The Education of Henry Adams

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.

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!