TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:--
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.