There never was a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that
which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with
all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an
authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against
that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as
surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, not by his
rainbows, or his Italian sunsets, but by that picture of _Storm, Rain,
and Speed_--an old-fashioned express fighting its way through wind,
rain, and of course rainbows--in the English National Gallery.
With all his love of that light that never was on sea or land, Turner
was yet able to see the romance of that new thing of iron and steam so
affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its
swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized
that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The
other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression
are the Sphinx and--the automobile. Unless you can realize that an
automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing
about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the
air-ship, and we shall not need to be long-lived to see the day when
we shall hear old-timers lamenting the good old easy-going past of
the seventy-miles-an-hour automobile--just as we have heard our
grand-fathers talk of postilions and the Bath "flyer."
Romance is made of two opposites: Change, and That Which Changeth Not.
In spite of foolish sentimentalism, who needs be told that love is one
of those forces of the universe that is the same yesterday, today, and
forever--the same today as when Dido broke her heart, as when Leander
swam the Hellespont? Gravitation is not more inherent in the cosmic
scheme, nor fire nor water more unchangeable in their qualities.
But Love, contrary to the old notion that he is unpractical, is a
business-like god, and is ever on the lookout for the latest modern
appliances that can in anyway serve his purposes. True love is far from
being old-fashioned. On the contrary, true love is always up-to-date.
True love has its telephone, its phonograph, its automobile, and soon it
will have its air-ship. In the telephone alone what a debt love owes to
its supposed enemy, modern science! One wonders how lovers in the old
days managed to live at all without the telephone.
We often hear how our modern appliances wear upon our nerves. But think
how the lack of modern appliances must have worn upon the nerves of our
forefathers, and particularly our foremothers! Think what distance meant
in the Middle Ages, when the news of a battle took days to travel,
though carried by the swiftest horses. Horses! Think again of news being
carried by--horses! And once more think, with a prayer of gratitude to
two magicians named Edison and Bell, and with a due sense of your being
the spoiled and petted offspring of the painful ages, that should your
love be in Omaha this night and you in New York City, you can say
good-night to her through the wall of your apartment, and hear her sigh
back her good-night to you across two thousand miles of the American
flag. Or should your love be on the sea, you can interrupt her
flirtations all the way across with your persistent wireless
conversation. Contrast your luxurious communicativeness with the case of
the lovers of old-time. Say that you have just married a young woman,
and you are happy together in your castle in the heart of the forest.
Suddenly the courier of war is at your gates, and you must up and arm
and away with your men to the distant danger. You must follow the Cross
into the savage Kingdom of the Crescent. The husband must become the
crusader, and the Lord Christ alone knows when he shall look on the
child's face of his wife again. Through goblin-haunted wildernesses he
must go, through unmapped no-man's lands, and vacuum solitudes of the
world's end, and peril and pestilence meet in every form, the face of
his foe the friendliest thing in all his mysterious travel. Not a
pay-station as yet in all the wide world, and fully five hundred years
to the nearest telegraph office!
And think of the young wife meanwhile, alone with her maids and her
tapestry in the dank isolation of her lonely, listening castle. Not a
leaf falls in the wood, but she hears it. Not a footstep snaps the
silence, but her eyes are at the sleepless slit of light which is her
window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only
news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be
the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or
imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing
heart--and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed
outside the walls of Ascalon or Joppa.
There is an old Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old
long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever
goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken
unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came
to him the summons to war. Then, as now, there was no arguing with the
trumpets of martial duty. The soldier's trumpet heeds not the soldier's
tears. The war was far away and likely to be long. Months, even years,
might go by before that Danish lord would look on the face of his bride
again. So much might happen meanwhile! A little boy, or a little girl,
might be born to the castle, and the father, fighting far away, know
nothing of the beautiful news. And there was no telephone in the castle,
and it was five hundred years to the nearest telegraph office.
So the husband and wife agreed upon a facetious signal of their own. The
castle stood upon a ridge of hills which could be seen fifty miles away,
and on the ridge the bride promised to build a church. If the child that
was to be born proved to be a boy, the church would be builded with a
tower; if a girl, with a steeple. So the husband went his way, and three
years passed, and at length he returned with his pennons and his
men-at-arms to his own country. Scanning the horizon line, he hurried
impatiently toward the heliographic ridge. And lo! when at last it came
in sight against the rising sun, there was a new church builded stately
there--with two towers.
So it was with the most important of all news in the Middle Ages; and
yet today, as I said, you in New York City have only to knock good-night
on your wall, to be heard by your true love in Omaha, and hear her knock
back three times the length of France; Pyramus and Thisbe--with this
difference: that the wall is no longer a barrier, but a sensitive
messenger. It has become, indeed, in the words of Demetrius in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_, the wittiest of partitions, and the modern
Pyramus may apostrophize it in grateful earnest:
"Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall ...
Thanks, courteous wall. Jove shield thee well for this!"
So at least I always feel toward the wall of my apartment every time I
call up her whom my soul loveth that dwelleth far away in Massachusetts.
She being a Capulet and I a Montague, it would go hard with us for
communication, were it not for this long-distance wall; and any one
who knows anything of love knows that the primal need of lovers is
communication. Lovers have so deep a distrust of each other's love that
they need to be assured of it from hour to hour. To the philosopher it
may well seem strange that this certitude should thus be in need of
progressive corroboration. But so it is, and the pampered modern lover
may well wonder how his great-grandfather and great-grandmother
supported the days, or even kept their love alive, on such famine
rations as a letter once a month. A letter once a month! They must have
had enormous faith in each other, those lovers of old-time, or they must
have suffered as we can hardly bear to think of--we, who write to each
other twice a day, telegraph three times, telephone six, and transmit a
phonographic record of our sighs to each other night and morn. The
telephone has made a toy of distance and made of absence, in many cases,
a sufficient presence. It is almost worth while to be apart on occasion
just for the sake of bringing each other so magically near. It is the
Arabian Nights come true. As in them, you have only to say a word, and
the jinn of the electric fire is waiting for your commands. The word
has changed. Once it was "Abracadabra." Now it is "Central." But the
miracle is just the same.
One might almost venture upon the generalization that most tragedies
have come about from lack of a telephone. Of course, there are
exceptions, but as a rule tragedies happen through delays in
communication.
If there had been a telephone in Mantua, Romeo would never have bought
poison of the apothecary. Instead, he would have asked leave to use his
long-distance telephone. Calling up Verona, he would first cautiously
disguise his voice. If, as usual, the old nurse answered, all well; but
if a bearded voice set all the wires a-trembling, he would, of course,
hastily ring off, and abuse "Central" for giving him the wrong number.
And "Central" would understand. Then Romeo would wait an hour or two
till he was sure that Lord Capulet had gone to the Council, and ring up
again. This time he would probably get the nurse and confide to her his
number in Mantua. Next morning Juliet and her nurse had only to drop in
at the nearest drug store, and confide to Romeo the whole plot which
Balthazar so sadly bungled. All that was needed was a telephone, and
Romeo would have understood that Juliet was only feigning death for the
sake of life with him.
But, as in the case of our Danish knight, there was not a pay-station
as yet in all the wide world, and it was fully five hundred years
to the nearest telegraph office. Another point in this tragedy is
worth considering by the modern mind: that not only would the final
catastrophe have been averted by the telephone, but that those beautiful
speeches to and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to
both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have
been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant
apartments.
Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic
crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone.
Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of
sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love.
Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic
servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the
feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love
across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from
eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living,
but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In
fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its
discoveries for the sake of love.