I will now describe the accident just mentioned, because it is closely connected with the main thread of my narrative. In the beginning of the Easter term, the third term of my training under Routh, I had caught up with my class and had spare time for outside reading. Niven was greatly impressed by my enthusiastic eulogies of Maxwell’s little book, “Matter and Motion,” and he suggested that I take up the reading of another of Maxwell’s little classics, “Theory of Heat.” It was written with the same elegant simplicity as his “Matter and Motion.” This little text-book on heat was the first to give me a living physical picture of the mode of operation by which heat is transformed into mechanical work, an operation which I had watched so often in the Cortlandt Street boiler-room. I had watched it, but I had never dreamed that the operation could be described as Maxwell described it. According to him it may be considered as the resultant action of non-coordinated activities of an immense number of busy little molecules, each of which, as far as human observers can tell, moves about lustily according to its own sweet will. But behold the miracle: the average activity of the countless crowd obeys with mathematical accuracy the fundamental law for heat transformations, the so-called second law of thermodynamics discovered by Sadi Carnot, the great French engineer. It was Maxwell’s little classic which also informed me that in all cases of very large numbers of individuals, whether they be active molecules or busy human beings, exhibiting as far as an observer can tell non-coordinated activities, we must apply the so-called statistical method of inquiry, that is, the method which statisticians employ in recording the activity of a nation. Newton’s dynamics, which at that time had been the food of Cambridge for two centuries, said nothing about that. It was a new idea in the heads of new men, who, under the leadership of Maxwell, were creating a new and far-reaching science. Up to that time Tyndall’s poetical description of “Heat as a Mode of Motion” was my gospel regarding thermal phenomena, but Maxwell’s plain and modest text-book, intended to stimulate the imagination of the inquisitive mind of the young student, was the first to assist me in forming my own judgment on the doctrines described by Tyndall and illustrated by beautiful experiments. Routh’s training-table of tripos athletes offered no such morsels of stimulating food, because these athletes were training for tripos examinations and not for research in physics. I will say now that it was in Maxwell’s theory of heat that I first saw the name of Willard Gibbs, and I heard from Niven that Maxwell held Gibbs in very high esteem. I must say also that Gibbs was the first in this country to write a splendid treatise on statistical mechanics.
When the Easter term approached its end in May I began to think of my summer vacation. I needed one. Seven months of steady drilling under Routh, supplemented by extra reading prescribed by him, and also by the reading of Maxwell’s inspiring books, had produced results with which I was satisfied, and so was Mr. Niven, my Trinity College mentor. I certainly did not feel any more like a goose wandering in a fog; I saw much light ahead, and felt much more confident that I saw the goal for which I was steering. But my pitch was very high and I needed de-tuning. I finally decided to visit some little place in France and selected Pornic, on the French Atlantic coast, in the department called Loire Inférieure. I knew nothing about it except what I had read in Baedeker, but it looked to me like a quiet little place where in addition to complete change of scene I should have a good chance to learn French. The names of Laplace, La Grange, and Ampère were mentioned so often and with so much veneration by Maxwell, that I felt ashamed of my ignorance of the language of France. Pornic was only a day’s journey from Cambridge, and off I went with no other books in my bag beside Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell” and a French grammar.
The Pornic landlady was not up to the standard of my Cambridge landlady, but I did not complain nor make any invidious comparisons; the English were not very popular in those days on the Atlantic coast of France, where the oldest fishermen had not yet forgotten the operations of the English fleet during the Napoleonic wars. I was the only stranger in town, and when it became known that I was an American who had come to Pornic to study the language of France the village was mine. I engaged the village schoolmaster to give me French conversation lessons. I met him in his garden every evening and we talked to our hearts’ content. He was a most entertaining little fellow, with a bald head, a red nose, and a big snuff-box to which he appealed very frequently for a fresh supply of interesting topics of conversation. He boasted among the villagers that his reputation as a French scholar had reached the United States and, voilà, had brought me to Pornic. I never denied it, but on the contrary I often walked through the village streets with the good old maître d’école and listened most attentively to his French accents as if they were the rarest pearls of wisdom.
When the villagers found out that I was not only an American but also a student of a great English university, then the stock of the little schoolmaster rose sky-high. My landlady informed me that the old curé had become quite jealous of the little man’s rapid rise in the community. An old but renovated Norman castle was a part of Pornic; it stood on the very edge of the steep coast and it was inhabited in summer by a rich merchant of Nantes. The castle had a thick grove of stately old trees, and there the nightingales revelled. On moonlight nights I spent many watchful hours listening to their mellow notes, accompanied by the solemn rhythm of the Atlantic waves striking gently upon the cliffs of the rocky coast, which appeared in my imagination, as I listened, like towering pipes of a giant organ. In daytime I selected lonely spots on the coast and there I spent my days from early morning till late in the afternoon memorizing my French grammar and vocabulary. Every evening I practised for an hour or so in conversation with my beloved maître d’école. This advanced my knowledge of French very rapidly and before one month was over I could converse tolerably well. My circle of acquaintances expanded rapidly as my knowledge of French increased, until it took in the nightingale grove, including the family of the merchant from Nantes. Between my friends in the nightingale grove and my schoolmaster’s garden my conversation in French became so fluent that it astonished the natives. They pronounced it perfect. But discounting this enthusiastic estimate by even fifty per cent I was still secure in my belief that I was enriched by a good knowledge of the language of a great civilization. A two months’ visit to Pornic had been my plan; its end was very near, and my trip was a success. I bade good-by to my friends in little Pornic and arrived in Paris on the following day, the fourteenth of July, 1884.
Paris was gay, celebrating the national holiday of France, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. This gave me a chance to see many of the striking characteristics of the gay side of Paris in a single day. The next day, while visiting the great Sorbonne and the Collège de France in the Quartier Latin, I found a great treasure in a second-hand bookshop: La Grange’s great treatise, “Méchanique Analytique,” first published under the auspices of the French Academy in 1788. La Grange, the Newton of France! There was no student of dynamics who had not heard of his name and of his great treatise. My two months’ stay in Pornic had enabled me to appreciate fully the beauty of the language of this great work, and my training with Routh had eliminated many difficulties of the mathematical technique. I was convinced of that in my very first attempts in Paris at deciphering some of its inspiring pages. I describe this short stay in France at some length, because I wish to refer to it later for the purpose of showing how little things can exert a big influence in the shaping of human life.
I had promised my mother to visit her again during that summer, and off I went, deserting without delay the gay scenes of Paris. On my journey to Idvor I wasted no time looking to the right or to the left of my speeding train; villages and towns, rivers and mountains, and the busy folks in the yellow fields who were gathering in the blessings of the harvest season appeared like so many passing pictures which did not interest me. La Grange was talking to me, and I had neither eyes nor ears for anybody or for anything else. Oh, how happy I was when I saw Idvor in the distance, where I knew I should be free for nearly two months during that summer to read and to reflect, free from all restraints of the Cambridge routine. By the end of that heavenly vacation I had mastered a good part of La Grange’s classical treatise, and in addition I had reread carefully Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell,” and I understood many things which I had seen in Cambridge but had not understood before. The Cambridge movement described above was clearly revealed to me in the course of that summer, by a careful study of Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell.”
Idvor was never rich in books nor in people who paid much attention to books. To think that a native of Idvor would ever read a La Grange in his humble peasant home seemed incredible. The natives of Idvor noticed that, during my second visit, I was much less communicative than during the first, on account of my devotion to what they considered some strange books, which to those who saw them suggested sacred books. The company of La Grange and of Maxwell kept me a prisoner in my mother’s garden. I told my mother that Maxwell and La Grange were two great saints in the world of science, and she regarded my reading during that summer as a study of the lives of saints. That made her happy, but it puzzled the good people of Idvor. Studies of this kind they associated with priests and bishops; and, noticing that I paid much less attention to bagpipes and kolo dancers and to other worldly things, they began to whisper about that Misha was getting ready to enter monastic life. What a pity, they said, to gather so much knowledge in great America and then bury it in a monastery!
My mother paid no attention to these idle whisperings. She knew better. When I described to her the ancient college buildings and the beautiful chapels of Cambridge, and the religious life of the students and of the dons, she listened spellbound. When I related to her the many traditions of the old university, and informed her that one learned there, not only from the teachers living there at that time, but also from great teachers who had long departed, a luminous expression in her eyes told me that she was about to reveal to me an original thought. “I go to church, my son,” she said, “not so much because I expect the priest to reveal to me some new divine truth, but because I wish to look at the icons of saints. That reminds me of their saintly work, and through the contemplation of their work I communicate with God. Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth: it is filled with icons of the great saints of science. The contemplation of their saintly work will enable you to communicate with the spirit of eternal truth.”