Time Lord (17 page)

In 1885 Sir Lyon Playfair, reflecting on his long service to
the crown and on the number of commissions of inquiry he’d chaired, contrasted British methods with those of the Americans (so robustly recovered from their Civil War) in assessing so mundane a subject as the decline of commercial fisheries:

Oxford and Cambridge had been disastrously slow to introduce science and engineering courses to their curricula. Civil-service exams for the Foreign Service through the 1880s weighed Greek and Latin results higher (six and eight hundred respectively) than scores in the natural sciences (five hundred for chemistry and three hundred for other physical sciences). The cult of the gentleman still held sway. In 1885 the twin prides of Britain’s ancient university system were judged not even the equal of second-rate German institutions. Science writers and popular philosophers such as Herbert Spencer harped on Darwin’s darker prophecies of the “devolution” of species, and the “degeneration” of nations. Questions were being raised about the fitness of modern man and modern society, and the failure of British institutions to meet the competitive challenge of younger and more vigorous nation-states, particularly Prussia and the United States.

Nature still exerted a deep influence on Victorians, but it was
a call that had to be tempered with reason. In particular, nature was only to be studied, not to be worshiped. Most of us have sampled the vast, cautionary literature of moral unraveling, in which reason and refinement “revert” to the state of nature (usually preceded by the adjective “raw”). The agents of degeneration, the dark legacy of Darwin’s hopeful evolution, were everywhere. Gypsies, shamans, medicine men, “half-breeds” and “octoroons,” Hindus, Catholics, Muslims, the miscegenist, the scholar who identified too strongly with his subject and “went native,” becoming … a monster, a Kurtz, a madman. In the tropics we must always dress for dinner, maintain a steely distance from the natives, avoid dangerous spices, and keep our linens starched. The natives are children—appealing, sometimes clever, often mischievous, eternally in need of models and a stern rebuke. A stiff peg in the evening, preferably with quinine, will see us through.

After 1860 the contributions of the amateur, the “rambling” naturalist, began to fade. Cultured dilettantism showed its inadequacy, especially in the face of a technically proficient Prussia and an ever-curious, expansive United States. A genial agnosticism took root across Victorian middle-class society. Religion was a social duty, a weekly reach toward the sublime—rather like Fleming’s “Earth” speech—but otherwise discouraged in the Victorian hurly-burly. This is not to suggest, however, that religious attendance or its attendant social pieties disappeared. Scientists still proclaimed their faith. Fleming, a faithful Scottish Presbyterian, rewrote his faith’s prayer book to accommodate worshipers in isolated Scottish settlements in the western provinces, often hundreds of miles from an organized church and ordained minister.

Outward observation, all those Sunday sermons at sea, or in jungle clearings, remained a significant part of Victorian life, as of course were missions to the heathens on every continent. Sermons were crafted documents, listened to and judged not on
their emotional content, but on their intellectual and moral merit. In the seventy years of Fleming diaries, no more than half a dozen missed Sunday services are recorded, and always with remorse and a good excuse. The fervor of old-time religion, the emotional faith, was forced underground.

Victorians wanted to know about the earth, the plants and animals, the nature of the sun and stars, the atom, and the human body, and they saw all of nature as part of a unified system. They believed in a knowable universe and the unification of all knowledge. Thomas H. Huxley, in his 1887 essay, “The Progress of Science,” a review of science during Victoria’s first fifty years, predicted the imminent announcement of a unified theory that would combine not only light, gravity, and magnetism, but also biology, linguistics, and religion. Under Victoria, he wrote, science had discovered the three touchstones of nature: the molecular theory of matter, the conservation of energy, and evolution. Those three principles were sufficient to anticipate more wonders to come. He defended the approaches of induction and deduction, wild guesses and speculations—“anticipations of nature,” he called them—in a wondrous adaptation of time all his own.

Huxley’s expectation of an imminent explanation was almost met. Eighteen years after his essay, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) did grow from specialized concerns to have profound effects on philosophy and the arts, just as Darwin’s had had thirty-five years before. What Huxley did not foresee—and this divides the Victorian from the modern world, the natural from the rational—was the resistance to reason. The first of
The Fundamentals
, the source of all twentieth-century biblical literalism, had already been published in 1902. This was a series of pamphlets, which appeared under the imprimatur of the American Bible League, which attacked humanism, socialism, feminism, and evolution, and promoted a new view of biblical inerrancy.

It was not just pride in the sheer accumulation of scientific
knowledge that concerned the Victorians; they also demanded that it have practical application and social benefit. After meticulously listing and crediting the great minds of England and the Continent who had brought so much fundamental scientific knowledge to mankind since the Renaissance, Huxley proceeds to list their failings:

The Victorian mantra is simple and ringing:
Be of practical use to society, serve mankind
. What good is theory if it does not improve the lives of common man? This is England’s great departure from the Continental tradition of theory and pure research. It is also an expression of the choice that was facing the United States after the Civil War—adopt the British or German model of higher education?—and it is evident in the thinking of everyone associated with the standard-time movement. Research is fine, ran the popular interpretation; just don’t lose touch with reality. “The later Victorians as a group were men and women of remarkable moral resolution,” writes Richard Altick. “Living in a wasteland strewn with blasted articles of faith, they carried on, with spirit and confidence. What they lost in intellectual assurance and emotional comfort, they compensated for in sheer strength of will.”

Around 1870 the British technical advantage of mid-century stalled. Part of it was the inevitable result of competition with
Germany, France, and the United States, but Britain blunted its own growth by failing to increase its investment in technical and scientific education. The emphasis on social utility, the historic scorn for theory and basic research, cost Britain dearly. Sir Lyon Playfair noted that a single German university, for example Strasbourg or Leipzig, received ten thousand pounds more in direct state aid than the half-dozen colleges and universities of Scotland and Ireland together. Holland, with only four million people and four universities—the same in both regards as Scotland—out-spent Scotland nearly fivefold. France, in her determined rebuilding after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, had asked herself a question that Britain would not raise for another halfcentury: Why could superior men not be found in France at the moment of her peril? One obvious answer was that in 1868, the Sorbonne had received the equivalent of £8,000 in state aid for academic use. By 1885 that amount had climbed to over £3 million. The implications are clear: Britain had retreated into its historic insularity. The rallying voice of Prince Albert had long been stilled. France and Germany had acted on Albert’s assertion that science and research are the source of wealth, power, and progress.

OF COURSE
Victorians were not modernists. They could not know that their own proudest inventions—sociology and psychology as obvious examples—would contribute to the undermining of Victorian confidence. What did those new “social” sciences prove but that man behaved irrationally, and that one of the vaunted Victorian articles of faith, “character,” derived as much from secret drives, repressions, or unconscious influences as from sturdy moral and social exempla? After the standardtime issues had been settled, Fleming spent the next twenty years perfecting a world-circling undersea cable that would link England instantaneously with all her distant colonies. He believed (and how could he not?) that intimate and immediate contact
would spawn greater knowledge, loyalty, and affection between the mother of parliaments and her satellites. The better we know our government, the deeper our respect. How could they have guessed that loyalty and affection were better guaranteed by the mystique of remoteness, that intimacy was the surest guarantor of mutual contempt?

Their children became avid appreciators of all that the Victorians had dismissed as natural, or primitive. Hermann Hesse, Pablo Picasso, E. M. Forster, Romain Rolland, D. H. Lawrence, Igor Stravinsky, painters, dancers, and composers, tried to restore the balance between nature and reason and to inject, or even inflate, the primitive elements in their work. But by then it was too late. The “real” Italy, Tahiti, Mexico, and India had been tamed, even Christianized. Their mythic, sexual, and Tantric “natural” identities had been driven, Forster-style, into caves, or into the hearts of various darknesses. However faintly, however ghostly those longitudinal and time-zone borders were drawn, north and south, colonizer and colonial were pinned to the same grid, stuck in the same time. The natural world had been banished, except through the occasional sexual encounter with the Greco-Roman or Indo-Aryan ideal, or sentimentalized, or Romanticized, as in the case of Lawrence of Arabia.

The application of dispassionate reason to unruly nature created modern science and the methodology that still sustains it. Sherlock Holmes’s famous magnifying lens can stand for all the microscopes and telescopes, the patient accumulation of “trifles” and the inexhaustible permanence of clues in the natural world still waiting to be discovered—and fashioned into stunning, all-encompassing revelation. Those methods of inquiry had created the Industrial Age and the technological revolution, they built the communications networks, they asked the questions that led to the discovery of bacteria, radiation, spectroscopy, natural selection, that spawned the fields of earth science, philology, physics, chemistry, sociology, and psychology. Call
him Holmes, or Darwin, or Freud, or Whitman—or in the context of this book, Abbe, Allen, Barnard, Dowd, Fleming, Herschel, Janssen, Strachey, Struve—any of that largely self-taught Victorian band and their European and North American equivalents who applied the abstract to the practical, and the practical to the abstract, induction and deduction, to come up with a new way of organizing time.

Standard time is the biggest gauge in the world. It converts celestial motion to civic time. And the most important fact about Sandford Fleming is that he realized it first and brought it to the attention of the rest of the world. That the world would finally opt for a simpler configuration in no way negates his message.

IN
1870s Ottawa, where the social tone was set by the British-appointed governors-general, Fleming ranked first among equals. Sandra Gwyn in her history of early Ottawa social life,
The Private Capital
, describes Fleming as
sui generis
, topping the A-list of every ambitious hostess. He was everything the Victorian gentleman should be. In the city, charming, sophisticated, commanding, at ease in all circles, political or diplomatic. Camped in the extremes of the Canadian summers and winters, leading survey crews over the swamps and mountains, he reveled in hardship.

And yet, two years after his return to Canada from his sabbatical in 1878, he was relieved of his CPR commission. For a period of about three years, from 1878 until he righted himself in 1881, he exhausted the tide of good luck that had floated him from relatively uneducated, penniless immigrant to the number-one civilian in Canadian society. In the dark year of 1880, Fleming was reduced to begging Parliament for a fair settlement, citing his double commission on the two railroads, the workload he had carried, his broken health. In all his letters, only that of February 9, 1880, after his fate had been decided, can be called self-pitying:

It earned him a severance package (as we’d say today) made up of what he might have made as Chief Engineer of the CPR, alone, minus the salary he’d already received for his years on the Intercolonial, times his eight years in service. In the Gilded Age, when the golden goose took the form of the iron horse, Fleming was cut loose for $29,800.