Part 23 (2/2)

St Gaudens caent painted his portrait, two steps essential to ination, but he gruo to St Louis to address soo with them, for whatever use he could suppose hiion of World's Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind i the more readily because it united his two educations in one; but theory and practice were put to equally severe test at St

Louis Ten years had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and he found everything new In this great region froriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, for of every town

Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure of force little, while the chiht the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform at every station to ask ere the people; for the American of the prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee and the buffalo

The subject grew quickly delicate History told little about these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their race-nah the Rhine and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio John Hay was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been bred on its shores, and the city of St Louis had turned its back on the noblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its own banks The new Ae proudly; he was the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this ether by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach to shape; a product of sono distinctive marks but that of its pressure The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church, and the features would follow the parentage

The St Louis Exposition was its first creation in the twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting One saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital--without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored--but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk frolomerate, with no tie but its steam-power and not much of that, threay thirty or forty e flat The world had never witnessed so ht Arabia's cri, as one wandered ahted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as though the E the beauties of this City of Brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast, white,suns One enjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits but rather because of their want Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted one's mental faults Had there been no exhibits at all, and no visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the e That the poasted, the art indifferent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to the interest The chaos of education approached a dreaance reflected the past or ied the future; whether it was a creation of the old American or a proriht allow himself to hope The prospect from the Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see alress In another half-century, the people of the central valleys should have hundreds of millions to throay more easily than in 1900 they could throay tens; and by that tiht even have learned how to reach it

This was an optirims of World's Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of the Mississippi, the St Louis Exposition , beyond th in Aton on May 24, and before sailing for Europe, Adaarden-porch of the White House He found hied Mrs Roosevelt to visit the Exposition for its beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last

He left St Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found hiain in the town of Coutances, where the people of Normandy had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which architects still adularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin On this Sunday, the Nor a pretty church-feast--the Fete Dieu--and the streets were filled with altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the pave handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged at in did not shut her costly Exposition on Sunday, or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St Louis Exposition to her--or for her; and a historical traladly have offered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor, if she would have taught him her relation with the deity of the Senators The power of the Virgin had been plainly One, e all human activity; while the power of the Senate, or its deity, seeht one say--to be reat interest as far as it concerned the somewhat obscure iven no clearer idea than priests of the deity they supposed themselves to honor--if that was indeed their purpose; but it interested a student of force, curious to in--or her Son--had no longer the force to build expositions that one cared to visit, but had the force to close them The force was still real, serious, and, at St

Louis, had been anxiously measured in actual money-value

That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate Cha Adams to buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams most aboin, not as a sentiment but as a motive pohich had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached The automobile alone could unite theh the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seeker of history In his mind the problem offered itself as to Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in his own case, to be a fort2/2, if he could but experimentally prove it Of the attraction he needed no proof on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others than hiin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile and its ohere she would, to her wonderful palaces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to A, ah she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could not ravitation of which he knew nothing but the forlad to yield himself entirely, not to her charion, but to her y of creation which had built up these World's Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St Louis pale

”Both were faiths and both are gone,” said Matthew Arnold of the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was to ask where they had gone The Virgin had not even altogether gone; her fading away had been excessively slow Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less ad, happy in the thought that at last he had found a e of her lovers

Her own age had no tie, Adalass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that of a century afrom one century to another without break The centuries dropped like autu over them too fast When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead The hunt for the Virgin's glass opened rich preserves Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in sensuous worshi+p Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France, broke into Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers throhich had left every rements that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness

One dared not pass a parish church in Cha to look for itsof fraglass discovered the Christ-child in hisears froless Fle on his head with a broken halbert; all invoked in prayer by reht have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they had paid for and lost France abounds in sixteenth-century glass Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within fifty miles contains scores of churches where the studentbefore the Virgin'sin the silent solitude of an e his historical sins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education, and still desperately hoping to understand

He understood a little, though not h the ONE had becoh the Multiple still showed one back to the Roman Empire and forward to the Ane and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still supreme At Beauvais in the Church of St Stephen was a superb tree of Jesse, farand le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, ain, three-fourths bore features of the Kings of France, a the than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine purity Compared with the stillfrorand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction? Coht suggest, but what step towards perfection?

One late afternoon, at h the streets of Troyes in close and intihly intelligent seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two , he read that M de Plehve had been assassinated at St Petersburg The mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodroe into the fascinating Church of St Pantaleon near by Martyrs, lass and half in telegraave hio Had one sat all one's life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this? Was assassination forever to be the last word of Progress? No one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he hihtful s, in its exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come to his own, but which was he--the in herself never looked so winning--so One--as in this scandalous failure of her Grace To what purpose had she existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history The effort for Unity could not be a partial success; even alternating Unity resolved itself into less ive it up seeo on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to ht hiht-angled triangleelse Every h to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed There, whether finished or not, education stopped The formula, once in at once, for time pressed The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be ant or eccentric One sought no absolute truth

One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it Aht the orbit which would best satisfy the observed e, 1838, commonly called Henry Adaht a common factor for certain definite historical fractions Any schoolboy could work out the probleht to state it in his own ters and frosts stopped his slaughter of the centuries, and shut hiain a boy at school to shape after his own needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History

CHAPTER xxxIII

A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)

A DYNAMIC theory, like ress as the development and econo that does, or helps to do work

Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a h without dis the question again taking for granted that he captures the forces A dyna bodies in proportion to the law of ranted that the forces of nature capture man The sum of force attracts; the feeble atom or rowth; he is the suht are alike their product; the ress of his e on his senses, whose sue, the theoryfor chance prey Forces of nature dance like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on theh its theory of force is sound

The spider-ular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations theno power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces Fire taught hi water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons ofthemselves into his handshis burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study With little or no effort on his part, all these forces forure

Long before history began, his education was complete, for the record could not have been started until he had been taught to record

The universe that had formed him took shape in hisall forces except hiroups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to act on hie of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did, to these attractions Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between thehest educator Man alwaysandforces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshi+pped as God To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name