THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:--
"Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."
The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools:--
"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."
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 of 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 superstition." 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.
Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500s
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.
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.
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.
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.