University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXVII
TEUFELSDRÖCKH (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 Opéra 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 palefaced
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 Théatre Français. 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 thereabouts,
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
Brünhilde, 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 "Götterdämmerung" 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 Brünhilde 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 "Götterdämmerung." 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 Élisée
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:—

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 naïveté 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 Teufelsdröckh
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 Teufelsdröckh
sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent
electric lights of Hammerfest.

He had good reason—better than the Teufelsdröckh 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 Teufelsdröckh, 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 Düsseldorf 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 of
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.