The Education of Henry Adams

NUNC AGE (1905)

Nearly forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they saw American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains.  As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more striking than ever —­ wonderful —­ unlike anything man had ever seen —­ and like nothing he had ever much cared to see.  The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.  Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom.  The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.  The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.  Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.  All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man —­ a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type —­ for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight.  As one jolted over the pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.  Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos.  A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act.  The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington to wait the end.  There Roosevelt was training Constantines and battling Trusts.  With the Battle of Trusts, a student of mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society, but also as a measure of motion.  The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy.  They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring.  They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot.  As one of their earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of mechanics, any change, within the range of the forces, must make his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man, since no other energies seemed left on earth to breed.  The new man could be only a child born of contact between the new and the old energies.

Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown, and neither had warped the umpire’s judgment by its favors.  If ever judge had reason to be impartial, it was he.  The sole object of his interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one watched, the less could be seen of him.  Of the forces behind the Trusts, one could see something; they owned a complete organization, with schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of the forces behind Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was slight; their training irregular; their objects vague.  The public had no idea what practical system it could aim at, or what sort of men could manage it.  The single problem before it was not so much to control the Trusts as to create the society that could manage the Trusts.  The new American must be either the child of the new forces or a chance sport of nature.  The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a crab-like process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to restore to even action, and he had every right to active support and sympathy from all the world, especially from the Trusts themselves so far as they were human; but the doubt persisted whether the force that educated was really man or nature —­ mind or motion.  The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require that the law of mass should rule.  In that case, progress would continue as before.

In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been to the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding his tongue.  For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years.  At the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion.  Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense.  If the acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces, were to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as that of the November meteoroids.

Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators.  Above all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage effort.  On the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and to economize waste of mind.  If it was not itself education, it pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new American.  There, the duty stopped.

There, too, life stopped.  Nature has educated herself to a singular sympathy for death.  On the antarctic glacier, nearly five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace.  “Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have been past believing that a dying seal could have transported itself over fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface,” but “the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies.”  In India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship, sought solitude, and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys, rather than remain with man.  Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone —­ but never hustled.  For that reason, one’s own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer nature than John Hay’s exposure.  To the normal animal the instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not exempt from the passion of baiting their bears; but in its turn even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him outright.

On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a glance that Hay must have rest.  Already Mrs. Hay had bade him prepare to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the Session should be over, and although Hay protested that the idea could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding without struggle.  He would equally have resigned office and retired, like Purun Dass, had not the President and the press protested; but he often debated the subject, and his friends could throw no light on it.  Adams himself, who had set his heart on seeing Hay close his career by making peace in the East, could only urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was worth the cross of martyrdom; but the cross was full in sight, while the crown was still uncertain.  Adams found his formula for Russian inertia exasperatingly correct.  He thought that Russia should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur, January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant to wait till her navy should be destroyed.  The delay measured precisely the time that Hay had to spare.

The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the strength to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer had reached half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as when he first lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four years earlier.  The clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad.  One walks with one’s friends squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with a smile.  One has done it so often!  Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no illusions; he was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and mortality together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the sense of tasks incomplete.

One could honestly help him there.  Laughing frankly at his dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a butcher’s shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly completed.  In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or nothing to annoy his successor.  He had brought the great Atlantic powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed about to be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium based on an intelligent allotment of activities.  For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman pax was in sight, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him.  Except for making peace in Manchuria, he could do no more; and if the worst should happen, setting continent against continent in arms —­ the only apparent alternative to his scheme —­ he need not repine at missing the catastrophe.

This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting statesman feels, and commonly with reason.  One had no need to get out one’s notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on either side.  Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy?  The Kaiser supplied him with these figures, just as the Cretic approached Morocco.  Every one was doing it, and seemed in a panic about it.  The chaos waited only for his landing.

Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and heard no call for action.  Then they all went on to Nanheim without relapse.  There, after a few days, Adams left him for the regular treatment, and came up to Paris.  The medical reports promised well, and Hay’s letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever.  To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress, and amusingly with his usual light scepticism, of his various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three weeks later, and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first glance, that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs and interviews wore him rapidly out.  He was conscious of it, and in his last talk before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his activity for granted.  “You must hold out for the peace negotiations,” was the remonstrance.  “I’ve not time!” he replied.  “You’ll need little time!” was the rejoinder.  Each was correct.

There it ended!  Shakespeare himself could use no more than the commonplace to express what is incapable of expression.  “The rest is silence!” The few familiar words, among the simplest in the language, conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served Shakespeare, and, as yet, no one has said more.  A few weeks afterwards, one warm evening in early July, as Adams was strolling down to dine under the trees at Armenonville, he learned that Hay was dead.  He expected it; on Hay’s account, he was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would all die if we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally regretted, and wielding his power to the last.  One had seen scores of emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive; and now, at least, one had not that to fear for one’s friend.  It was not even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet’s Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow —­ the assent to dismissal.  It was time to go.  The three friends had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive —­ no attraction —­ to carry it on after the others had gone.  Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter horizon could its values be fixed or renewed.  Perhaps some day —­ say 1938, their centenary —­ they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.

The end