The Education of Henry Adams

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.

Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian’s uncertainty of attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge.  Only Bostonians can understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences of the Boston mind.  His theory and practice were also at variance.  He professed in theory equal distrust of English thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes precious but never sure.  For him, only the Greek, the Italian or the French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice.  He knew that his artistic standard was the illusion of his own mind; that English disorder approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French measure or Italian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic.  He loved the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of their example, but because of their humor.  He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying consistency —­ but he was not a Senator.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.  Adams had no reason to care whether his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were always liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion yield suddenly under their feet.  With this game an elderly friend had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished.  There was nothing in it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat.  The larger study was lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men; but foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personal relation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with Roosevelt or Lodge.  As an affair of pure education the point is worth notice from young men who are drawn into politics.  The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power —­ steam, electric, furnace, or other —­ which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to manage it.  The work of internal government has become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one skinned them alive.  Most of them have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power.  They are trustees for the public, and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on them that title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and will then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men.  Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.  The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses.  The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while for a teacher to insist upon it.  What he insists upon is only that in domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object, commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon, while in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide as the world.  There the merest scholar could see what he was doing.  For history, international relations are the only sure standards of movement; the only foundation for a map.  For this reason, Adams had always insisted that international relation was the only sure base for a chart of history.

He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he found it convenient.  The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian.  Required to look far ahead and round hm, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat.  The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which Congress repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject.  Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in Senators’ service.

This is a matter of history which any one may approve or dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865.  Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the office.  He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had never imagined.  He needed to write no state papers; he wanted no help, and he stood far above counsel or advice; but he could instruct an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world could do; and Adams sought only instruction —­ wanted only to chart the international channel for fifty years to come; to triangulate the future; to obtain his dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.

Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last the stream of events favored him.  With infinite effort he had achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate, with only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce, without equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years defended tooth and nail.  This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measures for general peace.  About England the Senate could make no further effective opposition, for England was won, and Canada alone could give trouble.  The next difficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected the object —­ a combination which, as late as 1901, had been visionary.  The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed.  This was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home, and realizable abroad.

With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist scheme of Jaures and Bebel.  That John Hay, of all men, should adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in politics as in science.  When one saw the field, one realized that Hay could not help himself, nor could Bebel.  Either Germany must destroy England and France to create the next inevitable unification as a system of continent against continent —­ or she must pool interests.  Both schemes in turn were attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other he would have to choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits; but, granting both to be feasible, Hay’s and McKinley’s statesmanship turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia.  Thus Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were partners.

The problem was pretty —­ even fascinating —­ and, to an old Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometrical demonstration.  As the last possible lesson in life, it had all sorts of ultimate values.  Unless education marches on both feet —­ theory and practice —­ it risks going astray; and Hay was probably the most accomplished master of both then living.  He knew not only the forces but also the men, and he had no other thought than his policy.

Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a scholar could ever reach.  He had under his eyes the whole educational staff of the Government at a time when the Government had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence.  Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest masters and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international action, not to speak of personal influence; and the entire machinery of politics in several great countries had little to do but supply the last and best information.  Education could be carried no further.

With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its effects on himself were grotesque.  Never had the proportions of his ignorance looked so appalling.  He seemed to know nothing —­ to be groping in darkness —­ to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew more.  He had, at least, the mechanical assurance of certain values to guide him —­ like the relative intensities of his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers —­ but he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts of his own Government —­ had the Czar and the Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him all they knew, he would still have known nothing.  They knew nothing themselves.  Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student measure his own.