Part 19 (1/2)

UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in Novee, and helpless to find it He would have liked to kno rasped by the best-inforley caley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knehat to study, and why, and hohile Ada at the Milky Way Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one ht not have learned froh one should have known the ”Advancement of Science” as well as one knew the ”Co until some teacher should sho 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 econoan the study at Chicago

Nothing in education is so astonishi+ng as the anorance 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 kno 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 thereat 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, alnored almost the whole industrial exhibit He led his pupil directly to the forces His chief interest was in new ht Ada complexities of the new Daimler motor, and of the autohtmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tra to becoine itself, which was ale

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 voluht spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it To hienious 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 Adarew accustoan 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-fashi+oned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within ar--scarcely hu to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of pohile it would not wake the baby lying close against its fraan to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression ofthe thousand syy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the ine, was the most familiar of exhibits For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult allery of ine-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 hiley 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, hich he had doubled the solar spectruether harmless and beneficent; but Radiu, denied the truths of his Science The force holly new

A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley or Kelvin, , and le 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 ed the dynaure 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 est 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 ured 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 couldexcept by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to soley see, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused--physics stark e sequences,--called stories, or histories--assu 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 ht, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed the 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 hi, with the least possible coorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of human movement The result had satisfied hie Where he saw sequence, otherquite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure He cared little about his experiments and less about his statesnorant 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 ofand that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of tiht was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years'

pursuit, he found hi 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 y like that of the Cross; they hat, in terms of mediaeval 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 Herays 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 radiuh the rays were unborn and the women were dead

Here opened another totally new education, which proe along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdo in conet is froravitation, or love The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in Ain ever had value as force--at most as sentiment

No American had ever been truly afraid of either

This probleravely 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 asha-leaves so profusely all over her When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the azine-made Anized by Adam The trait was notorious, and often hu Puritans knew that sex was sin In any previous age, sex was strength Neither art nor beauty was needed Every one, even a Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental Goddesses orshi+pped for her beauty She was Goddess because of her force; she was the anireatest and ies; 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:--

”Quae quondaubernas”

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

”Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali, Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre, Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali”

All this was to Ah it had never existed The true A of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adain to the Dynah 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 tovastly ines and dynay was unknown to the Ain 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 hi 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 Whitazines 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 unfee 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 thethe relations of un for the sex of the dyna a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit, and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St Gaudens's General Sheriven the central post of honor St

Gaudens hi on the work his usual inter to the usual contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors Of all the Aave 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 e 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 siive any form but his own to the creations of his hand No one felt th of other men, but the idea that they could affect hie in his mind

This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low For such a teaiety was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the studio on Mont Parnasse to draw hine, or dinner as pleased his o 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 the 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 hireat reat truths, provided they are not taken too sole 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 huely for a photograph of the fat little historian, on the background of Notre Da to persuade his readers--perhaps hi 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 huin, because in 1789 religious monuments were out of fashi+on In 1900 his rereen fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no ht find it more instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin One sees what one brings, and at that ht reaction against the Revolution St

Gaudens had passed beyond all He liked the stately monuments nity; 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 Woenius ”the stately h which she was expressed

He would have seenin Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the say was lost even upon the artist

Yet in mind and person St Gaudens was a survival of the 1500; he bore the stae 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 to the twentieth century, and forgotten where it canorance, 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 frohted from babyhood Each had but half of a nature, and when they caht 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