturesque and tragic element in politics --
incidentally requiring character-studies like Aaron Burr and
William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with Sir
Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like
Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and
offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs,
and Malvolios -- endless varieties of human nature nowhere else
to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is
so gay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and
more rarely, but what he felt most was the enormous complexity
and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly
complained that it had made him a bore -- of all things the most
senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was
lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the
complexities and multiplicities of his new world.
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| To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great
value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the
practical interest and the practical man were such as looked
forward to the next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five
or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named
who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead; while any
historian who means to keep his alignment with past and future
must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to
align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of some
sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian --
sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably -- must have put
to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
system last? He can never give himself less than one generation
to show the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to
triangulate from the widest possible base to the furthest point
he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curvature of
the horizon.
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| To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right
-- if the question of right or wrong enters at all into the
matter -- the historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in
his own profession few companions offer help, and his walk soon
becomes solitary, leading further and further into a wilderness
where twilight is short and the shadows are dense. Already Hay
literally staggered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than
he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an
hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling
how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All
three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that if it
were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of
readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid
resource, though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed
of it even in the acting.
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| The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that
a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King
disappeared from their lives; but Hay had still his family and
ambition, while Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly,
wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail
across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big
or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop,
some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly
curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though
thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's
arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life.
Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.
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| He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest
toy he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played
since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk
with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass.
Then he read all the books he could find, and tried in vain to
makes his lines of force agree with theirs. The books confounded
him. He could not credit his own understanding. Here was
literally the most concrete fact in nature, next to gravitation
which it defied; a force which must have radiated lines of energy
without stop, since time began, if not longer, and which might
probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why -- or how -- or what it radiated --
or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of
all natural forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have
suggested no idea to any one until some mariner bethought himself
that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand years passed
when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump,
supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity,
still without knowing how it worked or what it was. For a
historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention
of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as
his mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some
one, somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could
but find the book -- although he had been forced to admit the
same helplessness in the face of gravitation, phosphorescence,
and odors; and he could imagine no reason why society should
treat radium as revolutionary in science when every infant, for
ages past, had seen the magnet doing what radium did; for surely
the kind of radiation mattered nothing compared with the energy
that radiated and the matter supplied for radiation. He dared not
venture into the complexities of chemistry, or microbes, so long
as this child's toy offered complexities that befogged his mind
beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless variety of
pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He wanted
to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a
magnet. He figured the human mind itself as another radiating
matter through which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.
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| In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new
relation staggered his new education by its evidence of growing
complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He
could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the
same, and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he
turned. He found it in politics; he ran against it in science; he
struck it in everyday life, as though he were still Adam in the
Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and Satan who was
complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth. The
problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.
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| All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had
overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were
triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and
the momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.
One had in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks,
corporations, trusts, and even to the popular will as far as one
could understand it -- or even further; the multiplicity of unity
had steadily increased, was increasing, and threatened to
increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his favorite
prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism -- except
for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant
necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and
Pteraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones; and now --
just when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the brow
of a completed education -- science itself warned him to begin it
again from the beginning.
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| Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles
Lyell, and that it might be worth looking at if only to steady
his vision. He read it again, and thought it better than he could
do at sixty-three; but elderly minds always work loose. He saw
his doubts grown larger, and became curious to know what had been
said about them since 1870. The Geological Survey supplied stacks
of volumes, and reading for steady months; while, the longer he
read, the more he wondered, pondered, doubted what his delightful
old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have said about it.
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| Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities,
and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars
resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see
but one. Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted
towards unity or multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would
depend on the age of the man who drifted.
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| Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid
fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had
sported when geological life was young; as though they had all
remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow
Castle, and repeat "how charming is divine philosophy!" He felt
almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of
Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and
far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis
as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for
him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life.
A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the
liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not
for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet
historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the
value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform
Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his
neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not
select -- evolution finished before it began -- minute changes
that refused to change anything during the whole geological
record - survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no
origin -- uniformity under conditions which had disturbed
everything else in creation -- to an honest-meaning though
ignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not
assume it, such sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown
that changes in form caused evolution in force; that chemical or
mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes,
under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought. The
ganoid fish seemed to prove -- to him -- that it had selected
neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right
in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a
huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid
troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal
that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he
asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any
doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere
vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical
explanation, had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be
driven back on the old independence of species.
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| What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to
them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of
thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell
in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had
entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a
universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far
vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every
direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly,
vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences
that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly become
specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an
amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for
beginners, as they had served when new.
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| So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into
half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the
northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to
assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could
possibly be referred to a horizon more remote. Continents still
rose wildly and wildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had
written an epoch-making work, showing that continents were
anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. Lyell's
genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its
place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing
had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts
had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to
discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing
that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.
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| Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness
in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to
dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history
of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had
no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to
record in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church,
raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy.
Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet
the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up
courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin
forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly
to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff
of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the
universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could
not state the geological record in terms of time; they had
murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared
to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.
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| Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other
times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic -- who knew what? -- defying science, if not denying
known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church,
and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again.
Historians have got into far too much trouble by following
schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis,
that they should willingly repeat the process in science. For
human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger
synthesis is suicide.
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| Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that
the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing.
Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of
his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the
opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even
to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of
peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of
fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never
saved him from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay
and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the
corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but
they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which
way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with
the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged
and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it
serve? A seeker of truth -- or illusion -- would be none the less
restless, though a shark!
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