TWILIGHT (1901)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!