The Education of Henry Adams

DARWINISM (1867-1868)

Politics, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly long.  At that moment Darwin was convulsing society.  The geological champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate at the Legation.  Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town, Adams should be asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to town, or ever cared to meet a young American, and one could not go to them because they were known to dislike intrusion.  The only Americans who were not allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation.  Adams was content to read Darwin, especially his “Origin of Species” and his “Voyage of the Beagle.”  He was a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow Darwin’s evidences.  Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way, building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous.  The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on trust.  Neither he nor any one else knew enough to verify them; in his ignorance of mathematics, he was particularly helpless; but this never stood in his way.  The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere —­ to some great generalization which would finish one’s clamor to be educated.  That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them all, no one could expect, still less exact.  Henry Adams was Darwinist because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.

By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert.  He did the next best thing; he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution.  He was ready to become anything but quiet.  As though the world had not been enough upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more.  He had his wish, but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.

He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology; a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history.  Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of Creation.  Darwin hunted only for vestiges of Natural Selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about Selection, unless perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting curates.  He felt, like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no more concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized with greediness the new volume on the “Antiquity of Man” which Sir Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking the Garden of Eden.  Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new edition of his “Principles,” then the highest text-book of geology; but here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature.  Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity.  This was a vast stride.  Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one —­ except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.  Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it had the charm of art.  Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it —­ to reach God a posteriori —­ rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite.  Any road was good that arrived.  Life depended on it.  One had been, from the first, dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and another.  The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one’s self-esteem.  Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy.  So, one day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his “Principles” properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles would tell him what to say.  Youth risks such encounters with the universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles’s ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after half an hour’s conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of American geologists about the principles of their profession.  This was getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.

The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt by Adams’s learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their account.  He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell, asked him to explain for Americans his last edition of the “Principia,” Adams would have jumped at the chance.  Unfortunately the mere reading such works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying them for criticism.  Ignorance must always begin at the beginning.  Adams must inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why the apple fell to the ground.  He did not know enough to be satisfied with the fact.  The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown quite off his base if Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.

At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles’s Glacial Theory or theories.  He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world.  If the glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe?  To him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of nothing, and were quite unsolid as support for so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity.  If one were at liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, and to assume unity from the start, one might better say so, as the Church did, and not invite attack by appearing weak in evidence.  Naturally a young man, altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles’s views, which he thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs.  Sir Charles himself seemed shy of them.  Adams hinted his heresies in vain.  At last he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke correction.  “The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles’s argument, obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing more violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day.”  The hint produced no effect.  Sir Charles said not a word; he let the paragraph stand; and Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian was strict or lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.

Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man’s Darwinism.  Had it been the only one, he would not have fretted about it; but uniformity often worked queerly and sometimes did not work as Natural Selection at all.  Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to illustrate the Law of Natural Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of uniformity on record.  Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that certain forms, like Terebratula, appeared to be identical from the beginning to the end of geological time.  Since this was altogether too much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the end —­ himself.  Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate.  Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under Adams’s own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.

By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he loved best.  Like Catherine Olney in “Northanger Abbey,” he yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior’s House, and both these joys were his at Wenlock.  With companions or without, he never tired of it.  Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and Uriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins, all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales.  The peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of evolution; it was better marked in Egypt:  it was felt wherever time-sequences became interchangeable.  One’s instinct abhors time.  As one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium, nothing suggested sequence.  The Roman road was twin to the railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas were far superior to Bridgnorth.  The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the monks of Buildwas, had they approached where he lay in the grass, would have taken him only for another and tamer variety of Welsh thief.  They would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steam of a distant railway.  One might mix up the terms of time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past, measuring time by Falstaff’s Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one’s earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria.  Life began and ended there.  Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish.  On the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of organic existence had been erased.

That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American, seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate parentage as modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him as much as though he had found Darwin himself.  In the scale of evolution, one vertebrate was as good as another.  For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis .  To an American in search of a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet.  Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals.  This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result.  La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:—­

  “Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
     Que scelerat pour scelerat,
   Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu’un homme.”

It might well be!  At all events, it did not enter into the problem of Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and that before Pteraspis was eternal void.  No trace of any vertebrate had been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the shores of Quincy Bay.

That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child.  In Siluria, he understood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus , which helped nothing.  Neither in the Limulus nor in the Terebratula , nor in the Cestracion Philippi ,any more than in the Pteraspis, could one conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little.  Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fix them.  When the vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.  Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of ascent or descent to a lower type.  The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams himself —­ in some respects more so —­ at the top of the column of organic evolution:  and geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything else.  Ponder over it as he might, Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a watch, one inferred a maker.  He could detect no more evolution in life since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the Abbey.  All he could prove was change.  Coal-power alone asserted evolution —­ of power —­ and only by violence could be forced to assert selection of type.

All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir Charles it was mere defect in the geological record.  Sir Charles labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them till the mass became irresistible.  With that purpose, Adams gladly studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform; and Selection that did not select.  To other Darwinians —­ except Darwin —­ Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection.  Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.

Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of education.  As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass —­ or whatever there was to nibble —­ in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes.  He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he determined to stop it.  Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus.  Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one.  Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed.  Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true.  He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing.  He was a Darwinian for fun.

From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded as criminal —­ worse than crime —­ sacrilege!  Society punished it ferociously and justly, in self-defence.  Mr. Adams, the father, looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises great or small.  He had no notion of letting the currents of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience.  To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might.  He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity.  The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society.  One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits.  One had no time to paint and putty the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten.  For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives.

As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this; but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it.  He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith.  The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law.  This was the result of five or six years in England; a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an Oxford degree.

Quite serious about it, he set to work at once.  While confusing his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments.  His principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to restrict currency.  He thought he might win a name among financiers and statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England, after the classical suspension of 1797-1821.  Setting himself to the study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done.  Time and patience were the remedies.

The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and Pteraspis to his principles of geology.  A mistake about Evolution was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the last hope of employment in State Street.  Six months of patient labor would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole scheme of making himself a position as a practical man-of-business.  If he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?  Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or forgave.

With labor and caution he made one long article on British Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for choice.  He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus thrown at an editor’s head, would probably return to crush the author; but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic —­ when successful —­ than his ignorance.  The editor accepted both.

When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though he were a debtor who had begged for an extension.  He read it with as much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan.  The letter gave the new writer literary rank.  Henceforward he had the freedom of the press.  These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review .  Precisely what this rank was worth, no one could say; but, for fifty years the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved.  Few writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development, but for such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space.  An article was a small volume which required at least three months’ work, and was paid, at best, five dollars a page.  Not many men even in England or France could write a good thirty-page article, and practically no one in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game —­ a bluefish or a teal —­ worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars.  Newspaper writers had their eye on quarterly pickings.  The circulation of the Review had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and the Review had never paid its reasonable expenses.  Yet it stood at the head of American literary periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.

With the editor’s letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself what better he could have done.  On the whole, considering his helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors.  No one could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a part in the great world.  A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid.  No one would have picked out William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen.  Boston was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson.  Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard; Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start.  Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor.  The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks.  Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path.

Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the pleasantest.  He was already old in society, and belonged to the Silurian horizon.  The Prince of Wales had come.  Mr. Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background the memories of Palmerston and Russell.  Europe was moving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing that London liked to recall.  The revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself almost as strong as an Englishman.  He had thirty years to wait before he should feel himself stronger.  Meanwhile even a private secretary could afford to be happy.  His old education was finished; his new one was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end of a very long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another to follow, and a summer sea between.

He made what use he could of it.  In February, 1868, he was back in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell.  For another season he wandered on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of Trevi.  Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its mediaeval society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley.  The long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing for him there.  He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858.  He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle.  The case was no better when he got back to London and went through his last season.  London had become his vice.  He loved his haunts, his houses, his habits, and even his hansom cabs.  He loved growling like an Englishman, and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a straw.  He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments of his friends.  When at last he found himself back again at Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechanically, unstrung, but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858.  He could see only one great change, and this was wholly in years.  Eaton Hall no longer impressed his imagination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their country houses; he had become English to the point of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes.  As far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education, but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years in London.