And so he left Paris in August, when heat lay over the city like the weight of a welcome which is over. If he had had dreams of an honorable position where he could live and work and perhaps raise his young family (for Cily would like Paris), the dream was over. There was still England where he was to stay a month before sailing. England had liked him so long. It was almost like home.
England was cool, and green, and glad to see him. Sir Charles Lyell, who had traveled twice to America and who had induced the Lowell Institute to invite Agassiz for lectures, filled him with tales of the life which awaited him. Louis listened, heard no word about return to England, and filled his mind with thoughts about the new home. For home it must be now. There was no other. At the end of September he walked down the dirty crowded dock at Liverpool and aboard the steamer bound for Boston.
Behind him he had left all security; ahead of him was a long and dangerous voyage leading perhaps to a few brief lectures, and then a return to what? It was a situation to give pause to anyone, even with as optimistic temperament as his. His spirit was not lightened by the late fall storms which the ship ran into. Agassiz knew mountain tops of rock and snow, but these mountain tops were white with broken rushing water which engulfed the ship and bore it down into their roaring depths. They sailed on and on, delayed by weather until at last the newspapers announced that the ship was lost. It was a pity, they said, that such a valuable scholar should perish in the middle of the ocean. If Rose and Cily Agassiz read these rumors, their hearts must have been wrung.
But Louis rode out this storm, as he rode out others. In spite of his inland life, he proved a good sailor. The long voyage gave him time to think. He looked at his future and saw that its success lay in his own hands. He saw, too, that he had no alternative now except success. He felt less apprehension at the difficulty of his problem than excitement about its solution.
Charles Lyell, who knew, had told him that he must give up the idea of lecturing to Americans in either French or German. They have a language of their own, he explained, but they understand English. Other languages they do not use. Very well then, agreed Louis, I will speak English. Now while the boat rolled and tossed, he spoke English. Spoke it to anybody who would listen to him, learned paragraphs of it and repeated them aloud, followed the captain about chanting English at him. And the captain, who had never had such a passenger before, and the other passengers as they crawled out on deck, all capitulated to that irresistible charm which Louis Agassiz had brought away with him as part of his belongings. When the ship at last came into Boston port, Agassiz bade his fellow travelers good-bye in English phrases a little queer as to accent, but quite intelligible and wholly engaging. They watched him stride off across the wharf and down the ship-lined avenue, and the October day seemed to lose a little of its brightness.
He walked more slowly, stopping now and then to stare at the strange new world into which he had stepped. He carried his bags nor did he think of taking a cab. The solid ground felt too good beneath his feet. The clear air was dry and sweet in his lungs. Now and then he would ask directions from some bystander who was observing him curiously. Pemberton Square, he would pronounce with great rolling of r’s. Then he listened intently to the strange tongue, his head a little on one side like a setter dog. People were kind. They looked into his deep, friendly eyes, and answered the magic of his smile with, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk a way with you,” Louis did not understand the what they would tell him, but he enjoyed their company. Ladies glanced up at him from under their little veils, and sighed softly. He was a handsome figure of a man with a kind of radiance about him which they had not often seen. High color in his cheeks, dark glowing eyes, a massive head of chestnut hair, and great grace of bearing. A fine figure of a man! Who could he be?
Higher and higher in him rose the tide of his excitement. Pemberton Square! He turned into it, and saw a little London square with a bright fall garden of marigolds in the middle of it, and about it, in decent spacing, dignified brick houses three stories high. A square in which he felt at once at home. He peered up at the houses, this number, that number, ah, he had it! He rang the bell and looked up into the kindly face of his first real friend in America, John Lowell.
It was no new experience for Louis Agassiz to be liked immediately, but it was never more important for him to win friends. He had not lived for nearly forty years without learning something of his own potentialities. He was well expressed. His inner friendliness, as honest as the warmth of the sun, was as clear in its source as that of the sun. He had no need to work for effects; he was himself.
Nor could Agassiz in the whole world have sailed into a port where he would have been more welcome. America was so ready for him that he seemed to have been created for her need. Concerned as the people had been with the problems of existence and growth, they had only recently found time and money to encourage interest in the arts and sciences. Of original achievement they had little; of admiration and respect for European achievement they had much. A scholar like Agassiz, who contributed scientific work with equal ease under Swiss, French, German, or English encouragement, was a man who could lead them into contributions of their own. Far back in the days of the parsonage at Motier, Rose Agassiz had known her son a born leader; now she could have told these eager people struggling through the adolescence of their development that the one man in the whole world best fitted for their need had just sailed into their port.
It was as if everything Agassiz had done had been by chance a preparation for his place with us. It was by no chance, however, that America had chosen to make her entrance into science through geology where lay his special achievements. As ever, we were a practical country. We realized even in our youth that we had sources of great riches in the unknown earth of our continent. “Geology received encouragement because geology could furnish useful facts about the location of these riches. A blundering government furnished money so wastefully, and tied up results with such political strings that Louis Agassiz was horrified, and with no hesitation whatever, hurried down to Washington and insisted that ways be changed at once. Moreover, Washington listened, and changed its ways; in that direction, at least. An amazing triumph of a man’s personality!
Perhaps it was that personality, rather than his achievements of which fairly few of his American admirers had ever heard, that won him his entrance into our friendship. There is something disarming about the foreigner in a strange country which precludes the ordinary jealousy of competition. In France, Agassiz was too much of a Frenchman, in Germany too nearly a product of its universities, in England too close to its narrow sources of original research, to be wholly safe as a competitor. America, dazed by its own unlimited resources, could afford to be generous with them. Convinced of the omnipotence of European science, she could with no loss of self-respect pay homage to this representative of it. And when by some lavish good luck, Agassiz turned out to be a person who had charm added to his useful qualities, New England recognized it by giving him her heart.
Not only her heart but her head she trustfully consigned to him. New England meant above everything else to be educated. And education to her meant education of every man, woman and child who lived in New England. A baby was supposed to be born with as great a thirst for knowledge as for his mother’s milk. It was as much his right to have it. Grown people were stupid only as they had been denied proper training of the brain. Children were started free and equal, and New England intended to see to it that they were kept that way. Bronson Alcott had the right idea, and he went busily about distributing it with his peddler’s wares. The factory girls at Lowell had turned the mills into centers of learning which modern colleges might envy. Everybody should go to college, and not until we got colleges enough for everybody to go to, did we discover that something more than registration was necessary to make a successful student. But then we might never have found out this pertinent fact if we had not poured so much unnecessary grist into our education mill.
At any rate, New England in the eighteen-forties was never keener on the trail of education for everybody, rich or poor, moron or genius. Since colleges were few and expensive, and the professors never overpaid, a kind of extension system started which to this day can fill a hall of any size with an attentive, contented audience. The Lowell Institute was Boston’s most important contribution to the plan of lectures for everybody. Louis Agassiz was the Institute’s catch of the season. Everybody in Boston, and within train or driving distance of Boston, tried for a ticket. A gold rush for something in which gold had no part, was on.
Louis, lost in admiration of the collections and markets of the country, had no idea of the disturbing competition to hear him talk. He was busy looking us over, he saw us for what we were, and he liked what he saw. His comments upon us and our ways to his curious friends at home tend to produce the sort of nostalgia for the good old times which is likely to be senility’s danger sign. “I have not yet seen a man out of employment or a beggar,” he says in a letter to his mother, “except in New York, which is a sink for the emptyings of Europe.” He should see us now! He somehow got the impression that we as a people were always in a hurry about the business of living. And that impression from Louis Agassiz whose own pace at times seems slightly swift should give us pause! He traveled from Boston to visit Yale by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad, a breathless trip to the man who had always depended upon his own legs and European transportation. “The rapidity of motion is frightful to those who are unused to it,” he says, “but you adapt yourself to the speed, and soon become, like all the rest of the world, impatient of the slightest delay. I well understand that an antipathy for this mode of travel is possible. There is something infernal in the irresistible power of steam, carrying such heavy masses along with the swiftness of lightening. The habits growing out of continued contacts with railroads, and the influence they exert on a portion of the community, are far from agreeable until one is familiar with them. You would cry out in dismay did you see your baggage flung about pell-mell like logs of wood, trunks, chests, travelling-bags, hatboxes, all in the same mill, and if here and there something goes to pieces no one is astonished; never mind! We go fast, we gain time,—that is the essential thing.”
It occurs to him, watching us race past him, to wonder what we do with the minutes we work so hard to gain. “What is wanting in all these men is neither skill nor knowledge. In both, they seem to compete with us, and in ardor and activity they even surpass most of our savans. What they need is leisure.” And what we still need is leisure. Leisure to observe, leisure to think, leisure to find our place in the universe before we are snatched from it. Quite likely, though, we shall never have it; we are too sure that leisure and laziness are synonyms.
Yet something in his own strong swift pace probably gave Louis a certain amount of enjoyment in our mill-race. He tried conscientiously to keep out of it by presenting his letters of introduction only as he left a place. He paid no attention to New York except for a collection of fossil fishes in it. With Asa Gray, who liked him at once, he stopped at Princeton, “a small town half a day’s journey from New York, and the seat of a considerable university,” where outside the town he found a rare kind of turtle. He stayed four days in Philadelphia, where there were no less than three professors of chemistry, examining collections, and remarks that “the liberality of the American naturalists toward me is unparalleled.” In fact he would have carried most of the specimens away if he had not been bound for Washington to set it straight about certain matters. Publish only well-executed volumes, he told them, and I will show you how. Back for five days in New York, he spent every morning in the markets filling a great barrel with different kinds of fish and turtles which so excited him that he wrote that the day ought to have thirty-six working hours. The leisure of Louis Agassiz seems to have been largely theoretical.
All along the way of his travels he collected specimens through a system of exchange which was the source of constant letters home asking for European specimens to help him with his bartering. Before he had been in this country three months he had a collection which demanded a museum. And before he left it he had founded such a great museum that at last his needs were satisfied. In those first months, indeed, he indexed clearly his three great contributions which he was make to us: his museum, his lectures and teaching, his research and writing. In these days of specialization no one man could win recognition in such diverse ways; possibly in those days it took a man who was somewhat of a Titan.
14. NEW PEAKS TO SCALE
November hurried by and Louis stopped filling his barrels to go back to Boston for the opening of the Lowell Institute lectures. Just what they were, he knew only vaguely. But they paid an excellent fee, and they could not be very different from the lectures in Neuchâtel, or the Little Academy, or anywhere else when people gathered to hear him speak. He realized a little uncomfortably that he had given small attention to improving his vocabulary since he had left the ship, but he marshaled what he had by shutting himself up just before his lecture and reciting aloud all the words that he knew. More preparation he did not need for he was filled with his subject and wanted only an adequate medium for expression of it. He was to talk on “The Plan of the Creation, Especially in the Animal Kingdom,” a matter about which he had decided opinions. John Lowell’s butler, outside the door of this strange guest with summons to dinner, would have heard his sonorous tones calling out words which made so little sense that he might well wonder where the man could get an audience to listen to such nonsense.
But the Lowell Institute could always supply an audience. That raw December night on the way to the hall, John Lowell tried to explain to Agassiz what to expect, but Louis was busy thinking about the English words which would express his gratitude for their attention. He walked onto the platform, and sat quietly observant while Mr. Lowell introduced him in highly flattering terms which Louis knew were quite true. But what a crowd! Was all Boston there? Once he had talked to two hundred scientists, but here at his feet stretched row after row of faces, thousands of them, he thought. Nor were they scientists if he knew the breed; ladies in fine clothes, men tucking top hats under their seats, laborers with clean blue shirts, fresh-faced young students, row after row of them. Then he recalled how Mr. Lowell had said that tickets were drawn by lot and could not be bought for money because these lectures were for the public, and he admired again our American system and was filled with zest at all the wonders he could teach his intent listeners.
Never did a Lowell audience listen with more pleasure. Louis Agassiz was in his element. He stood before them, friendly, sanguine, with no consciousness of self or of anything except them, and the exciting things he had to tell them. They capitulated without a struggle, delighting in his accent, waiting breathlessly while he hunted for a word, watching his blackboard as if life itself grew under his skilful strokes, bursting into such wholehearted applause when he left the platform that even Louis Agassiz was satisfied. If Europe had been able to furnish him with audiences of this sort, he might well have preferred them to fossil fishes.
Yet Louis was not quite satisfied. He knew that engaging as he was, playing for time to snare a word, he could never show an audience his full power while he was limited by its language. Not many people in Boston and Cambridge could follow a lecture in French, either then or now. But when subscriptions to a French Agassiz lecture were offered them, they did not hesitate on that account. In a short time Louis had his select audience well supplied with ladies who listened with ardor to his lectures on “Les glaciers et l’èpoque glaciaire.” Boston and Cambridge were at his feet! Albany followed, and the South in its time, but the first recognition came from New England where Agassiz was to make his home.
Louis, accustomed as he was to response to his lectures, looked with amazement at them in the sheets of the daily newspaper. He shook his head regretfully at the offers which poured in, writing home in a letter, “I could easily make more
than enough by lectures which would be admirably paid and are urged upon me, to put me completely at my ease hereafter.” Something of a temptation to a man who had never an extra cent, and who thoroughly enjoyed popularity. But he adds that he will take on only enough to pay his debts, and “beyond that all must go to science—there lies my true mission,” a Victorian statement of a fundamental and honest fact.
After a couple of months of pouring intellectual riches into heads which somehow did not seem to hold them, Louis began to feel a little doubtful about the comparative excellence of the American and European methods. He was neither the first nor the last to reach that state of bewilderment.
“I am delighted with my stay here,” he writes to a French friend, “although I do not quite understand all that surrounds me.” Perfect principles, he discovers, involve unexpected results. “I am constantly asking myself which is better, our old Europe, where the man of exceptional gifts can give himself absolutely to study, opening thus a wider horizon for the human mind, while at his side thousands barely vegetate in degradation or at least in destitution; or this new world, where the institutions tend to keep all on one level as part of the general mass, but a mass, be it said, which has no noxious elements. Yes, the mass here is decidedly good. All the world lives well, is decently clad, learns something, is awake and interested. The strength of America lies in the prodigious number of individuals who think and work at the same time. It is a severe test of pretentious mediocrity, but I fear it may also efface originality.”
And then follows a note of homesickness from the man who had felt it so seldom:
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