| CHAPTER XXVII
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| TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
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| INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no
other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every
side. Even more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris
taught in the twentieth, with no other school approaching it for
variety of direction and energy of mind. Of the teaching in
detail, a man who knew only what accident had taught him in the
nineteenth century, could know next to nothing, since science had
got quite beyond his horizon, and mathematics had become the only
necessary language of thought; but one could play with the toys
of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons of painting,
operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture, theology
and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth
and the Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris
remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though
China fell. Scores of artists -- sculptors and painters, poets
and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs
and furniture -- hundreds of chemists, physicists, even
philosophers, philologists, physicians, and historians -- were at
work, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass
and originality of their product would have swamped any previous
age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the effect was one of
chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos
of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of the
movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.
| 1 | |
| The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the
pale-faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of
Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two
o'clock in the morning in a beer- garden even after four hours of
Mounet Sully at the Theatre Francais. In those branches,
education might be called closed. Fashion, too, could no longer
teach anything worth knowing to a man who, holding open the door
into the next world, regarded himself as merely looking round to
take a last glance of this. The glance was more amusing than any
he had known in his active life, but it was more -- infinitely
more -- chaotic and complex.
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| Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or
there-abouts, he had been repeating that he really must go to
Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade
him come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager
and appreciative as ever, at the little old town of
Rothenburg-on-the Taube, and they went on to the Baireuth
festival together.
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| Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would
have opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether
different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo
setting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried
and Brunhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the
world, calm, contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had
altogether changed, and Wagner had become a part of it, as
familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred.
Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna -- perhaps the Potomac itself
-- had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and one
could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York, among
throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of
nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at
Baireuth, as though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or
Paris might be whatever one pleased -- venal, sordid, vulgar --
but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay, certain
anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. Perhaps they
were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible for them
as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Baireuth what
Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more than once
included the rising of the Seine to drown out the Etoile or
Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts spells
of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery
in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would
surely happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening
at Baireuth, or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with
catastrophe as though it were an old mistress -- faced it almost
gaily as she had done so often, for they were acquainted since
Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with a glow of
fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard
Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and
thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular
oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm,
but the Fluch-motif went home.
| 4 | |
| Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy;
though not with socialism, which, to young men who nourished
artistic emotions under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed
hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe
Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of
Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under
the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw no
inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience
were -- relatively -- stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
| 5 | |
| Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had
supposed himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau
Wagner and the Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the
Senator, yearning for sterner study, pointed to a haven at
Moscow. For years Adams had taught American youth never to travel
without a Senator who was useful even in America at times, but
indispensable in Russia where, in 1901, anarchists, even though
conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.
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| This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian
anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer
rightly understood. By the necessity of their philosophical
descent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other as
unequal to his lofty task and inadequate to grasp it. Of course,
no third member could be so much as considered, since the great
principle of contradiction could be expressed only by opposites;
and no agreement could be conceived, because anarchy, by
definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the kinetic theory
of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction was itself
agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with
freedom; but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement
provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger
contradiction. Thus the great end of all philosophy -- the
"larger synthesis" -- was attained, but the process was arduous,
and while Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare the
principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied both the assumption and
the principle in order to assure its truth.
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| Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist,
conservative and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to
attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate
progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply
and intensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and
magnify momentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of
the universe as science explained it; but partly also in order to
get done with the present which artists and some others
complained of; and finally -- and chiefly -- because a rigorous
philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and
satisfy man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its
ultimate contradiction.
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| Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but
such objection meant only that the critic should begin his
education in any infant school in order to learn that anarchy
which should be logical would cease to be anarchic. To the
conservative Christian anarchist, the amiable doctrines of
Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian mental inertia
covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise their
innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were ideals of
the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a
bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of
anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity.
Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe
than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which
their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist,
communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no
relation; if anarchists needed order, they must go back to the
twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its thousand
years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have
no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature
itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault of being so
supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty could
scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order -- except the
Church -- had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the
conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own.
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| Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner
or Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men
have been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such
refinements were Greek or German, and affected the practical
American but little. He admitted that, for the moment, the
darkness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence, even to
himself, that his "largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to
be chaos, since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos.
The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for
thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred
million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already
more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked
merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist
saw light.
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| Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis" -- and much he needed
it! In America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the
faith was national, racial, geographic. The true American had
never seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades
between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for
exclusively human and his own. He never had known a complete
union either in Church or State or thought, and had never seen
any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to meet any
contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly the
opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire
was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to
history than all the complex variety of American newspapers,
schools, trusts, sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were
Nature -- pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian
anarchist saw Nature -- active, vibrating, mostly unconscious,
and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one
caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the
Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his
candle and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the
station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative,
Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any
ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the
oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and had kept none
for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase,
which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was
as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth
century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy,
Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a
negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies
had been sucked out -- an inert residuum -- with movement of pure
inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations
of nomad life -- herders deserted by their leaders and herds --
wandering waves stopped in their wanderings -- waiting for their
winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that
had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means
of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited
and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could
never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice
and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day,
in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no
need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or
Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis
of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough:
Kropotkin answered every purpose.
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| The Russian people could never have changed -- could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up,
or take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller
scale, the question was old and unanswered. All the so-called
primitive races, and some nearer survivals, had raised doubts
which persisted against the most obstinate convictions of
evolution. The Senator himself shook his head, and after
surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to St.
Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the
people seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or
fifteen years of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing,
for, since 1898, Russia lagged.
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| The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed
disposed to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For
him, all opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts
can never be complete, and their relations must be always
infinite. Very likely, Russia would instantly become the most
brilliant constellation of human progress through all the ordered
stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a value as movement
of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration that
would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap between east and
west relatively the same.
This result reached, the Lodges thought their moral improvement
required a visit to Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions
had not deadened Adams's memories of Berlin, and he preferred, at
any cost, to escape new ones. When the Lodges started for
Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily, in a
day or two, at Stockholm.
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| Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he
gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might
doubt whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any
Grand Duke, or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their
neighbors; and Adams was quite sure that, even in America, he
should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of any
Secretary of the Treasury, or railway president, or President of
the United States whom he had ever known, that should concern the
America of the next generation. The mere fact that any man should
dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to judge. Yet
Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented three-
fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration
of America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity,
and the tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught
himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror he
held before him. "Am I satisfied? " he asked: --
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"Moi? pourquoi non?
N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ebauche;
Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."
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| Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in
details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or
decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take
even in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of
three. No man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would
do to him; but so much was sure; the monkey and motor were
terribly afraid of the bear; how much,- only a man close to their
foreign departments knew. As the monkey looked back across the
Baltic from the safe battlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more
portentous than from the Kremlin.
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| The image was that of the retreating ice-cap -- a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever
at its mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that
crossed the level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
merely extended the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and
Poles on one side still struggled against the Russian inertia of
race, and retained their own energies under the same conditions
that caused inertia across the frontier. Race ruled the
conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could
tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be
known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound
of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
history was a nursery tale.
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| The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous
mass of inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever
Russia moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it
were an ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries.
In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern
streets of St. Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision,
and Sweden lured the tourist on. Through a cheerful New England
landscape and bright autumn, he rambled northwards till he found
himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway. Education crowded
upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vast surfaces
of history about which he had lectured and read for a life-time.
When the historian fully realizes his ignorance -- which
sometimes happens to Americans -- he becomes even more tiresome
to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible.
Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached
the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and
beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the
despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with
Norway started voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he
took the mail steamer to the north, and on September 14, reached
Hammerfest.
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| Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the
deep fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and
reindeer were watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate
channels outside, as their ancestors had watched the first Norse
fishermen learn them in the succession of time; but it was not
the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic gloom, that impressed the
tourist, so much as the lights of an electro-magnetic
civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia, which more
and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the
errors of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the
ecliptic. As one approached the end -- the spot where, seventy
years before, a futile Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to ask
futile questions of the silent infinite -- the infinite seemed to
have become loquacious, not to say familiar, chattering gossip in
one's ear. An installation of electric lighting and telephones
led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of
the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdrockh sat dumb
with surprise, and glared at the permanent electric lights of
Hammerfest.
| 19 | |
| He had good reason -- better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had
ever told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without
means of speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent
itself to gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before,
breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught,
across, the neighboring table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper,
announcing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, and from
Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up the coast to Hammerfest, day
after day the news came, telling of the President's condition,
and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, until at last a
little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing
the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of
McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his
depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate
friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please
him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The
electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.
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| No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines
of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across
the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an
abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the
glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full
vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that
lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a
day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the
ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged
tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had
stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to
make of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian
fishermen ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands,
jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the
ice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a
trifling danger compared with the inertia. From the day they
first followed the retreating ice-cap round the North Cape, down
to the present moment, their problem was the same.
| 21 | |
| The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a
long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took
possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to
climate or geography or soil.
| 22 | |
| The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered
south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne.
A mere glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind.
Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the
green rusticity of Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of
Birmingham. The Rhine in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as
it resembled the Rhine of the Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway
centre that had completed its cathedral which bore an absent-
minded air of a cathedral of Chicago. The thirteenth century,
carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked up, was visible to
tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling, curiosity. The
Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be, since it
produced far more coal; but all this counted for little beside
the radical change in the lines of force.
| 23 | |
| In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the
prehistoric highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route
followed the old routes of invasion, and Cologne was a
resting-place between Warsaw and Flanders. Throughout northern
Germany, Russia was felt even more powerfully than France. In
1901 Russia had vanished, and not even France was felt; hardly
England or America. Coal alone was felt -- its stamp alone
pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy -- and the
stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The
Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced the same
people -- the same mind -- the same impulse. For a man
sixty-three years old who had no hope of earning a living, these
three months of education were the most arduous he ever
attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel he ever
met; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable.
From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean -- from
Halifax to Norfolk on the other -- one great empire was ruled by
one great emperor -- Coal. Political and human jealousies might
tear it apart or divide it, but the power and the empire were
one. Unity had gained that ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there
an older, perhaps a surer, power, resting on the eternal law of
inertia, held its own.
| 24 | |
| As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian
inertia was moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in
its path. As long as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de
Witte fall, Hay would totter. One could only sit down and watch
the doings of Mr. de Witte and Mr. de Plehve.
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