The Education of Henry Adams

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CHAPTER XXI

TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)

  ONCE more! this is a story of education, not of adventure! It
is meant to help young men -- or such as have intelligence enough
to seek help -- but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did
-- or did not do -- with one's education, after getting it, need
trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only
which would confuse him. Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth
educating; most keen judges incline to think that barely one man
in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purpose on
the forces that surround him, and fully half of these react
wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be the
teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the
world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as
to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for
Henry Adams; but education should try to lessen the obstacles,
diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train
minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of
force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of
little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. Throughout
human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this
story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No
doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands
behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is
stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and
the most favored have overcome the friction or the viscosity of
inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their
energy in doing it.

  Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At
the end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could
sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against man or
woman. They had all treated him kindly; he had never met with
ill-will, ill-temper, or even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He
had never seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a
readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to
him far beyond all he had reason to expect. Considering the stock
complaints against the world, he could not understand why he had
nothing to complain of.

  During these twenty years he had done as much work, in
quantity, as his neighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop
to look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the
shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served
a useful purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of
his friends, even the artists, none of whom held any lofty
opinion of their success in raising the standards of society, or
felt profound respect for the methods or manners of their time,
at home or abroad, but all of whom had tried, in a way, to hold
the standard up. The effort had been, for the older generation,
exhausting, as one could see in the Hunts; but the generation
after 1870 made more figure, not in proportion to public wealth
or in the census, but in their own self-assertion. A fair number
of the men who were born in the thirties had won names --
Phillips Brooks; Bret Harte; Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John
La Farge; and the list might be made fairly long if it were worth
while; but from their school had sprung others, like Augustus St.
Gaudens, McKim, Stanford White, and scores born in the forties,
who counted as force even in the mental inertia of sixty or
eighty million people. Among all these Clarence King, John Hay,
and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill in the
social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and
little cohesion. The combination offered no very glittering
prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with as much
patience and effort as though it led to fame or power, until, at
last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed
and his account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life
amazingly, and would not have exchanged it for any other that
came in his way; he was, or thought he was, perfectly satisfied
with it; but for reasons that had nothing to do with education,
he was tired; his nervous energy ran low; and, like a horse that
wears out, he quitted the race-course, left the stable, and
sought pastures as far as possible from the old. Education had
ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so
little!

  As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the
question of return imposed its verdict on him after much
fruitless effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of
January, 1892; he was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of
midwinter. He was close on his fifty-fourth birthday, and Pall
Mall had forgotten him as completely as it had forgotten his
elders. He had not seen London for a dozen years, and was rather
amused to have only a bed for a world and a familiar black fog
for horizon. The coal-fire smelt homelike; the fog had a fruity
taste of youth; anything was better than being turned out into
the wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by
living over his youth, and driving once more down Oxford Street
in 1858, with life before him to imagine far less amusing than it
had turned out to be.

  The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he
reflected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the
South Seas with John La Farge, who had reluctantly crawled away
towards New York to resume the grinding routine of studio-work at
an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as choice, have
gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the
trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark
purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not
that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly
he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard Kipling's
"Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem, like
millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world
exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of
beginning a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any
new one could only add to its faults. Life had been cut in
halves, and the old half had passed away, education and all,
leaving no stock to graft on.

  The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
fantastic Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some
kind of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it
reasonable. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the
dismal ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at
the old Palais Royal; but, except for them, his own Paris of the
Second Empire was as extinct as that of the first Napoleon. At
the galleries and exhibitions, he was racked by the effort of art
to be original, and when one day, after much reflection, John La
Farge asked whether there might not still be room for something
simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was
no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should
express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams
nor La Farge understood.

  Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed
fairly to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it
promised to be. He was ready to quit it, and the easiest path led
back to the east; but he could not venture alone, and the rarest
of animals is a companion. He must return to America to get one.
Perhaps, while waiting, he might write more history, and on the
chance as a last resource, he gave orders for copying everything
he could reach in archives, but this was mere habit. He went home
as a horse goes back to his stable, because he knew nowhere else
to go.

  Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended,
in 1877, and Evarts became Secretary of State, Adams went back
there, partly to write history, but chiefly because his seven
years of laborious banishment, in Boston, convinced him that, as
far as he had a function in life, it was as stable-companion to
statesmen, whether they liked it or not. At about the same time,
old George Bancroft did the same thing, and presently John Hay
came on to be Assistant Secretary of State for Mr. Evarts, and
stayed there to write the "Life" of Lincoln. In 1884 Adams joined
him in employing Richardson to build them adjoining houses on La
Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this was it. To the
house on La Fayette Square he must turn, for he had no other
status -- no position in the world.

  Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of
going back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All
his family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or
three friends in Washington, who were themselves uncertain of
stay, no one cared whether he came or went, and he cared least.
There was nothing to care about. Every one was busy; nearly every
one seemed contented. Since 1871 nothing had ruffled the surface
of the American world, and even the progress of Europe in her
side-way track to dis-Europeaning herself had ceased to be
violent.
After a dreary January in Paris, at last when no excuse could be
persuaded to offer itself for further delay, he crossed the
channel and passed a week with his old friend, Milnes Gaskell, at
Thornes, in Yorkshire, while the westerly gales raved a warning
against going home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in the
South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; not many
to Fiji or Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between
past and future, and Adams was grateful for it.

  At last, on February 3, he drove, after a fashion, down the
Irish Channel, on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the
Atlantic for a dozen years, and had never seen an ocean steamer
of the new type. He had seen nothing new of any sort, or much
changed in France or England. The railways made quicker time, but
were no more comfortable. The scale was the same. The Channel
service was hardly improved since 1858, or so little as to make
no impression. Europe seemed to have been stationary for twenty
years. To a man who had been stationary like Europe, the Teutonic
was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his dinner through a
week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he should have a
deck stateroom, with fresh air, and read all night, if he chose,
by electric light, was matter for more wonder than life had yet
supplied, in its old forms. Wonder may be double -- even treble.
Adams's wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to the
Teutonic -- as 1860 was to 1890 -- so the Teutonic and 1890 must
be to the next term -- and then? Apparently the question
concerned only America. Western Europe offered no such conundrum.
There one might double scale and speed indefinitely without
passing bounds.

  Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wedding
trip to America, thanks to the mediation of Henry James, dashed
over the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit -- as
though playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia.
Kipling could never know what peace of mind he gave, for he could
hardly ever need it himself so much; and yet, in the full delight
of his endless fun and variety; one felt the old conundrum repeat
itself. Somehow, somewhere, Kipling and the American were not
one, but two, and could not be glued together. The American felt
that the defect, if defect it were, was in himself; he had felt
it when he was with Swinburne, and, again, with Robert Louis
Stevenson, even under the palms of Vailima; but he did not carry
self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular.
Whatever the defect might be, it was American; it belonged to the
type; it lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that
held him apart, it was English; it lived also in the blood; one
felt it little if at all, with Celts, and one yearned
reciprocally among Fiji cannibals. Clarence King used to say that
it was due to discord between the wave-lengths of the man-atoms;
but the theory offered difficulties in measurement. Perhaps,
after all, it was only that genius soars; but this theory, too,
had its dark corners. All through life, one had seen the American
on his literary knees to the European; and all through many lives
back for some two centuries, one had seen the European snub or
patronize the American; not always intentionally, but
effectually. It was in the nature of things. Kipling neither
snubbed nor patronized; he was all gaiety and good-nature; but he
would have been first to feel what one meant. Genius has to pay
itself that unwilling self-respect.

  Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again
in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a
return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of
reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place there;
improvements had been made; with time -- much time -- the city
might become habitable according to some fashionable standard;
but all one's friends had died or disappeared several times over,
leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or London. Slowly, a
certain society had built itself up about the Government; houses
had been opened and there was much dining; much calling; much
leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted for less than in
1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both Executive
and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the
ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any
reason for consulting any one in society. The world had ceased to
be wholly political, but politics had become less social. A
survivor of the Civil War -- like George Bancroft, or John Hay --
tried to keep footing, but without brilliant success. They were
free to say or do what they liked; but no one took much notice of
anything said or done.

  A presidential election was to take place in November, and no
one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were
singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of
them had no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who
was at that time altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of
the Senate, was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in
glowing terms and at great length, as one of the loftiest natures
and noblest characters of ancient or modern time; "but," he
concluded, "in future I prefer to look on at his proceedings from
the safe summit of some neighboring hill." The same remark
applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest
of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies,
was as nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on
their friends. Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To
the American people, the two candidates and the two parties were
so evenly balanced that the scales showed hardly a perceptible
difference. Mr. Harrison was an excellent President, a man of
ability and force; perhaps the best President the Republican
Party had put forward since Lincoln's death; yet, on the whole,
Adams felt a shade of preference for President Cleveland, not so
much personally as because the Democrats represented to him the
last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of Hosea
Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a
banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years,
more and more despotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no
longer croak except to vote for King Log, or -- failing storks --
for Grover Cleveland; and even then could not be sure where King
Banker lurked behind. The costly education in politics had led to
political torpor. Every one did not share it. Clarence King and
John Hay were loyal Republicans who never for a moment conceived
that there could be merit in other ideals. With King, the feeling
was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the negro and
Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies; but with Hay,
party loyalty became a phase of being, a little like the loyalty
of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all the
failings of the party, and still more keenly those of the
partisans; but he could not live outside. To Adams a Western
Democrat or a Western Republican, a city Democrat or a city
Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a J. G. Blaine, were actually the
same man, as far as their usefulness to the objects of King, Hay,
or Adams was concerned. They graded themselves as friends or
enemies not as Republicans or Democrats. To Hay, the difference
was that of being respectable or not.

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  Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step by
step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning
than inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them held
any post at all. With great effort, in Hayes's administration,
all King's friends, including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz, had
carried the bill for uniting the Surveys and had placed King at
the head of the Bureau; but King waited only to organize the
service, and then resigned, in order to seek his private fortune
in the West. Hay, after serving as Assistant Secretary of State
under Secretary Evarts during a part of Hayes's administration,
then also insisted on going out, in order to write with Nicolay
the "Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and when his
friends asked the reason, he could not go into long explanations,
but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever invited
him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also conveniently
true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity.
Why had no President ever cared to employ him? The question
needed a volume of intricate explanation. There never was a day
when he would have refused to perform any duty that the
Government imposed on him, but the American Government never to
his knowledge imposed duties. The point was never raised with
regard to him, or to any one else. The Government required
candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and
ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula
carried this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who
may for years have used some other man's house as his own, when
promoted to a position of patronage commonly feels himself
obliged to inquire, directly or indirectly, whether his friend
wants anything; which is equivalent to a civil act of divorce,
since he feels awkward in the old relation. The handsomest
formula, in an impartial choice, was the grandly courteous
Southern phrase of Lamar: "Of course Mr. Adams knows that
anything in my power is at his service." A la disposicion de
Usted! The form must have been correct since it released both
parties. He was right; Mr. Adams did know all about it; a bow and
a conventional smile closed the subject forever, and every one
felt flattered.

  Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His
duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind.
Unless his friend served some political purpose, friendship was
an effort. Men who neither wrote for newspapers nor made campaign
speeches, who rarely subscribed to the campaign fund, and who
entered the White House as seldom as possible, placed themselves
outside the sphere of usefulness, and did so with entirely
adequate knowledge of what they were doing. They never expected
the President to ask for their services, and saw no reason why he
should do so. As for Henry Adams, in fifty years that he knew
Washington, no one would have been more surprised than himself
had any President ever asked him to perform so much of a service
as to cross the square. Only Texan Congressmen imagined that the
President needed their services in some remote consulate after
worrying him for months to find one.

  In Washington this law or custom is universally understood, and
no one's character necessarily suffered because he held no
office. No one took office unless he wanted it; and in turn the
outsider was never asked to do work or subscribe money. Adams saw
no office that he wanted, and he gravely thought that, from his
point of view, in the long run, he was likely to be a more useful
citizen without office. He could at least act as audience, and,
in those days, a Washington audience seldom filled even a small
theatre. He felt quite well satisfied to look on, and from time
to time he thought he might risk a criticism of the players; but
though he found his own position regular, he never quite
understood that of John Hay. The Republican leaders treated Hay
as one of themselves; they asked his services and took his money
with a freedom that staggered even a hardened observer; but they
never needed him in equivalent office. In Washington Hay was the
only competent man in the party for diplomatic work. He
corresponded in his powers of usefulness exactly with Lord
Granville in London, who had been for forty years the saving
grace of every Liberal administration in turn. Had usefulness to
the public service been ever a question, Hay should have had a
first-class mission under Hayes; should have been placed in the
Cabinet by Garfield, and should have been restored to it by
Harrison. These gentlemen were always using him; always invited
his services, and always took his money.

  Adams's opinion of politics and politicians, as he frankly
admitted, lacked enthusiasm, although never, in his severest
temper, did he apply to them the terms they freely applied to
each other; and he explained everything by his old explanation of
Grant's character as more or less a general type; but what roused
in his mind more rebellion was the patience and good-nature with
which Hay allowed himself to be used. The trait was not confined
to politics. Hay seemed to like to be used, and this was one of
his many charms; but in politics this sort of good-nature demands
supernatural patience. Whatever astonishing lapses of social
convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equally
heartily, and told the stories with constant amusement, at his
own expense. Like most Americans, he liked to play at making
Presidents, but, unlike most, he laughed not only at the
Presidents he helped to make, but also at himself for laughing.

  One must be rich, and come from Ohio or New York, to gratify an
expensive taste like this. Other men, on both political flanks,
did the same thing, and did it well, less for selfish objects
than for the amusement of the game; but Hay alone lived in
Washington and in the centre of the Ohio influences that ruled
the Republican Party during thirty years. On the whole, these
influences were respectable, and although Adams could not, under
any circumstances, have had any value, even financially, for Ohio
politicians, Hay might have much, as he showed, if they only knew
enough to appreciate him. The American politician was
occasionally an amusing object; Hay laughed, and, for want of
other resource, Adams laughed too; but perhaps it was partly
irritation at seeing how President Harrison dealt his cards that
made Adams welcome President Cleveland back to the White House.

  At all events, neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to gain
by reelecting Mr. Harrison in 1892, or by defeating him, as far
as he was concerned; and as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland, they
seemed to have even less personal concern. The whole country, to
outward appearance, stood in much the same frame of mind.
Everywhere was slack-water. Hay himself was almost as languid and
indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finished
their literary work. The "Life" of Lincoln had been begun,
completed, and published hand in hand with the "History" of
Jefferson and Madison, so that between them they had written
nearly all the American history there was to write. The
intermediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap
between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially
filled by either of them. Both were heartily tired of the
subject, and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the
redeeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the
resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force,
the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even
the year before, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met
everywhere in the East a sort of stagnation -- a creeping
paralysis -- complaints of shipping and producers -- that spread
throughout the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange
and silver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a
change of party government might shake it even in Washington. The
matter did not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always
richest when the rich were poor; but it helped to dull the
vibration of society.

  However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the
last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams,
was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years, but
what had they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had
a singular faculty for remembering faces, and would break off
suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the window
on La Fayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral
of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or
his cocktail: "There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at
Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!" Or
what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes old Boutwell
gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! Men who had
swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King,
and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral Congressman behind
them, who could not have told whether the general was a Boutwell
or Boutwell a general. Theirs was the highest known success, and
one asked what it was worth to them. Apart from personal vanity,
what would they sell it for? Would any one of them, from
President downwards, refuse ten thousand a year in place of all
the consideration he received from the world on account of his
success?

  Yet consideration had value, and at that time Adams enjoyed
lecturing Augustus St. Gaudens, in hours of depression, on its
economics: "Honestly you must admit that even if you don't pay
your expenses you get a certain amount of advantage from doing
the best work. Very likely some of the really successful
Americans would be willing you should come to dinner sometimes,
if you did not come too often, while they would think twice about
Hay, and would never stand me." The forgotten statesman had no
value at all; the general and admiral not much; the historian but
little; on the whole, the artist stood best, and of course,
wealth rested outside the question, since it was acting as judge;
but, in the last resort, the judge certainly admitted that
consideration had some value as an asset, though hardly as much
as ten -- or five -- thousand a year.

  Hay and Adams had the advantage of looking out of their windows
on the antiquities of La Fayette Square, with the sense of having
all that any one had; all that the world had to offer; all that
they wanted in life, including their names on scores of
title-pages and in one or two biographical dictionaries; but this
had nothing to do with consideration, and they knew no more than
Boutwell or St. Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had
passed ten years in writing the "Life" of Lincoln, and perhaps
President Lincoln was the better for it, but what Hay got from it
was not so easy to see, except the privilege of seeing popular
book-makers steal from his book and cover the theft by abusing
the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson and
Madison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business, could
hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand
dollars, on a salary of five thousand a year; and when he asked
what return he got from this expenditure, rather more extravagant
in proportion to his means than a racing-stable, he could see
none whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkman
never printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popular
volumes, numbering more than seven hundred copies, until quite at
the end of his life. A thousand copies of a book that cost twenty
dollars or more was as much as any author could expect; two
thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless it were canvassed
for subscription. As far as Adams knew, he had but three serious
readers -- Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and Hay himself. He was
amply satisfied with their consideration, and could dispense with
that of the other fifty-nine million, nine hundred and
ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven; but neither
he nor Hay was better off in any other respect, and their chief
title to consideration was their right to look out of their
windows on great men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a
privilege which had nothing to do with their writings.

  The world was always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused;
open-armed to any one who amused it; patient with every one who
did not insist on putting himself in its way, or costing it
money; but this was not consideration, still less power in any of
its concrete forms, and applied as well or better to a comic
actor. Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely
more applause as it gave infinitely more pleasure, even in
America; but one does what one can with one's means, and casting
up one's balance sheet, one expects only a reasonable return on
one's capital. Hay and Adams had risked nothing and never played
for high stakes. King had followed the ambitious course. He had
played for many millions. He had more than once come close to a
great success, but the result was still in doubt, and meanwhile
he was passing the best years of his life underground. For
companionship he was mostly lost.

  Thus, in 1892, neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether they
had attained success, or how to estimate it, or what to call it;
and the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they.
Indeed, the American people had no idea at all; they were
wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had
ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden
calves to worship. They had lost the sense of worship; for the
idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of
money was an old-world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship
of the Gods, or to worship of power in any concrete shape; but
the American wasted money more recklessly than any one ever did
before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court
aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not
what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make
more, or throw it away. Probably, since human society began, it
had seen no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San
Francisco millionaires on Nob Hill. Except for the railway
system, the enormous wealth taken out of the ground since 1840,
had disappeared. West of the Alleghenies, the whole country might
have been swept clean, and could have been replaced in better
form within one or two years. The American mind had less respect
for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its loss
more easily; but it had been deflected by its pursuit till it
could turn in no other direction. It shunned, distrusted,
disliked, the dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in
history for its ignorance of the past.

  Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's
notice. His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out
to the cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure
which St. Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally
every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the
artist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation;
every possible doubt of St. Gaudens's correctness of taste or
feeling; so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop
there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new;
but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of
questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the one
commonplace about it -- the oldest idea known to human thought.
He knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man,
woman, or child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more
than a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura
Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to
Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though
it had nothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in
its meaning, but in the response of the observer. As Adams sat
there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have
become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning.
Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were
vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what
would have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese
jinricksha-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who
taught a lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions
there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke
out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure
of despair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest
saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens
held up the mirror and no more. The American layman had lost
sight of ideals; the American priest had lost sight of faith.
Both were more American than the old, half-witted soldiers who
denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which should
have been given for drink.

  Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain
of self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to
which all others were subservient, and which absorbed the
energies of some sixty million people to the exclusion of every
other force, real or imaginary. The power of the railway system
had enormously increased since 1870. Already the coal output of
160,000,000 tons closely approached the 180,000,000 of the
British Empire, and one held one's breath at the nearness of what
one had never expected to see, the crossing of courses, and the
lead of American energies. The moment was deeply exciting to a
historian, but the railway system itself interested one less than
in 1868, since it offered less chance for future profit. Adams
had been born with the railway system; had grown up with it; had
been over pretty nearly every mile of it with curious eyes, and
knew as much about it as his neighbors; but not there could he
look for a new education. Incomplete though it was, the system
seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society better than
any other part of the social machine, and society was content
with its creation, for the time, and with itself for creating it.
Nothing new was to be done or learned there, and the world
hurried on to its telephones, bicycles, and electric trams. At
past fifty, Adams solemnly and painfully learned to ride the
bicycle.

  Nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life. Nothing
else offered itself, however carefully he sought. He looked for
no change. He lingered in Washington till near July without
noticing a new idea. Then he went back to England to pass his
summer on the Deeside. In October he returned to Washington and
there awaited the reelection of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no
deeper thought than that of taking up some small notes that
happened to be outstanding. He had seen enough of the world to be
a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers.
Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXII

CHICAGO (1893)

  DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle -- and during
this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel
fin-de-siecle -- where not a breath stirred the idle air of
education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived
alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. For years he had
not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as
unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed
that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that
resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than
rest, profound as the grave.

  His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a
meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but
existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so
to him. Of the society favorites who made the life of every
dinner- table and of the halls of Congress -- Tom Reed, Bourke
Cockran, Edward Wolcott -- he knew not one. Although Calvin Brice
was his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no
one had ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never
entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled Senator Brice in
hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming
era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President
Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or
Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one
may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without
returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he
was unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.

  Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to
pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social
offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than
himself; but a few houses always remained which he could enter
without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was John
Hay's; another was Cabot Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy
which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of
the very class of American politician who had done most to block
his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had
married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio,
thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics, and
in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron
and Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without
succession, as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both
of them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this
intimacy had made him one of their habitual household, as he was
of Hay's. In a small society, such ties between houses become
political and social force. Without intention or consciousness,
they fix one's status in the world. Whatever one's preferences in
politics might be, one's house was bound to the Republican
interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay, and
Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all,
and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The
relation was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or
patronage, since Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little
more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society and interests of
this particular band of followers, whose relations with the White
House were sometimes comic, but never intimate.

  In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point
on St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken,
with the rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on
to Havana, and came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near
April. In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the
Exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed
for England together, and at last, in the middle of July, all
found themselves in Switzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and
Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and went
down by rail to Lucerne.

  Months of close contact teach character, if character has
interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever
since it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President
Grant. Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood
of Adam and Eve, the primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the
blood of the cottager working against the blood of the townsman;
but whatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The
Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was not complex; it reasoned
little and never talked; but in practical matters it was the
steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most efficient;
certainly the safest.

  Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical
Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard,
Benjamin Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of
Albert Gallatin, indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an
elaborate picture, only to show that he was, if American at all,
a New Yorker, with a Calvinistic strain -- rather Connecticut
than Pennsylvanian. The true Pennsylvanian was a narrower type;
as narrow as the kirk; as shy of other people's narrowness as a
Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan farmer. To him, none but
Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro, Dago, Italian,
Englishman, Yankee -- all was one in the depths of Pennsylvanian
consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what it took
for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study of
President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was
admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same
lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when
he allied his interests. He then became supple in action and
large in motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he
happened to be right -- which was, of course, whenever one agreed
with him -- he was the strongest American in America. As an ally
he was worth all the rest, because he understood his own class,
who were always a majority; and knew how to deal with them as no
New Englander could. If one wanted work done in Congress, one did
wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian
not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, and
intelligently.

  Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron
believed in an Adams -- or an Adams in a Cameron -- but they had
curiously enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons had
what the Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their
objects without much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue
of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulous purity
or sparkling professions. The machine worked by coarse means on
coarse interests, but its practical success had been the most
curious subject of study in American history. When one summed up
the results of Pennsylvanian influence, one inclined to think
that Pennsylvania set up the Government in 1789; saved it in
1861; created the American system; developed its iron and coal
power; and invented its great railways. Following up the same
line, in his studies of American character, Adams reached the
result -- to him altogether paradoxical -- that Cameron's
qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the most
useful member of the Senate.

  In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable
specimen of this American type which had so persistently
suppressed his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron
strongly influenced him, but he could not see a trace of any
influence which he exercised on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view
of his on any subject was ever reflected back on him from
Cameron's mind; not even an expression or a fact. Yet the
difference in age was trifling, and in education slight. On the
other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and in nothing
so much as on the great subject of discussion that year -- the
question of silver.

  Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing
about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana
Horton; but inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose
sides, he was sure to choose silver. Every political idea and
personal prejudice he ever dallied with held him to the silver
standard, and made a barrier between him and gold. He knew well
enough all that was to be said for the gold standard as economy,
but he had never in his life taken politics for a pursuit of
economy. One might have a political or an economical policy; one
could not have both at the same time. This was heresy in the
English school, but it had always been law in the American.
Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side of the
question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston
maintained, wholly on the side of gold; but, had they been ten
times as great as they were, he could not have helped his bankers
or croupiers to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his
winning the stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval
-- or thought he was. From early childhood his moral principles
had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of
one law that ruled all others -- masses of men invariably follow
interests in deciding morals. Morality is a private and costly
luxury. The morality of the silver or gold standards was to be
decided by popular vote, and the popular vote would be decided by
interests; but on which side lay the larger interest? To him the
interest was political; he thought it probably his last chance of
standing up for his eighteenth-century principles, strict
construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and
the rest. He had, in a half-hearted way, struggled all his life
against State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew it
in old England or new England, and he was fated to make his last
resistance behind the silver standard.

  For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in
company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was
little difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn
backwards, but the case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a
typical Pennsylvanian, a practical politician, whom all the
reformers, including all the Adamses. had abused for a lifetime
for subservience to moneyed interests and political jobbery. He
was sure to go with the banks and corporations which had made and
sustained him. On the contrary, he stood out obstinately as the
leading champion of silver in the East. The reformers,
represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose personal
interests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that
Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced
his corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking
a bribe.

  More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams.
His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver; the
Evening Post's and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they
frankly said so, yet they avowedly pursued their interests even
into politics; Cameron's interests had always been with the
corporations, yet he supported silver. Thus morality required
that Adams should be condemned for going against his interests;
that Godkin was virtuous in following his interests; and that
Cameron was a scoundrel whatever he did.

  Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:
-- Adams or Godkin or Cameron? Until a Council or a Pope or a
Congress or the newspapers or a popular election has decided a
question of doubtful morality, individuals are apt to err,
especially when putting money into their own pockets; but in
democracies, the majority alone gives law. To any one who knew
the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a
popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous; yet the
popular vote in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.

  The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his
interests, or his antipathies; but the true American, slow to
grasp new and complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover
where his greater interest lay. As usual, the banks taught him.
In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise
lessons for which an insect had to be grateful whether it liked
them or not; but of all the lessons Adams learned from them, none
compared in dramatic effect with that of July 22, 1893, when,
after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the
top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they
reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from
his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because
the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.

  If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he
was himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had
struck him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first
thought was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a
sleepless night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the
problem how any man could be ruined who had, months before, paid
off every dollar of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that
insoluble riddle in order to fall back on the larger principle
that beggary could be no more for him than it was for others who
were more valuable members of society, and, with that, he went to
sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started for Quincy
where he arrived August 7.

  As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years
old, the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several
months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got
there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow
degrees the situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him,
among others, some money -- thousands of millions were -- as
bankruptcy -- the same -- for which he, among others, was
responsible and of which he knew no more than they. The humor of
this situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the
terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he had
been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had
nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose
their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody,
but money was their life. For the first time he had the banks in
his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was
in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the
banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it. To
Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it,
the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody
understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was
at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went
to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on
deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and
Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself
refusing to let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that
belonged to them. Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused
to pay their debts, and he could find no answer to the question
which was responsible for getting the other into the situation,
since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and socially
the same person. Evidently the force was one; its operation was
mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power; but no
one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an
emotion -- a panic -- that meant nothing.

[combinator]

  Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly
old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for
at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his
education, interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it
were worth finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the
first time since 1870, to feel that something new and curious was
about to happen to the world. Great changes had taken place since
1870 in the forces at work; the old machine ran far behind its
duty; somewhere -- somehow -- it was bound to break down, and if
it happened to break precisely over one's head, it gave the
better chance for study.

  For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother
Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the
same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old;
a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many
Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two
brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were
used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a
law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and
having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for
the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things
European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new
equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks,
with the advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much
rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for
himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily
events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The
instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of
acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid
down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between
capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but
anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.

  By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the
storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and
one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the
Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He
found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education
spread over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year,
education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell
into relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with
the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it;
and when one sought rest at Chicago, educational game started
like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among
thousands of its kind before one could mark its burrow. The
Exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault till
the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed
explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it,
but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there
at all -- more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the
continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole
railway system thrown in, since these were all natural products
in their place; while, since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose
and ill joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts
and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition,
had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.

  The first astonishment became greater every day. That the
Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the
Northwest offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that
it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still;
and even granting it were not -- admitting it to be a sort of
industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts
artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake
Michigan -- could it be made to seem at home there? Was the
American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air of
enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was good;
he was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had
passed his life in landscape gardening and architectural
decoration. If he had not done it himself, he had known how to
get it done to suit him, as he knew how to get his wives and
daughters dressed at Worth's or Paquin's. Perhaps he could not do
it again; the next time he would want to do it himself and would
show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to have leaped
directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of
London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic
Chicago. Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism,
but all trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to
the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than
Venetian Gothic. All trader's taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago
tried at least to give her taste a look of unity.

  One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome
almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the
same purpose. Here was a breach of continuity -- a rupture in
historical sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? One's
personal universe hung on the answer, for, if the rupture was
real and the new American world could take this sharp and
conscious twist towards ideals, one's personal friends would come
in, at last, as winners in the great American chariot-race for
fame. If the people of the Northwest actually knew what was good
when they saw it, they would some day talk about Hunt and
Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and
Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were
otherwise forgotten. The artists and architects who had done the
work offered little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely
enough, but not in terms that one cared to quote; and to them the
Northwest refused to look artistic. They talked as though they
worked only for themselves; as though art, to the Western people,
was a stage decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but
possibly the architects of Paestum and Girgenti had talked in the
same way, and the Greek had said the same thing of Semitic
Carthage two thousand years ago.

  Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits
for help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so
much and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some
millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of
them were seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed
natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of
thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and
expected to understand one as little as the other. For the
historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort. Historical
exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; none were
thoroughly worked out. One of the best was that of the Cunard
steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself
obliged to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to
calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power,
tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach
its limits. His figures brought him, he thought, to the year
1927; another generation to spare before force, space, and time
should meet. The ocean steamer ran the surest line of
triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of
man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because they
seemed already finished except for mere increase in number;
explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists,
physicists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught
least because it had barely reached infancy, and, if its progress
was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would
result in infinite costless energy within a generation. One
lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave
to history a new phase. Men of science could never understand the
ignorance and naivete; of the historian, who, when he came
suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull
or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate?
Was it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such
questions to which he expected answers and was astonished to get
none.

  Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds
which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which
they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever -- who had
never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces -- who had never
put their hands on a lever -- had never touched an electric
battery -- never talked through a telephone, and had not the
shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an
ampere or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced
within a hundred years -- had no choice but to sit down on the
steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of
Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what
they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed
of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society
that let them say and do it. The historical mind can think only
in historical processes, and probably this was the first time
since historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless
before a mechanical sequence. Before a metaphysical or a
theological or a political sequence, most historians had felt
helpless, but the single clue to which they had hitherto trusted
was the unity of natural force.

  Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he
had known enough to state his problem, his education would have
been complete at once. Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time
the question whether the American people knew where they were
driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but would
try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the
shadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the
American people probably knew no more than he did; but that they
might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in
thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards
some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough
could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the
first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start
there.

  Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell
headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the
Silver Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to
prevent it, and most of the majority had little heart in the
creation of a single gold standard. The banks alone, and the
dealers in exchange, insisted upon it; the political parties
divided according to capitalistic geographical lines, Senator
Cameron offering almost the only exception; but they mixed with
unusual good-temper, and made liberal allowance for each others'
actions and motives. The struggle was rather less irritable than
such struggles generally were, and it ended like a comedy. On the
evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back from the
Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and
Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as though they were
rid of a heavy responsibility. Adams, too, in a bystander's
spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenth
century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his
Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long
as any one would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless
twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old
attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether
alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and
capitalistic society until he had become little better than a
crank. He had known for years that he must accept the regime, but
he had known a great many other disagreeable certainties -- like
age, senility, and death -- against which one made what little
resistance one could. The matter was settled at last by the
people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American
people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back,
between two forces, one simply industrial, the other
capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue
came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last
declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic
system with all its necessary machinery. All one's friends, all
one's best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated
classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism;
a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of all forms
of society or government, this was the one he liked least, but
his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of
State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it
were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by
capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of
trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by
Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city
day-laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed
even under simple conditions.

  There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was
question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved
no disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be
efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it
should be run, but in any case it must work concentration. Such
great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but
nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease
with which he and his silver friends slipped across the chasm,
and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic
system with its methods; the protective tariff; the corporations
and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism which
necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical
consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of
the class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies
capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.

  Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders
of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing
remained for a historian but to ask -- how long and how far!

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXIII

SILENCE (1894-1898)

The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed
much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort
such as no one had thought within its powers, the individual
crawled as he best could, through the wreck, and found many
values of life upset. But for connecting the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to 1897, had no value
in the drama of education, and might be left out. Much that had
made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin,
and among the earliest wreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence
King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander chose to read in
it; but to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral, if he could
but understand it. In 1871 he had thought King's education ideal,
and his personal fitness unrivalled. No other young American
approached him for the combination of chances -- physical energy,
social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality, and
science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly
strong. His nearest rival was Alexander Agassiz, and, as far as
their friends knew, no one else could be classed with them in the
running. The result of twenty years' effort proved that the
theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails --
for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he
thought, quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been
caught in the cogs, and held for months over the gulf of
bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the whole class of
millionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the banks were
forced to let the mice escape with the rats; but, in sum,
education without capital could always be taken by the throat and
forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped by the knowledge
that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered. Whether
voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same.
The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it,
was flagrant.

  The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless
without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to
be frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a new
society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness could
be known only from success. One looked about for examples of
success among the educated of one's time -- the men born in the
thirties, and trained to professions. Within one's immediate
acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and
William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand to marriage,
education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in 1893,
William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.

  Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very
rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York
might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered
at them, and never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very
rich men held any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or
could have been elected to an office, or even into a good club.
Setting aside the few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social
position had little to do with greater or less wealth, riches
were in New York no object of envy on account of the joys they
brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the very
rich; yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason for
it. Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after
having gratified every ambition, and swung the country almost at
his will; he had thrown away the usual objects of political
ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other
amusements, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, won
every object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had
carried his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer
knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had
succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed.

  Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond
reversal; but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an
American education ought to be in order to count as success. Even
granting that it counted as money, its value could not be called
general. America contained scores of men worth five millions or
upwards, whose lives were no more worth living than those of
their cooks, and to whom the task of making money equivalent to
education offered more difficulties than to Adams the task of
making education equivalent to money. Social position seemed to
have value still, while education counted for nothing. A
mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if
fortunate might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open
market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval
qualities of energy and will, but no education beyond his special
branch, would probably be worth at least ten times as much.
Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it
best. Wealth valued social position and classical education as
highly as either of these valued wealth, and the women still
tended to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he
was himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had
failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams, had
achieved phenomenal success.

  Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile
use of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
Spanish. With these he could still make his way to any object
within his vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine
rivals in ten. Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician,
priest or professor, native or foreign, he would fear none.

  King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced
him to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the
little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which
King knew well, was more amusing than any other that one had yet
discovered in the whole broad world, but made no profession of
teaching anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and
neither on his own nor on King's account did the visitor ask any
loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on the
trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or the colors of sea and
shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran Piedra; but, as
though they were still twenty years old and revolution were as
young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid,
fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of
mischief. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were
always falling on one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant
political convulsions taught least. Since the time of Rameses,
revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but they
have sometimes the merit of changing one's point of view, and the
Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams
to a Democratic administration. He thought that President
Cleveland could have settled the Cuban question, without war, had
he chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the
Democratic Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and
the gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to
leave no choice between parties. The new American, whether
consciously or not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century
before he was done with it; the gold standard, the protective
system, and the laws of mass could have no other outcome, and, as
so often before, the movement, once accelerated by attempting to
impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushing
equally the good and the bad that stood in its way.

  The lesson was old -- so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex,
among the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never
been fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more
amusing for their torpor. After passing the winter with King in
the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the
Yellowstone, and found there little to study. The Geysers were an
old story; the Snake River posed no vital statistics except in
its fordings; even the Tetons were as calm as they were lovely;
while the wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laid
no traps. In return the party treated them with affection. Never
did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of
the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labor of
skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown the
sedate, middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found
the trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips
himself, who managed the party loved to play Indian hunter
without hunting so much as a fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist
was reduced to shooting only for the table, and the guileless
prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple life. Compared
with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had vanished; one
saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as in
chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent ponies scented
an occasional friendly and sociable bear.

  When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway
systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and
no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography
than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American field, he
set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean
and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty
thousand miles of American land and water.

  He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life --
tropical islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde
types. Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque
than civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's
sixtieth year approached, the artist began to die; only a certain
intense cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded
to sensual stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as
though art were a trotting-match. For this, one was in some
degree prepared, for the old man had been a stage-type since
drama began; but one felt some perplexity to account for failure
on the opposite or mechanical side, where nothing but cerebral
action was needed.

  Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic,
plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find
the surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had
ever approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited
statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomless averages
merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington
Ford supplied any material that curiosity could imagine for
filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and methods for applying the
plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be winning ground,
and one's averages projected themselves as laws into the future.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the attitude
of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in
their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they
talked like other men who knew less. The method did not result
faith. Indeed, every increase of mass -- of volume and velocity
-- seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last, a scholar,
fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a
superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing
came out as it should. In principle, according to figures, any
one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame no sort
of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam
Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the
anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will
in the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving
the prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible
in the future; but meanwhile these societies which violated every
law, moral, arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated
each other, but produced also fresh complexities with every
propagation and developed mass with every complexity.

  The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying
discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the
student as the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one
seemed very much concerned about this world or the future, unless
it might be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked
the present. Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and
his interest in future society was becoming slight, yet he was
kept alive by irritation at finding his life so thin and
fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind march on, like a train of
pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from one morass into
another, and at short intervals, for no reason but temper,
falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres had become
so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed
up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in
South Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges
thought them all not merely unnecessary, but foolish -- induced
by greed of the coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the
Romans were still robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be
natural and inevitable, but the murder seemed altogether archaic.

  At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
Possibly growth m human nature might show itself there. He found
no need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he
preferred on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances
of betterment; and he very gravely doubted, from his aching
consciousness of religious void, whether any large fraction of
society cared for a future life, or even for the present one,
thirty years hence. Not an act, or an expression, or an image,
showed depth of faith or hope.

  The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care
for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the
mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics,
statistics, travel had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago
Fair had only confused the roads. Accidental education could go
no further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed
beyond hope with the millions of chance images stored away
without order in the memory. One might as well try to educate a
gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student less
than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself
ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated
pedagogue.

[combinator]

  For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to
Europe with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is
useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women;
and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough
with what are called historical sources to realize how few women
have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man
is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no
woman has pictured herself. The American woman of the nineteenth
century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be
less known than the woman of the eighteenth; none of the female
descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so familiar as
her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to history,
for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better
company than the American man; she was probably much better
company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge and her husband,
Senator since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder
brother or uncle since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his
examination-papers on Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and
crossed the street to Christ Church in Cambridge to get married.
With Lodge himself, as scholar, fellow instructor, co-editor of
the North American Review, and political reformer from 1873 to
1878, he had worked intimately, but with him afterwards as
politician he had not much relation; and since Lodge had suffered
what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not only a Senator
but a Senator from Massachusetts -- a singular social relation
which Adams had known only as fatal to friends -- a superstitious
student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality, would
rather have recognized him only as an enemy; but apart from this
accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of
average humanity had been greatly dependent on his house.
Senators can never be approached with safety, but a Senator who
has a very superior wife and several superior children who feel
no deference for Senators as such, may be approached at times
with relative impunity while they keep him under restraint.

Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at
Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history
had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar, it was the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do
with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture system
turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely through the
medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must
have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a
glance what he had thought unessential because un-German. They
breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a compliment which
would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or even in
sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life in
trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in
the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of
the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual
chance, even a Senator became natural, simple, interested,
cultivated, artistic, liberal -- genial.

  Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One
could not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of
mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it
expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without
seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington
with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in
April returned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of
pulque and Churriguerresque architecture. In May he ran through
Europe again with Hay, as far south as Ravenna. There came the
end of the passage. After thus covering once more, in 1896, many
thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home October, with
every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the world
anew.

  For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan
or historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything
he wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only the
public mind which balanced itself so exactly between the
unpopularity of both parties as to express no sympathy with
either. Even among the most powerful men of that generation he
knew none who had a good word to say for it. No period so
thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since
Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American
society; but the natural result of such lack of interest in
public affairs, in a small society like that of Washington, led
an idle bystander to depend abjectly on intimacy of private
relation. One dragged one's self down the long vista of
Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's friends, and
avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow
with years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses
round La Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in
power except in the case of Mr. Blaine whose tumultuous struggle
for existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the
White House and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a
moment the whole nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces
and scattered over the world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay
took his orders for London. Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil
Spring-Rice had been buried in Persia. Cameron refused to remain
in public life either at home or abroad, and broke up his house
on the Square. Only the Lodges and Roosevelts remained, but even
they were at once absorbed in the interests of power. Since 1861,
no such social convulsion had occurred.

  Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most
strongly the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos,
the man in the State Department seemed more important than the
man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the United States
fit to manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and
had no candidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all
restraints of expression to learn that the President meant to put
Senator John Sherman in the State Department in order to make a
place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had done nothing
that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough to
distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for
the place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was
notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed
to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State
Department. One might have shrugged one's shoulders had the
President named Mr. Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna
was a man of force if not of experience, and selections much
worse than this had often turned out well enough; but John
Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.

  The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and
to Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than
all the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor
was the matter improved by hints that the President might call
John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman should retire.
Indeed, had Hay been even unconsciously party to such an
intrigue, he would have put an end, once for all, to further
concern in public affairs on his friend's part; but even without
this last disaster, one felt that Washington had become no longer
habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary contemplation of
Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more amusing than
the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely
cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!

  Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached
the month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years'
dogged effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend
it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel
had become more and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of
the Civil Law had been locked in its dark closet, as far back as
1860. Noah's dove had not searched the earth for resting-places
so carefully, or with so little success. Any spot on land or
water satisfies a dove who wants and finds rest; but no perch
suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and uneducated, who has
lost his taste even for olives. To this, also, the young may be
driven, as education, end the lesson fails in humor; but it may
be worth knowing to some of them that the planet offers hardly a
dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without
ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year.

  Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to
his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him
the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he
has a right to require amusement -- or at least education, since
this costs nothing to any one -- and that a world which cannot
educate, will not amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right
to exist than he. Both views seem sound; but the world wearily
objects to be called by epithets what society always admits in
practice; for no one likes to be told that he is a bore, or
ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to say in its defence,
it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, the man
of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue.
This truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds
equally for men of half that age Only the very young have the
right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people
commonly know enough not to betray themselves.

  Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on
one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in
others. Of all characteristics in human nature, this has been one
of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the
long history of human expression, has been said by the fool or
unsaid by the wise, shows that, for once, no difference of
opinion has ever existed on this. "Even a fool," said the wisest
of men, "when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise," and still
more often, the wisest of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom,
has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the merits of
silence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which
should have struck the Athenians as new to them; but of late the
repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle vociferated his
admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of
expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most
noble to the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked: --

  "A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
   Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
  "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,   
Only silence is strong, -- all the rest is but lies."

Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have
decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm
that --

  "The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
   Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"

with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The
evidence of the poets could not be more emphatic: --

  "Silent, while years engrave the brow!
   Silent, -- the best are silent now!"

  Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in
silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them,
and all philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at
sixty, had ever been known to attain knowledge; but that a very
few were believed to have attained ignorance, which was in result
the same. More than this, in every society worth the name, the
man of sixty had been encouraged to ride this hobby -- the
Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence -- as though it were the easiest
way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more oppressive
than the ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might still
hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content reigned --
although long search had not revealed it -- and so the pilgrimage
began anew!

  The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about
it; education could not be expected there; but there Adams
arrived, April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many
days, for Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change
in St. James's Street. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the
streets of Rome, actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till
one felt like Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a
"bloodless fear"; but in spring London is pleasant, and it was
more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when every one was welcoming
the return of life after the long winter since 1893. One's
fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.

  This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family
jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No
wrinkled Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled
Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and that even
penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris,
and set up a household at St. Germain where he taught and learned
French history for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars
of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and rode about the green
forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time to time Hay
wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel
at home in France as in other countries he had thought more
homelike. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris
because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the
Hays came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a
stanch and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to
Egypt.

  Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and
what they said had as little to do with education as possible,
until one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the
Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to
announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the
greatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach?
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak and
watched a jackal creep down the debris of ruin. The jackal's
ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building.
What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the
sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had
taught him that the relation between civilizations was that of
trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He
tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to
Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of
Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied the
great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian.
His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long
enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of
thought along the great highways of exchange.

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CHAPTER XXIV

INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)

  The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life
to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap
in peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had
reason to be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no
such sense of power and momentum, and had seen no such number of
personal friends wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for
much in one's contentment, but the sense of winning one's game
counts for more; and in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly
interesting to the last survivor of the Legation of 1861. He
thought himself perhaps the only person living who could get full
enjoyment of the drama. He carried every scene of it, in a
century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite alive in his mind
-- all the interminable disputes of his disputatious ancestors as
far back as the year 1750 -- as well as his own insignificance in
the Civil War, every step in which had the object of bringing
England into an American system. For this they had written
libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war,
losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and patient
Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and
suddenly, by pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two
hundred years of stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument
and no violence affected, the people of England learned their
lesson just at the moment when Hay would otherwise have faced a
flood of the old anxieties. Hay himself scarcely knew how
grateful he should be, for to him the change came almost of
course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to it, and
to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the
atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance
of Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected
what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain -- frightened
England into America's arms -- seemed as melodramatic as any plot
of Napoleon the Great. He could feel only the sense of
satisfaction at seeing the diplomatic triumph of all his family,
since the breed existed, at last realized under his own eyes for
the advantage of his oldest and closest ally.

  This was history, not education, yet it taught something
exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson.
For the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible
purpose working itself out in history. Probably no one else on
this earthly planet -- not even Hay -- could have come out on
precisely such extreme personal satisfaction, but as he sat at
Hay's table, listening to any member of the British Cabinet, for
all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as a question of
balance of power in the East, he could see that the family work
of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand
perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off
with artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations
looked stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and
certainty of the arcade. In the long list of famous American
Ministers in London, none could have given the work quite the
completeness, the harmony, the perfect ease of Hay.

  Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it,
for chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal
property by inheritance in this proof of sequence and
intelligence in the affairs of man -- a property which no one
else had right to dispute; and this personal triumph left him a
little cold towards the other diplomatic results of the war. He
knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he would have been glad
to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an
acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knew
the West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the
American people might think or say about it, they would sooner or
later have to police those islands, not against Europe, but for
Europe, and America too. Education on the outskirts of civilized
life teaches not very much, but it taught this; and one felt no
call to shoulder the load of archipelagoes in the antipodes when
one was trying painfully to pluck up courage to face the labor of
shouldering archipelagoes at home. The country decided otherwise,
and one acquiesced readily enough since the matter concerned only
the public willingness to carry loads; in London, the balance of
power in the East came alone into discussion; and in every point
of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the result as
though one had shared in the danger, instead of being vigorously
employed in looking on from a great distance. After all, friends
had done the work, if not one's self, and he too serves a certain
purpose who only stands and cheers.

  In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they
made a sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms
rivalling those of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many
beautiful places scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler
or more genial than Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the
Saxons, its avenues, its terraces, its deer-park, its large
repose on the Kentish hillside, and its broad outlook over whet
was once the forest of Anderida. Filled with a constant stream of
guests, the house seemed to wait for the chance to show its
charms to the American, with whose activity the whole world was
resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings could the
little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such
work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant group under
the shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of
the Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in
1588; and there, later in the season, came the order summoning
Hay to the State Department.

  Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as
he. No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries
of State, or how little strength he had in reserve against it.
Even at Surrenden he showed none too much endurance, and he would
gladly have found a valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on
both sides was earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave was
that, though if he were a mere office-seeker he might certainly
decline promotion, if he were a member of the Government he could
not. No serious statesman could accept a favor and refuse a
service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in that case he must
resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen fascination
for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old
drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes,
even though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him,
no doubt, the service, though hard, might bring some share of
profit, but for the friends who gave this unselfish decision, all
would prove loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become a
little daft. No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed
through that malarious marsh. In his fancy, office was poison; it
killed -- body and soul -- physically and socially. Office was
more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it
held more power; but the poison he complained of was not
ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence
for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits;
his poison was that of the will -- the distortion of sight -- the
warping of mind -- the degradation of tissue -- the coarsening of
taste -- the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged
rat. Hay needed no office in order to wield influence. For him,
influence lay about the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it;
he enjoyed more than enough power without office; no one of his
position, wealth, and political experience, living at the centre
of politics in contact with the active party managers, could
escape influence. His only ambition was to escape annoyance, and
no one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age, sensitive
to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality,
vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.

  Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made presence of
gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner
and lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the
lighter for their humor, and his obedience to the President's
order was the gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams
took dark views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own,
for, while Hay had at least the honors of office, his friends
would share only the ennuis of it; but, as usual with Hay,
nothing was gained by taking such matters solemnly, and old
habits of the Civil War left their mark of military drill on
every one who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and
started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a
struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to
avail. The chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw
it away; so, as soon as the Surrenden establishment broke up, on
October 17, he prepared for return home, and on November 13, none
too gladly, found himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.

  He had made another false start and lost two years more of
education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics
nor society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do
with Hay's politics at home or abroad, and never affected
agreement with his views or his methods, nor did Hay care whether
his friends agreed or disagreed. They all united in trying to
help each other to get along the best way they could, and all
they tried to save was the personal relation. Even there, Adams
would have been beaten had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay, who
saw the necessity of distraction, and led her husband into the
habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend off for an
hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards,
and a chat with any one who called.

  For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits
which were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right
to be called pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued
nothing, but drifted as attraction offered itself. The short
session broke up the Washington circle, so that, on March 22,
Adams was able to sail with the Lodges for Europe and to pass
April in Sicily and Rome.

  With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of
1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only
catastrophe and violence, running riot on that theme ever since
Ulysses began its study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in
anarchy, without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and
defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome
was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli seemed more and more to
draw all the threads of thought to a centre, for every new
journey led back to its steps -- Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
Mycencae, Constantinople, Syracuse -- all lying on the road to
the Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches
could not yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of
moral; and New York sent most of all, for, in forty years,
America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of
1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same
plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read
of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of
Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew
the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with
political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The
climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as
though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

  Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
obvious -- in no way unpleasant -- truth; therefore one sat
silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the
lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview
with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the
most satisfactory -- or sufficient -- ever offered; worth fully
forty years' more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself,
or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most
bewildering effect of all these fresh cross-lights on the old
Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast
between what he had taught then and what he found himself
confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards --
between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his
sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes
of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of
derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac
and Soc: --

     HIC JACET
HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
 DOCTOR BARBARICUS
   HENRICUS ADAMS
 ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
   PRIMO EXPLICUIT
       SOCNAM

  The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal
meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have
scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality;
but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir
Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac
and Soc. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and
that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's
scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other
path to a profession.

  The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its
own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and
solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams
returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to
admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any
case it no longer mattered. He passed a summer of solitude
contrasting sadly with the last at Surrenden; but the solitude
did what the society did not -- it forced and drove him into the
study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he entered the
practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could no
longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a
methodical survey -- a triangulation -- of the twelfth century.
The pursuit had a singular French charm which France had long
lost -- a calmness, lucidity, simplicity of expression, vigor of
action, complexity of local color, that made Paris flat. In the
long summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in
the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the little
twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as their
own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at
last driven back to the quays and photographs. For weeks he lived
in silence.

  His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new
value. Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since
1850 John La Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry
Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much
he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he
had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge
alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the
commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
American mind -- the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western
-- likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny
something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional
approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion,
as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly
asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcerting trait of
John La Farge was his reversal of the process. His approach was
quiet and indirect; he moved round an object, and never separated
it from its surroundings; he prided himself on faithfulness to
tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and abhorred
dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were the
same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
sketching the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of
sea-sickness, or drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of
Japan, or sipping his cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of
Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bo-tree at
Anaradjpura.

[combinator]

  One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but
always there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it
flowed, for even a contradiction was to him only a shade of
difference, a complementary color, about which no intelligent
artist would dispute. Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams,
you reason too much!" was one of his standing reproaches even in
the mild discussion of rice and mangoes in the warm night of
Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed Adams for being born in
Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of training, and
Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind.

  To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone -- a
shade -- a nuance -- and the finer the tone, the truer the
eccentricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same
point of view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and
often the contrast is excessive between their art and their talk.
One evening Humphreys Johnston, who was devoted to La Farge,
asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge was ill -- more
ill than usual even for him -- but he admired and liked Whistler,
and insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to
overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear
that of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the
Boer War was raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject
Whistler raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed
against England -- witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter,
amusing, and noisy; but in substance what he said was not merely
commonplace -- it was true! That is to say, his hearers,
including Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed with it
all, and mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent,
and this difference of expression was a difference of art.
Whistler in his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far
beyond any point reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in
talk he showed, above or below his color-instinct, a willingness
to seem eccentric where no real eccentricity, unless perhaps of
temper, existed.

  This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value
of La Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was
too ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible
more ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to
the twelfth century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt
at home, but felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a
right there, unless he too were a member of the Church and worked
in glass. Adams himself was an interloper, but long habit led La
Farge to resign himself to Adams as one who meant well, though
deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though near sixty years old
before he knew anything either of glass or of Chartres, asked no
better than to learn, and only La Farge could help him, for he
knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use glass
like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead
for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt
the early glass rather as a document than as a historical
emotion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and
Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to hold their
own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La
Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of
light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In
glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his
personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before
seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

  Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a
step backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became
more and more alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back
to New York, January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to
Washington to find out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could
be hoped, for Hay's troubles had begun, and were quite as great
as he had foreseen. Adams saw as little encouragement as Hay
himself did, though he dared not say so. He doubted Hay's
endurance, the President's firmness in supporting him, and the
loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry on Hay's account
fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own.
Here was a problem in his political education that passed all
experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his
astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of
view; their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams
the war became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from
childhood, even in England, that his forbears and their
associates in 1776 had settled, once for all, the liberties of
the British free colonies, and he very strongly objected to being
thrown on the defensive again, and forced to sit down, a hundred
and fifty years after John Adams had begun the task, to prove, by
appeal to law and fact, that George Washington was not a felon,
whatever might be the case with George III. For reasons still
more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain question of
the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even further, and
avow the opinion that if at any time England should take towards
Canada the position she took towards her Boer colonies, the
United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, and
to insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him
the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed
exceedingly un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.

  Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it
could never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with
theoretical objections which were every day fretting him in
practical forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good-temper
till the luck should turn, and to him the only object was time;
but as political education the point seemed vital to Adams, who
never liked shutting his eyes or denying an evident fact.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and
politics are two different and often contradictory things. In
this case, the contradiction seemed crude.

  With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram
Hewitt, Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden -- men who played
the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule,
much better than the professionals, but whose aims were
considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt
no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work. In return, the
professionals felt no great love for them, and set them aside
when they could. Only their control of money made them
inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The
story of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman
series, and that of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside
the one; President Harrison set aside the other. "There is no
politics in it," was his comment on Hay's appointment to office.
Hay held a different opinion and turned to McKinley whose
judgment of men was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley
brought to the problem of American government a solution which
lay very far outside of Henry Adams's education, but which seemed
to be at least practical and American. He undertook to pool
interests in a general trust into which every interest should be
taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should,
under his management, create efficiency. He achieved very
remarkable results. How much they cost was another matter; if the
public is ever driven to its last resources and the usual
remedies of chaos, the result will probably cost more.

  Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of
whom was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and
his task hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by
simply paying their price; but abroad whatever helped on one
side, hurt him on another. Hay thought England must be brought
first into the combine; but at that time Germany, Russia, and
France were all combining against England, and the Boer War
helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home,
except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that Pauncefote
alone pulled him through.

  Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more
unmanageable, even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was
less the fault of the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of
peace, in any normal state of things," said Hay, "ought to be
ratified with unanimity in twenty-four hours. They wasted six
weeks in wrangling over this one, and ratified it with one vote
to spare. We have five or six matters now demanding settlement. I
can settle them all, honorably and advantageously to our own
side; and I am assured by leading men in the Senate that not one
of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the Senate. I should
have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third would
certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the
original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of
our politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution
the Senate will reject. They will reject, for instance, any
treaty, whatever, on any subject, with England. I doubt if they
would accept any treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany.
The recalcitrant third would be differently composed, but it
would be on hand. So that the real duties of a Secretary of State
seem to be three: to fight claims upon us by other States; to
press more or less fraudulent claims of our own citizens upon
other countries; to find offices for the friends of Senators when
there are none. Is it worth while -- for me -- to keep up this
useless labor?"

  To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it
in a dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred
years before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be
humorous. The intrigue was too open to be interesting. The
interference of the German and Russian legations, and of the
Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the Senate was innocently
undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, Count Cassini, the
ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days pass
without appealing through the press to the public against the
government. The German Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously
did the same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was
brought instantly to the Department. These three forces, acting
with the regular opposition and the natural obstructionists,
could always stop action in the Senate. The fathers had intended
to neutralize the energy of government and had succeeded, but
their machine was never meant to do the work of a twenty-million
horse-power society in the twentieth century, where much work
needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The only defence of
the system was that, as Government did nothing well, it had best
do nothing; but the Government, in truth, did perfectly well all
it was given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied
equally to human society altogether, if one chose to treat
mankind from that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so
much work must be done; bad machinery merely added to friction.

  Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
treated the world as something to be taken in block without
pulling it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all:
he laughed and accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would
have gladly lived his entire life over again exactly as it
happened. In the whole New York school, one met a similar dash of
humor and cynicism more or less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet
even the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction
The old friend was rapidly fading. The habit remained, but the
easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humor, the
equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine of
office; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed
to react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of
politics, and the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau,
the result seemed ennobling.

  Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that
these political and social and scientific values of the twelfth
and twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relation of
movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care
in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or
that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula
beyond the schoolboy s = gt^2/2. If Kepler and Newton could take
liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote
wilderness like La Fayette Square could take liberties with
Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction into the
square of its time. He had only to find a value, even
infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical
formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar
universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like
this was one in which he could look for no help from anybody --
he could look only for derision at best.

  All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
futile and almost immoral -- certainly hostile to sound
historical system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility
to all that he had taught for history, since he started afresh
from the new point that, whatever was right, all he had ever
taught was wrong. He had pursued ignorance thus far with success,
and had swept his mind clear of knowledge. In beginning again,
from the starting-point of Sir Isaac Newton, he looked about him
in vain for a teacher. Few men in Washington cared to overstep
the school conventions, and the most distinguished of them, Simon
Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to treat such a scheme
seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his rank in
science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams never
enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more
accessible, to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning
whenever he wanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of
ignorance. Langley listened with outward patience to his
disputatious questionings; but he too nourished a scientific
passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its avowal. He
had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing
between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most
physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the
amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting
unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the
problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper,
even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their
existence, while doubting their respectability. He generously let
others doubt what he felt obliged to affirm; and early put into
Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern Science," a volume by Judge
Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools
with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every
revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
questions and failed to get answers.

  Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be
as ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science
meant nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not
enough, or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never
to direction or progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it
needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction,
relation. Everything must be made to move together; one must seek
new worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once
more, and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very
door of the Trocadero.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXV

THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)

  UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and
helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it
could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world.
While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed
it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its
superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley
knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well
have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. Yet
Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not
have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well
as one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge
counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply
it. Bacon took a vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I
and his subjects, American or other, towards the year 1620, that
true science was the development or economy of forces; yet an
elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces;
or even so much as to say to himself that his historical business
in the Exposition concerned only the economies or developments of
force since 1893, when he began the study at Chicago.

  Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had
looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses
called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art
exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of
history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at
Paris. Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment,
threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new
application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with,
almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored almost the
whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the
forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship
feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the
new Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had
become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as
destructive as the electric tram which was only ten years older;
and threatening to become as terrible as the locomotive
steam-engine itself, which was almost exactly Adams's own age.

  Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and
explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any
kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in
inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout
less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it.
To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for
conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal
hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but
to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew
accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the
forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians
felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this
huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous
speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible
warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power --
while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.
Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct
taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite
force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo
was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

  Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its
occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines
and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to
abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation
could he discover between the steam and the electric current than
between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were
interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an
absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help
him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same trouble,
for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical,
and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays, that
were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit towards
science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar
spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium
denied its God -- or, what was to Langley the same thing, denied
the truths of his Science. The force was wholly new.

  A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and
mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort
of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses.
He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he
would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he
hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to
figure out the equation between the discoveries and the economies
of force. The economies, like the discoveries, were absolute,
supersensual, occult; incapable of expression in horse-power.
What mathematical equivalent could he suggest as the value of a
Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some
scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a
thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no
part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had
figured only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man
had translated himself into a new universe which had no common
scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual
world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance
collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even
imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other,
and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed
prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of
universes interfused -- physics stark mad in metaphysics.

  Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories,
or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and
effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty
libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and
childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag
them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice,
that they had never supposed themselves required to know what
they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to
find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen volumes of
American history for no other purpose than to satisfy himself
whether, by severest process of stating, with the least possible
comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed
rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a
necessary sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied
him as little as at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other
men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit
of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about
his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself
and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of
sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would
try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence
of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society
could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was
artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at
last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after
ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of
Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck
broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

  Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person
without other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900
was not the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo
had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood
the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to
the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up
the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which
he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a
revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were
what, in terms of mediaeval science, were called immediate modes
of the divine substance.

  The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value,
this common value could have no measure but that of their
attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been
felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeable attractions on
thought. He made up his mind to venture it; he would risk
translating rays into faith. Such a reversible process would
vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could not deny that he,
or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the force of both.
When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had
probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the
Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or
automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force
of all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.

  Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be
by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he
must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two
kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction.
They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing
one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of
the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent
as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value
as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly
afraid of either.

  This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American
historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still
seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was
she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her,
and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have
strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true
force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the
monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that
would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and
often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that
sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art
nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that
neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses
was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her
force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction -- the
greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was
to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools
of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of
Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin
literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked
the Virgin: --

  "Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools: --

  "Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
   Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
   Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."

[combinator]

  All this was to American thought as though it had never
existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but
nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt
the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams
felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as
though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and
at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and
still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man,
the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly
more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines
and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to
the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command;
an American Venus would never dare exist.

  The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth
century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost
violently to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys
were as useless as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos.
The idea survived only as art. There one turned as naturally as
though the artist were himself a woman. Adams began to ponder,
asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had
ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always
done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far
as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters,
for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment,
never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias
an unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language
and American education, was as far as possible sexless. Society
regarded this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the
historian readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the
moment, did not concern one who was studying the relations of
unmoral force. He cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until
he could measure its energy.

  Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor.
St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
interminable last touches, and listening to the usual
contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the
American artists who gave to American art whatever life it
breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens was perhaps the most
sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate. General Grant
or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric than he.
All the others -- the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford
White -- were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or
dilate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to
his work the forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or
affected the despot, or became brutalized like Whistler by the
brutalities of his world. He required no incense; he was no
egoist; his simplicity of thought was excessive; he could not
imitate, or give any form but his own to the creations of his
hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength of other
men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an
image in his mind.

  This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For
such a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own
gaiety was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the
studio on Mont Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois
de Boulogne, or dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St.
Gaudens sometimes let Adams go about in his company.

  Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of
Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves
actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it
dawn on Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that
spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great
men before great monuments express great truths, provided they
are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the
supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals:
"I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of
supersition." Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had
never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would
have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian,
on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his
readers -- perhaps himself -- that he was darting a contemptuous
look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the
respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always
feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one
felt also the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in
1789 religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark
sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had
heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and
certainly less simple. Without malice, one might find it more
instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one
brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution.
Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had
passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than
he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their
decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of
the force that created it all -- the Virgin, the Woman -- by
whose genius "the stately monuments of superstition" were built,
through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning
in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same
thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the
artist.

  Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500;
he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an
image of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like
Louis XI. In mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by
chance to the twentieth century, and forgotten where it came
from. He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did
at his own, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of
Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a
quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like
Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from birth, and Adams's
instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but half of a
nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of Amiens
they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them one;
but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel
of force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of
taste.

  For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman
monument. Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so
American that, for at least forty years, Adams had never realized
that any other could be in sound taste. How many years had he
taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were
driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895
had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not
everywhere even so. At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly
at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked
Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force
to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago
in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly
less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew
Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses
as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty,
purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway
train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly
complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never
be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like
the Virgin, build Chartres.

  Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on
man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science
measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a
straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no
serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his
convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable,
that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a
compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might
prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their
value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities
to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to
follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and
where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its
values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more
complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted,
polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter.
Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a mathematical
problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult,
all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
Virgin easiest to handle.

  The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to
Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and
Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a
German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could
one force one's self into this old thicket of ignorance after
having been repulsed a score of entrances more promising and more
popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an
exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of study had proved
to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one controlled no
more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force
controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of
education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one
fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff
is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a
sort of blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the
gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand,
modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form
that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of
growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for
often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness,
loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on
its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result
of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what
is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on
their play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on
this support, Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures
as formal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out,
altering, burning, experimenting, until the year had expired, the
Exposition had long been closed, and winter drawing to its end,
before he sailed from Cherbourg, on January 19, 1901, for home.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXVI

TWILIGHT (1901)

  WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the
Paris Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin,
and Besnard, the world that thought itself serious, and showed
other infallible marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in
weird doings at Peking and elsewhere such as startled even
itself. Of all branches of education, the science of gauging
people and events by their relative importance defies study most
insolently. For three or four generations, society has united in
withering with contempt and opprobrium the shameless futility of
Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du Barry; yet, if one bid at an
auction for some object that had been approved by the taste of
either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy
half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all
the philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a
cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had adorned.
The same thing might be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire;
while, as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke of
Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all
proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to
delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values,
and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile.
The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle
for the control of China, which, in his view, must decide the
control of the world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China
was chiefly studied in Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese
porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious than
universal war.

  The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama
on future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew
no more about it than though he were the best-informed statesman
in Europe. Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations
were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championed China's
"administrative entity," would be massacred too, since he must
henceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany
dismembered China, and shut up America at home. Nine statesmen
out of ten, in Europe, accepted this result in advance, seeing no
way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and laughed at Hay for his
helplessness.

  When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on,
as incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on
that branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing
so meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On
returning to Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the
world as astonished as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a
moment, indeed, the world had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put
Europe aside and set the Washington Government at the head of
civilization so quietly that civilization submitted, by mere
instinct of docility, to receive and obey his orders; but, after
the first shock of silence, society felt the force of the stroke
through its fineness, and burst into almost tumultuous applause.
Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, with all its
painful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the American
blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History broke
in halves.

  Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of
his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him
fresh life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic,
and depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles
nested at home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's
diplomatic court had become the largest in the world, and the
diplomatic relations required far more work than ever before,
while the staff of the Department was little more efficient, and
the friction in the Senate had become coagulated. Hay took to
studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams eighty years before,
and calculated that the resistance had increased about ten times,
as measured by waste of days and increase of effort, although
Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly
treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved
it, for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes
painful.

  For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole
load and turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and
Holleben helped the Senate to make what trouble they could,
without serious offence, and the Irish, after the genial Celtic
nature, obstructed even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks
to their sympathetic qualities, never made lasting enmities; but
the Germans seemed in a fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly
temper in the spirit of politics, which was by no means a part of
Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to overcome domestic
friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign powers. Yet so
much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they commonly
knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive. Cassini
had for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of
his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief
as with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious
objects; but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction.
In every hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and
try to invent reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no
worse than the board of a university; but incorporators as a rule
have not made this class of men dictators on purpose to prevent
action. In the Senate, a single vote commonly stopped
legislation, or, in committee, stifled discussion.

  Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused
incessant obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience
and bargaining in executive patronage, if indeed it could be
overcome at all. The price actually paid was not very great
except in the physical exhaustion of Hay and Pauncefote, Root and
McKinley. No serious bargaining of equivalents could be
attempted; Senators would not sacrifice five dollars in their own
States to gain five hundred thousand in another; but whenever a
foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage without an
equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty. In all
such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of
time and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed
Hay; "the Major will have promised all the consulates in the
service; the Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe
me dis-consulate; I shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by
one, by the thirty-four per cent of kickers and strikers; the
only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part of the
time; I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great culbute is
approaching."

  He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight -- the
solitary picturesque and tragic element in politics --
incidentally requiring character-studies like Aaron Burr and
William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with Sir
Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like
Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and
offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs,
and Malvolios -- endless varieties of human nature nowhere else
to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is
so gay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and
more rarely, but what he felt most was the enormous complexity
and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly
complained that it had made him a bore -- of all things the most
senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was
lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the
complexities and multiplicities of his new world.

  To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great
value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the
practical interest and the practical man were such as looked
forward to the next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five
or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named
who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead; while any
historian who means to keep his alignment with past and future
must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to
align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of some
sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian --
sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably -- must have put
to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
system last? He can never give himself less than one generation
to show the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to
triangulate from the widest possible base to the furthest point
he thinks he can see, which is always far beyond the curvature of
the horizon.

  To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right
-- if the question of right or wrong enters at all into the
matter -- the historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in
his own profession few companions offer help, and his walk soon
becomes solitary, leading further and further into a wilderness
where twilight is short and the shadows are dense. Already Hay
literally staggered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than
he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an
hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling
how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All
three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that if it
were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of
readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid
resource, though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed
of it even in the acting.

  The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that
a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King
disappeared from their lives; but Hay had still his family and
ambition, while Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly,
wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail
across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big
or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop,
some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly
curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though
thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall into King's
arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life.
Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.

[combinator]

  He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest
toy he knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played
since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk
with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass.
Then he read all the books he could find, and tried in vain to
makes his lines of force agree with theirs. The books confounded
him. He could not credit his own understanding. Here was
literally the most concrete fact in nature, next to gravitation
which it defied; a force which must have radiated lines of energy
without stop, since time began, if not longer, and which might
probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
earth, since no one knew why -- or how -- or what it radiated --
or even whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of
all natural forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have
suggested no idea to any one until some mariner bethought himself
that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand years passed
when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump,
supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity,
still without knowing how it worked or what it was. For a
historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention
of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as
his mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some
one, somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could
but find the book -- although he had been forced to admit the
same helplessness in the face of gravitation, phosphorescence,
and odors; and he could imagine no reason why society should
treat radium as revolutionary in science when every infant, for
ages past, had seen the magnet doing what radium did; for surely
the kind of radiation mattered nothing compared with the energy
that radiated and the matter supplied for radiation. He dared not
venture into the complexities of chemistry, or microbes, so long
as this child's toy offered complexities that befogged his mind
beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless variety of
pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He wanted
to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a
magnet. He figured the human mind itself as another radiating
matter through which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.

  In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new
relation staggered his new education by its evidence of growing
complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He
could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the
same, and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he
turned. He found it in politics; he ran against it in science; he
struck it in everyday life, as though he were still Adam in the
Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and Satan who was
complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth. The
problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.

  All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had
overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were
triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and
the momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.
One had in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks,
corporations, trusts, and even to the popular will as far as one
could understand it -- or even further; the multiplicity of unity
had steadily increased, was increasing, and threatened to
increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his favorite
prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism -- except
for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant
necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and
Pteraspis and ice age and tramways and telephones; and now --
just when he was ready to hang the crowning garland on the brow
of a completed education -- science itself warned him to begin it
again from the beginning.

  Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles
Lyell, and that it might be worth looking at if only to steady
his vision. He read it again, and thought it better than he could
do at sixty-three; but elderly minds always work loose. He saw
his doubts grown larger, and became curious to know what had been
said about them since 1870. The Geological Survey supplied stacks
of volumes, and reading for steady months; while, the longer he
read, the more he wondered, pondered, doubted what his delightful
old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have said about it.

  Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities,
and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars
resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see
but one. Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted
towards unity or multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would
depend on the age of the man who drifted.

  Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid
fish, the Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had
sported when geological life was young; as though they had all
remained together in time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow
Castle, and repeat "how charming is divine philosophy!" He felt
almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting the part of
Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and
far back into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis
as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for
him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of known organic life.
A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the
liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not
for all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet
historian dare to hazard even in secret an opinion about the
value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes under Uniform
Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of his
neighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not
select -- evolution finished before it began -- minute changes
that refused to change anything during the whole geological
record - survival of the highest order in a fauna which had no
origin -- uniformity under conditions which had disturbed
everything else in creation -- to an honest-meaning though
ignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not
assume it, such sequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown
that changes in form caused evolution in force; that chemical or
mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes,
under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought. The
ganoid fish seemed to prove -- to him -- that it had selected
neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right
in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a
huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid
troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal
that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he
asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any
doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere
vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical
explanation, had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be
driven back on the old independence of species.

  What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to
them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of
thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell
in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had
entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a
universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far
vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every
direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly,
vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences
that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly become
specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an
amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for
beginners, as they had served when new.

  So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into
half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the
northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to
assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere could
possibly be referred to a horizon more remote. Continents still
rose wildly and wildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had
written an epoch-making work, showing that continents were
anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose and sank. Lyell's
genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken its
place, though, in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing
had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts
had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even to
discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing
that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.

  Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness
in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to
dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history
of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had
no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to
record in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church,
raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy.
Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet
the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up
courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin
forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly
to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff
of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the
universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could
not state the geological record in terms of time; they had
murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared
to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.

  Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other
times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic -- who knew what? -- defying science, if not denying
known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church,
and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again.
Historians have got into far too much trouble by following
schools of theology in their efforts to enlarge their synthesis,
that they should willingly repeat the process in science. For
human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger
synthesis is suicide.

 Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that
the change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing.
Any student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of
his thought, should delight in turning about and trying the
opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even
to a tired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of
peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of
fret. Every schoolboy knows that this sum of all knowledge never
saved him from whipping; mere years help nothing; King and Hay
and Adams could neither of them escape floundering through the
corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but
they could at least float with the stream if they only knew which
way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with
the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged
and unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it
serve? A seeker of truth -- or illusion -- would be none the less
restless, though a shark!

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXVII

TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)

  INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no
other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every
side. Even more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris
taught in the twentieth, with no other school approaching it for
variety of direction and energy of mind. Of the teaching in
detail, a man who knew only what accident had taught him in the
nineteenth century, could know next to nothing, since science had
got quite beyond his horizon, and mathematics had become the only
necessary language of thought; but one could play with the toys
of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons of painting,
operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture, theology
and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth
and the Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris
remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though
China fell. Scores of artists -- sculptors and painters, poets
and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs
and furniture -- hundreds of chemists, physicists, even
philosophers, philologists, physicians, and historians -- were at
work, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass
and originality of their product would have swamped any previous
age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the effect was one of
chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos
of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of the
movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.

  The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the
pale-faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of
Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two
o'clock in the morning in a beer- garden even after four hours of
Mounet Sully at the Theatre Francais. In those branches,
education might be called closed. Fashion, too, could no longer
teach anything worth knowing to a man who, holding open the door
into the next world, regarded himself as merely looking round to
take a last glance of this. The glance was more amusing than any
he had known in his active life, but it was more -- infinitely
more -- chaotic and complex.

  Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or
there-abouts, he had been repeating that he really must go to
Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade
him come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager
and appreciative as ever, at the little old town of
Rothenburg-on-the Taube, and they went on to the Baireuth
festival together.

  Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would
have opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether
different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo
setting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried
and Brunhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the
world, calm, contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had
altogether changed, and Wagner had become a part of it, as
familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred.
Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna -- perhaps the Potomac itself
-- had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and one
could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York, among
throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of
nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at
Baireuth, as though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or
Paris might be whatever one pleased -- venal, sordid, vulgar --
but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay, certain
anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. Perhaps they
were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible for them
as artistic emotion. New York knew better than Baireuth what
Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris had more than once
included the rising of the Seine to drown out the Etoile or
Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts spells
of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery
in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would
surely happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening
at Baireuth, or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with
catastrophe as though it were an old mistress -- faced it almost
gaily as she had done so often, for they were acquainted since
Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with a glow of
fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard
Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and
thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular
oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm,
but the Fluch-motif went home.

  Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy;
though not with socialism, which, to young men who nourished
artistic emotions under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed
hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe
Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of
Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under
the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw no
inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience
were -- relatively -- stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.

  Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had
supposed himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau
Wagner and the Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the
Senator, yearning for sterner study, pointed to a haven at
Moscow. For years Adams had taught American youth never to travel
without a Senator who was useful even in America at times, but
indispensable in Russia where, in 1901, anarchists, even though
conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.

  This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian
anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer
rightly understood. By the necessity of their philosophical
descent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other as
unequal to his lofty task and inadequate to grasp it. Of course,
no third member could be so much as considered, since the great
principle of contradiction could be expressed only by opposites;
and no agreement could be conceived, because anarchy, by
definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the kinetic theory
of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction was itself
agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with
freedom; but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement
provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger
contradiction. Thus the great end of all philosophy -- the
"larger synthesis" -- was attained, but the process was arduous,
and while Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare the
principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied both the assumption and
the principle in order to assure its truth.

  Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist,
conservative and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to
attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate
progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply
and intensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and
magnify momentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of
the universe as science explained it; but partly also in order to
get done with the present which artists and some others
complained of; and finally -- and chiefly -- because a rigorous
philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and
satisfy man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its
ultimate contradiction.

  Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but
such objection meant only that the critic should begin his
education in any infant school in order to learn that anarchy
which should be logical would cease to be anarchic. To the
conservative Christian anarchist, the amiable doctrines of
Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian mental inertia
covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise their
innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were ideals of
the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a
bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of
anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity.
Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe
than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which
their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist,
communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no
relation; if anarchists needed order, they must go back to the
twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its thousand
years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have
no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature
itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault of being so
supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty could
scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order -- except the
Church -- had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the
conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own.

  Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner
or Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men
have been mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such
refinements were Greek or German, and affected the practical
American but little. He admitted that, for the moment, the
darkness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence, even to
himself, that his "largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to
be chaos, since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos.
The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for
thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred
million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already
more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked
merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist
saw light.

  Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis" -- and much he needed
it! In America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the
faith was national, racial, geographic. The true American had
never seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades
between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for
exclusively human and his own. He never had known a complete
union either in Church or State or thought, and had never seen
any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to meet any
contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly the
opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire
was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to
history than all the complex variety of American newspapers,
schools, trusts, sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were
Nature -- pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian
anarchist saw Nature -- active, vibrating, mostly unconscious,
and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one
caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the
Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his
candle and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the
station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative,
Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any
ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the
oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and had kept none
for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase,
which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was
as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth
century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy,
Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a
negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies
had been sucked out -- an inert residuum -- with movement of pure
inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations
of nomad life -- herders deserted by their leaders and herds --
wandering waves stopped in their wanderings -- waiting for their
winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that
had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means
of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited
and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could
never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice
and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day,
in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no
need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or
Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis
of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough:
Kropotkin answered every purpose.

[combinator]

  The Russian people could never have changed -- could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up,
or take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller
scale, the question was old and unanswered. All the so-called
primitive races, and some nearer survivals, had raised doubts
which persisted against the most obstinate convictions of
evolution. The Senator himself shook his head, and after
surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to St.
Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the
people seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or
fifteen years of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing,
for, since 1898, Russia lagged.

  The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed
disposed to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For
him, all opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts
can never be complete, and their relations must be always
infinite. Very likely, Russia would instantly become the most
brilliant constellation of human progress through all the ordered
stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a value as movement
of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration that
would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap between east and
west relatively the same.
This result reached, the Lodges thought their moral improvement
required a visit to Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions
had not deadened Adams's memories of Berlin, and he preferred, at
any cost, to escape new ones. When the Lodges started for
Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily, in a
day or two, at Stockholm.

Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he
gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might
doubt whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any
Grand Duke, or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their
neighbors; and Adams was quite sure that, even in America, he
should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of any
Secretary of the Treasury, or railway president, or President of
the United States whom he had ever known, that should concern the
America of the next generation. The mere fact that any man should
dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to judge. Yet
Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented three-
fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration
of America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity,
and the tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught
himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror he
held before him. "Am I satisfied? " he asked: --

                          "Moi? pourquoi non?
  N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
  Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
  Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ebauche;
  Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."

  Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in
details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or
decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take
even in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of
three. No man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would
do to him; but so much was sure; the monkey and motor were
terribly afraid of the bear; how much,- only a man close to their
foreign departments knew. As the monkey looked back across the
Baltic from the safe battlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more
portentous than from the Kremlin.

  The image was that of the retreating ice-cap -- a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever
at its mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that
crossed the level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
merely extended the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and
Poles on one side still struggled against the Russian inertia of
race, and retained their own energies under the same conditions
that caused inertia across the frontier. Race ruled the
conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could
tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be
known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound
of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
history was a nursery tale.

  The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous
mass of inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever
Russia moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it
were an ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries.
In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern
streets of St. Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision,
and Sweden lured the tourist on. Through a cheerful New England
landscape and bright autumn, he rambled northwards till he found
himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway. Education crowded
upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vast surfaces
of history about which he had lectured and read for a life-time.
When the historian fully realizes his ignorance -- which
sometimes happens to Americans -- he becomes even more tiresome
to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible.
Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached
the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and
beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the
despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with
Norway started voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he
took the mail steamer to the north, and on September 14, reached
Hammerfest.

  Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the
deep fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and
reindeer were watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate
channels outside, as their ancestors had watched the first Norse
fishermen learn them in the succession of time; but it was not
the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic gloom, that impressed the
tourist, so much as the lights of an electro-magnetic
civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia, which more
and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the
errors of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the
ecliptic. As one approached the end -- the spot where, seventy
years before, a futile Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to ask
futile questions of the silent infinite -- the infinite seemed to
have become loquacious, not to say familiar, chattering gossip in
one's ear. An installation of electric lighting and telephones
led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of
the magnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdrockh sat dumb
with surprise, and glared at the permanent electric lights of
Hammerfest.

  He had good reason -- better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had
ever told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without
means of speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent
itself to gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before,
breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught,
across, the neighboring table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper,
announcing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, and from
Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up the coast to Hammerfest, day
after day the news came, telling of the President's condition,
and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, until at last a
little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing
the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of
McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his
depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate
friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please
him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The
electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.

  No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines
of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across
the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an
abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the
glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full
vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that
lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a
day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the
ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged
tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had
stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to
make of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian
fishermen ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands,
jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the
ice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a
trifling danger compared with the inertia. From the day they
first followed the retreating ice-cap round the North Cape, down
to the present moment, their problem was the same.

  The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a
long line of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took
possession, divided his lines of force, with no relation to
climate or geography or soil.

  The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered
south again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne.
A mere glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind.
Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the
green rusticity of Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of
Birmingham. The Rhine in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as
it resembled the Rhine of the Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway
centre that had completed its cathedral which bore an absent-
minded air of a cathedral of Chicago. The thirteenth century,
carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked up, was visible to
tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling, curiosity. The
Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be, since it
produced far more coal; but all this counted for little beside
the radical change in the lines of force.

  In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the
prehistoric highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route
followed the old routes of invasion, and Cologne was a
resting-place between Warsaw and Flanders. Throughout northern
Germany, Russia was felt even more powerfully than France. In
1901 Russia had vanished, and not even France was felt; hardly
England or America. Coal alone was felt -- its stamp alone
pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy -- and the
stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The
Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced the same
people -- the same mind -- the same impulse. For a man
sixty-three years old who had no hope of earning a living, these
three months of education were the most arduous he ever
attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel he ever
met; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable.
From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean -- from
Halifax to Norfolk on the other -- one great empire was ruled by
one great emperor -- Coal. Political and human jealousies might
tear it apart or divide it, but the power and the empire were
one. Unity had gained that ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there
an older, perhaps a surer, power, resting on the eternal law of
inertia, held its own.

  As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian
inertia was moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in
its path. As long as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de
Witte fall, Hay would totter. One could only sit down and watch
the doings of Mr. de Witte and Mr. de Plehve.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)

  AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans
ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle
Ages; and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of
hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure.
Three hideous political murders, that would have fattened the
Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White
House.

  The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of
his son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that
of his chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his
recovery." The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have
acquired the funeral habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him
yesterday, and he did not know me." Among the letters of
condolence showered upon him was one from Clarence King at
Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and tenderness -- the old King
manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till nature and the foe
have done their struggle." The tragedy of King impressed him
intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said -- "the best
and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often
sickened me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind
luck; hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy
of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless
suffering alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous
amuse, la vie?"

  The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's
funeral, and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to
travel than that which led to Washington, where a revolution had
occurred that must in any case have made the men of his age
instantly old, but which, besides hurrying to the front the
generation that till then he had regarded as boys, could not fail
to break the social ties that had till then held them all
together.

  Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time,
felt half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office,
if only to save himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all
was pure loss. On that side, his education had been finished at
school. His friends in power were lost, and he knew life too well
to risk total wreck by trying to save them.

  As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken
seriously in his old character, and could not be recovered in his
new one. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most
serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his
restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt,
more than any other man living within the range of notoriety,
showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate
matter -- the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God --
he was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power with
immeasurable energy, in the White House, the relation of age to
youth -- of teacher to pupil -- was altogether out of place; and
no other was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while
Adams's ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable
now; but human nature retains a few of its archaic, proverbial
laws, and the wisest courtier that ever lived -- Lucius Seneca
himself -- must have remained in some shade of doubt what
advantage he should get from the power of his friend and pupil
Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he received
Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the vast
circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
friend lost -- a fact very much worth insisting upon -- while the
gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many
moth-administrations and had singed his wings more or less in
them all, though he now slept nine months out of the twelve,
acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the
north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient habitude
of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering between
them.

  Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was
bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic,
chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse
reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced
as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or
knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs
of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent,
but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn
out most tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency
showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The effect
of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the
power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the
control of the infinite.

  Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths
of history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The
personal lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed
no reason why Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result
was mathematically certain. With Hay, it was only the steady
decline of strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with
Lodge it was law of politics. He could not help himself, for his
position as the President's friend and independent statesman at
once was false, and he must be unsure in both relations.

  To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great -- much
greater than that of the usual Senator -- but it hung on his
position in Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive
patronage; and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure.
Nowhere in America was society so complex or change so rapid. No
doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic
irritability -- a sort of Bostonitis -- which, in its primitive
Puritan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors,
and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M.
Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New
England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends
-- such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington --
but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards were
various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly
multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to
become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough --
State Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old
Congregational clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes,
but rich in social influence, a third; the foreign element,
especially the Irish, held aloof, and seldom consented to approve
any one; the new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to
become more exclusive than the Irish. New power was
disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force
to work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine
together. No one could represent it faithfully as a whole.

  Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in
that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type
for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more
interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be
taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching -- Boston incarnate
-- the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led
him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was -- as Adams
admitted in his own case -- restless. An excellent talker, a
voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a
clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly
at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with
painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another,
uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure
American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish,
Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College.
English to the last fibre of his thought -- saturated with
English literature, English tradition, English taste -- revolted
by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or
any other Continental standards, but at home and happy among the
vices and extravagances of Shakespeare -- standing first on the
social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the
license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial,
always intelligent -- Lodge had the singular merit of
interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows,
black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his
flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that
he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and
might have a future, if they could but divine it.