CHAPTER XVII. A BRITISH LION WITH AN AMERICAN HEART
The influence of Paine's Quaker training has been traced in his constructive politics, but its repressive side had more perhaps to do with his career. "I had some turn," he said, "and I believe some talent, for poetry; but this I rather repressed than encouraged." It is your half-repressed poets that kindle revolutions. History might be different had Paine not been taught fear of music and poetry. He must have epical commonwealths. The American Republic having temporarily filled his ideal horizon in the political direction, the disguised Muse turned his eye upon the possibilities of nature. Morally utilitarian, he yet rarely writes about physics without betraying the poetic passion for nature of a suppressed Wordsworth. Nature is his Aphrodite and his Madonna.
"Bred up in antediluvian notions, she has not yet acquired the European taste of receiving visitors in her dressing-room; she locks and bolts up her private recesses with extraordinary care, as if not only resolved to preserve her hoards but conceal her age, and hide the remains of a face that was young and lovely in the days of Adam."
Defining for Jefferson the distinction between attraction and cohesion, he says:
"I recollect a scene at one of the theatres which very well explains the difference. A condemned lady wishes to see her child and the child its mother: that is Attraction. They were admitted to meet, but when ordered to part threw their arms around each other and fastened their persons together: this is Cohesion."
All the atoms or molecules are little mothers and daughters and lovers clasping each other; it is an interlocking of figures; "and if our eyes were good enough we should see how it was done." He has a transcendental perception of unity in things dissimilar. On his walks to Challiot he passes trees and fountains, and writes a little essay, with figures, explaining to his friend that the tree is also a fountain, and that by measuring diameters of trunks and tubes, or branches, the quantity of timber thrown up by sap-fountains might be known. Some of his casual speculations he calls "conceits." They are the exuberance of a scientific imagination inspired by philanthropy and naturalistic religion. The "inner light" of man corresponds to an "inner spirit" of nature. The human mind dimmed by ignorance, perverted by passion, turns the very gifts of nature to thorns, amid which her divine beauty sleeps until awakened by the kiss of science.
It would be difficult to find anything in the literature of mechanical invention more naively picturesque than this Quaker, passed through furnaces of two revolutions, trying to humanize gunpowder. Here is a substance with maximum of power and minimum of bulk and weight.
"When I consider the wisdom of nature I must think that she endowed matter with this extraordinary property for other purposes than that of destruction. Poisons are capable of other uses than that of killing. If the power which an ounce of gunpowder contains could be detailed out as steam or water can be it would be a most commodious natural power."
Having failed to convert revolutions to Quakerism, Paine tries to soften the heart of gunpowder itself, and insists that its explosiveness may be restrained and detailed like strokes on a boy's top to obtain continual motion. The sleeping top, the chastened repose of perfect motion, like the quiet of the spinning worlds, is the Quaker inventor's ideal, and he begs the President of the United States to try the effect of the smallest pistol made—the size of a quill—on a wheel with peripheral cups to receive the discharges.*
* I am reluctantly compelled to give only the main ideas of
several theses of this kind by Paine, found among
Jefferson's papers. The portion of the "Jefferson Papers"
at Washington written by Paine would fill a good volume.
"The biographers of Paine," wrote his friend, Joel Barlow, "should not forget his mathematical acquirements and his mechanical genius." But it would require a staff of specialists, and a large volume, to deal with Paine's scientific studies and contrivances—with his planing machine, his new crane, his smokeless candle, his wheel of concentric rim, his scheme for using gunpowder as a motor, above all his iron bridge. As for the bridge, Paine feels that it is a sort of American revolution carried into mechanics; his eagle cannot help spreading a little in the wondering eyes of the Old World. "Great scenes inspire great ideas," he writes to Sir George Staunton.
"The natural mightiness of America expands the mind, and it partakes of the greatness it contemplates. Even the war, with all its evils, had some advantages. It energized invention and lessened the catalogue of impossibilities. At the conclusion of it every man returned to his home to repair the ravages it had occasioned, and to think of war no more. As one amongst thousands who had borne a share in that memorable revolution, I returned with them to the re-enjoyment of quiet life, and, that I might not be idle, undertook to construct a single arch for this river [Schuylkill]. Our beloved General had engaged in rendering another river, the Potowmac, navigable. The quantity of iron I had allowed in my plan for this arch was five hundred and twenty tons, to be distributed into thirteen ribs, in commemoration of the Thirteen United States."
It is amusing after this to find Paine, in his patent, declaring his special license from "His Most Excellent Majesty King George the Third."* Had poor George been in his right senses, or ever heard of the invention, he might have suspected some connection between this insurrection of the iron age and the American "rebellion." However, Paine is successful in keeping America out of his specification, albeit a poetic touch appears.
* "No. 1667. Specification of Thomas Paine. Constructing
Arches. Vaulted Roofs, and Ceilings." The specification,
dated August 28, 1788, declares his invention to be "on
principles new and different to anything hitherto
practised." The patents for England, Scotland, and Ireland
were granted in September. An iron arch of one hundred feet
was designed by Pritchard and erected by Darby at Coalbrook
Dale, Shropshire, in 1779, but it did not anticipate the
invention of Paine, as may be seen by the article on "Iron
Bridges" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which also well
remarks that Paine's "daring in engineering does full
justice to the fervour of his political career." (Eighth
edition; it is omitted in the ninth.)
"The idea and construction of this arch is taken from the figure of a spider's circular web, of which it resembles a section, and from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it. Another idea, taken from nature in the construction of this arch, is that of increasing the strength of matter by dividing and combining it, and thereby causing it to act over a larger space than it would occupy in a solid state, as is seen in the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds, canes, &c. The curved bars of the arch are composed of pieces of any length joined together to the whole extent of the arch, and take curvature by bending."
Paine and his bridge came to England at a fortunate moment. Blackfriars Bridge had just given way, and two over the Tyne, one built by Smeaton, had collapsed by reason of quicksands under their piers. And similarly Pitt's policy was collapsing through the treacherous quicksands on which it was based. Paper money and a "sinking fund" at home, and foreign alliances that disregarded the really controlling interests of nations, Paine saw as piers set in the Channel.* He at once took his place in England as a sort of institution. While the engineers beheld with admiration his iron arch clearing the treacherous river-beds, statesmen saw with delight his prospective bridges spanning the political "Rubicon." Nothing could be more felicitous than the title of his inaugural pamphlet, "Prospects on the Rubicon." It remembered an expression in Parliament at the beginning of the war on America. "'The Rubicon is passed,' was once given as a reason for prosecuting the most expensive war that England ever knew. Sore with the event, and groaning beneath a galling yoke of taxes, she has again been led ministerially on to the shore of the same delusive and fatal river." The bridge-builder stretches his shining arches to France, Holland, Germany,—free commerce and friendship with all peoples, but no leagues with the sinking piers called thrones.
* It is droll to find even Paine's iron bridge resting
somewhat on a "paper "pier. "Perhaps," he writes Jefferson,
"the excess of paper currency, and the wish to find objects
for realizing it, is one of the motives for promoting the
plan of the Bridge."
At Rotherham, in Yorkshire, where Messrs. Walker fitted up a workshop for Paine, he was visited by famous engineers and political personages. There and in London he was "lionized," as Franklin had been in Paris. We find him now passing a week with Edmund Burke, now at the country-seat of the Duke of Portland, or enjoying the hospitalities of Lord Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House. He is entertained and consulted on public affairs by Fox, Lord Lansdowne, Sir George Staunton, Sir Joseph Banks; and many an effort is made to enlist his pen. Lord Lansdowne, it appears, had a notion of Paine's powers of political engineering so sublime that he thought he might bridge the Atlantic, and re-connect England and America! All of this may be gathered from the Jefferson papers, as we shall presently see; but it should be remarked here that Paine's head was not turned by his association with the gentry and aristocracy. The impression he made on these eminent gentlemen was largely due to his freedom from airs. They found him in his workshop, hammer in hand, proud only of free America and of his beautiful arch.
Professor Peter Lesley of Philadelphia tells me that when visiting in early life the works at Rotherham, Paine's workshop and the very tools he used were pointed out. They were preserved with care. He conversed with an aged and intelligent workman who had worked under Paine as a lad. Professor Lesley, who had shared some of the prejudice against Paine, was impressed by the earnest words of this old man. Mr. Paine, he said, was the most honest man, and the best man he ever knew. After he had been there a little time everybody looked up to him, the Walkers and their workmen. He knew the people for miles round, and went into their homes; his benevolence, his friendliness, his knowledge, made him beloved by all, rich and poor. His memory had always lasted there.