The Education of Henry Adams

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.

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.