The Tele-Victorian Age

IN violation of one of the etymologist’s rules, I have made two languages conspire to give name to the age in which we live — the age of the victory over the remote in space and time, the age of the conquest of the Far, the ‘ Tele-Victorian Age.’

The ancient Hellenic age might fitly be called by contrast the Perinikian Age (to conform for the moment to the etymologist’s requirements), the age of the conquest of the Near. The very language of that ancient age would intimate to us this characteristic even if we had no other testimony. In a standard Greek lexicon there are sixtyseven columns of words with the prefix ‘peri’ (though in some of these words the prefix has not the significance of nearness, but the derived sense of completeness), and there are less than five columns of words with the prefix ‘tele.’ And even these latter words, when they are defined in what is now known to be their geographical reach, are also but peri words—words that tell of what we should now call the Near. The striking afar of telebolos was not beyond the reach of the sling, the telemachos of the arrow. The teleplanos, far-wandering, traveler had never journeyed farther on the earth’s surface than one would now go in a day or two of twentiethcentury locomotion. The telekleitos, far-famed, hero would be thought in this age to have but provincial reputation. The teleskopos, far-seeing, wise man could actually see no greater distance than his naked eye could distinguish objects from the tallest peaks of Greece. The teleboas, far-shouting, orator could make himself heard no farther than his stentorian voice could carry. The telegonos, far-born, foreigner came from a place probably no more distant than Chicago from Boston. And telothi, the far, far, far-away, was no more remote than San Francisco.

The brilliant author of The World Machine¹ has recently written of that age: ‘Means of communication were then slow; no “liners” then raced straight and swiftly from port to port. Men did not venture far. Though there were records of the compass in use in China nine centuries back of this, it was unknown to the Greek and Tyrian mariners, who crept along the coast of the sea in Media-Terra, the known terra, and out through the Pillars of Hercules to the Ultima Thule. From the ports of Tyre to the Gateway of Night was scarce two thousand miles. The Hellespont and the Euxine carried the map-maker’s stylus scarce another thousand eastward. Half this combined distance reached from the mythical borders of Hyperborea to the fabulous regions of the Upper Nile. The known earth was a rectangle of about the present size of the United States.’

The perimeter of the telouros, the distant-boundaried, territory was indeed but the circumference of the Near. Environment — adaptation to which has been defined by high authority as education — was within range of the eye, the ear, the foot, or the sail; and a much simpler matter adaptation, and so education, were, than they are in those days, when the adaptations have to be made to environments beyond all reach of these. Think of one man who was ‘abreast if not in advance of the astronomy of his day,’ who had, as he himself said, of all his countrymen, ‘ traversed the greatest part of the earth,’ who wrote a treatise on navigation, who was learned in physics, discoursing on the Magnet, the Rays of Light, and the Water Clock; who was ’fond of music and poetry,’ leaving works on Rhythm and Harmony and on the beauty of epic poems; who was a critic in matters of art; who must ‘have been a physician’ since he left a book on Fever, another on Prognostics, another on Pestilences, another on the Right Way of Living; who assumed to write authoritatively on such varied knowledges as Agriculture, Tactics, the Principles of Laws, the Calendar and Colors, Ethics, and finally on Cheerfulness; besides being a zoölogist, anatomist, and psychologist. But with all this reputed wisdom, his science was the science of the Near, the Visible, the Palpable, the Audible, even though his speculation was of the Afar.

Nor was it the age of the Near in space alone. The Greek chronology did not stretch backward beyond that which was accepted as the age of the world in my own youth. I remember distinctly that in my college days the chronology of Ussher was followed in fixing the date of the creation of man as the year 4004 B.C. Since then the earth has grown a million years or more older; and the age of man has been increased to at least two hundred thousand years.

And a few months ago I heard the great astronomer-physicist Arrhenius, speaking of the propagation of life through the universe, express the view that spores of life caught or propelled beyond one planet or star atmosphere, wandered in space until, brought within the force of another gravitation, they entered as immigrant star-dust the atmospheric shores of another planet or star, beginning a new life that was to evolve into the vegetable, and the animal, and the human, under new conditions, — and so led the imagination on from star to star and from eon to eon, till infinity of space and eternity of time became conceivable.

Not long after, I chanced to hear another Nobel Prize scientist who went in the other direction, as far as the microscope could go, to the fields farthest back toward the genetic eternity, to the land of the phagocytes, to the infinitesimal, to the atom, crying as the ancient poet who but dreamed of what his eyes could not see, ‘considera opera atomorum.’

Together have these and such men, astronomers, biologists, chemists, carried the boundaries of man’s environment from one eternity to another.

Moreover, to consciousness of distance and time has been added mobility of human life.

One widely cherished recovery from that ancient age, the wonderfully beautiful statue of the Niké, the Winged Victory, of Samothrace, which Mr. II. G. Wells, after his visit to Boston a few years ago, referred to as the symbol of the ‘terrifying unanimity of æsthetic discrimination,’ was a few months ago reproduced by a cartoonist in intimation of the achievement of that pioneer of aviation, the first of the bird-men. But the Niké of Samothrace was, after all, perhaps but the figure-head of the prow of a boat. Her feet were fastened to a keel. The epinikian odes — the songs of victory —were of races whose distances were measured in stadia. The higher freedom, the mobility of wings, was but a possession of the gods, an aspiration of rash men, who, like Icarus, fell back to earth for their venturing.

Those who are familiar with the poet Maeterlinck’s botany are aware that his story of the evolution of animal life from the vegetable is the story of the struggle of life to escape from a state of immobility into one of mobility, of auto-mobility; from a static slavery to roots into the joyous freedom of feet; for, as Maeterlinck says, it is its rôle ‘ to escape above from the fatality below, to evade, transgress the heavy, sombre law, to set itself free, to shatter the narrow sphere, to invent or invoke wings, to escape as far as it can, to conquer the space in which destiny encloses it, to approach another kingdom.’

And when we read on into the history of the development of the highest animal, man, we find that we are following the story of the same kind of evolution, the story of the struggle from a lower toward a higher and higher state of mobility. Primitive patriarchs walked. Abraham was commanded to walk through the land he was to possess. But, from the very first, man longed for a greater mobility than his feet permitted. The ideal, happy, perfect creature was one equipped with wings; one who had ’the wings of the morning,’ who could travel afar, one who could see to the ends of the earth, one who had knowledge of all things that are in the earth, one who knew the beginning and end of time.

It is in this our age that this aspiration is being realized; this age, in which the man has indeed become the ἄγγελος, at any rate, in respect of locomotion; in which he has, in a sense, approached another kingdom. He is able to speak and to hear and to write around the world. He is able to see not only to the ends of the earth, but millions of miles into space. He can talk with the stars in a very literal sense, for he has made a new alphabet of varicolored lines (spectra they are called instead of letters), in which the stars are able to reveal to him what is burning in their hearts or what is glowing in their skies. Greater space, longer time, higher mobility, and the flying of the images of all things to his senses! Day unto day utters a speech never heard in the days of the Psalmist, and night unto night shows a knowledge beyond the wisdom of the wisest of the elder age.

Lucretius, the ancient Epicurean poet and philosopher, in trying to explain perception of the nearer phenomena of life, assumed that all bodies were constantly giving off filmy images or idols of themselves, and that the air was crowded with millions of these images, along with less definite emanations — images ever passing and crossing each other, in every direction, some swifter, some slower, in infinite complexity, yet in no confusion, very substantial, yet keeping their forms as they sped on their way to the senses, and traversed by mind-images, infinitely finer and more subtle, and by those subtlest and swiftest of all, the majestic images of the gods who came flying from the unknown afar through all the rest, in never-ceasing flow. His only Afar was the dwelling of the gods. Thence their images came flying, majestically.

But now,—according to the most widely accepted view, — everything comes through the medium of waves; a scientific theory which will some day be poetically translated, so that every aroma will have its wave-image, even as the flower that sent it forth had its idol or image under the Lucretian theory. All light, sound, perfume even, are but different forms of motion, we are assured, revealing themselves in waves of varying length or frequency. Everything that comes to us from the outer world comes through the beating, the ceaseless beating, of these waves upon our bodies, our minds, which are as receivers of some sensitive, invisible, wireless system. When God said, ‘Let there be light,’ so science would now express it, He but caused the waves to vibrate at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand a second, and when He wished to diversify color, He but made waves of varying length.

The whole history of the human race, since the first cry of the first paleolithic infant and the first onomatopoetic verb of the paleolithic man, has been written in indestructible ether.

But most of the waves reach no human shores, except through other waves to which they give their impulses. I have often recalled hearing Justin Winsor of Harvard University say, ‘If we only had instruments delicate, sensitive enough to record these unspent waves, what might we not hear? The prayer of Columbus out upon the ocean; the plash of the oars of Joliet and Marquette out upon the Mississippi; the footfall of Plato in the Academe.’

I once expressed the hope, in the presence of Mr. Thomas A. Edison, that he would some day become an ethereal archæologist and invent such an instrument: one that would bring to our eyes, ears, and nostrils the submerged waves of the long past, even as men dig up buried cities; that we might, for example, hear again the voice of Beatrice; that we might know the color of Helen’s eyes, and enjoy the fragrance even of the flowers that once grew in the Garden of Eden.

For all that record is there, in imperishable ether, either in still persistent waves which carry their treasure and refuse to be dissipated, or in yet other waves to which they have given their dying impulses. What I am at this moment saying, what you are at this moment thinking, ‘ has come to us,’ says Carlyle, ‘from the beginning of time, and will go on to an endless future.’

But whether the waves of the past are individually recoverable or not, or collectively distinctive, more and more are the waves of the present transmutable into human experience.

Not long ago I had an impressive illustration of this. I went one day to the laboratory of a physicist to witness an experiment. I was asked to stand in front of a rough detached frame in the corridor, where I could hear only the noise of students speaking or passing to and fro. But the moment I put to my ears a receiver, I heard exquisite music coming from some distant instrument, I knew not where. So full is the ether of harmonies and melodies, although there seem to be in our near environment only substantial walls and the commonplace noises of the day. I had but finished writing this line when, taking up a daily paper, I read that a bit of the ‘Marseillaise’ played on the shores of Algeria was heard across the Mediterranean in southern France. It is as if one side of the ancient world were singing to the other, Alexandria to Athens, across the sea in the middle of the earth.

But what of this age in which the perimeter has become as the centre, this age in which eternity of time has become conceivable, this age of angelic mobility, this age of instantaneous transmissibility of images, idols, and ideas?

The most obvious fact is, not that the Almighty has made of one clay all nations, but that this mobility and transmissibility are making of all nations one clay. One of our greatest jurists, in a letter which I was permitted to see a few days ago, quoted Tarde in the statement that while the former sanction was immemorial practice, now a new hat goes around the world in six months and is forgotten in a year; and he raised the question whether, instead of immortality, we should not now find our glory in ‘ illocality.’

I find a most pathetic support of this thesis of the great jurist in a letter from a missionary out upon the edge of the Orient who, writing to a friend here to thank her for sending a hat, inquired whether hats were at present worn with dents in the crown or whether those dents were made in transit. And another from a masculine source. Attending a high service in the Cathedral in Havana (where it is claimed the bones of Columbus were at that time reposing), a service celebrating the inauguration of the Republic, I saw walking in the recessional before the new President and the Archbishop, a tall priest carrying a salver, and on it the silk hat of the President of the Republic. The immemorial custom of bearing the crown or the sword as symbol of office was modified by a sense of democratic illocality.

Human experience is being put at the command of the whole earth, not only in images, in ideas, but in the substance of things wherever they can be carried afar, and where ships and trains offer, and tariffs do not interfere. Every great department store is an epinikian ode, and every jeweler’s shop is a telenikian sonnet. Walt Whitman could have written a poem on democracy from a railroad time-table, and on the federation of the world from a metropolitan grocery catalogue. And I know a newspaper man who could make an Iliad from the weekly cotton bulletin, beginning with the reports from Bombay, or an Odyssey from Lloyds’ reports on ships and shipping. Mistral might have added a notable poem to his Poèmes du Rhone if he had but put into verse the import of my seeing, on entering the gates of Avignon, that city of the Palace of the Popes, a sign advertising the McCormick agricultural implements; and Daudet’s Tartarin, who really lived in Nîmes, I am told, instead of Tarascon, had no more world-significant experience than I, who, when trying to get a good view of the historic Amphitheatre, all but fell over an Oliver chilled plough, from Syracuse (N. Y.), standing on the sidewalk to invite custom.

Mobility of person and transmissibility of ideas, one or both, are the prerequisite of a wide democracy. This republic of ours could not have become one, or remained one, except by means of both; the railroad, the telegraph, the newspaper, and the library, were necessary to ‘union, one and inseparable,’unless there were in lieu of these a mighty standing army. And the more democratic form of government, which is now so vigorously advocated, and exemplified in the direct primary, the initiative and the referendum, and the like, is possible only by reason of this heightened mobility and transmissibility.

These are, also, it need hardly be remarked, a condition of planetary consciousness. Until this new day, as the author of The Great Analysis well says, ‘we have not really inhabited an isolated sphere. Civilization has always been in contact with the Unknown.' ‘But now there is no Unknown this side of the moon.’ There are no new invaders to be feared, — not even the ‘Hunnish bacteria.’ We are prepared to think ‘planetarily,’ to act without fear of ambush in unexplored spots. Mr. Marconi said to me not long ago that the speed of wireless messages was retarded when the ocean was part dark and part light; and there will be retardation of ideas still as they pass into certain dark spots of earth from the light. Nevertheless, the waves do carry through them, as the conditions in China have demonstrated. And the speed of progress is likely to be quite as great in the next cycle of Cathay as in any now well-lighted tract of earth.

But with the passing of the unknown, with the coming of this complete ‘planetary consciousness,’ with this constant calling to our senses from the ends of the earth, what time the Near is not more demanding, with this increasing appeal of the road, the water and the air, is man to lose the old culture of the local, is he to throw away his inheritance of the immediate environments? It was the prodigal who, in the parable, went into the far country. And it was when he ‘came to himself’ that, he went back to his family heritage. Is it now the wanderer, the mobile one, who is to find himself, and the immobile, jealous elder brother who is to miss again the greatest gifts? Is man to go out and buy his experience of the race instead of trying to raise it in his own little valley or street ? And the neighborliness of the valley and the street, with all its homely virtues, — is the superseding neighborliness of the Afar to give something better? It is, indeed, to bring something better if it quickens our spirits to do for the impersonal and the illocal what our sympathies in narrower circles have driven us to attempt for the very personal anguish or pain. Simon Patten in his New Basis of Civilization has said in the same thought, ‘Civilization,’ that is, this far-seeing and far-calling and far-helping civilization, ‘spares us more and more the sight of anguish, and our imaginations must be correspondingly sharpened to see in the checkbook an agent as spiritual and poetic as the grime and blood-stain of ministering hands.’ Such an education must come with the Tele-Victorian Age if it is to carry to a higher virtue the old neighborliness of the isolated, the provincial.

And I think of the exquisite joy of neighborliness that comes from Afar. With the aid of the waves of ether, transmuted or translated into waves of sound for those who have not eyes, or into light for those who have not ears, we may find neighbors where there is greatest need, or where our noblest need is best fulfilled. Mobility, transmissibility, are they not to bring mankind nearer, if not into, the higher kingdom, even as they brought the vegetable to be an animal, to approach, and then to enter its next kingdom? Arthur O’Shaughnessy, in that poem on John the Baptist which has for many months possessed my memory, wrote of him, —

And I have been asking myself often, are the noises of the far towns, these daily reports of the deeds of men, this gossip about kings’ crowns, are these to take away all thought of the supernal even from those who dwell in wildernesses, penetrated as they are by telephones and newspapers? The majestic images of the gods, as we have observed, walked through every assemblage of the Lucretian, the perinikian, world; they inhabited every atmosphere. And in the indistinct light of the Middle Age, they were the supreme images. Even Dante employed angels to move the crystal spheres about in his universe. But it is the great problem of this day in which there are no longer secret places for the residence of the supernatural on the globe, in which there is nothing ‘unknown this side of the moon,’ in which the great mystery of creation has been pushed back millions of years, and beyond the sight of the strongest microscope, and the other great mystery of death forward into conceivable immortality, it is the great problem to keep the thought which took hold of John in the Wilderness, or even give it a chance to take hold of us. The victories of the physical Afar are, after all, of no value unless the spirits of men become more valorous, more independent of passion or prejudice, by reason of them; unless the mobile creature grows in its higher characteristics toward the perfect being, whom the Christian world has, in its imagery, endowed with wings.

It took the Almighty ages upon ages to evolve an animal that could fly, a bird, and it has taken ages and ages longer to evolve a human being that can fly; but if we, learning at last to fly, have not learned, also, more nobly to aspire and to live, the birds who have taken the short cut to aviation have the advantage over us.

I believe, however, that this conquest of the earth, water, air, which has given us planetary, if not cosmic, consciousness, is but preface to the lessening of racial, national, and provincial hatreds, antipathies, and jealousies, preface to the planning through local enlightenment for the good of humanity as a whole, and not for a selfish part of it, preface to the defining in ever higher spiritual terms of the ideals of mankind, and to the speaking of man to man, as through centuries each has spoken, in his own tongue, to his all-understanding deity.