University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXV
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'slength
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 the
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 mediæval 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:—

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools:—

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed.
The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of
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 1500;
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
into 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 forces 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
into 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
at 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.