Chapter XXV. The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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's length 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 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 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. 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: --

"Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas." 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 American thought as though it had never existed. The
true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the
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 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 supersition." 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 to 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 force 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
to 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 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.