University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXVI
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
Bratuses 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 rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource, though

the only one. Non dolet, 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 con tradiction, 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!