The age of the oceans has also been calculated. Geologists have taken as their starting point the assumption that the world’s oceans initially consisted entirely of fresh water, but gradually accumulated salts washed off the continents by the world’s rivers. By calculating how much salt is deposited in the oceans each year, and dividing that into the overall salinity of the world’s body of seawater, a figure for the time such salination has taken can be deduced. The best answer at the moment is between 100 and 200 million years.61
In trying to set biology to one side in his understanding of the Negro position in the United States, Du Bois grasped immediately what some people took decades to learn: that change for the Negro could only come through political action that would earn for a black skin the same privileges as a white one. He nevertheless underestimated (and he was not alone) the ways in which different forms of knowledge would throw up results that, if not actually haphazard, were not entirely linear either, and which from the start began to flesh out Darwin’s theory of evolution. Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of evolution would have a scientific life and a popular life, and the two were not always identical. What people thought about evolution was as important as what evolution really was. This difference was especially important in the United States, with its unique ethnic/biological/social mix, a nation of immigrants so different from almost every other country in the world. The role of genes in history, the brainpower of the different races, as evolved, would never go away as the decades passed.
The slow pace of evolution, operating over geological time, and typified by the new realisation of the great age of the earth, contributed to the idea that human nature, like fossils, was set in stone. The predominantly unvarying nature of genes added to that sense of continuity, and the discovery of sophisticated civilisations that had once been important but had collapsed encouraged the idea that earlier peoples, however colourful and inventive, had not become extinct without deserving to. And so, while physics undermined conventional notions of reality, the biological sciences, including archaeology, anthropology, and geology, all started to come together, even more so in the popular mind than in the speciahst scientific mind. The ideas of linear evolution and of racial differences went together. It was to prove a catastrophic conjunction.
* Passed into law over the president’s veto in 1917.
* In some geology departments in modern universities, the twenty-sixth of October is still celebrated - ironically - as the earth’s birthday.
* In some geology departments in modern universities, the twenty-sixth of October is still celebrated - ironically - as the earth’s birthday.
8
VOLCANO
Every so often history gives us a time to savour, a truly defining moment that stands out for all time. 1913 was such a moment. It was as if Clio, the muse of history, was playing tricks with mankind. With the world on the brink of the abyss, with World War I just months away, with its terrible, unprecedented human wastage, with the Russian Revolution not much further off, dividing the world in a way it hadn’t been divided before, Clio gave us what was, in creative terms, arguably the most fecund – and explosive – year of the century. As Robert Frost wrote in A Boy’s Will, his first collection of poems, also published that year:
The light of heaven falls whole and white …
The light for ever is morning light.1
Towards the end of 1912 Gertrude Stein, the American writer living in Paris, received a rambling but breathless letter from Mabel Dodge, an old friend: ‘There is an exhibition coming on the 15 Feb to 15 March, which is the most important public event that has ever come off since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, & it is of the same nature. Arthur Davies is the President of a group of men here who felt the American people ought to be given a chance to see what the modern artists have been doing in Europe, America & England of late years…. This will be a scream!’2
In comparing what became known as the Armory Show to the Declaration of Independence, Mabel Dodge was (one hopes) being ironic. Nonetheless, she was not wholly wrong. One contemporary American press clipping said, ‘The Armory Show was an eruption only different from a volcano’s in that it was made by man.’ The show opened on the evening of 17 February 1913. Four thousand people thronged eighteen temporary galleries bounded by the shell of the New York Armory on Park Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. The stark ceiling was masked by yellow tenting, and potted pine trees sweetened the air. The proceedings were opened by John Quinn, a lawyer and distinguished patron of contemporary art, who numbered Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce among his friends.3 In his speech Quinn said, ‘This exhibition will be epoch-making in the history of American art. Tonight will be the red-letter night in the history not only of American art but of all modern art.’4
The Armory Show was, as Mabel Dodge had told Gertrude Stein, the brainchild of Arthur Davies, a rather tame painter who specialised in ‘unicorns and medieval maidens.’ Davies had hijacked an idea by four artists of the Pastellists Society, who had begun informal discussions about an exhibition, to be held at the Armory, showing the latest developments in American art. Davies was well acquainted with three wealthy New York wives – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan. These women agreed to finance the show, and Davies, together with the artist Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, an American painter and critic living in Paris, set off for Europe to find the most radical pictures the Continent had to offer.
The Armory Show was in fact the third great exhibition of the prewar years to introduce the revolutionary painting being produced in Paris to other countries. The first had taken place in London in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries. Manet and the Post-Impressionists was put together by the critic Roger Fry, assisted by the artist Clive Bell. Fry’s show began with Edouard Manet (the last ‘old masterly’ painter, yet the first of the moderns), then leapt to Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin without, as the critic John Rewald has said, ‘wasting time’ on the other impressionists. In Fry’s eyes, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, at that point virtually unknown in Britain, were the immediate precursors of modern art. Fry was determined to show the differences between the impressionists and the Post-impressionists, who for him were the greater artists. He felt that the aim of the Post-impressionists was to capture ‘the emotional significance of the world that the Impressionists merely recorded.’5 Cézanne was the pivotal figure: the way he broke down his still lifes and landscapes into a patchwork of coloured lozenges, as if they were the building blocks of reality, was for Fry a precursor of cubism and abstraction. Several Parisian dealers lent to the London show, as did Paul Cassirer of Berlin. The exhibition received its share of criticism, but Fry felt encouraged enough to hold a second show two years later.