The Education of Henry Adams

VIS NOVA (1903-1904)

Paris after midsummer is a place where only the industrious poor remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where history would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees was so deep that when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while one might have supposed, from the silence, that the Viceroy Alexeieff had reoccupied Manchuria as a fulfilment of treaty-obligation.  For once, the conspiracy of silence became crime.  Never had so modern and so vital a riddle been put before Western society, but society shut its eyes.  Manchuria knew every step into war; Japan had completed every preparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur, mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expected attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war conditions; but Europe knew nothing.  The banks would allow no disturbance; the press said not a word, and even the embassies were silent.  Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and began to collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and the Grand Dukes who swarmed there professed to know directly from the Winter Palace that there would be no war.

As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could see that the ignorance was assumed.  After nearly fifty years of experience, he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted.  Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their own except what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg.  He could make nothing of it.  He found himself in face of his new problem —­ the workings of Russian inertia —­ and he could conceive no way of forming an opinion how much was real and how much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace himself.  At times he doubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew, but old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence.

This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris.  On January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his country think as a world-power.  No doubt, Japanese diplomacy had much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority of Japanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe than in America, and in any case, could not account for the total disappearance of Russian diplomacy.  A government by inertia greatly disconcerted study.  One was led to suspect that Cassini never heard from his Government, and that Lamsdorf knew nothing of his own department; yet no such suspicion could be admitted.  Cassini resorted to transparent blague:  “Japan seemed infatuated even to the point of war!  But what can the Japanese do?  As usual, sit on their heels and pray to Buddha!” One of the oldest and most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show his hand so empty as this if he held a card to play; but he never betrayed stronger resource behind.  “If any Japanese succeed in entering Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive.”  The inertia of Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of diplomatists, deeply interested a student of race-inertia, whose mind had lost itself in the attempt to invent scales of force.

The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the President.  Reticence had no place there.  Every one in America saw that, whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive struggles in American history was pending, and any presence of secrecy or indifference was absurd.  Interest was acute, and curiosity intense, for no one knew what the Russian Government meant or wanted, while war had become a question of days.  To an impartial student who gravely doubted whether the Czar himself acted as a conscious force or an inert weight, the straight-forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a standard of measure.  By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to take the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic Reception immediately after his return home, and the part of proxy included his supping at the President’s table, with Secretary Root on one side, the President opposite, and Miss Chamberlain between them.  Naturally the President talked and the guests listened; which seemed, to one who had just escaped from the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a free breath after stifling.  Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser Wilhelm and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at table; and this evening he spared none.  With the usual abuse of the quos ego, common to vigorous statesmen, he said all that he thought about Russians and Japanese, as well as about Boers and British, without restraint, in full hearing of twenty people, to the entire satisfaction of his listener; and concluded by declaring that war was imminent; that it ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped:  ” I could do it myself; I could stop it to-morrow!” and he went on to explain his reasons for restraint.

That he was right, and that, within another generation, his successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow of doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been folly when he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of President Hayes; but the listener cared less for the assertion of power, than for the vigor of view.  The truth was evident enough, ordinary, even commonplace if one liked, but it was not a truth of inertia, nor was the method to be mistaken for inert.

Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as methodically —­ as mathematically —­ as a demonstration of Euclid, and Adams thought that as against any but Russians it would have lost its opening.  Each day counted as a measure of relative energy on the historical scale, and the whole story made a Grammar of new Science quite as instructive as that of Pearson.

The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new equilibrium which would prove the problem in one sense or another, and the war had no personal value for Adams except that it gave Hay his last great triumph.  He had carried on his long contest with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough to understand the diplomatic perfection of his work, which contained no error; but such success is complete only when it is invisible, and his victory at last was victory of judgment, not of act.  He could do nothing, and the whole country would have sprung on him had he tried.  Japan and England saved his “open door” and fought his battle.  All that remained for him was to make the peace, and Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand, for Hay’s sake as well as for that of Russia.  He thought then that it could be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military sense, the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and every one felt that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race was close, and while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay’s strength every day declined.

St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President made him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the Exposition; and Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever use he could suppose himself to serve.  He professed the religion of World’s Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind impossibility; and obeyed Mrs. Hay’s bidding the more readily because it united his two educations in one; but theory and practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis.  Ten years had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and he found everything new.  In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every town.  Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so much that Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform at every station to ask who were the people; for the American of the prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee and the buffalo.

The subject grew quickly delicate.  History told little about these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their race-names, who had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio.  John Hay was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back on the noblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its own banks.  The new American showed his parentage proudly; he was the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed humanities, brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing no distinctive marks but that of its pressure.  The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church, and the features would follow the parentage.

The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting.  One saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital —­ without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored —­ but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk from attempting.  This new social conglomerate, with no tie but its steam-power and not much of that, threw away thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant as ephemeral as a stage flat.  The world had never witnessed so marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia’s crimson sands had never returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as though the Emir Mirza were displaying the beauties of this City of Brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast, white, monumental solitude, bathed in the pure light of setting suns.  One enjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits but rather because of their want.  Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted one’s mental faults.  Had there been no exhibits at all, and no visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more.

Here education found new forage.  That the power was wasted, the art indiflerent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to the interest.  The chaos of education approached a dream.  One asked one’s self whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old American or a promise of the new one.  No prophet could be believed, but a pilgrim of power, without constituency to flatter, might allow himself to hope.  The prospect from the Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almost an adequate motive for power; almost a scheme for progress.  In another half-century, the people of the central valleys should have hundreds of millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they could throw away tens; and by that time they might know what they wanted.  Possibly they might even have learned how to reach it.

This was an optimist’s hope, shared by few except pilgrims of World’s Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of the Mississippi, the St. Louis Exposition met a deliberate conspiracy of silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an optimistic dream of future strength in American expression.  The party got back to Washington on May 24, and before sailing for Europe, Adams went over, one warm evening, to bid good-bye on the garden-porch of the White House.  He found himself the first person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the Exposition for its beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.

He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found himself again in the town of Coutances, where the people of Normandy had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which architects still admired and tourists visited, for it was thought singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in the Virgin.  On this Sunday, the Norman world was celebrating a pretty church-feast —­ the Fete Dieu —­ and the streets were filled with altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass.  The scene was graceful.  The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on Sunday, or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. Louis Exposition to her —­ or for her; and a historical tramp would gladly have offered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor, if she would have taught him her relation with the deity of the Senators.  The power of the Virgin had been plainly One, embracing all human activity; while the power of the Senate, or its deity, seemed —­ might one say —­ to be more or less ashamed of man and his work.  The matter had no great interest as far as it concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes of Senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than priests of the deity they supposed themselves to honor —­ if that was indeed their purpose; but it interested a student of force, curious to measure its manifestations.  Apparently the Virgin —­ or her Son —­ had no longer the force to build expositions that one cared to visit, but had the force to close them.  The force was still real, serious, and, at St. Louis, had been anxiously measured in actual money-value.

That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams most abominated.  He had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached.  The automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seeker of history.  In his mind the problem offered itself as to Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt^2/2, if he could but experimentally prove it.  Of the attraction he needed no proof on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than sufficient:  but as teacher he needed to speak for others than himself.  For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile and its owner where she would, to her wonderful palaces and chateaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed.  He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the formula.  He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and physical energy of creation which had built up these World’s Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale.

“Both were faiths and both are gone,” said Matthew Arnold of the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was to ask where they had gone.  The Virgin had not even altogether gone; her fading away had been excessively slow.  Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less admit her annihilation as energy.

So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers.  Her own age had no time-measure.  For years past, incited by John La Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to another without break.  The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one’s road, and one was not fined for running over them too fast.  When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead.  The hunt for the Virgin’s glass opened rich preserves.  Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in sensuous worship.  Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France, broke into Shelley’s light dissolved in star-showers thrown, which had left every remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness.  One dared not pass a parish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look for its window of fragments, where one’s glass discovered the Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a fragmentary donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all invoked in prayer by remnants of the donors and their children that might have been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors as fresh and living as the day they were burned in, and with feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradise they had paid for and lost.  France abounds in sixteenth-century glass.  Paris alone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within fifty miles contains scores of churches where the student may still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling before the Virgin’s window in the silent solitude of an empty faith, crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical sins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years’ education, and still desperately hoping to understand.

He understood a little, though not much.  The sixteenth century had a value of its own, as though the one had become several, and Unity had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still showed modest numbers.  The glass had gone back to the Roman Empire and forward to the American continent; it betrayed sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still supreme.  At Beauvais in the Church of St. Stephen was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as the work of Engrand le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the fourteen ancestors of the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the Kings of France, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine purity.  Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction?  Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might suggest, but what step towards perfection?

One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin’s pilgrim was wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window.  Approaching, he read that M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg.  The mad mixture of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the Renaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of St. Pantaleon near by.  Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and assassins —­ half in glass and half in telegram; chaos of time, place, morals, forces and motive —­ gave him vertigo.  Had one sat all one’s life on the steps of Ara Coeli for this?  Was assassination forever to be the last word of Progress?  No one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself felt none; the charming Church with its delightful windows, in its exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come to his own, but which was he —­ the murderer or the murdered ?

The Virgin herself never looked so winning —­ so One —­ as in this scandalous failure of her Grace.  To what purpose had she existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born?  The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history.  The effort for Unity could not be a partial success; even alternating Unity resolved itself into meaningless motion at last.  To the tired student, the idea that he must give it up seemed sheer senility.  As long as he could whisper, he would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something else.  Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed.  There, whether finished or not, education stopped.  The formula, once made, could be but verified.

The effort must begin at once, for time pressed.  The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was not extravagant or eccentric.  One sought no absolute truth.  One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.  Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams.  As term of a nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions.  Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were given the right to state it in his own terms.

Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down as though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.